Bury Her Deep

20

The moon, looking as tremulous and iridescent as a soap bubble balanced on the branch tips of the bare dark trees, shone down through the windows of the schoolroom onto the heads of the Rural ladies. Miss Lindsay, standing on a set of steps with a taper in her hand, began touching its glowing tip to the candles and as the dots of light steadily grew into pointed, flickering flames and the flames spread all around the tree with each touch, the ladies began to murmur.

‘Oh, did you ever see so bonny!’

‘My, those bottle tops fair catch the light when they’re strung together.’

‘Away. It’s your bobbles you made that are twinkling.’

‘And what a fair heat comes off it. You’ve got the fire bucket there, eh no, Miss McCallum?’

Miss Lindsay stepped down and blew out the taper and we stood in silence for a while, admiring.

‘Let’s not put the lamps on again,’ she said. ‘Let’s have our tea in the candlelight.’

‘Are those mincemeat pies warmed through yet, Moyra?’

‘Aye, they’re rare and hot.’ And then, sotto voce. ‘I’d be as happy with a scone myself, mind.’

‘No! Fruit only lies heavy if you’ve put too much peel through it. You’d better have one of my ones, Mrs Martineau – with the wee stars on the top – and you’ll be fine.’

When we had collected our cups from the tea table and sat back down in the ring of chairs around the tree we looked, in the soft light, like children gathered around a manger, or rather like children pretending to be wise men gathered around a manger, half the air of wonderment acting and half of it real.

Miss McCallum settled down next to me.

‘I’m sorry about your talk, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘You’re fated never to give it, it seems.’

‘If I’d insisted on the Household Budget instead of a Christmas party with a tree, there might have been a riot,’ I said and there was some soft chuckling from the ladies nearest us, who were listening in.

‘Well, you’re always welcome to come back and join us,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, from across the way. ‘You’ve been a good friend to Luckenlaw.’

‘Aye, some folk can fit in anywhere,’ said another voice, sounding rather grim for the setting. ‘And some folk just fit in nowhere, try as they will.’

There was a slight silence after that, and a few throats were cleared. I had seen the board as I drove past the gateposts of Luck House on my way down that afternoon. Fine small estate, historic mansion house, tenanted farm, cottages, trout stream, stocked shoot. Enquiries and viewing strictly through agents.

‘I hear that Vashti one is still in the hospital,’ said Annette Martineau. ‘What is it that’s wrong with her again?’

‘They’ve never said,’ said Molly.

‘I heard the pair of them had been dabbling…’ said a timid voice. I stiffened. ‘In… drugs.’

‘Now, ladies,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘The Rural is no place for gossip.’ There was a rumble of assent, with just a hint of amusement too. ‘There but for the grace of God…’

‘I cannot agree with you there,’ said Mrs Palmer. ‘I think you make your own luck in this world.’

‘You’re right,’ said Mary Torrance. ‘The good you do and the harm you do: both come back to you threefold.’

‘And what’s for you won’t go by you,’ said Mrs McAdam, of course, because someone had to.

‘Let’s not dwell on it,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘It’s Christmas time. Let’s be happy that we’ve got this first year behind us and the Rural is going strong.’

‘And we’ve a lot to look forward to next year,’ said a voice from the other side of the tree, sounding slightly knowing. ‘I hear we’ve a wedding coming.’

Lorna Tait looked down and said nothing, but she was smiling. Jock Christie from Luckenheart Farm had been there at the manse for tea before the meeting tonight, very well-scrubbed and uncomfortable in his good shirt and squeaky shoes, looking younger than ever but not much younger than Lorna with her rosy cheeks and dancing eyes, and while I was changing I heard from Grant who had heard from Mrs Wolstenthwaite in the kitchen that he was there two and three times a week, and they had been seen out walking together with no chaperone, and last Sunday young Christie had sat in the manse pew at the kirk and Mr Tait had looked mightily pleased and said nothing.

