by Kim Wilkins
“My original intention was to stay for the entire winter, sort out my grandmother’s things.”
He physically recoiled. “The entire winter. But…it’s so cold here,” he finished lamely.
Maisie considered him. She had thought he was concerned she would find his village unappealing and go home, but now she wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Her brain was too tired to process the information, so she just said, “I’m sorry, Reverend. I can’t tell you for certain. It could be that I’m ready to go home much sooner.”
He nodded and tried a smile again, but this time it was more strained. “Thank you for your time, Miss Fielding. I’d best be on my way.”
“Goodnight, then.”
“Yes, goodnight.” He had turned and headed up the path. She watched until he was on the road and then closed the door.
Maisie turned around and stood in the hall, looking from left to right. What next? More sleep? She wasn’t tired any more. Her stomach growled. Ah yes, food.
She made her way down to the kitchen and opened the fridge door. It was an old-fashioned fridge, off-white with rust spots. Inside, along with a funny smell, was a carton of milk and nothing else. She closed the door and began opening cupboards. Bread, butter, eggs, teabags, sugar were all stacked together in one of the cupboards, cowering from the clutter of pots, pans and plastic containers. The kitchen was unfamiliar and the stove looked a century old, and nor could she find an electric kettle. She didn’t have the mental energy to figure out how to cook anything, so she made herself bread and butter and a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table to eat it. As she did, she looked around the kitchen and tried to imagine it tidied and painted. Here was a principal difference between her mother and grandmother: Janet Fielding was very particular about her home; Sybill, clearly, was not.
Sybill. Maisie wished she had asked the Reverend more about her grandmother. What kind of person was she? What did she look like? Had she been lonely living up here on a cliff-top by herself? What did she do with her time, given that she wasn’t cleaning the house? And most importantly, what was the secret that her mother was keeping from her? Maisie hadn’t found any headless bodies in the cupboards yet, but there were a lot of cupboards in this place. Knowing Janet, their falling-out was probably over something minor, something about which her mother would say “but it’s the principle”, as if principles were life rafts and she a drowning swimmer.
Maisie rinsed her plate and glass and went to look for the telephone. She found it in the lounge room, but she found no radiator. She looked behind curtains and armchairs, then realised that the room had a fireplace – no need for a radiator as well. Her problem now was that she had no clue how to light a fire. A stack of newspapers and a wire rack with a few logs on it sat next to the hearth, but she was too tired and homesick – yes, that was the other feeling no matter how much she resisted it – to work it out. She just wanted to call Adrian, hear his voice and make contact with something resembling normality.
No dial tone. How irritating. She checked the connection and everything looked okay. Perry Daniels had lied to her. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault, perhaps it was British Telecom’s. In any case, she hoped Adrian wouldn’t worry that he hadn’t heard from her yet. She replaced the receiver and picked up a photograph in a frame that sat next to the phone, examined the people in the picture.
A white-haired lady in a red dress – too bright a red for a woman that age, really – smiled out of the photo. Maisie guessed this was Sybill. She had a nice face, perhaps looked like she didn’t take herself too seriously. She had her arm around a youngish man. Maisie wondered if he might be a long-lost cousin or something, as his hair was the same black as hers, his eyes the same dark, dark brown. But there was some kind of Eastern European aspect around his eyes and cheekbones, something a little exotic about his eyebrows. So her grandmother had friends. That was good.
Maisie stood and yawned. Was she tired enough to sleep again? She had a horrible feeling that if she did she would be awake at around three a.m. It hardly mattered really. So what if she was up at odd hours for a few nights? All she had to do here was sort out her grandmother’s clutter. This time she would turn out all the lights to discourage the visits of local Reverends.
She was in the kitchen, her hand just falling away from the light switch, when she heard…what was it? Footsteps? But light, gliding footsteps. Perhaps not footsteps at all. She froze where she was, her body tense as she listened. She had almost managed to convince herself that she had heard nothing when the sound came again. This time she could pinpoint it as being somewhere beyond the grotty laundry window.
