The Mark of Cain

by Lindsey Barraclough

  “Please put that thing back when the fire goes down — that thing you found,” Mimi hisses, pulling her blankets around her with a last quick glimpse at the door.

  I get up quietly and stuff the piece of leather well down behind the logs, grab the blanket Mimi has kicked out for me, and wrap myself up on the floor.

  Unsettled, still shivering with cold, I turn over towards the fire and see Roger’s school scarf — navy with red and green stripes just above the fringe — on the floor under the small table near my pillow. I reach out with my fingers, pull it over.

  It smells of bonfires, leaves, the outside, of the ease of Roger’s house.

  I wind it around my neck, roll myself in the eiderdown and blanket, and tuck in my feet. The scarf lies crossed over my chest under my close-folded arms, a scrap of warmth.

  I lie there with no hope of sleep. Troubled, I wait restlessly for the pale, cold dawn.

  After church, Pete, Dennis, and Terry turn off the main road and begin to tramp through the snow down to Bryers Guerdon. I stand for a moment, looking over at the white hedgerows that mark the line of Old Glebe Lane.

  “You coming? Dinner’ll be ready soon,” Pete calls, a tad touchily. “Remember we’re having it early ’cause Dad’s going over to clear Grandma’s drive.”

  “I won’t be a minute. I left my scarf down at Guerdon Hall yesterday. I’ll need it for school. You go on. Unless” — I swallow — “do you want to come with me?”

  His face darkens. “You’ve got to be joking, mate,” he mutters through clenched teeth, turning away.

  “Woo-woo!” Dennis pouts. “Roger’s going to see that Cora.”

  “Shut up, you flippin’ idiot!” cries Pete, from nowhere landing a whistling thump on the side of Dennis’s head.

  Shrieking, “What did you do that for?” Dennis lunges towards Pete, kicking out at his shins, then slipping on the snow. Pete seizes the moment to snatch his arm and twist it behind his back. Dennis struggles, howling, “Get off me! Leave off!” trying to catch Pete’s ankles with his heels.

  “You’re really naughty boys!” Terry taunts from a safe distance. “Only just been to Communion an’ all. Going to tell Mum!” He turns and runs off down the lane, almost coming a cropper on a patch of ice.

  Dennis spits after Terry. Pete, in a fury, still holding Dennis’s arm in a lock up his back, dishes out another clout, and Dennis bawls again, managing to land a backward kick on Pete’s knee. “Why’re you so — flippin’ — mad? I — didn’t — say a — blimmin’ thing! Let go!”

  “Stop it, Pete! Stop it!” I yell, wrenching him off. “Leave him alone!”

  Without saying another word, Pete, panting, flexing his fingers, marches away.

  “You all right, mate?” I ask Dennis.

  Red-faced, a few angry, embarrassed tears welling, he shrugs me off and rubs and stretches his arm. “What’s the matter with him?” he mutters, kicking at a stone sticking up out of the thin crust of a frozen puddle, before crossing the road so he doesn’t have to walk down on the same side as Pete.

  What’s the matter with him? It’s best not to know, Dennis.

  Shaken, I walk to the Thin Man, then cross over into Old Glebe Lane.

  It is slightly warmer, and some of the snow has melted in the weak sunshine, but even so, large patches hug the bottoms of the trees and it’s blown deep into the dark spaces under the hedgerows.

  Ahead of me, a smart Rover noses out of the gates of Glebe House. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Treasure, off to the service at Saint Mary’s in North Fairing. Mr. Treasure is surprised to see me on the road, turns into the wet at such an awkward angle that I have to move back onto the verge; the back wheel sprays a huge fan of cold slush around my knees, which then slops in an icy dribble down inside my boots. Mrs. Treasure waves to me with her leather-gloved hand. I wave back with my big grey woolly one and force a smile through gritted teeth.

  I shake one leg and then the other, but it only sends the freezing water trickling down my socks.

