The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Mummy, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to be sorry, Will.’ I reach my hand out to him, his fingers still cold to the touch. ‘What do you have to be sorry for, my darling boy?’

  ‘I didn’t think you looked hard enough for Daddy; I thought if you’d really looked properly, you’d have found him.’

  The light changes to green but I don’t drive. Instead, I put the car into neutral.

  ‘But Will, I think you’re right. I looked as hard as I could, then, at that time. But I wasn’t strong; I was lost and afraid and it was a strange place and I – I didn’t want to know what had happened to Daddy. Do you understand?’

  Will nods.

  ‘But I came home to be with you. I needed to be with you. So – so I think you’re right. I didn’t look as hard as I could have. And I realise that we need to know, Will. You and I, we need to know for sure what happened to Daddy. Even if it might hurt, even if it might be hard, we need to know. So I’m going to go back, as soon as I can. I’ll go back and look again, and maybe it will take more than one trip, maybe it will take years, but I promise I won’t stop looking, Will. I promise.’

  ‘Really?’ Will’s eyes shine and I see something in his face I haven’t seen for a long time. What happened at Castle Ellis, it terrified him. But it released him, too – I’m looking at the face of the little boy I knew before the world went dark.

  ‘I promise,’ I say.

  ‘I love you, Mummy,’ he says. ‘You are the bravest person in the world.’

  When he says it, I feel as though it might even be true.

  And then there are no more words to be said as we make our way through the thick night of the wild moors. We don’t need a moon to guide us home, because we have the light of Ponden shining on the hill, the kind of light you feel in your heart instead of seeing with your eyes. And we have the hope of a family that still seeks to understand what family means.

  And, more than anything that ever was or ever will be, we have each other.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I let Will run ahead of me, into the arms of Ponden and his granny, to tell her about his adventure, without a thought of stopping him, for as terrifying, as improbable, as his tale is, I know Ma will believe him.

  The last thing I expected to find at Castle Ellis was Agnes. Not in the archives, not in the house. And what I felt there was different from my experience of her at Ponden, as if the house tempers her somehow. But at Castle Ellis I saw that centuries of disquiet create a powerful matrix of emotion, and that emotion can be overwhelming and dangerous. It’s as if all the traces of pain and loss that make up the remains of Agnes that have always existed in the air around Ponden recognised those same emotions in me and galvanised around them, finding impetus, a kind of force to finish what for so long has been incomplete, a wave of energy that has engulfed me, searched me out because we both seek the same thing in this vast expanse of time.

  We long for hope and we will not rest until we know that we have found some reason for it.

  It’s as if this trace of a human life, this revenant, isn’t bound to the house, but to me. And we will be together until I set her free into the air again, her journey complete at last.

  Did she come with me to Castle Ellis, and perhaps even direct me to that one box where I would find a relic of her, of her existence outside of her mind? This other paper, the packet that Will gave me, I don’t know where it has come from; I can’t explain it. Castle Ellis was built long after Emily died, completed in the year that Emily’s Robert Heaton died; neither one of them would have hidden it in the walls behind the playroom, so why? Why then, and how?

  All that I know is that something terrible happened to the hopeful, happy girl who scratched out her first words in secret that brought her to be tried for witchcraft and murder just a few years later. Some cruelty and injustice that I cannot imagine.

  I do know that the worst of witch hysteria was over by the mid-seventeenth century. As a child, I was fascinated with the fate of the Pendle witches and the heated fervour and fear, neighbour rivalry and feuding, that led to the death of innocent women, women who were nothing more than wise, knowledgeable or outspoken.

  Within forty years, when the same accusations were brought against Pendle women again, they were eventually acquitted, because attitudes, education and enlightenment had advanced so much. Before that, though, the word witch was attached to every kind of woman who transgressed outside of what was expected of them.

  If Agnes was believed to be a killer, even if she was just a troublemaker, or merely an inconvenience, the fastest way to dispatch her would have been to call her a witch – murder within the law.

