Ellis Peters - George Felse 03 - Flight Of A Witch (4 page)

‘In the seventeenth century,’ said the vicar, glowing with ardour, ‘we’re told there was a witch-coven in these parts that used to meet on the hill-top.’ His voice sounded somehow light-weight and breathless, emerging from that big, lean, shapely body. I’ll bet he was a Rugby blue, thought Tom inconsequently, and felt a small shock again at the uncertainty and shallowness of the face. For all his regular features, he looked more like a sixth-form schoolboy than sixth-form schoolboys themselves do nowadays. And why should he be so anxious to get in his Black Mass and his coven and his devil? But of course, he had, in a way, a vested interest in these blasphemies. Where would his profession be without them?

‘Coven, nonsense!’ said Regina roundly. “There isn’t a particle of evidence for that tale, and I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘But how can you dismiss Hayley’s diary so lightly? One of my predecessors in office, Mr Kenyon, the incumbent in the mid-seventeenth century, left a very circumstantial journal—’

‘Your predecessor was a demented witch-hunter,’ objected Regina firmly. ‘He left a reputation, as well as a journal, and personally I think I’d rather be called a witch than the things some of his contemporaries called him. By all accounts he’d have had half the village searched and hanged if he’d had his way, but luckily the local justices knew him too well, and were pretty easygoing country fellows themselves, so he didn’t do much damage. But
don’t
quote him as evidence! No, Mr Kenyon,’ she said, fixing Tom with a smiling but authoritative blue eye, ‘the occasional people who strayed into fairyland, or limbo, or whatever is inside magic mountains, I’ll stand for. I don’t mean they necessarily happened, these Rip-Van-Winkle vanishings, but I do accept that people here
believed
they happened. But witches, no! There never have been and there never will be any witches on the Hallowmount!’

And that was the sum of what he had got out of the evening, that and the fifteen minutes of unbelievable anguish and bliss on the way home, with Annet silent beside him in the passenger seat. That was the night he began to realise fully that this was different, that he couldn’t make use of it and wasn’t capable of disentangling himself from it; that he would never get over her, and never again be as he had been before he had known her. What he had thought to be a mild infatuation, only a little more serious than half a dozen others he had lived through and exploited, had grown and deepened out of knowledge, until it filled all his world with its new sensitivity, inordinately painful and disturbing. Annet was like that. He should have known at sight of her. But at sight of her it had already been too late to back away.

And then this afternoon, half-term Thursday. He had had a free last period, and got away early to pick up his case and set out on the drive home; and as he slid out of the car at the gate Annet had come out in her dark-blue coat, a nylon rain-scarf over her hair, three letters in her hand. At sight of him she had checked and recoiled very slightly, and the kind, careful, palpable veil of withdrawal had closed over her face. She knew his wants, and was sorry; she did not want him, and was a little sorry for that, too, or so it seemed to him. If she had not liked him she would not have troubled to evade him, she would not have shrunk from so small an encounter; but she liked him, and preferred not to have to remind him at every touch that she had nothing to give him that could ever satisfy him.

‘You’ll get wet,’ he said fatuously, ‘it’s coming on to rain. Let me take them for you.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I want a breath of air, I don’t mind the rain.’

‘I’ll run you down, then, at least let me do that.’

‘Thank you, but no, please don’t. I just want to walk.’ She saw the next plea already quivering on his lips, and staved it off rapidly and gently. ‘Alone,’ she said, the deep voice making it an apology and an entreaty, while her eyes stood him off with the blue brilliance of lapis lazuli in an inlaid Egyptian head.

‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘Don’t be hurt. I should only be horribly unsociable if you did come, and I’d rather not.’

She had even gone to the trouble to find several small, kind things to say to him, she who had no small-talk, softening her enforced rejection of him – and why had he forced it? – with reminders of his family waiting at home, of the long journey before him, and the advisability of making an early start and taking advantage of the remaining daylight to get as far as the Ml. And he had followed her lead gratefully, glad to return to firmer ground.

‘Your people must be looking forward so much to having you home again.’

He said he supposed they probably were. What could he say?

‘Have a pleasant journey! And a nice week-end!’

‘Thank you! And you, too. See you on Tuesday evening, then. Good-bye, Annet!’

‘Good-bye!’

