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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Cornish Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
Cornwall, 1844. On a lonely moorland farm not far from Jamaica Inn, farmhand Shilly finds love in the arms of Charlotte Dymond. But Charlotte has many secrets, possessing powers that cause both good and ill. When she's found on the moor with her throat cut, Shilly is determined to find out who is responsible, and so is the stranger calling himself Mr Williams who asks for Shilly's help. Mr Williams has secrets too, and Shilly is thrown into the bewildering new world of modern detection.
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Seitenzahl: 442
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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FALLING CREATURES
KATHERINE STANSFIELD
For my sister, Lil, with whom I’ve climbed Roughtor many times and who loves a good prison yarn
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
The pony had given in by the time we found her. This was near the ford, halfway between Roughtor and Penhale. The marsh there was broad and very wet.
The creature had struggled, though, we could see that, for the grass was churned brown where she’d fought to stand. Her eyes were rolling white. Sweat was creamy on her shoulders. Her backside was sinking in the pit of mud and black water seeping. She was tired from the pain, from trying to get up. Her breath loud and rasping.
We stood safe at the marsh edge, where the grass was longer. I knew where a marsh started but that was because I was born on the moor. Charlotte was born by the sea. It made a difference, something like that.
Charlotte went to cross the marsh. I grabbed her. Harder than I meant to. She cried out.
‘We can’t help her,’ I said.
The only sounds were the sucking of the water and the pony’s hard breath.
‘Look.’ Charlotte pointed across the moor, towards Lanhendra. Ponies stood watching – four of them.
‘They’re waiting,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Until she’s dead. They won’t leave her.’
The moor and its marshes were the only things that made Charlotte Dymond afraid. She put her hand in mine and squeezed it. Her palms were hot, and rough as gorse. We were close as moor stone and the ground that held it.
Until someone uprooted us.
ONE
Charlotte Dymond gifted me blood-heat on the day we met. She took it from another living creature without any cutting. She carried no knife that I saw. She didn’t need such a tool. Her workings were in her hands, then later the water. This I would have told the magistrates but they wouldn’t hear truth. They would hear only lies.
Charlotte made me the gift at the hirings, at All Drunkard, a place so sinful it was called such even though its true name, as written on the tithe map, was All Worthy. My father had told me All Drunkard was the better name because the magistrates met there and they were drunkards all. He wanted rid of me. I knew he would leave me at the hirings like I knew he’d taken to spirits since my mother coughed her last. It was him deserved to be left at All Drunkard, not me.
To reach the hirings on that Lady Day in 1844 my father and I left our home in Blisland and went across the moor before it was light. My father caught me when I stumbled against moor stone or fell into hollows made by sheep and ponies. I didn’t mind him not speaking. I had nothing to say and the wind was cold on my face though it was March and the days were lengthening.
When we came to All Drunkard there were crowds outside the inn. It was easy to make out the masters and mistresses from those looking to be hired because the farm servants had boots like mine, with thin soles and the leather ripped. Our clothes were thin too, clutched against the wind. My father went inside and left me with the horses standing in cart shafts. He didn’t come back.
The wind came sharp off the moor and I had no shawl or gloves. I crept to a black carthorse, the creature tied furthest from the inn, and pressed myself into its coat. I was seventeen years of age and my mother had been dead a week. My sister hadn’t come home for the burial. I hadn’t seen her since I didn’t know how long. She might have been in the ground herself.
‘You’ll not get much warmth from that bag of bones.’
I looked up from the carthorse’s greasy hide. A woman stood before me.
‘Better than nothing,’ I said.
I thought I’d seen her before. But I knew I hadn’t. She was the same height as me and had the same dark hair. She wore a fine dress, green, was it silk? And good shoes, with pattens to keep them from dirtying.
She pushed a strand of hair from her face and I felt my own hand move likewise though there was no hair across my face. I bit my lip and she did the same or was it the other way around? We smiled. We were close as moor stone.
‘There’s always something to be got from nothing,’ she said, and she cupped her hands and held them out to me. Her nails were bitten to the quick so bad they were bloodied. There was a smell about her. Like bread caught in the hearth.
‘See now,’ she said, ‘nothing here.’
Then she put her hands on the carthorse’s rump, the fleshy part of its back leg. A quiver ran all through the creature, but the woman paid no mind to the horse’s discomfort. She dug the heels of her hands into the horse, moving them in a circle, over and over, steady and the same. The horse tossed its head and tried to swing its backside away from her but it was like she held the horse where it stood. The creature made no sound. It had lost its tongue. I was wondering at this strangeness, for the horses I had known were quick to shriek their pain and then, oh then—
Her hands on my cheeks, as hot as if she’d cut the horse’s neck and laid me down in its still beating blood. I felt the blood pour over me, soak me to my bones. The creature’s heat was mine, its life was mine, even as it stood breathing at my side. She made me warmer than I’d ever been in my life, warmer even than when the gorse was burnt on the moor for clearing ground and the whole world was blazing round me.
‘Better now, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘How did you—?’
She put her hands behind her back. The carthorse dipped a mite then remembered how to use its knees and stood straight. It tossed its head once more, coughed, and then there was just her looking at me.
‘Quiet now,’ this blood woman said. ‘Don’t you go telling.’