It could not have been the ideal way to meet one’s future mate, being carried down a hillside in a dead faint and laid on his kitchen table wearing nothing but a blanket, but Alec told me that Christie had taken it all in his stride and had attended to Lorna as he would attend to any sick calf or heifer struck with milk fever.

He had had time to gather himself, right enough. He had, of course, not believed me that nothing was wrong and had run to the manse at a sprint as soon as I had left him. He met Alec coming out of the gates.

‘I need to see Mr Tait,’ Christie panted.

‘He’s not in,’ said Alec, whose sides were also heaving. ‘I’m trying to find him too. I’ve just been up the law and there are lights, candles. I saw them and went to investigate but there’s no one to be found.’

‘I think they’re in that cave-thing at my place,’ said John Christie. ‘That dark-haired lady went in after them.’

‘A dark-haired lady?’ said Alec, starting to run. ‘Didn’t you try to stop her?’

By the time they had reached the cleft in the rock and Alec had seen my motor car sitting there, Mr Tait was almost all the way down the hill with Lorna in his arms, his knees threatening to give out at the strain.

‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘Captain Watson? Jockie? Someone help me.’

‘I’ve got her, sir. You can let go now,’ said Christie.

‘Where is she?’ demanded Alec.

‘I saw the lights,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I should have gone for help, but I was so worried about Lorna I just hared off up there alone and-’

‘Where is she?’ Alec almost shouted.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mr Tait, sounding enfeebled by his fright and exhaustion. ‘I couldn’t manage them both. She’s still up there.’

So she was, but she was quite safe. I had one of the stone angels kneeling at my side, smoothing back my hair and murmuring softly until, hearing Alec gallop up the stony steps and scramble to the top of the law, his breath ragged, she melted away. Alec returned to the rest of the party with me over his shoulder, like a fireman, and we all staggered and stumbled into Luckenheart Farm kitchen and collapsed there.

I did not remember any of this, of course. I remembered nothing after the black bell that was Vashti and the five stone angels who had disappeared except perhaps for that one who sat with me, but when Alec told me about the kitchen and, afterwards, the journey to the manse laid out across the back seat of my motor car beside Lorna, it was as though he was reminding me about a dream someone had told me a long time ago, or describing a picture I had seen once in a book in my nursery, but only once and never again.

The first thing I remember clearly was coming round in the spare bedroom, feeling sick and weak, and turning my head to find Hugh at my bedside, staring at me.

‘Mr Tait has told me everything,’ he said.

‘Lucky you,’ I croaked back. Hugh held out an invalid’s cup of water to me and I sucked thirstily on the spout before speaking again. ‘He’s hardly told me anything,’ I said.

‘A private detective?’ said Hugh, but I could not tell what he might be thinking from his voice, which was as blank as his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

I thought about it for a moment.

‘We’re not given to confidences,’ I pointed out. ‘I have no idea what you’re doing most days.’ Hugh looked at me as though he were my school matron and he had caught me inking my legs instead of darning my stockings like a good girl. ‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘I thought you would stop me.’

‘And how did you think I should do that?’ said Hugh, sounding resigned. ‘What have I ever managed to stop you doing?’

‘What else have I ever done?’ I said.

Hugh regarded me for a long time before he spoke again.

‘I saw “Captain Watson” this morning.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well, the thing is, Hugh, that Alec is my… assistant. Actually my Watson, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘And truly.’

‘I thought,’ Hugh began, but then cleared his throat and started again. ‘I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear you’re not foolish enough to be harbouring ideas, Dandy.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said, lifting my head a little but letting it fall back to the pillow as my head swirled and a sharp stab of pain reminded me that my rib was broken. ‘Ugh, I feel so sick. I could never be a bohemian.’

‘What do you think I meant?’ said Hugh. ‘You’d be making a fool of yourself, that’s all. You are very unworldly, my dear, which is a pleasant trait for any woman to exhibit, so don’t think I’m complaining, but what you don’t realise is that Osborne is no threat to another man’s wife.’

