The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  Anna and I left them to their worry and made our way past the cottages in the direction of the summer house.

  ‘The thefts are increasing,’ Anna said.

  ‘And all costly things. But Miss Franks and Mathilda are too well known to pass by here unnoticed, surely?’

  ‘If they haven’t enlisted the Devil to turn them invisible.’

  ‘That’s not funny, Anna.’

  She waved away my telling-off. ‘It’s true, though. The thief must be someone known here, someone no one thinks will steal.’

  I glanced about me as we passed the last few cottages, and met stares in return. Folded arms. Children herded indoors and doors banged shut, bolted. The Haskell girls, making their way home, skirted us, their squabbles forgotten. We were strangers in that place.

  It was late by then – too late to cross the river and see Miss Franks and Mathilda to ask them about what we’d learnt in Boscastle, too late to ask the squire the same. Climbing the steps to the summer house door I caught sight of something stowed beneath the wooden slats. A basket, the cloth cover tucked in tight to keep out the birds. But the care wasn’t needed today, for in the magpie tree there was only one bird. If the tree was Saint Nectan’s, did that make the bird the saint’s own too? The magpie watched me take the basket and make my way inside, and I was sure it watched me long after I’d locked the door.

  We were tired after our day asking questions and didn’t have words left for each other as we ate the food brought us – bread and hard cheese, some salted fish that dried my mouth so badly I wanted to stick my head under the waterfall.

  When we had finished eating, Anna took from her black bag the broken piece of por-s’lain we had found outside Miss Franks and Mathilda’s cottage – the bottom half of the woman in the pink dress, birds gathered at her feet. Anna put it on the window ledge, and next to it I put the lump of coal I’d taken from the road to Boscastle, and Paul Haskell’s rabbit snare.

  ‘Three clues,’ Anna said. ‘And two of them missing something.’

  ‘The snare has no rabbit. The woman has no body. And the coal?’

  ‘Is itself standing in for missing things – a mirror, a spoon, a brooch. And a boy.’

  ‘Do you think Paul Haskell is dead?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. I … I fear it.’

  ‘If I were to have a drink—’

  She blew out the candle.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I woke and the first thing I saw was black fidgeting at the window. Fidgeting flickering. Five or six of them, birds’ tails, hanging from the roof. A creak, then the summer house sighed with the relief of them going – the magpies, swooping across the river. To the women on the other side.

  We were to follow the birds. It was barely light but that was light enough for there wasn’t time to waste while Paul was still missing. I felt better for my knotted rope. Anna didn’t notice I’d brought it until we were on the last of the crossing stones and I stumbled, the rope slipping free of where I’d tucked it in the waist of my dress.

  ‘Four pence for a knot,’ she said. ‘That rope-seller is no better than whoever is thieving in these woods.’

  ‘You won’t be saying that when I blow away all the ill feeling in this place. You’ll be thanking me then.’

  ‘Oh, will I? And when do you intend to unleash the fury of the weather, Shilly?’

  ‘I’ll know.’ I tucked the rope back inside my dress. The roughness of it grazed my skin.

  ‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘I look forward to seeing what my four pence has bought.’

  ‘My four pence.’ I sloshed through the shallows and stepped up onto the bank. ‘Come on, Anna. We don’t have time for your shilly-shallying.’

  There was no smoke from the chimney today, and no devilish shouting either. Anna went to knock on the door but I didn’t think we should give Miss Franks a chance to say we couldn’t come in, so I shoved the door with my hip, calling out we were coming as I did so.

  We found them much as when we’d come before – seated by the hearth and surrounded by unwashed plates. Mathilda jumped to her feet and got hold of my elbow.

  ‘It is Shilly! Shilly, come again!’

  I found that I was pleased to see her, this smiling girl with her wide cheeks and her badly pinned hair, her hand ashake. I had the sense she would hold nothing back in life. Her every hope and fear and love would be spoken and meant truly.

  My feet brushed something. Paper. It was everywhere – scattered across the table as well as on the floor. And amid the paper, jars. Filled with murky water, little sticks in them.

