Missing Joseph

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT DID THAT SIGN SAY? did you see it, Simon? It was some sort of placard at the edge of the road.” Deborah St. James slowed the car and looked back. They’d already rounded a bend, and the thick lattice of bare branches from the oaks and horse chestnuts hid both the road itself and the lichenous limestone wall that had been edging it. Where they were now, the roadside’s demarcation consisted of a skeletal hedge, denuded by winter and blackened by twilight. “It wasn’t a sign for the hotel, was it? Did you see a drive?”

Her husband shook off the reverie in which he’d spent much of the long drive from Manchester airport, half-admiring the winter landscape of Lancashire with its subdued blend of moorland russets and farmland sage, half-brooding over the possible identifi cation of the tool which had cut a thick electrical wire prior to its being used to bind together the hands and the feet of a female body found last week in Surrey.

“A drive?” he asked. “There might have been one. I didn’t notice. But the sign was for palm reading and a psychic in residence.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. Is that a feature of the hotel you’ve not told me about?”

“Not that I know.” She peered through the windscreen. The road began to slope upwards, and the lights from a village shimmered in the distance, perhaps a mile farther on. “I suppose we haven’t gone far enough.”

“What’s the place called?”

“Crofters Inn.”

“Decidedly, then, the sign didn’t say that. It must be an advertisement for someone’s line of employment. This is Lancashire, after all. I’m surprised the hotel isn’t called The Cauldron.”

“We wouldn’t have come had it been, my love. I’m becoming superstitious in my advancing years.”

“I see.” He smiled in the growing darkness. Her advancing years. She was only twenty-fi ve. She had all the energy and the promise of her youth.

Still, she looked tired — he knew she hadn’t been sleeping well — and her face was wan. A few days in the country, long walks, and rest were what she needed. She’d been working too much in the past several months, working more than he, keeping late hours in the darkroom and going out far too early on assignments only marginally connected to her interests in the first place. I’m trying to broaden my horizons, she would say. Landscapes and portraits aren’t enough, Simon. I need to do more. I’m thinking of a multimedia approach, perhaps a new show of my work in the summer. I can’t get it ready if I don’t get out there and see what’s what and try new things and stretch myself and make some more contacts and… He didn’t argue or try to hold her back. He just waited for the crisis to pass. They’d weathered several during the first two years of their marriage. He always tried to remember that fact when he began to despair of their weathering this.

She pushed a tangle of coppery hair behind her ear, put the car back into gear, and said, “Let’s go on to the village, then, shall we?”

“Unless you’d like to have your palm read fi rst.”

“For my future, you mean? I think not, thank you.”

He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”

She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”

But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.

He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.

From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into the small village of Win-slough, which was built along the acclivity of a hill. They passed the church fi rst — a Norman structure with crenellation on its tower and along its roofl ine and a blue-faced clock permanently displaying the time as three twenty-two — then the primary school, then a row of terraced houses facing an open fi eld. At the peak of the hill, in a Y where the Clitheroe Road met the west-east junctions leading to Lancaster or to Yorkshire, Crofters Inn sat.

Deborah idled the car at the junction. She wiped at some condensation on the windscreen, squinted at the building, and sighed. “Well. It’s not much to speak of, is it? I thought…I was hoping…It sounded so romantic in the brochure.”

“It’s fi ne.”

“It’s from the fourteenth century. It’s got a great hall where they used to hold a Magistrate’s Court. The dining room’s got a timbered ceiling, and the bar hasn’t been changed in two hundred years. The brochure

even said that—”

“It’s fi ne.”

“But I wanted it to be—”

“Deborah.” She finally looked at him. “The hotel’s not the point of our being here, is it?”

She looked back at the building. In spite of his words, she was seeing it through the lens of her camera, weighing each area of composition. How it was situated on its triangle of land, how it was placed in the village, how it was designed. She did it as a second-nature response, like breathing.

“No,” she said at last, although she sounded reluctant. “No. It’s not the point. I suppose.”

She drove through a gate at the inn’s west end and stopped in the car park behind it. Like all the other structures in the village, the building was a combination of the county’s tan limestone and millstone grit. Even from behind, aside from white woodwork and green window boxes that were filled with a motley array of winter pansies, the inn bore no truly distinguishing features and no adornments. Its most significant distinction seemed to be an ominous portion of concaved slate roof that St. James earnestly hoped wasn’t over their room.

