The Magpie Tree

by Katherine Stansfield

  And so I stowed them all behind the trough again, as I had found them, all but the framed picture. That was small enough to carry and I could see a use for it. Miss Franks had turned us out. Food wasn’t bait enough for us to get back inside the cottage, but a treasure might be. I remembered how sad she’d been when she told us what had been taken, and the woman in the picture looked so much like her that I thought she must be a relation.

  I decided such cunning deserved another sip. Only a sip, mind, and then I would have had enough to go back into the world and try again to be good and worthy of being taught my letters. But I took the bottle with me. For Paul, I told myself, and was on my way to the summer house before I could think that mightn’t be the truth of the matter.

  ‘Anna, you won’t believe—’

  A man was by the window, his back to me. He spun round as I burst in to the summer house, his hand fumbling to free itself from inside his fly. From rubbing at himself. He was speechless, open-mouthed. But we needed no introductions. His neat but thick moustache, his spectacles. The disappointment on his face at seeing me, along with the flush of shame. I knew him all too well.

  Mr Williams had returned.

  ‘If you’ve a need,’ I said, starting towards him, ‘I can—’

  ‘I was just … changing my clothes.’

  I didn’t look away while he was taken off and packed back into the travelling case, Anna revealed beneath him. I enjoyed her blushes, her failure to meet my eye. I had been right to think she took pleasure in men’s clothes, and I would find a time to make use of it. For now, though, there were other things to speak of.

  ‘Did you see the squire?’ I asked her.

  ‘He wasn’t at home to callers, according to the delightful Mrs Carne.’ Anna sat down to put her stockings on. ‘All I learnt was that Mrs Carne was forced to do the washing because Lucy has taken to her bed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did Mrs Carne tell me? Because she has the same capacity for sympathy as this chair.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why has Lucy taken to her bed.’

  ‘Ill, apparently. Mrs Carne told me, at great length, I might add, about the overwork she faces as a result.’

  ‘I wonder … The baby belonging to the woman that lost her brooch, the one with red hair. The baby has marks—’

  ‘Mr Williams’s visit wasn’t completely in vain,’ Anna said, not heeding me. ‘He met someone as he was leaving the house. Someone else looking for the squire.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The quarry captain. I forget his name, but he was pleased to tell Mr Williams of the fineness of Trethevy’s slate. Not so fine as that of Delabole, which I gather is the best in these parts, but Trethevy has the advantage for they are closer to the coast for shipping.’

  I went to the window and looked out at the waterfall for its tumbling was more interesting than Anna’s slate rambles.

  ‘Mr Williams was delighted to hear all about the quarry, of course,’ Anna said, ‘given that he is writing a piece for his newspaper about Cornwall’s mineral extraction.’

  ‘Is he indeed?’ I said, jealous of Mr Williams being able to turn to whatever strangers chose to tell him. And admiring of Anna too, of course.

  ‘The captain shared all sorts of insights,’ she said. ‘About inclines and drainage, how they winch up the larger blocks using that wheel on a tripod – that’s a “poppet head”, he told me.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘The most interesting thing is how they get it out of the ground in the first place. They blast it, Shilly. With explosive powders.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘And do you know what they do before they set the charge?’

  ‘I’m certain you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘They ring a bell.’

  I looked at her then. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s an alarm, to warn anyone nearby that a blast is imminent. It’s not a dead saint that has been ringing a bell of warning. It’s the quarry captain.’

  ‘But the people here, they live so close to the quarry, they work in it. They’ll know the blasting bell, won’t they? Why would they mistake that for another? There must be two of them being rung, two different bells. The saint is here, Anna, looking after his people.’

  ‘No, he isn’t. It’s the quarry captain who’s doing the looking after, stopping people being blown to pieces. And the reason the inhabitants of these woods have mistaken the sound of their own blasting bell is because they’re afraid. Afraid of two foreign spinsters so poor they’re eating snails.’

