“Aff-ra!”
As scraps of snow fall onto the splintered planks at the bottom of the cart, Dr. Fortyce, the divine they brought in at Lokswood, wraps a dirty piece of sacking around my shoulders and another over my frozen knees, twisted on the hard wood. Fortyce prays all the while, urging me to repentance, his voice rumbling all at one with the jolting wooden wheels, the creaking of the reins, the clatter of the chains, the steady clot, clot from behind — Myldmaye and Guerdon and their men on high steeds, all closely wrapped in winter furs.
On and on we lurch along the high roads and icy tracks, back from the Moot Hall. My oozing sores chafe with each stone, rut, and turn. The manacles cut through my skin, but I clench my mouth to endure the torment, as I must endure the greater torment to come. Terrors pounce in unwelcome — Zillah and Damaris screaming in the flames in the house in the wood, the sweet stench of roasted flesh, the crackle of sizzling fat. My limbs stiffen, begin to tremble. I stifle a whimper of fear. When unwanted tears spill from my eyes, I lower my head, blink them hard away.
Ahead and beside ride rough guards on shaggy ponies. Behind them along the verges, close-cowled men, women, and children gaze out at me, their faces blue and red veined with cold, as the witch in the dung-cart passes by on her way back to Bryers Guerdon to die.
As we pitch and tilt down the slippery hill towards All Hallows, I hear below the bellman summoning the marsh-dwellers from their labours.
Before the lychgate the horse lurches to a halt.
A drummer stands on a stool, a thin layer of snow covering his hat. He beats out a roll, then a throb like a heartbeat, waits, a roll and a throb, a roll and a throb.
In front of him a wooden stake, laced with heavy chains, rises up from a monstrous stack of interlaced branches, faggots, and bundles of twisted straw.
A large crowd has gathered, all eyes turned towards me, in silence, save for the heartbeat of the drum. The cart scrapes over the rough ground, then stops. I slide across the coarse planks and the anklets bite into my bruised and blistered skin.
I raise my head.
Behind a spitting brazier, ready to light the torches, a huge man stands in the wavering, smoky air. I remember him — Slater, the brute from Hunsham who tried to spike my ear for a vagrant when I was hardly out of childhood, brought here to do this wretched, filthy work. He will not throttle me first for a mercy. He will make the agony last.
My gaze moves from Slater to the priest, Piers Hillyard, who looks on with pity and mutters prayers. Guerdon on his high saddle cannot meet my eye, but turns and makes some aside to his lordship.
Rough hands pull at my arms, but my feeble body will not support me. A rush of fear sweeps over me. My head pounds. My legs buckle. Around me blurred faces sway, leer forward, fall back. Powerful, filthy hands hold me upright. I cannot stand on my deadened feet, can barely feel the boards of the cart. Dr. Fortyce reads from a parchment, but I do not hear the words.
As the learned man’s mouth opens and shuts, I look across to the church. With half-closed lids, my eyes roam over the top of the leafless, spiked hedges.
A point of light moves in the glimmering air, then another. I look along the trail of little stars and see him, the long man, leaning into the topmost branch of the double-hooked tree that overhangs the marshy pool on the far side of the churchyard. His face is disfigured, his body corrupted. He clings weakly to the branch with his poor shredded arms and gazes at me, and the dying lights lift off him, up into the falling snow.
Looking at him, I draw myself up and stand.
A bitterly cold wind begins to blow so the snowflakes spin and fly back upwards to the dull grey sky. The people wrap their woollens tightly about them.
The drum begins again.
They pull me down from the cart.
Under Lankin’s gaze, I will endure.
I am the dust of charred bones and ash.
While the embers were yet smouldering, red eyes of heat still glaring out of the blackened wood, charred bone, and burned flesh too scorching hot to be touched, a mighty winter storm swept in. The winds blew and blustered from all four quarters to scatter me, but it was the north wind that gathered me up. In a whirl of icy rain, it pitched and flung me, hurled me against wall, stone, and tree, broke up all that remained of me, and carried me across the empty spaces. Writhing in its fury, it began unravelling the thatches of the meagre huts on the marshes, spitting out the sticks of fences and sheep pens, snapping the reeds and foaming the pools. Then, when the wind had spent its mischief here, it raged off southwards to be spiteful on the sea.