“Well,” Deborah said again with some resignation.

St. James leaned towards her, turned her to face him, and kissed her. “Did I mention I’ve been wanting to see Lancashire for years?”

She smiled at that. “In your dreams,” she replied and got out of the car.

He opened the door, feeling the cold, damp air lap against him like water, smelling woodsmoke and the peaty odours of wet earth and decomposing leaves. He lifted out his braced bad leg and thumped it to the cobbles. There was no snow on the ground, but frost rimed the lawn of what would otherwise be a seasonal beer garden. It was abandoned now, but he could imagine it fi lled with summertime tourists who came to walk on the moors, to climb the hills, and to fish in the river that he could hear but not see, coursing noisily some thirty yards away. A path led towards it — he could see this as well since its frosty fl agstones reflected the lights at the rear of the inn — and although the inn’s property clearly did not include the river, a boundary wall had an access gate built into it. The gate was open and as he watched, a young girl hurried through it, stuffing a white plastic bag into the over-size anorak she was wearing. This was neon orange, and, despite the girl’s considerable height, it hung down to her knees and drew attention to her legs which were encased in enormous, muddy green Wellingtons.

She started when she saw Deborah and St. James. But rather than hurry by them, she marched right up and, without ceremony or introduction, grabbed the suitcase that St. James had lifted from the boot of the car. She peered inside and snatched up his crutches as well.

“Here you are,” she said, as if she’d been searching them out by the river. “Bit late, aren’t you? Didn’t the register say you’d be here by four?”

“I don’t think I gave any time at all,” Deborah replied, in some confusion. “Our plane didn’t land until—”

“No matter,” the girl said. “You’re here now, aren’t you? And there’s plenty of time before dinner.” She glanced at the misty lower windows of the inn, behind which an amorphous shape was moving under the distinctive bright lights of a kitchen. “A word to the wise is in order. Skip the beef bourguignon. It’s the cook’s name for stew. Come on. This way.”

She began lugging the suitcase towards a rear door. With it in one hand and St. James’ crutches under her arm, she walked with a peculiar, hobbling gait, her Wellingtons alternately squishing and slapping against the cobbles. There seemed to be nothing to do but follow, and St. James and Deborah did so, trailing the girl across the car park, up a set of back stairs, and through the rear door of the inn. This gave way to a corridor off of which opened a room whose door was marked with a hand-lettered sign saying Residents’ Lounge.

The girl thumped the suitcase onto the carpet and leaned the crutches against it with their tips pressing onto a faded Axminster rose. “There,” she announced and brushed her hands together in an I’ve-done-my-part gesture. “Will you tell Mum that Josie was waiting for you outside? Josie. That’s me.” This last she said stabbing a thumb to her chest. “It’d be a favour, actually. I’ll pay you back.”

St. James wondered how. The girl watched them earnestly.

“Okay,” she said. “I can see what you’re thinking. To be honest, she’s ‘had it with me,’ if you know what I mean. It’s nothing that I did. I mean, it’s lots of stupid stuff. But mostly it’s my hair. I mean, it doesn’t generally look like this. Except it will for a while. I s’pose.”

St. James couldn’t decide if she was talking about the style or the colour, both of which were dreadful. The former was an ostensible attempt at a wedge which seemed to have been rendered by someone’s nail scissors and someone else’s electric razor. It made her look remarkably like Henry V as depicted in the National Portrait Gallery. The latter was an unfortunate shade of salmon that did battle with the neon jacket she wore. It suggested a dye job applied with more enthusiasm than expertise.

“Mousse,” she said apropos of nothing.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mousse. You know. The stuff for your hair. It was s’posed to just give me red highlights, but it didn’t actually work.” She drove her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “I got just about everything going against me, see. Try finding a fourth form bloke my height sometime. So I thought if I made my hair look better, I’d get some notice from a fifth or lower sixth bloke. Stupid. I know. You don’t have to tell me. Mum’s been doing that for the last three days. ‘What am I go’n’ to do with you, Josie?’ Josie. That’s me. Mum and Mr. Wragg own the inn. Your hair’s awful pretty, by the way.” This last was addressed to Deborah whom Josie was inspecting with no little interest. “And you’re tall as well. But I expect you’ve stopped growing.”

“I think I have. Yes.”