  I leant against the wall, not minding its damp fur for once. Could it be true what Anna said? She was still speaking. She had all the answers, and yet, and yet …

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘now that we’ve solved that mystery, what’s that you’ve got?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In your hand there.’

  She took the frame I’d forgotten I was holding. The bottle was safe in the ferns beneath the magpie tree. Anna looked at the drawn woman in the frame.

  ‘Does she remind you of anyone?’ I said.

  Anna tilted the picture to make use of the light. ‘The resemblance is quite striking. The same shaped face, and the mouth. The dress is old-fashioned – the lace at the collar.’

  ‘Miss Franks’ mother?’ I said.

  ‘A close relation, certainly. Where did you find this, Shilly?’

  ‘The ruined mill, on the road. I was looking for Paul there.’

  She frowned at me. ‘I would have thought the mill had been searched already. Are you lying to me?’

  I told her of the other things I’d found, and that I’d left them there so that we could find the thief.

  ‘And if we catch the thief, we find Paul,’ Anna said. ‘The boy must have seen something he wasn’t meant to, that day near Miss Franks and Mathilda’s cottage. The thief needed to silence him. That’s our motive. We just have to hope the boy is still alive.’

  ‘Even if he isn’t, the knowing is worth something.’

  We were quiet then, thinking of Paul, before Anna upset all my good detective work by asking a hard question.

  ‘So how do you suppose we catch the thief, Shilly? We can’t keep watch on the mill all hours of the day. We can’t put all our eggs in that basket.’

  ‘I …’

  She gave a tight smile of satisfaction, which did away with the last of her embarrassment at having been caught enjoying herself. She was in charge once more.

  ‘Don’t fear, Shilly. I have an idea. We’ll need to go upstream for once, rather than down.’

  ‘Upstream, why? What’s there?’

  ‘Not what, but who. David Tonkin.’

  She told me of the plan as we walked. We would ask David Tonkin for the dye he used to colour cloth, and then we would paint it on the stolen things.

  ‘Only the undersides,’ Anna said. ‘We don’t want the thief to see anything is amiss before he or she has picked them up.’

  ‘And then the dye will mark the thief – a sign of their guilt.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I had to own that it was very cunning, but I only owned that to myself. Anna was prideful enough as it was.

  ‘What shall we say to David Tonkin if he asks why we want the dye?’ I said.

  ‘We’ll tell him … Well, what shall we tell him, Shilly? Time you decided a lie. I know you’ve a talent for it. Don’t think I can’t smell spirits on you.’

  I quickened my pace and put all my thinking into what to say to David Tonkin.

  By the time we arrived, having fought our way along the riverbank, through brambles and ferns and falling over the fallen trees and lumps of moor stone hidden there, I had my lie ready.

  David Tonkin was hard at work, lifting and dropping a big club into a big tub, grinding at the dark water thickened with cloth. He greeted us like old friends, and told the lad helping him that we were ‘the two art ladies’. This was helpful for my lie, for I told him we needed dye for our
painting.

  ‘Well now, I’ve never been asked for that before, and there’s plenty other painters come to the woods. Modern painting you’re doing, is it?’ he said, his whiskers twitching, as if such a thing were fearful.

  ‘I …’

  ‘Quite right, Mr Tonkin,’ Anna said, and saved me. ‘We’re experimenting with some new techniques. A wash, for which I think a dark dye might be just the thing. The river here, it moves so beautifully in the shadows cast by the trees.’

  That put him at ease. ‘Oh yes, she’s quite a sight, isn’t she? That’s why so many come, and I always say to them, to you artists, I say, do you know the name of such a fine river as this here in Trethevy?’

  He beamed at us with great expectation, and I took this to mean we were to ask for this answer, so ask him I did.

  ‘What is the river’s name, Mr Tonkin?’

  ‘’Tis the Duwy, my dear, which in the language of these parts means—’

  ‘Dark River,’ I said.

