The Black Mountains

by Janet Tanner

  “You’m different,” she said shortly. “Folk are always funny with anybody a bit different.”

  Rosa could get no more from her, and she did not ask again. But she began listening to the talk when she could, standing so still and so silent that it was easy to forget she was there at all, and she compared the way she looked with the fairness of her parents and her brothers.

  After much consideration, she came to a conclusion. She was a foundling. It was the only answer.

  At first the thought frightened her, for it seemed she had suddenly lost everything that had made her feel safe—her family, her name, even her identity. Then, gradually, excitement stirred as she realized the wonderful, endless possibilities.

  If she was not Rosa Clements, she could be anyone. It was like being born again, with the world to choose from.

  She debated the possibilities sitting in the fork of a tree in the woods above Greenslade Terrace. She stared at her own dark-skinned reflection in the cracked mirror above her wash-stand. But it was when the black cat from along the rank had come to her one day purring and rubbing itself around her legs that she had known.

  I’m a witch, she thought. I’m a witch-child, and that’s why they left me. And she smiled a secret smile and laughed softly to herself because, if she was a witch, then it made her more important than any of them, and there was nothing she could not do.

  For a while, she was satisfied with the knowledge, but then the desire to test her powers began to gnaw at her—and with it the problems of being a witch-child separated from all other witches. For who was there to teach her spells and magic incantations? Who could show her which herbs had special properties and which were useless to her?

  She began to experiment, choosing the wild garlic that grew by the river because of its pungent smell, and the cuckoo pint and the berries she knew to be poisonous. Once she even crept from her bed to see if she could find some “ flowers of the night,” and in the dark fields, with only an owl hooting across the valley, she was not afraid, but alive and tingling with a strange excitement.

  In the morning, however, when Ada found her stockings damp and stuck with burrs, there were questions she could not answer, and she knew her night-time expeditions would have to be kept for very special occasions.

  When she was eleven years old, her world almost fell to pieces around her ears. In a rash moment, when the teasing of her school friends had become almost too much to bear, she had shouted at them that they had better beware, for she was a witch. But they only laughed at her.

  “You’re not a witch, you’re a gypsy,” one of them taunted, and Rosa recoiled as swiftly as if she had been stung.

  A gypsy—no, she couldn’t be! She thought of the families of poor, ingratiating tinkers who went from door to door with their baskets of clothes-pegs and paper flowers, begging from folk scarcely better off than they were, and her heart sank. Had they left her on a doorstep in a basket along with the clothes-pegs? It was a thought so awful it made her curl up inside, yet it had to be faced. They were dark-skinned as she was. Their eyes in their wizened, nut-brown faces were black, like hers. But she didn’t want to be a gypsy—oh, she didn’t want to be a gypsy! Unless …

  Unless she were a Romany. Now that would be something different again. Romanies lived in bright painted caravans and burned them when the occupant died, together with everything they owned. Romanies were bold and free, spoke a language of their own, slept under the stars. Romanies could read palms and tea leaves; they knew the future—and the past. Oh, it would be good to be a Romany …

  The thought satisfied her, and even as she grew older, she clung to it. Even when she began to realize that the foundling story was unlikely to be more than the figment of a child’s imagination, she never doubted that there ran in her veins blood that was wilder and more free than that of the people she called her parents, a blood that responded with restless longing to the call of the woods and the fields, and knew truths that they would never know. Deep inside, she recognized some part of her that was at one with nature and with super-nature, and she spurned the ordinary, everyday folk in their ordinary, everyday houses, living their ordinary, everyday lives.

  All except Ted. She adored him with a passion that was boundless and also irrational. For she knew that for him she would sacrifice the woods and the fields, for him she would live just as the rest of Hillsbridge lived. For him, she would cook and clean and mend, and bear and raise all the children he wanted. And she would be proud and happy to be his wife—and perhaps a little relieved, too, that she would no longer be the one on the outside—the one at whom fingers pointed and shoulders shrugged.