“I haven’t. The doctor says I’ll be over six feet. A throwback to the Vikings, he says and he laughs and pats me on the shoulder like I ought to get the joke. Well, what the H were the Vikings doing in Lancashire, that’s what I want to know.”

“And your mother, no doubt, wants to know what you were doing by the river,” St. James noted.

Josie looked fl ustered and waved her hands. “It’s not the river, exactly. And it’s nothing bad. Really. And it’s only a favour. Just a mention of my name. ‘Young girl met us in the car park, Mrs. Wragg. Tall. Bit gawky. Said her name was Josie. Quite pleasant she was.’ If you’d drop it like that, Mum might unknot her knickers for a bit.”

“Jo-se-phine!” A woman’s voice shouted somewhere in the inn. “Jo-se-phine Eugenia Wragg!”

Josie winced. “I hate it when she does that. It reminds me of school. ‘Josephine Eugene. She looks like a bean.’”

She didn’t, actually. But she was tall, and she moved with the clumsiness of a young teenager who has suddenly become aware of her body before she’s got used to it. St. James thought of his own sister at this very same age, cursed by height, by the aquiline features into which she hadn’t yet grown, and by a wretchedly androgynous name. Sidney, she would introduce herself sardonically, the last of the St. James boys. She’d borne the brunt of her schoolmates’ teasing for years.

Gravely, he said, “Thank you for waiting in the car park, Josie. It’s always nice to be met when one gets where one’s going.”

The girl’s face lit. “Ta. Oh, ta,” she said and headed for the door through which they’d come. “I’ll pay you back. You’ll see.”

“I’ve no doubt of that.”

“Just go on through the pub. Someone’ll meet you there.” She waved them in the general direction of another door across the room. “I’ve got to get out of these Wellies quick.” And with another querying look at them, “You won’t mention the Wellies, will you? They’re Mr. Wragg’s.”

Which went a long way to explain why she’d been flopping about like a swimmer wearing flippers. “My lips are sealed,” St. James said. “Deborah?”

“The very same.”

Josie grinned in response and slipped through the door.

Deborah picked up St. James’ crutches and looked about at the L-shaped room that served as the lounge. Its collection of overstuffed furniture was tatty, and several lampshades were askew. But a breakfront sideboard held an array of magazines for guests to peruse, and a bookcase was crammed with a good fi fty volumes. Above pine wainscotting the wallpaper appeared recently hung — poppies and roses twining together — and the air bore the decided fragrance of potpourri. She turned to St. James. He was smiling at her.

“What?” she said.

“Just like home,” he replied.

“Someone’s, at least.” She led the way into the pub.

They had arrived, apparently, during off-hours, for no one was present behind the mahogany bar or at any of the matching pub-issue tables which beer mats dotted in small round splodges of orange and beige. They dodged their way past these and their accompanying stools and chairs, under a ceiling that was low, its heavy timbers blackened by generations of smoke and decorated with a display of intricate horse brasses. In the fi replace, the remains of an afternoon’s blaze was still glowing, giving an occasional snap as fi nal pockets of resin burst.

“Where’d she get off to, that blasted girl?” a woman was demanding. She spoke from what was apparently an office. Its door stood open to the left of the bar. Immediately next to it, a stairway rose, with steps oddly slanted as if strained from bearing weight. The woman came out, yelled “Jo-se-phine!” up the stairs, and then caught sight of St. James and his wife. Like Josie, she started. Like Josie, she was tall and thin, and her elbows were pointed like arrow heads. She raised one self-conscious hand to her hair and removed a plastic barrette of pink rosebuds which held it haphazardly off her cheeks. She lowered the other to the front of her skirt and brushed aimlessly at a snowfall of lint. “Towels,” she said in apparent explanation of the latter activity. “She was supposed to fold them. She didn’t. I had to. That sums up life with a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“I think we just met her,” St. James said. “In the car park.”

“She was waiting for us,” Deborah added cooperatively. “She helped us in with our things.”

“Did she?” The woman’s eyes went from them to their suitcase. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. St. James. Welcome. We’ve given you Skylight.”

“Skylight?”

“The room. It’s our best. A bit cold, I’m afraid, at this time of year, but we’ve put in an extra heater for you.”

Cold didn’t really do justice to the condition of the room to which she led them, two fl ights up, at the very top of the hotel. Although the free-standing electric heater was ticking away, sending out palpable streams of warmth, the room’s three windows and two additional skylights acted like transmitters for the cold outside. Two feet in any direction from them, one walked into a shield of ice.

