The Woman in the Wood

by Lesley Pearse

‘Yes, Father,’ the twins said dutifully in unison, without conviction.

  It began to rain soon after that and the sky grew dark. The twins dozed a little and only woke up properly when the car bumped on uneven ground. It was too dark to see where they were.

  ‘Are we there?’ Duncan asked.

  ‘Yes, this is the lane to your grandmother’s house. It’s high time it was asphalted. There’s no street light either.’

  The car headlights picked up the sign ‘Nightingales’ on a wooden gate set in a picket fence. Some twenty or thirty yards back from the gate was the house, but all they could see of it in the dark was a well-lit porch and the two windows on either side.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ Father said. ‘Now don’t mind your grandmother if she’s a bit brusque. And be polite, please, and do as you’re told.’

  Maisy’s first impression as they were ushered by her father into a large, comfortable sitting room was that her grandmother was very rude. There was no attempt to get out of her chair to greet them, or to give them a smile, or even request that they come nearer so she could see them better. Maisy knew from Betty she was only seventy, not a great age which might excuse her. She was well dressed in a dusky pink knitted two-piece with pearls at her neck.

  ‘Well, Mother, I expect you’ll find them very much grown up since you last saw them?’ Father said.

  Maisy looked at him, surprised by his almost fawning tone.

  ‘Oh Alastair, children do grow, that’s expected,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ve warned them that I will not stand for any insolence, mischief or noise. They will eat in the kitchen with Janice, and only come in here when I summon them.’

  Maisy’s heart sank. She glanced at Duncan and saw that he looked equally dismayed.

  The old lady picked up a small handbell and rang it. Within seconds a brown-haired woman of about forty with a pleasant, open face came in and beamed at the children.

  ‘Bring tea for myself and my son, Janice,’ Grandmother said. ‘Take the children with you, give them some supper and show them to their rooms.’

  Janice looked enquiringly at their father. ‘Would you like a sandwich, soup or some cold cuts, Mr Mitcham? You’ve had a long drive and as I understand it you’re going back tonight?’

  ‘Yes, I am, Janice. A sandwich would be most appreciated, and a piece of your memorable fruit cake too, if there is any.’

  ‘I made one just yesterday,’ she smiled. ‘A ham sandwich?’

  He nodded, then moved towards the children, patting each of them awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘I’ll say goodbye now. Be good for Grandmother and write to me each week.’

  Janice led the twins out across the wide, flagstoned hall, past a huge, ancient trunk carved of dark wood and a grandfather clock with a very loud tick.

  ‘Wait till it chimes,’ Janice said with a little chuckle. ‘Enough to make you jump out of your skin.’

  ‘Don’t you remember the house?’ she asked as they went into the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘I know you were only about six when you last came, but children usually remember something.’

  ‘I seem to remember a pond with goldfish,’ Duncan said.

  Janice smiled. ‘Well, you’re right about that. I expect you’ll remember the garden when you see it again – on your last visit you were out there most of the time.’

  The scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the room was already laid for supper, the fruit cake on one plate, a Victoria sandwich on another. ‘I whipped the sponge up when I heard you were coming,’ Janice said. ‘Not all children like fruit cake.’

  ‘We eat anything,’ Duncan said. ‘Betty our housekeeper says we’re human dustbins.’

  Janice laughed and reached out to pat his cheek affectionately. ‘I’m liking you both already. Now, I thought a bowl of vegetable soup first, so sit down, and while you eat it I’ll make the tea for Mrs Mitcham and your father.’

  They heard him leave about an hour later. He didn’t come into the kitchen to say goodbye, and a few minutes later they heard Grandmother go up the front stairs to bed.

  But Janice’s warmth and jollity more than made up for being ignored. After delicious soup, ham sandwiches and cake, she took them up the back stairs just off the kitchen and showed them their rooms.

  They were both a bit shabby. Janice said that during the war various officers had come to stay there, but the twins weren’t bothered by that. They were just delighted to know that they were sleeping at the opposite end of the house to Grandmother, and that they had their own staircase so they never needed to go anywhere near the old lady.