“Now, Maisie,” she said, under her breath. “This is a new place – you don’t know what’s a normal noise and what isn’t.” It could be the wind. Or a cat. Or a…
Suddenly, a scratch on the glass. Despite herself, she let out a little yelp of fright. She ran away from the noise, towards her grandmother’s bedroom, burrowed under the covers and tried to compose herself. So it was a spooky noise. It didn’t necessarily follow that it had a spooky cause. She remembered as a teenager a Danish exchange student had stayed with them for a month. On the first night he had freaked out and woken the whole household after hearing strange, light footsteps on the roof and a sinister growling. What he had imagined as a dark, diabolic figure running lithely from rooftop to rooftop in search of…souls? children’s eyes?…was, in fact, the humble possum which had lived in their roof forever. This was just the Solgreve equivalent of a possum in the roof.
And anyway, she found that with the covers over her ears, she could hear nothing but her breath and the beating of her own heart.
CHAPTER THREE
Though he was loath to admit it, Reverend Fowler was afraid of Lester Baines. The big man sat across from him, all meaty forearms and ill-fitting clothes, looking like a criminal. Which was exactly what he was.
“Rev, don’t worry. I have sources all over the place – something will turn up soon.”
“But you mustn’t take unnecessary risks. Nobody must know.”
Lester twisted his lips into a kind of smile. “Hey, give me some credit. Haven’t I been doing this for you for ten years?”
That was true, taking away the short stretches Lester had spent in prison for various minor misdemeanours. But Reverend Fowler found it difficult to trust someone who could so blithely drive from one end of the country to the other with a body in the boot of his car.
Lester was on his feet now, looking around the office, picking up framed photographs and inspecting them. He always did this, and it always made Reverend Fowler nervous. The big man was just so confident, as if nothing frightened him. In contrast, the Reverend was painfully aware of his own physical weakness – he had ever been a small man – and of his own inability to be calm. He felt like a bird, tiny delicate heart beating frantically just in the business of living, while Lester was a deep-sea turtle. Which meant that in ordinary circumstances the crook would outlive him a hundredfold. But ordinary circumstances did not apply in Solgreve.
“You mind me asking something, Rev?”
He did mind. Lester always asked the same question. “What is it?”
“Why is it a nice bloke like you…I mean, you’re a priest, yeah?”
Reverend Fowler shrugged, turned his palms upwards.
Lester came back to his chair, leaned forward on the ugly desk and asked earnestly, “What do you do with the bodies?”
“Lester, you know I can’t tell you.”
“But you seem like such a nice geezer.”
“I am a nice…geezer. I’ve made a study of being so. It’s my job.”
“The two don’t go together – you being so soft and then paying me to snatch bodies from morgues.”
Even though nobody could hear them, Reverend Fowler felt the urge to shush him. If he had his way, they wouldn’t discuss the hows and whys of this project. Lester would come to him, take his money, then return in a week or two weeks with t
he necessary goods. But Lester was chatty, and the Reverend was too intimidated by him to try to shut him up. Another man might be able to be aloof, professionally cold, even arrogant. But Reverend Fowler was not that man.
“I serve a power greater than myself,” he said simply. “That is all I can say.”
Lester ran immense hands over his stubbly head. “I’ll never understand you, Rev. Still, I like working for you.” He pulled his massive body up to its full height and yawned immodestly. “I’ll have something for you in a week or two, yeah?”
“Thank you, Lester. And I can count on your discretion?” One of his greatest fears was that Lester would gossip among his friends about the business here in Solgreve, about the kindly priest who ordered the occasional corpse.
Lester nodded. “Of course you can,” he said, patting his jacket pocket. “You’ve paid for it.”
Maisie was discovering the delights of attempting to shower under an alternately freezing gush or scalding trickle when the telephone rang the next morning. She quickly twisted off the taps, grabbed a towel, and dashed to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Good morning. It’s Perry Daniels.”
