Borrowed Moonlight

by Helen Slavin

  He was miserly with his daughter, and this had been a blessing. Winifred had not been sent to boarding school in the family tradition, because Sir Henry did not think she was worth the expenditure. The girl was not pretty and not clever and, with the way the world was going to ruin anyhow, she would be better off learning how to strip down the Enfield and tinker with the plumbing. She was not wife material. It was a fact, and Sir Henry Hartley-Hartfield was a man who dealt in facts.

  Her mother had died in childbirth and, if the truth were told, rather than view Winifred as a lasting testament to his stern but deep love for his wife, he viewed the child as an underhanded assassin.

  The underhanded assassin was, today, being entrusted with taking a basket of scones and bread rolls, jam and pickles to old Mrs Massey, who lived at the other side of Leap Woods from Hartfield.

  “Now, what are your instructions?” Mrs Walters had folded the spotted teacloth over the top of the basket of provisions and was leaning on the worktop looking very seriously at Winn Hartley-Hartfield.

  “Don’t cut through Havoc Wood.”

  Winn knew Leap Woods like the back of her hand. It was her favourite playground. It was easy to stray into the wood through the gate in the walled garden at the rear of Hartfield Hall. Winn lifted the latch and headed out, closing the gate behind her.

  It was a lovely, sun-filled afternoon, and Winn picked her way carefully through the trees. She was following a path. This path did not go anywhere near the cinder track that was laid through the wood just here, nor did it step onto the other tracks of bared earth or small stones. This path was one she had been shown on many occasions by Mrs Walters, and she stuck to it.

  She was sweating a little bit. The basket she was carrying was heavy. Winn was glad of the errand though. It had been, as usual, a horrid day at school. Other children, she thought, were scary sometimes and often cruel. They were a puzzle to her, and piece by piece she was solving it, working out that she was not part of their picture. That indeed their picture was very small and black and white, and she didn’t want to be in it.

  Winn was thinking over the story they had read this afternoon with Mr Chideock, which had been full of knights and featured Woodcastle Castle. She was imagining herself on a horse, a rather magnificent beast, not a puny little pony like Patricia Henryson had, and she wouldn’t give it a stupid name either. Whoever called their horse Monty? No. She would call her horse Warrior or Agrippa. Yes. Agrippa. So there she was in armour. Bronze armour, because bronze had a good colour in the sunlight, not shiny, better than golden, and last week they had done a history lesson where Mr Chideock had shown them how people in the Bronze Age made bronze, and there had been a little fire and a crucible. Crucible. That was also a good word.

  Winn’s mind wandered into bronze-cast battles and, not surprisingly, took her feet with it.

  She had crossed the borderline into Havoc Wood and not really noticed. The path was cinder now, and it was only when she noticed how dirty her socks and shoes were that she realised what she had done. She stopped with a little hard breath. She knew her way around Havoc Wood, too, but she had only ever been allowed here in company with Mrs Walters and Mrs Way, the Gamekeeper. She looked about her. To the right of her was Pike Lake, just visible through the trees. She could not see Cob Cottage itself, because it was on the opposite shore of the lake. She could tell where Old Castle Road was, and she considered. It was a long way to walk back to Leap Woods and go around to Mrs Massey’s cottage. From here it would be quicker to just keep going. She needed to go up the hill a little way and onto the path through the birch trees. It was lovely there, the bark all white and silvery. Yes. It would be as quick. If she turned back she’d be late, and Mrs Massey and Mrs Walters would be worried.

  Winn walked on with purpose, her mind concentrating now on her feet and where they were placed. It was vital in Havoc Wood that you didn’t stray off your path. That was what Mrs Walters and Mrs Way had always said — “your path”. Winn knew which one she could take for safe passage. Not the bare stones. Never through the bracken. This one. This path. This way.

  Except that after half an hour she didn’t seem to be getting any further on. Her heart was panicking a bit now and she wanted to cry but thought that, if she didn’t find her way soon, she might cry later instead when she really had something to cry about. It was getting darker.

  There was a creak that poked itself into Winn’s ears. She halted. No. She couldn’t hear anything. Not a thing. She took another three steps. Except that was odd in itself, because she ought to be able to hear the birds. It was March, after all, and they were all fighting for territory and mates. Winn held her breath. There the sound was again, a distinct crack this time, as if someone had trodden on a branch. And still no birds. Why were there no birds?

