A Curse Dark as Gold

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Don’t be absurd.” But he said it absently, from mere force of habit. Pilot had risen, tense, and stared hard at Uncle Wheeler, her ears pricked forward with attention. I frowned into the dusky moonlight, then sighed. I was running out of time. The last thing in the world I wanted was to bring Uncle Wheeler along on my journey tonight. But the idea that some other carriage might come along and actually take him back to Shearing disturbed me even more.

  “Get in.”

  The shadowed coachlight made his face paler than ever, and I thought he looked thin. “Agreed. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d allow me to drive?”

  The look I gave him was all the answer he needed.

  We rode in silence for some time. I had nothing whatever to say to the man, but I did wonder where he’d been these two months. Had he found more rich friends to cadge off? Had Spinner caught him up?

  Perhaps I did not wish to know after all.

  Once inside the carriage, my uncle seemed free of the strange spell. He sprawled lazily on the seat beside me, one leg propped upon the dash rail, his hat drawn low over his brow. Finally, he said, “And where are you headed, by dark of night, all, all alone?”

  I started. His voice, smooth and languid as always, did not make those words any less chilling. He had not shown himself to be a violent man—but, then, did I truly know him? He could easily be concealing a knife in that black jacket, and we were as good as nowhere, out here on the long stretch of dark road.

  But, oddly, that thought no longer frightened me. I had faced this man down before, and he was no comparison to the threat that awaited me back home. “Haymarket,” I said.

  He eyed me from beneath his hat brim. “Haymarket’s a big city—well, compared to what you’re used to. Where, precisely?”

  I let the reins droop, trusting Blithe and Bonny to keep up their steady forward progression. From beneath my cloak I withdrew the rolled-up form of my father’s map, which I had, with no little pain, cut from his atlas. If it survived the journey, I would frame it above my fireplace. I showed the map to my uncle, and pointed a gloved finger at Simple Cross. There was just enough light to read by. Uncle Wheeler grabbed my hand.

  “That’s not Haymarket—that is the middle of nowhere. What sort of business could you possibly have there?”

  I didn’t answer, but my face must have given something away. Uncle Wheeler grabbed the reins and gave them a brutal jerk. The horses scrambled to slow down, rocking the trap madly, and I grabbed for the dash rail as Pilot rolled against my feet and barked.

  “Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what night it is?”

  “Are you superstitious, Uncle?”

  “Hardly. But I’m no fool, either. You must be mad; no good can come of this.”

  “I’m not looking for good,” I said softly. “I’m trying to save my son.”

  He eyed me warily, but a slow smile spread across his face. “Oh, I see,” he said. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with our mutual acquaintance, now, would it? You wouldn’t perhaps have gotten yourself involved in any…unfortunate bargains?”

  I drew back, stung. “Please, just give me the reins.”

  Uncle Wheeler made no response. He was staring past me into the shadowed trees. Pilot whined softly from beneath my feet, and the horses neighed, restless. A low wind had risen in the wood; branches rustled and creaked in the distance. I turned; among the shifting leaves ahead I saw the flash of lamplight—there and then gone again. I blinked, uncertain I had really seen anything. And then it was back, bobbing along steadily. I shook my head—someone walking home by the margin, carrying a lantern. Several yards farther along, another light—larger, yellower. A cottage. I reached across for the reins.

  “No, wait—”

  I glanced his way. “Uncle, let me say again: I really am pressed for time. I am happy for you to ride with me, but if you intend to distract me from my errand, I will leave you here.” Voice of the mill or no.

  He turned toward me. “Leave me? You’d like that, I’m sure.”

  When I made no reply to this, Uncle Wheeler looked sharply at me—and gave a strangled laugh. “Good God, girl, do you know nothing? Look—” I followed his finger into the darkness. The lights winked out, quick as that. “Keep looking.” Another light, deeper into the forest, now coming our way again, now gone. I watched in confusion for several minutes. Even Pilot climbed up to see what the delay was.

  “That isn’t lamplight. They’re corpse-lights—will-o’-the-wisps. There’s likely to be a bog back there, or a ravine.”