Mrs. Wragg drew the curtains. “Dinner’s from half past seven till nine. Will you be wanting anything prior to that? Have you had your tea? Josie can pop up with a pot, if you like.”

“Nothing for me,” St. James said. “Deborah?”

“No.”

Mrs. Wragg nodded. She rubbed her hands up the sides of her arms. “Well,” she said. She bent to pick a length of white thread from the carpet. She wound it round her fi nger. “Bath’s through that door. Mind your head, though. The lintel’s a bit low. But then all of them are. It’s the building. It’s old. You know the sort of thing.”

“Yes, of course.”

She went to the chest of drawers between the two front windows and made minute adjustments to a cheval mirror and more adjustments to the lace doily beneath it. She opened the clothes cupboard, saying, “Extra blankets here,” and she patted the chintz upholstery of the room’s only chair. When it became apparent that there was nothing more to be done, she said, “London, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” St. James said.

“We don’t get lots here from London.”

“It’s quite a distance, after all.”

“No. It’s not that. Londoners head south. Dorset or Cornwall. Everyone does.” She went to the wall behind the chair and fussed with one of two prints hanging there, a copy of Renoir’s Two Girls at the Piano, mounted on a white mat going yellow at the edges. “There’s not a lot likes the cold,” she added.

“There’s some truth in that.”

“Northerners move to London as well. Chasing dreams, I think. Like Josie does. Did she…I wonder did she ask about London?”

St. James glanced at his wife. Deborah had unlocked the suitcase and opened it on the bed. But at the question, she slowed what she was doing and stood, a single feathery grey scarf in her hands.

“No,” Deborah said. “She didn’t mention London.”

Mrs. Wragg nodded, then flashed a quick smile. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Because that girl’s got a mind for mischief when it comes to anything that’ll take her from Win-slough.” She brushed her hands together and balled them at her waist and said, “So then. You’ve come for country air and good walks. And we’ve plenty of both. On the moors. Through the fields. Up into the hills. We had snow last month — first time it’s snowed in these parts in ages — but we’ve only frost now. ‘Fool’s snow,’ my mum called it. Makes things muddy, but I expect you’ve brought your Wellies.”

“We have.”

“Good. You ask my Ben — that’s Mr. Wragg — where’s the best place to walk. No one knows the lay of the land like my Ben.”

“Thank you,” Deborah said. “We’ll do that. We’re looking forward to some walks. And to seeing the vicar as well.”

“The vicar?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Sage?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Wragg’s right hand slithered from her waist to the collar of her blouse.

“What is it?” Deborah asked. She and St. James exchanged a glance. “Mr. Sage’s still in the parish, isn’t he?”

“No. He’s…” Mrs. Wragg pressed her fi ngers into her neck and completed her thought in a rush. “I suppose he’s gone to Cornwall himself. Like everyone else. In a manner of speaking.”

“What’s that?” St. James asked.

“It’s…” She gulped. “It’s where he was buried.”

CHAPTER TWO

POLLY YARKIN RAN A DAMP cloth across the work top and folded it neatly at the edge of the sink. It was a needless endeavour. No one had used the vicar’s kitchen in the last four weeks, and from the looks of things no one was likely to use it for several weeks more. But she still came daily to the vicarage as she had been doing for the last six years, seeing to things now just as she had seen to things for Mr. Sage and his two youthful predecessors who had both given precisely three years to the village before moving on to grander vistas. If there was such a creature as a grander vista in the C of E.

Polly dried her hands on a chequered tea towel and hung this on its rack above the sink. She’d waxed the linoleum floor that morning, and she was pleased to note that when she looked down, she could see her refl ection on its pristine surface. Not a perfect refl ection, naturally. A fl oor isn’t a mirror. But she could see well enough the shadowy crinkles of carrot hair that escaped the tight binding of scarf at the back of her neck. And she could see— far too well — her body’s silhouette, slope-shouldered with the weight of her watermelon breasts.