‘It was a disguise,’ I said, gaping at him. ‘You know it was. He was pretending to be an artist.’

‘Well, he looked very at home in it,’ said Hugh, sounding so comfortable and superior that I wished I felt well enough to kick him. ‘One man can tell these things about another.’

I forbore from pointing out that Hugh had been as thick as thieves with Alec over their two estates, their walls and drains and spaniel puppies and bird tables for the last two years, and had not been able to ‘tell’ anything.

‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘you must admit that you haven’t been a good judge of character recently.’

‘I admit no such thing,’ I retorted. ‘Which characters? The Howies were perfectly respectable people as far as anyone could tell.’

‘Mr Tait tells me they were connections of the Balnagowan Rosses,’ said Hugh.

‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘Those women never shut up about the Balnagowan Rosses and their illustrious ancestress.’ Hugh stared at me, his mouth pursing in that way that makes his moustache bristle.

‘The illustrious Ross ancestress,’ he said, ‘poisoned half her family and killed the other half with darts driven into wax dolls. And then her son, if memory serves me, buried his brother alive and sold him to the devil in exchange for his own life.’

I stared at him.

‘When was this?’ I asked, boggling at the matter-of-fact way he spoke.

‘Oh, a while back,’ said Hugh. ‘But still.’

‘That explains a great deal,’ I said. ‘They married into a lineage and found out their husbands couldn’t care less about it.’

‘Best thing I’ve heard about them,’ said Hugh. ‘And I’m glad I could clear it up for you, Dandy. I only wish you had asked me before.’

This, it pained me to reflect, was a good point. In fact, if I had ever listened to Hugh on the subject of ancient Scots history I might have been able to see the Howies for what they were at the outset. I closed my eyes, not feeling up to admitting it out loud.

‘That’s right, you rest,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ll go and tell Mr and Miss Tait that you are quite recovered and there’s no need to fuss you. They’ve had a dreadful shock, finding out about those two… women. And I have to say, Dandy, you didn’t really handle this case with a light touch. Surely it would have been better to get to the bottom of things without a lot of rushing about in the night and fainting. In fact…’

With great thankfulness, I felt myself beginning to fall into a doze again and when I reawakened, he was gone.

He had barely referred to any of it since then, but he had looked askance at me when I said I was coming back to Luckenlaw for the Christmas Social.

‘Very well, then,’ he had replied at last. ‘But let that be the end of it. I am putting my foot down.’

Poor Hugh, I suppose he had to be allowed to put his foot down about something; now that I had told him a bit more about a detective’s rates of pay he certainly was not going to stamp on that. So, I concluded, I should just have to find it in myself to let the chance of addressing the Rural on the topic of the Household Budget pass me by.

I was glad to have the chance to see them all one last time, though, and to have a quiet word with Mr Tait the next day too, once Lorna had excused herself. She was off to Luckenheart Farm with a basket over her arm.

‘Taking a picnic luncheon?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to plant some crocuses in all those clay pots at the back door. They look a fair disgrace sitting there empty.’

‘And I’m sure they’ll be very happy,’ I said to her father as we watched her stroll off down the drive from his study window. ‘I’m glad the young curate didn’t work out in the end, aren’t you?’

‘Curate?’ said Mr Tait.

‘Wasn’t there a minister in the offing at one time, whom you dissuaded?’

‘No,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It was John Christie I was trying to keep her away from. I could tell he took to her from the first time he clapped eyes on her five years ago.’

‘And you disapproved?’

‘We all want the best for our children, don’t we?’ said Mr Tait. ‘We all want better for our children than we’ve had ourselves. It’s the one thing that we can do to change things.’

‘Well, it’s a hard life, I suppose, being a farmer’s wife,’ I said, slightly puzzled. ‘But he seems an excellent young man. Lettered and cultured, not at all a… well, a peasant, although it makes me sound a fearful snob to say so. And your wife was a farmer’s daughter after all.’

Mr Tait smiled at me for a while before he spoke again.

