by Kim Wilkins
“No problem. I’m going into business for myself.”
“Doing what?”
“Telling fortunes.”
A long silence. Maisie felt further away from Adrian than she had ever felt. Obviously, he couldn’t bring himself to express his opinion about her new scheme, just as she couldn’t tell him about the momentous decision she was facing right now. They were suddenly strangers.
“Adrian?” she said after a while. “This is an expensive way to give me the silent treatment. I take it you’re not happy with my choice of career.”
“Not happy? I’m horrified.”
“Horrified? That’s a strong word.”
“Maisie,” he said slowly, “your mother told me stuff about your grandmother. I’d be happy if you didn’t want anything to do with her legacy.”
“Mum really got to you, didn’t she?”
“No, Maisie, if you’d heard what I heard…”
“Go on then, tell me.”
He proceeded to tell her, in a whisper, about some kind of weird seance Janet had witnessed when she was a child. Maisie listened carefully, not liking what she heard but determined not to let it affect her decision. When he had finished she said, “But Mum might have been exaggerating.”
“She didn’t act like she was exaggerating. She was really freaked out when she was telling me.”
“I won’t be doing seances. I’ll just be reading fortunes.” She could hear the flap on the mail-slot snap.
“Maisie, you know you’re not that kind of person, not really. You’ve never been into that alternative stuff. It’s one of the reasons you never liked Cathy and Sarah.”
“But I’m really good at it.” And I love it, she wanted to say, but she could sense Adrian wouldn’t want to hear that.
“Let’s not talk about this now.”
Good idea. She had too much else on her mind.
“Maisie,” Adrian continued, “I want you to think about whether you want us to get married when you get home.”
“Is this a proposal?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Sure, I’ll think about it.” She had a sudden vision of herself on her wedding day, pledging herself until death do them part to Adrian, looking into his eyes and knowing that she had been unfaithful to him. It was going to haunt her forever, wasn’t it? Every important moment in her relationship with Adrian was going to be tainted by this. Wedding anniversaries, birthdays and Christmases, the birth of their first child – all the key moments were going to jolt her conscience. Her heart contracted with pity for Adrian. He deserved better. If she weren’t so selfish she’d tell him now, get it over with, let him break it off with her. But she was selfish, she knew she was. She felt so overwhelmed that she groaned.
“It’s not that bad, is it?” Adrian asked. “The idea of marrying me isn’t so bad?”
“Of course not. I was just thinking about organising a wedding. And my mother. She’ll boss us around.”
“We can do it however you want. We can go to a registry office while nobody’s looking.”
“Let’s discuss all of this when I get home.”
“Not long now.”
“No, not long.” Mila had entered the room and was hovering nearby, doing a bad impersonation of somebody who wasn’t listening in. Maisie turned her back on her. “It must be late over there,” she said.
“Yes, I’d better get to bed. I’ve got my score here for Il Trovatore.”
“Exciting. Better than a girlfriend.”
“Not quite, but close,” Adrian said, without a glimmer of humour. Maisie smiled to herself.
“Well, goodnight, sweetheart,” he said.
“I’ll see you soon.” She hung up and turned back to Mila.
“Was that your boyfriend?” Mila asked.
“Yes. He just proposed.”
“And you said…?”
“I haven’t answered. You know, it’s like a bloody arranged marriage. My parents found him for me, they’ll set us up in a house if I do what they say, I’ll probably be obliged to name my firstborn after one of them.”
Mila smiled, and held out an envelope. “This arrived.”
Maisie took it from her. The address was handwritten but there was no sender information on the back.
“I’ll be off tomorrow,” Mila said casually as Maisie picked open the envelope.
“You’re going?” she said, looking up startled. She couldn’t leave now. Maisie needed her.
“Yes, I’ve got to move my things out of the house I’m renting. The owners are back from France on the weekend.” She checked her watch. “I’m going for a walk. Would you like to come?”
Maisie shook her head, trying to control her anger and fear. How could Mila leave her in this mess? How did she expect Maisie to solve anything when she was so new at all this psychic stuff?
“Well then. I’ll see you in an hour or so.” Mila slipped out the front door. A blast of cold air rushed in but was soon shut out again. Maisie wandered into her bedroom and dropped down on the unmade bed, lay on her stomach and buried her face in Sacha’s pillow. It was rich with the scent of him. She breathed it deeply. She had never felt so helpless. Sacha wanted to try to find Georgette’s remains, extract her soul, and go after Dr Flood. Every thought of it horrified her. And it was Mila who was keeping the pressure on the hardest, telling her over and over that it was her “path”. This kind of thing was supposed to happen to people better-equipped than Maisie Fielding; she was far too ordinary to deal with such a huge responsibility.
But what of the people in the ground? Already Mila had corrected her on that. They weren’t people, they were souls, which made it infinitely worse. A person may live in ignorance, but a soul knows where it is supposed to be. And no soul is supposed to be trapped in the earth in Solgreve.
Maisie flipped over on her back and held the envelope in front of her face. She tipped it up and a letter fell out. She unfolded it and started to read.