“Oh, hi.” She heard the nasal twang of her accent for the first time in comparison with Perry Daniels’s perfect English pronunciation.
“How was your trip?”
“Traumatic.”
“Yes, it’s a long way. But the phone is connected now, which is good. I tried to call once or twice last night without much luck. I do apologise. I had organised for it to be working when you arrived but these things can be unreliable.”
“It’s fine.” There it was again. Foine. How had she managed to get through her life so far talking like this? She had to work on her vowel sounds.
“Now, do you know how long you’ll be staying?”
Maisie turned and looked around the untidy room. It could take years. “That depends on how homesick I get. I intend to sort out my grandmother’s stuff at least. My return flight is booked for the fourteenth of February, but I don’t know if I’ll make it that far.”
“If you stay that long, you’ll probably see some snow.”
Snow. Her mind filled with fairytale pictures of winter wonderlands. Perhaps that would be worth staying for, especially compared to the oppressive summer waiting for her back home.
“I’ll let you know in plenty of time when I’m going back to Australia.”
“Good, because we’ll have to decide what to do with the property. In any case, Maisie, enjoy your stay. Don’t hesitate to phone me if I can help you in any way.”
“Thanks. I will.”
She was slightly relieved to hang up on that posh voice. Back home she had always considered herself well-spoken. Don’t tell me I’m getting homesick already. She dialled Adrian’s number. At least not homesick for Brisbane. That would be too tragic.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is that Adrian Lapidea, the famous opera singer?” The name was a joke. Adrian’s real surname was Stone, but given that most opera stars were Spanish or Italian, she sometimes used the Latin translation to tease him.
“Maisie! God, I’m so glad you called. You’ve been gone for two days.”
“I tried to call last night – yesterday morning your time – but the phone hadn’t been connected.”
“Listen, I’ve got a rehearsal in twenty-five minutes. I’m literally just walking out the door.”
Maisie felt her heart sink. “But I haven’t spoken to you in so long.”
“I’ll phone when I get back around eleven. I have the number here from the fax the solicitor sent you.”
“This is going to cost us a fortune in phone calls, isn’t it?”
“We’ll manage. One other thing – it was so weird, but on the way back from dropping you at the airport I stopped in town and I ran into Sarah Ellis. Do you remember her?”
“Was she one of those two sisters who were in the choir you used to sing with? The hippy girls?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What’s weird about seeing her?”
“Her sister, Cathy, the red-haired one, moved to York in September. She’s studying medieval archaeology at the university there.”
“Really?”
“You liked her, didn’t you? I mean, they were both friendly enough girls.”
“She’s okay. Why?”
“I got her phone number for you, in case you get lonely. It seemed like too much of a coincidence not to exploit it. York’s not far from where you are and I’d be much happier if I knew you had some company.”
Maisie scratched around for a pen and paper. She doubted that she would actually call Cathy Ellis, but as Adrian had gone to the trouble of getting the number she may as well write it down. “Go ahead.”
Adrian dictated the number. “Sarah seemed to think she’d be happy to hear from you. Apparently she’s been a bit lonely.”
“Whatever. I might call her.”
“I have to go, darling. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She was unprepared for how devastating the click at the other end of the phone could be. Tears sprung to her eyes. “Shit,” she said, “shit, shit, shit.” He was just so far away. She took a deep breath. She would not cry. Crying would solve nothing.
She took her towel back to the bathroom – whose idea had it been to paint the walls salmon pink with navy trim? – then went to the bedroom to get dressed and pack her things away. She found a tube of Pringles that she had bought while waiting at Kings Cross for the train, and they seemed just the thing to have for breakfast given she hadn’t found the toaster yet.
