The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘It’s all right, Mark,’ she said. ‘But you are very tired. You need to go to bed now and get some rest.’

  He looked up at her and smiled. He looked down at his hands, linked in hers. He pulled gently free of her grip and rose and walked out of the room.

  It was the first time they had touched since their initial handshake of mutual introduction and greeting. Her instinct had told her it was, at that moment, the thing he most needed. She knew her reaching out to him as she just had, had not been wholly an act of compassion. Neither had it been entirely a signal of her desire. It had been somewhere between the two, dictated by strong and instinctive impulses. And she felt no embarrassment or regret or guilt at having done it. It was what he needed. It had been what she needed too.

  She would stay the night. The spare room was prepared. Adam did not seem to have any qualms over the sight of her at breakfast. She had drunk too much with Mark following the phone call from the man claiming to be Miss Hall’s emissary to drive the long and tricky route home in darkness. There, the remoteness of this house was an advantage. No busybody would see her car parked outside all night and draw malicious conclusions to spread as equally malicious gossip. She could not scandalise the neighbourhood if there was not a neighbourhood to scandalise. And she was relieved about that. Events in her family history had left her raw where speculation on lax morality was concerned. Minds could be as narrow in these parts as vistas were broad. Prejudices thrived and could endure even down the centuries.

  That reminded her. She yawned. She was glad the following day was a Saturday. She would sort out the child minder for Monday first thing. Then, she would go and see if she could dispel the anxiety a part of Mark’s account had inflicted upon her. It would mean going back to the family home, to see her mother. Generally, Elizabeth gained nothing but pleasure from visiting her mum. She would buy flowers and a nice cake from the bakery and motor the twenty familiar miles to her mother’s door. Those things, she always did. But this visit would be different in the carrying out of a singular task she hoped and prayed would prove of no significance. The anxiety provoked by that one troubling detail in Mark’s vivid account could easily blossom into fear. It was why she could not wait beyond tomorrow to have the issue resolved in her mind.

  Adam was already seated at the kitchen table when she came down the following morning. Mark had his back to her at the stove. He was whisking something, she assumed eggs. Adam showed no surprise at all at seeing her. He was playing with toy cars, enacting a police chase on the tabletop.

  ‘Hello, Dr Bancroft.’

  ‘Elizabeth, Adam, please,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Elizabeth.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Mark said, without turning round. Then, ‘Young man, I’m ready to take your order.’

  Adam parallel parked his cars on the table. ‘I’d like a Red Bull to drink. Don’t worry about pouring it. The can will be fine.’

  ‘So that’s a glass of apple juice.’

  ‘And a jam doughnut, please, with lots of icing sugar.’

  ‘So that’s scrambled egg. Toast on the side?’

  ‘And for dessert, I’ll have chocolate ice cream.’

  ‘You don’t have dessert at breakfast.’

  ‘Please? Can’t I have it just this once, Dad?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Adam looked up at Elizabeth. ‘It’s child cruelty. My father is a man without a heart.’

  ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Well. I think.’

  ‘Did you dream?’

  ‘Did I! Yes. Liverpool won the title. They beat us in injury time at home in the last game of the season. It was a complete nightmare.’

  She smiled. The resilience of children never ceased to amaze her. It was wonderful of itself, of course. And it was wonderful, she knew from her professional dealings with the bleaker sort of family, because it was so often necessary. But Adam really did look untroubled.

  ‘Are you going to stick around today, Elizabeth? Can you do stuff today with Dad and me?’

  ‘What do you guys do at weekends?’

  ‘Canoeing, walking, sometimes climbing and abseiling,’ Mark said, joining them at the table with plates of toast and bacon and scrambled egg. ‘A bit of exploring, castles and grand houses, places of historic interest.’

  ‘Car boots, when Dad feels like putting his hand in his pocket,’ Adam said. ‘Does any of that sound like it might be fun?’

