Long Lankin

by Lindsey Barraclough

  “We didn’t laugh, Mr. Thorston,” I said. “It was —”

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.” He gazed at the hedge opposite. “You know, I could have made a fortune for myself out in India. Oh, the colours of the place — blood red, ochre, burnished gold, the fragrance of spices, the baked earth, painted birds, the jewels, the palaces, the beautiful women … My uncle Leonard lived like a maharajah, and I could have done the same. He laid out an embroidered carpet before my feet but — but I couldn’t bring myself to walk upon it.”

  “Crikey, why not?”

  “Because Grace could not have walked beside me.”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Thorston, lots of English ladies went out to India,” I said. “Though I’ve always thought they must’ve been really hot in those great long dresses.”

  “And ladies had tight corsets on in them days, all laced up,” said Cora. “Must’ve been stifling.”

  “Ah, well, that’s it,” said Mr. Thorston. “Grace Jetherell would never have been considered a lady.”

  “Jetherell? Grace Jetherell?” I cried. “Like — like old Gussie Jetherell?”

  “Her sister,” said Mr. Thorston. “They were a large brood, the Jetherell children. When they were all very young, their father worked — when he could stand up, that is — as a labourer on the farm at Guerdon Hall. They lived in one of the cottages opposite the house. God knows where they all slept. Davy Jetherell drank away every last penny he made at the Thin Man. In the end, there was a nasty accident at harvesttime and he was killed. I doubt he would have lived much longer anyway, considering the probable state of his liver.

  “I first caught sight of Grace when I was just a boy. She was the most exquisite creature you ever saw — like a water sprite, with her hair blowing loose in twisted golden ropes. When I went away to school, and then to Oxford, I wrote her poems I knew she wouldn’t be able to read. Whenever I got back to Bryers Guerdon, I went straight down to the marshes to find her and recite my silly poems, waving my arms about in huge romantic gestures. Of course, she thought I was a prize idiot, which indeed I was.

  “She and her brothers and sisters ran wild when their father wasn’t around. The oldest boy, Charlie, was a nasty piece of work — got into a lot of trouble, hated me. Nellie, their mother, began to suffer early on from the same trouble that’s ailing Grace now. The youngest boy, Bobsy, disappeared.”

  “What happened?” asked Cora. “Did — was it Long Lankin?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Mr. Thorston. “Grace would never speak of it. That’s the first time she ever said … what she said just now.”

  “Only one of them disappeared? Living so close an’ all?” Cora said.

  “Well, Davy Jetherell was never a God-fearing man,” said Mr. Thorston. “He had no time for religion, and the children knew he’d beat them if they went anywhere near the church. Grace used to tell me how her father terrified the children witless with his stories of Long Lankin. I’m pretty certain the Jetherells knew exactly where they could and couldn’t go. You probably know that Lankin seems to avoid crossing water, and of course the whole area around the church and Guerdon Hall is a network of streams and channels, some freshwater, others salt and tidal. Many of the freshwater brooks flow underground from springs on the hillside. They run round and into each other so that some places are actually safe from him — the Chase, for example.”

  “Yeah, the safe bit starts where the farm cottages are,” said Cora. “There’s a stream that disappears under the track there.”

  “When the inspectors went down there to try to get them to go to the school in North Fairing,” Mr. Thorston went on, “the children would flee onto the marshes by the path behind the big barn, because they had worked out that Lankin would never go that way, but they didn’t dare go near All Hallows.

  “When Davy Jetherell died, your great-grandfather, Henry Guerdon, Cora, evicted the family. He wanted the cottage for another labourer, but Guerdon’s wife let the Jetherells live in the first of the two Bull Cottages in Fieldpath Road without her husband ever knowing. The two Bull Cottages are still part of the Guerdon estate. Mrs. Campbell pays rent to your auntie Ida, Cora, for number 2, but as far as I know Gussie’s never paid any rent for number 1. I don’t know what she lives on, to be honest. She never married. I think Mrs. Eastfield may give her some small allowance and sees that she’s all right. It’s none of my business.”

  “It’d all go on cat food, anyway,” I said.