  I shook my head, lost.

  “You’d call it superstition, no doubt. But the local peasantry will tell you those lights are the spirits of lost souls, leading unwary travellers to their doom.”

  All Souls’ Night.

  “So unless you mean to see me stumble off a cliff and break my neck—which, I have no doubt, should please you no end—I’ll thank you to keep driving.”

  The odd lights followed us all evening, first on one side of the road, then the other, then ahead. I told myself my uncle was having a jest at my expense—it was a cottager, out searching for a lost dog, or perhaps some drunken farmhand, stumbling home from a long weekend. Nothing more eldritch than that. But if that were all, my drunken cottager made as good time on foot as my horses. I reached down for Pilot’s feathered head, glad for her solid presence.

  Eventually we came in sight of Haymarket, or the first scattering of houses and farmsteads leading into town. The map was still open across Uncle Wheeler’s lap, and I peered at it again. I thought I could make out the shape of our path—and the tree-coated hill before us looked like the one marked out on the map. We were close; we had to be.

  Turning onto an outlying road, eerily bereft of habitation, I drove along flat pasture, toward the river. Drawing as close to the trees as I dared, I leaned forward and tried to make out a gap, a strange shadow—anything in the darkness that might once have been a path. I drove a quarter mile in both directions and saw nothing but more will-o’-the-wisp. Finally I stopped the carriage and sighed.

  “I’m sure you have no intention of divulging the true nature of this errand to me,” Uncle Wheeler said peevishly, “but you might offer some sort of hint. No doubt—”

  “Uncle, if you wish to contribute something to this journey, then you may at least look for that turning.”

  “You presume it’s still there, of course.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His expression clearly indicated that I was the most ignorant person he could imagine. “Although it obviously has never occurred to you that time could cause something to progress, instead of decay, woods do grow up. Trees fall over paths. Underbrush closes in. A road falls out of use, and the wood reclaims it. Likely no decent person’s stepped foot on that path in fifty years.”

  I stared at him, and then back to the map. Oh, he was right, and we were on a fool’s errand. We’d never find the cross-ways, not in the middle of the night—not in a week of trying.

  I didn’t have a week.

  “No,” I said, and started the horses forward again. “If it was there once, it’s there now—and we’ll find it. We must.”

  Suddenly, Pilot barked. “What is it, lass?” She nudged my hand absently, her eyes keen on the woods. The bobbing lights had swept toward us, and back out again, and they were coming near once more. First one dim glow on my left, pushing eastward…then another far off to the right, flickering on and out again. I watched in odd fascination for several moments.

  “No,” I said to Pilot. “You’re imagining things.”

  But was she? After a few minutes, I didn’t think so. The lights, like signal flares, bobbed and flashed in a way that could not have been random. I drove a few yards to the right, eastward, and stopped. The floating yellow orb followed, paused, and began a frantic flashing in much the same pattern as before. East. Was I being led east? And that second light, the stationary one—what did that mark?

/>   I decided to find out. I clucked the horses into action and drove straight for the still, eastward beacon. My lefthand companion winked out and only appeared again if I seemed to pause. As I approached the light, it seemed to sink deeper into the woods.

  “Stop!” I hadn’t meant to, but I cried out aloud. Uncle Wheeler sprang forward in the seat and grabbed my arm.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “What did I just tell you? Were you not listening?”

  “I heard you,” I said grimly. “But look—they want us to follow.”

  “Of course they want us to follow. That’s what they do. Bogs and ravines, remember?”

  But he was wrong. As I neared the spot where the light had hung, waiting, the trees broke open and a shadowy path appeared beneath the tangled branches.

  “Look,” Uncle Wheeler whispered—or I’d not have seen it, myself. An ancient stone marker, probably once a gatepost, sat by the wayside, signaling the now-obscured path.

  The corpse-lights winked and sparked among the branches, far into the depths of the wood. I pulled up close to the post and alit from the trap, preceded by a cautious-tailed Pilot. Some of the old fence boards were still attached, and I tied the horses to them.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Uncle Wheeler said, still sitting stubbornly in the trap. “You’ll be killed—and for what?”