‘But—’
‘Girl!’ a voice behind me called.
I turned to look. A stout old woman was waving at us.
‘You not taken?’ She reached us through the people and horses and carts and took hold of my arm to feel its strength. ‘Scrap of a thing, dear me, yes.’
She wore black and her black hair was piled any old way. She said her name was Mrs Peter and she farmed at Penhale, a short way across the moor.
‘You suited to farm work?’ she asked me. ‘Milking?’
‘Yes,’ the blood woman said.
The blood woman didn’t look a farm servant to me. She was dressed too fine. Mrs Peter didn’t see her as one either.
‘You’re looking for work?’ Mrs Peter asked her.
‘I can milk cows,’ the blood woman said. ‘Card wool. Cook and clean.’
She had a long face and large eyes. She looked hard at a person when she spoke to them, didn’t look away. I wanted her to speak to me again.
‘Well, I suppose I could take you pair,’ Mrs Peter said, ‘if you know the Good Lord’s love.’ She turned to me. ‘What about you – you can milk cows?’
I wanted to be away from the inn, away from my father and the memory of my mother coughing, her pale face and her eyes no longer seeing me, and I wanted to be with the blood woman who had warmed me, so I said yes. I said yes to everything Mrs Peter asked until she said, ‘Have you eaten?’ and I shook my head.
‘John! John!’ she called.
A man lumbered over. He had the same small eyes as the woman, the same black hair escaping from his hat. He looked younger than my father, about thirty years of age. He could have been thought handsome were it not for the largeness of his mouth and nose. He looked about him like he was afraid of the crowds and the noise. This made me think he was slow. But Mrs Peter wasn’t.
‘John,’ Mrs Peter said, ‘get them something to eat while I find who they belong to.’
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking at the blood woman. His mouth fell open.
‘Did you hear me, John?’ Mrs Peter took hold of his chin and made him look at her. ‘Go and get them some bread.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ he said.
He started for the inn’s door. His steps were plodding as a cow’s and he kept looking back at us. At the blood woman.
‘Now then, give me your names,’ Mrs Peter said.
‘Charlotte Dymond,’ said the blood woman.
I told Mrs Peter my name.
‘Well that’s no use to me,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to find some way of telling you apart. Wait here. I won’t be long.’
She followed the man John into the inn, leaving just the two of us again, which was better. Then something moved in Charlotte Dymond’s hand. Something vanished up her sleeve. She caught me looking and folded her arms across her chest.
‘I can’t stand cows,’ she said.
I didn’t see my father again but I dreamt him drawing up the bond with Mrs Peter. I dreamt him making his mark and stinking of drink. There was no one to sign Charlotte away.
TWO
Mrs Peter held the reins. I sat in the back of the cart with Charlotte and her box of belongings. I had no such box and I wondered at her riches. The poor road made us jolt about and knock each other. I didn’t mind such knocking. I wanted to keep near her and the warmth she could give. John Peter wanted to sit next to her too but his mother wouldn’t let him. He sat up front with her and moaned of the cold all the way.
We crossed the moor and Roughtor came in sight – the sharp hill crowned with towers of moor stone. Blisland, which I had left that morning, was on the tor’s other side. Heaven knew where my father was by then. He wouldn’t go back to that room where my mother died. I knew that much.
Mrs Peter slowed the cart and we turned down a rutted path that led to a yard in front of a house. Penhale. When I first saw it I was made dumb. The farmhouse was so smart-looking. There were fields all round it and round the fields was the moor. It was a lonely place but I liked the lay of it, the way the house stood firm in the green.
Mrs Peter pulled the cart to a halt. John Peter got down and went straight into the house, saying, ‘Cold cold cold’ to himself, with no thought for helping his mother. That was what we were for, I thought. Charlotte and me. But Mrs Peter was calling someone else’s name. A man came from the barn.
He drew close and I saw he had a face of scars from the pox. His mouth was twisted on one side where he had no teeth. I must have shown my fear but he was used to such looks because all he said was, ‘Two of them?’
He helped me down from the cart and then took Charlotte’s hand to do the same. He didn’t let go once she was standing. He was as mazed by her as John Peter had been. She did something to people. I could see it in the slackness of the men’s faces, the way they leant towards her, as if pulled. She was pulling me. I wanted to get hold of her. How did she do it?
‘I must see to John,’ Mrs Peter said, and she was away into the house, calling for her soft boy to get a jacket on if he felt the cold so.
Still the poxed man held Charlotte’s hand. I wondered if she’d take another creature’s warmth and gift it to him, or if she only did that for me. Then the poxed man came back to himself and saw he was still clutching at her.
‘Forgive me,’ he mumbled, and set to fiddling with the harness. He led the horse to the stable built onto the barn and I saw then he limped.
‘Tell Mrs Peter,’ he called over his shoulder, making sure to look at me rather than Charlotte, ‘that Matthew is putting away the cart.’
Then he was gone into the stable and I heard him singing in a strong, clear voice that didn’t match his weak face. Sweet maidens all, pray hear this tale, for I am blind and my heart doth ail.
Charlotte was by the front door. She ran her hands over the frame like I’d seen men run their hands over horses’ legs, like Mrs Peter had felt my arm for strength.