  No sooner have I set off again than I hear the throb of a second engine and the squelch of another set of tyres. Father and Mrs. Mansell’s battered old Wolseley emerges from the drive of Glebe House, also no doubt heading for Saint Mary’s. Father Mansell touches his hat to me as they pass. Again I raise my glove, then emerge from the verge into another shower of slush that shoots out from under the wheels. If Father Mansell had deliberately aimed at me he couldn’t have done a better job.

  As I stand there, drenched, cold, and uncomfortable, I feel stupidly sorry for myself, and irritated with the never forgetting, with the past that’s always tapping me on the shoulder — and Pete too, it seems.

  I decide to turn back, get some hot food, some warm, dry clothes, when I see Cora coming along the lane, muffled in her big blue duffel coat and red bobble hat.

  “You left this!” she calls, waving my scarf.

  “Oh, thanks.”

  I wrap it gratefully around my neck. It smells sweet.

  We stand there awkwardly for a moment.

  Then Cora says, “Coming down? Dad’s got some fires going and we can make a cup of tea.”

  “Mum’s doing dinner,” I say, “but I suppose I could come for a minute.”

  We walk on past the woods and down the hill, and as we draw near to the turning for the Chase and I look down the track to All Hallows, I am filled with a sense of deep remembered dread. I think of Pete again.

  I glance at Cora. She must see something in my face, turns slightly away.

  “Do you want to see it again — the church?” she asks, still not looking at me.

  “What’s it like?” My voice cracks oddly.

  “Well, they — they started to do some repairs, but the stuff’s all been left — you know, the bricks and sand and things. There’s this big fence round the church so you can’t get in. And” — she pauses, looks down at her boots — “there’s Auntie Ida’s grave, just a couple of feet away from where she … you know, where she died. Do you want to come? You don’t have to, you know.”

  I truly don’t know what’s best.

  “Perhaps — maybe I should go,” I say at last.

  The sky above the stark black branches of the winter trees has turned a deep brooding grey, and the air seems ever more raw as we move down the track. Inside my gloves my fingertips are deadening.

  “Feels like more snow’s coming,” Cora says, rubbing her hands together.

  My feet are heavy and unwilling as we approach the lychgate, bleak and miserable on the left-hand side of the road. A small tree rises out of the watery snow between the pillars, exactly in the place where Long Lankin fell.

  And he haunts it all, every stone of this gate, each frozen leaf and twig and blade of icy grass around it. Somewhere behind that net of new branches there are words carved into the wooden beam holding up the roof — CAVE BESTIAM… Beware of the beast.

  Something bitter comes up from my stomach. I swallow it down.

  Then the snow begins to fall, just gently drifting at first, powdering our hats and our shoulders.

  In silence, we tramp onwards to the metal gate and stand there, neither of us inclined to go through it into the churchyard.

  I feel myself shudder.

  “You all right?” Cora says.

  “Just cold,” I pretend.

  I look across the top of the gate at the new grey gravestone, capped with a soft arch of snow. No need to ask who is buried there. Above it the elder tree has spread a shield of branches.

  The freezing air stings my eyes. They begin to water.

  I should have been braver than this.

  Through my coat sleeve I feel Cora’s hand.

  “We can always come again another day.”

  We turn and walk back up the track in silence.

  In sight of the bend curving into the Chase, I steal a sideways glance at Cora. She blinks the snow off her lashes, and in that fleeting, unguarded moment I am shocked to see how drained her face looks, ho
w deep the shadowy smudges under her eyes appear in the steely air.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  She turns her head away.

  “What’s the matter?” I say; then, more gently, “You can tell me, surely, after everything …”

  She doesn’t move. I try the breezy tack, stamp my feet and blow through my gloves. “Honestly, I can’t stand around here for too long. It’s so parky I think my socks have frozen solid.”

  She lowers her eyes. “I don’t want to trouble you, Roger.”

  I wipe some snow off my nose. It’s getting thicker. “We’re always going to be troubled, Cora, all of us — you, me, Mimi” — I think of Pete’s outburst in the road — “and even Pete. I think it would have been better if we’d talked, Pete and me” — I look at her — “but we never did.”

