Flight of a Witch gfaf-3

by Ellis Peters

  ‘You shouldn’t have left her.’

  ‘She collapsed! Like that other time. She was lying with her head nearly in the hearth, and I couldn’t lift her alone. I ran for her mother to help me—’

  The window was wide open, the curtains swinging in the rising wind of the evening. Mrs Beck blundered past through the shaft of light, running with aimless urgency, turning again to run the other way, her face contorted into a grimace of weeping, but without tears or sound. As though death was all round the house, just outside the area of light, and everyone had known and recognised it except Annet; as though she was lost utterly as soon as she broke free from the circle and ran after her desire, and none of them would ever see her again. As though, plunging out of the window, she had plunged out of the world.

  George vaulted the sill and landed on the edge of the unkempt grass. Mrs Beck turned and stared at him with dazed eyes, and caught at his arm.

  ‘She’s gone! I couldn’t help it, no one could stop her if she was so set to go. It isn’t anyone’s fault. What could we do?’

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ he said, and put her off, and ran through the trees to the boundary fence, leaving her stumbling after him. No moon, but even in the starlight of half a sky the emptiness about Fairford showed sterile and motionless. He had met no girl on the road. She would keep to the trees as long as she could. He circled the grounds hurriedly, halting now and again to freeze and listen. He heard Beck baying at the remotest edge of the garden, and met Lockyer methodically threading the shrubberies.

  ‘No sign of her?’

  ‘No sign, sir. I heard your car. Crowther’ll have told you—’

  ‘Keep looking,’ said George, and turned back at a run towards the house. He overtook Mrs Beck on the way, and drew her in with him.

  ‘Here, sit down by the fire and be quiet. Lilian, close the window and get her a drink.’ He shut the door with a slam, and leaned his back against it. ‘Now, what happened?’

  ‘I told you, she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire. How could I know it was a fake? I ran for Mrs Beck – she was upstairs, she didn’t hear me call. When we came back Annet was gone.’

  ‘She climbed out of the window,’ said Mrs Beck, hugging her writhing hands together in her lap to keep them still. ‘Without even a coat – in her thin house-shoes!’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know all that.’ And Lockyer, patrolling dutifully outside, couldn’t be on every side of the house at once. Annet could move like a cat, she hadn’t found it difficult to elude him on her own ground. ‘But before! Something happened, something gave her the word. Why tonight? Why now? She chose her time, she had a reason. Has she had any letters? Telephone messages?’

  ‘No,’ said Lilian Crowther positively. ‘I’ve been with her all the time until she dropped like that. And Mrs Beck reads her letters – but anyhow there haven’t been any today.’

  ‘And no visitors,’ said George, fretting at his own helplessness, and caught the rapid flicker of a glance that passed uneasily between them. ‘No visitors? Someone has been here?’

  ‘I asked him to come,’ said Mrs Beck loudly. ‘I asked him to talk to her and do what he could. What else is he for, if not to help people in trouble? I thought he might get something out of her. It was last night being choir practice that made me think of it. I telephoned him, and asked him to come in today. There couldn’t be any harm in that. If she couldn’t see her own vicar – even criminals are allowed that.’

  ‘All right,’ said George, frantically groping forward along this unforseen path, ‘so the vicar came. No one else?’

  ‘No one else. You must admit I had the right—’

  ‘All right, you had the right! Was he left alone with her?’

  ‘No,’ said Lilian, defensively and eagerly, ‘I was with her all the time. Mrs Beck left them together, but I stayed in the room.’

  ‘Thank God for that! Annet didn’t object?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to care one way or the other.’ And yet she had bided her time, and torn herself resolutely out of their hold. Something had passed, something significant. Why otherwise should she have chosen this particular hour, after waiting so long and so stoically? ‘Well, what did they have to say to each other? Everything you can remember.’

