The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  She charged at me and I said to myself, this is it now, Shilly. She’ll have you over and smashed just like that bottle for you’re too drunk-trembly to fight her as you did once before, in the grip of the moor’s marsh.

  But I wasn’t taking my last breath, not yet awhile, for Anna stopped short of getting hold of me, though I could see in her tautness that she wanted to, by God she did.

  ‘That’s nothing but an excuse, Shilly, and some part of you, some part deep down not yet pickled by spirits knows that.’ She was spitting like the cat Pigeon had spat and I couldn’t look at her. ‘The things you can do, can see – that’s your doing, not the drink’s. That’s who you are.’ She turned on her heel and marched away, calling back over her shoulder, ‘When you’re ready to accept that, I’ll be here.’

  Panic rose like bile in my throat. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find these witches.’

  I followed her inside and she didn’t tell me no. We’d fought before and we’d fight again. I didn’t need drink to know that Anna and me were as often fury together as we were care. It was the caring that brought the fury.

  We put ourselves on, our hair and our cunning clothes, and I was Mrs Williams again. It was good to leave Shilly behind. She was a bad sort. I hoped she wouldn’t follow me across the river.

  We went back the way we’d come the night before, picking our way down slippery rocks and twisting past trees that sought to block the way with their roots or half-fallen limbs. I wondered that I’d made it up alive, given the gloom and the things I’d been carrying and my tiredness. But then I wondered if the way down was not the same, if it had remade itself while Anna slept and I saw blinded women drown a saint. I shivered and hurried after Anna.

  The way levelled out again once we had passed the pool. I was glad to be away from the drop into the water for my head was still sloshing from the temptations of Jamaica Inn and I didn’t trust myself. I was right to be so fearful of my own wanderings for the next thing I knew I’d crashed into Anna’s back for she’d stopped walking and was looking about her somewhat fretful.

  ‘It should be here, shouldn’t it? We’ve not gone too far. And I would have seen it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The wall. The monks’ wall.’ She looked left then right then left again. ‘I thought …’

  ‘I told you. Markers are no use when they move.’

  ‘It can’t have moved, Shilly. It’s a wall, for goodness’ sake.’

  And then the ferns rose up and spoke.

  NINE

  ‘Lost, are you?’

  He was a big man, tall as well as broad brushing the broken ferns from his clothes. His face was all over whiskery, but his head was without a hair at all, the skin pinked from the sun.

  Anna was without words for shock. I was much the same.

  ‘Took fright, have you? Ah, my dears, I’m sorry for that. Path moved, see, and we had to find a new way. I go first when that happens for I’m biggest to crash through. Sit you down here now, on this bit of stone.’

  He led Anna, oh so gently, to perch on a slab of moor stone that crowned the ferns and nettles.

  Others appeared from the trees. Men and women. Seven of them. No, eight. They wore working clothes, most with slate dust about them, but they carried farm tools – rakes and scythes.

  ‘We must go on, David,’ one of the women said.

  ‘Won’t do no harm to rest a moment,’ he answered.

  ‘It might do all the harm in the world! It’s been three days.’

  She looked like she’d argue more but for being weary, as they all were. Pale and their eyes red-rimmed. The whiskered man, David, he put a hand on her shoulder but she turned away from him and scritched with her back to us.

  ‘You’re looking for the boy,’ I said. ‘Paul Haskell that’s missing.’

  ‘That we are,’ David said. And then in a low voice, ‘I fear it won’t do no good now. It’s been too long with neither sight nor sound.’

  ‘I’m going on,’ the scritching woman said loudly. She lifted her rake like to beat someone with. ‘They’re abroad again. If we can keep them in sight they might lead us to him.’

  She pushed past him into the trees. All but David and another woman followed her. In a moment they were swallowed by the green, were gone. Their sound too. The only noises were the leaves shh shhing, and somewhere beyond them, the birds.

  ‘Maria will drop dead before she gives up hope,’ the woman said. She was well-fleshed and sweating in the close air of the woods. Down low, as we were, there wasn’t the freshness the waterfall gave.

  ‘Maria is the boy’s mother?’ Anna asked.

  ‘She is. Beside herself, as we all are. Until that pair are dealt with we’re none of us safe.’ She spat, and a clump of ferns bore the spittle.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Sarah. It don’t do no good.’

  ‘The women, you mean, across the river?’ Anna said. She got to her feet and was herself again.

  ‘They’re not women,’ Sarah said. ‘Not people at all.’

  ‘Then what are they?’

  Sarah dug her scythe into the ground with a splitting sound. ‘They’re creatures of the Devil. I’ve heard them, how they speak to him when they think they’re alone. Heard their Devil tongue. It was him that helped them take the child, and he’ll help take another unless we put a stop to them.’

  ‘Saint Nectan will keep us from harm,’ David said.

  ‘He’s not done a good job so far!’ Sarah said. She wiped her face and neck with a handkerchief. ‘And how can he when that pair has turned on him?’

  ‘What do the women have to do with the saint?’ I said, and thought of what I’d seen whilst insensible. Their blind looking.