‘What can’t be cured must be endured, or even embraced – which makes for a happier life in the end, don’t you think, Mrs Gilver?’

I nodded, absently. I was still puzzled by his reluctance about Jock Christie, but there were many more puzzles besides.

‘What of the Howies?’ I asked him. ‘Are you adamant about not going to the police?’

‘No good would come of it,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And a great deal of harm.’

‘They kidnapped Lorna when you get right down to it,’ I reminded him, although he surely could not need reminding. ‘And they killed the kitten. They should be punished.’

‘Oh, they will be, I’m sure,’ said Mr Tait.

‘Where will they go now? What will they do?’

‘I neither know nor care,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Mischievous, muddle-headed women the pair of them and those husbands no more use than… Ah, but I suppose I should find some charity in myself even for the likes of the Howies.’

‘They really believed it, you know,’ I said to him. This was still a struggle for me to comprehend. ‘They thought that putting a girl back in the chamber – whether the same girl or another one – would bring back the good times to Luckenlaw.’

‘Fools the pair of them,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I don’t know where they got their ideas, for they didn’t understand the first thing about it.’

I was eyeing him, speculatively.

‘And what if they did?’ I said. ‘What would they think then?’

He eyed me just as thoughtfully before he spoke.

‘I suppose I owe you an explanation,’ he said at last. ‘And doesn’t our contract bind you to silence on whatever I tell you?’

‘It does, as would yours with me if you were that kind of minister.’ We both smiled.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are those who think the Howies brought all the trouble with them. They were the ones who gave Luckenheart Farm to a boy on his own and changed its name. There are those who think none of it was anything to do with the girl in the chamber at all.’

‘I rather got the impression,’ I said, ‘that those people who seemed most concerned about Luckenheart – the farmers’ wives, you know – did believe in that girl.’

‘Oh, they did, they did, they do,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They thought she was causing the bother with the dark stranger. I’m talking about the other trouble. Are you familiar with the five elements, Mrs Gilver?’

‘Earth, air, fire, water and… I can never remember the other one.’

‘Ether,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Spirit. Well, there are those who looked at the blight and the fluke, the dry wells and the burned-out house and saw it as a punishment for what had happened at Luckenheart Farm.’

‘And Luckenheart Farm itself?’ I said. ‘Do you mean there was bad… ether there? That the place had a bad spirit?’ I spoke rather tentatively, unable to believe that I could be having this conversation, with a minister of the kirk, in Fife.

‘No spirit at all,’ said Mr Tait. ‘The place was dead with just that young boy who didn’t belong here. Although there was no harm in him, none whatsover. So that was the trouble – for those who believe it.’

‘But they thought the girl who had been buried in the law was the cause of the dark stranger?’

‘Until you found out about all the bread and bonfires and eggs and flowers and all that nonsense.’

‘I worked out the last smell in the end,’ I told him. ‘The first day I ventured out for a walk at Gilverton, it hit me. Stubble turnips.’

‘Wonderful winter fodder,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’m quite with Hugh there.’

I shuddered. It has always been one of the least pleasant features of country life in the depths of winter as far as I am concerned – the smell of half-frozen turnips strewn in the bare fields for the sheep to nibble, rotting slowly there until spring.

‘It was a jack o’ lantern I could smell,’ I said. ‘For Hallowe’en. Candle wax and smouldering turnip. Eggs in March, flowers in April, bonfire smoke in June.’

‘Easter, Beltane and the Solstice,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Yeast in August and corn in September.’

‘Corn for the Autumnal Equinox,’ I said. ‘But what was the yeast in August for?’

‘Lammas bread,’ said Mr Tait, but he sounded very scathing. ‘That was just like those Howies, making a pantomime of what they didn’t understand.’

‘What do you imagine they did exactly?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, they probably just cobbled together some little ceremony out of their books, some blessing or what have you.’

‘In their motor car?’ I said, but actually it did make some kind of sense; I had always thought the timing was odd on that first night when Vashti Howie had reported seeing the stranger. If they had drawn into a hedgerow to sprinkle seasonal foodstuffs around, it would have used up a good while. This thought immediately sparked another.