‘This will do very well,’ Charlotte said, and shoved open the door with her hip. I followed her inside.
It was the grandest house I’d ever seen, though it needed keeping clean. The front door gave onto a porch filled with boots and coats and a musty smell I knew from home. An umbrella was stuck in a tall boot covered in cobwebs. The porch gave on to the kitchen. Three steps in and my heel slid on a twist of mouldy bread. I fell into potato peelings on the flags. Charlotte helped me to stand and I kept hold her hand. I’d met her first. She was mine by rights.
The table was a mess of dirty plates and cups and a black cat gnawed the bones of what I took to be a chicken. One of her ears had torn and not healed closed. It was an ugly thing. I moved to knock her away, on to the floor, but Charlotte stopped me.
‘Don’t make her cross your path, not so soon after entering a new house. Don’t curse yourself so needlessly.’
‘There’s no curse in cats,’ I said. ‘That’s superstitious talk.’
‘There’s curses everywhere.’
Raised voices drifted down the stairs, mostly Mrs Peter’s. I went to the window seat that looked into the yard. We were to wait, I thought. Wait and then do as we were told.
Matthew the poxed man came in. He was carrying Charlotte’s box of belongings and set it by the stairs. He was careful with it, and looked to see if she’d noted his care. She hadn’t, but I had. He sat by me in the window seat to take off his boots.
‘Horse is fed,’ he shouted up the stairs.
Charlotte was at the back of the room, looking out of the second window.
‘What stood there?’ she asked Matthew, pointing.
‘In the Mowhay field?’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
I got up to look. In the field’s right corner I saw the top of a thorn tree. It was bent double like the few that stood on the open moor, made to bow by the wind. Beneath it were tumbled-down moor stone walls, half-hidden by tall grass.
‘There’s always something to be got from nothing,’ Charlotte said. ‘The stones. What was there?’
‘Grain house, perhaps,’ Matthew said. ‘If Mrs Peter would cut the field for hay we’d see it better.’
Charlotte spun round. ‘She mustn’t cut it. Terrible things will happen.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that. She’s left it years without cutting. Doubt she’ll do it any day soon. Now, I must ask you.’
He fussed with a button on his jacket and I saw how smart he was dressed. Too smart for a farm servant. Just like Charlotte.
‘Would you walk out with me on Sunday, on the moor?’ he said.
But she was looking at the tree and the moor stone walls and didn’t answer.
There was a clomping from above and Mrs Peter called down, ‘Dallying is the work of the Devil,’ which I took to mean she was waiting for us. The poxed man sang Charlotte and me up the stairs. For I am blind and my heart doth ail.
The stairs were dark and the landing darker still. Before me was a closed door and behind it I could hear John Peter muttering. Next to it was another door, next to which Mrs Peter and Charlotte waited. Mrs Peter put her hand on the doorknob.
‘This is where you pair will sleep,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to keep it yourself. I won’t do it for you. Supper will be in an hour or so, if Matthew will skin the rabbits. You’ll do the cooking from now on but I’ll make an exception tonight, seeing as you’re newly come.’
And then she opened the door to the room.
A low-slung bed with a wool cover. The cleanness of everything. The safe, warm heart of it. Mrs Peter was off down the stairs calling to Matthew that the supper needed getting and would he knock that cat out of the butter dish and Oh, John Peter, Oh, that boy.
Our room shared a wall with John Peter’s room and in the wall was a door. Charlotte tried it but it didn’t open. I was pleased. I didn’t want that slow man coming in when we were sleeping.
There was a small corner cupboard by the window. Charlotte fiddled about in front of it, her back to me.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
She looked to be shaking out her sleeve and I thought I heard something scrabbling against wood but when she turned round there was nothing to be seen.
‘We must keep the door shut when we’re out of the room,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Promise me you’ll keep it shut?’ There was a fierceness to her I hadn’t seen before. It was as if a storm cloud had blown up inside her and was about to burst.
I nodded.
She sat on the bed. Our bed. We’d be sharing.
She pitched backwards so she was lying down. I lay next to her. For the first time since my mother had died I felt peace enter me. Even my old need for what I knew to be sinful left me. It was Charlotte Dymond did that.
THREE
The smell of rabbit stew led us from the comfort of our room.
John Peter was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He took Charlotte’s arm and walked her to the table like she was a fine lady and he a gentleman.
‘You must sit here with me,’ he said. There were warts on both his thumbs. Ugly things, like the black cat’s torn ear.
‘Don’t fuss,’ his mother said. She was stirring a pot over the hearth. ‘It doesn’t matter where anyone sits. Matthew, lift this to the table. My shoulder’s paining me.’
‘Did you hurt yourself seeing to the pigs?’ he said, doing as she asked.
‘Perhaps … I don’t remember twisting.’ She tried to roll her shoulder free of the ache but that seemed to make it worse. ‘I hope it won’t put me in bed. If it does I’ll see if Daniel will come and help you.’
‘We’ll be all right without Mr Carwitham,’ Matthew said. ‘I can manage—’
‘Charlotte must sit by me!’ John Peter said. He thumped the table and a cup fell to the floor and cracked. He tried to pick up the pieces but soon cut himself.
