Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  The cigarette had quickly burnt down to a stump, and she placed it tip-down in the ashtray and ground it out, her knuckles whitening against the brown skin. She looked up at me through narrowed eyes. Her eyeshadow was smeared and mascara had found its way onto her cheeks. Still, she was enchanting to look at.

  ‘Did he tell you that they accused them of being witches?’

  I nodded, unable to say anything.

  ‘Did he tell you that the villagers thought they’d put a hex on the village and that’s why so many people caught the plague and died? Did he tell you that they said my ancestors—Sarah and Elspeth, they were called—didn’t get the plague because they used the devil’s magic to protect themselves?’ As she spoke, she made little curlicues in the air with her fingers, but her voice was bitter.

  ‘Tell me about them. Your ancestors. What else do you know about them?’

  Janet sighed. ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It was important to me to find out as much about Mally as I could. Janet tapped her fingers on the tabletop for a few seconds, drumming out a rhythm. Then she stopped.

  ‘They were only young—both in their early twenties—and Sarah had a child, a daughter called Alice. Only four years old, she was. They came from Derbyshire, from a village that had quarantined itself. Cut itself off from the world, on the instructions of the rector.’

  ‘Mally told me that. He said that Sarah and Elspeth escaped.’

  ‘They did. They fled in the middle of the night, them and Alice, and they walked for days until they came here. Nobody knows why they chose this village. There’s nothing about that in the papers my mother left me. It was all written down, you see? After the event. It was all put down on paper. Evidence.

  ‘Anyway, at first, they were welcomed here, by the men at least. Two young women, single and unattached—and they were lookers as well, by all accounts—turning up out of the blue. Why wouldn’t they be welcomed?’

  ‘But they brought the plague with them.’

  Janet shifted in her seat. ‘That’s what they all said. Who knows, it could have come from somewhere else; there were merchants and drovers and all sorts going backwards and forwards in those days. But not long after Sarah and Elspeth and Alice arrived, the rumours started.

  ‘Rumours that they were witches?’

  Janet nodded. She plucked another cigarette from the packet and held it between her fingers, unlit.

  ‘Apparently, it started out with just a few of the women, speculating about why so many folk suddenly caught the plague, and why it had started just after Sarah and Elspeth arrived. It’s my guess that they didn’t like the fact that their men were having their heads turned by these newcomers, and put the word out as a way of getting their own back. But you know what these places are like; once a rumour starts it soon spreads.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘They came for them in the middle of the night, that’s what happened. Not just the women; the menfolk as well. Said they were witches, and that they would pay a heavy price. They formed a mob and they took them from their beds and they dragged the three of them—Sarah, Elspeth and Alice—down to the stream.’

  Behind me, I could hear the kettle making the first noises of boiling, the sound of tiny fizzing bubbles rising to the surface.

  ‘The stream?’

  Janet nodded. ‘There’s a part where it gets deep, down past the bridge, next to the oak tree.’

  I pictured myself bathing, enjoying the touch of the water against my skin.

  ‘Why did they take them to the stream?’

  When she said it, Janet’s voice was matter-of-fact.

  ‘To drown them.’

  The bubbling sound from the kettle was getting louder.

  ‘To drown them? The villagers drowned them for being witches?’

  ‘That’s what they wanted to do. They tried to make them confess first, of course. They held Sarah under the water until she was almost dead, and then they brought her out again. But she wouldn’t confess, wouldn’t say she was a witch.’

  ‘What else did the villagers do?’

  Janet stood up, the chair scraping on the tiles. She took her time to push it in under the table and then she stood behind it with her hands resting on the chair back, the unlit cigarette dangling between two fingers. She leant forwards and I could see the curve of a breast again where her dressing gown gaped.

  ‘They drowned Alice.’

  ‘Alice? The little girl?’

  The kettle had started to make a low whining sound. Janet nodded slowly.

  ‘They drowned Alice to get Sarah to confess. Four years old she was. Four. Can you imagine that? Drowning a four-year-old?’