  “I don’t think so, Uncle. Look—you don’t have to come with us. Someone should probably stay with the horses anyway.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Stay right there; I’m coming down. If you fall and break your neck in there, someone is bound to assume I’ve done you in.”

  The woods were very dark, even stripped bare for winter. And Uncle Wheeler’s assessment proved accurate: No one could possibly have walked this tangled path in the last century. We stumbled across roots and fallen branches, ducked low-hanging limbs, pushed saplings out of our way. Pilot scrabbled through the dead leaves at our feet, her steps sure and light. We had only the corpse-lights and Pilot’s white breech to light our way.

  It’s a wonder we didn’t break our necks, and after a quarter hour of fighting that wood I began to regret disregarding Uncle Wheeler’s warnings. Clearly we were being led to our doom. And then, when I was almost ready to give up and turn back, we stumbled out into a clearing, where the path spread out wide before us, and at a long, oblique angle into the distance.

  “The cross-ways,” I murmured, and I saw Uncle Wheeler’s hat nod once.

  “And now?” he said, in that old arch voice.

  I sank gratefully onto the remnants of a low stone post. “Now we wait.”

  The will-o’-the-wisps had stopped travelling and were clustered across the clearing. Where there had been two, there were now five—then eight, then I lost count as they sprang into being. I stiffened and heard Uncle Wheeler draw a sharp breath. Pilot made a sound that was half growl, half moan, and pressed herself tight to my legs.

  I saw something else, then—the lights had gathered round an ancient beech tree, white with age and stooped under the weight of its massive branches. A raw scar on the trunk, high above the path, showed where a limb had fallen. The branch itself lay in the middle of the road, big as a tree in its own right. I found myself rising from my perch and scrabbling my way across the fallen limb toward the old beech.

  “Charlotte!” Uncle Wheeler’s whisper rang out loud and hoarse. I waved him to silence and crept on.

  “Charlotte!” Some urgency in his call made me turn back, and I nearly fell back across the branch at what I saw.

  A mist had risen—one tiny patch of floating, ragged fog hung above the center of the crossroads. It wafted upward like a puff of smoke, but with its own preternatural light. The blue-white glow, if nothing else, would have told me this was no ordinary mist. Hastily I clambered over the limb and underbrush and ducked back behind the beech tree.

  The mist congealed, taking on the form of—of a man, unbending himself from a stooped and gnarled posture. As the form solidified, I began to shake. I dug my hands into my skirts and felt my knuckles go white. A minute more, and the semi-solid, somewhat glowing man-shape stepped—stepped!—out into the roadway. I wanted to turn away, hide my face in my skirts—but I couldn’t.

  It was Jack Spinner. Something was different—but he was unmistakable. His carriage, the way he moved—I sat and trembled as Spinner took a few steps that did not touch the ground, paused to give himself a doglike shake, and looked around the clearing, as if confused. I thought he looked like someone awakening after a deep sleep and not, for a moment, recognizing the place he has found himself.

  He lifted his hands to his face, turned them back to front, flexed the fingers. He touched his face, his head, his ears and neck—his neck. He pulled at the collar of his ghostly shirt and felt below it with frantic fingers. For a moment he faded.

  Suddenly, he brightened, solidified—flashed like a burst of flame, and cried out like an enraged animal. Only there was no sound, and he clapped his hands to his silent mouth. I watched him bend to take a deep breath—he seemed to struggle to remember how—and cry out again. This time the roar rattled the dry dead leaves on the roadway and seemed to roll toward me like a slow, hot wind which shook me to my very bones.

  Spinner fell to his knees and caught up handsful of the earth and leaves, letting them spill through his fingers. For a moment he stayed there, head bent low, and when he lifted his face, it seemed to me that he wept.

  Horrified, fascinated, I could not draw my eyes away from the spectacle—the spectre. I leaned in closer, nearly lost my balance, and grabbed the trunk of the beech for support.