  Janice claimed she wasn’t as fierce and cold as she liked to make out, and that she’d actually said, ‘It might be nice to have children in the house to brighten it up.’ However, Maisy suspected she’d made that bit up to be kind. But both she and Duncan really liked Janice. She had a gentle, motherly quality about her, she laughed easily and she seemed genuinely pleased to have them to take care of.

  ‘I love to cook but it’s not much fun for just one elderly lady who eats like a bird,’ she said. ‘When old Mr Mitcham was alive he was poorly and needed a great deal of help – sometimes I never got a moment to myself – but since then I’ve had too much time on my hands and it gets a bit boring.’

  She told them there were a couple of bicycles in the shed and she would get Mr Pike the gardener to clean them up so they could use them. They could catch a bus to Lyndhurst, or further afield to Southampton or Bournemouth if they wanted to, and she was sure some of the young people in the village would want to make friends with them.

  ‘We’ve even got a real live witch in the village,’ she said. ‘She’s called Sybil Leek. She’s really famous cos she writes books about witchcraft, and she’s on the wireless too. You’ll see her when you go into Burley – she walks about in a long black cloak with a jackdaw called Hotfoot Jackson on her shoulder.’

  The twins stared open-mouthed in astonishment. Janice laughed. ‘It’s true. I’m not making it up, I promise. I think there’s something about the forest that attracts odd people. Actually, there’s another woman who there are dozens of stories about, much more fascinating than the ones about Sybil. She’s called Grace Deville and she lives in a very remote spot in a little shack. You’ll hear people refer to her as the “Woman in the Wood”. She always wears men’s trousers and she doesn’t like visitors. When people stumble upon her place by accident, she sees them off with her shotgun. The things they say about her! Everything from being mad to killing her own baby and poisoning people. It’s probably all rumour. But then people don’t like Sybil much, either, because she attracts weird, witch-loving people to the village.’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Maisy gasped. ‘To think we thought all the drama happened in London!’

  ‘Tomorrow you can start checking it all out,’ Janice said. ‘Now, it’s time you went to bed. I’ve put hot-water bottles in them.’ She kissed them both on the cheeks. ‘Sleep tight.’

  2

  Duncan braked so hard his bicycle spun on the dusty forest footpath. ‘I think that might be it,’ he yelled back to Maisy, pointing to a plume of smoke rising above the trees. ‘Janice said she had a fire going constantly.’

  They had been at Nightingales just over a week now, and despite their grandmother’s obvious lack of interest in them, the twins were surprised to find that they were really quite happy to be there. They had already spied on the witch Sybil Leek, seeing her out walking with her pet jackdaw, and had peered through her windows to check if she had a cauldron and spell books. Now they wanted to see Grace Deville, the Woman in the Wood. As Mr Pike the gardener had only this morning finished fixing up the bikes, this was the first time they were able to come this far into the forest.

  Maisy braked and jumped off her bike. ‘It could just be a woodcutter’s fire,’ she said, looking at the smoke reflectively. ‘But let’s go and look anyway.’

  They hesitated. The path towards the smoke was little more than an animal track. I
t certainly wouldn’t be possible to ride down; it was so overgrown it would be difficult even to push their bikes along it. But, as Londoners, they were nervous about leaving their bikes on the path. Back home you didn’t leave your belongings anywhere in case they were stolen.

  ‘I think they’ll be all right left here,’ Duncan said. ‘We haven’t seen one person since we left Burley, and who would come into a forest to look for something to steal?’

  Maisy propped her bike against a tree and swished her plaits back over her shoulder. She felt good today. Janice had remarked on how pretty she was over breakfast. As no one had ever said this to her before, Maisy wasn’t inclined to believe it. But it still felt nice to be told.

  ‘What if this woman really is totally mad?’ she asked her brother. ‘Remember what Janice said – she might come charging at us with her shotgun. She must be tough if she’s lived out here alone for years.’