Her lower back ached as it always ached, and her shoulders stung where the overfull bra pulled its dead weight against the straps. She prised her index finger under one of these and winced as the resulting release of pressure from one shoulder only made the other feel that much worse. You’re so lucky, Poll, her mates had cooed enviously as undeveloped girls, lads go all woozy at the thought of you. And her mother had said, Conceived in the circle, blessed by the Goddess, in her typical crypto-maternal fashion, and she swatted Polly’s bum the first and final time the girl had spoken about having surgery to reduce the burden dangling like lead from her chest.

She dug her fists into the small of her back and looked at the wall clock above the kitchen table. It was half past six. No one was going to come to the vicarage this late in the day. There was no reason to linger.

There was no real reason at all, in fact, for Polly’s continued presence in Mr. Sage’s home. Still, she came each morning and stayed beyond dark. She dusted, cleaned, and told the church wardens that it was important— indeed, it was crucial at this time of year — to keep up the house for Mr. Sage’s replacement. And all the time that she worked, she kept an eye watching for a movement from the vicar’s nearest neighbour.

She’d been doing that daily since Mr. Sage’s death when Colin Shepherd had fi rst come round with his constable’s pad and his constable’s questions, sifting through Mr. Sage’s belongings in his quiet, knowing constable’s way. He’d only glance at her when she answered the door to him each morning. He’d say Hullo Polly and slide his eyes away. He’d go to the study or to the vicar’s bedroom. Or sometimes he’d sit and sort through the post. He’d jot down notes and stare for long minutes at the vicar’s diary, as if an examination of Mr. Sage’s appointments somehow contained the key to his death.

Talk to me, Colin, she wanted to say when he was there. Make it like it was. Come back. Be my friend.

But she didn’t say anything. Instead, she offered tea. And when he refused — No thanks, Polly. I’ll be off in a moment. — she returned to her work, polishing mirrors, washing the insides of windows, scrubbing toilets, fl oors, basins, and tubs till her hands were raw and the whole house glowed. Whenever she could, she watched him, cataloguing the details designed to make her lot lighter to bear. Got too square of a chin, does Colin. His eyes are nice green but far too small. Wears his hair silly, tries to comb it straight back and it always parts in the middle and then fl ops forward so it covers his brow. He’s always messing it about, he is, raking his fingers through it in place of a comb.

But the fingers generally stopped her dead, and there the useless catalogue ended. He had the most beautiful hands in the world.

Because of those hands and the thought of them gliding their fingers across her skin, she’d always end up where she started from at first. Talk to me, Colin. Make it like it was.

He never did, which was just as well. For she didn’t really want him to make it like it had been between them at all.

Too soon for her liking, the investigation ended. Colin Shepherd, village constable, read out his findings in an untroubled voice at the coroner’s inquest. She’d gone because everyone in the village had done so, filling up the space in the great hall at the inn. But unlike everyone else, she’d gone only to see Colin and to hear him speak.

“Death by misadventure,” the coroner announced. “Accidental poisoning.” The case was closed.

But closing the case didn’t put an end to the titillated whispers, the innuendoes, or the reality that in a village like Winslough poisoning and accidental constituted a sure invitation to gossip and an indisputable contradiction in terms. So Polly had stayed in her place at the vicarage, arriving at half past seven each morning, expecting, hoping day after day, that the case would reopen and that Colin would return.

Wearily, she dropped onto one of the kitchen chairs and eased her feet into the work boots she’d left early that morning on the growing pile of newspapers. No one had thought to cancel Mr. Sage’s subscriptions yet. She’d been too caught up with thinking of Colin to do so herself. She’d do it tomorrow, she decided. It would be a reason to return once more.

When she closed the front door, she spent a few moments on the vicarage steps to loosen her hair from the scarf that bound it. Freed, it crinkled like rusty steel wool round her face, and the night breeze shifted it the length of her back. She folded the scarf into a triangle, making sure the words Rita Read Me Like A Book In Blackpool! were hidden from view. She put it over her head and knotted its ends beneath her chin. Thus restrained, her hair scratched her cheeks and her neck. She knew it couldn’t possibly look attractive, but at least it wouldn’t fly about her head and catch in her mouth as she made the walk home. Besides, stopping on the steps beneath the porch light, which she always left burning once the sun went down, gave her the opportunity for an unimpeded look at the house next door. If the lights were on, if his car was in the drive…

Neither was the case. As she trudged across the gravel and plunged into the road, Polly wondered what she would have done had Colin Shepherd actually been at home this evening.

Knock on the door?

Yes? Oh, hullo. What is it, Polly?