She went up the lane towards the postbox outside the Wastfield gate. He went into the house, drank a hasty cup of tea, finished the packing of his single case, and set off again in the Mini towards Comerford.

And chancing to lift his eyes to the long, rain-dimmed hog-back of the Hallowmount as he drove, just as the clouds parted and the quivering spear of light transfixed it, he saw the moving sapphire that was Annet climb the hillside and vanish over the crest.

It was after eight o’clock on Tuesday evening when he lifted and dropped the knocker on the front door of Fairford, and listened with pricked ears to the footsteps that advanced briskly from the living-room to open the door to him. He hadn’t taken his key south with him. There were only two, and the whole family would be in on a Tuesday evening, so there was no question of his being locked out.

He said afterwards that he knew as soon as the knocker dropped that something was wrong; but the truth was that the hole in his peace of mind really showed itself when he recognised the footsteps as belonging to Mrs Beck. There was no reason in the world why that should be a portent of any kind; but we make our own superstitions and our own touchstones, and it had been Annet who opened the door to him first, and she should have opened it to him now. If she had, he would have believed that he was being offered another chance, a new beginning with her, if he had the wit to make better use of it this time. But the steps were heavier and shorter than hers, the hand that turned back the latch was sharper and clumsier with it; and he knew Mrs Beck even before she let him in.

‘Ah, there you are, Mr Kenyon!’ She held the door wide. The hall was in half-darkness; the brittle brightness of her voice might have been trying to make up for the want of light on her face. ‘Have you had a nice weekend?’

Had he? Back from a brief re-insertion into a vacancy which no longer seemed large enough for him, back to a desired but elusive right of domicile which had not yet fully admitted him, he couldn’t find much comfort anywhere. But he said yes, he had, all the more positively for the nagging of his doubts. What else can you say? Everybody’d been almost overglad to see him, and made all the fuss of him even he could ever have wished; that ought to add up to a nice week-end, according to his old standards.

‘We’ve missed you,’ said Mrs Beck, making a production of taking his coat from him and hanging it up. He unwound his college scarf, and was stricken motionless for a second in mid-swing, arm ridiculously extended, at a statement so disastrously off-key. She didn’t say things like that. She was too correct and practical, and they hadn’t so far, been on that kind of terms. It was then he began to feel the ground quake under him with certainty that something was wrong.

There was no Annet in the living-room, no glossy black head lifting reluctantly from her book to speak faint, warm, rueful civilities over his return. Only Beck, with his glasses askew and his lofty brow seamed and pallid, almost mauve beneath the light. Too ready with a rush of welcoming conversation, missing his footing occasionally in his haste, like his wife. But unlike his wife, lurching at every mis-step; and his eyes, distorted by the lenses of his glasses, liquefying at every recovery into anxiety and fear.

‘Annet working late?’ asked Tom, himself shaken off-course by this inexplicable disquiet.

If the pause was half a second long, that was all; if they did exchange a look across his shoulder, it touched and slid away in an instant.

‘No,’ said Mrs Beck, ‘she’s gone into Comerbourne with Myra, there was some film they wanted to see. One of these three-hour epics. They’d have to miss the end if they caught the last bus, they’ll stay overnight with Myra’s aunt in Mill Fields.’

She must have seen his face fall, if she hadn’t been so busy desperately holding up her own. But he accepted it; he swallowed it whole, and gave up expecting to see Annet that night. Flat and cold the evening extended before him; and if he hadn’t succumbed to his hideous disappointment and taken cravenly to flight from the prospect of keeping up appearances face-to-face with her parents through all those dragging hours, the course of events might have been radically changed. But he did succumb, and he did resort to flight. Better drive over to the local club in Comerford than sit here trying to keep his mouth from sagging. He made his excuses winningly, and had the discomfiting sensation of having hurled himself at an unlatched door when they received them almost eagerly, without even formal regret at being deprived of his company.

He withdrew himself thankfully as soon as supper was over; he’d have skipped that, too, if he’d been less hungry, or if there’d been much prospect of getting a meal in Comerford at this hour. In the hall he wound himself up again in his scarf, and then, remembering that he was wearing his scuffed driving shoes, opened the large clothes-cupboard to fish out some more presentable ones.

