Island of Bones caw-3 Page 12

  ‘She reads fortunes,’ Stephen declared, never happier than when instructing someone, ‘and helps catch spies.’

  Harriet was afraid this might lead to more questions than she cared to answer, so decided to steer the conversation another way.

  ‘What does your father think of such traditions, Miss Scales? Here is Stephen, brimful with tales of witches and cunning-men.’

  Miss Scales grinned. ‘There are enough such stories to fill us all up! Have you heard that the last Lord Greta is said to walk the hills in hard times? And you will find a dozen households that put out bowls of milk and oats for the dobbies, and there are stories of bogles and devils in every village. I ask the people why they believe, and they say the butter is churning and the milk is gone in the morning, so why should they not believe the dobbie has had his feed and blessed them with his aid? For myself, I think butter churning is all in the wrist, and it’s foxes and hedgehogs that drink the milk. As to my father, he tries at least once a month to tell them there are no such things as witches, and he and his parishioners all walk away from the church, each thinking the other foolish and hoping for their enlightenment. Then all agree to say no more about it and carry on just as before. I say let them hear the word of Christ and love Him, and I’m sure the Lord will forgive a few shreds of the pagan hanging on the souls of such good Christian people. And they are good people here. Certainly there are some that take more than they give, but my father says he is blessed by his flock and I agree with him.’

  Harriet was surprised. It seemed entirely foreign to her that in her own country there should still be so many who clung to the old ways. She wondered if there was something unusual about this place, or if her own father’s parishioners had held similar beliefs. Her father had been blessed with a firm faith, but he had seen lively debate on matters theological as part of his Christian duty. He confessed his own doubts and confusions honestly and sought through conversation with his wife and daughters and his own careful reading to understand and overcome them. He had felt his efforts to come to a deeper understanding of the Christian message to be part of the same project for the enlightenment of the nation that the natural philosophers continued in their laboratories, or the anatomists in their lecture theatres. Harriet’s father, Mr Trench had believed there was no danger in knowledge, and all enquiry could only lead in the end to a deeper love of God and His works. Harriet could not recall, however, a single occasion where the subject of witchcraft had been mentioned in their home, other than as an historical oddity. Yet here such things blossomed like moss on her lawns at Caveley, and not all the raking and seeding of Church and State could pull it out. However far we come, she found herself thinking, we are at times still all animals huddled round the firelight fearing what moves in the dark.

  Stephen was asking Miss Scales about Casper.

  ‘Whenever I see a picture of the Green Man, I think of Casper,’ she said. ‘It is his beard, I suppose, but also he has that light in his eyes and that thirst for the spaces and hills. He seems part of them to me.’

  ‘Witches talk to him, Miriam told me,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Certainly someone does,’ Katherine said a little sadly. ‘I have seen it. He’ll look fierce, or sometimes you are speaking to him and suddenly it appears he can hardly hear you. Sometimes they are kind and sometimes cruel to him, I think. There have been periods when he has disappeared into the hills for weeks on end, and come back very weak. I am sure it is they that drive him to distraction at those times. It leaves him a little strange, but he is a good man and I think he knows what can harm and heal in these hills.’

  ‘When did they begin to talk to him?’ Harriet shifted her son’s weight, and hoped her dress would not become too badly crushed.

  ‘Soon after his father died, I believe. It was 1754. Ruben was taken in the same illness that took my mother and sister and left me as you see me now. Poor Casper was still very young.’

  Stephen looked concerned. ‘I hope they shall not start talking to me.’

  Harriet wondered what she might say to reassure him, but Miss Scales was already patting his hand. ‘Do not trouble yourself, young man. Not every boy who loses a father is haunted in such a way.’ Miss Scales lifted her face and Harriet followed her gaze to where Crowther was standing on the lawn with Mr Askew. He looked severe.

  It was at that same moment that Harriet became aware of a disturbance coming from where the lower lawns reached the lakeshore. She saw heads turning, the ladies covering their mouths then huddling together. Gently shifting Stephen from her lap, she stood. At the foot of the little wooden jetty she saw Felix, shoulders hunched, standing with an older man she did not recognise. He appeared to be shouting at Felix. To their left, a pair of younger men were helping a third man, soaked to the skin, out of the water. The third man was Mr Quince.