  She dredged up a number of embarrassed, agonising platitudes through which the adolescent rawness of pity showed like flesh through torn clothing. The vicar was back in the room with them, convulsed with sympathy and hideously unable to contain it, or spill it, or wring his inadequate if kindly heart open and give it to her frankly; an ageing boy with only a boy’s heaven to offer anyone, and stunted angels with undeveloped wings like his own.

  ‘He said he was to tell her the choir had missed her at practice, and sent her their prayers. He said they took comfort in the thought that they would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit, he said. And that was about all,’ she concluded lamely, scouring her memory in vain for more vital matter. ‘It doesn’t seem anything to set her off like this.’

  And yet she had received, somehow, the summons that sent her out into the dusk. He could not be mistaken. If it was not here, in this trite comfort, then there must be something else, something they had missed.

  ‘Nothing else happened? He didn’t give her a note from someone else?’

  ‘No, honestly. He never went near enought to hand her anything. You’d have thought he was afraid of her – I suppose he was, in a way,’ said Policewoman Crowther, with more perception than George would have given her credit for.

  ‘She didn’t see the paper?’ He hadn’t seen it himself, he didn’t know if there was anything in it to speak to her, but somewhere the lost thread dangled, and must be found again.

  ‘No, she never tried to. She never showed any interest.’

  Perhaps, thought George, because she knew they wouldn’t let her have the papers even if she wanted them. Perhaps because she had waited with such fatal confidence for the only message she needed, and knew it would not come that way.

  But then there was nothing left but those few, bald sentences, brought from the outside world by the vicar; and if the clue was nowhere else, it must be there. The choir had missed her – Mrs Beck must have telephoned him just before he went over to the church for practice, and he had unburdened his heart to her colleagues to spread the load. And nobly they had responded. Or had they? The tone of the message was surely his, or a careful parody. It sounded as though he had dictated, and they had said: Amen. They sent her their prayers. They would meet her at six-thirty at the altar. If only in the spirit. Six-thirty was the hour of evensong, that was plain enough. Yes, but it belonged to tomorrow, not today. Why did it send her out tonight. George sweated through it word by word, and darkness, rather than light, fell on him in the moment of discovery, stunning him.

  Six-thirty at the altar. Six-thirty at the Altar! All the difference in the world.

  Six-thirty!

  Twenty to seven by his watch, and she was somewhere out there in the dark, with a quarter of an hour’s start of him at least, bursting her heart on the steep climb to her lover.

  He tore the door open and was out of it and down the steps in a couple of raking strides, before they realised that he had found what he was looking for. Racing towards his car, he shouted peremptorily for Lockyer, and by the time he had the MG turned recklessly in the confined space and pointing down the drive, the bushes threshed before the constable’s galloping body, and Lockyer was running beside him. George slowed, and shoved open the door.

  ‘Get in, quick! Never mind searching, you’re not needed here. I know now where to look.’

  Lockyer fell lurching into the seat beside him, and slammed the door. They rocked out through the gate and swung left into the narrow road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lockyer clung to the dashboard, and hefted his big body to speed the turn, panting after his run.

  ‘Top of the Hallowmount.’

  ‘For God’s sake, what’
s she doing rushing up there?’

  ‘Meeting her lover. He sent for her.’

  Her lover, if he still was that, after being hunted for days, and nursing for days the knowledge that the case against him depended entirely upon her. More likely by now it was her murderer she was going to meet. One can run faster and live more cheaply than two, hide more easily, remain anonymous more surely. And besides, the bulk of the evidence would die with Annet. Even when he made up his mind to run, he couldn’t, he daren’t, run until he had silenced her. God alone knew what she thought they were going to do. Run away together, maybe, to the ends of the earth, ditch the BSA somewhere, hitch lifts, reach the sea and the chance of a passage over to France.

  Maybe! Or maybe she had something else in mind, something passionate and individual and her own, not to be guessed at too confidently by anyone in the world; because no one in the world knew Annet well enough to be sure what she would do, but George Felse by this time knew her at least well enough to wait with humility, and wonder, and acknowledge that she was a mystery.

