The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales

by Kate Mosse

  He moves slowly, pain in every step. Miette watches him and feels nothing. His body is failing him. He is old. His wounds, from war or the hunt, sing loud in the damp evening air. The scars, beneath the velvet of his robes, remind of hunting accidents and the memory of metal and spear. The crumbling of sinew and bone, eating him away from the inside out, grief or regret or anger? For eighteen years she has asked herself the same question, and received no answer. But she does not pity him. She cannot. She thinks only that he must be called to account. In Yniold’s absence, his lack of will, it falls to her.

  A daughter to avenge a mother, a less familiar story.

  Golaud places the lantern uncertainly on the edge of the well. Miette waits. It is not yet her turn to step upon the stage. Her father is muttering, talking, but so softly that she cannot distinguish one word from the next. She moves a little closer, picks out the words.

  ‘La vérité. La vérité.’

  Over and over, like a chorus refrain, the syllables bleeding one into the other and back again. Demanding the truth. The words he said to his Mélisande as she lay dying.

  Tell me the truth.

  Golaud leans forward, two twisted hands in the yellow halo of light on the grey stone of the well. Miette steps forward, in silence and without drama. For if she is to rewrite this story, it cannot be told in noise and emotion, but rather enacted with cold purpose. It is a practical ending, not a theatrical one.

  One step forward, then two. Un, deux, trois loup. Coming to get you, Mr Wolf, ready or not. A game of grandmother’s footsteps played by two lonely children, she and Yniold, in a desolate palace long ago.

  With a third silent step, she is on him.

  Now, at last, she is ready to join herself to him. A murderer for a father, a murderer for a daughter.

  As Golaud stoops forward to gaze into the blind eye of the water, Miette has the advantage of height. Thinking of Mélisande and her Pelléas, of Yniold’s mother too – dead before her time – Miette lifts the knife and, with the strength of both hands and the weight of her body, she brings the blade down between her father’s shoulders.

  He cries out, once, like an animal caught fast in the metal jaws of a trap, then nothing. She has heard it said that the soul takes flight alone and in silence. She does not know if this is true, only that he does not speak or cry out again.

  Miette relinquishes her hold on the hilt and steps back, half stumbling on the hem of her cloak beneath her heel, sodden with dew. She, too, is silent. There is nothing to say, though she wills him to turn, wishing her act of vengeance to be understood. At the same time, she does not want to see the life leaving him or her own image reflected in his dying eyes.

  Golaud falls forward, as once Pelléas had fallen. His hands slip from the wall, empty fingers scratching down the stone surface of the well, down to the ground. No crash of cymbals to mark the moment of death, no crescendo, merely justice done.

  Then, a nightjar calls, a spur to action. Taking the letter from her pocket, Miette places it upon her father’s body. The testimony of Mélisande’s daughter, eighteen years in the telling. A confession of why and how she killed her father.

  ‘La vérité,’ she whispers.

  This is the truth. Set it down, set it down.

  The truth is that stories can be rewritten. Acts of love and death.

  Miette stretches to take Golaud’s lantern from the rim of the well, taking care not to touch him, then turns to walk back through the forest. How easy, it seems, to kill a man. So easy to separate the spirit from the skin and bone?

  In the distance, the bell strikes another hour. It marks the end of one history and the beginning of another.

  Gold is the colour of loyalty. Of a duty fulfilled.

  THE REVENANT

  The Fishbourne Marshes, Sussex

  Winter 1955

  The Revenant

  When latest autumn spreads her evening veil,

  And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,

  I love to listen to the hollow sighs

  Thro’ the half leafless wood that breathes the gale.

  For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale,

  Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eyes;

  Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies

  As of night wanderers who their woes bewail!

  from Sonnet XXXII, ‘To Melancholy’

  CHARLOTTE TURNER SMITH

  I first saw her on a Thursday afternoon. She was ahead of me on the path out on the marshes, walking fast as if to keep an appointment. Her hands were dug deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. A blue belted jacket and pleated skirt, white shirt just showing above the collar and shoes suitable for pavements not mud. Seamed stockings. Later, I realised why she looked familiar and why the look of her struck a false note.