  She stayed very still and breathed in shallow little puffs so that she couldn’t hear herself breathe. There might be a bird of prey near. That would make all the wildlife silent. Winn looked up. Above her, the bare arms of the tree reached into an empty white sky. She looked back at the path she was going to take. She shouldn’t dawdle. If she was late, Mrs Massey would be worried.

  She walked on for a few more minutes before the stone almost missed her. She was startled, thinking at first that the object that grazed by her cheek must be a bird. But as she staggered back and reached up to the hurt place on her face, she saw the stone where it had fallen to the ground. She felt tears stinging inside her, her breath catching. She looked around. There was no one to be seen, and she could not think where the stone might have come from. She had blood on her hand. It made her feel light and panicky. She needed to hurry.

  As she picked up pace, she stumbled, sprawling down, her ankle catching against a tree root, her face scraped once more, this time by bark from a fallen tree. She began to cry and to feel smaller than she had ever felt in her life. Her hands were grazed with dirt. She stood up, wiped her hands on her cardigan. The basket had spilled, and the things were spread around. Winn took wobbly steps to retrieve them; nothing was broken. The scones smelt lovely, vanilla and cinnamon. She wiped at her face; all different bits of her were stinging now, and she was going to be in trouble for being late.

  The second stone hit her square on the back of her head. She stumbled once more, but this time she did not fall. She scrambled and ran, ran hard and, most important of all, the most severe instruction she had ever been given by Mrs Way, she did not look back.

  It had been a long haul uphill on a sunny day for Hettie Way. She had been waiting at the rendezvous for some time. This arrival, late as he was, was not unexpected and was only a visitor destined to be escorted through Havoc and onwards to the herepath at Yarl Hill. His safe passage request had been sent in good time. It had been a lovely day. Sunlight. Bright blue sky.

  But, something. Hettie Way disliked the word “something”, as it left the world wide open to itself, but, on this occasion, ‘something’ was the word that kept digging at her. Something was amiss.

  It was tiring working the wood. Hettie’s position as Gamekeeper had come down to her through many generations, and as a result of all those previous Gamekeepers, all of them Ways, Hettie’s senses were finely tuned. The edges of her hearing stretched into the distant edges of Havoc Wood, the sounds travelling to her, bouncing off the trunks of trees, skimming over the surface of Pike Lake. Scents were more to Hettie Way than to a bloodhound. Her sight was, to any optician, average for a human of her apparent age, but the periphery of her vision offered up the glimpses and shadows of her second sight.

  Skewed. That was the proper word. It was in the angle of the shadows, a pulling, a stretching taut. Hettie looked at it out of the corner of her eye, the best way to view if you did not wish to draw attention to the fact that you were alert to something. This anomaly was not connected to the Visitor.

  The Visitor was later, still, and in that far-flung border of Havoc Wood, Hettie Way grew beyond impatient. The skewing was sending a sharpness. It ne
eded to be attended to. Just as she was making the decision to leave the Visitor to wait, the Visitor himself stepped out from a long shadow.

  “Come far?” Hettie could hear how gruff she sounded. The Visitor, tall and thin as the shadow, stared at her.

  “Come far, going further.” It was their password, and at once Hettie nodded and set off, leading the way through Havoc.

  “Could you… could you halt the pace a little?” the Visitor requested as he stumbled for the third time. His legs reminded Hettie of a heron, and he seemed unused to walking through rough terrain. His pale face was flushed with a bluish red.

  “No.” Hettie was certain. The skewing was intensifying, a slow, tidal drag, and there was a taste in the air, sharp and metallic, bloody.

  “Is… is something amiss?” The Visitor was mauve with panic and exertion. Hettie pointed to a tumbled-down trunk covered with moss.

  “Sit. Wait.”

  He obeyed her instruction, and Hettie turned her mind fully. It came like a lightning flash. Someone was doing dark magic in her wood. The pictures flooded in. Location. Perpetrator. No. Victim. No. No. No. No. Hettie was whispering the word now, letting the wind carry it forward. She could not stop the magic from here, but she could flaw and fault it. “No, no, no,” she whispered, her feet beginning to drum their way over this earth beneath these feet, the one thing she was always certain of.

  In the end it was almost like flying, her feet light, her pace swift, so that she burst from the trees like an owl, her black raincoat making mighty swooping wings behind her. A woman was bent over the small bruised child, the thin arm as delicately balanced as a twig underfoot.

