by Syd Moore
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I know a mysterious lead coffin was set down on Leigh beach around that time. Some locals had it that it was a murdered nobleman. My dad always said inside it was the body of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, who had been killed by Richard II’s men in Calais. He was strangled with a sheet so violently that his head was severed. The coffin was whisked up to the castle. The next day it had vanished.’
‘How awfully sinister,’ said Martha, and took a long swig of her wine.
Sharon coughed on her fag and told everyone the St Clements steps creeped her out. This was the steep pathway that connected the Old Town on the seafront to the newer part of town higher up. ‘I always feel like I’m going to have a heart attack when I get to the top. And people have done: they used to try to bring the coffins up by a different route, which wasn’t at such a sharp angle. But then some posh bloke built a new house and closed that road off as he wanted a bigger garden.’
‘The Reverend Robert Eden actually,’ said Corinne. ‘And it wasn’t exactly a house. He built a new rectory as the old one was falling down. It houses the library now.’
‘Right,’ said Sharon, completely disinterested. ‘Anyway, everyone in the Old Town had to start using the steps to get the bodies to the church but it was so steep a few of the pallbearers started popping their clogs at their mates’ funerals. Imagine that! My neighbour swears blind Church Hill is haunted.’ She spoke the last words in a Vincent Price style and punctuated the sentence with a wicked cackle.
We all looked at Corinne again. This time she smiled. ‘Perhaps it is. For such a small place, the town has lots of stories. There was Princess Beatrice way back in the thirteenth century. Daughter of Henry III. Obviously she was meant to marry well. Henry had arranged for her to marry a Spanish count but she fell in love with a young man, Ralph de Binley, and ran away to Leigh to elope. Someone found out about it and they caught the couple on Strand Wharf. Ralph was sent to Colchester, accused of murder, but managed to escape back here where he was banished from England never to return. Some say, on clear nights, you can see Beatrice out on the wharf, waiting for her lover, pacing up and down, crying her eyes out.’
I didn’t want melancholy tales on a drinking night and was about to make some kind of glib comment to lighten the tone, but Sharon got in before me. She must have still been raw from being dumped.
‘Pass me the bucket. That’s not spooky. I thought we were doing scary.’
Corinne looked put out again so I grabbed the wine and refilled her. She fixed her grey eyes on me like a cat noticing a wounded pigeon for the first time. Her eyes widened and she paused theatrically, then said, ‘Aha, well if you want a scary story,’ her fingers made a kind of flourishing gesture in my direction, ‘look no further than our namesake here, Sarah Grey.’
I groaned and rolled my eyes. I shared my name with a local character and the pub named after her. There was lots of mileage in this one.
‘The other Sarah Grey,’ Corinne grinned and poked me in the ribs, ‘was a right old witch. Have you heard the tale, Sarah?’
Of course I had. I couldn’t move around the town without someone making a lewd comment about me doing favours for sailors.
But Sharon piped up that she didn’t know the whole story and Martha wanted the gory details, so Corinne drew us closer to the fire and asked if we were sitting comfortably.
‘Then I’ll begin,’ she whispered in a proper storyteller’s voice. ‘What we know is this – Sarah Grey was a nineteenth-century sea-witch who made her living from the pennies sailors threw her for a good wind. She would sit on the edge of Bell Wharf conjuring blessings for those that would pay. Until the captain of The Smack came along. Now he was a zealous man.’
‘What’s zealous?’ asked Sharon and hiccupped. Everyone ignored her.
‘A fervent Christian, he would have nothing to do with witchcraft so he forbade his crew to give her money.’ Corinne licked her lips and lowered her voice further. ‘It was a calm and sunny day when they set sail from the wharf.
‘But as they steered into the estuary, a strong wind came out of nowhere and lashed the boat. The sailors tried desperately to bring the sails down but the wind had entangled them and The Smack was tossed about the waves like a …’ she paused to find a simile.
‘Plastic duck?’ Sharon offered unhelpfully.
