by Mary Stewart
‘Or comes suddenly, like the sunrise at Stonehenge,’ he said, looking away through the trees, where the ruins, robbed of the last sunlight, showed ghostly grey. ‘Look, there’s a spike of wild arum by the abbey gateway. What could you want better than that for colour?’
We got back to Thornyhold at dusk. Christopher John saw me to my door, unlocked it for me, declined to come in, and tripped over Hodge on his way down the path. I heard the car door open and shut.
I snatched Hodge up and kissed him, said: ‘Oh, Hodge!’ and turned to run upstairs. Outside, the car’s engine started, idled briefly, was killed. Hodge kicked me furiously and leaped from my arms as Christopher John came rapidly up the path again, carrying the flowers I had picked, and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper.
‘You left your flowers, I’m afraid they got a bit squashed, but they might come round.’
‘Oh, dear! They were on my lap, and I forgot all about them. They must have slipped off and got trodden on. I’m terribly sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It was a good thing, as it happens. Reminded me of something I ought to have brought back weeks ago. Miss Saxon asked me to keep it for you. Here it is now, with apologies. And thank you once more for a wonderful day.’
Before I could answer he had sketched a salute, turned and gone. This time the car started with a roar, and went quickly away.
Hodge said something urgent from the baize door, so I pushed it open and carried flowers and package to the kitchen. Flowers first, into a jug of water. Hodge’s supper next, or there would be no peace at all. Finally, to unwrap the package.
Whether by witchcraft or not, I knew already what it would contain. And it did. Lying there on the table beside the sherry bottle and the jug of wild flowers was Goody Gostelow’s own Home Remedies and Receipts.
Of course I took the book to bed with me, and of course I sat up half the night, reading it.
Reading, that is, as much of it as I could. Agnes had been right; the crabbed, spidery hand and the faded ink made some of the words indecipherable, but a modern hand – my cousin’s – had translated the worst of the words, and had also pencilled in notes or even corrections to the old recipes.
For that is what they were. If I had expected a book of magic spells, I was disappointed. It was just what the title had promised, a book of recipes and home remedies. Some of them Cousin Geillis had obviously tried and used; here and there she had added notes: This works well, but use sparingly, half the dose for a child. Or: Too violent. Try (indecipherable) instead? and a further note: Yes. The comfrey salve was there: For the ointment, digest the root or leaves in hot paraffin wax, strain and allow to cool. I read it with a prickling of the skin at my own foreknowledge, and a smile at Cousin Geillis’s note: Culpeper’s recipe. Sovereign, inside or out. Against another recipe she had written: It won’t grow here. Italian. Ask CJ.
The book was not set in order; that is, the recipes seemed to have been written down as they were acquired, or tried out, so that soups, pies, puddings and so on, were interspersed with pickles and wines, medicines and household cleansers. The medicines, and of course the preserves and wines, used plants, herbs, fungi, mosses, the barks and sap of trees – every imaginable product, not only of the garden, but of the hedgerows and streams and woods.
I read on, and as I read, an idea began to grow, and gradually took hold of me. To begin with I had assumed, with a good deal of misgiving, that I should try to follow in the steps of Lady Sibyl and Cousin Geillis and become, in fact and not merely in jest, the third ‘witch’ of Thornyhold. But what I had seen of my cousin’s library, and the contents of her still-room – her professional life tidied away to make room for something new – had convinced me otherwise. Things had changed. Even to myself I would not acknowledge how, but I knew that the lifetime’s study given by my spinster cousin would take more time and dedication than I, with marriage and a young family, was likely to have.
So our minds leap ahead of facts or even probabilities. But mine made the leap, and I knew at last just what I had to do.
The talent you’re born with. I would use it, my one real talent, and make drawings of all the plants and fungi, with descriptions, and notes of their habitats, and perhaps some day make an illustrated book of the sovereign remedies and recipes of Thornyhold. Christopher John would advise me. But whether it made a publishable book or not, I would do it for my own pleasure, and in the doing, perhaps, learn how to use in my own way the gentle powers of garden and woodland. I would start tomorrow to make a fair copy of Lady Sibyl’s book, and perhaps even try out some of the recipes for myself.