You are in great danger. If you have not left Solgreve by the 31st of January, the hooded ghosts whom you have already seen will be instructed to kill you. Please, please, leave the village immediately. From a concerned citizen. PS. Please, do not mention this letter to anyone. They are all in on it.
“What the…?” She read it again. Who had written this? Did she have an ally in the community? She looked at the back of the envelope again. Definitely no return address. On the front, though, she noticed that the first letter of her surname had been over-written. She peered at it. Yes, somebody had definitely written an “F” over some other original first letter. Was it an “H”? She remembered Reverend Fowler accidentally calling her Miss Hartley, getting her name confused with her grandmother’s.
“Reverend, you old sweetie.” Still, it didn’t mean that he was going to help her beat Flood and let all the wrinklies in the village die. Probably quite the opposite, but it was comforting all the same.
She dropped the envelope and letter next to her and closed her eyes to think. The 31st of January – that was Monday night. It was already Thursday. She had about four and a half days to rid the village of an evil that had been practised here for centuries. She repressed a desperate laugh.
“Okay,” she said to the ceiling. “Okay. I’ll go dig her up.”
Maisie withheld revealing her decision until later that night. She was angry at Mila, and even a little at Sacha who seemed to think it was reasonable that his mother leave when she was needed the most.
After Mila had gone to bed, Maisie sat, staring into the fire, contemplating her fate.
“What’s wrong?” Sacha asked.
Maisie tilted her head towards Mila’s room. “She’s deserting us.”
“She thinks she’s doing the right thing.”
“Yeah, it’s my ‘path.’ Not hers. Sounds like a cop-out.”
“My mother doesn’t take such things lightly.”
Maisie bit her tongue. The last thing she needed was to get Sacha offside.
<
br /> “I’ve decided what to do. I think.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll dig her up. If you’ll help me, that is.”
“Of course I’ll help you. I feel just as responsible as you do for solving this problem.”
“But there are a few obstacles in our way.”
“Such as?”
“We don’t know if Edward actually buried her like she asked him. There might be nothing left of her. And the rosebushes down the back aren’t two hundred years old.”
He smiled. “You forget, I know these gardens well. I was here the day the old rosebush was removed. By then it was just thorny branches growing out of control. I know exactly where Georgette’s buried. Directly under the laundry window.”
Maisie nodded. “Okay, but once we find her – if we find her – I don’t fully understand the process for extracting her soul. The soul must be trapped where the practitioner can see its light – what does that mean?”
“We’ll have to have a closer look at Virgil’s letter. We’ve still got a week up our sleeves.”
She shook her head. She handed the Reverend’s letter to Sacha. “This came today. I think it’s from Reverend Fowler.”
Sacha quickly scanned the letter then handed it back. “Jesus, Maisie, my life was a lot less complicated before I met you.”
“So we’ll have to do it…”
“This weekend. I’ll bring a pick and shovel back with me tomorrow.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Are you sure the Reverend wrote it?”
“Not absolutely sure.”
“So we can’t go to him for help.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m up to this,” Sacha said, then fell silent. Maisie felt the same but didn’t say so.
After a long silence, Maisie said, “Adrian asked me to marry him today.”
“Did you say yes?”
“I said I’d think about it. Do you think I should say yes?”
“It’s none of my business. Not really.”
Maisie knew she was deliberately goading him, seeing if he’d get jealous. The tightening of his jaw was her reward. He turned away, opened the iron box and re-read Virgil’s letter. Maisie watched him.
“Any ideas?”
“Let’s think about it,” Sacha said. “Where can you see the soul’s light?”
“I don’t know. In heaven? In the dark?”
“Maybe that’s too symbolic. Let’s be more literal. He says you need a vessel.”
“A vessel you can see into.”
Sacha nodded. “Glass?”
“Yes. Yes, that makes sense.”
Sacha stood. From the top of the bookshelf he pulled down one of Sybill’s antique lanterns – black iron and discoloured glass – and brushed the dust off it. He held it out to her. “Shall we try it?”
“We have to try something.”
“Tomorrow night, then?”
“Tomorrow night.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Mila left in a flurry of apologies and promises at seven the next morning. Already a sea breeze was teasing the treetops. It promised to be a cold day, and an even colder night.
She was to spend the day in meditation Mila had said. But it was hard to turn off the chatter in her head. She was frightened. Simple and understandable. Flood had been practising his magic in the village since the sixteenth century and nobody had managed to stop him yet. In fact, he had a pretty good record of getting rid of those who tried. When she had expressed these concerns to Mila, her reassurance had been that Maisie was the first with the right combination of information and psychic power. This, Mila said, was Maisie’s destiny.
But then Mila had got in the van and left.
“One thing at a time,” Maisie said to herself as she lay down on her bed next to a napping Tabby. If she could just get through tonight, then she would worry about the rest. The Wraiths weren’t coming after her until the thirty-first according to the Reverend’s letter. No-one ought to be scared of digging in the garden.
Sacha was sent home from work early again. He let himself in just after three. When Maisie greeted him she noticed tiny white spots on his black jacket.
