The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

I waited in the dark until the house was quite still. Cold bit at my cheeks and toes. I’d left my babe asleep with John Bolton, and left my house, and it might be discovered at any moment that I was not present, but still I had left because I had to see Robert. I had to lay my eyes and hands and lips on him once again.

  Finally, all was silent. The dogs slept, the lights were snuffed out. Going roundabout I found the entrance at the kitchen open and old Keeper, Robert’s hound, stretched out in front of the fire. He did not stir as I passed. Betty slept in her cubbyhole and I stopped for a moment to look on her, and wonder at why she had not got word to me that Robert was back. For almost all my life I have loved and trusted her, above all others, she being something like a mother to me, but on this one subject she has held back again and again. She supposes that now I am married to John Bolton I am no longer free, but she does not understand love, nor what it means for one soul to be cleaved to another in such a way as Robert’s and mine. She seeks to protect me from harm, I don’t doubt, but she injures me to keep me from my love.

  Quiet as a ghost, as a spirit, I climbed the staircase of Ponden Hall, my frozen feet bare so that I may make no more sound than a whisper as I travel. At last, as I stood outside the room where he slept, my heart felt as if it might burst with feeling. Slowly, I approached the box bed, not wanting to startle him, searching in the dark for the door that closed it away.

  When I opened the door, though, all happiness, all joy, all hope, died.

  For before my eyes I saw Robert, sleeping peacefully, and alongside him another woman.

  A great sense of shock and grief took hold of me, and I could not move my feet. This vision that I saw was so unlike what I had dreamed that I could not perceive that it was real. So I stood and stared, like a fool waiting to be caught, without a thought to what would become of me, or Catherine, should I be found in Robert’s chamber, with no purpose or reason to be there.

  It must have been that he felt me near, for Robert alone woke. Seeing me, he sat bolt upright, smothering a cry, and stared at me in return until he could understand that I was not a vision, that I was really present.

  At once he leapt out of bed, and taking my arm, rushed me down and through the house and out of the front door, and in a great hurry, bore me down the path to the bee boles where it was perfectly dark.

  He was the first to speak.

  ‘Agnes.’ He said my name and it was the most beautiful music I have ever heard, for I knew when he said it that he still loved me and not the woman in his bed.

  ‘You are back,’ I said. ‘You never did come to claim me, Robert; you left me to marry another man to protect your child. That woman who lies with you … who is she?’ I asked, though my heart knew full well.

  ‘Betty sent word to tell me you were married,’ Robert whispered, his eyes never leaving me. ‘I meant to come to you, but there was no escape. Casson wanted me gone. He rode with me himself and put me on a boat to Ireland. Once on board I had no way, no means, to return until he deemed it so. I thought you were lost to me forever, Agnes. And in truth, you are. So I – I married. Mary is a good and kind woman, sweet and deserving of a good husband.’

  ‘I am deserving of a good husband,’ I said to him. ‘I, who you left with your child growing within. I, who was forced into marrying a man I cannot abide to give our daughter a roof and a name. You left me, and did not think of what would befall me while you were away.’

  ‘Not true.’ That is what he said, stepping ever closer to me. ‘Not true! I thought of you with every waking breath and in every dream. I failed you, Agnes, I was weak and undeserving of you, but I love you still.’

  He put his arms around me, his mouth on mine, and his hands all about me, in and out of my garments, and, so help me God, it was so sweet and so full of delight that it took me all that I had to stay his rovings and step away.

  ‘We cannot,’ I told him. ‘Though you are my true husband, we can no longer lie with one another as you desire. It is against God’s will.’

  ‘Damn the God that keeps us apart,’ Robert said with such force that I saw that he was no longer the boy that I had lost, but a man now.

  ‘Would you lie with me, Robert?’ I asked him.

  ‘I would,’ he replied.

  ‘Then you and I must find a way to be rid of those that shackle us. We must find a way to be together, Man and Wife, as we should be.’

  ‘What way is there that isn’t murder?’ Robert asked me, and I spoke no words for a long time. I weighed it carefully, that which I knew and had kept too close to myself for all these long years. I weighed the risk of revealing against the longing to have what should be mine by right.