  ‘How poetic,’ Anna murmured.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The poets come too. Scores of them.’ Then his expression darkened, dark as the river he’d been speaking of. ‘And they’ll have something for their poems now, won’t they? The tragedy of the lost boy.’

  We were all three silent a moment then, only the river loud outside the mill, but then the young lad coughed in the poor air and the spell was broken.

  ‘Now then,’ David Tonkin said, ‘let me get a little pot for you. I’d like to see the painting when you’ve finished, Miss Drake. See how a wash of dye looks.’

  ‘Of course. I’d be delighted. Would you have a cloth I could take too?’

  Still the better liar of the two of us.

  We left one mill and went straight to another – the ruined one on the road. Anna was too fearful of the rats to be much use. After much shrieking and cursing that would let all the thieves in Cornwall know we were there, she climbed into one of the empty stone troughs. From the safety of that spot she told me how I should place the dye, and then how I should do it better, so things were much the same as usual. Her talking, me doing, and both of us grumbling at the other.

  ‘Make sure you put some dye on each of the shoes.’

  ‘Do I have to? Waste of a fine pair, if you ask me. Miss Franks would likely think so too.’

  ‘Well, she isn’t going to know, is she? And it’s a small sacrifice if we catch the thief and it leads us to Paul Haskell.’

  Her words made me put a great wash of dye on the bottom of each shoe, caring less now about how the fine lace wilted in the dark splashes.

  At last I was done with it, and a messy job it was, too. I straightened up and looked for a place to hide the pot of dye and the cloth.

  ‘Shilly, doesn’t something about this mill strike you as odd?’

  ‘I know you don’t like the rats, Anna. You’ve told me enough times. Just let me put these things behind this beam and we’ll be off.’

  ‘It’s not the rats. Look around you. What do you see?’

  I did as she said. ‘I see an old mill with the roof coming down and brambles keeping it upright.’

  ‘That’s what I see too.’

  ‘So?’ I said, my patience all but gone.

  ‘So what don’t you see?’

  ‘That’s one of them foolish questions you only ask to make me look foolish. Well, I won’t be a fool, Anna Drake. I hope the rats get you.’

  I made my way towards the doorway with its half-hanging door more rot than wood. Wood. I put my hand out. Damp wood.

  I spun round. ‘There’s nothing here been burnt. The place has just fallen down.’

  Anna nodded, still standing in the trough, looking as if she floated above the ferns and brambles. ‘And yet Mrs Haskell said there was a fire here. That she’d been burnt in it.’

  ‘Why would she lie about that?’ I said.

  ‘Why indeed?’

  I gave Anna my hand to help her climb out of the trough.

  ‘Nearly everyone in Trethevy has a secret to hi—’

  A bell rang.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Shilly, wait!’

  I ran across the road and scrambled down the side of the bridge. The trees stood so close together it was as if I faced a wall. But I knew I had to find a way through, to get back inside the gloom.

  ‘Shilly!’

  ‘It’s the saint, he’s warning us.’

  I pushed my way between two tight trunks and then was forced to step high through the brambles, like some leggy wading bird. The bell rang and rang. A low peal. A sad peal. It was the song the trees would sing if they only had mouths.

  Anna had caught up with me but dithered at the treeline. ‘I told you – it’s the quarry’s bell.’

  ‘Something bad is going to happen,’ I said, and tumbled free of the brambles and into the woods.

  ‘A blast is going to happen.’

  She grabbed my arm but I got myself free. There was a rough path ahead. An animal track, at least. I looked about me. This wasn’t a part of the woods we’d been in before. I tried to get my bearings.

  ‘The quarry must be that way, mustn’t it, away from the river? Where’s the ringing coming from?’

  ‘Shilly, please. We can’t go near the quarry. It’s not safe.’

  ‘Believe what you like, Anna, but the bell rang when Paul Haskell disappeared. Some other bad thing might be happening right now. We can’t just ignore it.’