Press her thumb against the bell?

Is there something wrong?

Cup her eyes to the windows?

Are you needing the police?

Walk direct in and start up talking and pray that Colin would talk as well?

I don’t understand what you want with me, Polly.

She buttoned her coat beneath her chin and blew grey steamy breath on her hands. The temperature was falling. It had to be less than five degrees. There’d be ice on the roads and sleet if it rained. If he didn’t drive careful coming round a curve, he’d lose control of the car. Perhaps she’d come upon him. She’d be the only one near enough to help. She’d cradle his head in her lap and press her hand to his brow and brush his hair back and keep him warm. Colin.

“He’ll be back to you, Polly,” Mr. Sage had said just three nights before his death. “You stand firm and be here for him. Be ready to listen. He’s going to need you in his life. Perhaps sooner than you think.”

But all of that was nothing more than Christian mumbo-jumbo, reflecting the most futile of Church beliefs. If one prayed long enough, there was a God who listened, who evaluated requests, who stroked a long white beard, looked thoughtful, and said, “Yesssss. I see,” and fulfilled one’s dreams.

It was a load of rubbish.

Polly headed south, out of the village, walking on the verge of the Clitheroe Road. The going was rough. The path was muddy and clogged with dead leaves. She could hear the squish of her footsteps over the wind that creaked above her in the trees.

Across the street, the church was dark. There would be no evensong till they got a new vicar. The Church Council had been interviewing for the past two weeks, but there seemed to be a scarcity of priests who wanted to take up life in a country village. No bright lights and no big city seemed to equate with no souls needing to be saved, which was hardly the case. There was plenty of scope for salvation in Winslough. Mr. Sage had been quick to see that, especially — and perhaps most of all — in Polly herself.

For she was a long time, long ago sinner. Skyclad in the cold of winter, in the balmy nights of summer, in the spring and fall, she had cast the circle. She had faced the altar north. Placing the candles at the circle’s four gates and using the water, the salt, and the herbs, she created a holy, magical cosmos from which she could pray. All the elements were there: the water, the air, the fire, the earth. The cord snaked round her thigh. The wand felt strong and sure in her hand. She used cloves for the incense and laurel for the wood and she gave herself — heart and soul, she declared — to the Rite of the Sun. For health and vitality. Praying for hope where the doctors had said there was none. Asking for healing when all they promised was morphine for the pain until death finally closed all.

Lit by the candles and the burning laurel’s flame, she had chanted the petition to Those whose presence she had earnestly invoked:

Annie’s health restor-ed be. God and Goddess grant my plea.

And she had told herself — convinced herself utterly — that her every intention was wholesome and pure. She prayed for Annie, her friend from childhood, sweet Annie Shepherd, darling Colin’s own wife. But only the spotless could call upon the Goddess and expect response. The magic of those who made the petition had to be pure.

Impulsively, Polly traced her steps back to the church and entered the graveyard. It was as black as the inside of the Horned God’s mouth, but she needed no light to show her the way. Nor did she need it to read the stone. ANNE ALICE SHEPHERD. And beneath it the dates and the words Dearest Wife. There was nothing more and nothing fancy, for more and fancy were not Colin’s way.

“Oh Annie,” Polly said to the stone that stood in the even deeper shadows where the wall of the yard skirted round a thick-branched chestnut tree. “It’s come upon me three-fold like the Rede says it would. But I swear to you, Annie, I never meant you harm.”

Yet even as she swore, the doubts were upon her. Like a plague of locusts, they laid her conscience bare. They exposed the worst of what she had been, a woman who wanted someone’s husband for her own.

“You did what you could, Polly,” Mr. Sage had told her, covering her hand with his own large mitt. “No one can truly pray away cancer. One can pray that the doctors have the wisdom to help. Or that the patient develops the strength to endure. Or that the family learns to cope with the sorrow. But the disease itself…No, dear Polly, one can’t pray away that.”

The vicar had meant well, but he didn’t really know her. He wasn’t the sort who could comprehend her sins. There was no absolution saying go in peace for what she had longed for in the foulest part of her heart.

Now she paid the three-fold price of having invited upon herself the wrath of the Gods. But it wasn’t cancer that they sent to affl ict her. It was a finer vengeance than Hammurabi could ever have wrought.

“I’d trade places with you, Annie,” Polly whispered. “I would. I would.”