With the fragments of crackling brown leaves, scraps of feathers, twigs, and shreds of dry, white grass, I bobbed and twisted to the ground, each little part of me knowing, and seeing, and being.
The people were in turmoil that I had been taken up into the air, and none more afeared than Sir Edmund Guerdon himself.
He planted the sacred trees to keep me out of his garden, the elders and rowans, for I had cursed him.
“Do not cry out, Aphra. Use the pain for your hate.”
In my last agony, with my throat swollen and blistered, the flames scorching my flesh and boiling my blood, I cursed Guerdon and all his family that were to come and through all generations, cursed them and their infants with bitter suffering in mind and body, until the line was no more. I cursed Guerdon until my spitting, hissing body twisted out of the chains and rolled down into the raging wood.
And now I am being pulled out of the earth. On this night, in this place, I am drawing together.
Up between the stones and through the soil I come, from under the roots of the sleeping plants, squeezing past the blindworms, the soft black moles, the snails, slugs, and grubs that dwell deep in the clay-cold ground.
I am rising out of the water of fresh spring and salty mud, out of the moisture of the air, puffed out and blown in a string of tiny, crumbling pieces that swirl and gather close.
It is the Eve of All Hallows. The shroud between the world of the living and the otherworld of the dead ripples and grows sheer, allowing flow and passage from one side of itself to the other.
I move towards the house.
Once it lay under a mantle woven of sturdy threads spun with spells and enchantments to keep me out, but like the shroud between the worlds tonight, the cloak has become gossamer thin. The guardian trees are felled, the runes gone, the devices lost. A few silken strands yet hold the weakened fabric together, but a silken strand is easily cut.
Now I can sense them, behind those ancient walls — two hearts plump with cursed Guerdon blood. I am bound here, for as long as there are Guerdons in the world, I must be in it. And they have returned to the marshlands — to me.
But in this stillness another Guerdon heartbeat thrums faintly, somewhere far off — a thin, meagre pulse wavering on the edge of life.
I will find it.
In my time.
My new navy gymslip hangs on the outside of the wardrobe. On the chest of drawers are a stack of crisp white blouses with name tapes sewn on the inside of their stiff collars. Cora Drumm. Cora Drumm. Cora Drumm. Dad chose the embroidered blue copperplate, thought it looked posh, but Auntie Kath could only find grubby brown thread, and her stitching’s all over the place — ruins the effect entirely.
I look at them and sigh.
Girls of my age don’t wear brand-new uniforms, just as they don’t start another school halfway through the term, or at the back end of the week, but Dad didn’t take me to the outfitter’s in time and the stuff didn’t arrive until yesterday.
I take a pair of grey woollen stockings out of their cellophane wrapping, ready for the morning, and hear Mr. Blezzard’s raised voice over the wind outside.
“I told you, it’s what Drumm wanted. He said to get rid of it all.”
I peep round the side of the new curtains and look down into the garden.
Stout Mr. Blezzard, in flat cap and worn tweed jacket with elbow patches — proud owner of the dented green v
an standing on the other side of the creek with the bright-yellow hand-painted lettering: E. BLEZZARD — BIG OR SMALL WE DO IT ALL — TEL: HILSEA 317 — is towering over little Mr. Wragge.
“Well, I told you, Ed,” Mr. Wragge whistles through his three yellow teeth, one at the bottom and two at the top. “Over and over I told you, there are some things best left well alone. These trees is special. They was put here for a reason. You shouldn’t have gone chopping them down. The same with all that stuff you’ve chucked in the barn and broken. You shouldn’t have meddled. They could have stayed where they was and Drumm would have been none the wiser, but you wouldn’t take no blimmin’ notice. I wish to God I hadn’t gone and got that flippin’ jippy belly. I’d have stopped you doing it if I hadn’t been laid up.”
“Stop being so ruddy daft, with your silly witchy trees, Gideon. It’s what Drumm wanted, all modern, central heating, fireplaces boarded up. When you find a load of daft nonsense, you don’t just put it all back again, you get rid of it.”