  She first knew she wanted to marry him the day his brother Jim wed Sarah Brimble. She watched from the upstairs window as the wagonette carrying the bridal party lurched along the rank, and she dreamed of the day when she would be the one to sit proudly in a white dress with flowers in her hair. Her dark eyes grew huge in her thin face as she pictured it, and love swelled inside her until she had thought she would burst.

  Two years had passed since that day, but Rosa’s love for Ted had not dimmed. She was hurt when she saw him with other girls, but she had told herself her time would come. To him, she was still a child, but she would not always be a child. With pride she watched her thin body round into the curves of womanhood and the roses begin to colour her sallow cheeks. Soon, she thought, she would be ready to make him notice her. She would paint her lips scarlet and draw her thick hair away from her face so that it did nothing to hide her huge dark eyes. She had experimented secretly in the cracked mirror above the wash-stand and been pleased with the result. But she was not quite ready. She must wait for her breasts to fill out that little bit more. Then he would not doubt she was a woman. And in the meantime, what did it matter if he played around with every girl in Hillsbridge? She would soon outstrip them all.

  But she reckoned without Rebecca Church.

  She noticed the difference in him almost at once, and it worried her. That new buoyancy coupled with seriousness, and the way he seemed to whistle one moment and dream the next reflected her own feelings for him. Could it be that Ted had found someone who meant more to him than the casual, flirtatious encounters he had had before?

  Then something else happened to add to her troubles. Since leaving school, she had worked as a maidservant to the Misses Holland, two elderly spinster sisters who lived in a grand house on South Hill. But in the spring of 1915 Florence, the younger of the two, collapsed with a massive stroke. For a week the older Miss Holland, determined her sister should not be taken into hospital, struggled to nurse her. Then, on the morning that Florence slipped away, she collapsed herself before Rosa’s horrified eyes and died before the doctor could be fetched. The two sisters were buried together near the churchyard seat where they had often sat to watch the world go by, the house was put in the hands of Mr Clarence, the solicitor, and Rosa found herself out of a job.

  Panic seized her. There were few enough jobs in a town like Hillsbridge for young girls, but to leave the district, as so many of her friends had done, would mean leaving Ted. Rosa, in desperation, went to the woods. There, hanging from a tree, she found a piece of rope, and her heart lifted. What the rope had been used for, or why it was there, she had no idea. But she remembered having once heard that a knot tied in rope was part of a spell, and it seemed to her that the rope had been left there for her own special purpose.

  She picked some strong smelling onion flowers and lay them in a circle on the ground, then sat cross-legged in the centre, the rope between her hands. She tied three knots and whispered incantations that seemed to come from deep within her. Then she sat, her eyes narrowed against the sun that splintered through the branches of the trees, while the stillness inside her swelled and grew powerful. When at last she moved, her fingers were numb around the rope knots. As she flexed them, they tingled as if someone were driving pins and needles into them. She stood up, feeling for a fleeting moment that the world and
everyone in it was under her control. Then, slowly, she folded the rope and placed it under the ivy in the crook of a nearby tree. The onion flowers she scattered, murmuring over each one. But the feeling of power did not leave her. It hung over her in a satisfying cloud, and she somehow knew that things would come right in time.

  Rosa did not have long to wait. Next day, she received a message from Mrs Ford, at the draper’s shop. She had been a friend of the Holland sisters, she knew Rosa from the visits she had paid them, and she realized the girl was now seeking a new position. Her own housemaid had recently left to be married, and if Rosa would care to present herself …

  Rosa was jubilant. That night she returned to the wood, found the rope and whispered further incantations. It was necessary, she thought, to thank whatever power had helped her.

  Her jubilation, however, was short-lived. For when she began work at Fords, she found she had a new and privileged window on to Ted’s relationship with Rebecca, and she was not pleased by what she saw.

