The Mark of Cain

by Lindsey Barraclough

  It’s Mimi’s exercise book, the one she’s always scribbling in, hiding the drawings inside the crook of her elbow. I open the cover to the first page. Alarmed, I turn to the next page, and the next.

  Over and over again it is the same woman, always the same, the body gauzy but the features clear. She is standing on the edge of the creek, sometimes on the far side, on the brink of the marsh, sometimes on the near bank. In other pictures she is on the fringe of the garden itself, on the grass, always looking towards the house. On this page she is half hidden by a corner of the building, on that, she is behind a window, peering in. Mimi has roughly sketched the lines of furniture in the room. Here the woman is in daylight, staring through the sitting-room window, and there she is a pale shape against the darkness. There her face is pressed against the kitchen glass. I turn the page and feel a creeping sensation up my back.

  Mimi has drawn her looking into our bedroom.

  I lift up our pillow, pull out the crumpled letter.

  The Gilead House Institution, Mitre Fields …

  I now know what has to be done. The woman will take me there. I will use her body, her knowledge, but she will not know why she has come to London.

  There is no fresh milk. We need to save the tinned stuff for tea, so Mimi and I are eating our cornflakes dry. Ange comes into the kitchen wearing her hat, coat, and sheepskin boots.

  “Going out?” I ask needlessly.

  She seems a little dreamy, her eyes distant.

  “I — I’ve got to see somebody.”

  “Do you think you’re well enough? You weren’t too good yesterday. Can’t it wait?”

  “No. I’ve got to go today.”

  “Oh. When will you be back?”

  “Not sure — I might be out all day.”

  I make no protest whatsoever. When I hear her feet on the gravel path going round the house, I feel almost light-headed.

  Mimi looks at me. “When’s Dad coming home?” she says.

  “I think he said Monday.”

  “I wish he was here,” she says, leaving the room and going upstairs.

  Out in the hall, I stare after her for a moment, then pick up the telephone and dial. A gruff voice answers.

  “‘Ello?”

  “Hello. Is that the Half Moon? Mr. Myers?”

  “Alf’s down the cellar. It’s Bill Gurney ’ere. Who’s that then?”

  “It’s Cora — Cora Drumm, Mr. Gurney.”

  “Oh, ’ello, love. How are you getting on in the country?”

  “All — all right, thank you. Sorry to phone you so early, but is Dad there?”

  “Well, nobody’s in here yet, are they — we ain’t open for ages. Come to think of it, we ain’t seen your dad in a while. Shall I tell ’im to ring if he comes in at dinnertime?”

  “Yes — yes, please. Thanks, Mr. Gurney.”

  “Cheerio, love. Look after yourself.”

  I worry as I throw kindling sticks on the fire. How on earth can I get in touch with Dad if he isn’t going into the Half Moon? It’s the only telephone number we have for him in London. Maybe … maybe he’s at Auntie Kath’s. I wonder if her number’s lying around somewhere.

  I strike a match and light the paper. The little flames turn the edges black.

  The sticks begin to crackle. I reach for a log.

  Keep to the shadows, be a shadow, in among the noisy people, sitting silently, moving quietly, while the rumble and clatter of iron wheels and the hiss of steam carry us into the city. She takes out the paper, shows it to a woman on the teeming street, who points. We turn a corner between tall buildings, and the din and the rush become nothing more than a low hum behind the high walls.

  We wait, tucked against the brickwork, a little way from the arched door with metal words screwed into the wood. She mutters under her breath: “Gilead House.”

  A man comes along the street, pulls on a bell chain. We hear it echo around the spaces inside.

  The door opens. A woman in a white apron and cap talks to the man for some time, invites him in through the door.

  Keep to the shadows, be a shadow. We slip in, make no sound in our quiet boots as we weave our way round corners deep into the building, searching for a name… .

  Wailing, from somewhere above, passes through walls and down stairwells to reach this noiseless passage, but nobody minds it, or answers it. The people behind these doors are on the other side of weeping, though they must have wept many times. They would not be here otherwise.