  But not then. Not that first time.

  That Thursday, I stopped, puzzled I’d not noticed her before. The path, at this point, was narrow and accessed only from Mill Lane, and though I usually walked down to the estuary in the afternoon, when I could get away, it wasn’t a popular spot. Although the lights of the lending library were visible on the far side of the field, most local people considered this area west of the Mill Pond too deserted, too overgrown and that November it had rained and rained.

  She was too far ahead for me to make out her features and, besides, she didn’t turn round. But her brown hair, visible beneath the rim of her cap, looked salon curled and from the way she moved, I thought she was about my age. That, too, stuck in my mind. Those who did come out this way were mostly old men with time on their hands, or farm workers taking a short cut across the fields to the big houses up along. Not girls in their twenties.

  I followed her along the path, in that awkward proximity of strangers. I picked up my pace, feeling my gumboots slip on the mud. Was I hoping to catch up with her? I’m not sure of anything except that she stayed precisely the same distance ahead. But when I rounded the bend in the path, she’d vanished. I stopped again, trying to work out where she’d gone. There was a trail that cut down through the reed mace to the water’s edge, white stones marking a route over the mud flats at low tide. The sea was right up, though, and not even a local would reckon you could get across. I looked behind me, in case she’d doubled back, but there was no sign of her.

  What else? An odd smell, like rotten eggs, like seaweed on the shore in summer.

  Thursday, 24th November, 1955, an afternoon like any other. My routine, in those days, rarely altered. On Monday and Thursday afternoons, I helped out in the library as a volunteer. It was a debt, of sorts. When I was growing up in Fishbourne, the library was the only place I felt was mine. We had no books to speak of at home and, besides, my stepfather didn’t think girls should waste time reading. Didn’t think they were good for anything but cooking and fetching and carrying. In the library I was let alone. No one shouted at me, nobody took the mickey. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I travelled the world in the company of Agatha Christie and Eleanor Burford and Rider Haggard, dreaming of what I’d be when I grew up. Nothing came of any of it – Harry’s trouble with the police, then the war put paid to dreams of leaving – I retained an affection for the place. So when I found myself back in Fishbourne fifteen years later, the library seemed the obvious place to offer my services. And even now, when I stepped through the big oak doors, and breathed in the familiar perfume of dust and polish, life didn’t seem so bad for an hour or two.

  That Thursday the library was closed. A burst pipe had flooded Natural Sciences and we had all been sent home. So after I’d cleared the table and the dishes were stacked and drying on the draining board, I asked our neighbour, Mrs Sadler – who came in to keep an eye on my stepfather when I was at work – if she wouldn’t mind staying on for a while anyway, so I could slip off.

  I went out by the side door, turning the handle slowly so as not to disturb him. Old habits die hard. Over the main road, quiet in the drowsy part of the afternoon, down Mi
ll Lane and out onto the estuary, where the salt marshes lay spread out like a battered old map. When we were children, my older brother forced me to climb down the bank into the muddy creek. I was scared of the filthy, tidal water, but I was more frightened of Harry’s temper, so always did what he told me. It was different when I managed to get out on my own. Then, I could kick my heels. Bright days when the sun bathed the Downs in the distance in a chill yellow light. Stormy days when black clouds scudded along the horizon, the smell of bonfires heavy in the air. The soft days of spring, when pink ragged robin and southern marsh orchids pricked the green, or the white flowers of lady’s smock, identified from the Collins Guide borrowed from the Natural History section in the pocket of my regulation school coat.