  Past the Wastfield gate, bounding and wallowing over the cart-ruts, and on between the rought pastures, fence-posts blurring into a continuous flickering wall of pallor alongside. Half the sky dark over them, but glimmerings of starlight still. Pale objects shone lambent out of the darkness, a tall gate-post where the plantation began, the wall of a barn in the field opposite. Before them the Hallowmount loomed, cutting off the dapplings of the sky, its great bulk languid but aware.

  ‘But how did he get word to her? Or was it all arranged between them before?’

  All arranged, maybe, though they’d expected to make their bid for freedom in other circumstances than these. All arranged but the time and the place, perhaps even the place accepted, established by old usage. And the time he had appointed, and she was keeping her appointment. Without even a coat. In her thin house-shoes.

  ‘Her visitor brought the message this afternoon.’

  ‘Her visitor? But there wasn’t anybody, except—’

  Members of the clergy, like doctors and postmen, tend to be invisible, but that big, comely, well-meaning figure sprang into sharp focus now, became male, personable and possible in Lockyer’s eyes. He swallowed, appalled. ‘What, the vicar?’ He swallowed again, swallowed voice and all, and sat stunned.

  Her father! Well, he was old enough to fill the bill, if only just old enough, he made sense of the description; and nobody had enquired into his movements. Why should they? Certainly he was at choir practice, that night when Annet missed it, certainly he was at church and fulfilling his usual duties on the Sunday. But a man can be in Comerford church at half past seven, and in Birmingham by nine-o’clock, or shortly after. One man had.

  ‘But – the vicar?’ persisted Lockyer, gulping dismay and disbelief.

  George said nothing to that, he was busy holding the car steady over the worst patch of road without slackening speed. He knew now. This time he couldn’t be wrong, and he wasn’t in any cul-de-sac, with a blank wall at the end of it waiting for him to crash at speed.

  He saw the rough grasses of the slope put on form behind the wire fence, the couching bulk of the hill withdraw into its true dimension. He brought the car round into the arc of short grass by the second plantation gate, and scrambled out of the driver’s door and through the wires of the fence with Lockyer pounding at his back. Head-down, lungs pumping, he breasted the first slope, got his rhythm, and began to climb the Hallowmount faster than he had ever climbed a hill in his life.

  Tom Kenyon sat in a niche of the rocks on the highest point of the Altar, and stared along the ridge. It was the first time he had ever been up here alone, and the strangest thing to him was that it did not feel like the first time. The silence that had flowed down into the valleys with the dropping twilight was absolute now, it lay like a cloak over the whole great, wakeful shape of rock and pasture, smoothed and moulded to the stretched body. Sometimes he felt a rhythm stirring under him, like deep and easy breathing, and found himself tuning his own breath to the same measure. Sometimes he fell, without realising it, into such a stillness that the faintly-seen shapes of his own circling arms and clasped knees seemed to have acquired the texture and solidity of rock, as though he had grown into the quartzite of the Altar. He had no sense of undergoing a new experience; this was rather a recollection, drawn from so deep within him that he felt no desire to explore its origins, for that would have been dissecting his own identity, or to question its validity, for that would have been to doubt his own. He felt the tension of long ages of human habitation drawing him into the ground, absorbing him, making him part of the same continuity.

  Miles had been right, fear was inappropriate and irrelevant. Awe remained with him, and grew, but not fear. And if Miles had been right about that, too, then belonging was all. It could happen to you without any motion on your part. Suddenly it was, and you were in it. You belonged, you respected, you partook, you contributed, this earth and all its layers of ancestral bones accepted you; a better and safer, a more impregnable security than belonging to a tribe or conforming to a society could give you.

  How strange that you should have to clamber alone into some remote, wild place like this, into this articulate silence and this teeming solitude, to discover where you came from and where you were going, and in what company. I belong, therefore I am.