  Without warning, her face changed. The skin around her eyes and her jowls sagged. She seemed to grasp the meaning of what she’d said as suddenly as I did. She looked away from me, down at the tabletop. She bunched the fabric of her dressing gown around her, covering herself up, and when she spoke, she did so without looking at me, keeping her eyes firmly on the Formica.

  ‘They drowned Alice and then they drowned Sarah.’

  The kettle screamed and Janet moved quickly behind me to turn it off. I felt the steam against the back of my neck.

  ‘What about Elspeth?’

  Janet only paused for a moment before she took in a deep breath and replied in a brisk voice.

  ‘Elspeth got away. She managed to escape from them and she ran away and hid. Again, she walked for days to another village, a village where no-one knew her or what had been said about her and she settled there and had a family.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.

  ‘She wrote it down. Elspeth wrote it all down and passed it on to her daughter, who passed it on to hers, and so on. When my mother thought I was old enough to know about it, she passed it on to me.’

  There was a thump and Mally appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He looked like he’d just woken up: his hair was flattened against one side of his head and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He had sunglasses on, despite the gloom of the kitchen, and I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

  ‘Cosy,’ he said, nodding at the pair of us. He had something in his hand, something that looked like a pack of playing cards, which he slid into the back pocket of his jeans.

  He walked behind me and I heard a cupboard click open. Then the squelch of the fridge door and the clank of mugs. I didn’t turn around.

  Mally put a teapot on the table in front of me. A bottle of milk appeared, sugar in a pot and then three teaspoons landed with a clatter. He put a couple of teabags in the teapot and then appeared again with the kettle. He leant over me, the kettle inches from my face, the heat from the metal radiating onto my cheek. He poured boiling water over the teabags.

  ‘What have you two been talking about then, eh?’ The smell from his skin was sour and musky and animal. I breathed in greedily before he moved away.

  ‘I was just telling Nif what happened to Sarah and Elspeth and Alice.’

  Mally nodded slowly and went and stood behind his mother. Janet picked up my mother’s lighter and there was a tiny spark and then a flame flickered. The lines appeared around her mouth again, etched in deeper as she inhaled. Mally put one hand on her shoulder and I watched as he pressed, his fingers making the skin on her collarbone grow white against the tanned flesh. Janet breathed out the smoke, and started toying with her cigarette, rolling it and tapping it over the ashtray.

  ‘And?’ he said, his eyes still blank behind the sunglasses.

  ‘And what?’ I countered.

  ‘What do you think? About us? About our ancestors? Everyone round here…disapproves of us. What about you?’

  My eyes followed his hand as it moved down, the long fingers still pressing, but now on the soft flesh at the top of Janet’s breast. His fingers disappeared beneath the fabric of her dressing gown. Janet had turned her face and was looking up at him, her face soft and adoring.

  In one swift m
ovement, Mally took his hand away and plucked the cigarette from his mother’s fingers. He held the butt in his finger and thumb and rolled it around before putting it in his mouth. He sucked hungrily, and when he blew out the smoke, it filled the space between me and them, and for a moment they were faded, caught behind a veil.

  ‘Come on, Nif. We’re waiting.’ He was challenging me.

  ‘OK then. I think you’re weird, if you really want to know. I think you’re really weird for wanting to live in a shit place like this, where nothing ever happens and everyone hates you. Why do they despise you so much for something that happened hundreds of years ago?’

  Neither of them said anything at first. Then Janet coughed and cleared her throat. She took the cigarette from Mally gently, as if silently requesting permission, and when she spoke her voice was quiet, not much louder than a whisper.

  ‘It’s about revenge, simple as that.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s about the children being made to pay for the sins of their forefathers.’

  I looked at her face for clues. Who were the children and who were the forefathers? Were the villagers trying to avenge their predecessors who had died from the plague? Or were Janet and Mally trying to get back at the descendants of the people who had drowned their ancestors—who had drowned a four-year-old girl?