‘For heaven’s sake, John!’ Mrs Peter said.
Matthew got down on the floor to clear the mess, telling John Peter not to mind.
Charlotte took the seat John Peter wanted for her. He was master of the farm, after all. He squeezed her elbow with pleasure and she gave a little cry for he’d got blood on her smart green dress. She looked like she would curse him but Mrs Peter banged her spoon loudly on the table and said it was a sin to let good food go cold. It got colder still while Mrs Peter said Grace. At last we fell to eating and Mrs Peter told us of our work, for work was the path to His Love.
‘I see to the hens,’ John Peter said, before she could finish.
‘That’s women’s work,’ I said.
‘It is not!’ he said. ‘It’s the most important work on the farm, isn’t it, Mother?’
She patted his warty lump of a hand. ‘Where would we be without our eggs, eh?’ She eyed me sourly over her steaming bowl and began to talk to Matthew of farm matters – the calves’ field, broken fences. This Mr Carwitham coming to help.
Charlotte was whispering to John Peter. I watched her slip a scrag of rabbit meat from her bowl to her lap, and then she took hold of one of his hands.
He pulled away. ‘I mustn’t cut the warts,’ he said, looking sideways to see if his mother was listening.
‘Not cutting,’ Charlotte said. ‘I can make them go – disappear, as if they were never there. I don’t need a knife.’
His eyes widened, his fingers fussing his warts. ‘I don’t like them. I catch them on things. But Mother says I mustn’t cut them.’
She grabbed his hand again. ‘Said I won’t cut them, didn’t I? The charm doesn’t need cutting.’
She rubbed the rabbit meat on one of his thumbs before he had a chance to pull away but he made such a noise his mother ceased talking to Matthew.
‘What the devil is that?’ Mrs Peter said, getting to her feet.
‘Witching, Mother!’ John Peter said. ‘The girl will make my warts go with no cutting.’
‘Sit by the fire, John.’ Mrs Peter snatched the rabbit meat from Charlotte and shouted at her, ‘None of this wickedness in my house, do you hear me?’
She opened the front door and threw the rabbit meat in to the yard. The black cat bounded out like it was a dog and the rabbit meat a stick. We ate the rest of our meal in silence. I saw John Peter fussing his thumbs, looking slyly at Charlotte every little while. Matthew, too, had to look at her. Only Mrs Peter wasn’t charmed by Charlotte Dymond.
We finished eating and Mrs Peter talked very loud of the importance of going to worship regular.
‘I expect it of all who live under this roof,’ she said, looking at Charlotte. ‘Come Sunday you’ll be there with the rest of us at chapel and perhaps that will keep you from doing as you shouldn’t. May the Good Lord preserve us and keep us from wickedness.’
Charlotte and I were tasked with cleaning the plates and setting the breakfast things, and then Mrs Peter said we must all go to bed. It was barely dark but she took the candles upstairs with her, leaving no chance to do otherwise. I went up myself but Charlotte stayed downstairs. With Matthew. I waited on the landing, trying to hear if they were talking but no voices drifted up to me. I heard the front door open and feared she’d gone out with him but then she was back in our room, more quickly than it should have taken a body to climb the stairs, to my thinking. But what did I know of her then?
She threw something on the bed. It was the rabbit meat.
‘For burying,’ she said. ‘When his warts go, she’ll see her foolishness.’
We got in to bed and she seemed to fall asleep right away. I felt her softening. I lay awake, too knowing of her body next to mine to dare move. I heard John Peter murmuring in the room next door, and then I heard Matthew’s high voice too. I wasn’t certain why he was in that room when it was the master’s. I fell asleep to them talking but they weren’t in my dreams. I dreamt of the moor. I was climbing Roughtor and as I walked something walked alongside me but hidden beneath the ground. Something with claws that scratched moor stone.
FOUR
I was woken by banging on the door and Mrs Peter shouting that the sun was already risen and the blessed cows wouldn’t milk themselves. Did I not know the Good Lord looked well on those who toiled for His lands?
Charlotte was gone.
I ran down the stairs with my hair loose and my untied apron flapping. The black cat winked at me from her curled comfort on the settle. There was bread and tea on the table and I stopped to have it, no matter my lateness. Movement by the hearth made me catch my breath. John Peter was there. He was peering at a knife sharpener.
‘We don’t hold with idleness here,’ he said.
I pulled on my boots and left the breakfast though I was hungry for it.
‘No shilly-shallying,’ he said. He grinned at the words he’d put together. ‘Shilly,’ he said, pointing at me with the knife sharpener. ‘You’re Shilly-shally.’
I left him to his mutterings and ran to the yard. I could hear the cows bellowing though I couldn’t see them. Matthew came from the barn. His hands were full of pails and a low, three-legged stool. He gave me the pails and stool and directed me down a path that took me to the fields behind the house. Telling Mrs Peter I knew how to milk cows had been a lie and I made a poor show of it that morning. The first creature stood in my pail just missing my hand. All I got when I grasped its udder was a cow-shout of pain. My back ached within a moment of sitting down and I feared I should have to run away.