  “So I hear,” said Mr. Thorston, getting up from the bench. “Well, Gussie and Grace are the only Jetherells left now. I’m afraid, though, you’re a few years too late with your questions. Grace could have told you some of the old stories about Long Lankin, but, well … not now … not anymore… .”

  Cora had gone quiet.

  “Look,” Mr. Thorston said, “I’d better be getting back, or that Nurse Smallbone will be wondering where I’ve got to. Will you two be all right with those bags?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Thorston. Cheerio.”

  He started to walk away, then stopped and turned back. “Cora,” he said.

  She seemed to wake up from some private thought. “Yes, Mr. Thorston?”

  “You really need to speak to your aunt about this. She knows many things she shouldn’t keep from you. It’s your family, Cora. You must ask her.”

  “She won’t tell me nothing, Mr. Thorston.”

  “Flip!” said Roger, noticing the time on his watch. “It’s nearly four o’clock. We’d better get back to Grandma’s and pick up the boys. She hates it when you’re late.”

  “I ain’t coming,” I said.

  “What? She’ll go mad.”

  “Don’t be daft. She won’t go mad with me, will she? She don’t like me. She thinks I’m common. You go on. I’ll help you with this other bag of greens as far as her house, then Pete can carry it.”

  “Aw, come with me,” said Roger. “She might give you some Smarties.”

  “It wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. I wouldn’t care if she gave me ten tubes of Smarties in a gold box with brass knobs on, I ain’t coming.”

  Roger gave up. I went with him halfway up Hobb’s Lane, then we said cheerio. I handed him my bag and he carried them both up to York Lodge.

  I knew where I was going, and it wasn’t back to Guerdon Hall — not yet, anyway.

  I crossed over Ottery Lane at Mrs. Wickerby’s and turned right up Fieldpath Road, but I wasn’t going as far as Roger’s.

  The garden of number 1 Bull Cottages was ten feet high in stinging nettles. As I went up the path, I saw the nets moving. The door opened before I got to it, and Old Gussie grinned at me, her mouth all brown gums and stumps of teeth. Through her thin, uncombed hair, I could see her scalp was thick with scabby crusts.

  Flies crawled across the bowls of half-eaten cat food on the stairs.

  Gussie shut the front door behind me and then beckoned with a dirty finger. I followed her into the front room, which was piled up with junk, most of it tins of cat food, half of the cans long opened and abandoned on the floor. Gussie had the remains of a meal all down the front of her cardigan. It looked like Kitekat.

  She pointed to a filthy armchair beside the fireplace, so worn and covered in stains and loose threads it was difficult to tell what colour it might once have been. I perched on the very edge of the seat, unwilling to breathe in any deeper than I had to.

  Gussie picked up the skinny cat that lay asleep in the armchair opposite mine. It had barely any fur, its tail like a long pink pencil.

  “Off you go,” she said, putting it on the floor. It picked its way through the empty cans and slunk out of the door while Gussie sat down.

  There was no messing about with Gussie. She didn’t waste any time on the weather.

  “I’ve seen you go up and down the road,” she said in a voice like a loud hard whisper, as if she had a problem with her throat, and whistling on her s’s through her rotten teeth. “I’ve wat
ched you. You’ve got a little sister and you’re staying at Ida Eastfield’s. You’ve come because of what I said to the Jotman boy the other day.”

  “I suppose so,” I said, “though it ain’t just that. You see, I’ve just been over Mr. and Mrs. Thorston’s —”

  “Ha!” she said, so suddenly it made me jump. “Mrs. Thorston. She’s no more Mrs. Thorston than I am!”

  She chewed on her gums for a minute. I didn’t dare say a word.

  “Grace would never have gone to church for no one. She’d never have got herself tied down by no bit of paper. We were all scared of churches, all of us. Dad told us churches were bad places. He’d strap us if we went down.”

  I pushed a cat away with my foot.