  ‘But—’

  I set off in the direction I thought the quarry, for that would lead to the cottages, and crashed through all manner of green and scratching thing. Anna followed me and I followed the bell. It grew louder but my blood pounded in my ears and my body was tolling, tolling, and the light was fading. Too fast for dusk. The woods’ anger took the light. The branches seethed.

  At last I found the path to the cottages and I made for it, if only for the sight of something known in that unknown place. At once I was in a river, but not the Dark River that ran through the woods of Trethevy. This was a river of people, surging with panic.

  The quarry workers were streaming back, grey and frightened, calling names. Men and women grabbed children, shoved them indoors. All about me the children scritching. The birds screamed above. And still the bell rang, and my feet slowed, stopped, for the noise was inside me, as if my heart had been plucked clean out and a clapper left. I was so very afraid.

  ‘Jenna! Where is he? Where’s Peter?’

  Maria Haskell had her eldest daughter by the arm and was shaking her.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? I told you not to let him out of your sight.’

  ‘I tried! He went off while I wasn’t looking.’ The girl was scritching and clutching at her collar, her voice rising to a wail. ‘He kept saying he wanted to dig the water.’

  Maria looked up and down the path, her hands pressed against her mouth but I could hear her moans still as I went to her.

  ‘It’s Peter,’ she told me, ‘he’s out there somewhere. They’ll take him. Oh, dear Lord, whatever will we do?’

  The poor woman fell to the ground. Jenna covered her face with her skirt and howled. Faces appeared at the windows of the neighbouring cottages, but no one opened their door. There was no noise but the bell and the scritching, as if the world had folded in on itself and there was nothing left but the ground we stood on and the grief and fear that swelled from it.

  I couldn’t stay there a heartbeat longer. If I did I’d lay down in the dirt myself and never get up. I wrenched Jenna’s skirts from her face.

  ‘Where did you last see him?’

  ‘The summer house.’

  I ran, Anna behind me, calling I should take care. Past the cottages and left at the fallen oak and I knew it was the right way for the bell was louder now, calling me on.

  Ahead, the river came in sight, and then the path rounded on the monks’ wall. I skittered to a stop. There was no sign of Pe
ter Haskell there, on his way back, or anyone else, for that matter. I spat the froth of running and pressed on, climbing now, towards the summer house. Towards the ringing. And then Anna cried out behind me. I turned to see her crumple away, vanishing into a clump of thorns.

  I went to her side, tried to help her stand but the effort only made her cry more.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘I tripped. This wretched root!’

  Her left foot was caught in the snarl of it. I reached down, her leaning on my shoulder.

  ‘There,’ I said, yanking her free. ‘Now, come on!’

  But she couldn’t stand, could only cling to me. I had no choice but to let her sink into the ferns.

  ‘I’ll come back for you.’

  ‘Don’t go, Shilly. Please!’ Her face was leached of colour. She tried to grab me.

  ‘I have to. The saint—’

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ she said.

  A burst of wings above us but no birds to be seen. Between each peal of the bell the air tightened. I could feel it, as I had felt it before in that place. And now Anna could too. The trees put forth malice like other, more ordinary plants would put forth buds.

  ‘You can’t leave me here alone,’ Anna whispered.

  ‘You have your knife?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Then use it if you have to.’

  ‘Will it … will it work on …’

  ‘If you try then you’ll know, won’t you?’ I said. ‘Drive it home. Don’t hold back.’ I pulled free of her grasping hands and carried on, into the bell’s noise.

  I climbed to the summer house, my legs heavy as fallen beams, my heart heavier still with dread, but still I climbed. The bell called me on, louder than ever, even as I drew close to the waterfall, which should have drowned it out. If it had been an ordinary bell, that was. I didn’t look back at Anna below, tried not to think what might be waiting for me above. Made myself concentrate on each foothold, each step taken.