But then Charlotte was there, in worn working clothes like mine. She gave little murmurings to the creature I was working then leant her head against its flank, her dark ringlets pressed into the cow’s hide. I watched her ease her hands up and down the teat and the milk came warm, frothing into the pail, like the carthorse’s blood-heat had flowed into my flesh.
‘You said you didn’t like cows,’ I said.
‘I don’t.’
‘But you know how to milk them.’
‘Had to earn a living somehow,’ she said.
She’d been at other farms, then, shared other beds. I wanted to ask where she’d come from, how she’d taken the heat from the carthorse at All Drunkard without cutting the creature. But I knew she didn’t want me to. That was enough to hold my tongue.
When we went in for our dinner at midday, John Peter called me Shilly-shally again. Matthew and Mrs Peter laughed and I thought it would be forgotten. But it wasn’t. From that day on John Peter only ever called me Shilly. When anyone wanted John Peter to understand that they were speaking of me they had to use that name as well. After a few weeks my real name seemed forgotten by all of them, even Charlotte. I became the name they called me, for I was always running to catch up with myself at Penhale.
In the afternoon Matthew showed Charlotte and me the land. Up the path from the farm to the road, him naming each field we passed – the calves’ field next to the house, then higher well park field, great marsh field, square field, higher down field. Aside from the pigs and John Peter’s chickens that were kept near the house, the fields were empty. Yet the soft bleats of sheep reached us on the wind. Matthew said we weren’t far from Tremail, a hamlet just across the fields. That was where the sheep called from.
He limped all the time we walked but he didn’t use a stick and he set a fair pace.
‘You’ve had it a long time, your limp,’ Charlotte said. There was no tenderness in her voice. She spoke plainly.
Matthew’s face coloured. I thought he wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been me that had said such a thing. But I wouldn’t have dared.
‘Since birth,’ she said.
He nodded and walked a little ahead, trying to show he didn’t have a limp at all, though it was plain he couldn’t hide it and that trying to only gave him pain. His limp meant he put his weight on his left leg and was ungainly. I walked on his right side and Charlotte took his left. With each step he tilted away from me, towards her.
At the end of the path was a strip of moor and then the road.
‘Camelford and Davidstow are that way,’ Matthew said, pointing right. ‘And Altarnun is that way.’
It was the teeth missing that made his mouth strange. There seemed nothing mean-spirited about him.
‘If you should get lost,’ Matthew said, ‘look for Lanlary Rock, there.’
He pointed across the moor at a large lump of moor stone. I thought it to be the size of Penhale’s barn.
‘You’ll find that easy enough,’ Matthew said, ‘long as the mist isn’t low. If you can find that then you can find Penhale. Lanlary Rock is a friend on the moor.’
There were shouts close by. They came from a house with the sign of an inn above the door, a little way beyond the road. There was a sound like furniture breaking.
‘That’s Vosper’s place,’ Matthew said. ‘You’ll meet him soon, no doubt.’ He kicked the ground with his good foot.
At the sight of the inn the shake was on me, though I fought it. ‘Such places lead to sin,’ I said.
‘Vosper’s certainly does,’ Matthew said.
‘Humphrey Vosper?’ Charlotte asked.
‘You know him?’
‘What happened to Mr Peter?’ she said.
‘He’s long dead,’ Matthew said. ‘Before I came to Penhale and that was years ago now. How do you know Vosper?’
‘How did Mr Peter die?’
‘An accident. In the Mowhay. Fell and hit his head on a lump of moor stone, they say.’
‘Were they cutting the hay?’ Charlotte said.
He frowned at her. ‘How did you know that?’
‘The field hasn’t been cut for a long time,’ she said. ‘I thought Mr Peter dying there might be why.’
He looked at her for a moment then brushed his hands down the front of his white shirt and it struck me again how smart he was dressed for a farm servant.
‘Where do you get the money for such good clothes?’ I asked him. ‘Mrs Peter pays you as a farm servant, doesn’t she? She’s not paying us enough to get such things.’
Charlotte looked him up and down as if seeing him for the first time. She took his arm as we walked back to the house. I was left to walk behind them.
We went to bed, and, just as before, I heard Matthew and John Peter talking in the room next to ours. When the voices stopped there was no sound of the door opening and Matthew stepping out onto the landing. I guessed then that they shared the room, and I said as much to Charlotte as we lay together in the thickening dark.
‘John Peter’s not master, then,’ she said.
‘Mrs Peter is. Or she’s mistress, rather. It’s her we have to please.’
Charlotte must have fallen asleep then for she made no answer.
FIVE
A noise woke me. I thought it was the scrabbling I’d heard in my dreams but the room was quiet. Too quiet. No one breathed beside me.
Charlotte was gone.
I drew back the curtain and saw that it was still night, but a light was burning in the Mowhay field behind the house.
I wrapped my blanket round me and crept from the room, glad of the candle I had kept from Mrs Peter, even though the flame made the landing’s walls seem closer. They leant over me and I thought I felt them brush my face as if they had little hands or wings like moths. The wind was throwing itself against the house, making a fuss to be noticed. A draught clutched my legs.
On the last stair my foot touched something soft and yielding, and a cry escaped my lips. The black cat leapt from the shadows with a hiss. She crossed my path. There was nothing I could do.
