The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  Someone had been in his room. He knew it straight away. Switzerland was a fastidious country, almost clinical in its neatness and precision. There was an odour in his room, a dead reek at odds with the taut cover on his immaculately made bed and the way that the blades of his window blind cast perfect horizontals of light from the sodium lamps outside on to his spotless carpet. He remembered the tattooed man at the airport. He thought there might be three hundred pounds of malevolence waiting, lurking in the bathroom. But he did not really think the stink strong enough. He remembered Private Gaul’s description of the smell. Like something dead left neglected to decay, Gaul had said. He had been very accurate. The smell was faint, hours old. But it was still corrupt enough to gag on after the congealed richness of Miss Hall’s extravagant dinner.

  Cautiously, Hunter opened his bathroom door. He flattened himself against the wall beside it. He waited and listened. Nothing that breathed lurked in the darkness there. This was Switzerland, so there were no drips from the shower head or taps. And from the bathroom, the taint on the air was even fainter, fought by some lemony disinfectant and apple-scented soap. His intruder had gone.

  Hunter took a long shower. He washed the matted blood from his hair and sluiced warm water over his wounds. It wasn’t just his back. His whole body was a pattern of contusions and bruises on their painful blossoming from yellow to dark blue. It wasn’t just the consequence of the actual assault, he thought. It was as though his body had rebelled at the unnatural way in which the trauma had occurred. Hunter did not feel violated. But he did feel humiliated. And he had felt helpless. Lastly, draped in a towel, he went over to his window and looked out at the trees over the road outside and their gentle descent to the pebbly shore and the still inkiness of the night lake. There was starlight and it dabbed at the rough fur coats of the conifers. And he thought he saw the bald gleam of the scalp of someone watching him from among them. But this sentinel would not resolve itself into convincing shape and Hunter decided eventually that it was nothing more than a trick of the light preying on tired eyes. He could not remember having ever felt more tired.

  He lay in his bed. It was quiet and dark and he was warm under the covers, and the steam from his shower had cleansed his room of the last hints of the earlier smell of corruption. Without knowing why, he was reminded of something. It seemed a random recollection and it came to him on the edge of the abyss of deep sleep.

  The man with whom Lillian had wasted two years had been an airline pilot. She had found a prescription for Famciclovir when looking for dental floss in his bathroom cabinet. Confronted, he confessed he had contracted genital herpes having unprotected sex with a Tokyo lap dancer during a one-night stand. Lillian had not been infected. But infection, even the risk of it, was not the point. Deception was the point and the lies it had necessitated. You only needed to lie to Lillian once. Her pilot had spun her a whole web of them.

  A fortnight after he met her, Hunter had been having dinner with Lillian at a pavement table outside a Covent Garden restaurant when a man approached them. Lillian grabbed Hunter’s wrist. Hunter could tell from the expression on the man’s face that he was intent on confrontation. He did not require gilt lapels or a peaked cap for Hunter to guess who he was. And he could tell from the look of contorted fury on the face of the man that he knew exactly what it was in his life he had lost. Lillian had told Hunter his name. It was Albright. He was George Albright.

  Lillian later told him that her pilot was an expert at tae kwon do. He attended the dojo twice a week when he wasn’t reassuring his passengers in a British Airways purr over the intercom. But his opponent on this evening was a man who had studied every form of unarmed combat in existence. And he practised them with regularity and great seriousness in his working life. The ability to win a fight was life or death for Mark Hunter in the job for which he was paid and possibly born.

  He stood up. His attacker aimed a downward kick intended to dislocate his knee. Hunter stepped inside this and put him on the pavement with a leg sweep, hitting him just to subdue him with a short punch to the jaw as he went down. Hunter followed him there. Someone at an adjacent table screamed and Albright tried to backhand Hunter from where he lay. Hunter blocked the blow. He leaned close and said, ‘Get up and walk away. Do not cast a backward glance. Do it, or you will leave here on a stretcher with your back broken.’

  He did as he was told. Hunter felt a bit sorry for him as he walked off along Bow Street. He had lost Lillian. And now he had lost whatever myth he had harboured concerning his own invincibility. Lillian had, subsequently, been very critical of how Hunter had dealt with the confrontation. And it was this that he remembered now, as sleep overcame him. She had said that a man possessing Hunter’s resources could have handled the situation without escalating the violence. She said that he had hurt and humiliated George Albright in a confrontation someone with his skills could easily have defused. And in this she had been right.

  Lillian was a compassionate woman strongly opposed to the gratuitous infliction of violence. She was fastidious about pain, not so much squeamish as merciful and kind by nature. But after they were married, on his return from Magdalena, when he had told her about putting two bullets into her head in the execution of Mrs Mallory, Lillian had neither flinched nor criticised nor even commented. There had been no condemnation, just that enigmatic judgement exonerating him. Was there a paradox there? Was there a contradiction? Hunter was too tired to think it through. He later wished he had. But he was exhausted, and anyway, he was not to know that then.