  Miss Franks’ face made me think of the quarry workings – hard lines, worn deep.

  ‘You … you just come in?’ There was disbelief in her voice, but below that, rage. ‘You take liberty—’

  ‘We took the liberty of bringing you something to eat,’ Anna said, handing her the basket we had brought.

  Miss Franks’ fingers twitched on the handle. ‘That is …’

  ‘Is kind, Gertrud,’ Mathilda said. ‘That is what you must say to our guests, yes? You are kind, Shilly, Anna. Thank you.’

  There followed awkwardness as we waited to be asked to stay, even though we were going to anyway. There was a cost to the basket of food. I hadn’t kept back bread the night before for nothing. Miss Franks fought to keep her anger in check, while Mathilda fretted beside her, afraid of her companion but happy to see us at the same time. I decided to make things easier for everyone. I sat down.

  ‘Have you been out drawing the ferns?’ I said, picking up a bit of paper from the floor. ‘Oh, but this one is the sea. And this one, too.’ I gathered up those scattered around me, and Anna did the same.

  ‘Why, they’re all of the sea,’ Anna said. She smiled at Mathilda. ‘I don’t believe the famous hart’s tongue fern holds any interest to you at all. I think you are a natural landscape artist rather than a botanist.’

  Mathilda gasped with pleasure. ‘You think so? I like to draw the sea, and to paint it. The colours, the movement. This one, Shilly, it is after the big waves and the wind. You see – I want to make it peaceful but still the storm that come before. Still there.’

  Miss Franks set the basket on the table, so roughly some of the trinkets teetered then fell. She didn’t pick them up. I thought of the broken por-s’lain woman we had left at the summer house.

  ‘Is too dark, I think,’ Mathilda said.

  ‘This one is Boscastle, isn’t it?’ Anna said.

  ‘Yes. A good place for me.’ Mathilda gently touched the bridge in the picture with the tip of her little finger. ‘A good place.’

  ‘We were there yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘Ah! You are lucky, Shilly. You saw the fish boats come in?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to go again. You could come with us.’

  ‘I would like that,’ Mathilda said, with great seriousness.

  ‘We could stay there,’ Anna said. ‘We found a lodging house yesterday. I believe you know it, Miss Franks.’ Anna turned to look at the older woman brooding by the table. ‘The landlady is Mrs Teague.’

  ‘I do not know it,’ Miss Franks said.

  ‘Really? Because Mrs Teague remembers you both well. She remembers your visitor, too. Quite a distinctive look to him, with the patch over his eye.’

  Miss Franks’ own eyes widened and she started forwards.

  ‘You do know Squire Orton, then?’ I said. ‘Is he the reason you’ve come here?’

  And then Miss Franks screamed.

  ‘Spies! Everywhere in this place, people spy! In Boscastle, that woman at the keyhole, wanting to post my letters so she could read them. Her husband always asking why do we come where we do not belong. Every day he says that to me.’

  ‘Gertrud,’ Mathilda said, going to her side and plucking at her sleeve. ‘Please, be calm now.’

  But it did no good. Miss Franks was beyond being calm. And it was all our fault.

  ‘We leave Boscastle and fin
d only worse things in these woods. The people watch at the windows and put their filthy hands on my possessions. They are here, all the time. Watching. Listening. And now you.’ She spat out that last word and jabbed a finger at Anna and me in turn. ‘You come like it is your house, you do not ask, and then you say that you ask questions of us in Boscastle. You are no better than the rest.’

  ‘Miss Franks, Gertrud, I’m sorry to have upset—’

  ‘Out!’

  ‘But—’

  She hauled Anna to her feet and dragged her to the door. Mathilda was scritching, talking in German but I could guess the sense of her words. She was begging. It did no good, though. Miss Franks wrenched open the door and threw Anna out – properly threw her, like she was Pigeon being banished from the manor house kitchen. I didn’t wait to be so thrown myself and scuttled outside.

  Miss Franks seethed and spluttered in the doorway.

  ‘I will not be hounded!’ she shouted. ‘No more! I wait and I wait. That is enough.’