My candle would be no good in the wind so I set it in the porch window to guide me back. I went round the side of the house. In the field the light was still burning. It was bright and steady though the wind should by rights have blown it out.
I made my way through the Mowhay’s long grass, the light keeping my path true. I could smell water, heard it gurgling close by but couldn’t see it. As I drew close, I saw the light was set on the tumbled walls I’d first seen from the kitchen window, the stones watched over by the thorn tree that had forced its way to being so wide and thickety, had forced the wall apart, perhaps. Bright ribbons and scraps of white cloth were tied to the branches, and beneath them, in a tangle of ferns, Charlotte was seated. Her eyes were closed. Her face was bathed in the light of the flame. She held something in her hands.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
She gasped and opened her eyes. The flame died.
‘You shouldn’t creep like that!’ she said.
‘Charlotte – your hands!’
Blood seeped between her palms still clasped together. She opened them and a piece of mirrored glass fell to the ground, smeared red.
She licked each palm to rid them of the blood and she was like the black cat washing herself.
‘What is this place?’ I said.
‘A well. An old one. It would have had a roof once, somewhere to sit. Mrs Peter should have tended it better – it’s on her land. This is wickedness. At least the water still flows. That’s something. Look.’
Charlotte parted the ferns beside her and I saw the water. The pool was large as a good-sized cooking pot, the water shaking with the spring’s life.
‘It’s why the grass has grown so well,’ she said, plucking the water with her fingers. ‘It’s good Mrs Peter hasn’t cut it for hay.’
‘Why? What would happen if she did?’
‘Bad things. I’ve seen them. Last place I was, there was an old well in the Mowhay, just like this. The farmer who owned the land, he said the hay would be cut. I told him not to, that it would bring harm, but he didn’t listen. He called me names of spite.’ She took her hair into her hands and coiled it so tight I thought she’d pull it out. ‘When his son’s leg was cut by the scythe he knew my words to be true but by then it was too late.’
‘The boy died.’
‘Not right away. His leg was taken off below the thigh. I heard his cries from my bed. He died a week later when the rot set in.’
I thought she was smiling but it was hard to be sure in the dark.
‘But how did the boy get hurt? Was he lying in the grass?’
‘He was hurt because the well was hurt. It wasn’t an ordinary well, Shilly, and neither is this one. Such places are old – old as the earth. They must be cared for, tended. Every well has a power, just like every person. Some cure sore eyes, some mend broken bones. I’ve known some that keep a body from being hanged. This one … I don’t know yet what it can do.’
‘Perhaps it could help Mrs Peter’s bad shoulder,’ I said.
‘She’d have to be kindly to me first,’ Charlotte said.
And then I screamed. Something had dropped in to her lap. Something with claws and a tail.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘They’ll hear us in the house.’
The mouse sat on her knee and looked at me. His tail twitched. I slunk back until I was against the ruined wall.
‘This is St Michael,’ Charlotte said. ‘He’s my companion.’ She put her thumb close to his face and didn’t mind when he set to gnawing her nail.
‘You mean he’s a pet.’
‘No. He’s … a friend. He understands things.’
‘He’s a mouse, Charlotte. How can he understand things?’
‘He’s clever. He helps me.’
‘With what?’
‘Charms,’ she said.
‘The rags on the tree?’
‘They’re clouties.’ She brushed the cloth and ribbons with the back of her hand. ‘Charms are other things. Things you can hold and things you can say. St Michael makes them strong.’
I peered at the mouse – at St Michael. His tail kept twitching. He looked to be an ordinary creature. I reached to touch him. He darted up Charlotte’s arm and hid in her hair.
‘You mustn’t stroke him,’ she said.
‘He doesn’t like me.’
‘Because you forget to shut the door. He fears the black cat will get him.’
‘You keep him in our room?’
‘I don’t keep him anywhere. He comes and goes as he pleases. He has a straw bed behind the corner cupboard.’
‘Charlotte!’
‘Don’t tell Mrs Peter. She’d kill him with the poker, I know she would. And you must be careful with the door. Keep it shut or the cat will get him.’
‘Living with a mouse.’
‘Please, Shilly!’
For her, anything.
‘Don’t you let him near me,’ I said. Then the wind gusted and I remembered it was night and cold and our warm bed waited for us. ‘Are you … finished here?’
‘For now,’ she said, getting to her feet.
I followed her, hoping she’d have the makings of another fire to light our way but she didn’t and I had to stumble in the long grass and hidden stones.
The candle I’d left in the porch had gone out.
SIX
I made sure to shut the door to our room the next morning when we went out to work. I didn’t care for St Michael but I cared for Charlotte and she cared for him. That was enough for me to take more care.
I thought about the clouties tied to the thorn tree. I thought about the child losing his leg. I watched John Peter’s hands all through the week that followed but the warts stayed stout on both his thumbs. I asked Charlotte why they hadn’t gone.
‘His mother stopped my work too soon. She’s afraid of such things.’
‘But why, if there’s only good in them?’
‘There’s no such thing as only good, Shilly. There’s only balance – the good with the bad. You have to have one to know the other.’
We were at evening milking, the light seeping from the sky and disappearing into the thirsty ground that drank it down.
‘There’s badness in what you do?’ I said.
