The Witch's Daughter

by Nina Bawden

  Mr Jones was making a face as if he was sorry for her. Perdita thought he was the sort of person who could easily be terribly angry with you one minute, and very sorry for you the next. He said, pulling this long face, ‘Poor kiddie. It’s a shame, it really is …’ His eyes were bright and shining, almost as if he were going to cry. ‘Well, we’ll have to think of something to make up for it, won’t we?’ he said, and suddenly his sad look was gone and he was grinning all over his face. ‘Shut your eyes,’ he said.

  Perdita shut her eyes. There was a little click. She heard Mr Smith say, very softly, ‘Don’t, you fool …’ and Frog Face laughed, and said, ‘Why not, after all? There’s plenty more where that came from …’ Then there was a rattling sound as if small stones—or sweets—were being tipped onto the table.

  Behind her closed eyelids, Perdita tried to see what was going on. Often—not always, but often—if she kept quiet and concentrated hard, she could see what people were doing, even if her eyes were closed or she was on the other side of a wall, but tonight there had been so much talk to distract her, and she was very tired … Although she tried as hard as she could, she could only guess. And, because Frog Face had been eating toffees, she guessed there were toffees in the tin, and that he was going to give her one.

  The two men were muttering to each other, but so low that she couldn’t hear what they were saying, until Mr Smith laughed. It was a high, queerly excited laugh. ‘Hold out your hand, Perdita,’ he said.

  Obediently, she did so. Something hard and cold was placed in her open palm.

  ‘Open your eyes, now.’ She opened her eyes. She was holding a small stone—only it was prettier than any stone she had ever seen on the beaches of Skua. It was transparent, like glass: when she turned it over, it caught the reflection from the fire and looked, for a minute, like a piece of fire itself.

  She looked up at the two men.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Frog Face asked. ‘Do you like your present?’

  ‘It’s very pretty, thank you,’ Perdita said, though in fact she was rather disappointed: she would have preferred a toffee. And then, because Frog Face looked as if he were expecting her to say something more, she added, ‘It’s a very pretty piece of glass.’

  Mr Smith turned away. He poured himself a glass of whisky with a hand that was not quite steady. Frog Face made a small, yelping sound. ‘Piece of glass worth a king’s ransom,’ he said, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. His face was red and laughing.

  Mr Smith was laughing too, so much that some of the whisky slopped out of his glass and spilled down his waistcoat.

  ‘What shall I do with it?’ Perdita asked him.

  ‘Wear it round your neck on a piece of string,’ he said, and exploded in another burst of laughter.

  Frog Face answered her more seriously. ‘Keep it safe, it’ll bring you luck,’ he said. Then he hesitated before adding, ‘But only if you keep it safe, mind. Don’t go showing it to anyone.’

  Perdita shook her head, a little impatiently. Annie MacLaren would not be interested in a piece of old glass, anymore than she was in the shells Perdita collected on the beach. And who else was there, to show it to?

  Mr Smith had stopped laughing. He said, to the other man, ‘You’d best take your own advice. Don’t go blabbing. Or drinking, down at the town. It loosens the tongue.’

  ‘What d’you take me for?’ Frog Face asked indignantly.

  Mr Smith did not answer him. Instead, he said to Perdita, ‘Off to bed, now. Take your present and get off to bed.’

  He spoke, not unkindly but brusquely, as if he had suddenly grown tired of some game they were playing. This was a way he had: he would play with her, idly amusing himself, but the instant he tired he would dismiss her without warning, turning her summarily out of the room as if she were a tiresome puppy or a kitten. Since Perdita was used to it, she did not resent his behaviour. She went now without a word, out of the room and up the dark stair.

  *

  She got into bed and lay there, sleepily fingering her stone and wondering if it really was lucky, as Frog Face had said, and how long he would stay, and where South America was, and if it was an island like Skua, or a big country like Scotland. Yawning, she listened to the men’s voices murmuring on downstairs. Just as she was drifting off to sleep, they must have opened the door and come into the hall, because she heard Frog Face say quite clearly, ‘No—no one else staying at the hotel. Only this man Hoggart and his wife and a couple of kids. He’s a botanist—funny sort of occupation for a grown man, collecting flowers!”

