The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  The optimism in the farmer’s voice was anguished. Light flooded through gaps in the beams above and bathed everything in a fierce, ethereal light. Max Hector had seen the sunshine for the last time. He was thirteen. His parents had been both in their early forties at the time of his birth. There would be no other children.

  ‘Leave me with my patient,’ Margaret Bancroft said. Susan looked up at her and let go of her son reluctantly and stood in her blood-soaked blue pinafore and staggered towards the barn door. Her husband steadied her with an arm across her shoulders. And with a glance back towards where their son lay dying, they closed the door behind them. It was an act of faith in her proficiency that Margaret thought heartbreaking. She gripped Max’s wrist but she could no longer feel a pulse at all, so faint was it. She had to staunch the blood. She held the injured arm to her stomach and closed her eyes and willed the wound away. And when she opened her eyes, it was gone. And she raised her gaze to heaven in thanks and her eyes alighted on the face and idiot leer of Lincoln, who had been ratting in the barn. Lincoln, who had seen the accident and raised the alarm. Lincoln, the nineteen-year-old halfwit the Hectors employed because they were kind-hearted people and no one else would. He was up in the hayloft that bordered the building’s interior. He had witnessed what she had just accomplished.

  ‘And I lost my nerve,’ Margaret Bancroft told her daughter. ‘I realised that it was something I would never be able to explain. The miracle would cost me my reputation and career. So I undid what I had just done. I did what I should have. And Max Hector slipped shivering from this life a few minutes later, a full quarter of an hour before the ambulance arrived.’

  Elizabeth stared into the china cup cradled in her lap. Her tea was stone cold. She had not touched it. She had not even taken a sip. The milk had separated and formed a shimmering ring around the top of the beverage. ‘How did you undo what you had done?’

  ‘I reopened the wound.’

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘In the same way I had closed it.’

  ‘Was it hard to?’

  ‘The magic was not hard. I had endowed poor Max with the vigour to replenish the blood he had lost. I could feel it in the strengthening pulse under my thumb. I had to take that strength away from him again. Ebb it out of him. It was easy. But it was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.’

  ‘And you’ve never used that power again, have you, Mum?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And Tom Lincoln told someone and they harassed you as a witch. Do you know who that was?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt it’s the same person harassing you now, Elizabeth. That’s one of the reasons I have told you this today.’

  ‘You know about the cross daubed on my cottage door?’

  ‘It may be well spaced, but this is a small locality. I have a telephone. And I have a few friends left alive.’

  Elizabeth nodded.

  ‘There is something you should know about what I called bone magic, all those years ago,’ her mother said. ‘I was a soft-hearted girl and I used my gift of it to heal. But when I undid the good I had done poor Max Hector, when I unravelled that boy’s young life with my mind, the magic felt exultant.’

  ‘You said it was the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do.’

  ‘It was. But it felt like what the power was for, you see. I used my bone magic as a force for good. In that barn, the realisation came to me that its intended purpose is quite the opposite.’

  Elizabeth looked around the room. She looked at the upright piano in the corner, its polished walnut glimmering in the fading light. She looked at the pictures on the walls, the land and seascapes she had grown up knowing. Against the wall behind her was the radiogram on which she knew her mother listened to Woman’s Hour each weekday with the clockwork regularity of orderly retirement. She looked at the wood fire burning before her with its warm scent in the grate and the blue surround of floral-patterned tiles and the mantelpiece with its ticking eight-day clock and family photographs in their wooden frames. It was all profoundly familiar but all of it seemed illusory now, as bogus as a stage set full of cosy period props.

  ‘Was I an only child, Mum?’

  Her mother stared at Elizabeth. ‘Good heavens, girl. What sort of question is that to ask me?’

  ‘One to which I would like an honest answer.’

  Margaret Bancroft smiled. ‘You think you and your twin sister were separated at birth?’

  ‘Interesting that you say my twin,’ Elizabeth said. She was shaking. She could barely keep the tremor out of her voice. ‘Interesting also, that it’s to a sister you refer. I could have suspected it was a brother I had, after all.’