  ‘All of it. But I can’t today. I have obligations, Adam.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. He looked like he meant it.

  Ruth Campbell had been hanged, convicted of witchcraft in the autumn of 1656. The officials of Cromwell’s Protectorate had been zealous in their eradication of the black arts. Nowhere in the Commonwealth was spared the commissions, the trials, the ordeals and the executions. It was probably worst in Ireland and England’s West Country. But it had been bad too in the Highlands of Scotland, where envy and spite sparked the deadly rumours that spread until they eventually brought the witch finders thundering up from Whitehall on the iron hooves of their great horses, with their Model Army outriders and their instruments of interrogation dragged behind them in rattling carts.

  Ruth had been Elizabeth’s grandmother, with so many ‘greats’ positioned before the ‘grand’ that Elizabeth had never been able really to properly remember their exact number. It did not matter. The bloodline was pure and the genetic link undeniable. Then there was the legacy. Ruth had been a healer. That was what had got her into trouble. She had not been the lonely crone of witch stereotype. She had been the wife of a prosperous beef cattle farmer and the young mother of two infant sons. She had been, by reliable account, a popular, pretty woman, characterised by vitality and good humour. But she had possessed a healing gift. And when someone in the community, envious of her other attributes, decided to bring her down, it was this that they used, to cruel effect, to do so.

  After her bloody trial by ordeal she was made to watch, broken, as they burned the farm buildings and cast out her husband and sons from their home. Then they dragged her, bound behind a horse, through a jeering throng to the place of execution. The executioner placed a rope around her neck and she was hoisted on to the gallows. It was the slower sort of hanging. There was no merciful drop to snap her neck and deliver an instant death. Instead she was strangled, kicking, as the rope tightened with the burden of her weight. The contemporary account said it took her two or three minutes to die. During that time, someone emerged from the watching crowd and stole the shoes from her feet. She died eventually. But even then, her ordeal was not at an end. She had shown insufficient shame and remorse, the commissioner said. Picked at by carrion crows, putrefying, her body was left suspended for a month before her father was allowed to take it down.

  By the time Ruth’s father performed this pitiable task, the witch finder who had condemned her was dead himself. Judge Josiah Jerusalem Smith had suffered his fatal stroke in the house on the hill Mark Hunter now owned. His body had been taken back to London and buried with some ceremony in consecrated ground. Ruth’s remains had been burned on a pyre, her ashes scattered to the winds, no man of the cloth to be found with the courage or compassion to preside over a Christian burial.

  The house owned by Elizabeth’s own mother was a walk of only a couple of miles from the scene of the burning and the subsequent execution of her ancestor. Staying in the locality had been an act of defiance for Ruth Campbell’s husband John and her boys and their descendents. To go would have damned them, confirmed their collective guilt in the eyes of everyone who had known them. So they had stayed and borne the stigma down the generations with a bloody-minded sort of defiance. And the Campbell women had carried on with their custom of healing

  The thing she wanted to look at was kept in the stable. It was an object both of veneration and mystery. It was the one relic rescued from the fire that destroyed his home by Ruth’s widower, John Campbell. The scorch marks were still
there to see at its top edge, three hundred and fifty years on from the blaze. The stable of course was no longer used as such. It was no longer used for anything. It had been the repository for her tools and sometimes a potting shed when Elizabeth’s mother had possessed the energetic strength for her large garden. But she was old now and frail. She did not garden any more. Elizabeth paid for a man to come and tend to the garden. In the summer months, he came twice a week. In the autumn and winter, he came for just a few hours every Wednesday. In the summer, her mother would walk in the garden on her frame or on Elizabeth’s arm. In the winter she was pretty much housebound. But she was old, her home was comfortable and warm and her daughter visited pretty frequently. The hired hand worked out of the back of his van. The stable door was locked with the sort of large padlock bought to discourage the depressing recent rise in rural theft.