And suddenly something fell into place, a doubt, a premonition, a memory, whatever it was that put his own intended moves out of mind, and set him searching through the many coats on their hangers, looking for the dark gentian blue one with the large collar. Her best amber-gold one was there, the new one she had bought only a few weeks ago. Her second-best tweed raincoat was there. But not the blue. When did Annet ever go into town to the cinema in her everyday coat? He looked for the blue nylon head-scarf, that she used to drape casually over the rail, since it could hardly be creased even if one tried. He couldn’t find it. And her shoes, the shoes she had been wearing that rainy Thursday afternoon, strong half-brogue walking shoes suitable for such weather – where were they? Her more prized pairs she nursed carefully in her own room, but her walking shoes stayed down here. Where were they now?

Slowly he went back into the living-room. They both looked up at him with a quick, oblique uneasiness, and fastening on his face, calmed and stilled into a kind of resigned despair.

‘It’s a fine night,’ he said, with what sounded even in his own ears like horrible inconsequence. ‘Stars shining, not a sign of rain. Did she go off wearing her rain-hood, and her heavy shoes, a night like this?’

No one, apparently, noticed his effrontery in making deductions unasked about Annet’s movements, no one bridled at his asking these questions as though he had a right to an answer. The Becks looked at each other with a long, drear look, and crumbled before his eyes.

‘She isn’t out with Myra – is she?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Beck, and straightened her back and met his eyes wretchedly; not resenting him, almost grateful for him. As a pair they only depressed and de-gutted each other, those two, they grasped at a third, now that it was inevitable, like drowning men at a good solid log. ‘No, she isn’t.’ She dropped her hands in her lap, and let them lie, let the breath go out of her body in a great, helpless sigh.

Tom moistened his lips. ‘She went out on Thursday,’ he said, ‘just as I came in. She was wearing that blue coat she wears around, and those shoes, and the rain-hood. That makes sense, it was raining then. But where I’ve been it hasn’t rained again all the week-end. I don’t know about here. But the roads were bone dry all the way.’

‘It hasn’t rained here, either,’ said Mrs Beck in the same flat, drearily angry tone. Beck made an inarticulate sound of protest, and she rode over him, raising her voice. ‘What’s the use? He may as well know. At this rate everybody’ll know before long. Where’s the sense in thinking we can keep it quiet? She did go out on Thursday afternoon. She said she was going to post the letters and then have a quick walk before tea. She said she wouldn’t be long.’

‘Mother!’ said Beck in reproachful appeal. She turned her head for a moment and gave him a startled, wondering, almost derisive look in return for the incongruous word; but her eyes came back almost at once to Tom’s face. If she was pinning her hopes to anyone at this minute, he realised, it was to him. ‘And she never came home,’ said Mrs Beck.

Once it was out they could all breathe and articulate again, and by an appreciable degree the tension eased. Things admitted can be faced. They have to be, there’s no choice in the matter. But they were all trembling; and the relationship between them, that had been so decorous and neutral until that moment, would never be the same again.

Very carefully, so as not to unbalance himself and them, Tom asked: ‘Have you notified the police that she’s missing?’

They had not. They shook their heads mutely, eyeing each other, each willing the other – he should have foreseen it – to tell him the reasons that were so obvious to them and should have been incomprehensible to him. They imagined him seeing Annet, with her perilous beauty, dead in a ditch; they couldn’t know that he was seeing her rather as they saw her, alive, resolute and passionate, in the company of some other man. Or boy. Or whatever sixth-formers are these days, with their prodigiously advanced bodies and their struggling half-adult minds, so mutually hurtful, so impossible fully to reconcile. He almost went along with their instinct for concealment, and concealed his own knowledge; but then he shook off the temptation and slashed his way through to the truth. For what mattered was not their sensitivities but Annet’s safety.

‘I know about that last time,’ he said. ‘I know why you kept it quiet. But what does that matter, when she may be in trouble worse than that? Someone has to find her. And they’ve got the best chance, the best facilities. You’ll have to go to them.’

‘Yes,’ said Beck, grey as cobwebs, ‘I suppose we shall. But you see, once before she went off of her own will – or tried to. And now again. People will say – they’ll call her— We didn’t want that. No more scandal round her name, not if we could avoid it. What will her life be like, if—? It’s for her own sake!’