I remembered then that I had promised to let Agnes see the book. That first, then. Tomorrow as ever was I would gather my new courage, take the book down to the lodge, and get answers to the questions I wanted to ask. But no mention, no hint at all, of brambles and the quarry and Boscobel.
Brambles. A thought struck me, and I picked up the book again. I checked through it, curiously. There was no recipe in it for bramble jelly.
Beyond the open window the owl hooted. Overhead some small clawed creature pattered among the remains of the pigeons’ grain. Beside me, snuggled deep in the eiderdown, Hodge purred suddenly, then switched off like Christopher John’s engine. A big moth flew in, and beat crazily at my bedside light. I reached to switch off and give the creature a chance to get away and back into the cool night.
No recipe for bramble jelly. That had been Agnes’s excuse for getting me to look for the book. If she had wanted some of the herbal recipes for herself, surely she would have said so. But there had been those elaborate lies about ‘Miss Saxon’s jelly was always the best’, and the special recipe that must be in this book. And this was certainly the book with the difficult writing that she had not had time or chance to make out.
Conclusion? That the book contained some other recipe that she wanted, but did not want to talk about.
And on the heels of that conclusion, another. That whatever it was, Cousin Geillis had not wanted her to have it. Had perhaps found her examining the book, and so had taken the precaution of lodging it in Christopher John’s safe keeping till my arrival.
I switched the light on again. The moth had gone. Hodge half-opened an eye in reproach, then shut it again, stretched luxuriously and sank back into sleep.
I reached to pick up the book. Its cover, never a very strong one, had split with long usage, and the backbone had broken, letting the stitching go. My action in stretching for the bedside lamp had tumbled the book aside, so that it slid, half opened, across my knees, while a loose page slid out free of the rest.
I picked this up and opened the book to replace it, glancing at it half-idly as I did so. It looked and felt different from the rest; a thicker, yellower paper, brownish ink, splotches and blots made perhaps by a quill pen, and in a different, older hand. A recipe supplied by an altogether different person from the virtuous ladies Sibyl Gostelow and Geillis Saxon. A recipe belonging to the book I had expected to find, the only recipe that could claim to be ‘real’ magic, and pretty certainly the one that our local witch wanted so very badly.
It was called, simply: The Love Philtre.
I think that my first emotion was recoil, then, woman for woman, a sort of pity. Afterwards, sharply, and still woman to woman, a flash of uncertainty: am I wrong about the way he feels for me? And finally, an incredulous: supposing the damned thing works?
I picked up the thick, tatter-edged parchment and read it through …
The Love Philtre. Take the wings of four bats, nine hairs from the tail of a newly dead or dying dog, the blood of a black pigeon, and seethe together with …
I omit the rest. But there already, with no questions asked or possible to ask, was the answer to another of my questions.
I sat there in the dark for a long time, trying not to blame Agnes for what (I told myself) was an uneducated country-woman’s attitude to animals. For Agnes, as for many of her kind brought up in the remoter countryside of the �
��40s, all wild creatures were vermin; a cat was tolerated only as it would kill mice or birds, even the robin; a dog only as it would work, or act as guard. She would think nothing of wringing the necks of my stray pigeons, or drowning the ownerless Hodge, or keeping the wretched Rags for her witch’s cauldron. I could acquit her of the injury to Rags, inflicted by Jessamy in his unthinking simplicity, but it was impossible – and, surely, wrong? – to forgive the cruelty that had tied him up and kept him on starvation rations – for the sake of that repulsive spell …
I was trying so hard not to blame Agnes that I found I was shaking. I told myself that my own deep and even obsessive love for animals was a personal thing, a product of my own unhappiness and lack of self-confidence. Animals were safer, and far kinder, than people. It was I myself, in my inadequacy, who was abnormal, not the simpler, more extrovert people with their robust attitudes to the natural world.