  Caught out, the white-haired woman leapt up like a flame, abandoning her magic. The child’s arm bone was unbroken, but Hettie clutched at her anyway, her fingers clawing into the woman’s hair as she pulled away and pulled away, desperate for escape. Neither was giving up, and so the hair tore free, bloodied tufts left in Hettie’s fingers as Whitehair headed for the cover of the trees. Except, there was no cover for Trespassers such as her in Havoc Wood, so she kept on running, her heart pounding itself into a stone with the effort of outrunning the wrath of Hettie Way.

  At Cob Cottage, Winn Hartley-Hartfield awoke to find herself wrapped in a blanket with Mrs Way looking down at her with a smile.

  “Cup of tea?” Mrs Way asked. Winn nodded. There was nothing she liked better in all the world than a cup of tea, not even cream soda. Then she remembered her errand. As she started up in fear, Mrs Way put a hand on her arm, the one the lady had hurt. It felt instantly better. The fear ran away from Winn and hid in the very back of her mind.

  “You were very strong,” Mrs Way told her. “And you ran very fast.”

  “But I shouldn’t have wande—” Winn was horribly aware of her mistake. This was all her fault. She’d done the very thing she ought not.

  “It was not your fault. It’s easy to wander into Havoc Wood. You were on the way to Mrs Massey’s, yes?” Mrs Way’s china cup chinkled like a small bell. It was comforting, and as Winn sipped at it the tea was delicious and refreshing. “You did all that you should. You were careful. You respected the wood,” Mrs Way assured her.

  “But the lady was…” Winn thought of the twig snapping, and the thought brought back a memory of the lady in the wood, of her thin fingers squeezing at her arm. Mrs Way moved her hand to the place.

  “Here?” she asked, her voice soft and low. Winn’s arm felt warmed, as if by sunlight. She nodded. She had run so hard, felt the woman’s hand grab for her, and she had dodged away, time and again. Then she had tripped, and the woman caught her. Winn felt the tears rising up, and she gave a little whimper.

  “No… it’s alright, Winn. Above all, it is alright to be scared… being scared makes us run faster, think quicker.”

  Winn nodded, understanding.

  “I am going to give you something, something to keep with you, something that will protect you even when you are not in Havoc Wood.” She reached for some secateurs that were sitting on the little table, and she waved her little finger at Winn. “This is my magic finger, Winn, and I am giving it to you.” Winn watched, silent, as Mrs Way set the jaws of the secateurs around her left hand’s little finger and snipped, hard. There was a brief, bright crunch of bone, and blood oozed. Quickly, Mrs Way snapped her fingers and a small bright flame sparked up, glowed blue, yellow hot, white hot. With this she cauterised the wound and the end of the finger. Then she curled the finger over and popped it into a small leather pouch.

  “Keep this with you. It’s my marker, Winn. No one… not anyone… not the wood woman… not anyone, at all, ever… will touch you while you have this.” She pulled the top of the pouch closed with its plaited string and handed it to Winn. Winn did not reach for it. She was wide-eyed, her ears replaying the small clicking bone sound, seeing the blood ooze.

  “Winn, take it.” Mrs Way spoke her name carefully and with authority. Winn looked at the small pouch, understood that it was a significant gift and that she must not be afraid. Mrs Way was not someone to be afraid of.

  Unless you were the white-haired woman in the wood.

  In town on market day with Mrs Walters, Winn saw the woman from the wood — in her red dress it was hard not to. Mrs Walters gave her a hard stare and the woman in the wood just gave a sour grin, to which Mrs Walters pulled Winn tight and almost squeezed her hand flat.

  “She better not cross me…” Mrs Walters muttered under her breath. Winn felt the small pouch in her pocket, the finger curled within like a sleeping snail.

  Nuala Whitemain wandered through the market wondering about the unfairness of everything. It was alright, was it, for Hettie Way, lording it over everyone as Gamekeeper, to use dark magic? It was alright then, was it? Using dark magic to help other people? What a waste. Ha. Not very dark then really, was it?

  She wandered a little more, rather bored with herself, and she considered that there were other people here she could use for bone magic. Not as powerful as the child, but still. There was that stupid grinning oaf of a butcher for a start. Look at the forearm on that? As she thought of marrow and shards and the power, she felt a tweak of fear, of what vengeance Hettie Way might take should Nuala approach the butcher and break his bones. At once she understood that Hettie Way had to be got at, had to be taken down. A small black spike of Strength radiated towards her from that dratted child’s pocket.

  Yes. Hettie Way needed to be dealt with.

  Not today. No. But someday.

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