‘Sometimes. If people are bad to me. Pass me that pail. I swear these creatures get more wilful by the day. Get on!’
She slapped a cow hard across its backside. The sound rang out like a shot.
After supper she said she was going for a walk. Matthew and John Peter both made to put their jackets on but she said no, she’d rather go alone. She was going to the old well in the Mowhay field, I thought, and though she didn’t ask me to go with her I was pleased I knew her ways and the men didn’t.
The porch door banged shut and Charlotte was gone. Mrs Peter gave a sigh like she’d been holding her breath.
‘There now. Wake up the fire, Shilly. My bones are cold tonight.’
She eased herself in to the settle, the high back good for her bad shoulder, which didn’t seem to be getting better. Matthew and John Peter took chairs on either side and we softened to our evening. It was easier without Charlotte there. I hadn’t known it until she’d gone but there it was. The air in the room was quieter. Mrs Peter’s face lost its sharpness. She didn’t speak of the Devil or the Good Lord as much. Matthew looked to the porch from time to time, until Mrs Peter asked him for a song and he gave us his favourite, the tune I’d heard him sing on the day I came to the farm.
Sweet maidens all, pray hear this tale,
for I am blind and my heart doth ail,
my golden lad is gone, is gone,
and on the moor I am undone.
I felt my eyes close. The room was warm from the turfy fire that brought the moor into the house for burning. The dark earth and darker water beneath were thick in my mouth, my throat.
Matthew beat time with the little knife he kept in his belt, tapping it on his chair. It was easy to forget his afflictions when his voice was so beautiful and in the flickering light of the fireside his poxed skin was smoothed. His mouth was eased from the near-sneer that didn’t belong on such a kind person. He was made handsome, almost. I wondered if Charlotte saw him so.
The next day was Sunday, chapel day. Mrs Peter said so and we were Mrs Peter’s so we were going with her to worship at Tremail, where a chapel was newly opened. We were to meet Mrs Peter’s daughter Mary there and we would be on time, Oh heavens, yes, for the Good Lord couldn’t be kept waiting.
But milking took too long. The creatures were wilful and stamping in the pails and pushing their nasty, wet noses in our faces. We smacked them and shouted and made Mrs Peter late. And then I shamed her for I had no Sunday clothes.
‘What will people think?’ she said, seeing us still in our working dresses, covered in mud and cow dirt and sour milk.
‘You can have something of mine,’ Charlotte said to me.
‘So you do have something in that great box of yours,’ Mrs Peter said. ‘Get up the stairs, then, and be quick about it. We’ll have to go on foot across the fields for you’ve left us no time to take the road.’
‘But my good trousers!’ Matthew said. He was in the porch, waiting to leave. ‘The fields will dirty them.’
‘You’ve Charlotte and Shilly to thank for that,’ Mrs Peter said.
Charlotte’s box of belongings was under our bed, where it had lain since we first came to the farm. She and I knelt on the floor and together we pulled it out.
‘Close your eyes, Shilly.’
‘Why? What have you got in there – more mice?’
She reached for my face and before I knew what she was doing she’d run her hot palm over my eyelids to close them, as I’d seen my mother close the eyes of the dead.
I heard the creak of the box opening and thought I would look a little. What could be the harm? But my eyes wouldn’t open. I clawed at them. The lids had gone. There was just a spread of skin. She had sealed them closed.
‘What have you done to me?’ I screamed.
‘Easy, easy,’ she said, as if I was a horse. ‘I said not to look.’
I felt her take my hands and then there was something on me, on my legs and across my front.
‘See what I’ve given you,’ she said.
My eyes opened to patterned cloth, red with white shapes. So much cloth I could bunch it and bunch it and there was still more to hold.
And it was on my body. I was clothed in it. My working dress lay on the floor, a heap of rags. But I hadn’t put this new dress on. Hadn’t felt Charlotte put it on me, either. She was changed too, wearing the fine green dress she’d worn at the hirings. She’d managed to clean John Peter’s blood from the elbow, though I hadn’t seen her scrubbing anything. St Michael’s tail hung out of her sleeve.
‘How …?’
‘Have you pair expired?’ Mrs Peter shouted up the stairs.
Charlotte kicked the box back under the bed then grabbed my hand and we were away down the stairs and out the porch door into the sunlight of the yard. My heart sang and I felt like the whole world was mine, because she was mine. I knew it.
I knew what she was too.
SEVEN
We were too late to find a seat near the front of the chapel, where Mrs Peter said her daughter would be, and could only press in at the back instead. The draught came cold and keen through the poorly shutting doors and the service was too long. The singing helped me bear it, and Charlotte’s fine voice joining in, for she could read the words in the hymnal.
‘Who taught you to read?’ I asked her, amazed that she could. Jealous, too.
‘My mother,’ she said. She stopped singing for a time after that.
At last the service was over and the doors were opened, but no one was in a hurry to be home. The bare ground between the chapel and the road was full of the lingering, and in their press and gabble Charlotte and I were parted.
‘It’s Shilly, isn’t it?’ a voice beside me said.
She was older than me. Fair-looking, with a wide mouth that was the spit of John Peter’s but it gave her a pretty smile. Her hands were broad.
I nodded. ‘You’re Mrs Peter’s daughter,’ I said.