  ‘Stephen, stay here with Miss Scales, please.’ And when he looked as if he might be about to protest, she repeated, ‘Stay here,’ and before he could argue she began to walk briskly between the groups of staring guests, reaching the little group just as her son’s tutor managed to set foot on shore again.

  Mr Quince was in a sorry state. He had lost one of his shoes, his hair was flattened to his pink face, and his pale coat was dirty, and clinging to him. He was gasping a little and his chin wobbled. He sat down on the bank and began to shiver, wrapping his arms around his thick waist and keeping his back to the staring crowd.

  Harriet came to a halt by him. ‘Are you injured, Mr Quince?’

  He looked up quickly and saw her. ‘No, I thank you, Mrs Westerman.’

  ‘What happened here?’ she asked.

  An older gentleman stepped forward and pointed at Felix. ‘He pushed him in!’ He spoke with emphasis and passion enough to fill a theatre. ‘I saw it all. That gentleman,’ he indicated the unfortunate Mr Quince, ‘joined him on the jetty. They exchanged a few words. He bowed and turned away, then this damned boy pushed him in — just like that! I have never seen such a thing.’

  The head-shaking and murmuring that followed this statement flowed up the lawn in ripples. The fierce gentleman’s words were being repeated and exclaimed at, all the way to the house.

  Harriet glanced down at her shivering employee. He looked utterly miserable and she felt her palms itching to slap Felix’s face. ‘Felix?’

  Before he could lift his eyes, they were interrupted by the trill of the Vizegrafin as she came down towards them almost at a run. Mrs Briggs followed behind her with a towel over her arm.

  ‘It was an accident! A silly accident. No doubt Mr Quince slipped. A narrow jetty for a big man.’

  The witnesses’ looks were speaking. Mrs Briggs said nothing, but laid the towel around Mr Quince’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. He turned his blotched red face towards Felix with a look of loathing. ‘I did not slip.’

  ‘Wasn’t it, Felix, dear? An accident?’ The Vizegrafin put her hand on her son’s arm and smiled at the world in general, but Harriet noticed her fingers tightening round his wrist. Felix seemed to shake himself awake.

  ‘Naturally. I am so terribly sorry. It was I that lost my footing and stumbled against him. Please accept my apologies, Mr Quince. Unforgivably clumsy of me.’

  He stepped forward and put out his hand. Mr Quince looked at it but made no move. Harriet was keenly aware of the total silence around them and the fixed attention of Mrs Briggs’s guests.

  ‘Mr Quince?’ she said, very softly and not moving her head. Mr Quince took Felix’s hand and shook it without a word. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Quince glanced at her, water still dripping from his hair onto the towel round his shoulders, then allowed himself to be shepherded by Mrs Briggs up the slope. The groups of people made way for him as he hobbled past, and stared, then as he passed began to whisper.

  Felix watched his progress up the lawn, a slight smile on his lips, then turned to Harriet. ‘I am sorry your son’s tutor got a drenching, Mrs Westerman. These larger fellows can be rather unsteady o
n their feet.’

  The Vizegrafin fluttered her eyelashes. ‘True, Felix, very true.’

  Harriet moved away from them both without a word and followed Mr Quince up the lawn. Had Crowther renewed his offer to horsewhip Felix at this moment, she would have taken him up on it with delight.

  II.5

  Casper Grace did not travel as far from the lake as he had intended. He heard word as he left Keswick that one of the farmers between that village and Naddle Bridge had been asking for him, so he retraced his steps past the Druidic circle to call on him. The farmer, Kerrick, was a tall man with thick knuckles and the grave demeanour of a man who trusted neither his luck nor his land not to play a trick on him. He consulted Casper in a regular way, so Casper was welcomed into his kitchen with respectful friendliness. While Mistress Kerrick served them with house cheese, oatcakes and beer, her husband told Casper slowly that he was thinking on the purchase of a piece of land on the edges of what he already owned. Casper listened to the terms and when the beer was done, walked the ground with him. Casper thought it a fair price and he said so. He was ready to make his way off again, his eye on the progress of the red disk of the fogged sun, when Kerrick put a hand on his arm.