  Chapter Six

  Elizabeth emailed the British Library inquiring about the archive left by Cromwell’s Scottish witch finder, using Mark Hunter’s desktop computer first thing the following morning. He had told her how to operate the machine as a guest user. Adam came down while she was typing her email request to arrange to see the material relevant to her ancestor. His dream the previous evening had been benign, his audible sigh as he slept probably popcorn induced and certainly nothing to do with his recent nocturnal trauma. He looked refreshed and carefree.

  ‘Just going into the kitchen,’ he said.

  ‘I’m almost finished,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Another minute and I’ll get you some breakfast.’

  ‘I can help myself,’ he said.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Okay if I help myself to a Red Bull?’

  ‘Fine,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The day hell freezes over.’

  ‘Not even on medical grounds?’

  ‘Only if you can specify the medical grounds.’

  ‘You’re even more heartless than my dad.’

  ‘I’ll take that, Adam, as the compliment I know you intend it to be.’ She heard the nanny using the key she had been given to open the heavy locks that fortified the front door. She pressed Send and then shut down the computer. She got up and ate a quick breakfast at the kitchen table with Adam, then grabbed her bag, intent on an early start. She wanted to make time, if she could, to pay a surprise call on her mother after her mother’s lunchtime nap.

  Scotland’s first female surgeon famously qualified to practise in 1914. The country had always been at the forefront of pioneering medicine. But Edinburgh was a long way from a remote practice in the highlands. Even after the Second World War, the majority of rural Scots preferred a male to a female GP. It was perfectly all right for a woman to be trusted with lives as a district nurse or midwife. But male GPs were widely considered a safer, steadier, altogether more knowledgeable bet. This prejudice was particularly entrenched among older women. And it had made the early part of Margaret Bancroft’s career always challenging and sometimes worse than that. On occasion it had been callous, and sometimes it had been downright cruel.

  Elizabeth thought about the treatment meted out to her mother on her way back to her cottage. That was only a slight detour on the route from the Hunter house to the surgery. She wanted to see if any further damage had been inflicted. She thought it more likely a window had been broken tha
n the place burned to the ground. A rock flung through a pane with a note tied to it was a favourite tactic in any campaign of menace aimed at a domestic target. But she had resolved that if anything beyond the daubing of the cross had been done, she would involve the police. She was innocent and angry at the violation already carried out and would not tolerate its escalation. Her bit of theatre in the pub the previous evening might have reached the right ears. She hoped it had done the trick. She did not think painting a cross in pig’s blood on someone’s door a crime that would exact any great punishment in the courts. But any more abusive nonsense and she would go to the boys in blue. She had an excellent relationship with the local police. Like most rural forces, they were under-resourced and the services of a police doctor were theirs only after formal written requests and delays that could be inconvenient or catastrophic, depending upon the seriousness of the crime. Independent and unattached, Elizabeth was a medical expert for whose availability they had often been given cause to be grateful. And they were grateful, and she knew that they thought highly of her professionalism and not just of her willingness to help.

  Her cottage sat in the early morning sunshine, untroubled and untouched. She went in only to open the curtains and to put fresh water in the vase of flowers on the kitchen table. She knew why she was thinking about her mother and the daily trials of her professional life and the campaign of hate she had endured in the summer of 1972. It was because she felt hostile and suspicious towards her mother after the stable incident. The text had only increased the feeling of suspicion. And what she wanted to feel towards her mother was warmth and sympathy. That was what she had always felt towards her in the past. Now, Elizabeth felt that her mother had become someone she didn’t really know, a stranger to her, almost overnight. She did not want this mother. She wanted back her mum.

  Margaret Bancroft was waiting, her face a pale, distorted shape in the lozenge panes of the right-hand window as Elizabeth approached the house. The door was on the latch. Elizabeth had a key in her bag but had known the door would be standing unlocked when she saw her mother waiting for her. As she walked the path to the door she glanced to the right, in the direction of the stable, and shivered. It was not cold. It was bright and unseasonably mild. But she could do nothing about the chill of dread and trepidation as it trammelled through her.

  ‘You were waiting for me.’

  Her mother had not risen from her chair. ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. There has not been time.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘Because there are things you have not told me. Were you telling me the truth? When you told me you have never read the trial account?’

  ‘I have never dared.’

  Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. This was so odd. She had not embraced her mother as she always did. There had been no invitation to do so. She had not even sat down, and now felt scant invitation to relax.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I can, Elizabeth. I’ll do that. Then judge me if you must.’

  ‘Then there is something you have kept back.’

  ‘You are my child. I never wanted to frighten or estrange you from me. I felt the same way about your father.’ Margaret Bancroft smiled. ‘Sit down, Elizabeth. I’ll make some tea. And then I’ll tell you a story.’

  She had first become aware of her ability to heal as a little girl. She thought she had probably been born with the compassion of a healer. When she was five, her own mother asked her if she would like as her pet a kitten from a litter born to a tabby cat owned by their postman. But she said that she would not. She knew that she would love the kitten. And when it became a cat she would love it. And when it grew old and inevitably died, she knew that she would find the loss unbearable.