  ‘I know something about Henry Casson,’ I told him. ‘Something we may use to force him to help us. I have known it since I was a child and kept it safe my whole life for fear that he would murder me if I did not, but I am a frightened child no more, and, with you by my side, to protect me, I believe that what I know may hold sway over him. Something that he will wish to keep secret, knowing that I was witness to his dreadful deed. I fear him no longer, and I, with the knowledge I have, believe he may be willing to direct the church to dissolve your marriage to keep his own neck from the rope.’

  ‘My wife, she has done nought to deserve this …’

  ‘I am your wife,’ I said, with such fury and grief that he took me in his arms, and held me until I was still once more, though I fought against him.

  ‘You are! You are my true wife.’ He spoke the words again and again until at last I was calm. ‘What do you know?’ Robert asked me, and I could see that he was afraid.

  ‘Before I tell you, swear to me that you love me, Robert. Swear to me that never again will you let Henry Casson or any other come between you and I and that you will do all that is necessary to put right what is wrong.’

  ‘I swear it, Agnes.’ He held me tight against him. ‘I swear it on our child’s life.’

  ‘Henry Casson killed your father,’ I said. ‘He murdered him.’

  He stared at me as though I were the Devil, face as white as the Lord on the Cross.

  ‘I will kill him! He has taken everything from me. He has taken it all.’

  ‘You need not kill him,’ I told him. ‘But you must break free of him and the shackles he has put on you. I will kill him, Robert. I will kill him.’

  Then Robert was upon me, with such lust and such fury and passion as I have never known, and after many long months of loneliness and anguish we were as one again. As we lay in the grass, looking up at the moon, he turned to me and asked me when I discovered this crime, and how.

  Twas only then I realised that he did not comprehend what I had said before.

  ‘I have always known it, Robert,’ I told him. ‘I have always known, because I saw him do it with my very own eyes.’

  ‘And you never spoke of it to me?’ His voice was dark as midnight, and for a moment I was afraid of him.

  ‘I could not,’ I said. ‘And you know why. I was so afraid of him, knowing that at any moment he might snuff out my life in an instant and then you … you were lost to me. If you do not love me now, then tell me and I will go back to Bolton and live the rest of the days of my miserable life under his fist. But tell me, Robert, if you love me no longer.’

  I’d held my breath, felt the terror of losing him again as sharp as a knife in my gut.

  ‘But I do love you, Agnes,’ he said. ‘What I am without you, but half a man? I believe you. I’ll talk to Henry Casson, for what I say holds weight and he knows it.’

  Now I wait for Robert to do his part, to go to Casson and command him to have his marriage dissolved if he wishes his sins to be held quiet. And I shall do mine. And all that I have wished for shall be mine at last. And perhaps God will cast me out of his heart for what we are willing to do. Even so, it is a price I am willing to pay for my love.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  ‘You well?’ Ma asks me as I return.

  ‘Quite well,’ I re
ply, hesitant. ‘Why?

  ‘You’re clutching your bag to your chest like you stole it,’ she says, eyeing me up and down.

  ‘I suppose I sort of did.’ Taking the wrapped book out of the bag, I open it to the title page and rest it on the table. ‘Look, Ma.’

  ‘A Ponden book!’ Ma bends as she peers at the bookplate, following each rise and fall of the design. ‘You found one.’

  ‘I found more than two hundred,’ I said.

  ‘He’s the one that stole the Ponden books?’ Ma scowls. ‘I knew I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Well, hardly him personally, Ma, it was a hundred and twenty years ago they went missing. But yes, I would like to know how they got there. See, here where it bulges? This one has something hidden under the endpapers.’

  ‘So you’re going to have a look?’ Ma nods encouragingly. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Well no, I need time and my tools and, strictly speaking, I’m vandalising someone else’s property.’

  ‘No, you ain’t,’ Ma says. ‘Those books were stolen. Even if Mr Fancy Pants bought them off of someone, they still belong to us. It’s the law, love. And the provenance is pretty clear, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Really?’ I look down at the book. ‘So this is a homecoming?’