  There is so much more I have to discover, connections I have to uncover, secret histories that must be revealed, but somehow I know that, if I can resolve this one long-lost and hidden story of a life that was invisible to history, then I will find a way to move on with mine.

  Then I see Ma’s face as she stands waiting for me in the doorway.

  ‘Jean came down to say she’d had a call for you. From the embassy. She had a number to call, so I – I hope you don’t mind, I went back with her and used her phone. I didn’t want you to have to do it.’

  ‘They found his body, didn’t they?’ I ask, feeling the earth crumble away beneath my feet.

  ‘No.’ Ma’s pale-blue eyes meet mine as she holds my hands, her fingers tighten and I brace myself. ‘A hiking party found the plane, or part of it. There were no bodies in the wreckage, but … they say it looked unsurvivable, Trudy.’

  Reflexively, my body braces for the wave of agony I know will break, but all I find is calm. Not acceptance, but something else, something that I can’t explain in any other way but love.

  I love my husband with such enduring strength that nothing will ever alter it. And he loves me the same way, I know it. More than that, I feel it; in every beat of my heart and firing synapses, he is there, his love is there still. It is real, it is present and it is alive. It is an indestructible love. No body means there is still hope: that’s what Will would think, that’s what I feel.

  Look, the word that started all of this scratched into a floorboard two hundred years ago, is the word that stays with me. I will still look for him until we know, and this news just strengthens my resolve.

  ‘Are you going to tell Will?’ she asks me, and I nod.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He needs to know everything there is to know, but I don’t want you or anyone to talk about Abe as if he is dead. Not any more.’

  ‘Trudy, are you sure? Wouldn’t it be better to accept—’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, Ma. Never give up, that’s what Will and …’ I glance around the room ‘… this place has taught me. Never give up, for in time everything that was once secret will become known.’

  ‘Well,’ Ma says, nodding, ‘you know best, I expect. Maybe after you’ve given it some time to sink in, you’ll feel differently. You must be in shock.’

  ‘No, I’m not in shock,’ I say. ‘I understand everything that has happened. But I have to go on, I have to. I promised Will that I would never let him down again, and I won’t. So, for now at least, I have to go on hoping and believing. What other choice is there? I’m not giving in to this.’

  ‘Proper Yorkshire woman.’ Ma’s eyes are bright with unshed tears. ‘I’ll get tea on.’

  After she’s gone, I take the crumpled and badly damaged piece of writing from my bag and smooth it on my knee and read it, my heart aching for Agnes. This is the first part of her story we have discovered which had not been accompanied by a note from Emily. Perhaps Emily never found this note; perhaps that’s why Agnes went to such lengths to press it into Will’s hand, to make sure that every part of her story is told. But there is something else too, something else I can’t fathom yet.

  Tru and Abe

  I can hear the wind talking to me as I head up to Ponden Kirk, see it write its messages in the long grass, the heather that trembles
under its touch, the wild flowers bejewelled with early-morning dew.

  It’s cold as Hell and my heart is beating hard as I tackle the steepest part of the walk, but it feels cleansing to be out here, my hair tangled with weather, cheeks numb and ruddy. Out here I feel at home, on top of the world, at the centre of the universe, for this is my landscape, as uniquely mine as my own fingerprint or palm.

  Right back when we first met, this was a special place for us. From opposite sides of Penistone we’d walk towards each other, each knowing that the other would be there, waiting on the Kirk.

  Sometimes he’d be there before me, and how my heart would fly to see his long frame looking out down the valley, how my soul would swoop and soar with the kestrel. He’d turn to me and smile and, even on the darkest, coldest day, there would be heat.

  As much as I loved it I’d always been a little afraid of the Kirk, the way the rock juts into thin air, nothing above or below but space. Even as a girl I’d had to force myself to step onto it, edging forwards to its end, with my hands and backside firmly attached to its surface. God knows how many thousands of years it had been there, that outcrop of rock, but still it felt to me always as if it could tumble at any second.