  Rosa didn’t have a great deal of contact with the girls in the shop, but she did learn from Marjorie about the serious relationship between Ted and Rebecca.

  “I wish somebody thought that much of me, that’s all,” Marjorie had said. “ Though what will happen when her father finds out, I dread to think.”

  Rosa was distraught. Throughout the summer she watched and waited, her body tense with concentration as she willed the affair to end. But it was only when she heard Marjorie talking of the way Alfred Church had learned the truth about his daughter’s lover and the way he had reacted, that she realized the time had come for drastic measures.

  That night she went to the woods again. She found the rope where she had hidden it, deep in the ivy, and she heaved a sigh of relief. If it had gone, she would have known that it was an omen of her own fallibility, and she must never again sit cross-legged in a circle of onion flowers. As it was, she was half-afraid to put the strange spell to the test again. After all, it was her own innovation, called up from the depths of her and owing little to anything she might have learned of magic. But now, so desperate was she, that she trembled as she sought for the onion flowers in the thickest, deepest places beneath the trees, and laid them in a sparser circle than before on the ground.

  At first the trance was more difficult to summon. Her mind was too preoccupied for concentration. Then she set herself to dwell upon the one thing that mattered to her.

  Send Rebecca away, she whispered, and the words seemed to encircle her and spiral up like chimney smoke between the overhanging branches. Send her away … away … away …

  The sun dropped behind the hills in a blaze of scarlet and gold, and still Rosa sat. Only when the first cool breeze of night rippled over her bare arms, making her shiver, did she move, and as she stood up, she waited for the rush of power to fill her as it had done before.

  It did not come. Rosa felt a rush of disappointment and a weariness. She’d tried her best. She’d done all she could do. But why should it be enough? Why should she, a fifteen-year-old girl, think she could change anything? And yet …

  I did it before, Rosa thought. Let me be able to do it again, just this once. If she doesn’t go away, I think I shall die …

  Next day, Rosa ached from head to foot. Every muscle jarred when she moved, and there was a heaviness in her head and neck that made her wonder if she was going to be ill. Even her mother remarked on how pale she was, and when she peeped at herself in the cracked mirror, she was startled by her drained appearance. She knew, of course, that her session in the woods was to blame, but she did not tell her mother.

  “You’m cracked, Rosa,” she’d say in her whining voice. “Sometimes I think you bl’aint all there.”

  Rosa, already unsure of herself, certainly did not want her spell-making to be reduced to that.

  For the first time since she had begun working for the Fords, she was late arriving, and Mrs Ford gave her a ticking off so that she had felt obliged to work harder than she usually did, in spite of the heaviness inside her.

  But when she was polishing the hall-stand in the passage that ran alongside the millinery room and gave access to the shop from the house, she had overheard Marjorie talking to the other apprentice, and their conversation had made her stop work and stand, wide-eyed, the duster still in her hand.

  Could it really be Rebecca Church they were talking about—bundled into a car and driven off to the station? As she listened, Rosa began to tremble, her aching body suddenly cold with fear.

  What have I done? she asked herself. What am I capable of doing? And then, through the fear, she caught the first glimpse of triumph. Rebecca had gone away. She, Rosa, had willed it, and it had happened. The feeling of power that had deserted her last night came to her now, and she closed her eyes, her fingers tightening around the crumpled duster.

  “Rosa, are you feeling quite well?” She opened her eyes to see Mrs Ford regarding her suspiciously. “You really are very pale, you know.”

  Rosa nodded, unaware of the strange, distant expression on her narrow face.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Ford. I’m all right really.” she said and returned to the polishing with new vigour.

  All day, as she worked, the excitement grew in her as she thought of what she had done. Sometimes it constricted her throat so that she could scarcely breathe. It was so momentous, so enormous, she could hardly believe it. Yet it had happened.

  I was right, she thought, over and over again. All along, I was right I am a witch. I do have magic powers. This time there can’t be any doubt about it.