I thought suddenly of my father’s curate, now himself long dead, and what he had done with my rabbit. Presumably he had bred the rabbits for food, and if a child had kept one for love, and subsequently returned it, it would go back into the category of meat. Fair enough. I ate meat myself. The wrong had been done, not to the rabbit, but to the child.
And my mother, with the dog? She had been the product of a tough pioneer society, hacking a living out of the New Zealand bush, where animals were stock or game, and there was no room, in the poverty of a hardworking life, for sentiment. Even the children would be regarded as working tools, and daughters in consequence as less desirable than sons. The wrongs of my childhood, if they were that, could, with this sweating effort of the imagination, be understood, and forgotten …
So the obscene love philtre led me, through that long night, to the exorcism of my own miserable spectres, and, finally, to an exhausted kind of peace.
When at last I slept I dreamed, not of stone circles and dying dogs, but of pigeons flying against a high blue sky, and Christopher John smiling and saying: ‘Happiness comes back, in the end.’
22
Since this is not a tale of midnight witchcraft, but a simple, a reasonably simple, love story, it is fitting that the final chapters should open on the morning of a glorious day.
Even the early sunshine warming the crisp air, the dew shimmering thick on the grass, and the thin cloud misting the shine of the river, could not disperse the heaviness that lay on me when I awoke. And when I remembered what the day was to bring, I had to hold fast to my courage. Only the thought of Rags, the ‘newly dead or dying dog’, sustained me. I hurried through the morning’s chores, then ran upstairs for the book.
I had no intention of letting Agnes have it until I had had my talk with her and got the truth from her. Even then, I was not going to hand it over with that ghastly recipe still in it. I took the parchment page out and, with no flicker of compunction, set a match to it and washed the charred flakes down the still-room sink. I put the book on a shelf with the rest, locked the door, and went downstairs to prepare, while my resolution held, to go and see Agnes at the lodge.
It is always better to meet the enemy on one’s own ground; to choose the position to fight from. I had never been inside the lodge, had not been asked inside on the few occasions when I had stopped there on my way past. I did not want the coming interview to take place in front of Jessamy, and I was certainly not going to talk on Agnes’s doorstep. I intended merely to tell her that the coveted book had been found, but that it was fragile and possibly valuable, so that if she wanted to look at it she must do so at Thornyhold, where she would be at liberty to copy out what recipes she wanted.
Afterwards, not to waste this beautiful day, I would go to Tidworth and see Mr Masson, who had taken Cousin Geillis’s pigeons, and ask him about the birds that had brought the messages. See if the wild idea I had had about the second message could possibly be right. And (though I tried not to admit it even to myself) see if, as I passed the track that led to Boscobel, I might catch a glimpse of Christopher John.
I cut myself some sandwiches, put one of my pots of bramble jelly in the bicycle basket, and set off down the drive.
At the lodge I met the first check to my brave and cunning plans: Agnes was not at home, and neither, apparently, was Jessamy. There was no answer to my knock.
But as I stooped to put the pot of jelly on the doorstep I heard Jessamy’s voice just behind me.
‘Why, good morning, miss!’
He had been, not in his own house, but in its twin on the other side of the drive. He had left the door wide. Inside I caught a glimpse of a tiny room, spotlessly neat, with a red checked cloth on a small table, a fireplace glinting with brass, and an old-fashioned rocking-chair where the old lady sat, looking surely twice as old as her years, like a Victorian picture, with an apron over her lap, and a white shawl round her shoulders. She nodded and smiled at me, and waved a hand. I smiled and waved back. Jessamy said: ‘Ma’s not here, miss. Her’s gone out.’
‘Do you know where she’s gone?’
‘Never said.’
‘And you didn’t see? Did she go up through the woods?’
‘Nay. Went towards town.’ He pointed in the direction of St Thorn.
‘And she didn’t say when she’d be back?’
He shook his head. ‘Went after breakfast. Never said. Did’ee make the jelly, miss?’
‘Yes. It made a lovely batch. Thank you again, Jessamy. I brought a pot for you and your mother. How’s the arm?’