‘Mary Westlake,’ she said, and bobbed her head like saying how do you do. ‘Not much to look at, is it?’ she said, waving at the chapel. ‘But I like the hymns better than in church.’
‘It’s good to hear singing that isn’t “Sweet Maidens All”.’
Mary laughed. ‘Matthew still going on about that poor woman, is he? Some things don’t change.’
‘You know his songs?’
‘Too well. Matthew came to Penhale before I married.’
I wondered where her husband was. Mrs Peter hadn’t spoken of him. Perhaps he was as dead as Mr Peter, killed by the cutting of hay.
‘Tell me, how do you find my mother?’ Mary said.
‘She’s crosser than a baited cat sometimes, and she takes all the candles to bed with her.’
‘I meant her health,’ Mary said.
‘Oh! I shouldn’t have said—’
But Mary laughed and said she’d wanted for candles of an evening too when she lived at the farm, so it was all right and I liked her.
‘My mother looks worse each Sunday,’ Mary said.
Mrs Peter was leaning against the chapel’s wall as she talked to the women. Her Sunday hat had slipped.
‘Her shoulder’s giving her pain,’ I said. ‘But Charlotte could mend it, she knows things.’
‘The other girl?’
‘She rubbed John Peter’s warts with rabbit meat.’
‘I shouldn’t think that pleased my mother,’ Mary said, and then she said something else but the noise of other people’s talk had grown louder around us and I didn’t catch her words.
Nearby a crowd of men were jostling – Matthew, John Peter and some others. One was a heavy-set man who stank of spirits. I could smell him from where I stood. I was taken bad then, needing to do as I didn’t ought to. My skin went clammy. I swallowed the need, fought it, not wanting Mary to see.
‘Who’s that there, with John Peter and Matthew?’ I asked her.
‘You’ve not met Humphrey yet? He’s at the inn. Has eggs and milk from the farm.’
There was a lanky boy too. Thin as a willow. He shoved John Peter in the ribs. Mary sucked in her breath.
‘That Tom Prout. There’s a relation I would happily be without.’
John Peter rammed the boy Tom with his huge shoulders but it was poor Matthew who was knocked to the ground. His right leg, his lame one, twisted under him and he cried out. I couldn’t see what was making the men so devilish, and when I turned to ask Mary she’d slipped away. Then the heart of the crush came clear. Charlotte was in the midst of the men.
Mrs Peter appeared at that moment, looking grey about the face. Her mouth was pulled into a line.
‘Your shoulder?’ I said.
‘Giving me some pain today.’
She leant on my arm and we went slowly to the gap in the wall that marked the path home.
Someone called Mrs Peter’s name. A gentleman was hurrying towards us. A tall man with blue eyes and brown hair the colour of good chairs.
‘I was hoping to catch you,’ he said to Mrs Peter. ‘I must speak to you about—’
Mrs Peter held up a gloved hand. ‘Not today, Daniel. I won’t talk of business on the Sabbath. And besides, we must get home to start the dinner.’
‘Phillipa, I really—’
‘Come tomorrow,’ Mrs Peter told him. She turned for home. ‘Where are Matthew and John?’
The men were following us slowly, looking back at Tom Prout whispering in Charlotte’s ear.
We were granted a half day Sundays so the afternoon was our own. Matthew went out before dinner was done, before I’d even cleared the plates away. He didn’t say where he was going but wherever it was, he went there in his good Sunday clothes.
Charlotte looked to be going out too, putting on her pattens and her bonnet. When she opened the porch door John Peter got up from the table to follow her, like a fish drawn on a baited hook. But his mother pulled him back.
‘You’ll stay with me this afternoon, John.’
‘No, Mother, I—’
‘It’ll soon be dirty out. Rain’s coming.’ Her hand tightened on his arm.
The porch door opened and Charlotte was gone. I felt a dark weight settle on my shoulders, across my back. But then she called me from the yard and I was lifted into the light.
We took the path up to the moor, crossed the road and walked on to the big lump of moor stone that was Lanlary Rock. She whistled and St Michael scrambled out of her sleeve. She let him gnaw on her already bitten thumbnail.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘To see what the land will give us. And isn’t it good to be out of the house, away from that woman?’
‘Mrs Peter isn’t so bad,’ I said, thinking of my father and what I’d left behind. His breath burning with spirits and his fists too often finding my flesh. ‘She’s not mean with feeding us, and we’ve half days.’
‘And that’s enough for you, is it, Shilly?’
It was, but I didn’t say so, because I didn’t want her to think me foolish. That was what her voice was saying to me.
For a time Roughtor sank below the horizon because of how the land rose and fell. It was strange that such a thing as a tor could disappear but that was how the moor was. Something could be there one minute and gone the next, though of course it wasn’t truly gone. It was hiding in plain sight.
The ground sloped and then there were marshes. Charlotte’s walking slowed. She took a step then stopped. Took another, sideways, then stopped again. St Michael shot up her arm and clung, shaking, to her shoulder. Charlotte plucked at the strings of her bonnet, plucked at her lips. Looked about her like a lost child.
‘You’ve not been long on the moor,’ I said.
‘It’s so open. Not like … I can’t see … There’s nowhere to hide.’