  “I used to watch them — Grace and Hal Thorston — down on the marshes,” Gussie went on. “I used to hide in the reeds. They’re higher than a man, you know, those reeds, and sharp, too, if you’re not careful. I’m a great watcher, I am. Hal was a tall, handsome devil, all right. He spouted poems at her, and she’d laugh. She didn’t know what they meant. Sometimes she’d grab the paper and drop it. When the two of them went off, I looked for the pages. If they’d landed in the water, I fished them out with a stick. The ink ran, but it was no matter because I couldn’t read the words. I just liked to look at his writing, and touch it.”

  Suddenly Gussie got up and leaned right over to me. “It was very pretty writing. Would you like to see?”

  I nodded.

  Gussie reached up to the mantelpiece for a small brown teapot with a broken spout. Inside was a dirty grey ball of old papers, wrapped around in layers like an onion. She stretched forward and put the ball in my hands.

  “What am I supposed to do with this, then?” I asked.

  She leaned towards me, took the ball in her grimy fingers, and unwrapped the first piece of paper. I held it, stiff and curved like a cup, impossible to smooth flat. Looking closely, I made out some lines of faded writing, in script that matched Mr. Thorston’s. I read it with difficulty. Sixty years before, maybe more, he had written it for Grace Jetherell.

  Your dwelling place is the airy world between the sky and the water,

  You … footprint, you are the marsh-king’s daughter,

  And … moistened vapour of your breath,

  You leave a … which … I follow, though …

  “I can’t read it,” I said. “It’s all smudged.”

  “Try another one, then,” said Gussie.

  I removed the next layer of paper. It was much easier to read:

  She fashions from a skein of mossy weeds

  A wreath, then weaves from drops of water hanging on the reeds

  Long dripping strands of silver beads.

  She twists these glistening threads of liquid jewels

  Into her crown, then from her rushy throne, she rules

  The kingdom of the green glass pools.

  I couldn’t undo the next piece of paper. The rest of the ball was a hard lump, and when I tried to peel the top layer away, the corner tore off and crumbled.

  “I’ve kept them all these years,” Gussie said, grinning with her rotten teeth. Then, before I knew what was happening, she snatched the ball out of my hands, wrapped the two poems around it again, and pushed it back into the teapot on the mantelpiece.

  “But I know what you want.” She turned to me again. “You want to know about Long Lankin.”

  “Well, I suppose —”

  “’Course you do. Hang on, though. I’m parched.”

  Gussie shuffled out of the room in her grubby slippers and returned with a dirty tin mug. I could smell strong alcohol. She sat down, took a swig, then, as it went down, screwed up her eyes, shook her head, stuck out her horrible tongue, and went “Haaaa!”

  “Are you going to tell me about him, then?” I didn’t want to have to stay in the filthy chair any longer than I needed to, and the cats were coming in. “Do you remember the story?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she said. “My old dad told us over and over, so we’d never ever forget it. Remember it? Ha! You never forget about Lankin and his poor old mother. Leastways, she wasn’t old but just looked it, like everybody down there on the marshes in them days. She was always sick, and all her babies died before they was even born. When this ugly child come along, and stayed alive, she thought it was a changeling left by the fairies and they’d stole her own baby away. She gave him a cursed name because she didn’t own him and she didn’t want him — she called him Cain.”

  “Who was his father?”

  “Not even his mother knew that.”

  Gussie took another gulp from the tin mug.

  “When he grew up, Cain Lankin was an outcast, taller than any other man, thin as bones, and ugly as sin. Folk shunned him and began calling him Long Lankin. He did some bad things — a bit of thieving to get food, killed animals in the night. They said he ate them raw and got a taste for blood. He never wandered far from the water, but wouldn’t cross it, even then. He thought it took his strength away. Then he fell in with this young woman — Aphra Rushes, a vagrant. No one knew where she’d come from. In them days people liked to know their own. Why should anyone leave where they was born and choose to wander about like a stranger, unless they was driven away by their own folk?”

  Old Gussie took another sip from her cup —“Haaaa!”— before continuing.

  “Aphra Rushes had just gave birth to a dead baby. Still full up with milk, she was taken on as wet nurse to the Guerdons’ baby son, John. In them far-off days, a woman of her kind was only fit to be a nursemaid or a midwife, then the lowest calling on God’s earth.”

  Gussie wiped her mouth. “In this life, bad finds bad,” she said.