  Duncan bent over to examine his grazed knee. The previous day he’d fallen over and since then he’d been complaining bitterly that he was still expected to wear grey flannel shorts. Long trousers were only for wearing to church or other formal occasions.

  ‘She can’t be mad or even a witch if she wears men’s trousers,’ he said with an exasperated tone. ‘Trousers are sensible out here. Besides, why would she attack us if we don’t threaten her in any way?’

  ‘Well, even our own parents don’t like us much,’ Maisy said. ‘So maybe there really is something horrid about us.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Duncan sniffed disdainfully. ‘We weren’t sent here because they didn’t like us, as you very well know. It was only because Father …’ He paused, not knowing how to explain the reason.

  ‘Cos Father wants to sell the house, have a fling with Betty and doesn’t want us around?’ Maisy suggested.

  ‘That wasn’t what I was trying to say; you always have to be so dramatic. Anyway, I’m glad to be here. I like it.’

  ‘I like it too, but I just wish Father and Grandmother could talk to us properly about what’s happened and why. We aren’t babies. When I tried to explain that to Grandmother she said, “Children should be seen and not heard, but in my opinion it’s preferable they aren’t seen either.” She also said that Father had informed her that this was the right place for us to be and the asylum was the right place for Mother, and that she wanted no further questions on either subject.’

  Duncan seemed happy enough to be told what was what, with no explanation as to why, but Maisy wasn’t. She wanted to know why her father didn’t want to spend any time with his children, and why the only form of communication he seemed capable of was a question and answer system. What position did they hold in class? Which of the classics were they reading? Could they tell him the capital of Brazil/Albania/Venezuela, or some other, even more obscure country?

  She wondered if he had a friend at work, someone he chatted normally to, perhaps had lunch or a drink with. But if he had it was never mentioned. For as long as she could remember, when he wasn’t away on business he left home for his office in Whitehall at precisely eight thirty each morning, and walked up to Notting Hill Gate to catch the tube to Westminster. He always wore a pinstriped navy suit and bowler hat and carried a furled umbrella, just like thousands of other businessmen. When he’d gone away for his work he had never warned them he was going, or even told them where he’d been when he came home. The only way the twins had ever known he was going away was when he took a small suitcase with him.

  It wasn’t as if they could ever ask their mother about anything – she was always too poorly, lying back on her pillows with that vacant look they’d become so used to. They had, until recent events, believed it was the after-effects of her long-ago riding accident, though they had speculated that maybe she had some disease too. They were puzzled as to why Betty or their father hardly ever called a doctor to her. Maisy had asked Father once and he’d said it wasn’t a child’s place to question adults.

  At least now she knew what was wrong with her mother, and however bad that was, Maisy felt she and Duncan could cope with it. They had one another, after all, and they had Janice. The housekeeper’s interest and loving care more than made up for their frosty, distant grandmother.

  ‘I used to play board games with Alastair when we were young,’ she told them one evening. ‘When Mrs Mitcham told me you two were coming to stay, I was so excited about seeing you again. Now I’ll have to rack my brains to try and remember some little stories about your dad.’

  To Maisy the very best thing about coming here to live was walking out into the garden with Duncan on their first morning and seeing Nightingales in all its glory.

  It was mellow red brick with triangular eaves at either end of the house, and all the upstairs windows were set into the roof. Not that they could see much of the brick, as the house was almost covered in a profusion of wisteria, honeysuckle and roses. Janice had told them that when they came into flower the scent wafted into all the bedrooms and it looked sensational.

  The garden was vast by their London standard, and was mostly well-kept lawns and trees, but Janice had informed them that after the daffodils and tulips ended the borders would be a blaze of colour for the whole summer.

  Nightingales was over two hundred years old, and Grandmother’s family had lived there for half of that time. They had barely seen their grandmother since they arrived. They heard her playing the piano most days, and sometimes she hobbled around the garden when the sun was shining. But so far, she hadn’t summoned them to her sitting room.