  One time we met there stands out like a jewel in my memory. As soon as Abe had seen me coming, he’d leaped onto the great flat rock at once, feet planted wide, arms outstretched, calling ‘Halleluiah’ into the air, his voice echoing down the valley.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I’d asked, half charmed and half mortified, although there wasn’t another soul to be seen for miles around.

  ‘I don’t know. Standing here made me want to cheer on God for such good work.’ He’d turned to look at me, holding out his hand and beckoning me to join him. I’d shaken my head.

  ‘I like having a hill under my feet,’ I’d told him.

  ‘But this is your place,’ Abe had said, laughing. ‘Yours and Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s place. You’re my Cathy and I’m your Heathcliff, right?’

  ‘I hope not,’ I’d said. ‘Cathy was a terrible cow, and Heathcliff was a stone-cold psycho.’

  ‘Where’s your sense of romance?’ He’d pretended to be shocked. ‘Won’t you come and stand with me and we can do Kate Bush?’

  ‘Um, I would rather jump off?’ I’d said.

  ‘Please.’ Abe had dropped his voice, so that I had to take a few steps closer to be sure I’d heard him right. ‘Come to me and let me kiss you.’

  I go back to this moment again and again, reaching for it, holding it almost close enough to touch, so slow, so gentle. I’m looking into his eyes again, feeling his smile against my cheek. My body is melting into his, my heart bursting into flame.

  It’s not that Abe made me brave, brave enough to step out onto the Kirk and into his arms. It’s just that, at this one moment, I knew exactly how much courage I already had, and I knew that there would be nothing in my life that could frighten me as much as the idea of losing him.

  ‘I love you, Abe,’ I say now, letting myself fall back into the heather, as I stare at the indifferent sky. ‘I love you.’

  The world doesn’t care that one human has lost another they love. How much grief, how much sorrow like mine, is mirrored all around the world in just this one moment, and then repeated again and again in every moment after?

  The world doesn’t care, but I do. So I tell the sky how much I love Abe, and how I always will, and how I need to find out what happened to him.

  And even if it doesn’t care, it listens.

  PART FIVE

  With wide-embracing love

  Thy Spirit animates eternal years,

  Pervades and broods above,

  Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

  Emily Brontë

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Dad’s office in daylight is peaceful, and though the day outside is dark and filled with rain, this is much more like the happy space I remember: a haven.

  In the kitchen, Will and Ma are setting about baking a cake. Will and I had sat, our arms around each other, as I explained to him about the discovery of the plane wreck, and his small, serious face turned into my embrace. As he’d listened, then simply folded into me, Ma had set out her old mixing bowls, ancient wooden spoons, a rusty tin and all the ingredients required for a Victoria sponge.

  ‘Now then,’ she’d said to Will, as she’d walked into the room, ‘I’m about baking a cake, and I’ll need a helper for the stirring and the tasting. How about it, Will?’

  ‘OK, Granny,’ Will had said, peeling himself off my lap. But in the doorway he’d turned and said, ‘We are still going to look, aren’t we, Mummy?’

  ‘We will never stop looking, I promise,’ I’d replied. He’d nodded and gone, reassured.

  I’d paused for a moment in the hallway before coming in here, listening to Ma pretending to be scandalised by some joke Will had played on her, and closed the door behind me.

  Now the work begins …

  After several minutes of moving stuff around, I finally clear his old desk chair and lift the last box off of his desk. What I see hooks into my heart and pulls hard. A pen, resting on a notebook filled with his handwriting. A mug, full of the dust of decayed mould. A flattened photo frame of him and me manning the barbecue at the local summer fair, Dad with his beard in full flight, me gazing up at his face.

  Grabbing the corner of my shirt, I roughly dust the old and battered leather chair and the desk, put the picture frame right, and slowly sit in the chair, letting my elbows rest in the dents where his once had, my fingers tracing the imprints worn away by his.