‘They didn’t have plastic back then,’ said Martha, opening another bottle of wine. ‘Like a cork perhaps?’
Corinne was irritated. We had broken her rhythm. ‘OK, OK. The Smack was tossed around like a cork.’
‘A cork’s quite small though,’ I said mildly. ‘And a ship’s quite big …’
‘Do you want to hear this or not?’ she snapped.
We muttered apologies and tried to focus.
Corinne cleared her throat and continued. ‘So they’re in this massive storm. One of the crew started shouting, “It’s the witch! It’s the witch!” Suddenly the captain picked up an axe and hit the mast. The sailors watched him thinking he had gone completely mad but when, on the third stroke the mast fell, the wind immediately dropped. When the boat eventually managed to limp home to Bell Wharf, do you know what they found? There, on the side, was the body of Sarah Grey, three axe wounds to her head.’
We made approving noises and raised our eyebrows.
‘That made me shiver,’ said Sharon.
‘Well,’ said Martha. ‘It is a bit cold. You know, Corinne, I’ve heard another ending. Deano’s cousin told me that, yes, the captain had forbidden his men to give her money, so Sarah Grey put a curse on them. The wind came up when they went out to sea and they couldn’t get the mast down but, then he says, every member of the crew but the captain perished. When the captain finally made it back to the shore he swore vengeance on Sarah Grey. The next day her headless body was found floating in Doom Pond, the ducking pond.’
I sniffed. ‘The ducking pond?’
‘Where they used to dunk scolds. Most old villages used to have one: if a woman argued or quarrelled with her husband or neighbours, she’d be strapped into the “ducking stool” and dunked in the water.’
A small piece of wood exploded in the fire, sending sparks over Martha. We all jumped.
Martha brushed them off her jeans and laughed. ‘Is that someone telling me I’m right or that I’m wrong?’
‘I suppose that’s quite likely to be true,’ Corinne said. ‘Who knows? It’s a shame about Doom Pond.’
A relative newcomer to the town I’d failed to notice the pond and asked her where it was.
Corinne’s voice became doleful. ‘Underneath those horrid mock-Tudor flats in Leigh Road.’
We all went ‘Ah!’ and nodded.
I said that I had looked at a flat there.
‘What was it like?’ asked Sharon. ‘Never been inside one of them.’
I thought back. God, it had been horrible. Not the interior or the layout but the atmosphere. There was a sharp sense of misery lurking in the corners. It had hit me as soon as I’d walked through the door. But I was still raw then. I reckoned it was just the similarity to my flat back in London and the emotional wreckage that had surrounded me there. But I simply said, ‘It was too small. Smart enough, good finish.’
Anyway, Corinne was off again so we returned to her pretty face flickering in the firelight. ‘Before the flats there was a supermarket on the site. My friend’s mum used to work there. She said the shelves were wonky. You used to put the tins on one end and they’d slide down the other and onto the floor. Then one day she went to work and it had gone. The whole place had slid into the pond.’
Martha shifted her weight from the left buttock to the right. ‘So, is that why they call it Doom Pond?’
Corinne shook her head. ‘Nah. It used to be referred to locally as the Drowning Pool.’
A flurry of unseen wings took off somewhere in the darkness.
‘Really?’ Goose bumps appeared across the bare flesh of my arms. The name sent a shudder right thr
ough me. ‘Why the Drowning Pool? What else happened there, apart from dunking scolds? Blimey, did they actually drown people?’
Corinne shrugged. ‘I guess it must have had something to do with local witches.’
‘Local witches?’ The casual comment intrigued me. ‘You say that as if they were commonplace.’
Corinne’s eyes flitted across Martha and Sharon then back to me. ‘Sarah, this part of the country is riddled with folklore. I know you wouldn’t think it now but Essex was once known as “Witch County”. The village of Canewdon is meant to be the most haunted place in England. And there was the wise-man and sorcerer Cunning Murrell in Hadleigh.’
Sharon straightened herself. ‘So did he get done then? For being a witch?’