‘The change of direction,’ I said, smacking my hand against my forehead. ‘At first the stranger was coming from the north and then from July he suddenly started coming from the south. The only thing that changed in July was that the Howies joined the Rural. Vashti Howie always drove on the main road, never round the lanes. There was a solid, physical clue there all along, that was nothing to do with strangers or devils or any of it.’

‘I was sure there would be,’ said Mr Tait. ‘That’s why I needed you, my dear, to unearth the solid clues.’

‘I was so distracted by all those men,’ I said, ‘out of their houses and refusing to say where they’d been. Do you know what they were doing at Jock Christie’s all those nights their wives were at the Rural?’

‘I do,’ said Mr Tait, and a rich chuckle burbled up from deep inside him. ‘You were right enough, my dear. Their wives wouldn’t have turned a hair at cards or drinking, but this…!’

‘What?’ I said, leaning forward in my seat.

‘It started when Jock Christie came,’ said Mr Tait. His tone was sepulchral, but I could tell he was teasing me. ‘He’s lured them all in one by one and now they’re planning something big. Utterly in thrall to it, they are.’

‘“It” being?’ I asked, smiling back at him.

‘The “new ways”,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They’re clubbing together to buy a tractor. And a potato sorter and a steam thresher. That young Christie and his college ways have turned their heads completely.’

‘The more I hear, the less I can believe it,’ I said. ‘Mr Hemingborough and Mr McAdam embracing science? I thought they were such stick-in-the-muds.’

‘Now, wherever did you get that impression?’ said Mr Tait, his eyes very wide. For once, he did not seem to be teasing.

‘I don’t really know,’ I said, casting my mind back over the case trying to remember. ‘Aha! That’s it. It was because they taunted Miss Lindsay about setting up the Rural. It seems odd, somehow, that they should be so down on new ideas for women if they’re so keen on new ideas for men. But they shouted names at her in the street, you know.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Mr Tait. ‘There was an altercation, certainly. And names were used. But you’ve got the thing entirely about face, my dear. They were berating Miss Lindsay for the wasted opportunity, you see. They thought the Rural could achieve great things, wanted their wives to join and learn some modern ways. Bessie McAdam has a cousin whose Rural has had talks on “incubators for poultry farmers” and “the Education Bill”.’

‘So what were the names?’ I asked.

‘Well, I believe it was the night of the home-made hair tonics and egg-cosies from four continents that made Tom Hemingborough see red in the end. He called Miss Lindsay a feather-brain and a coquette.’

‘A coquette? Morag Lindsay?’ I was laughing again now.

‘Och, he’ll have heard it on the pictures,’ said Mr Tait. ‘He probably doesn’t know what it means. So you see, it’s all of a piece, really. The wind of change must sweep through every farm and through the Rural too, if those five men have anything to say about it.’

‘And you think they really feared to tell their wives about their plans?’ I said.

‘For sure!’ exclaimed Mr Tait. ‘My own dear wife was the same. Nothing altered, nothing new, nothing different, everything as it always was. Mrs McAdam, for one, will be much more disturbed by the tractor than she was by the Howies’ goings-on. And if Mary Torrance knew that Drew was planning to sort his tattie crop with a machine, instead of having the tinkers down from Tayside as her father always did, she would be shocked to her core.’

‘Speaking of shocking to the core,’ I said, ‘here’s something I always wanted to ask, but never could. What on earth happened at the Rural in July, Mr Tait? You invited that Wisconsin preacher into the place, so it should by rights be you who has to tell me.’

Mr Tait always did a lot of laughing, but at this he clutched his ample frontage and shook all over.

‘Oh my, oh my,’ he gasped. ‘I wasn’t there, of course, but I got caught up in the aftermath. Pastor Ammon showed me everything, appealing for my support. Oh my, oh my.’

‘But what was it?’ I said.