  I couldn’t help it. My eyes were drawn to the herbs hanging from the ceiling and the shelf with the brown glass bottles. Even before I said it, I knew how ridiculous it was going to sound.

  ‘And were they witches? Your ancestors, Sarah and Elspeth. Were they witches?’

  Janet snorted. ‘Witches? Who believes in witches these days?’

  ‘The people who go to the chapel certainly do. Mr Beynon and Mr Vaughan and all the others. They think your ancestors were…’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the word evil. ‘They think your ancestors were up to no good and because of that, they think you’re doing the same. I’ve seen them, with their cleansing rituals and their witch marks on your gatepost.’

  Janet sniffed. ‘It’s not as easy as that. It’s not a question of good and bad or anything as cut and dried as that. It’s…it’s a question of what you believe in. Where your faith lies.’ She looked up at Mally and then back at me.

  ‘There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of religions in the world. All of them have their own beliefs and philosophies, their own structures and rituals. The chapel-goers here have a belief in their god that they think allows them to take the moral high ground. They think theirs is the only religion that should be allowed to exist and that all the others are…illegitimate.’

  She paused for a second to take a drag on the cigarette.

  ‘Now, take your mother. She lost her faith in her god after your sister died, but that doesn’t mean she can’t believe in something else. She can be more…flexible about what she believes in. It’s a case of picking and choosing, of finding the path that’s right for you. Isn’t that right, Mally?’ She looked up at him again and he nodded.

  He reached round and took the pack of cards from his pocket, and that’s when I saw that it wasn’t a pack of cards, but a stack of photos, Polaroids, like the ones I’d seen on his bedroom wall. Like the ones he’d taken of me by the plague cross and at the stream. He started shuffling them, as if they really were just a pack of playing cards.

  ‘And who are you to judge?’ he said, and I still couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. ‘What about you and the Creed, eh? How is that any different from the things other people believe in?’

  I looked quickly at Janet and there was no sign of surprise or interest on her face. He’d already told her. I felt another rush of heat up my neck. All the time he kept on shuffling.

  ‘You’re just a little girl who’s angry because her sister’s died and you want to blame everyone else. You’ve made up this stupid thing, with relics and incantations and shit like that. It’s bollocks, the lot of it. If you really want to get revenge, you need to know how to do it properly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Mally fanned the Polaroids out face down in his hand and offered them to me.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Take one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pick a card, any card. But don’t look at it.’ I hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Humour me. Mally the Marvellous, remember?’

  I felt stupid, but I reached out and took a card from the middle of the pack.

  ‘The thing is, Nif, you’re just a little girl playing with things you don’t know anything about. You’re just a kid. It won’t be long before you go back to school and it’ll be like these last couple of weeks never happened.’ The thought of going back to school stung.

  ‘But you said we were the same,’ I said. ‘You said that we needed to stick together, that we were both outsiders and needed to form an allegiance.’ I could hear the wheedling in my voice and felt the tears prickle the backs of my eyes and I hated myself for it.

  ‘That’s shit, Nif. You just seemed like someone who needed to get laid and so I obliged.’ Mally took his sunglasses off and his eyes looked more deep-set and dark-smudged, and the line between his eyebrows was now etched deeper. ‘And it wasn’t easy,’ he said. His mouth was twisted into a cruel, sharp-toothed smile. ‘Take some advice from me. Try having a wash now and again, and brushing your teeth, and basic things like that. A change of clothes wouldn’t go amiss either.’

  My hand was sweaty where it clutched the Polaroid and I curled my fingers into my palm.

  ‘You can look now,’ he said, nodding at the photo in my hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on, turn it over. Look at it.’

  The paper of the Polaroid was creased where I’d been clutching it, and the edges were furled. I was still holding it like a playing card, face down on the palm of one hand, gripped between my thumb and my fingers. I knew what I was going to see when I turned it over. It was something that had always been at the back of my mind, ever since I’d seen the photos arranged on Mally’s bedroom wall. But even then, that inkling of knowledge, that foreshadowing of an idea, didn’t quite prepare me for the violence of the image.