“Polly?” A low, disembodied whisper in return.

She jumped back from the grave, her hand at her mouth. A rush of blood beat against her eyes.

“Polly? Is that you?”

Footsteps crunched just beyond the wall, gumboots snapping on the icy dead leaves that lay on the ground. She saw him then, a shadow among shadows. She smelled the pipe smoke that clung to his clothes.

“Brendan?” She didn’t need to wait for confirmation. What little light there was shone itself on Brendan Power’s beak of a nose. No one else in Winslough had a profile to match it. “What’re you doing out here?”

He seemed to read in the question an implicit and unintended invitation. He vaulted the wall. She stepped away. He approached her eagerly. She could see he held his pipe in his hand.

“I’ve been out to the Hall.” He tapped the pipebowl against Annie’s gravestone, dislodging burnt tobacco like ebony freckles on the frozen skin of the grave. He appeared to realise the impropriety of what he had done in the very next instant, because he said, “Oh. Damn. Sorry,” and he squatted and brushed the tobacco away. He stood, buried the pipe in his pocket, and shuffled his feet. “I was walking back to the village on the footpath. I saw someone in the graveyard, and I—” He lowered his head and seemed to be studying the barely discernible tops of his black gumboots. “I hoped it was you, Polly.”

“How’s your wife?” she asked.

He raised his head. “The renovation at the Hall’s been tampered with again. A bathroom tap left on. Some carpet’s got ruined. Rebecca’s worked herself into a state.”

“Understandable, isn’t it?” Polly said. “She wants a home of her own. It can’t be easy, living at her mum and dad’s, with a baby on the way.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not easy. For anyone. Polly.”

At the warmth of his tone, she looked away, in the distant direction of Cotes Hall where for the last four months a team of decorators and craftsmen had been pounding away at the long-abandoned Victorian structure, attempting to ready it for Brendan and his wife. “I can’t think why he doesn’t arrange for a night watchman.”

“He won’t be bullied into a watchman, he says. He’s got Mrs. Spence right on the grounds. He’s paying her to be there. And by God she ought to be bloody enough. Or so he says.”

“And does—” She worked at saying the name and betraying nothing as she said it. “Does Missus Spence never hear any mischief being made?”

“Not from her cottage. It’s too far behind the Hall, she says. And when she makes rounds, no one’s ever there.”

“Ah.”

They were silent. Brendan shifted his weight. Icy soil crackled beneath him. A gust of night wind soughed through the chestnut’s branches and blew at the back of Polly’s hair where the scarf couldn’t manage to hold it in place.

“Polly.”

She heard both the urgency and the plea in his voice. She’d seen them before on his face when he asked to join her at her table in the pub, appearing as if with preternatural knowledge of her movements each time she went to Crofters Inn for a drink. Now, as on those other occasions, she felt her stomach knot and her limbs grow cold.

She knew what he wanted. It was no different from what everyone wanted: rescue, escape, a secret to cling to, a half-formed dream. What did it matter to him if she was hurt in the process? On what account book was ever written the payment exacted for damage to a soul?

You’re married, Brendan, she wanted to say in a tone that combined both patience and compassion. Even if I loved you — which I don’t, you know — you’ve got a wife. Go on home to her now. Climb into bed and make love to Rebecca. You were willing enough to do that at one time.

But she was cursed with being a woman not naturally given to either rejection or cruelty. So instead, she said only, “I’ll be off now, Brendan. My mum’s waiting supper,” and she headed out the way she had come.

She heard him following. He said, “I’ll walk with you. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“It’s too far,” she said. “And you’ve just come that way, haven’t you?”

“But on the footpath,” he said with an assurance suggesting he believed his answer was the height of logic. “Across the meadow. Over the walls. I didn’t walk along the road.” He matched his steps to hers. “I’ve got a torch,” he added, pulling it out of his pocket.

“You shouldn’t be walking at night without a torch.”

“It’s only a mile, Brendan. I can cope with that.”

“So can I.”

She sighed. She wanted to explain that he couldn’t simply take a walk with her in the dark. People would see them. They’d misunderstand.

But she knew in advance how he would respond to her explanation. They’ll just think I’m walking to the Hall, he’d answer, I go out there every day.

