A Hint of Witchcraft (10 page)

Who was responsible? The weight of blame was distributed between her accuser, the police (as a matter of course), the coal company, the landowner, and the late Bert Cosway, a former owner of the Lucknow Drift, deceased in 1902. The only people to emerge unscathed from the tragedy were the gallant young men who had found the girl and participated in the recovery of her body regardless of personal risk.

Only Margot knew how Alex felt. After she left him that night he had lain awake. Far-fetched as it seemed, it was not impossible that Katie had tried to hide in the shaft. Miles had seen her there by the ash tree; the brickwork was low enough in some places to be stepped over. To Katie's imperfect understanding, that was a place where things disappeared from sight and were never seen again.

And who had driven the message home, lording it over his humble admirers from Clint Lane, among them quite possibly Katie herself? He found it hard to believe that the ridiculous incident could have such a long-term effect and yet, improbable as it was, he couldn't rest without making sure.

There was a light in Lance's window: he was still mulling over other people's livers. The two had reached the ridge in the grey of daybreak and shone torches down into the shaft. Discarded rubbish had caught on the rough masonry of the casing and had impeded her fall. She had dropped to a point just beyond reach and lay suspended on the rail of a dismembered bed-head wedged crosswise. They had roused the constable and two of his neighbours: it seemed best to keep the Judds out of it. Alex had insisted on being the one to be lowered.

‘There was absolutely no danger with a rope round the tree and four men to haul me up. It makes me sick to be praised for courage. I tell you, Meg, this thing has put years on me. The Greeks had a saying: Man know thyself. Looking back I see myself as a conceited ass.'

He looked older, and not merely because he was pale and heavy-eyed. As long as he lived he would remember the cool dawn breeze and the scent of elderflowers, the first downward look into the dark, the distorted figure strangely sprawled in the torch light.… Holding her in his arms, he had felt the brevity of life, the finality of death.

‘Her neck was broken. But Lance thinks that in any case she could have died of shock.'

For Lance too the experience had marked a turning point. Since the cautious handling of his first cadaver, he had familiarized himself with physical death but this was the first time he had been confronted with the corpse of someone he knew; of Katie who had cleaned his shoes and from time to time had nervously removed his empty dinner plate and backed away from the table as if it might explode. Taking her from Alex – light and limp in her pink apron – he underwent a change of heart. In those solemn minutes as daylight grew, he learned more than theory could teach. It was people who mattered; people who were breathing one minute and the next minute might be gone. He had thought himself wholly committed to medical research. It was Katie, her fair hair grimed with soot, her neck lolling, who changed his mind. She rescued him, he afterwards thought, from the laboratory and nudged him into general practice.

Margot suffered the first heartache she had known.

‘I said that I would look after her – always. She was so helpless. I should have stayed with her.'

It was extraordinary that Katie, timid, almost speechless, patronized, forgotten most of the time, should leave an emptiness so wide, an echo so persistently reproachful.

‘You loved her because she needed to be loved,' her father told her. ‘There are so many things that people like Katie can't do, but there is something important they can do: they can create love.' In loving hearts he mentally added, remembering Miss Burdon.

Margot, drying her tears and shedding more, could have added another name to the list of those who had not loved Katie. The simplicity of her grief was soon complicated by a worrying thought. From the garden gate at Bainrigg, Miles had seen Katie though without knowing who she was. Linden, walking down the field path towards the chimney, had not seen her. A curve in the path or a thickness in the hedge might for a moment or two have limited her view.

But suppose Katie had seen Linden, conspicuous in her white skirt and blouse and coming towards her. They would soon be face to face, just the two of them in empty fields under a wide sky. Margot knew as surely as if she had been there, how Katie would have felt. Could it have been the sight of Linden that drove her panic-stricken to the nearest hiding place? How strange if her unaccountable fear of Linden had been in some weird way a forewarning that Linden would be the cause of her death, indirectly of course. Margot shivered in the grip of a superstitious fear as irrational as Katie's. There were already reasons, suppressed or unacknowledged, for the gradual change in her attitude to Linden. The possibility that she might unintentionally have driven Katie to her death at the very time when Katie most needed help seemed actually to change Linden herself. For the time being she didn't want to see her.