  She ducked inside and I was going to run away but then she was back, throwing something at us. The basket of food and everything in it tumbling into the ferns.

  ‘You will not come here again!’

  And she slammed the door shut.

  Anna uttered a curse. ‘You should have knocked, Shilly, made more effort to act polite caller than spy.’

  ‘But we are spying, aren’t we? Anyway, it was saying the squire’s name that was the problem, not me barging in.’

  I helped her to her feet and we gathered the scattered food before the birds should come. Anna was all for leaving then, going back to our side of the river, but I told her to wait, and crept to the back of the cottage, taking with me a knocked-about half loaf. The window was easy to open, just as before, and I dropped the bread onto the bed below it. Miss Franks might be teasy but that didn’t mean she deserved to starve, nor smiling Mathilda.

  When I joined Anna on the path she was making her thinking noise, tapping at her false teeth with her tongue.

  ‘You’re right that mentioning the squire touched a nerve,’ she said.

  ‘Which proves he was their visitor in Boscastle.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Shilly. But if they won’t tell us if they know him—’

  ‘We’ll ask the squire if he knows them,’ I finished for her. For that was what had to be done, no matter the risk to the reward.

  ‘Mr Williams will ask,’ Anna said, ‘and he will go alone. He needs to appear entirely unconnected with our investigation. Shilly, you can—’

  ‘I’ll join the searchers. The luck we’re having finding Paul Haskell, it might be the most useful thing I can do.’

  ‘If you think that’s for the best,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Will Mr Williams be the newspaperman he was when I first met him?’ I said.

  ‘Of course. That’s who he is. He can’t be just anyone.’

  ‘But won’t he need a new name?’ I said, ‘to stop the squire thinking him my husband?’

  ‘An excellent point, Mrs Williams.’

  We went on a few paces and then I asked a question I had been wanting to for some time. ‘Is he the only man in your travelling case?’

  That surprised her, and she couldn’t meet my eye. ‘There might be others, Shilly. Would you like to … to meet one of them?’

  ‘I might,’ I said.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she said, as if we had been speaking of a clue, ‘Well, that is something we shall have to see about.’

  And so the talk of us becoming men was put aside. But I wouldn’t give it up. Anna’s travelling case held many chances to become someone else. She’d already given me one just by helping me leave the moor. I was keen to try others.

  We had been walking back towards the river but Anna stopped now beside a wide stump made lumpy with moss and said it was as good a place as any to bring out Mr Williams. I saw then that she had him in her black bag. He’d been with us the whole time.

  ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘if you should see Mr Williams, who will be wandering the woods with his new name, you don’t know him. His status as an outsider must be preserved if we’re to have the most use of him.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m not soft in the head, Anna.’ And I left her. She was already reminding me too much of the wretched Mr Williams and she hadn’t even put on his thick spectacles yet, or taken up his limp!

  The path was up to its usual tricks as I made my way to the cottages but I was ready for it now and didn’t grow so afraid as when we had first arrived, for that was how to become lost in the woods – giving in to them. It was what they wanted, the huddling trees. Perhaps that was what had happened to Paul and I should even now come across him wandering about, dressed in clothes made of ferns, eating snails like Miss Franks and Mathilda. That was a better thought than him drowned in the river or buried by the quarry workings.

  A magpie landed on a lump of moor stone a little way ahead. I passed it, and it flew ahead of me again. It did this watching and catching up all the way to the cottages and I was quite breathless when I reached them for trying to outrun the bird.

  A few people were about, and I caught sight of the red-haired woman who had lost her brooch the day before. She was outside her cottage, surrounded by piss bottles. The baby was squalling in her lap, a miserable thing, curled fists and sweaty with rage. As I drew closer I saw the likely cause of the child’s misery – her arms were sore-looking, covered in red pinpricks. I took a few steps back for I didn’t want the pox. I wouldn’t be much use to Paul Haskell if I had to take to my bed, or if I should die.

  I asked the child’s mother if there was any news of Paul.

  ‘No, God help us. Nothing.’ She clutched the baby to her. ‘Why you asking, anyway?’