“That’s opinion, that is,” says Mr. Wragge with a phlegmy cough. “And what’s Drumm doing coming here anyway? He had no business turning it all around, an old place like this. Should have stayed in London, or bought hisself a house on one of them new estates instead. More money than sense.”
“Well, it’s too bloody late now, so stop going on,” says Mr. Blezzard. “Anyway, Drumm didn’t buy it. Them girls of his were left it all from Ida Eastfield — leastways he’s in charge of the money till they get to twenty-one. I think Mrs. Eastfield didn’t have no other family, but it took them lawyers a long time to sort all the ins and outs.”
It’s quiet for a moment. When Mr. Wragge speaks again, I can hardly hear him.
“They’re the last of the Guerdons, then?”
“I suppose so, even though their name’s Drumm. Maybe it’s something on their mother’s side, though she must be dead, ’cause this woman who’s come from London with them isn’t their mum.” He leans in to the old man, looks about, and taps the side of his nose meaningfully. “Them girls call her Auntie Kath, know what I mean? Anyway, I’m off home for me tea. Sometimes it puts the wind up me, working down here, even in the daylight. I don’t want to be hanging around in the dark. We’ll come back and finish clearing up when Drumm’s paid me what I’m due. I’ll leave me big wheelbarrow and the crates and give you the word when to start loading. Let’s go round to the van.”
“I’ll get the bus.”
“For God’s sake, Gideon, don’t make it flippin’ personal. I’ll take you home.”
“I’m telling you, Ed,” I hear Mr. Wragge mutter as they make for the gravel path, “you should have left all that stuff where it was.”
“Oh, leave off, will you,” says Mr. Blezzard, “or I’ll change me mind about the lift. Here, have a peppermint, warm yourself up.”
I look out over the garden, still encircled by the shifting tides. Most of the old shrubs have been hacked to stumps. The bare ground left behind by the purposeless clearing is covered with felled trunks, lopped-off branches, and splinters of wood, all that’s left of the trees that grew around the creek before.
On the other side of the bridge, Mr. Blezzard’s van coughs, coughs again, then rumbles off.
I still can’t quite believe we are here.
Back in Limehouse — maybe half a year ago, I don’t know exactly — Dad began to stay away the odd night or two. Then, every so often, I would catch him looking out from the edge of the nets into the street, fingering the long scar on his cheek. He and Auntie Kath would have muffled arguments behind closed doors, and she’d go off to her mother’s for a couple of days.
Around the same time, the council inspector, then the medical man, turned up and said our houses had to be pulled down. Slum clearance. No bathrooms. Outside privies. When our neighbours started leaving for the new blocks of flats or the estates built out towards the countryside in Bexleyheath, Dad hurried up the lawyers, who were taking years to sort out Auntie Ida’s money. It was difficult — difficult because of Mum. In the end something was sorted out, and Mimi and I seemed to be in line to get it — and Guerdon Hall — and Dad decided we were going to come out here and live in it, and be grand.
But I never wanted to see the place again.
I meet nobody’s eye, just lower my head under the wide brim of my school hat and stare at my sturdy black outdoor shoes. I may be dressed the same as all the other girls — silk-lined navy coat and every layer inwards down to the regulation blue knickers — but it doesn’t make me the same, not in any way.
The Judys, Patsys, and Carols in my new class only had to hear me answer our form teacher, Mother Anselm, in registration to decide that I was nothing more than a curiosity — Cora Drumm, the new girl from the East End of London. They weren’t unkind to me, just indifferent. The stiff knife-edge of my collar has cut into the back of my neck all day, reminding me of the scrappy stitching around my name.
I stand well back into the fan-shaped entrance of the ironmonger’s, G. H. Firestone & Sons, in between the neat rows of drawer handles in the window display on one side and the spades and saws on the other. One by one the green buses come along. Girls surge onto the platforms, disappearing upstairs and inside. When there is nobody left at the bus stop, I emerge from my place and wait for the next 2A, standing on a flattened mat of damp brown leaves blown off the tree overhanging the shelter.