  ‘Lizzie. My God. You really are serious.’

  Elizabeth nodded. She did not trust herself to speak.

  Her mother closed her eyes. She began to weep. Elizabeth put down her cup and saucer on the carpet and slid from her chair and knelt before her mother and held both of her hands.

  Her mother’s eyes opened. They were filmy with tears and age. ‘I’ve kept one secret from you, Lizzie. It’s the one I’ve just revealed to you. And one was terrible enough. You were an only child.’

  ‘Shush, Mum.’

  ‘You were loved and cherished. You were, you know, as you are loved and cherished still.’

  Adam Hunter thought it scary, just how much Elizabeth the cool doctor looked like his mum had. He thought his mum had been cool. She had been lovely too. And he did not like to think about her too much because it made him sad and sorry for his dad when he did. But she really had been cool. He’d even overheard grown-ups saying it. And so was Elizabeth, with her green sports car and her black leather jacket and her sunglasses pushed up to her hair and the pilot’s watch she wore with buttons either side of the winder and the relaxed attitude about bedtime and her totally deadly popcorn. And she really did look like his mum. Scary was the word for it. Except that it wasn’t really scary. It wasn’t scary like the dreams. Elizabeth’s resemblance to his mum was one of those freaky coincidences life threw up more often than Adam thought the laws of probability should have allowed. The dreams, though. When it came to scary, the dreams were off the scale.

  He had lied to his dad about not remembering their detail. He remembered them very vividly. He remembered every detail exactly. The dreams were so strange, how could he not? But he had not wanted to worry his dad. It was bad enough as things were, his dad being so lonely and sad. Adam wanted to cheer him up, not concern him or depress him even further. He knew his dad had done his best. But he also knew what a strain it was. Before the dreams had started, he had lain awake and heard his dad cry from the bedroom next to his in the night and had wanted to go in to him. But he had not. Dad had to learn to live without Mum and Kate. They both did. It was hard, but they had no choice. Mum and Kate were gone and were never coming back.

  Adam had lied about the dreams to the cool doctor because he had lied to his dad. She would have had to tell because adults had their own rules about that kind of stuff. Had he made her promise not to tell, she probably would have done. She’d have done it just to get the truth out of him. And telling Elizabeth the truth would have been a relief. Because she wasn’t just cool, she was kind as well. And keeping something so horrible totally private was not exactly easy. But she would have broken her promise and told his dad. She would have seen it as her duty. He did not resent that. He understood the grown-up world abided by its adult rules. He accepted it. But it did mean he had not been able to tell her. He did not want to worry his dad. Neither did he want his dad to feel his son had betrayed him through dishonesty.

  It was what was called a dilemma. He knew the word from football. When Sir Alex had three forwards in form at United but only room for two in the team he faced what was called a selection dilemma. Football seemed to be full of dilemmas of every sort. But Adam thought his dilemma over the dreams somewhat more serious. The languages, though, he had told the truth about. He had woken once
speaking fluent Russian. He had woken once thinking in German. He had never studied either language. But after a few hours awake, the language skills were gone.

  Anyway, right now, he had another problem. And this one was a consequence of something else he had not told Elizabeth. He had come back from his first day after his long absence from school with a homework assignment. You could tell Elizabeth wasn’t a mum because a mum would have asked if his homework had been done. Elizabeth didn’t and so it hadn’t been. He had farted around customising a couple of toy cars, and then obliterating her at chess and watching Clarkson, filling his face with popcorn while his homework assignment wasn’t being dealt with.