Maisie crammed some chips into her mouth and pulled the wardrobe door open with a creak. As she had suspected, the wardrobe was overflowing with more clutter. About two dozen dresses hung there with four or five coats, old clothes folded up in the bottom, shoes crowded in anywhere. This was going to be more difficult than she thought. But then, if she had been close to or fond of her grandmother, she might feel obliged to keep everything. Instead, she could simply package it all up and take it to Oxfam. One by one she pulled down the dresses and piled them near the bedroom door. She hung up her own clothes and was so satisfied with her work that she started on the chest of drawers.
Sybill’s underwear, cardigans, wool blouses and skirts were haphazardly folded among what smelled like decades-old soap and perfumed drawer liners. Maisie pulled it all out. In the bottom drawer she found a small jewellery box: bits and pieces of junky jewellery and old keys. Maybe she should hold on to one or two of these things for her mother, as a keepsake. No, that made no sense. The animosity there was too old and too deep, and besides, Maisie wanted to get the place cleared of as much clutter as she could as soon as possible so that she could live here comfortably. In that respect she was the same as her mother – she liked things to be tidy. She kept what looked valuable and threw the rest on the pile.
She filled the drawers with her own things, lined up her toiletries on top of the chest, then stopped to put on a bit of make-up when she saw how sickly she looked in the mirror. Jetlag was not a girl’s kindest fashion accessory.
As she was sliding her suitcases under the bed, an old hatbox edged out. Curious, Maisie opened it. It was full of half-written short stories, scraps of poetry, pencil sketches and designs. The few lines of poetry Maisie glanced at were desperately bad, but the drawings were excellent which surprised her; like her mother, Maisie was capable of drawing nothing more complex than stick figures.
Maisie closed the box and reorganised under the bed so her suitcases could fit. This was fun – she was learning about her grandmother. Sybill wore bright colours, she was creative, she had at least two friends – a handsome young man and a rich lady who caught cabs from Whitby to see her – and she was very, very untidy. Already, Maisie was sensing that Sybill might be eccentric, which would go some of the way towards explaining why Janet was so at odds with her. Some of the way, but not all
of the way.
Maisie stripped the linen off the bed and prepared to change it. Kind of creepy to think that her grandmother had slept among these sheets before she had died. In fact, Maisie couldn’t know for sure that the old woman hadn’t died in her bed and lain there for a few days before anyone had found her. Last night she had been too tired to worry about things like that, but now it seemed urgent, ghastly. She turned the mattress over and took the sheets, pillowslips and quilt cover to the laundry. At the foot of her bed was a large chest, where Maisie expected to find more linen. She flipped it open.
A layer of red silk covered the contents. Maisie lifted it back and was surprised to find no linen. Instead, a bizarre collection of objects. A bronze dish with scorch marks inside, a brass cup, an incense holder, spare sticks of incense wrapped in plastic, candles, a mortar and pestle, a silver-handled knife, a long, grey robe. As she moved further into the chest, she found books of moon and tide charts, tables listing elements, types of rocks and flowers, a mirror wrapped in black velvet, and pouches of white linen tied with string, holding stones, dried herbs, seeds. The tarot cards were merely the confirmation of her suspicion. Her grandmother was a practising witch.
Maisie laughed out loud. Was this it? Was this what her mother’s warning was about? Janet Fielding had always been suspicious of anything that she couldn’t see and bully into her service. Immediately, though, Maisie was overcome by a sense of sadness. Had Janet and Sybill really ended their relationship over this? Surely the mother-daughter bond of love was stronger than superstition and prejudice.
But she knew Janet.
“Oh, Mum. What were you thinking?” she said as she rummaged further in the chest. She found an old exercise book and flipped it open. The pages were filled with more tables and lists. The date of the first page was June 1960, the last was just months ago in April, and four blank pages followed it. She had never managed to finish the book. Maisie flicked through it. No personal information, just dispassionately noted magical properties and times. The final item in the chest was a large, inlaid, wooden box. It contained a collection of scrolls nestled in black velvet, with stones and herbs and dried petals accompanying them. Each scroll was made of homemade paper and tied with a black ribbon. She unrolled the scrolls one by one to read them. A simple line was inscribed upon each.