‘His wife,’ said Mr Tait, sighing and catching his breath, ‘was supposed to talk on the subject of “The Modern Family”. And so she did. It turned out, though, that what makes a family truly modern in Wisconsin is well-spaced children and not too many of them.’

‘No!’

‘It was a cataclysm, my dear Mrs Gilver. Not only a lecture, but enormous diagrams and…’ Here Mr Tait lost the power of speech again briefly. ‘… sample appliances! Marie Stopes would have blushed. And then it came out afterwards that Mrs Ammon had gone to tea with the Howies the day before, and realising – rather late in the day – that she had better make sure her material was suitable, she had asked Vashti and Nicolette for their opinion.’

‘And they egged her on then came along to watch the explosion?’ I was giggling a little, but my overwhelming feeling was relief that I had not been there to see it. I was surprised at Mr Tait too. He seemed, not only for a minister but taken against the population at large, to be absolutely unshockable.

‘I can imagine what the devotees of the old ways made of that!’ I concluded at last. ‘Not to mention your even more staid parishioners.’ Then I went back to attacking another little corner of what was still a mystery to me. ‘Speaking of how people take what befalls them,’ I said, ‘the villagers in general had what we might call a normal reaction to the dark stranger – they were scared stiff and made sure they never got in his way again – but if the farmers’ wives believed it was an angry spirit, as you say, why were they so wiling to put themselves in harm’s way?’

‘They thought it was their due just to let her do what she would, for she had clearly been wronged.’ Mr Tait’s chuckles had evaporated and he spoke sombrely again.

‘Ah.’ I understood at last. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you.’

‘They believe so,’ he said. ‘The good you do and the harm you do: both will come back on you threefold. Or on your daughter or your daughter’s daughter or whoever it is that’s there to be paid back when the time comes.’ He drew a hefty sigh. ‘Those farms have always passed down from mother to daughter, always.’

‘All the daughters of Luckenlaw.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I daresay that’s where the belief began. The belief that for all to be well there must be five daughters around the law, that harm followed because there were only four.’

‘What’s wrong with four?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ said Mr Tait. ‘But five is a good number, so they say, those who follow the old ways. Another thing those silly Howies got wrong. Three might be powerful, but five is best. All the years that Luckenheart stood empty, after my wife’s mother died, the other four women tended the place and kept it in good heart, but they always felt the strain of it, with someone missing.’

‘And now they’re back up to strength with Lorna anyway,’ I said, and then I seemed to hear what I was saying and I stopped to stare at him. Mr Tait’s sombre frown deepened and his eyes glistened as though with sudden, unshed tears.

‘I’ve tried so hard for so long,’ he said. ‘Tried to keep a balance, tried to keep everyone in this place happy enough so that no one rocks the boat and we can all muddle on together somehow. Tried, more than anything, to keep Lorna away from it all.’

‘Does she know?’ I said.

Mr Tait shook his head.

‘I never told her. But she’s young and strong and she’ll learn. And besides, I’ve always asked myself about my wife, you know.’

‘What about her?’

‘If maybe she would be here today if she hadn’t left her home. She never thrived up there at Kingoldrum, and when I brought her back, I think it was already too late.’

There was such a weight of sadness in his voice that I could not bring myself to jolly him out of these strange things he was saying.

‘And when you get right down it,’ he concluded, ‘it isn’t for me to choose Lorna’s life, is it? That’s another thing they believe. They do not approve of casting spells and trying to influence others, but they do believe this: if it harms no one, do what you will.’

‘In other words,’ I said, ‘play bonny.’

‘It’s time for me to let Lorna make her own life.’

I nodded, rather uncertainly.

‘You’ve done a remarkable job of bringing her up alone,’ I said.

‘I’ve had a lot of help,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And would have had more, if I hadn’t been so set on some of my ways getting a look in too.’