  The ground-wind had dropped, the grasses were motionless. The cold, clear air hung still. He heard, with some detached sense that did not suffer his deeper silence to be broken, light, distant sounds from the edges of Comerford, the faint, far hum of cars on country roads, a motor-cycle climbing steadily, small synthetic echoes from other worlds.

  And all this time, side by side with this unbelievable serenity of mind, the horror possessed him that had fallen upon him when George Felse had said: ‘Annet described him as her father.’

  There was nothing new to be thought or felt about it now, but he could not let it rest, his mind trod round and round the same path endlessly, agonised and finding no reassurance.

  George had taken it to mean merely that she was preparing the way for some man respectable enough and old enough to pass for her father, in case they should be seen together. But supposing she had been using the term more precisely than that? Supposing she really meant the man everyone thought of as her father?

  He had tried to get the idea out of his mind, but it would not leave him. All the details that might have presented discrepancies, and delivered him from the nightmare, came treacherously and fell into place. Beck had been home all the week-end? Oh, no, by his own account and his wife’s, he hadn’t. He’d tramped the lanes and the streets of Comerford most of Thursday night, but after that he’d gone off by bus to his sister’s place at Ledbury and his cousin’s small-holding in the Teme valley, in case Annet had turned up there. He’d come home only on Monday night. Nobody had checked his statements, why should they? Not even his wife. Nobody knew that he wasn’t really Annet’s father, nobody except Mrs Beck and Tom Kenyon.

  Unless Annet knew. That was the whole point. Did Annet know? And if so, how long had she known? He pondered that painfully, and he could not avoid the fear that she did know it, and had known it for a long time. It accounted all too reasonably for her inaccessibility, her estrangement from them both. From Beck as father, that is. But Beck as a man?

  Was it too far-fetched? It would be an appalling tragedy, but it could happen. There was an even worse thought peering at him relentlessly from the back of his mind: that Beck had told her the truth himself, because he could not feel towards her as his daughter, knowing she was not, and his sick conscience would not let him rest until he had made confession. He was a stickler for truth and duty in his ineffective way, he might even have meant it for the best.

  And she – how could you ever be sure about Annet? She might have reacted with warmth and indignation and tenderness, from which the slippery path to love is not so far. And granted that as a possibility, into what a d
esperate and piteous situation they had trapped each other. Flight, robbery, murder might well come to look like legitimate ways out of it, if no other offered.

  He wished now that he had told George, he even made strenuous resolutions to tell him as soon as he came; but in his heart he knew that he never would. He could not repeat what he had heard from an overwrought and drunken man; he had no right to break that lamentable confidence.

  As often as he reached the end of this reappraisal, and turned to look at the whole idea with a more critical eye, he was convinced that he was mad, that it was impossible, that he had a warped mind; but as soon as he began a feverish examination of the details, in the hope of throwing it out altogether, he knew that it could happen, that such things had happened, that there was no immunity from the abnormal even in a world of careful normality, and no place to hide from love if it came for you. Look at his own case! Had he ever wanted to love her? Does anybody ever want to walk into the fire?

  Half past six by his watch. The small, luminous pinpoints of the figures were the only brightness in this calm, immemorial, secret dark. He stirred, finding his limbs cramped by the gathering chill, and slid down from his perch into the grass. George would surely be here soon. And almost inevitably the two boys, though told to go home after their tea, would use their own obstinate judgement, and come back to share what was left of his vigil. More than likely even Jane, having packed her coach-load off to Comerbourne in charge of a couple of prefects, would return to see how he had fared. It couldn’t be long now.

  He would be sorry, almost, to have his solitude shared by the living. For all the innumerable generations of the dead, dwindling far into time past, before the Romans came mining for lead, before the Iron Age fort on Cleave was dug, before the chipped flints of Middlehope were made, he had no need of speech in order to communicate, no need to exert himself in explanations or response. He was at one with them without effort of any kind, without rites, without ritual.

  Regina was surely right. There were not, there never had been, any witches on the Hallowmount. They would have been inappropriate, derisory, redundant, alien, false. Incantations were for outsiders.