Nor did she. Linden left immediately after breakfast on the fateful morning and judiciously stayed away. The atmosphere at Ashlaw for the next week or two would not have been to her liking. Among other things she missed Katie's funeral.

Never in living memory had there been such a funeral in Ashlaw. For Jo Judd's sake as well as for his daughter's, the Hope Brass Band turned out to a man and led the cortège. It was felt that the
Dead March from Saul,
customary for men killed in the pit, was less suitable for a young girl.
Abide With Me
fell more kindly on the summer scene she had so abruptly left. The procession included every adult capable of following the hearse. Others lined the main street and Church Lane. Boys clinging to railings or peering through bushes took off their caps as Katie passed, the flowers on her coffin lying almost as deep as the earth that would soon cover it. The publicity surrounding her death had moved sympathizers to send donations to her family. Some of the more generous remained anonymous: neither the coal company, the landowner, or the Mining Association would wish to accept responsibility, but as individuals they were not without heart.

The Judds were gratified. Their prestige had never been higher. Their resentment against the world was appeased – for the time being – by the inquest, the crowds, the wreaths, the band and not least by the service in church. It was Mrs Dobie who urged the revival of the old custom of hanging white garlands in church when a young girl died. It had not happened for over fifty years and she was the only person who remembered it. Then, afterwards, the sit-down tea in the British Legion hut was photographed and the pictures were published in the
Elmdon Gazette.
The funeral did all that funerals are supposed to do in dignifying grief and making it bearable. The folk of Ashlaw, drawn together as they had been in other disasters, knew how to look after their own.

On the second day after the funeral, Margot made a private pilgrimate to Katie's grave. The little twelfth-century church of St Michael stood isolated from the village on a rise overlooking the river. Late sunshine gilded the gentle slopes beyond the churchyard wall. A mountain ash leaned over from the neighbouring pasture to shade the spot where – unbelievably – Katie lay in quietness unbroken save by the murmur of the river below.

Margot knelt to replace a fallen spray of flowers. She smelt the dying fragrance of wreathed lilies and the sharper scent of new-turned earth, and gradually there came to her in the hush of the June evening the sense of a mysterious yet natural wholeness: the transition from life to death was perhaps no more than the gentle flow of water between green banks in the valley below. The distress of the past days yielded to blessed relief. Katie was safe: nothing would harm or frighten her again.

Inside the church it was dim and cool. Above her head as she entered by the west door hung Katie's maiden garlands looped to a rail. They were made of white linen in the shape of crowns adorned with rosettes. Later they would be hung on the north wall.

Margot's heart leapt as the awesome silence was broken by a faint beating of wings on the St Oswald window. A bird, misjudging the level of its flight, had struck the stained glass. It clung for an instant, wings outspread as if balked of entry, then took to the air once more and was gone.

Behind her the door opened. The garlands swayed in a current of air.

‘Miles.'

‘They said you had come this way.' To conceal his delight in having found her, he looked up at the crudely made garlands.

‘There haven't been garlands since 1875,' she told him, ‘when Mrs Dobie was a girl. It was her idea to bring them for Katie. You remember Mrs Dobie?'

‘No one could forget Mrs Dobie. It was a good idea. So many customs have died out – and that's how places change. I'd like things to stay just as they are' – how lovely she was, her eyes pensive, her lips tremulous – ‘at this very moment.' Conscious of having spoken ardently, he looked up again at the dangling shapes. ‘They used to hang gloves on them in the Middle Ages as a challenge to anyone who cast doubt on the innocence and purity of the dead girl.'

‘No one doubts Katie's innocence. She must have taken the beads instinctively because they were pretty. She didn't realize that it was wrong – and she has paid for them, hasn't she?' Her voice trembled; she must find something else to talk about. ‘I've been looking at the memorial tablets. Thomas Rilston, Isabella, Henry … they're all your ancestors.'