  Green tiles gleam in the low light. At the end, a glow from an open door and the edge of a white sleeve, an arm resting on a table, barely moving. A green cup askew on a saucer.

  Below each glass peephole is a small metal frame around a scrawled name. She whispers them to herself: “Scribbs Jane … Warren Edith … Drumm Susan.”

  Dying lights seep one by one out of the empty keyholes and through the gaps under the doors — slow, slow deaths behind the green wood.

  The distant wailing becomes a cheerless singing:

  “There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole… .”

  I expect the door to be locked, but we turn the knob with our fingers and it moves outwards on its quiet oiled hinges. We glance down the passage at the doorway, but the white sleeve stays unmoving on the table.

  “…There is a balm in Gilead, to soothe the sin-sick soul.”

  We go into the small, hard room, begin to close the door but see there is no handle on the inside. We pull it to, leave a gap. Mustn’t be trapped in here with Drumm Susan.

  Twelve squares of cold grey sky send a ghostly, slanted reflection of themselves onto the painted wall opposite the metal bed.

  She lies there, still and bone thin in a white shift under a crumpled sheet and rough brown blanket, fair hair matted and knotted around bloodless skin, dark half-moon smudges under the closed eyes, a brownish stain on the pillow near the mouth.

  On the small cupboard by the bed head, a metal spoon stands in a smear of milk at the bottom of an empty glass. An acrid smell comes from it, and the same unpleasant odour hangs on Susan’s shallow breath.

  In the angle of the shadowed corner is a metal chair with a seat of colourless cloth coming loose on one side. We sink into it and watch the wasted woman on the bed.

  A light lifts from the pale body, moves slowly to the sealed window, then crosses the room and disappears into the passage beyond the door. So many lights have left her, little by little over these years, that she has become diluted.

  I slip out, leave Ange slumped on the metal chair, and move across the narrow space to the bed.

  Susan’s skin is insubstantial, like a film of water over deeper empty water, memories washed away in almost perpetual sleep, by whatever was in the foul-smelling glass on the cupboard — balm in Gilead. I pass beneath the riverbed into the deepness of her and find a vast blackened place where all recollections have been drowned out. I look for her two daughters, but they no longer exist in this sea of nothingness.

  I search and search, and find at last dim, smoky images — the only memories left undestroyed — a door left ajar, the curl of a twisted claw round the frame. I see him as she did, distorted in a mirror — Lankin, almost fleshless, festering, hungry. An empty bed, the barely remembered face of a snatched child, a sister, a name — Annie — a never-ending cry: “It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault… .”

  That’s all there is.

  Two pillows. We could press her face between the two — soft slumber to soft slumber. Maybe a shudder, a slightly raised hand, perhaps not even that, just a gentle slipping away into the night. It would be a mercy, a release for her poor, sunken soul.

  But even I know that Ange would not do that for me. She would rise up, struggle, battle to regain herself. I must be cunning, delicate — a twist or a pinprick she would not understand; a little craftiness, use her artfully, not alarm her.

  We have the swan-necked scissors in our pocket. I could take a snip of clothing from this woman on
the bed, a lock of hair. I have the bloodstone safe. It could all be set quietly in motion before we steal away, then a little bit of sewing in the night.

  Or I could leave her to sleep away her wasted life.

  Very soon she will be dead. The lights are almost gone, the Guerdon blood thinned in her to a droplet in a vast ocean.

  She is no threat to me.

  Unlike her forgotten daughters.

  I take the box of matches and some newspaper into the sitting room. The hearth is a heap of cold grey ash. There are few logs left in the pile and hardly any kindling, barely enough to get the fire going.

  Clutching the rim of the barely warm radiator, I stand at the window, rub away a patch of rime from one of the diamond panes, and look out to see if I might get across to fetch some more wood. My breath mists the glass. I wipe it again. It is a bleak grey-cold outside. The frost still clings to the ground, little needles of it stiffening the grass. The black gaping crack of the frozen creek is overhung by the dark shapes of the stunted trees on the far bank.