‘Better. That’s healed right up.’
‘I’m glad. When your mother comes in, will you tell her that I found the book? Tell her to come up if she wants to see it.’
‘A book?’ That vague, puzzled look. ‘Ma to look at a book?’
‘Yes. She’ll know what I mean. Just tell her I found the book.’ I picked up my bicycle. Gran was waving again, and I responded. ‘Tell her I’ll be out till about tea-time, but to come up after that if she wants to see it. Thanks, Jessamy. All clear?’
‘Aye.’ He lowered his voice. ‘’Tain’t no use at all you coming in to talk to Gran. She be pleased to see you, that’s all.’
‘It’s all right, I understand. It’s nice to see her. She looks very well.’
Another wave, and as I wheeled my bicycle out in the sunny road, I saw the rocking-chair begin its incessant swaying once more.
There was no sign of Christopher John as I passed the mouth of the Boscobel track. Beyond it the road deteriorated into a rutted lane, obviously much used by cattle, which wound between hedges for another mile or so before reaching Tidworth. And there it stopped. Tidworth was remote, a tiny hamlet, with half a dozen cottages huddled round a green where white ducks were enjoying a muddy pond. A pillar-box outside one of the cottages, and some goods for sale in the window, indicated the post office. I left my bicycle at the gate and went in. There was no one in the shop, but the smell of baking bread drifted in from the back room, and the ting of the doorbell was answered by a woman who hurried in, wiping flour off her hands on to a large checked apron.
‘I’m sorry to bother you when you’re busy—’ I began.
‘That’s all right, miss. What can I do for you?’
I hesitated, looking around me, wondering what to buy. There was very little on the shelves; rationing had hit this sort of tiny general shop hard, as people tended to take their coupons into the town where their custom might bring the odd perk with it of unrationed goods. And in a place like Tidworth people would have their own eggs, grow their own vegetables, make their own bread … My eye stopped at a stack of unrationed cocoa.
‘May I have one of those tins of cocoa, please?’
She reached for the tin, but without taking her eyes off me. She was a tall, bony woman, dressed in black with a rust-coloured cardigan. She had greying hair pulled back into a bun, a strong-looking jaw, and black eyes that took me in with interest, more, with a sharp curiosity that surprised me till I recollected that strangers must only rarely come along this dead-end road.
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br /> ‘Was there anything else? That’ll be one and four-pence halfpenny, please … Much obliged.’
‘There – er – there was something else, actually … I’m told that there’s a Mr Masson who lives in Tidworth? I wonder if you could tell me which is his house?’
‘Eddy Masson? Aye, he’s got the end cottage. You passed it, it’s the first one you come to on the road. But I doubt you’ll not find him there. He’m rarely there except at nights, or Sundays. Works over to Farmer Yelland at Black Cocks.’
Why had I not thought of that myself? To get to Black Cocks you had to go by Boscobel. I smiled at her.
‘Thank you very much. I could call there on the way back. But – perhaps Mrs Masson’s at home?’
‘Not married,’ she said, and then, with a disconcerting flicker of amusement, ‘not yet.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said vaguely, ‘thank you so much.’ I turned with an odd sense of relief towards the door.
Her voice stopped me. ‘You staying in these parts, then?’
‘Yes. That is, I’m not on holiday. I live here now, at Thornyhold. You must know it? I moved in in September, and I’m still just finding my way about. This is the first time I’ve been to Tidworth. It’s very pretty, but a bit out of the way, isn’t it?’
‘They say that even the crows ha’ to fly out backwards.’ She nodded, looking pleased. ‘There now! As if I didn’t guess who you were as soon as you came into the shop! Miss Ramsey you’ll be, as the Widow Trapp works for! Well, miss, I’m glad to know you.’
She pushed up the counter flap and came through, holding out a hand.
Pigeon post, I thought. Pigeon post was nothing to the jungle drums of Westermain. But of course everyone within miles would know of me by this time. Would probably also know me by sight. They would certainly know all that I had done to the house; the ‘Widow Trapp’ would have seen to that.