  ‘You want to get all those books and bring them back here,’ Ma says. ‘Me and Will finished clearing out the three small rooms, and I had a good look, best as I could, all round them, but I can’t get down on the floor like you, so you’ll want to check them too. I made a steak pie for dinner. Build you up a bit.’

  ‘Where is Will?’ I ask.

  ‘In the bath. Mab’s up there with him. Hopefully not in the bath, though she could do with one. We both of us got covered in muck and dust, so I thought I’d better wash him.’

  ‘Right, I’ll check on him,’ I say.

  ‘And then get opening up that book,’ Ma says. ‘You’ve got time. I’ll shout you when dinner’s ready.’ She nods, leaning in a little closer. ‘I want to talk to you, Tru, tell you something important.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, hesitantly. ‘Are you OK, Ma?’

  ‘I will be,’ she says. ‘Now, go on with you; check that Mab isn’t in the tub with our boy.’

  Will is dried and snug in his PJs and Mab is somewhat damp but very waggy-tailed as they head off downstairs to see what Ma is up to. Holding the book under my arm, I stand at the top of the stairs for a moment, closing my eyes, trying to read Ponden. Somehow, I thought I’d find Agnes’s unhappiness in the atmosphere, that longing and cold isolation. But it’s not Ponden that apparitions haunt, it’s me. I don’t know if it’s Will, or how things are between Ma and I, but this house is as full of light and love and warmth as I remember it when I was a very little girl, playing hide-and-seek with my dad. Which means my son is safe, and it’s up to me, and me alone, to conclude this story.

  It makes the most sense to examine the book properly in Cathy’s room. Here there is room to work, and the best light – at least if I sit right under the bulb. And besides, this place meant something to Agnes and Emily. Parts of both of their stories were written here.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I set out my book pillow, page-turner and scalpel.

  Taking a deep breath, I wait a moment for my hand to stop trembling before opening the book to the backboard. Picking up my scalpel I immediately put it down again. What I’m about to do to this book is sacrilege, something I find deeply uncomfortable. What I should do is apply a special poultice to the glue that will dissolve it without damaging the paper, so that, very gradually, over a period of days, I will be able to peel the added paper away, and so preserve it as an important part of the book’s history. I know that’s what I should do, and I know how to do it – and yet there is no time for the care that this book deserves. I have to butcher it as gently as I can.

  So I pick up the scalpel again, and this time I cut. Slowly and with precision, retaining as much of the paper as I am able, I cut it away. And revealed beneath it, folded neatly in half, are more pages of Agnes’s writing and two further pages of the Ponden Witch Pamphlet. And something more, something written onto the backboard of the book itself.

  With trembling hands I take the cheap and flimsy printed paper out and set it to one side, and then I see them. Underneath where the papers were stored are a series of simple hieroglyphs, inked onto the board.

  An eye.

  And … and a thumbprint made in red ink, a face drawn into it. This image that returns again and again, from one age to another. Agnes draws it, Emily – I did as a little girl – and now Emily’s Robert Heaton. It must be a part of Agnes’s story, perhaps related to how she died, to how she feels. Perhaps she’s been showing this to me my whole life, and to others for many lives before mine, waiting for someone to understand what it means.

  Beneath it, one word; one word that seems to be embedded into the card rather than written.

  Look.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Within these pages a true relation of the barbarous murders committed by Agnes Bolton upon the persons of her husband, John Bolton, and her infant daughter, Catherine Bolton, only one year of age. And how she did use poison upon her husband, saying he died a natural death and had his body buried, until upon the violent death of her child at her own hands it was brought up again, and it was found that he had been killed by the witch, who wished to sacrifice her husband, and even her child, to Satan, that she would be brought great riches and power beyond measure.

  Written in Caution to all Graceless Persons.

  How terrible it must have been for Agnes to lose her baby to a terrible end and then face this accusation. The legend of the tiny ghost child, its baby hands scratching at the window by the box bed, crying to be let in, feels suddenly viscerally real, and then I understand.