  With my cheek to the edge of the frame, I can feel the whisper of a light but steady icy draught seeping its way in. No sound comes from beyond the walls, from the hushed world outside.

  With a sigh I go back to the fire, prod the ash through the basket with the poker, and lay and light the ends of the twisted paper, set a match to some thin twigs, then reach for a piece of wood from the meagre pile.

  Something drops down.

  I reach behind and tug out the piece of leather I pulled out of the chimney last week.

  I run my fingers around the small studded nails, then over the scratched letters — SEHSURARHPA — Aphra Rushes. I force my hand into the fold, and although the leather is stiff, I manage to separate one side from the other and open it out. It won’t flatten completely — there is a fat lump of a crease — but it opens well enough for me to see what it is: a shoe, plain, slipper shaped. I am able to wriggle my fingers into the upper.

  What did Mr. Wragge say? They used to shove all sorts of stuff up chimneys in the old days to keep the witches out — dead cats, shoes, all sorts.

  “Cora, you said —”

  The shoe falls out of my hands and hits the floor with a dull thud. Mimi is in the doorway, her face pale with alarm.

  “You said you’d put it back. You said, Cora.”

  “Mimi — I forgot.”

  “It was the last thing.”

  “What — what do you mean, the last thing?”

  She turns and rushes out of the room. I run after her.

  “Mimi! Come back! What do you mean?”

  She stops halfway up the stairs and looks down at me over the rail. “It was the last thing stopping her! It’s your fault, Cora. You did it!”

  I dash to the bottom of the stairs. “How do you know all this, Mimi? How do you know?”

  She thunders up the rest of the stairs and into our bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Dazed and confused, I go back into the sitting room, look at the shoe on the floor, pick it up, turn it over. It occurs to me that if what Mr. Wragge said was true, then the magic would have gone out of it, the harm done, the moment I pulled it out of the chimney. The place — the chimney — was part of the charm. It would have made no difference whatsoever if I’d put it back.

  All my fault.

  I hear a rasping cough.

  Ange comes in with her sewing box, sits down on the settee, and opens the lid, begins to cough again into her hand. She takes out her handkerchief and dabs her mouth.

  “What on earth was that about, Cora?” she asks, clearing her throat. “I’ve never heard you shout at each other before.”

  “Oh, nothing,” I say, slipping the leather into my palm and holding it close to my side, not really knowing why she shouldn’t see it.

  A small piece of fabric flutters in Ange’s hands. I can’t think of anything that’s left to mend, but she must have found something to keep her fingers busy.

  I move towards the door along the back of the settee. As I pass behind Ange, my hand, with the shoe held stiffly in it, brushes the back of the seat.

  Instantly she flinches, sucks in her breath as if she is in pain.

  “Ange?”

  I put the shoe down on the floor and hurry back to her.

  “Did you hurt yourself? Ange? Do you need your pills?”

  She is bent slightly forward. I rub the back of her hand with my fingers.

  “Gosh, you’re freezing. What’s the matter?”

  “I — I’m all right.”

  Slowly she raises her face to me.

  I take a step backwards.

  Something isn’t right at all. There was a shift in her eyes, a quick movement like a cat’s in sudden light; a swift change in the iris, there a moment ago, now gone.

  “Why — why don’t you move nearer the fire?” I say, swallowing. “Do you want me to get you a blanket?”

  “No, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. I’m warm as toast — look …” She holds out her hand. Gingerly I touch it. It is warm as toast. “You go and patch things up with Mimi. I hate to think of you two falling out.”

  Behind her I pick up the shoe, look at the letters on the sole, then, with a flicker of unease, at the back of Ange’s head, now bowed over some sewing.

  A few minutes later, I am knocking gently on our bedroom door.

  “Mimi?”

  “Go away! It’s all your fault.”

  Bewildered, I go back downstairs and into the kitchen.