The bus turns left at the Anchor and runs along the Wrayness promenade, past the candyfloss and hot dog stalls, closed for the coming winter, and the children’s rides, tightly covered in weatherproof canvas wrappings. Wide-mouthed bloody skeletons, needing a good coat of paint before next season, leer down from the hoarding around the entrance to the Ghost Train. Old cigarette packets, crumpled oily pages of newspaper discarded from fish and chips, and small, squashed empty cardboard tubs that once held cockles, prawns, and winkles have blown into grubby piles underneath the padlocked fortune-teller’s booth, the bolted rifle range, and the rickety wooden scaffolding holding up the Wall of Death.
The bus trundles on beyond the attractions, past the cockle boats waiting in the mist for the turn of the tide and the Victorian boarding houses and shops, then bends right into Strand Drive. It stops in front of the row of smart mock-Tudor detached houses with their large gardens running down to the road that skirts the seashore. I know that many of the girls in my new class live in expensive properties like these.
When I get to twenty-one, I will come into enough money to buy every house in Strand Drive — if I wanted to.
Wrayness is left behind. Under a darkening sky, the bus rumbles on into Lokswood, then through Daneflete.
A few miles farther on I can see the pub, the Thin Man, rising up out of the gloomy distance, the street lamp in front of it already on. There is no other building close by, just endless flat grey fields stretching away from the road on either side, bounded in the distance by straggling, almost-winter trees, rising up, just visible out of the darkening haze.
I force myself to get up from my seat, ring the bell, drag my feet down the stairs, and step off the platform. As the empty bus moves off towards Hilsea, I look back in the direction of Daneflete to Ottery Lane, over the road on the same side as the pub. The tall, arching trees on either side of the lane lead, in a long bristling line, to Bryers Guerdon.
I wonder if Roger and his brother Pete still live there, in the wooden house with the veranda and the huge wild garden, with their mum and dad, two younger brothers, Dennis and Terry, and Baby Pamela. Of course, she wouldn’t be a baby anymore. She would be four or so, the same age Mimi was when we came here before.
For a long time I haven’t been able to picture Roger’s face at all, not properly. I have flashes of remembering the colour of a shirt, a hand-knitted jumper, a pair of shoes, but not his face. The harder I try to recall it, the more blurred it becomes. If I saw him now, I’m not sure I would recognize him at all, especially as he must be all of sixteen.
I approach Old
Glebe Lane — bold words on a new sign, crisp black letters on white metal. The hawthorn hedges on either side of the road have been neatly cut, the gaping potholes repaired with patchy tarmac.
I pass the rectory, Glebe House, on my right. Beyond the wrought-iron gates, sturdy trees line the drive to the huge house. The warm lights are already shining brightly downstairs. Mr. Treasure, the headmaster of Lokswood School, and his family used to live in the front half, with its pillars and glossy black door. Father Mansell, the rector, and his wife lived in rooms at the back; probably still do.
I walk on beside the high garden wall until it stops at the edge of Glebe Woods. The hissing trees send drifts of crumpled brown leaves down onto the dry earth.
Moving on to the brow of the hill, I stand there in the dying light, looking down at the steeple of All Hallows, the little church all on its own, rising up out of a knot of trees on the edge of the marshes.
I tighten my school scarf and make my way down the hill. At the bottom I take the right turn into the Chase, lowering my head to avoid looking forward where the track continues on to the church.
A cold wind is beginning to blow from the distant river, making the trees that line the left side of the road bend and squirm above the overgrown ditch at their roots.
The muddy holes in the Chase have been filled with stones, so vehicles can come up to Guerdon Hall. Dad drove off to London in his blue Zodiac yesterday, for all I know to avoid paying Mr. Blezzard the money he owes him for doing up the house.
I’m not sure when Dad’s coming back — sometime over the weekend, I hope.
I walk past the front door, in shadow under the ancient tiled porch, and round the corner of the house.
A table lamp glows through the diamond panes of the sitting-room window. I glance in. Mimi is sitting on the settee watching Crackerjack, eating something off a tray on her lap. Auntie Kath is standing by the lamp, putting a cigarette to her lips. She looks over at me as I go by. Her eyes are unsettled and her dimpled hand shakes slightly.
“Do you want beans on toast?” she calls as I come through the back door and into the stone passage. “There ain’t no bacon left, though. We’ve had it all.”
The Mark of Cain Page 5