  Adam knew why they had been assigned the particular homework they’d been given. It was because a set of statistics had been collated that proved the school library was being used 8 per cent less every year. Either the school reversed the trend, or the library would be seen as more of a luxury than a resource and dispensed with altogether. It was a small school. It had been built in Victorian times. The library had been endowed by some rich American called Carnegie. It sat separate from the main building and was beautiful, like a little Gothic castle. It was shaped in a hexagon and had stained-glass windows and granite walls covered in ivy. Inside was a coke-burning fire with a brass mantel and stuffed wildlife in glass cases and lots of first editions signed by famous Scottish authors. It wasn’t really a resource, he had overheard the maths teacher Mr Cawdor say, it was an anachronism. But Adam thought the school library a very pretty anachronism and thought it would look terrible gutted of books, filled with ugly banks of computer monitors on metal-legged tables with veneered tops.

  Their assignment was to choose and learn overnight a new poem by a poet they had not studied. This was a strategy meant to send the whole class flocking to the library in search of something short that rhymed and they could easily memorise. It would help buck that 8 per cent downward lending trend. Adam thought each class had probably been set a similar task. It was a way of tackling the anachronistic library dilemma. But it had not worked on him. He had not borrowed a book from the library that looked as though a fey princess in a pointy hat should live there. His dad had a shelf full of books of poetry and listened to CDs of the stuff. You could download poems from the internet and press the print button. He could do that in his room.

  Partly, it was Jeremy Clarkson’s fault. If Clarkson and those crap cars had not distracted him so successfully, he would have done his homework without any fuss. He was a quick learner. He only had to read six or eight lines twice, if he really concentrated, to know them by heart. But he had been concentrating on Austin Allegros and Hillman Avengers. Damn Clarkson. It was his turn next. He knew it was. Mrs Davies would ask him next and he had no excuse and what made it worse was that everyone else, the whole class, all eleven of them, had done their homework thoroughly. He did know some poems. He knew quite a lot of The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins. His dad listened to it sometimes on the stereo at home. But Hopkins had been Welsh. He knew that one by Seamus Heaney, the one about digging up peat and the milk bottle with the cardboard stopper. Heaney was his dad’s favourite poet of all. And Adam liked that one himself. But Heaney was Irish. That was even worse than Welsh. If he was going to recite poetry by a Celt, in these circumstances it really had to be a Scotsman. There was Robert Burns. Burns was actually the only Scottish poet he could think of. But he did not know a single line of Burns. Adam felt his cheeks begin to prickle and glow.

  ‘Master Hunter,’ Mrs Davies said. She was standing at the front of the class, between her desk and the blackboard.

  The sun was slanting in low through the row of windows to his right. He got to his feet with a squeal of chair legs against wood.

  ‘Your turn, if you please. Culturally, we’re very cosmopolitan at this particular seat of learning. English poetry is quite permissible.’

  The class laughed at Mrs Davies’s well-meant joke. Well meant, because it was intended, Adam knew, to help relax him. Some children found public speaking of any sort an uncomfortable ordeal. That was particularly true, he thought now, when you did not possess the remotest idea of what it was you were going to say. The autumn sun was warm through the window on the side of his face and through the wool of his school jumper. He tried to think, to remember. His mind was as blank as canvas not yet primed.

  He did not know how long it was before he sat down again. He was aware only of silence and a slight dryness in his throat. The angle of the sun through the window was the same. All his classmates were looking at him. Mrs Davies was looking at him and her expression was one he had not seen on her face before. She had removed her glasses and held them dangling by one of their arms from her fingers. He had never seen her face naked, without those wire frames and lenses. She looked younger and a bit perplexed. Two lines resonated in his head. They formed a couplet from the long poem he had just recited:

  The stream mysterious glides beneath,

  Green as a dream and deep as death.

  Mrs Davies coughed and put back on her glasses. ‘Adam’s splendid recitation was a poem by the English neo-Romantic poet Rupert Brooke. Would anyone like to venture an opinion as to what it was about?’

  Alice Cranbourne put up her hand. Adam thought vaguely that Alice was probably the cleverest girl in the class. She had earlier recited something by Burns in Highland dialect. Adam had not understood a single word of it.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘It seems to be about homesickness, Miss. It’s got this sad, pining tone to it.’