He told her about them. All except Isabella had died in battle: Thomas at Corunna in the Peninsular War: Henry on the Northwest Frontier: another Thomas in the Boer War and the latest, Miles, his father, at Ypres.

‘Must all the Rilstons be soldiers?' She saw that the question troubled him.

‘It's been a problem.' He opened the heavy door and motioned her to the seat in the porch. ‘I know it's inconsistent after what I said about disliking change, but I don't feel that I can carry on the family tradition of soldiering.'

‘I'm glad. There have been far too many deaths. Mrs Dobie was right about that too. A wicked waste of flesh and blood, she called it.'

‘Actually it's unlikely that there'll be another war in our time. The world is weary of slaughter. Killing on that scale must never happen again. I'd probably be safer in the army now than any of the earlier Rilstons but I'd still be out of my depth.'

‘What would you like to do?'

He looked out from the narrow porch at ancient yews and headstones so worn by time that no one could tell who lay beneath them. Long beams of late sunlight touched here and there a carved cross or the crooked lettering of ‘here lies…' and the bolder lines of a lost name. He could have said that he would like to stay for ever in such a hallowed place beside the one person with whom he felt at ease; that in the few hours they had spent together she had taught him how lonely he had been before he knew her. It was too soon: she was too young, her future still unshaped.

‘I'd like to take up flying,' he said. He had a friend, an enthusiast with his own plane. ‘I've been up with him a few times and taken the controls. It's a marvellous sensation – to look down on the earth. People shrink to pin-points in the sweep of the land – and all around you there's the empty sky.'

It's people who worry him, she thought. He isn't used to them. He doesn't understand people.

He was complaining that when a Rilston died his eldest son was expected to give up his career in the army and devote himself to looking after the family property. As a rule he would by that time be middle-aged. In his own case since the inheritance would miss a generation, it would probably come to him at an earlier age.

‘Shall you like living at Bainrigg?'

‘More than I once thought. Yes, I could be content here. Meanwhile being at Oxford gives one time to sort things out.… What is it? You're looking suddenly radiant?'

‘I haven't told anyone yet, not even Mother. She wasn't there when I came home from school. Miss Hepple sent for me this very afternoon. She thinks there's a possibility – I'm sure it's not at all likely – but it might be worth trying. Actually it was such a surprise that I'm almost afraid to talk about it.'

‘I hope eventually you're going to put me out of my suspense and tell me what on earth it is.'

‘Oh, Miles, I never thought.… She thinks I might take the entrance exam for one of the Oxford colleges, St Hugh's, perhaps.'

Silenced by the sheer wonder of it, she leaned back and stared unseeing at the tablet of St Michael's incumbents on the opposite wall. It is doubtful whether in its long history the porch had ever encompassed a more blissful moment.

‘Well done. If you come up to Oxford I'll be able to keep an eye on you.'

‘Yes! But' – her face clouded – ‘it would mean another year's study – and by that time you would have left.'

‘Not necessarily. I may stay on and take another degree. That's one advantage of reading history, there's so much of it. One can go on for ever.'

She would read history too, her favourite subject even before she knew that it was also his. With Miles as guide she would wander amid the historic halls and seats of learning, hear the bells chime from venerable towers, trace the haunts of the Scholar-Gipsy. Her vision of Oxford was similar to, indeed identical with, that of Matthew Arnold.

For a moment he had lost her. His pleasure in the prospect of halcyon days together was modified by this fresh reminder that she was only eighteen, too young to be told that he hoped to share with her not only Oxford for a few years but Bainrigg for all the years to come. He must wait, thankful for having found at last something to live for.

Margot sensed his mood. She understood that by temperament he was inclined to be melancholy. Unlike Alex he was patient rather than decisive. Above all she sensed his loneliness. His mother had died when he was eight. Since Major Rilston had also been an only child there were no cousins on the paternal side of his family. A sudden realization of her own good fortune in being one of a complete family prompted her to say, ‘You must come and see us more often, whenever you're at home.' The words and manner were her mother's. ‘You mustn't mind my saying it. You're so short of relations.'