  The County Records lies beside the sugar bowl. I thumb to Katherine Myldmaye’s letters at the back, slowly turn the pages to find the one dated 10th April 1584:

  We know that malignant cunning women can be possessed of potent gifts, but can it be true what Kittie Wicken told you of — that when alive, Aphra Rushes frighted her with the threat that she could creep into Kittie’s skin, look out of her eyes and use her hands to do whatsoever the witch willed with them? This is diabolic work indeed. Surely it cannot be possible under heaven to interfere with another’s soul in such a way as this.

  I turn back to the letter written on 21st December 1583.

  Joan enquired of me whether this burned witch was properly laid to rest in the manner befitting a handmaid of the Devil. Were her ashes burned again to remove all traces of cunning and magic? Perhaps your lord is afeared lest she rise again like the Phoenix from its fire to cause him mischief.

  Forward again, to 8th February 1584.

  … think what agonies Father must have endured in his heart when he was present at the witch’s execution, by your lord’s very side, and heard her bring down her terrible malediction on the heads of the Guerdons, even unto the very end of the line …

  I stare at the page, but the printed words fade and blur under my fingers as all I seem to see is that little shift in Ange’s eyes, as if for a fleeting moment someone else was looking out of them.

  … even unto the very end of the line …

  That’s Mimi and me — the very end of the line.

  My hands tremble as I close the book. My mouth goes dry.

  In Julius Caesar it’s hard to decide who is meant to be a goodie and who is a baddie. Some of them start out one way and end up the other. Unfortunately, in this essay I am supposed to work all this out, discuss it, and use quotations to back it up. I asked Mum when she was washing up after dinner, but she said she’d only seen the film and she wasn’t sure even then, but Marlon Brando doing Mark Antony had been nice to look at.

  When she’s gone to get Pamela ready for bed, there is a loud rapping at the door.

  “Roger?”

  It’s Cora.

  My face goes hot.

  She knocks again, almost falls into the kitchen when I open the door, and drops a heavy old book onto the table next to my homework.

  “I can’t stay,” she says breathlessly, “but please, please could you look at something in this book for me. I’ll leave it here for when you’ve got a min
ute.”

  I pick it up, feel its weight. “Where on earth did you get this old thing from?”

  “Please don’t tell anyone, but I stole it from school, from the head’s study.”

  “Crikey!”

  “Ssh. Please, please keep it secret.”

  “What bit do you want me to look at?”

  She spreads it out, and towards the end reaches over for my blotting paper and sticks it between two pages.

  “These letters — all right? I’ve got to go.”

  “What? Don’t you want a cup of tea?”

  “I’ve got to get back quick as I can. I’ve left Mimi with Ange.”

  And she has gone through the door.

  If it wasn’t for the book lying there and the icy cold hanging in the air, I would have thought I’d dreamed it.

  I look over my shoulder to where Ange is lying back on the settee cushions, fast asleep in front of the dying fire, some strands of red hair loosened from their grips, a threaded needle still between her fingers. One of Dad’s shirts, thin black stripes on white, is draped beside her over the wooden arm, its frayed cuff half repaired on her knee.

  I study her face — the little black dots where her eyebrows need replucking, the smudges of blue eyeshadow, the fair lashes edged with caked mascara, lipstick worn off to an outline, the attempts at glamour that never really come together properly. There seems to be nothing threatening about her, nothing out of the ordinary as she lies there, a little whistle escaping from her nose as she lightly snores.

  But she is frightening me.

  I don’t want to think what I am thinking.

  And I don’t want her in the house anymore.

  I pull the door almost shut, daren’t risk the click of it closing, creep into the hall, and lift the telephone receiver, dial, turn my back, half cover the mouthpiece with my hand.

  “Mr. Gurney?” I hiss hoarsely. “Is that the Half Moon?”

  “What? Why are you whispering? Is this a funny phone call?”

  “It’s Cora, Mr. Gurney — Cora Drumm.”

  “What’s happened to your voice?”