by Jane Adams
The appearance of the child in the doorway startled him.
‘Hello,’ Ray said. ‘I thought you were playing with your dad.’ He felt a momentary pang of fear that John might have sent her to fetch him.
‘He’s looking for the ball. It’s gone in the bushes.’
‘Ah.’
Beth came over to him, studying his face with an expression of pursed-lipped concentration.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked him. ‘Did you get burned?’
‘Sort of, yes.’
‘My friend Emily, at school. She got burned with a kettle. She’s got scars all down her back.’
‘Nasty,’ Ray said.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Um, someone burned me.’
‘Did they mean to?’
Ray nodded. ‘Yes, they meant to.’
‘Why?’
It was a question Ray had no real answer to. ‘They thought I was someone else,’ he said. ‘It was a mistake.’
Beth considered this. ‘Did they burn the lady in the church too?’
‘The lady in the church?’ He was confused. ‘You mean Sarah?’
‘Don’t be silly. Sarah’s pretty, she doesn’t have that on her face. No, the other lady. The one sitting on the other side of you.’
Ray stared hard at the child. The space in the pew next to him had been empty. ‘I’m sorry, Beth, but I didn’t see any other lady.’
Beth frowned at him, clearly disbelieving. Ray decided he should try again. ‘What did she look like, this lady?’
‘She looked like you, of course. She had those lines.’
‘Scars?’
‘Yes, on her face. The same side as you do. And she was wearing a white hat and a white shirt and a black jacket and a long black skirt. I thought she was a friend of yours and she might be coming to our house as well.’
Chapter Eighteen
The sky was cloudless and an almost unearthly blue, glowing with the weak light of a winter sun. Ray could feel the chill of a north wind blowing through his clothes, cutting with a sharpness that promised snow. In his dream, a child ran through the open square, one chubby little hand clutching the string of a red balloon. The child laughed aloud, chasing through a flock of grey-flecked pigeons that took to the air in a chaos of fluttering wings. In his dream Ray watched the child and laughed with him and there was no tightness and no pain from overstretched skin and destroyed muscle to mitigate his laughter. And yet, even as he watched the boy run, the red balloon tugged by the bitter wind, Ray knew what was coming. The same dream, so many times before, ending in the same anguish as the child ran to him, growing and growing with every step, tugging at the string until, a full-grown faceless man, he stood before Ray with the red balloon clutched tight between his hands. Laughing out loud as he hurled pain into Ray’s face and outstretched arms.
* * *
On the Monday evening, they had eaten together at the cottage. Ray had bought steak and made a passable job of cooking it, serving it with little potatoes glistening with butter and a salad he’d found ready-prepared in the local supermarket.
‘Not much of a cook, I’m afraid.’
‘Join the club,’ Sarah commented. ‘My mother and grandmother were brilliant. My sister’s not bad either so I don’t know what happened to me.’
‘Do you think there’s a gene for cooking?’
‘Buggered if I know, but there seems to be one for everything else so I don’t see why not.’
Ray laughed, but the dream, which had come as it always did just before the dawn, had tormented him all day. It soured his mood and left him feeling vulnerable.
‘What is it?’ Sarah asked him. ‘You’re not yourself tonight.’
The question had been asked with an un-Sarah like gentleness and he looked up suspiciously expecting to see pity in her eyes. Instead there was only considered thoughtfulness.
‘Bad dream,’ he said.
‘About this?’ she reached across and touched the scarring on his face. ‘No, don’t pull away. If I minded it I wouldn’t be here with you, would I?’
‘I mind it.’
‘I know you do. You hate your scars as I hate mine, but we have to accept them for what they are. A part of us now whether we wanted them or not.’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘It was about what happened. But it was different, you know the way dreams are.’
‘I remember seeing you in the papers,’ Sarah told him. ‘You made the headlines, but I’m not one for reading that sort of stuff.’
Ray was amused. ‘What do you read? Or don’t you bother?’
‘I read a lot, you know I do, but as far as the papers are concerned I read the reviews and I look at my horoscope and I might even scan the weather report. Oh, and I do the crossword once in a long while.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Believe me, I am. I think maybe I prefer the past when it comes to news. At least you know how the past turned out. I don’t like surprises.’
Ray laughed again, touching his cheek as he did so. He fancied it felt hot where Sarah’s fingers had lain. ‘I was waiting for a colleague,’ he said. ‘Standing by his car outside of the Magistrates’ Court in Middleton. Do you know it? There’s a big open square in front, with a fountain.’
Sarah nodded. ‘I worked there for a while, across the road on Main Street.’
‘Well, it was a bitterly cold day. Very crisp and clear and Guy was chatting up some woman in the lobby, so I knew I was in for a wait. I was just about to get into the car when it happened. He came from nowhere. I didn’t even see him till the very last second. He had this aerosol in his hand. He sprayed it in my face and lit it with this stupid little disposable lighter. It acted like a flamethrower and he kept it trained right on my face.’
It sounded so simple put like that, Ray thought, so why did his throat grow so tight and his hand shake when he reached for his glass?