  Suddenly—the clearing disappeared, or cleared. The fallen limb vanished from the decaying underbrush; the underbrush itself was absolutely gone—the very clearing became wider, more open, more like the crossroads of old. Gone were the tangled, overgrown weeds, and back were the stone-posted fences, the wide, clean, dusty roads. I looked up, and instead of the raw gash in the beech’s trunk, a stately limb arched gracefully overhead, fully leafed. I pulled back from the tree with a gasp, but nothing changed. Or rather, everything remained changed, the roads, the cross-ways, the fences and hale summertime trees.

  A bright, full moon shone overhead in a clear starlit sky.

  The corpse-lights had vanished. Where they had been was now a mob.

  Perhaps twenty men emerged from the woods, from the road, from the darkness. They were armed—some with muskets, some with pitchforks, some with sticks. One man carried a rope. As they materialized, I heard shouting—laughter. They did not walk, exactly, but seemed to float onward, inexorable, as if it was not necessary, now, to remember footsteps.

  Jack Spinner stood rooted to his spot at the heart of the crossroads, and shook.

  They overtook him, like a fog rolling across the land. Caught by the arms and struggling like a mad thing, Spinner screamed and wept and made not a single sound.

  “Kill the witch!” I did not note who said it first, but it thereafter spilled from the lips of every man assembled there.

  “Kill him!”

  “Devil!”

  “String him up!”

  “Stop! Don’t—help me, please!”

  My eyes flew open. For a wild moment I thought he was speaking to me, but no one took any notice of me, though surely I was in plain enough view. My heart rattling like a loose shutter, I held fast to the tree and trembled.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the magistrates?”

  “And risk them letting him go? Not a chance. You know what he is.”

  “Aye, confessed, he did.”

  A man stepped forward out of the mob. I knew immediately who he must be. The arrogant height, the stern features…they did not belong to anyone I knew. But something—a stirring in my blood, perhaps, like iron to a magnet—connected me to him across the years: Harlan Miller. He drew a rolled-up paper from his coat and unfurled it.

  “I have the confession here, if there is any doubt. This man is a dangerous crimi
nal, and I think it best we take care of him once and for all.”

  “No—it’s me! Joseph, Peter, you know me, it’s John—John Simple.” The words were a whimper, but they pierced my soul. Simple. It was a name.

  Harlan Miller laughed, an ugly, ugly sound. “Your very name condemns you! For what is a simple, but a spell?”

  “Aye,” someone agreed. “Wheeler makes wheels, and Miller runs the mill—what does your name mean, then?”

  Simple only sobbed harder. They brought the rope. I closed my eyes; I could not watch further. I buried my face in my arms and realized I was weeping. It didn’t matter that this scene was ages old, over and past. We were all trapped now—those men had condemned us all.

  “John Simple, you are charged with the crime of witchcraft and bedevilment. You have confessed to bewitching the sheep of Farmer Sherman and preventing Mrs. Woolsey’s butter from taking.”

  “That were a lease I signed, for you to build yon mill on my land—and you know as much.” I was surprised at the venom in Simple’s voice—now, when it was too late.

  Miller laughed again. “Was it? Well, here—why don’t you have a closer look and read me what you signed?”

  Against my will, I found myself peering out at them again. Miller held the paper right up to Simple’s face. He closed his eyes and turned away. “You know I don’t read.”

  “Well, then—you ought to be more careful what you put your hand to. Have at it, lads!”

  I braced myself for the creaking of the rope against the branch—but what I heard was Simple, speaking out low and softly over the mob.

  “Harlan Miller, you will have no good of what you took from me, and you and yourn will suffer the loss I felt, until the Miller line may die out. Malton Wheeler, I see you here, too—and I’ll see you and yours in Hell!”

  “Charlotte!”

  I jumped, a scream caught in my throat. Uncle Wheeler had crept up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulder. Somewhere, Pilot was barking. Frantic, dazzled, I stared wildly round me. I was crouched in a pile of dead leaves and vines, a long white limb stretched out on the ground before me. The mob was gone—Simple, Miller, all the others, disappeared into the dark night. I choked back a sob.