  “It’s just that —” she begins, stops, begins again. “This place seems, I don’t know, not like other places. Even now, after everything, it’s not right… .”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Honestly, I really wanted to tell you before.” She blows out a long breath of resignation. “You see, not long after we came, I was all by myself in the house when I found this bunch of twigs tied to the front door knocker with funny red string. It really scared me, Roger. Why should anybody put something like that there? Then, on Bonfire Night, someone hung little white stones over the back door, with the same red string. Auntie Kath threw them away.”

  Then Cora takes off her glove and pulls a folded sheet of paper out of her pocket, pushes it into my hand.

  “Look, I found this in Mimi’s book — at your house, actually. See, it’s from the Saint Lazarus Hospital in Hilsea.”

  “The Saint Laz?”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, it’s not the sort of hospital that’s got doctors and nurses and things; it’s almshouses — really, really old, hundreds of years. It’s little houses all joined together, five or six of them — I can’t remember exactly — for old gentlemen to live in.”

  Cora taps on a letter M crowned with a circle. “And look, you see this little drawing? Mimi scrawled it on our door with chalk — least I think it was her. Dad made me rub it off, then I found one on the front door an’ all. Do you know what it is?”

  “No idea.” I try and puzzle it out for a few seconds, then give up. “Have you asked Mimi about it? And these two?” I run a finger across the two names — Mrs. Lailah Ketch and Miss Iris Jewel.

  “To be honest, I didn’t want her to know I’d pinched this paper from her. But when I do ask her anything, she clams up, like blimmin’ everybody else — even like Auntie Ida did until the very end. It’s like an infectious disease around here, everyone keeping flippin’ secrets.”

  “Come on, Cora,” I say. “You’re almost as bad.”

  She sighs. “Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve caught the disease an’ all.”

  I kick the snow off a tree root to see if I can feel anything through my boots.

  “Do you know who these ladies are?” I ask.

  “Of course I don’t, but Mimi does.”

  “Um, do you mind if we keep walking. Everything’s gone numb.”

  Cora puts the paper back in her pocket, and we trudge on without a word until we’re almost at the Chase, then she says, “Oh, you know that piece of leather we found up the chimney yesterday, before we lit the fire?”

  “The thing you hid behind the logs?”

  “Well, it’s got a name scratched on it — backwards.”

  “Crikey.”

  “Do you remember the witch who killed the Guerdon baby with Long Lankin, the one who was burned here at Bryers Guerdon?” She turns and faces back down the track. “Down there …” She points towards the lychgate. “She was burned down there.”

  “Aphra Rushes,” I breathe.

  “It was winter.” Cora shivers. “I wonder if they brought her down this track, and it was snowing, like this.”

  A few seconds go by. Unsettled, we turn and plod on towards the bend.

  “Why do you think her name’s backwards?” I say.

  “How should I know?”

  All at once Cora gasps and stares straight ahead, her face colourless under the vivid bloodred of her hat. I follow her gaze. Through the flurry of snowflakes I can make out two dark figures struggling up the hill.

  Cora starts to move quickly. “We’ve got to catch up with them,” she cries, stumbling on. “I’m sure it’s the two women whose names are on the paper. They must come from Hilsea — I saw them catch the Hilsea bus last week.”

  The snow is now sweeping down the hill towards us, reddening our cheeks, filling our mouths, settling in an icy crust on the front of our coats.

  We battle up the slope, heads bent, hanging on to each other to stop slipping, but by the time we crest the hill and squint ahead through the white, gusting swirl, the two figures are way ahead, almost at the main road. Breathless, we plough on, but at the end of the lane their footprints are so heavily covered we can’t see whether they turned left or right. What we hear, though, is the throbbing of a bus, just visible in the distance, labouring through the snow towards Hilsea.

  Cora covers her cold cheeks with her hands and puffs out, “I can’t believe they’ve got away.”

  “What were they doing at Guerdon Hall? They must have been there — there’s nowhere else to go.”

  “See if we can find out.”