‘No,’ said Corinne. ‘He was actually quite well-respected by the community, although he obviously still had a fearsome reputation.’
Martha leant forward and threw a couple of twigs on the fire. ‘So witches got subjected to all sorts of ill treatment yet Mr Murrell’s skills were, er, more appreciated?’
Corinne opened her mouth to reply but Sharon was in there immediately. ‘Because, my dear Martha, he was in possession of a cock.’
I sniggered. Martha laughed and poked the fire. ‘You’re about right there.’
‘So,’ I said, steering the conversation back to the pond topic. ‘Why the “Drowning Pool”? You said because of the witches. What have they got to do with the pond?’
‘Oh right,’ Corinne nodded and took a sip of her wine. You could see she was enjoying the limelight. ‘They used to “swim” them there: the witches would get tied up, sometimes right thumb to left toe, other times they were bound to a chair, then they would be thrown in the pond. If they sank and drowned they were innocent, if they floated, they were a witch, and would be dragged off to the gallows to be hanged.’
Martha said, ‘Talk about a no-win situation. Poor women.’
I sent up a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t bought that flat.
‘So,’ said Corinne, anxious to go easy on the tragedy and high on spooky. ‘That’s why locals say it was haunted. By the restless souls of the witches and innocents drowned there.’
‘And Sarah Grey,’ said Sharon sadly.
I went, ‘Wooo.’
But nobody laughed this time.
Martha started talking about a ghost in the cemetery and we all crowded in. The stories picked up and whirled on and on into the midnight hour, with wine flowing, the girls howling and the fire roaring.
I now understand, as I’m writing it down, that what we were doing, without realizing it, was creating some kind of séance. We stirred things up, opening a rift. Things got channelled down.
But that’s all come with the benefit of hindsight. If only I’d had a clue at the time. Things were, of course, happening but nothing really registered until the girl on fire.
But I need a drink before I start that one.
Chapter Two
That June was one of the hottest we’d had for years, which, on the plus side, meant that Alfie and I were able to spend a good deal of time down in the Old Town, a cobbled strip of nostalgia severed from the rest of the town by the Shoebury to Fenchurch Street train line. We liked it down there, crabbing, paddling and building sandcastles on the beach. Although Alfie was too young to miss his father, back then Josh’s absence still stung like a fresh wound, so I tended to overcompensate with painstakingly organized ‘constructed play’ and serious quality time. But it was fun. Alfie was now four, a lovely boy with his dad’s well-humoured outlook and a steady stream of gobbledegook that made me smile even on bad days.
On the down side, the heat-frayed tempers amongst students and staff at the private school where I taught Music and Media Studies. A few miles into the hinterland, surrounded by acres of carefully landscaped gardens, St John’s had been one of the county’s few remaining stately homes. It was converted from a family residence into a hospital during the First World War. In 1947 it became a private secondary school. Since then its buildings had encroached onto the lawns in a steady but haphazard and entirely unsympathetic manner. The block in which I worked was a 1980s concrete square that, rather surprisingly, managed to churn out excellent academic results and was in the process of expanding over the chrysanthemum gardens with another inappropriate modern glass structure.
Despite the new build however, the recession was eating into the public consciousness and the economy’s jaws were contracting. As a consequence our day students were being pulled out left, right and centre.
My boss was Andrew McWhittard. A forty-year-old unmarried, bitter Scot with a malevolent mouth. Tall and lean with a smother of thick black hair, he caused quite a stir amongst the female support staff when he arrived to head up the team. The honeymoon lasted two weeks, by which point he had revealed himself to be an HR robot – built without a humour chip and programmed only to repeat St John’s corporate policy. Personally, I found him arrogant in the extreme. When we were first introduced he gave me this look like he couldn’t believe someone with my accent could possibly work in a private school.
You live and learn.
McWhittard was a bully at the best of times and of late had started reminding us that pupils meant jobs, and the loss of them did not bode well for our employment prospects. He loved the fear that generated amongst us, you could tell.