  ‘They’re his helpers. Or they were.’ She spat again. ‘Sisters who served him. They’ve come back to plague us, taken up bodies, but without the saint they’ve gone to the bad. We shall never be safe,’ she muttered darkly.

  ‘Now, Sarah, didn’t the saint ring his bell to warn us just before the boy was lost, as he used to warn the boats when the storms came, to keep them from the rocks?’ David said. ‘Doesn’t that show he still guards us in the woods, much as he can?’

  But Sarah only shook her head. ‘Maria was right. We must keep going while the sisters are abroad.’ She hefted her scythe and was ready to be gone, but then a thought seemed to strike her. She took a step closer to Anna.

  ‘What’s your business in these parts?’

  ‘A sketching holiday. I mean to make a study of the waterfall for a larger work.’ Anna shifted her black bag across her hip, by way of proof, I thought.

  ‘Where are they living, these sisters?’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t like to run into them.’

  Sarah pointed at the river with her scythe and I saw there were flat stones rising from the water. Beyond, only more trees.

  ‘This is where they cross. Their cottage isn’t far along the path the other side. If you should see them, you get straight away. You’ve come at a bad time.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Anna said scornfully, and I thought it foolish of her to mock the fears of people who knew their own place well. But that was Anna’s way. She thought she had all the answers and that people like me, whether in the woods or on the moor, we were nothing but fools. Would I ever help her see different?

  ‘The sisters don’t confine themselves to their cottage, then?’ Anna said.

  ‘If only they would,’ David said. He scratched at his whiskers with his knuckles, making a raspy sound. ‘No, they like to walk here, in the woods. They’re out every day.’

  ‘To take another child!’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll be in my own grave before I see that happen. No saint will save us in Trethevy.’

  She pushed past Anna and was gone into the green.

  ‘You mustn’t mind Sarah,’ David said. ‘With the boy lost … Well, if you should see anything while you’re painting, any sign of him—’

  ‘We’ll go straight to the Haske
lls,’ I said.

  David nodded. ‘I’d best be getting after them. If the path should change again …’ He looked back the way he’d come, when he’d crashed through the ferns, then looked at each of us in turn. ‘Keep away from them sisters, if you value your lives.’

  ‘Oh we will, Mr …?’

  ‘Tonkin, David Tonkin.’ He shook hands with us, which was a strange way to say goodbye. His grip was firm and his hands faintly stained. Blue they were, as if he was bruised but the bruises were fading.

  ‘You live here, in the woods?’ I said.

  ‘I’m further upstream. Have the mill there. Last of them on the river still working.’

  ‘A corn mill?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yarn and blankets. Dyeing, too. Not that I been doing much of it since the boy went missing.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor wretch. I must go—’

  ‘We were looking for the monks’ wall,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not far. Keep on that way.’ He pointed back the way we’d come. ‘Then bear left. You should see the wall not long after. That’s if it hasn’t moved again.’

  Before Anna could tell him this wasn’t likely, as she had been so quick to tell me, David Tonkin was gone, and once more the woods swallowed any sign of him and his whiskers.

  ‘You see!’ I said. ‘The woods are shifting about.’

  ‘I don’t see any such thing, Shilly. We’re still new to the place, that’s all.’ She started after David.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘If these women are out walking then why shouldn’t two others do likewise? The sooner we find them, the sooner we can find out if they really do know anything about Paul Haskell’s disappearance.’

  And she set off after David Tonkin who had set off after Sarah who had set off after Maria Haskell and the others. We would all be lost in the woods together.

  The path we took was not one we had trod before, for the trees changed almost at once, becoming shorter and wider, which made me think of the squire, whose trees they were, after all. The ferns grew less thickly and in their place were low branches that reached for the mud beneath them, and for the river that they closed upon. Everything was narrowed, and inside my head was narrowed too without a sup to save me.

  ‘What do you know of talking to the Devil, Shilly?’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about it!’

  ‘I thought not. And do you know why? Because there’s no such thing.’

  ‘But that woman Sarah heard the women talking to him.’ A whippish branch flew at me, caught the soft flesh just beneath my eye.

  ‘She might have heard them talking. That doesn’t mean they were conversing with the Devil.’

  ‘That Sarah’s not as honest as she makes herself out to be, that I do know.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Anna stopped to scrape her boots against a slate edge that poked from the ground, to rid them of the rind of mud that caked them. The mud made her feet look bigger than they were, like those of a man. I thought of Mr Williams.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Sarah told us she heard the women talking when they thought no one was there to listen. So she was spying, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose she was,’ Anna said. ‘You were keen to ask her about this Saint Necktie.’

  ‘Saint Nectan. There’s no need to be scornful.’

  ‘Did you discover Christianity at the bottom of that bottle, Shilly?’

  ‘I discovered something,’ I muttered.

  ‘Something you’d care to share?’

  She’d asked so I told her. I didn’t see that I should have to fear those two blinded sisters alone, and if we were going to seek them out then Anna should know what was coming. That was only fair.

  She told me it was nonsense, of course, even though it was because I could see such strangeness that she’d asked me to leave the moor and work with her, but she didn’t like such talk. Neither did I, to be truthful. But it was what I’d seen.