‘Is that the worst of it?’ she asked him. ‘That you didn’t see it coming? In that one moment you weren’t alert or prepared and didn’t even have time to fight back?’
She had done it again, he realized. Put her finger squarely on the deepest part of his pain and pushed hard. ‘Yeah, I guess it is,’ he told her.
They cleared the remains of their meal away, moving quietly around each other in a way that Ray found oddly soothing. He was rarely comfortable with silence, though at the same time always awkward when it came to making small talk and it was a relief that with Sarah neither was a problem. He wanted her so much. Wanted to lie naked with her in the big bed upstairs and feel the warmth of her body. Inhale the scent of her and feel the weight of the thick red hair loose in his hands. It was a long time since he had felt this way and he was uncertain as to what to do about it. He’d never been a man to rush headlong into things but to remind himself that he had only known this woman for a few precious days seemed an irrelevancy.
Ray reached out and touched her hair. ‘Sarah, I . . .’
She took a deep breath then took his other hand. ‘We’re both far too old to play silly buggers, Ray. You want to go to bed with me and I want you too. So why don’t we just get on with it?’
‘Romantic to the last.’
‘I don’t think.’ Sarah smiled at him, that slightly tight-lipped smile that belied the way it made her eyes sparkle if you took the time to look. He followed her upstairs, guiding her towards Mathilda’s room, closing the curtains and switching on the bedside light, feeling like an awkward child in the company of an unfamiliar adult. He watched her as she unfastened her dress and let it fall to the floor, then pick it up and smooth the creases from it before laying it on the chair. ‘Help me, Ray,’ she said. ‘I’m out of practice when it comes to this.’
He went over to her, eased the straps of her slip from her shoulders and kissed her gently. Her hair and her lips and then the curve of her neck. He couldn’t place the perfume that she wore but it was warm and sweet with just the faintest tang of
citrus and her skin was soft beneath his hands.
‘Has there been anyone,’ he asked, ‘since . . . ?’
‘No one. I tried, but somehow it never worked out.’
He moved the straps of her slip further down her arms, letting it slide down her body. This time she left it where it lay. His fingers were clumsy on the hooks of her bra. Naked from the waist, she would no longer meet his eyes. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said and meant it. She flinched when he touched the scars that quadranted her breast, his fingertips brushing lightly, uncertain just how far he could go. How fast.
‘Touch me properly,’ she said. ‘Like you mean it. Anything that was going to break did so long ago.’
‘Oh, Sarah.’ He pulled her to him and for a long time just held her, stroking her back, feeling the richness of her hair twisted in his hands until she pulled away and shed the rest of her clothes, pulling back the covers and sliding into bed.
Ray undressed quickly, the buttons on his shirt awkward beneath clumsy fingers and there was no way, he thought, to elegantly remove socks and shoes.
He was aware that his body, never particularly shapely, had suffered from the months of inactivity. That he was overweight and gauche. He was suddenly panicked that after such long abstention everything would happen far too fast and the moment be spoiled, never to return.
But it was better than that. ‘We have all night,’ Sarah told him. ‘Nothing else matters right now.’ And they made love gently at first, as though afraid to cause each other pain, only gaining in confidence when the expected hurt failed to arrive. And finally, when Ray fell asleep, it was with Sarah wrapped tightly in his arms.
Chapter Nineteen
Lammas had arrived with the promise of a good harvest later in the year. The first fruits had been gathered and the first sheaf of ripe wheat been cut from the top field where the sun always shone the longest and the wheat always ripened the earliest in the season. In the seven years since she had come to live in Oscombe, she had never known a time when there was not enough ripe wheat to make the harvest dolly on Lammas eve.
Kitty had been attending a birth, the woman being delivered with the Lammas sunrise. It had been an easy birth, the mother having borne one a year for the past five years with equal ease had needed little help, but it had become accepted in the village that Kitty would be there, despite her own lack of husband and babies. Her father had taught her well. She had a good knowledge of the herbs that could ease labour and improve the flow of milk or help cracked nipples or bring down the dreaded fever that plagued so many women after birth and so often killed. In six of these last seven years few children had been born within ten miles of Oscombe and she had not attended.
It was a state of affairs that did not best please Mistress Randall, the new reverend’s wife. The thought of an unmarried woman having to do with details that only a married woman should know had outraged her sense of propriety. And she had been raised in town, where so often to call the midwife was a resort only of the desperate. Kitty had once witnessed the results of such a birthing when she had gone with her father to help a woman whose bleeding would not stop. A so-called midwife, eager to collect her next fee, had wrapped the cord around her hand and wrenched the placenta from the mother’s body.
The poor woman had died. Kitty’s father told that oftentimes such action led to the womb being turned almost inside out. Beyond an infusion of poppy to kill the pain, there had been nothing he could do.
This day though, Kitty had followed the rising sun home across the fields, impatient to be back in the village for the celebrations. She had a great liking for the Lammas worship, the taking of the first harvest for blessing, the making of the ‘dolly’ and the meal that the whole village shared on the green beyond the churchyard wall. The weeks following would always be amongst the busiest. Harvest stretching well into the autumn and that followed by the preparations for the winter planting and the laying down of the food stocks for the cold months to come. Lammas brought a breathing space. A moment of rest before the chaos and it was one that Matthew Jordan had whole-heartedly approved, for all, as he confided to her, that he was certain of its pagan origins.