  Agnes, wherever she is, is not with her child.

  All that Agnes wants is that which any mother who loves her child would: she wants to comfort her baby, the Ponden child crying in the dark.

  And there is something in the air, not a sound, or a movement, but something. Some disturbance in the atmosphere that is something like a great letting out of air, something like a sigh of loss and longing.

  There are tears in my eyes, tears that don’t belong to me as I turn to the next page.

  On this day, 3 October, The Year of our Lord 1659, Mistress Agnes Bolton was tried before the Constable Henry Casson, with the charge of double murder by witchery. That she did poison her husband with Devil’s brew and dash out the brains of her child as a sacrifice to the Devil. And that she did curse the neighbour’s cow. And that she did wish the death of her former mistress, Anne Casson, and so it did happen. And that she did dance naked under the moon to seduce good local men into her thrall. And that she did seek to blight the health of all that had crossed her, including the young and godly wife of Master Robert Heaton, who she hated with a jealous rage.

  At the trial Mistress Agnes Bolton did proclaim her innocence at every turn and shouted over every testimony, crying and claiming to mourn for her poor, pitiful child, but none put any stock in her wailings.

  She was found guilty and sentenced to hang the next day.

  And yet in the night-time the Devil did come to claim his own, and she was taken from the Black Bull Inn where she was locked away, and escaped. And many say they did see her on the Devil’s back, flying away across the sky, shrieking and howling and laughing at her evil and fiendish devilments.

  Beware Godly persons that do read this tale. The Ponden Witch is not found yet, and some say she still means to curse and kill all that crossed her from now until the end of time.

  ‘You escaped?’ I stand up, letting the delicate page fall to the floor. ‘You escaped, Agnes? What happened next?’

  1659

  Before dawn I went up onto the moor, with Catherine on my back, and looked in the places where I knew I would find what I wanted, their roots buried deep in the bracken. It was not the season for foxgloves,
and the cold earth was hard as bone. On my knees, I dug down as deep as I could, clawing away clumps of frozen earth until I found the bulbs I sought, collecting many more than I needed, storing them in my apron. At home, as Bolton still slumbered, I took them out, turning them over and over again in my hands, as I weighed what I would do with them. Great pain would befall the man that ate them, sickness and vomiting, fever, and a feeling as if his racing heart would soon explode. A crushing like a mountain would be placed on his chest, a great fear, and terrifying visions, and then, finally, death. He would not be given a good end. As I thought on it, I knew well what I was about to do. And it came back to me that strange dream from long ago, when I was cast out of Eden. Only now I see Hell, hot as fury, with flames of bile green and devils waiting to torment me for eternity. I know that I will burn when I am dead. But to live even one day on this earth, with my husband and daughter at my side, will be worth a thousand years of pain.

  The sun was rising as I banked the fire and prepared his breakfast, when he finally woke, and set out to work. It was a fine day, cold, but with a bright sky, and he was in good spirits. Let him have the day, I thought. Whatever he has done he at least deserves the day.

  That night it was harder than I thought it would be to set his fate before him. John Bolton is a cruel man, and has never shown me any kindness, nor affection. Perhaps, if he had been a different sort of man, a more gentle one, we might have made something of a marriage. I might, in time, have forgotten or, at least, learned not to yearn for my Robert. But John was lost to drink and anger before I ever knew him. And a thin, red-haired woman, who bore the child of another was not to be the woman to change him, if there were ever any.

  I cut the bulbs very fine, and added salt and strong herbs to the stew to cover the taste. And I thought what life might have been like for me and for John if fate had not marked us so cruelly. There might have been kindness and companionship, love and partnership. Church on a Sunday, and every day in between seeing our children prosper and grow. A small life, perhaps. An ordinary one. But one that might have made me happy. Before Casson ripped me from my mother and made me party to a murder. Before Robert showed me what love could be, and spoiled me for any other. Before I was forced to sacrifice my own body to a man that all but hates me to keep a roof over my baby’s head and food in her mouth.