  ‘There’s also the matter of our lass, Mr Grace.’

  The man had three daughters. The two younger ones were still infants, and if it were a matter of fever or shakes, Kerrick would have said so at their first words.

  ‘Agnes?’

  Kerrick nodded and studied his thick boots. ‘There’s something in her manner these last weeks. She’s off and away in her head half the time, been out late in the evenings when she’s no right to be, and there’s a twitch to her. The livestock are nervous of her.’

  Casper heard the rising whisperings of the witches in the still air. No wonder that Kerrick looked so wary. Casper liked Agnes. He had watched her grow from a stumbling toddler to a fine dark-haired girl of sixteen wearing the shape of a woman like a new dress. She had a certain wit and manner and had been quick to learn from him whatever he had thought to tell her. She was a wanderer in the wild places, like himself. He had seen her as he walked up to the stones with the boy from the Hall and his friends, and had thought the genteel company had made her shy when she did not come to meet them. Now he wondered if she had been shy of him.

  ‘Is she in the house now?’ he asked. Kerrick nodded. ‘Send her out to me then.’

  Kerrick went back to his cottage, his shoulders hunched and his footsteps heavy. Casper sniffed. Then took a seat on the mossy turf, pulled his carvings from his pocket and began to work his knife.

  As the evening started to darken, Mrs Briggs’s guests began to make their way around the head of the lake towards Crow Park for the next stage of their day’s entertainment. There, in a roped-off area where the park’s low swell sank gently again to the shore, they found their numbers augmented by the local yeoman farmers and tradesmen and their families who could afford the shillings necessary to watch the fireworks from a comfortable seat and with a glass of punch in their hands, but were not eligible to be invited into the grounds of Silverside Hall.

  As they surveyed the ground and assessed the quality of the refreshments, the continual topic was the dousing of Mr Quince. There was much speculation as to whether any of the party resident in Silverside would attend the fireworks at all. Some maintained that Mr Quince would stay away, too humiliated to show his face; others vigorously disagreed and said rather it was Felix who should remain at the Hall. Others still agreed he most certainly should, but reminded their friends that von Bolsenheim was a foreigner by birth, for all the advantages of his heritage and education, so his behaviour would be unpredictable. He had proved himself to be no gentleman by pushing Mr Quince in the lake. He might now do so again by inflicting himself on the company. A certain amount of money changed hands. Several women also remarked they thought Felix’s good looks had been over-rated, and Mr Quince was of a much more English mode. All the men claimed to have spoken to the tutor and thought him a promising young man of great good sense. They also muttered darkly that some ‘foreign manners’ seemed to have rubbed off on the Vizegrafin.

  While these opinions were being rehearsed and refined in Crow Park, Mr Quince was sitting in the little room next to his own bedroom which served as a temporary study for Stephen and himself. He was no longer wet, but was perhaps still a little damp around the edges. He had changed his clothing, but still felt the lakewater on his skin.

  Harriet sat opposite him.

  ‘I do think you should come to the fireworks, Mr Quince.’ He did not reply. ‘Please do, for my sake.’

  He shifted in his seat and sneezed, then having buried himself briefly in his pocket handkerchief said: ‘I do not wish to be stared at and talked about, Mrs Westerman.’

  ‘You have my sympathies,’ she replied dryly and when he looked up at her, she saw a glimmer of reluctant amusement in his eyes.

  ‘Mrs Westerman, I appreciate you have insight into being discussed by a crowd, but nothing you have done has rendered you ridiculous.’ He twitched as he said the word. Harriet wondered if it was difficult for this young, educated man to have an employer like herself. She had never really considered the matter or the man, beyond his abilities to educate her son. She realised that she knew nothing of his ambitions and tried to recall if she had mentioned to him that she intended to send Stephen to school in a year or so.