  Mr Smith said something she couldn’t catch and then Frog Face laughed. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Smithie. I don’t suppose they’ve even noticed me.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  CARLIN’S CAVE

  ‘HE MUST BE absolutely barmy,’ Timothy Hoggart said. ‘Crazy as a coot.’

  ‘Who?’ his father asked, without much interest. He was preoccupied with easing Mr Tarbutt’s old Ford over a deep rut in the rough road.

  ‘That chap.’

  ‘What chap?’

  Tim sighed heavily. ‘It’s amazing, the way you don’t notice people. The man with the golf clubs who eats toffees all the time.’

  ‘Oh, that man. Jones, his name is. Open the gate, Tim.’

  Tim got out. The gate was tied up with wire in an extremely complicated system of knots that took a long time to undo. Once he had opened the gate, and the old car had jolted through, it took almost as long to tie the gate up again. ‘It’s awfully inefficient,’ Tim complained when he got back into the car. ‘All these gates. I mean, I know they’ve got to have gates because of the animals, but they might make them a bit easier to open. It’s such a waste of time.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time on Skua. You might say it’s about the only thing there is plenty of, so people can afford to waste it.’ Mr Hoggart laughed to himself, pushing his glasses up on his nose. ‘At least there’s a gate to open. There’s a place I know in Ireland where they simply build the wall across the road: when a car wants to go through, they knock the wall down and build it up again.’

  Tim’s mouth gaped open. Then, through the front window of the car, he saw something that made him shriek with delight. ‘Dad—look—an eagle …’

  Mr Hoggart put on the brakes, banging Tim’s nose against the windscreen. ‘Glasses, Tim.’

  Tim grabbed the field glasses from the glove compartment and gave them to his father. After a minute, Mr Hoggart gave a disappointed sigh. ‘Only a buzzard. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there are any eagles on Skua. There he goes …’

  They watched as the big, brown bird sailed slowly overhead and disappeared between two peaks of the stony mountain. Mr Hoggart started the car.

  ‘Why d’you think he’s barmy, Tim?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Jones.’

  ‘Because of the golf clubs,’ Tim said. ‘I mean, why would you bring golf clubs to a place like Skua? Everyone knows it’s a wild, lonely sort of place with only one town and no proper roads …’

  ‘Not everyone, Tim. He didn’t apparently.’

  ‘That’s what’s funny. I mean …’ Tim frowned, trying to put his thoughts in order. ‘The golf clubs are new,’ he said at last. ‘So he must have bought them specially, to come on holiday. And you’d think, if you’d gone to the trouble of buying new golf clubs just to go on holiday with, you’d go to the trouble of finding out if there was a golf course, where you were going to …’

  ‘I expect there’s some perfectly simple explanation, such as he’s spending the first half of his holiday here, on Skua, and the second half somewhere else, playing golf.’ From the tone of his father’s voice, Tim knew he was trying not to sound bored.

  ‘Then why did he ask Mr Tarbutt where the golf course was? He did, I heard him. If he’s not mad, then I think that’s pretty sinister,’ Tim said comfortably. ‘Don’t you think it’s sinister, Dad?’

  His father smiled at him vaguely, but did not
reply.

  ‘Aren’t you interested?’

  Mr Hoggart said, very apologetically, ‘Well—since you ask, no, not really. Sorry, Tim, but I’m more interested in looking for orchids, just at this moment.’

  It was Tim’s turn to say nothing.

  ‘Does that bore you?’ his father asked in a suddenly anxious voice.

  ‘Oh, of course not, Dad,’ Tim said at once, doing his best to sound enthusiastic.

  Mr Hoggart was an easy man to deceive. ‘That’s good,’ he said, and stopped the car. ‘I think we might try over there, on the cliffs. It looks like the right sort of terrain.’

  They left the car and took to the peat bog. Round their squelching feet, tiny white flags of bog cotton waved, like the banners of a miniature army. They plodded on towards dryer ground, watched by sheep with long, white aristocratic faces and a few highland cattle with terrifying, curved horns. There was no sound except the crying of gulls and the music of water, falling in silver streaks down the brown mountains and rushing in clear, rocky streams across the flatter land to the cliff edge and the sea.