  We left Fishbourne when I was twelve, too young to understand the whispers or the way neighbours fell silent when Harry stepped into the Woolpack Inn. I knew there was talk – about him, and my stepfather too – but my mother never explained and I was too timid a girl to ask. Then Harry signed up – moment he could, couldn’t wait to get away – and went to war. Never came back. When we came back to Fishbourne, I realised there had been rumours about the pair of them, Harry and my stepfather, even before it happened. I never wanted to come back to this corner of Sussex – it rubbed it in how little I’d made of my life, to end up back where I’d started and been so unhappy – but my stepfather was insistent and my opinion wasn’t taken into account. I understand now that, as his mind started to unravel, something drew him back.

  These days there was a footbridge over the creek. Sometimes I stopped there a while, the wooden handrail greasy beneath my fingers, and told myself that, despite it all, things were better now. Pretended that time and the war had buried the past.

  Wiped the slate clean.

  For the last week of November, my stepfather’s health kept me indoors. I couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even get out to the shops. We were locked together, he and I. One of those things. I’d always been scared of him, and he’d never shown any affection for me, but now Mum was gone it fell to me to look after him. Duty, just the way it was. There was no one else. So it wasn’t until the following Thursday, December 1st, that I went back to the marshes.

  I changed into my boots as I left the library, wrapped my indoor shoes in brown paper and put them in my handbag, then set off along the same path. It was a blustery day and the gulls were shrieking out at sea. Only as I got out onto the marshes did I realise I’d been half looking out for the girl I’d seen the week before. I suppose I’d been hoping we might talk. All the women my own age were married and had children or husbands to keep them occupied. The neighbours were nice enough, to pass the time of day with in the post office or the shop, but I had no friends. I kept hoping, but there was no sign of her and, as I climbed up to the flint sea wall, I had a knot of disappointment in my stomach.

  Just someone to talk to.

  That afternoon, I walked all the way to Oak Pond, where an old rowing boat lay abandoned in the silted water, and the trees hung low. I smoked a cigarette and thought about some domestic worry or another, before turning back. I’d been gone longer than usual and so I hurried, knowing Mrs Sadler would be ready with her lips pursed and her hat and coat at the door. Four o’clock. I remember glancing at my wristwatch.

  Then, on the far side of the silent expanse of water, I saw something flash. At first, I thought it was the library, but realised it was too far over for that. A light, right out in the middle of the marshes where Cornmill House had been. In Victorian times there had been several mills on the eastern side of Fishbourne Creek, powered by wind or by the sea, though they were mostly gone now. The water cornmill and the house attached had all but burned down during the First World War and the high tides each spring had done the rest. Its black and rotting features had been a childhood landmark, a draw for brave or foolish boys to explore.

  By the time we were back in Fishbourne, it had gone. Pulled down last year, Mrs Sadler had told me. After fifteen years, it still attracted too many gawpers, too many ghouls. A shrine, of sorts. And I remembered back to how newspaper reports at the time claimed Cornmill House was being used as a rendezvous long before it became notorious. Smugglers evading the excise men, ghosts, enemy spies. It was another occasion I’d taken refuge in the library, poring over a local history book and mugging up. Drawings, maps of underground passages, rumours, I knew the history of the house backwards though I’d never been inside. My brother Harry boasted he and his friends used to go in, dare each other to stay all night. Seen writing on the walls and blood on the stairs, he’d said, smears on the glass where smugglers had kept their prisoners in the old days.

  At first, I thought he was making it up to scare me. I didn’t believe him. Later, when the police came, he denied he had ever been there. He’d only been home on leave for a few days, he said. A few pints in the Woolpack, sleeping in a proper bed, no time. But as I listened through the crack in the door and heard him wriggle like a fish on the line, I knew for certain he had been in the house at some time or another and knew the worst it had to tell. I told no one. No one asked me anyway. Harry rejoined his unit and was posted to France. His luck ran out. When he died a couple of weeks later, his secret died with him.

  Another flash, bright, gone, then another. I pulled my coat tight around me. There should not have been a light there. Another flash. A signal of some kind? The sight of it, on that cold December dusk, and the past fifteen years fell away and I was back there again in our old kitchen, with the fug from the stove and the condensation on the inside of the windows. My mother’s worn, housewife’s red hands twisting at her pinny and the look of calculation in my stepfather’s eyes as the copper questioned Harry.