  So carried away was she that she hardly spared a thought for Ted. It was only when she glimpsed his face as he left the shop, Marjorie having told him the news, that a shadow crossed her trembling excitement.

  She loved Ted. She didn’t want to hurt him. She just hadn’t thought about it from his point of view, that was all.

  Her dark eyes grew serious as she remembered his look of disbelief and desperation. Then, determined not to let her moment of triumph be spoiled, she tossed her head, casting her doubts aside. She’d make Ted happy if it was the last thing she did. She’d show him what love was, and he’d soon forget that shy, sheltered little Rebecca Church.

  She smoothed her apron over her hips, feeling the roundness where before there had only been skin and bone. The time had come, Rosa thought. With the spell, she had left behind the last of her childhood. Now, at last, she was a woman. And not even Ted Hall could fail to recognize it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As he left the shop, unaware he was being watched, Ted fought off a feeling of utter disbelief.

  Rebecca gone! It couldn’t be true! But Alfred had told him he’d never see her again, and he must have meant what he’d said.

  For Christ’s sake, why didn’t I bring her away with me? Ted thought. She was frightened, but she’d have come if I’d made her. There was no way the old bugger could have stopped her, lying there with the wind knocked out of him.

  Helplessly he struck his side with his balled-up fist, wishing he’d hit Alfred harder, wishing he’d grabbed Rebecca and dragged her out of the house. He shouldn’t have left her. He should have made up his own mind and done what his intuition had told him to do. But he hadn’t, and now it was too late.

  In a dream, he rounded the bend, but as the Co-operative store loomed up before him, all his confused thoughts and emotions crystallized into a sense of purpose. Above the Co-operative store were the Co-operative offices. And in the Co-operative offices, unless he, too, had taken a taxi and a train and disappeared, Alfred would be at work.

  Ted crossed the road without looking to left or right. A bicycle, speeding down the hill, narrowly missed him and the rider yelled abusively. But Ted took no notice. He marched on, staring up a the windows that overlooked the town and wondering which was Alfred’s office.

  There was a passageway along the side of the ugly stone building and a flight of steep stairs leading to the offices. Ted marched
up them, his boots thudding loudly on the bare boards. A cubby hole marked ‘Inquiries’ faced the head of the stairs, but he ignored it. He did not want Alfred warned of his arrival.

  The corridor branched away to his left, and at the end of it he could see a heavy, oak-panelled door decorated with a large plaque. He turned towards it, past tall cupboards and a room fall of musty ledgers where Joey Bird, one of the clerks, was huddled over his books. He looked up at the sound of Ted’s approach, but Ted ignored him and marched on.

  As he neared the door, he saw that he had been right. The plaque was inscribed with the word ‘Secretary.’ Without knocking, he turned the brass handle and pushed open the door.

  Alfred Church was there, seated behind a desk impressive enough to do justice even to his majestic frame. He had been bending over a ledger, and as the door opened he looked up, startled but otherwise immobile, so that for a moment he looked oddly like a figure in the waxworks Ted had once toured on a day-trip to the seaside. But as he recognized the young man his eyes widened and he half-started to his feet.

  Ted crossed the office in two strides, planting his hands on the paper-covered desk and leaning across so that his face was close to Alfred’s.

  “Where is she?” he demanded. “What have you done with her?”

  Alfred swelled with indignation. Then, as suddenly, he relaxed, sinking back into his chair, and a small smile of satisfaction twisted his mouth.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Becky. What have you done with Becky?”

  “My daughter? What business is that of yours?”

  “You know damn well it’s my business!” Ted brought his fist down hard on to the desk.

  “I’m afraid that there we must agree to differ. There is no need whatever for you to concern yourself with my family. But since you are here, I will tell you Rebecca has left the district. She is staying with relatives and will remain with them until she comes to her senses. Then she will be married to Rupert Thorne, her cousin. She is betrothed to him—I believe I told you. And now, perhaps you would be so good as to remove your hand from my desk.”