  Elizabeth waited until her mother was soundly asleep in her armchair after a large and cheerful lunch before going and fetching the padlock key from its hook in the kitchen. Dusk was an hour away. She was anxious to see the object stored in the stable in daylight. This was partly because she wanted to scrutinise it in detail. It was equally because, if she was honest with herself, the thing had always unnerved her. From her first, childhood glimpses exploring the stable in games, it had not seemed to her quite right. There was a furtive energy to it, a quality not wholesome. If you looked at it out of the corner of your eye, you could swear you sensed a sly movement. And that was not possible.

  The stable was about eighty yards from the house. Elizabeth put her coat over her head against driving rain and ran the distance with the big brass key held in one fist. She did not feel in any great hurry to get to her destination. But she wanted to get this over with. The tightness in her stomach she had controlled earlier was a swarm of beating butterflies now. She released the padlock and it tumbled heavily through her hands and dropped to the ground. The stable door opened outwards. Inside, she could smell the ghosts of old plants, compost, mildewed hessian from a pile of slowly rotting sacks. And it was cold. She could see her breath. Her object rested on the shelf against the rear wall; a heavy cloth, secured by its top edge, was covering it. She walked over and released the cloth to reveal the object.

  It was a carved oak relief. It showed a scene from a banquet. The diners were seated at a long table in a sumptuous chamber. A chandelier hung above them. Florid candelabra graced the table. The windows in the wall to the rear of the chamber were set in high Gothic arches and tapestries hung between them. It was night in this depiction of a feast. There were stars visible through the windows. But though they possessed some anthropomorphic character and handled their cutlery with apparent ease, the guests at the table were more beast than human being. The constellations through the windows were alien to any Elizabeth had learned to recognise by looking at the night sky. And the tapestries hanging between the arches depicted shapes that seemed unstill in their shifty mockery of geometric proportion and truth. Holding the heavy relief firmly between both hands, Elizabeth looked away from it, to her left. Then she risked a sideways glance at it. And in the swiftness of a glance the figures seemed to shift and leer and wink outward from the wood. She almost dropped it. She put the relief back on the shelf and picked the cloth up from the floor to cover it again.

  ‘You should not play with that,’ a voice behind her said.

  Elizabeth turned. It was her mother. She was at the open stable doorway on her frame and her expression was one Elizabeth could not remember having seen since childhood, when mischief had sometimes crossed the line into wilful disobedience.

  ‘I was curious to see it.’

  ‘Cover it,’ her mother said.

  Elizabeth did so. As she did, she smelled distinctly the charred scent of the wood and felt the heat of recent scorching through her fingertips. But she knew both sensations had to be imaginary.

  ‘Come here. Bring the key. Do it quickly, girl.’

  Her mother had not used this tone with her since Elizabeth’s adolescence. She had been a very loving mother. But her mother had needed to be the disciplinarian in the house because her father had died when she was young and was not present to restrain her.

  The door locked, her mother turned to her. She looked very old in the light. The rain had been a heavy shower but had given way now to bright autumn sunshine slanting from the low corner of a sky about to surrender the day to darkness. It was a harsh light on her mother’s blue-veined cheeks and papery skin. But her eyes looked fierce in its orange cast.

  ‘Some things are best left undisturbed,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mean artefacts, or do you mean secrets, Mum?’

  ‘I mean what I say. You meddle with the past at your peril, Elizabeth. Please promise me not to visit that object again.’

  The sternness had gone from her mother’s expression, replaced by a look deep with concern. Elizabeth wanted to offer her mother reassurance. And she had seen what she had needed to. ‘I promise, Mum,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  Her mother smiled. ‘Good. Now be kind enough to come and make an old lady a cup of tea.’

  She sat over tea with her mother, in her mother’s familiar house. She could not have been more at home, nor felt further away from it. She looked around. And it was as though she saw the mirror image of everything. She trusted none of it. Everything, every feature, seemed out of kilter. She had to ask.

  ‘Are we a family with a secret, Mum?’