  ‘That’s very astute, Alice. Brooke wrote it at a café table in Berlin in the spring of 1912. He lived near Cambridge, at the old vicarage of the poem’s title in Grantchester. He mentions a lot of place names, Cambridgeshire villages. Geographically and in his mind, he was a young man a long way from home.’

  Those two lines rattled and reverberated in Adam Hunter’s head. They were not redolent to him of forgotten English summers. They did not sound wistful or mournful or sentimental in the slightest. They spoke of blood and stealth and jungle and hinted at the lurking patience of fate. He listened to what Mrs Davies said. He thought it was all very interesting. It was also entirely new to him. Until he’d sat down after the recitation he could not now remember having given, he had never heard of the Old Vicarage at Grantchester. And he was equally certain he had never heard of Rupert Brooke. There had been no pictures in his mind when he’d stood to recite he knew not what. Except that very briefly, he had been reminded of the glamorous woman with the cruel mouth who sometimes smiled at the edge of the bad dreams he had endured.

  Mark Hunter had learned to ski on the Stubai Glacier so the Austrian Tyrol was both well known to him and fondly remembered. He had learned as an officer cadet seconded to a platoon of Gurkhas. They had never really progressed as he had technically. He recalled the experience now with a rueful smile. Self-preservation was the instinct that taught you to turn on skis, to carve precisely with their edges to control your rate of descent. The Gurkhas had not seemed to him in possession of this instinct at all. They would listen to the instructor. Then they would point their skis downwards towards their distant, intended destination below. And they would go. Some of them caught an edge and came a spectacular cropper. Most of them made it and were slowed finally by gravity at the bottom of the run. That was proof to these men of the validity of their technique and they would never change it. The instructor bellowed and gesticulated and turned puce with indignation in the cold. But it was no good. The Gurkhas skied like they fought, in a straight line, with total commitment and entirely without fear. More circumspect, on the sidelines, Hunter practised the rudiments of this new skill for a full fortnight, until he could ski down anything. He knew the Austrian Tyrol. But he wasn’t skiing now.

  It was dusk when he got to where the road petered out. He had taken trains from Geneva to Innsbruck. At Innsbruck he had hired a car. He was about eight kilometres from the Stubai Valley. The country
was very remote. There were no dwellings here, no twinkling house lights at the foot of the rising slope. He had a climb ahead of him, but Miss Hall had said it was a climb that could be accomplished without the use of ropes or crampons. He had to climb a path that wound through the tree line and then the going became steeper and more demanding. He looked up. The darkening sky was spangled by crystals of falling snow increasing all the time in weight and density. He had bought boots and cold weather apparel and a head torch at a store near to where he had hired the car and he wore this clothing and equipment now. And he needed it. All he could hear as night descended under the white, thickening sky was the tick of his hire car’s cooling engine in the bitter cold. This did not seem a location suited to the sorceress femme fatale he remembered from Magdalena, to the black magician party animal Miss Hall had insisted he pursue. But he was in the right place. It was exactly as Miss Hall had described it to him and he could see the thin path twisting through the dark rise of conifers ahead. He took a drink from the metal water bottle he had bought with the rest of his kit at Innsbruck and had the wit to fill from the water cooler in the car hire office before setting out. The bottle had travelled there on the back seat of the car but its contents were already icy against his teeth and on his tongue. Hunter wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, screwed the cap back on to the bottle and set off.

  He had bought an ice axe in the shop at Innsbruck. And after some hesitation, he had bought a combat knife. The knife had a knuckle duster guard and a saw edge on what would be the blunt of the blade on a conventional knife. It was Solingen forged steel and its blade was eight inches long and lethally honed, and Hunter had it now in its sheath on his belt. In the display case in the shop it had looked like the hunting knife from hell. He did not really know why he had bought it. In a way it felt like sixty euros’ worth of macho folly after the rag doll an enfeebled Miss Hall had been able to make of him with a few vindictive thoughts. What good was a blade, however keen, against such malevolent power? But instinct had impelled him to buy the knife and he had learned over the years not to ignore his deep, nagging hunches. They had frequently urged precautions that had definitely saved his life.