  ‘You have not made yourself ridiculous, Mr Quince. He did push you, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Quince hung his head again. ‘It was quite deliberate. Though I must count myself lucky he claimed it was an accident and apologised as he did. I should have had to call him out otherwise, and then probably would have ended up dead as well as wet. I have no doubt he is an expert shot. Men such as he always are.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you would be willing to tell me what passed between you?’

  He shook his head, which made the flesh under his chin wobble. ‘It was a private matter, but there was nothing offensive in it to my knowledge. I have never been so surprised in my life as when I found myself spitting up lakewater.’

  Harriet laughed softly and saw a smile twitch again on Quince’s face.

  ‘I am beginning to consider Felix a rather foul young man,’ she said. ‘If he continues like this, Crowther will find some way to cut off his inheritance, I think.’

  ‘But he is very handsome,’ the tutor said sadly.

  Mr Quince would never be handsome, but Harriet hoped very much he would someday find a woman who would make him believe he was, at least from time to time.

  ‘I would rather have a man like you in the circle of my acquaintance, Mr Quince, than a dozen Felixes,’ she said firmly. ‘Now will you come to the fireworks? Crowther, I know, intends to spend his evening among the boiled bones of the wretch from the island.’ She caught Quince’s look of surprise and lifted her hand. ‘Please, do not ask, Mr Quince. But I would like to go with Stephen. May I take your arm as we walk? Then we may be talked about together, as it were.’

  Mr Quince held his head on one side. ‘Does the Vizegrafin intend to go?’

  ‘Her son will drive her in the phaeton. You and Stephen will travel in the carriage with Mrs Briggs and myself.’

  ‘I should go. I know it.’ He put his hand to his head and smoothed his hair, then straightened his back and met her eyes. ‘Very well, Mrs Westerman.’

  ‘I shall see you downstairs in a quarter of an hour then, Mr Quince.’ She stood and made her way to the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, and she let herself out of the room.

  Casper heard the girl approach but continued to carve, listening to the chatter of the witches and spirits arguing with each other, advising, cursing or cajoling him until her shadow fell softly over his work. The black witch, loudest and most vicious of them all in his head, spat and growled.

  ‘Sit down, Agnes,’ he said without looking up. She did so, just opposite him on the grass with her
legs tucked under her and leaning on her arm. He lifted his eyes to her face and the black witch howled. She was a good-looking girl. Thick dark hair hung round her shoulders in a sheet; grey eyes with a sharp edge to them. She was paler than she should be, and her lips had a whiteness to them. He knew then.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded. Her chin started to tremble and she put her arms around her knees. Casper continued to carve. ‘Who began it?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘What occurred? Steal your beau, did she?’

  The girl had started to rock a little. ‘I thought she was my friend, but then at the Greeup wedding in May she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’s not even pretty.’

  Casper sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Such things occur, girly. No reason to start playing games you shouldn’t. You know those games have a price. Tell me what you did.’

  The girl pushed back her hair from her face and lifted her eyes towards the horizon. ‘I made a poppet.’

  Casper felt the air chill around him and was afraid. ‘You fed it?’

  ‘Blood and rue.’

  ‘How do you know such things?’

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘They are spoken of.’

  His knife ceased work for a moment. ‘So this girl we are speaking of is Stella Giles, who broke her ankle in June?’ The black witch was already howling as he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at him, mumbled, ‘I didn’t mean it to be so bad, but she deserved it.’

  He leaned forward and pointed at her chest with his knife so that she flinched back. ‘And what do you deserve now, Agnes? This is hateful work. You get snubbed by some lad, then young Stella isn’t able to work for a month. I should have known there was something in it, her taking so long to heal. You might have killed her.’ He spat on the ground. ‘You’ll have to pay it back, my girl, or it’ll go rotten on you — on you and in you.’ He paused, picking up the threads of talk from the arguing voices in his head. ‘Such matters are black. Tonight, no fireworks. Dig up the doll and take it up Swineside. Wash it in running water, and wash it well. Gather rowan and hazel enough to pack round it tight, tight — and bury it. Then you sit and you pray over it for forgiveness and think on what you have done. Never let me hear tell of you playing with such things again. Till dawn, mind — no creeping off. We’ll find a way for you to pay what you owe to Stella too, but first the lines must be straightened out.’