‘And ours, too,’ said his wife flatly and coldly. ‘Because we know we’re to blame, too. We’re out of touch with her, we don’t know how, we don’t know why. We’ve no influence over her. But that makes it our fault as much as hers. Where did we fail? Where did we lose contact with her?’ She turned her rigidly-waved head and looked at Tom with fierce, helpless eyes. ‘Who told you? Are people still talking?’

‘No. Not the way you mean. Someone told me rather with the opposite intention, to soften the effect if anyone else should gossip, that’s all. But I can see that you hoped she’d just come home in her own good time, or write to you, and nobody else any the wiser. Did you
look
for her?’

A fool’s question; or maybe a lover’s, someone who can’t trust anyone else to value his divinity or exert himself for her fittingly. Of course they’d looked for her. Beck had tramped the lanes and combed Comerford all the evening and half the night, and then gone off by bus to his sister’s house in Ledbury, and his cousin’s Teme valley small-holding, in case she had turned up there; Mrs Beck had sat at home over the telephone, calling up with careful, ambiguous messages anyone who might, just might know anything, anyone who had a window overlooking the railway station, or a teenage son who could, in some way, be brought into the conversation and eliminated from the enquiry. But there were plenty of mothers of young sons with whom she wasn’t on telephoning terms, plenty of dancing partners who didn’t move in her orbit at all. And she had got nowhere.

‘And Mrs Blacklock? Hasn’t she been on the line wanting to know where her secretary’s got to?’

‘Regina’s away. She’s been away all the week-end at some conference in Gloucestershire – something about child psychology. She gave Annet the whole week off. If Annet came back now, no one would know – no one but us three. Mrs Blacklock won’t be back until tomorrow night.’

She offered that as a life-line, and as such he clutched at it. Because if that was the case, Annet also might come back tonight, or tomorrow, in time to be stonily in her place when next Regina looked for her. That was if this was not final; if she meant it only as a fling, a gesture, a statement of her own will and her determination to go her own way. That was what her mother was hoping for, he saw that. Damage there would still be, irreparable after its fashion; but the worse damage is the known damage, and this, barring the last cruelty of fate, wouldn’t be known. If he hadn’t been so acutely tuned to everything that touched Annet, not even he need have known it.

‘She’s clever,’ said Mrs Beck strenuously, ‘and strong-willed, and capable about practical things. She can take care of herself, and she’s no fool. We thought she’d come home in time. We did what we could to find her ourselves, but we didn’t want to start a hue and cry. If we did, she’d be ruined.’

‘You must see that,’ said Beck, pleadingly. He might have been an old man in his dotage, looking to his son to save something for him out of his life’s wreckage.

‘I do see it, I can understand it. But it’s five days! And no message, no letter, nothing!’

‘Nothing!’

‘And what if it isn’t what you think? Haven’t you been afraid of that? What if she’s come to some harm through no fault of her own, while we’re writing her off as her own casualty? We’ve got to go to the police. What matters now is to find her.’

Deliquescing, disintegrating before his eyes, they owned it. They dwindled, leaning on him. If he could bring her back safely and keep them their faces and their respectability through this they would give her to him gladly. Only he didn’t want her given, he wanted her to come of her own will, as of her own will she had turned her back on him. All manner of perversity he read into her actions, but he would have cut off his own hand to have her back intact, whether she ever came his way or no.

‘I saw her,’ he said deliberately. ‘Last Thursday, when I left. I was driving along the lane past the farm, and the sun came out on the Hallowmount. I saw Annet then. She was climbing up the side of the hill, towards the top. I saw her go over the crest and disappear. Do you know what she could have been doing there?’

Staring at him without comprehension, almost unbelievingly, they shook their heads. But even at that straw they clutched eagerly.

‘Are you sure? Then she couldn’t have been heading for the station, or the bus. And she had no luggage,’ said Mrs Beck, her face flushing into life and hope again.

‘Not with her then. But she could have left a small case somewhere to be collected.’ How could they, how could he, talk of her like that? Not some common little delinquent, but Annet, whose erect, flaming purity he saw now for the first time. And yet she was gone, and surely not alone. Why should she go at all, if she was alone? She knew very well how to seal up her solitude against all comers, she needed no distance between herself and men. But what could he do but go on fighting for her in these small, corrupt, prosaic, impertinent ways? She was in the world, they must reckon with the world if she would not.