‘She has not gone short of love, even for a motherless girl,’ I assured him. ‘Why, last month she even thought you were organising a secret party frock for her.’ Again I stopped, thunderstruck by a new idea. Mr Tait waited, smiling. ‘You never took that girl to another minister to be buried, did you?’ I said. He shook his head. ‘She was in your wife’s bedroom and they all came to pay their respects.’ He nodded. ‘Then what?’ I said. ‘After she was in the bedroom. She’s not there now.’

‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘You’re nearly there. I’ll give you a clue. When was it? Ask yourself when and you’ll know what.’

I thought hard for a moment and then smiled.

‘The full moon,’ I said. ‘The dark of the moon is a time for dark deeds, but they were doing good by her. That’s why none of your farmers’ wives were at the Rural meeting last month when the stranger came for me. They were busy putting things right on the perfect night to do so.’

‘And where is she?’ said Mr Tait. He was teasing me again, but so gently I did not mind it.

‘She’s where she belongs,’ I said. ‘On top of the law? In a good place?’ He was nodding. ‘Would she have been a witch?’ I hazarded. He nodded again.

‘That’s the common name for it, although hardly a kind one,’ he said. ‘Killed by the mob and left like an animal,’ he added softly, sounding sorrowful. ‘And even the five daughters of the Lucken Law, whoever they were all those years ago when it happened, couldn’t save her.’

‘And so their descendants believed that when she was let out of the chamber she hit out?’

‘She visited threefold harm upon them – girls, brides and women – and they had to grin and bear it.’

‘Except she didn’t. It was Vashti and Nicolette mucking about with flower garlands and lucky loaves of bread, playing at spells. I should have guessed really, because they were quite open about their interest in folklore and their seasonally themed parties and it all makes sense in its own terms if you try hard enough to look at it that way. Almost all, that is. Except this. It’s what you keep saying about five, Mr Tait. I was sure there were five of them on the law the night that Vashti had Lorna there. Five figures in grey.’

‘There are only four daughters just now,’ said Mr Tait.

‘I know. Mrs Hemingborough, Mrs Palmer, Mrs McAdam, Mrs Torrance. But I’m sure someone else was there too. Who was it?’

‘Jock Christie was there and Captain Watson.’

‘I don’t mean them,’ I said. ‘There were five stone angels. Five… witches, shall we call them.’

‘You were not yourself that night,’ Mr Tait told me. ‘You could never have known if it was four or five.’

‘But could good have come from four?’ I insisted. ‘Would the same people who thought that having four around the farms instead of five had brought all their troubles have even tried with four? And that other night – would four have laid her to rest on top of the law and expected peace to follow?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Mr Tait.

‘I’m not worried,’ I assured him. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘None of it?’ said Mr Tait, giving me one of his amused looks.

‘Of course not!’ I exclaimed. He nodded slowly.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You never felt anything… odd… up at Luckenheart Farm, for instance?’ I hesitated, remembering. He swept on. ‘No, of course you didn’t. It’s just harmless old stories and sayings, nothing in it at all.’

‘Well, whether I believe it or not,’ I said, colouring slightly, ‘I’m puzzled at the behaviour of those who do. And besides, I’m sure there were five. Four swooped down on Vashti and one – the biggest one – tended to Lorna. I know I was confused, but I remember that clearly.’

‘My advice is not to fret about it,’ said Mr Tait, and then he said what he had said before: ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. All manner of things, Mrs Gilver.’

‘Where in the Bible is that?’ I asked him. ‘It’s lovely but I can’t place it.’

‘It’s not from the Bible,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It was Julian of Norwich who said it.’

‘Who was he?’

‘She,’ he told me. ‘She. A woman of God.’ He sighed. ‘I always think she’d have finished up as the Pope if she’d been a man.’ He shook his head, but not sorrowfully this time. ‘Wouldn’t the world be a simpler place, Mrs Gilver, if a woman could be a priest and a man could be…’

‘A what?’ I asked him. He only looked back at me, with those kindly dancing eyes.

‘Oh Mr Tait!’ I said at last as, finally, I got it. He chuckled. ‘Please can I ask an enormous favour?’ I begged him. ‘Please can I be there if you ever tell Hugh?’