  The bog ended and they came to a hollow where the ground was firmer. On the far side of the hollow, sheltered from the cliff edge, was a broken down crofter’s cottage, just four blackened, roofless walls and a hole where the door had been. Tim went to explore and found the remains of an iron bedstead, lying on its side among the grass and the sheep dung.

  It was the fourth abandoned cottage they had seen since they left the hotel that morning.

  ‘Where did all the people go?’ he asked his father, who had got tools out of the rucksack and was digging up spagnum moss to line his specimen boxes.

  ‘De-population.’ Mr Hoggart glanced at Tim, sighed, and stopped work to explain. ‘The land’s poor, so were the people. Their children wanted a better living, so they went away and when their parents grew old and died, there was no one to farm the croft. Sometimes whole families went, to the mainland, or to America …’

  ‘But it’s so nice here,’ Tim objected.

  ‘You mightn’t think so, if you were starving.’

  Tim had thought Skua the most beautiful place he had ever seen. Now, though it was still beautiful, it seemed somehow desolate, too.

  His father smiled at him. ‘We came here to look for orchids,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

  They were looking for a black orchid—at least, that was how Mr Hoggart described it to Tim, not bothering his son with its long, botanical name. He just told him that this black orchid was very rare, that it had only, so far, been found in parts of Scandinavia, and that it might not be black at all, but a kind of wine red or dark purplish colour.

  They searched all morning. They found mauve and white wild orchids, incredibly small and delicate, but no darker ones. Mr Hoggart could have gone on searching all day, but by lunch time he judged Tim had had enough. They cleaned their tools, packed the specimen boxes, and settled down on the edge of the cliff to watch the sea and eat sandwiches.

  Below them, the sea boomed. It was a hollow sound, like gun fire. ‘There must be caves down there,’ Tim said. He got out the map and, tracing the wavy line of the small road they had taken, stabbed his finger triumphantly on the jutting headland. ‘There are caves,’ he shouted. ‘Look, Dad, it’s called the Point of Caves.’

  ‘A long way down.’ Mr Hoggart lay on his stomach and looked over the edge. ‘Sheer,’ he said. ‘No way down. Not even for goats.’

  Tim was examining the map. ‘There’s a sort of gully here …’ He looked out to sea, orientating himself by the other islands which looked, from this distance, curiously unreal, like floating cardboard castles. ‘At the bottom of the gully, there’s a cave called Carlin’s Cave. I should think it’s about a mile from here.’

  ‘Caves are only exciting in books,’ his father said. ‘In real life, they’re usually a disappointment. Smelly, damp, full of dead sheep …’

  But Tim was already on his feet, humping his rucksack. They walked along the cliff top, wind in their faces, gulls screaming overhead. Tim’s reckoning had been wrong. They came across the gully after about five hundred yards, and suddenly: the ground seemed to open beneath their feet.

  A steep, grassy slope went down between rocky sides, and disappeared. There was the sound of water.

  ‘Dangerous,’ Mr Hoggart said.

  ‘If you’re frightened, you can stay here,’ Tim said kindly. He went down the grass on his bottom. Mr Hoggart followed him gingerly. The gully twisted, then opened out onto a flat ledge of grass beside a waterfall which shot out from glistening, black rock. The water fell into a clear, shallow pool, snaked and curled downwards over more rocks, and fell again, out of their sight, with a sound like thunder.

  ‘It’s very pleasant here,’ Mr Hoggart said hopefully, but Tim had already vanished, further down.

  ‘We can get down the sides of the fall,’ he shouted, his voice echoing against the rocky sides of the gully.

  Mr Hoggart gave a loud groan and went after his son, working his way down the precipitous sides of the lower waterfall. It was a treacherous climb. The rocky cliff crumbled like plaster in places, and the grassy patches, that looked safe and easy enough, were slippery as an ice rink when he stepped onto them. Mr Hoggart, who was not a climbing man, was sweating when he arrived on a small, shingle beach. He sat on a rock to recover.

  Tim was on his hands and knees, scrambling over rocks. ‘There’s some super stones for my collection. Look, Dad …’

  He staggered over to his father, carrying a piece of granite flecked with pink and green, the shape of a giant ostrich egg.

  ‘You’re not hoping to get that back up the cliff, are you?’ Mr Hoggart said.