  Then one day out walking close to Christmas, she happened upon a robin caught in a thorn bush. It was snowing and she supposed that the robin had lost its bearings on the wing and landed badly. Or it could have been forced into the refuge of the thorns by a hawk or even an eagle. Over the course of a bad winter the eagles would come inland from their eyries on the coastal cliffs to hunt. Kestrels were common. Whatever, trapped and flapping feebly, the tiny bird seemed to have damaged a wing and broken a leg. It was only half alive as Margaret prised it from between the barbs of the thorn bush and wrapped it in her woollen scarf and put it into her pocket.

  Her first thought trudging home through the snow was that her father could provide the injured bird with a quick and painless death. He was a practical man with a strong stomach and would pinch the robin’s neck between finger and thumb and break it cleanly and easily. Margaret would scrape a little grave for it in the turf under the snow so that it would not become carrion. All the way home she could feel the tremble of its tenuous life as it beat with its one good wing in the pocket of her coat against her hip. And she could not later have said at what point on her journey through the pretty white landscape this ceased to be her plan. But at some point it did, because she got to the house and stamped the slush from her boots and took them off and hung her coat on the hook, careful to remove her scarf and its precious living cargo from the pocket with only a nod at her father reading in his favourite chair before taking the stairs to her room. Her father did not even look up from his paper. Margaret held the scarf to her chest in both hands and climbed the stairs. It was the first winter she would recall as an adult with singular clarity. She was eleven years old.

  The house was warm. Her parents were more prosperous than they were frugal. They did not follow the country custom of heating only the one room. Dusk had descended by now. Her walk had been a long one taken after their main meal at midday on a Saturday and the land vanquished the light early at this time of the year. The sun was an orange smear on the brink of the white moor, reddening through her window, and her walls were blood-coloured. With a hand pressing her scarf to her breast, Margaret opened the window. Then she let the scarf fall to the floor, enclosed the damaged bird in the cradle of her hands and parted her thumbs fractionally. She closed her eyes and blew gently through the gap. And she opened her eyes and hands and the bird gathered itself and flew through the open window strongly into the cold and the twilight. It swooped and thrummed on vibrant wings. And she knew it was healed. And she knew that she had healed it. And she was not, when she considered it, in the least bit surprised.

  ‘I called it bone magic,’ she told her daughter. ‘I was eleven. Eleven-year-olds need names for things, especially when those things are abstract.’

  ‘You really think the robin lived?’

  ‘I think it may live still.’

  ‘The magic was that strong?’

  ‘I felt it in my bones. Thus the name given it by the child I was. I felt the age and the power of it very deep in me. I felt it in my marrow.’

  ‘Wasn’t it frightening, Mum?’

  ‘In the end, it was terrifying. I healed a few injured creatures. I always did so secretly. Then when I was fourteen, I heard a blind shepherd was losing his sheepdog to cancer. I climbed the hill route to the hovel where he lived and held the collie between my hands and used my mind to push the affliction out. It was hard. The disease had flourished in poor Baxter’s old bitch and was stubborn. But after that, I came to believe I could do anything. I wondered if I could not bring back something dead.’

  Elizabeth swallowed. ‘Did you ever try?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever use your bone magic on a patient?’

  But Elizabeth thought she knew the answer to that question already.

  In the late spring of 1972 Margaret Bancroft was a seasoned GP, thirty-five years of age and long beyond the point at which the demise of a pet cat could have left her feeling disconsolate. She had seen her share of compassion and cruelty and caprice. She was not the stranger to death she had been as a little girl. Suffering touched her of course. But it was an occupational hazard, like engine oil ingrained in the pads of a mechanic’s fingertips. You co
uld not do the job without encountering pain and grief. You had to endure the bad to effect what good your expertise sometimes enabled.

  Such was the balance of her thinking when she was summoned to a medical emergency at the farm owned by Andrew Hector. Andrew stood pale-faced to greet her outside his barn. Andrew’s wife Susan was within, cradling their son Max in her arms. A makeshift bandage had been wrapped around the lower half of his left arm.

  ‘Do you think he’ll lose the limb, Doctor?’ Andrew said.

  Margaret Bancroft looked at the quantity of blood under the straw on the cobbles surrounding the unconscious boy. She thought it likelier he would lose his life. She squatted beside Max with her bag and unwound the bandage, which seemed to be a torn bed sheet. It was soaked in blood and useless. She revealed the wound, clean and very deep and gushing blood from the severed artery beneath the flesh with each beat of a fading pulse.

  ‘He was sharpening a scythe on the stone. The steel must have caught. Lincoln was ratting in the barn and he fetched me straight away.’

  But not soon enough, Elizabeth thought, binding the upper arm tightly and, she knew, too late. ‘How long did they say until the ambulance comes?’

  ‘Forty minutes,’ Andrew said. ‘Only twenty minutes, now.’