A couple of administrators had gone on maternity leave and had not been replaced. The unspoken suggestion was that we absorb the admin ourselves. I only taught three days a week but my paperwork increased substantially and what with the marking, exams, reports, open days and parents’ evenings, June is the cruellest month of all.
Plus I had this other thing; one of my eyelids had started to droop. It wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone else and, at first, even I assumed it was down to tiredness. But after a week without wine and five nights of unbroken sleep, it was still there, so I booked an appointment with the doctor. The receptionist told me the earliest they could see me was Friday morning before school so I took that slot.
So you see, I had a lot on my mind. Which is why it took me a while to tune into Alfie’s strange mutterings.
Like I said, he was a born chatterbox – even before he formed words he’d sit in the living room with his Action men, soldiers, firemen and teddies and act out stories, giving them different voices and roles. The ground floor of our 1930s villa was open plan with large French doors leading out onto the garden. The design meant I could potter around with the vacuum cleaner or do the washing up with one ear on the radio and the other on my son. Though recently Alfie had taken to setting his toys out in the garden instead of staying indoors.
It was the Monday before my visit to the doctor’s that it first occurred to me to question why. My initial thought was that Alfie wanted to enjoy the sunshine. But then that was such an adult custom: I remembered the bleaching hot summer Saturdays of my childhood, sat on the sofa with my sister, Charlotte, or Lottie as she preferred, watching children’s TV, oblivious to the gloom of the room. How many times had Mum flung back the curtains and berated us for staying in on such a beautiful day? How many times had we shrugged and carried on regardless?
All kids love playing outside but they don’t make the connection when the sunshine appears. It takes many more years to wise up to the fickle nature of our very British weather. You certainly don’t get it when you’re four.
So, I peeled off my Marigolds and went to stand by the French doors. Alfie was sitting on the grass by our old iron garden furniture. He had lined up his puppets to face the chairs, and was engrossed in ‘doing a show’. It was a few minutes before he became aware of my presence, then, when he did, I was formally instructed to take a seat and join the audience.
There were four chairs, two either side of the table. I fetched my mug of coffee and was about to sit on the chair to the left when he shouted, ‘No, no, no. Mummy, no!’
It’s not unusual for kids to fuss over little things, th
ey all have their own idiosyncrasies, so I let Alfie grab my skirt and guide me to the farther chair.
‘Sorry, Alfie.’ I grinned and leant over to put my mug on the table, but he was up again.
‘No, Mummy. Not there!’ A little toss of his golden locks told me he was cross now. He frowned, took my free hand and led me to the other side of the table. ‘You sit there.’
‘You sure, sir?’ I said gravely.
‘Not that one,’ he said, indicating the chair which I had so rudely stretched across. ‘The burning girl is there.’
He rubbed his nose and went back to the puppets.
‘Sorry.’ I laughed, indulging him. I had wondered if he’d develop any imaginary friends and secretly had hoped that he would. Lottie once befriended an imaginary giant called Hoggy who ate cars and ended up emigrating to Australia. As a kid I was absolutely enthralled by her Hoggy stories. Later they proved hugely amusing to an array of boyfriends.
‘What’s her name?’ I asked Alfie. He was concentrating hard on pulling Mr Punch over his right hand and ignored me.
I reached over and tapped playfully on his head. ‘Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?’
Alfie wriggled away.
‘What’s your friend’s name, Alfie?’
He turned his back on the irritation. ‘Dunno.’
I was getting nowhere so contented myself with observing him. He was funny and sweet and growing up so quickly. It was in these quiet moments that I missed Josh. The reminder that there was no one else to share my fond smile was painful.
Widowhood is a lonely place.
After a few more tries Alfie mastered the puppet and spun round. ‘That’s the way to do it!’ he squeaked in a pretty good imitation. Then, glancing at the empty chair, his face puffed out and his shoulders fell. He snatched the puppet off his hand and threw it on the floor. ‘Look what you done!’ Alfie jabbed his podgy index finger at the iron seat. ‘You made her go! Mummy!’