  Setting down the wooden box in the space I’d cleared, I begin to look through it once again, to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

  Carefully, I set aside the documents that I remember seeing in that first brief search, birth and death certificates dating back two or three generations, including my grandfather’s, his cause of death listed as ‘Death by Misadventure’. And I do find something I missed in the first search, probably because it’s a poor-quality photocopy – but it’s a copy of the original catalogue of the 1898 library sale. For a few minutes I trace down column after column of titles, wondering at all the treasures we lost. Much of it was land law, farming practices, animal husbandry. But there were centuries-old books of prayer, poetry, illustrated books of wild flowers and their uses, and, of course, the legendary lost copy of Audubon’s The Birds of America, one of the world’s most valuable books, and a Shakespeare first folio, both worth many millions, all gone, lost and no one knows exactly where. At least there was no first edition of Wuthering Heights – but what if it was among these lost books that Emily’s Robert Heaton hid the pages of The House at Scar Gill?

  The thought of what might have been, so casually lost, makes my stomach churn, and I press on.

  Underneath that are some late seventeenth-century documents relating to the hearth tax that existed then, and it’s strange to see the signature of my long-gone ancestor, William Heaton, lying about how many hearths we had at Ponden so as to play less tax to the county.

  Amongst them, the most important document when it comes to the family history. The administration of the goods of William Heaton were returned to his widow, Anne Casson, and on 22 February, Agnes’s Robert Heaton buys back his rightful inheritance from Henry, ending his reign at Ponden Hall and returning it to the Heatons for good. Somewhere in this legal administration, lost to history between the lines of archaic legal language, is the story of Agnes.

  The room stirs around me, just a little. Furniture creaks and settles, dust rises and billows, and the shadows seem to draw a little closer. I lean into the silence, hoping to catch the whispering trace of a voice telling me what to do and where to look. Outside, the storm has turned the day slate-grey, and the room darkens as the rain drives down into the ground.

  Strangely, it’s right at the bottom of the box that I find the most recent items, and I take them out. I can almost see Dad carefully burying
them under all the archaic paperwork, trusting that no one would delve too deeply. I can see at once why one of the items was buried.

  The first is a photo of a woman in a swimming costume, blowing the photographer a kiss. I turn it over and there is a date written in Dad’s handwriting. It is two years after Ma and Dad got married.

  The second is a cassette tape, unmarked. Under the window is Dad’s old stereo, and after a few minutes of plugging leads into mysterious-looking sockets, I switch it on and the speakers hum. I hesitate for a moment before I push the tape into the slot and press play.

  ‘I’m saying this now, and then I’m never talking about it again.’

  I start at the sound of his voice and realise the volume is turned right up. Pressing pause, I turn it down low enough not to heard outside of this room, and give myself a moment to adjust to the shock of hearing his voice again after so long. Oh Dad, you were not perfect, I see that now, but I loved you. After a moment I press play again.

  ‘This is Bob Heaton, aged thirty-four, and I am of sound body and mind, sober as a judge. I have lived in this house a long time, and I know there’s more to her than meets the eye, but tonight … I can’t believe what I saw just now. I’m at my desk, working late, trying to make the books balance, and I hear a noise at the window, scratching, and I think it’s a cat maybe, or the twigs on the trees. But then I hear this crying, like it’s part of the wind, but not quite. It’s a baby crying outside, some poor little lost mite. And I’ve heard about the Ponden Child and thought maybe this is where it comes from, this strange kind of a wind that whistles down the valley. So I get up and I go over to the window; I don’t know why, because it’s black as night out there, and nowt to see, or so I thought. And I’m standing at the window, listening to the crying sound, of the wind as I thought. And there it was, pressed hard against the glass, white as snow and so small. A hand, a tiny hand, a child’s hand.’ I hear him swallow, hear the tremble in his voice. ‘And then it’s gone, and the wind’s dropped and I’m already wondering if I imagined it. But I saw it, it happened, and this is the proof.’