  I picked my way through moor stone and roots and all manner of unevenness. ‘Them creatures I saw were of the kind that would speak to the Devil. They had the Devil in them to drown the saint.’

  ‘And what of these creatures, Shilly?’ She had stopped walking.

  I looked where she was looking, and there they were, the pair. Not twenty paces from us but walking away, slipping through the trees. A flash of long brown hair, hanging loose, unpinned. A hand on a thin trunk, then gone. A wink of grey cloth. Their backs to us so I couldn’t see if their eyes were as they should be.

  Anna went after them and that meant there were three ahead of me, three women in the woods, walking amongst the green. I followed and made four. If David Tonkin and the others came across us now, with their scythes and their rakes, would they know which of us to strike?

  TEN

  There was no sign of David Tonkin and the others, even though they’d gone this way before us. Sent on another path by the shifty woods. But the trees wanted us to see these women newly come to the woods. See but get no closer, I realised, for no matter how fast we went after them, they drew further away, even though they seemed to go no quicker than we did.

  ‘Hello there!’ Anna called. ‘Might we speak with you?’

  I didn’t think her voice would carry in the woods but it must have done for one of the women stopped. The ferns grew tall there, as high as my waist, and it looked as if she had no lower body. I held my breath for her to show her face, the smooth skin where her eyes should be.

  Slowly, she half turned, her head cocked to one side as if listening to us as we crashed through the ferns to try and reach her.

  But then the other, the one slightly ahead, she called to her. I couldn’t hear the words but I heard the sharpness of the tone, and the woman who had stopped began to walk again. Neither had shown their faces.

  ‘Are they cutting their way through?’ Anna said, wiping the sweat beading at the edges of her false hair.

  We were running now, or as close to running as we could manage in the thickety woods that made us twist and turn and climb over sudden logs and rocks. And still the women were ahead of us, still their backs to us as they slipped in and out of the trees.

  ‘They’re not slashing at anything, are they?’ I said, doing my best to study them as we stumbled on. ‘Look at them – they’re just strolling.’

  ‘Calm as you like,’ Anna said. She leant on a mossy rock to catch her breath. ‘Let’s give it up, Shilly. We’re not going to catch them.’

  ‘And do you know why that is?’ I said. ‘Because the way is shifting!’

  ‘Perhaps Tonkin and the others will have more luck. They’ll know the woods better, know what special path these women have found. That they must have found.’ She waved in their direction, but they were gone.

  ‘What about the boy? Tonkin said he’s been gone three days. Much longer and if we find the boy at all it’ll only be a corpse.’

  ‘I agree that time is of the essence, Shilly. But there are other ways to spend it than chasing women who don’t want to be caught.’

  ‘Back to the cottages, then – talk to the boy’s family?’

  ‘A much better plan.’

  I hoped we might get ourselves a morsel to eat, too, for we’d had nothing since the stolen cake the night before. My head still felt as if the waterfall had worked its way inside my skull but the roar was quieter now and I was ready to partake of something other than that which came from a bottle.

  We went back the way we’d come, me in front this time, for I was hungry and keen to be around people like Mrs Haskell again. Ordinary people. Anna kept glancing back. I feared the women had bewitched her and she would be lost to me, endlessly chasing them. I told her so and she smiled.

  ‘You won’t lose me to phantoms, Shilly. More like breaking my neck on a tree root.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve more humour than when I first met you and you were a glum man,’ I said, ‘but that’s not funny.’

  We came out of a thorny patch and there was the river again, wi
de and not too deep at this point. I thought we might be back at the place we had parted from David Tonkin, for a little way ahead were flat stones that gave a way to cross the water. If I was right then I was starting to know the place, as Anna had said I would, given time. But there could be many such places to cross, and this one, that now we stood before, might be another, leaving the sisters well served for ways to ford the river, for the taking of children.

  ‘You’d better bathe that, Shilly.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Your hand, look. You must have caught it on the thorns.’

  She was right. There was a deep scratch across the back of one of my hands, and it was dirty. As if she’d given me the pain with her words, now I felt the sting. I gave her back the pain by telling her that her cheek was likewise scratched, cut right through the greasy paint she wore.

  ‘We won’t get out of here alive,’ I muttered.

  I knelt and lowered my hand into the water. The sting worsened then eased, mostly from the cold of the water that chilled my hand so I couldn’t feel anything. It was like drinking. I wondered if I should plunge myself into cold rather than go for the bottle again. And then I wondered if I had been drinking that morning, for I heard a little voice ask, are you there? are you there?

  ‘Looks like Peter Haskell is going to get another telling off,’ Anna said, nodding upstream.

  The boy was on the other side, up to his knees in water and digging in it, if anyone could be said to dig the shifting slip of water.

  Anna and I made our way along the bank until we drew level with the crossing stones. Anna called to the boy but he gave no sign he’d heard her.

  ‘Is everyone in these woods deaf?’ she said, and gathered her skirt to keep the bottom from getting wet.

  She called to the boy again as she crossed to him. Though she was much closer to him now, not five feet away, he remained digging the water and asking his question of the river – are you there? are you there? I began to cross. The water slipped cold between the worn seams of my boots.