This year though, her hopes for the festival were troubled the moment she entered the village. A small crowd had gathered by the church, the Reverend Randall at its heart and Master Eton standing close by listening to the quarrel.
‘What goes on?’ she asked him.
‘The reverend does not approve our way of worship.’
‘Whyever not?’
Mim turned to her. She held the new made dolly in her hands.
‘Mistress Hallam. Please will you explain. This is no sinful thing, it has been done since my grandfather’s time and his before that.’
‘A sinful thing?’ Kitty asked him. ‘I do not understand.’
‘I have already told him, Mistress Hallam, that it is nothing but a country tradition,’ James Eton said. ‘But it seems we differ in the way we view these things.’
‘Most certainly we do,’ Edward Randall said, his face distorted by anger. ‘The fruits of the field, I will bless,’ he said. ‘God’s harvest I will welcome to this church, but that idol. That creation of the devil I will not allow to cross this threshold.’
‘We told him that the idol had been kept within the church these many years,’ Eton said. ‘That each year the old one was taken from the church and burned and the new one welcomed in. Matthew had no quarrel with this.’
‘What Master Jordan believed to be the truth,’ Randall replied, ‘and what I hold dear are different things. Already I have found a store of incense within the church. And candles to be lit before the Virgin’s statue. Papish things that I have already disposed of. This “dolly”, had I seen it within the church, I would have burned also.’
‘What harm could come from a bundle of woven straw?’
‘If that were all!’ he said, jabbing a finger towards Mim. ‘That woman, when she came to bring that thing into the church, said the spirit of the harvest was locked inside her dolly. This is a place of God, mistress, not the site of some pagan spirit.’
‘It is a cocoon of straw,’ said Kitty. ‘It represents the hope of good harvest in the eyes of those who work the land. They depend on the harvest to feed and clothe them through the winter. Where else should they bring their hopes if not to the church?’
‘It is a point well made,’ James Eton said. ‘Believe me, Master Randall, I have little patience with such superstitions, but I do not see the harm that can be done by what is a simple act of faith.’
But Edward Randall would have none of it, he straightened to full height and looked with pity on them all. ‘I can see that there is much work to be done here,’ he said. ‘But I am disappointed. Simple folk, I could understand holding such beliefs and failing to see the harm, but you, Master Eton and Mistress Hallam, I had understood to be educated well beyond the commonplace. I have tolerated what could be seen as your strangeness, your healing and your meddling, yes, and even spoken for you, seeing much good in what you did. But this is indefensible.’
Mim was crying, unable to understand what was so wrong.
He demanded to know where last year’s dolly was kept and was told it was in the bell tower lodged above the bells.
‘Then I will send my man to fetch it down,’ Randall said, his anger seeming to dissipate then. ‘This afternoon bring the harvest and I will bless it. God will see the rightness of the act and will forgive such superstition.’ Then he nodded briefly at Master Eton and took his leave.
‘He is convinced of his own righteousness,’ James Eton said. ‘I believe we should view him as sincere, if a little zealous. And his views, it must be said, differ from Matthew’s greatly.’
He bent and picked up the straw dolly that Mim had left beside the gate. It seemed wrong just to cast it aside. ‘Perhaps you should take charge of this,’ he said to Kitty. ‘At least the village will know that it is kept, and maybe he will mellow a little as the year pas
ses and will allow his mind to be changed.’
It was in Kitty’s mind that this would not be so, but she said nothing. Mim and the others departed and left Kitty to walk back towards her cottage with Master Eton.
‘This is bad, Kitty, but it is all of a piece with what is happening everywhere just now.’
Kitty nodded. Her father’s letters regularly brought her news of what was happening in the country. There had been fighting the month before in Manchester between the King’s men and those who would rise against him. Her father expected war.
So did James Eton. ‘Both sides are too stubborn and too certain of their own righteousness,’ he said.
‘And you, sir?’ she asked him. ‘You have spoken against the King, would you fight against him?’
He shook his head. ‘I hope not to have to decide,’ he said. ‘I wish only to attend to my affairs here. To farm my land and be left alone, but I doubt I will be so fortunate. I doubt that any of us will be left untouched.’
Chapter Twenty
George frequently worked odd hours, late nights and weekends. Since the death of his wife and then the tragic loss of his daughter Janine, he had found little reason to go home.
Phil worked odd hours for other reasons. Phil was an obsessive who lived as easily in the virtual community of the Net as he did in the outside world. George was never clear which one he preferred.
He had worked with George for close on two years and it was a change for Phil to be, approximately at least, inside the law, though it was more often his approximately outside the law skills that George and his department made most use of.
‘Any ideas what these are?’ George dumped a list of names and numbers down on Phil’s desk.
‘Look like PNC references.’
‘That’s what I thought, but it keeps coming up with “reference not recognized” and throwing me off.’
Phil took another look at the codes and then logged on. The PNC — Police National Computer — was something George had free access to. It was strange for him to find somewhere he couldn’t go.