  It was a picture of Mr Beynon, and it was similar to all the other photos I’d seen stuck to Mally’s bedroom wall. It had the same orange-brown glow to it, and it showed just the minister’s head and shoulders. He was facing the camera full on, and had his mouth open, as if castigating the person taking the photo. But there was one difference between this picture and the other Polaroids I’d seen. In this one, the minister’s eyes had been scratched out. Something sharp had been rubbed over them again and again, removing the shiny surface of the photograph and revealing the white paper beneath.

  The last thing I saw before I left was Janet, the smirk firmly in place on her lips, even as she dragged on her cigarette.

  Twenty-six.

  I found myself standing in the lane outside Mally’s house. I was holding the treasure bag with the raven’s skull and I was trembling. Almost without thinking, I’d put my hand to the back pocket of my shorts, to check that the wire was still there, and I’d been relieved to feel its powerful presence through the fabric.

  Then I saw my dad. He was standing next to the Cortina and he’d hitched the trailer back onto the car. Some of his sculpting stuff was scattered around on the parking area and I knew straight away that he was packing to go home. I knew immediately what this was. This was the end.

  When he saw me he tried to smile, but it didn’t work and he gave up.

  ‘You’re up early, Nif,’ he said, and his face had a grey tinge to it that matched the sky behind him. ‘Storm’s on its way, I think.’

  ‘Yeah. Looks like she was right.’ I couldn’t bring myself to speak Janet’s name, yet still I was testing my dad. It worked. He refused to meet my eye and shuffled his feet in the gravel, flipping the stones over with the toe of one sandal. I thought he was going to say something. He even opened his mouth but then he closed it again and wiped his hand o
ver his eyes and down his face, drawing his eyelids closed. He stood like that for a moment, his head thrown back, shoulders slumped, looking defeated and wan. Then he made a real effort to draw his shoulders up again, to open his eyes and look at me.

  ‘We need to go home, Nif. This place isn’t right for us.’ It was the simplicity of his words that did it, I think, the pure statement of fact. He didn’t even try to persuade or cajole me, and I think that was what made me just nod back at him. He was right. We weren’t welcome here.

  ‘If we crack on, we can get the trailer filled before the rain comes.’ He nodded towards the horizon which was already darker, drabber than it had been when I came out that morning, as grey as the shadows under his eyes.

  Again, I nodded, silent. I was numb. Then I had a sudden feeling of being inexplicably drawn to the plague cross. An invisible thread drew me towards it, and I knew I would acquiesce. I mumbled something to my dad and set off down the lane, still conscious of the wire in my pocket. I thought of the sisters, Sarah and Elspeth, but mostly of Alice, little four-year-old Alice who had drowned at the hands of the villagers.

  That was when I heard the first rumble of thunder.

  The cows were still in the field when I rounded the corner, and they were lying down, their skeletal ribs bulging. The air was cooler now. It was still warm, still eerily quiet, but now it was muggy as well; there was a humidity that promised change. Ahead of me stood the plague cross, taller than I remembered and more imposing. I had become used to seeing the cross at the top silhouetted against a cobalt sky, a stark shape out of the blue, but now it seemed to merge into the sky, dissolving as the grey met grey and mingled.

  I stood for a moment at the base of the plague cross and passed my fingers over one of the indentations at the base. That was when the first drop of rain hit me squarely on the nape of my neck, and then another and another, dozens of them falling suddenly across my shoulders and over my arms and bouncing off the stone. I stood at the bottom of the steps and held out my arms and surrendered myself to the rain. I threw my head back and let it fall on my face, washing my tears away and cleansing me. I stood like that for ages and when I was soaked through and my arms were aching, I sat down on the steps and hugged the treasure bag to my chest.