  They liked having meals with Janice in the kitchen, and in the evenings they played cards with her, read or listened to the wireless. They did wonder how long it would be before they had to go to a local school, but they didn’t ask Janice in case she spoke to Grandmother and she interpreted it as them wanting to go home. That was the last thing they wanted.

  They felt guilty at admitting to feeling this way even to one another, but back in Holland Park there had always been a tense atmosphere, like something bad might happen at any minute. There had been no escape from it, since they hadn’t been allowed to go anywhere after school, and the most they had been allowed at weekends had been an hour’s walk.

  Betty was mostly grumpy, and Rose the maid and Mrs Gait, who both came in daily to do cleaning and laundry respectively, were too nervous of getting on Betty’s wrong side to chat. The freedom of Nightingales felt like paradise.

  ‘What do we say to Grace Deville if she’s in?’ Maisy asked. ‘Could we ask her why she lives out here alone?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. She’s not going to tell us that.’ Duncan smirked. ‘I know Janice said some people believe she’s a witch, but even if she is, she’s not going to be like the one in Hansel and Gretel, putting us in a cage and fattening us up to eat.’

  ‘Yes, but what if she really did kill her baby?’

  They had both asked Janice a great many questions about this woman, but disappointingly she either knew little or didn’t think it was right to tell them.

  ‘Janice said there was absolutely no proof of that, and it was in her opinion a nasty story spread by mean-spirited and cruel people who had nothing better to do than make things up,’ Duncan said loftily. ‘Anyway, let’s stop talking and creep along silently so we can spy on her.’

  It was further than they had expected, at least a mile from where they’d left their bikes. They walked in silence, Duncan in front of Maisy, but they were both flagging and Maisy was about to suggest turning back when suddenly the narrow path came out into a glade.

  There in front of them was a shack. Surely it must be the one where Grace Deville lived.

  ‘Whoa,’ Duncan said, holding out one arm so his sister didn’t blunder on past him. ‘Let’s hide and watch for a while.’

  Maisy was happy to comply. She wasn’t keen to go charging in to talk to a woman who by all accounts didn’t like people.

  The pair of them crawled under a thick bush, lay down on their stoma
chs and parted the leaves to see.

  The shack was prettier than Maisy had expected. It reminded her of the games pavilion at her old school, with a couple of steps leading up to a wooden veranda. It was rather dilapidated – the roof was sagging in the middle, several of the banisters on the veranda were missing, and the paint was peeling off – but there was a big wicker chair with a red cushion and a small table with some books on it, and Maisy thought she’d rather like to live here herself.

  Clearly there was no electricity, but there were water butts to catch rainwater, and there was also a little stream bubbling away just a few yards from the front door. Beyond the shack were a few small sheds; she assumed one of these was Grace’s lavatory. Close to it was a hen house, the hens spilling out into an adjoining pen.

  ‘It’s really nice,’ Maisy whispered. ‘I feel like we’re in a Famous Five book and any moment a man with a limp will come staggering along with a lumpy sack over his shoulder.’

  Duncan gave an amused little grunt. ‘It’s all tidier than I expected,’ he admitted. ‘Look at those piles of logs in the shed, so neatly stacked. And that vegetable patch is thriving.’

  Maisy looked towards the vegetable patch and saw Duncan was right: there were straight lines of vegetables pushing up through the soil, and the woman had even erected stick wigwams for runner beans. It looked as well cared for as their grandmother’s kitchen garden, and she had Mr Pike to look after it for her.

  Maisy and Duncan liked to help Mr Pike in the garden. In London they only had a tiny patch of grass which was always in the shade. There was nothing to it other than a mossy lawn and a few evergreen shrubs, so they’d never taken any interest in it. But Mr Pike was jolly and they liked the way he told them about different plants and trees; he’d even given them a little plot of their own to grow stuff. Maisy had planted some flowers, and Duncan had opted for lettuce and radishes. They couldn’t wait for the seeds to sprout.

  ‘Here she comes,’ Duncan whispered. ‘I hope her dog doesn’t smell us and come charging to attack us. Yikes, she’s got a dead rabbit over her arm!’