  She leaned forward again and fixed her bloodshot eyes on mine.

  “One night, when Sir Edmund Guerdon was away in London, his wife and son were killed in the old kitchen down at Guerdon Hall. Her ladyship tried to escape and left her lifeblood all up the stone stairs before she died. They found the woman, Aphra Rushes, with the baby’s body still in her bloody hands, and there was strange things on the table — burning candles, a silver bowl, a silver knife stole from the master.

  “Rushes was taken for murder and witchcraft. Whispers started that the outcast Cain Lankin needed to drink the blood of an infant, caught in a silver bowl, to cure his terrible affliction, for he was a leper.”

  “But why did she kill the baby’s mother?” I asked.

  “Maybe she was jealous because her own baby was dead and she had to feed this other one,” Gussie said, “or she hated Sir Edmund Guerdon and wanted to make him suffer. The master went after women, you know. Maybe he tried to get her to go with him and she didn’t like it, or maybe he ignored her and she didn’t like that either, or maybe she was just plain wicked.”

  A black cat jumped onto the arm of my chair, sat down, and began to scratch itself furiously behind the ear. I gently pushed at its legs with my hand, and it jumped off.

  “The thing is, Long Lankin wasn’t in the old kitchen when the servants found Aphra Rushes with the dead baby, but they were sure he’d been there. If she’d done the baby in, who’d done in her ladyship lying halfway up the steps? The men swore that they’d seen these bloody footprints leading away across the kitchen floor, footprints that just stopped and went into nothing. The story spread around that Long Lankin could be somewhere then nowhere in the time it took to blink your eye, that he could slip through narrow gaps and spaces, could pass through keyholes and under doors.”

  Gussie leaned towards me again, and I breathed in the smell of whisky.

  “Nothing could be proved against him,” she said, “and Aphra Rushes never let on, even to save her own skin.”

  She sat back.

  “Aphra Rushes was packed off to Lokswood Gaol,” she continued. “They jabbed pins an inch into her flesh all over her body to find the Devil’s Mark, and she was stuck in the pillory and they did all sorts of other nasty things to her, but she never told on La
nkin.

  “Then, before they could get her in the big court, this horrible sickness spread through the gaol, something like the plague. Lots of prisoners died, as they would, all squashed close together in the filth like they were in them days. Of course nobody wanted Aphra Rushes to die like that. They wanted her to be punished properly for everyone to see it, so they had to take her out and put her somewhere else, where she couldn’t get out. And do you know where they brought her? Back to Bryers Guerdon. They locked her up in the bell tower in the steeple at All Hallows church. She stayed in there for weeks, sick with all the torture they’d done to her. It was said you could hear her crying out across the marshes, half-starved and going crazy.

  “They couldn’t find nobody brave enough to guard her, especially at night, not for a fortune, so they chained her up with only a bit of slack and put strong locks on the doors. Only the priest, Piers Hillyard, out of his good Christian heart, brought her bread and water.”

  Gussie took another drink from the tin mug.

  “Sometimes,” she continued, “on stormy nights, when we was children down in the cottage, we could hear the sound of the passing bell coming from the church, though no human hand was ringing it. My ma said it was the wind wailing and whining its way through the tower and snatching at the rope, but my dad would say, ‘Hush, it is not the wind that shakes the rope; it is Aphra Rushes tolling the bell, calling for Long Lankin… .’”

  Then Gussie looked at me hard. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “I think I can hear it still, even up here.”

  She drank again.

  “The story goes that Cain Lankin would come each night from his hiding place on the marshes and creep around the church, looking for a way to set Aphra Rushes free, but he couldn’t. They said he’d scrape away at the earth in the graveyard with his fingernails like claws, so that he could tunnel his way under the walls of the church. But before he could finish digging with his hands into the dwelling place of the dead, Aphra Rushes was taken out and sent to Lokswood for her trial and condemned to death. Then she was brought back to Bryers Guerdon and burned.

  “Piers Hillyard found Lankin’s body down on the marshes, but even with his death, this was a tale that wouldn’t have no ending … not now, not ever … no ending… .”