  ‘I was looking to help. Join the searchers.’

  ‘Well, they’re at the quarry. Going to search the spoil heaps. Squire finally let them stop work to do it.’

  I went on my way, towards the quarry, to see if I could be of some use. But then I passed a place that held more usefulness, better usefulness in finding Paul.

  Richard Bray was snoring loud enough to raise his roof and neither heard nor saw me creep inside. From the smell coming off him, when he woke his head would be so sore he’d never miss the bottle. Without Anna there to chide me, to forbid, I could do what I had need of – for myself and for the missing boy.

  I knew where to take my prize. I’d thought of it the day before, on our way to Boscastle when I first saw the ruined mill by the bridge. That’s why I’d stopped to look at it. Anna didn’t guess. She never did. Mrs Haskell was right. Anna didn’t know how to look, and Mr Williams’s thick spectacles would make her blindness worse, rather than let her see.

  My hands on the bottle shook and I feared I’d drop it. Just a sip on the way, I told myself. Just a little one, to keep my feet moving, my breath coming. I’d be more like myself in no time, and the trees wouldn’t have me.

  If I could just get to the mill. Get to the mill and then I could have it. I couldn’t let them see, let them know, those good people. Those Haskells. Anna. I told myself to run. Past the quarry and the search for Paul, because my help was something different. Something better, even, yes? Yes. Run, Shilly, run. There was the light beyond the trees, there was the path opening out, there was the manor house and Anna inside it, Mr Williams inside it, and I was running, no – flying. Flying past the house and there was the road and there was the old mill, burnt beyond use to all but me. Fly away home. Fly away, away to the bottle at my lips, the good taste, the best taste, oh that it would never end, that I should die at that moment and not have to go another day without a drink and Anna shaking her head, hating me for what I was. Look at her shaking her head, her eyes red-rimmed, red-veined. Her nose red too. Her hair lank. Her skin sallow. The bottle to her thin, pale lips. Her lying lips. Her saying, Shilly, what have you done?

  And then I saw that Anna’s mouth was my mouth, Anna’s
words, my words. My own hateful face staring back at me.

  I had found the stolen mirror.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Because I couldn’t bear to see myself, I looked away, and took in where I was. The mill I had run to, run to like a desperate animal. A bird, I had thought. Flying. No. A rabid dog, more like. Something that should be shot.

  I was lying in a pit of blind nettles and broken slate, the bottle beside me, not empty yet. I put the stopper back. I managed that, and told myself that was a start, at least. I got to my feet and saw my palms were scratched. How had I done that?

  All four walls were still standing, and most of the roof, though a corner had fallen in and left the shattered slates beneath my feet. They scraped and ground their rough edges together as I stepped this way and then that, picking through the brambles and fallen beams that took up most of the floor. A millstone was propped against one wall, and there were stone troughs nearby. Sarah’s stolen mirror had been tucked behind one of these, but had slipped from its hiding place, pushed into view by one of the scurrying things I could hear but not see. Rats, I thought, but forced myself to peer behind the trough. Sure enough, there were other treasures.

  I pulled out shining knives and forks and spoons, and amongst them one I thought likely to be Richard Bray’s christening spoon for it was smaller and thicker than the others, and looked too good to eat with. The other cutlery I guessed belonged to Miss Franks and Mathilda. A bit more reaching and fiddling behind the trough, trying not to think about the rats and trying not to feel the pain when the moor stone of the trough grazed me. My hand closed on something small and sharp. A silver leaf with a pin worked into it. The red-haired woman’s brooch. More fiddling and I had a frame for a picture. The woman inside it looked very much like Miss Franks. Then a pair of shoes fine enough for Mrs Williams to wear, all lacy bits and silver thread.

  I felt very pleased with myself for finding so many fine things, like a magpie must feel when she looks at the trinkets she has gathered. I gathered them up and thought how pleased Anna would be when I showed her. But then I put the things down again, for I knew what Anna would say. You have the stolen goods, Shilly, but you don’t have the thief. Better to leave the things and wait to see who comes for them.