  Her mother smiled. The tea seemed to have revived her. She looked composed and alert. ‘All families have secrets, Lizzie. Your vocation must have taught you that.’

  She nodded. It had. But her inquiry of her mother had been in the singular. The reply had been plural. She wondered how many secrets there were. She wondered whether she wanted any of them revealed.

  ‘There is a transcript of your unfortunate ancestor’s trial, Lizzie.’

  She was your ancestor before she was mine, Elizabeth thought. ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘I have not. I have always believed what I said to you outside, that some things are best left alone. You must keep your promise to me about that artefact.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘But I cannot stop you reading the transcript if you choose to do so. If you really want to find out more, I mean.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Judge Smith left an archive of papers. They survived the Restoration. They are at the British Library, I think. I doubt they are available for general public view. But your name should enable you to see them without academic credentials if you wish. Access to such resources is much easier now than it was when I was a young woman.’

  Elizabeth thought about this possibility for a moment. It would mean a trip to London. That was impractical just now. She wondered was there any real point. She looked at her mother. ‘Don’t you wish to know what’s made me curious?’

  ‘No, Lizzie. I don’t. I have your promise concerning the thing in the stable and I know my daughter is a woman of her word.’

  Elizabeth nodded. She did not quite know what to say. The conversation seemed to be over.

  ‘Leave that awful relic to itself,’ her mother said. ‘Read the transcript of Ruth Campbell’s trial.’

  As the aeroplane achieved its cruising altitude on the flight to Switzerland, Mark Hunter thought about the feeling of revulsion that had overcome him at Elizabeth Bancroft’s physical touch. He hoped with all his heart he had not allowed it to show in his expression or body language. He had done everything but recoil. He knew very well what had provoked the reaction. It was the same consideration that had made her such an immediate success with his son. She had meant well of course in reaching out to him, sensing the depth of his emotions and his struggle to control them in the moment. And there was no question that she was a compellingly attractive woman. The problem was that she reminded him so very strongly of another woman he had not only found attractive but come to love very deeply. Elizabeth reminded him so forcefully o
f Lillian that at one moment on the Friday evening, tired after a couple of whiskies, he had almost slipped and called her by his dead wife’s name.

  She was a fine person, intelligent and caring. She was helping not only Adam, but him. She was a generous and compassionate soul and she was even blessed with a sense of humour. But he knew that he was attracted to her for reasons that were anything but healthy. Would courting Elizabeth Bancroft raise the ghost of his wife? Or would she instead be a replacement so perfect he would eventually come never again to feel the pain of Lillian’s loss? He would not find out. He had more urgent priorities on his mind than a romantic dalliance with the good doctor. He was very tempted but knew that giving in to the temptation was something he would come to regret.

  He smiled to himself, looking at the approach of the coastline, blue and hazy through his window. He thought about the arrogance and vanity he knew had always undermined his character. He had postulated all this of course on the assumption that the attraction would be mutual. But why should Elizabeth Bancroft have the remotest romantic interest in him? Should she do so because she resembled Lillian, who had loved him? The idea was nonsensical. He was merely her patient’s father. That was all he was to her. She had been intrigued by his background. But its clandestine nature and relevance to the case had prompted a curiosity there that was only natural. No. Where he was concerned, Dr Bancroft was courteous, professionally sympathetic but personally, profoundly indifferent. And that was just as well.

  He thought about the specifics of how she looked. Her hair was cut into a shorter style than Lillian had worn, but the colouring was the same and he knew if he stroked it with his hand, the texture would be too. The eyes were the same shade of green and had the same feline upward slant. She had the same generous mouth. He knew how her lips would feel against his in a kiss. And she had the same appraising expression, with the eyebrows subtly arched, that he had never learned to read in his wife. She was an inch or two taller than Lillian had been and shared his dead wife’s slender figure. It was as natural he felt attracted to her as it would be unnatural to try to do anything about it.