  Tim looked up at the menacing black cliff, which seemed to move against the sky. He grinned. ‘Perhaps we’ll find something smaller in the cave.’

  The beach was triangular: Carlin’s Cave was at the apex of the triangle. It was smelly, as Mr Hoggart had said, but it was not a disappointment. The entrance was arched, like the doorway to a cathedral, and inside the walls rose high and seemed to be made up of black columns. The cave went back, deep into the cliff. Tim went in until it was too dark to see. His father shouted and his voice boomed weirdly, with a strange, hollow sound like an organ. When Tim came back, he was looking at his watch.

  ‘Not yet,’ Tim pleaded. We don’t have to go yet. Let me just find some stones.’ He searched on the beach and in the cave mouth that was full of great boulders and rock pools between them. The boulders were slippery and Tim splashed into one pool after another, talking fast as he always did when excited. ‘This is the most marvellous place—do you suppose it used to be a smuggler’s cave? No—it can’t be—you couldn’t carry smuggler’s loot up those cliffs—perhaps no one’s ever been here … Oh, Dad, do you suppose we’re the first people ever to come here?’ He stopped, awed. ‘The first people since the beginning of the world?’

  ‘Well…’ His father hesitated. Driven into a rock outside the cave, was a rusty, iron ring, as if someone, sometime, had beached a boat here. A stickler for truth, Mr Hoggart was about to point this out, when a shout from Tim distracted him.

  ‘Look … look what I’ve found, Dad.’

  In his excitement, Tim dropped the small stones he had already collected, to pounce on the new one that had caught his eye. It was inside the cave and had been trapped between two small rocks at the side of a pool, wedged so tight by sea or tide that Tim had to hammer at it with a larger stone to get it loose. His father waited impatiently. ‘Tim—we really must go,’ he said, at last.

  ‘Wait … oh wait …’ Tim gasped as the stone came suddenly loose and would have fallen down the crack between the rocks if he had not jammed his fingers quickly beneath it, grazing his knuckles so badly that he hissed in his breath with pain.

  The pain was forgotten in a moment, but when he rushed to his father with his prize, Mr Hoggart was too concerned with his son’s bleeding knuckles to be interested in the stone.
In any case, he was used to Tim’s collection, and, though he tried to enthuse when a new treasure was brought to him, he felt as lukewarm about stones as Tim did about flowers. ‘Very pretty,’ he said now, ‘but—oh goodness—you’ve made a nasty mess of yourself getting it.’

  ‘You haven’t looked at it,’ Tim complained. ‘T’isn’t an ordinary stone.’ He scratched at one salt-encrusted edge with his nail. The surface was smooth and ruby red. ‘It is a ruby,’ Tim breathed. ‘Dad, I’m sure it’s a ruby.’

  Mr Hoggart glanced at the dirty stone, about the size of a sixpence, and laughed gently. ‘Oh, Tim, Tim … a ruby that size would be quite valuable.’

  Tim scowled at the tone of his father’s voice. ‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t one.’

  ‘No—but you don’t find rubies on beaches. Oh—it’s pretty, or will be when it’s cleaned up, but it’s a piece of glass or quartz, something like that. I’m no geologist. Tell you what, Tim, we’ll see if there’s a reference book at the hotel. It’ll be fun to look it up, won’t it? We’ll do that soon as we get back, shall we?’

  He spoke coaxingly, smiling at Tim to cheer him up, as if, Tim thought, suddenly savage with disappointment, he was a baby, not a boy twelve years old.

  He trailed up the cliffs and back to the car, lagging behind his father all the way, silent and sullen. Mr Hoggart, who was not naturally a noticing man—though tactful and kind whenever he did notice—thought he was just tired.

  *

  They met the stranger when they were halfway back to the hotel. Rounding a bend in the pot-holed road, they almost ran into a white Jaguar car, that was slewed sideways, its back wheels in the ditch. A man in dark glasses sat in the driving seat, smoking a cigarette.

  Mr Hoggart stopped the Ford and got out. ‘Can we help?’ he asked. The man stared, not replying until Mr Hoggart repeated his question when he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘She won’t budge. Got bogged down trying to turn.’ He looked coldly angry, as if this was Mr Hoggart’s fault. Tim and his father inspected the back of the car. It was sunk in the boggy ditch, up to its bumper.