“It’s snowing?” she asked.
“Yes. Not heavily enough to stop us, just enough to make the whole venture unpleasant.”
“When shall we do it?”
“We’ll wait for full dark.” He glanced quickly out the window. Twilight was approaching. The wind blew tiny snowflakes against the glass. “The later the better. If anyone drives down the bottom of the street they may see us out there.”
“It’s not the kind of night I want to be out of doors.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Everything will be fine. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You can still change your mind.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. You know I can’t. There are souls trapped forever in the ground. What happens to them? My grandmother is among them.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, stealing her breath from her lips. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just get through tonight.”
At ten o’clock, Maisie ran an extension lead out the laundry door and set up a lamp for illumination in the dark. The wind battered her ears, light snow swirled in frigid gusts. She was wearing so many layers of clothes she could barely move her arms.
Sacha fetched two spades and a pick from the van. He handed her a spade and laid the pick on the ground. “Perhaps we’d be better off doing this without the light on. Our eyes will get used to the dark quickly, and we’ve got at least a metre to get through before we can expect to find anything. I don’t want to draw any attention to what we’re doing.”
“Okay,” Maisie said, crouching to turn the light off.
“We’ll turn it back on when we get deeper. By then it should be nearly midnight. I’m sure nobody in Solgreve is up at midnight.”
Maisie stood and held the spade out in front of her. “Shall we get started?”
“Sure.”
Simultaneously, they plunged their spades into the earth.
The evening was far too cold for a community meeting. The Reverend was annoyed that Margaret King and her lynch mob had rejected his invitation to meet him personally in his heated office during daylight. Clearly she had a keen sense of drama; she wanted the whole town there to hear the showdown.
The Reverend rose, clutching the back of his chair to steady himself. Everyone in the hall looked up. He waited a few moments for the last remnants of conversation to subside. The wind howled over the gutters and forced its way through cracks in the wood. He shivered.
“I wanted to speak with you,” he started. He realised his voice was too tremulous, too feeble, and cleared his throat with purpose. “I wanted to speak with you about Miss Fielding.”
Raised eyebrows and smirks across the room. Walter King said, “What about her?”
“I want you to reconsider your decision about what should be done. The deadline is only a few days away and I think we should –”
“Reverend, Douglas Smith died because of her.” This was Margaret. She had just dyed her hair and it was brassy orange under the fluorescent light.
“No. No that’s not the case. I can’t tell you for certain how it happens that some of us die younger than others, but I assure you there is nothing that anybody from outside can do that could –”
“Rubbish!” snorted Walter King. A few others echoed his anger.
“She is not Sybill Hartley,” the Reverend said, trying to keep his voice even and strong. “She is an innocent young woman. Do you want her death on your consciences?”
A few moments of quiet conversation among the circle. With surprise, the Reverend noticed that Dr Honour had pulled himself to his feet.
“Reverend, my sister’s grandson is finishing a master’s degree in theology in Nottingham.”
The Reverend was bewildered. “What? I don’t se
e what this has to do with…”
Margaret King clapped her hands together loudly. “Yes, perhaps that’s what we need in Solgreve – somebody new and fresh in the church.” She turned to the Reverend. “How do you feel about retiring, Linden? I don’t know if you’re equal to the responsibility any more.”
“I…” the Reverend started. “What are you saying?”
“My great-nephew might be willing to take up the post here if you feel you’re no longer able to serve the village,” Dr Honour said.
A mutiny. That’s what this was. That’s why Margaret King had wanted a community meeting. The question of his successor had always been a thorny one. He had never married, had no brothers or sisters. He always knew he would be the last Fowler to preside here in Solgreve, but had so far deferred making a decision about training a replacement. Guilt, perhaps? To explain what happened here in Solgreve was to acknowledge his complicity.
So, should he give in? Let them run him out of his job, perhaps even out of the village? It seemed an easy solution. But he had spent too many years of his life in the certain knowledge that he was destined to perform this task until the day he died. It had been in his family for centuries. Just because he was the last Fowler didn’t mean he should allow himself to be the least.
“I am able to serve the village,” the Reverend said emphatically.
“Then comply with our wishes,” Tony Blake said.
“Yes, yes,” the Reverend said. “I shall go to him tomorrow and make sure he knows.”
“And no more of this shrinking from your duty,” said Margaret imperiously. “We look to you to be a strong leader, not a mouse.”
The meeting broke up shortly after. The Reverend sagged in his chair, waiting for everyone to leave. One or two gave him an encouraging word and Tony Blake patted his shoulder. The hall slowly emptied. He stared at his hands in his lap. They were so old, he was so old. But apart from the occasional twinge in his joints, he was as healthy as a horse. No heart problems, no lung problems; liver, kidneys, bladder, all in good order. It was unnatural. He recoiled, suddenly seeing himself as an unnatural being, some distant variation of what Flood had become. If he had been born into a different family, would he be dead already? Dead and on his way to whatever Afterlife was set out for him? In a way, he was just as trapped as all those others, all the souls held at a distance from their true destiny…