  I took a deep breath, in, then out. No sense in raking it all up again. That house was gone. Harry was gone, Mum too. My stepfather no longer knew who he was. And if I had seen a light where Cornmill House used to be – and already I was no longer sure – odds on it was only someone carrying a lantern over the fields to Apuldram or to the church. Nothing iffy about it.

  All the same, I looked for the book in the library the following Monday, but it had been taken out of circulation and there was nothing else in the Local History section that caught my fancy. Besides, it was ever so busy. I had no time to think about the light on the marshes or Cornmill House. We put up the Christmas decorations. Children from the village school came to sing carols around the tree. We made paper chains.

  The nights were bad that week, though. My stepfather woke two or three times between midnight and six. A bad conscience, Mrs Sadler said, when I told her. So by the time the next Thursday came around, I was tired to my bones and tempted to go straight home from work. But, telling myself the fresh air would do me good, I set off once more along the path. A mist had come in from the sea and everything was muffled, suspended, though I could hear the suck of the tide and the call of black-headed gulls massing in the harbour. It was cold, proper December weather, and the chill seemed to soak through my woollen hat and mittens.

  I’d barely gone a few steps when I noticed the smell again, the same as a fortnight ago, though far stronger. A foul stench of rotting seaweed and mud and rust. As if something in the earth had been turned inside out. I took a few more steps, then heard something moving in the reeds alongside the path. Not a noise quite, more a shifting of the air. Though I told myself not to be silly, the nerves twisted in my stomach.

  I walked faster. The sound kept pace with me, a kind of rattling, shimmering, in the rushes to my left, then a loud crack of the reed stems underfoot, as if someone was pushing their way through towards the path. I felt a moment of blind panic, not sure where the sound was really coming from or whether it was just my imagination playing tricks on me.

  I forced myself to stop. Stood still, completely still. Now, hearing nothing. The noise had stopped and yet, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that someone was close by. I could feel it in the pricking of my skin. Hands clenched inside my mitte
ns, my palms greasy with fear, slowly I turned round. All the way round, 360 degrees, eyes staring into the white fog, but not able to make anything out. I was torn between turning back or going on. I took a few snatched steps more, the rustling in the reed mace again, the stench even stronger now. Looking around me, behind me, panic rising crawling over the surface of my skin. Was someone following me? Was there someone out here on the deserted marshes, just waiting for a girl like me to venture out on her own?

  Then, then.

  Suddenly, ahead of me on the path, was a figure, come out of nowhere. Indistinct in the mist, blocking my way. My hand flew to my mouth, stifling a scream, then a moment of relief. I gasped. It was her, it was the same woman, dressed just the same as before.

  ‘You didn’t half give me . . .’ I started to say, then I stopped. There was something not right in her silence and the way she was standing, her head down, hands hanging loose by her side.

  ‘You gave . . .’

  Then, all at once, I realised why she looked familiar. She was the spit of the girl who’d gone missing fifteen years ago. They’d run her photograph on the front page of the Observer for weeks. And, more to the point, she was wearing the same WAAF uniform – blue jacket, shirt and tie, pleated skirt, cap. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force girls, they’d been billeted all over the village during the war.

  I couldn’t help myself. My eyes slipped down to her hands. I saw her gloves were torn, fragments of pale material, all in tatters at the cuffs. A matching scarf around her neck, pale pink with a red lining, coming unravelled too. No, not gloves.

  Not gloves, but skin. Torn, tattered skin.

  A wave of nausea rose in my throat, threatening to choke me. It wasn’t possible. I took another step back, another, then turned and started to run. Stumbling, slipping, struggling to keep on my feet, running back along the path. I could feel her dead eyes on my back, felt the stench of seaweed and rotten eggs all around me, a palpable living thing, catching in my nose and my mouth. My legs moved faster, running through the reed mace, trying to outrun whatever was behind me.