  The snow eases as we turn, stumble back down the hill, and tramp along the Chase, and by the time we reach the bridge it is falling sparsely once more.

  From across the creek comes the sound of a man shouting. Alarmed, we hurry on towards the house, round the corner, and approach the sitting-room window. Cora pulls me in and we flatten ourselves against the wall.

  “… upsetting Mimi like that!” Mr. Drumm is yelling. “She won’t even let me in her room! Stuck a ruddy chair against the door or something! I won’t have it, Ange, making her cry like that! She’s had enough to bloody put up with!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Drumm —”

  “And shrieking at them two women like — like a fishwife!”

  “I’ve told you I’m sorry, Mr. Drumm. I don’t know what got into me. I don’t even remember what I said.”

  “I tell you, Ange, I don’t want no crazy woman looking after my kids! I — I’ve had enough of it! You’ll be out on your bloody ear!” Mr. Drumm goes quiet for a moment. We peer round the edge of the icy window and see him distractedly running his hand through his hair.

  He starts to speak again. We duck back.

  “They must have got lost, the two of them — looked ruddy frozen,” he says. “You could have made them a cup of tea, helped them get warm by the fire. What were you ruddy playing at, shouting at them like that, telling them to push off?”

  “I told you — I think they were looking in the window, I think I remember that — then Mimi came down, tried to talk to them… . I think —”

  “This is a bloody awful start, Ange!”

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I notice something blue in the middle of a patch of watery slush, just a few feet away from us. Cora looks over as I crouch down under the window and steal towards it — a large drum of Cerebos salt lying on its side, lid off, contents spilled across the path in an arc, melting the snow.

  I pick it up, shrug my shoulders.

  Cora dips down and creeps towards me, takes the tin, turns it in her hand curiously, then, with raised eyebrows and an answering shrug, drops it back into the snow. Glancing cautiously at the window, she waves me to follow her round the house.

  As we turn the corner I can smell roasting meat. My stomach growls.

  Moving along the wall, we step over another spilled drum of salt turning the snow to a puddle.

  “Has your dad, or Ange, tried to clear the path?” I whisper.

  “Don’t know,” Cora says under her breath, “but we’ve never had that posh salt in the house. We have Saxa.”

  She snatches a loo
k to right and left, then moves out slightly and cranes her neck upwards to one of the first-floor windows.

  She cups her hands around her mouth, tries to shout quietly: “Mimi!”

  She steps back, calls again. “Mimi!”

  A face comes to the window. In the same moment I take in Mimi’s watery mouth and tear-streaked cheeks, the glass steams up, and she wrenches the curtains furiously together.

  “Oh, Mimi …” Cora sighs.

  “Should you go up and see her?”

  “She’s not going to let me in any more than Dad. She’s … well, she’s a bit odd sometimes.”

  Cora thinks for few seconds, pats her pockets, then says, “I’m sorry, but have you got any money?”

  “What?”

  “Have you got enough for the bus to Hilsea? I want to find those two women.”

  “What?” I jingle the few coins in my pocket. I was going to get Dad the Sunday newspaper from Mrs. Wickerby’s on the way back from church. “Hilsea? Now?”

  “Roger — would you come with me?”

  The smell of sizzling meat with a hint of lemon fills my nose.

  “Aren’t you starving?” I ask, looking along the wall to the kitchen window.

  “I’ve lost my appetite.” She looks at me imploringly. “Please.”

  What’s a chap to do?

  We tramp back along the Chase and up Old Glebe Lane, but at the main road a car, snow halfway up its wheels, has stopped on the road facing Hilsea. A man with a spade is leaning in at the window, talking to the driver.

  “You won’t get through,” he’s saying. “There’s two cars stuck in a drift by Rushbottom Farm. A lorry’s had to turn round and they’re stopping the buses at Daneflete now. We’ve heard they’re going to send out the snowplough from Lokswood. Could be hours. Why don’t you come in? The missus has done a big cottage pie, if you’d like some.”

  We can’t hear what the man says, but after a minute he gets out, locks the car, and follows the landlord across the road and into the Thin Man.