What an innocent he was. How imperfect was his understanding of village life. It would matter little to anyone who saw them that Polly and her mother had lived twenty years in the gabled lodge at the mouth of the drive that led to Cotes Hall. No one would stop to think of that, or to think that Brendan was checking on the Hall’s renovation in anticipation of moving there with his bride. Assignation by night, the villagers would label it. Rebecca would hear of it. There’d be hell to pay.

Not that Brendan wasn’t paying already. Polly had little doubt of that. She’d seen enough of Rebecca Townley-Young throughout their lives to know that marriage to her under the best of conditions would not be a particularly nurturing affair.

So among other things, she felt sorry for Brendan which is why she allowed him to join her at Crofters Inn in the evening, which is why she now just kept walking along the verge, with her eyes fastened on the steady, bright beam from Brendan’s torch. She didn’t attempt to make conversation. She had a fairly good idea where any conversation with Brendan Power would ultimately lead.

A quarter of a mile along, she slipped on a stone, and Brendan took her arm.

“Careful,” he said.

She could feel the back of his fi ngers pressing against her breast. With each of her footsteps, the fingers rose and fell, acting the part of distant cousin to caress.

She shrugged, hoping to disengage his hand. His grip grew fi rmer.

“It was Craigie Stockwell,” Brendan said diffidently into the growing silence between them.

She drew her eyebrows together. “Craigie what?”

“The carpet at the Hall. Craigie Stockwell. From London. It’s a ruin now. The drain in the basin was plugged with a rag. Friday night, I should guess. It looked as if the water had run all weekend.”

“And no one knew?”

“We’d gone down to Manchester.”

“Doesn’t anyone go inside when the workmen aren’t there? Check things’re in order?”

“Mrs. Spence, you mean?” He shook his head. “She generally just checks the windows and doors.”

“But isn’t she supposed to be—”

“She’s a caretaker. Not a security guard. And I imagine she’s nervous out there alone. Without a man, I mean. It’s a lonely spot.”

But she’d frightened off intruders at least once, Polly knew. She’d heard the shotgun herself. And then a few minutes later came the thudding of two or three frantic, shouting runners, and the gunning of a motorbike afterwards. The word went out to the village after that. People didn’t mess Juliet Spence about.

Polly shivered. The wind was rising. It blew in brief, frigid gusts through the bare hawthorn hedge that bordered the road. It promised a heavier frost in the morning.

“You’re cold,” Brendan said.

“No.”

“You’re shivering, Polly. Here.” He put his arm round her and drew her snugly next to him. “Better, isn’t it?” She didn’t reply. “We walk together at the same pace, don’t we? Have you noticed that? But if you put your arm round my waist, it’s even easier going.”

“Brendan.”

“You haven’t been to the pub this week. Why?”

She didn’t respond. She moved her shoulders. His grip remained fi rm.

“Polly, have you been up Cotes Fell?”

She felt the cold on her cheeks. It insinuated itself like tentacles down her neck. Ah, she thought, here it comes at last. Because he’d seen her there one evening last autumn. He’d heard her petition. He knew the worst.

But he went on easily. “I find I like hiking more and more every week. I’ve been out to the reservoir three times, you know. I’ve done a long tramp through the Trough of Bowland and another near Claughton, up Beacon Fell. The air smells so fresh. Have you noticed that? When you reach the top? But then, I suppose you’re too busy to do much walking.”

Now he’ll say it, she thought. Now comes the price I’ll have to pay him to hold his tongue.

“With all the men in your life.”

The allusion was a puzzle.

He shot her a glance. “There must be men. Lots, I’d guess. That’s probably why you’ve not been in the pub. Busy, aren’t you? Dating, I mean. Someone special, no doubt.”

Someone special. Without consideration, Polly gave a weary chuckle.

“There is someone, isn’t there? A woman like you. I mean. I can’t imagine a bloke who wouldn’t. Given half a chance. I would. You’re terrific. Anyone can see that.”

He switched off the torch and put it in his pocket. Freed, his other hand grasped her arm.

“You look so good, Polly,” he said and bent closer. “You smell good. You feel good. Chap doesn’t see that needs his head examined.”

His steps slowed then stopped. There was reason for this, she told herself. They had reached the drive at one side of which sat the lodge where she lived. But then he turned her to him.

“Polly,” he said urgently. He caressed her cheek. “I feel so much for you. I know you’ve seen it. Won’t you please let me—”

A car’s headlamps caught them like rabbits in its beam, not coming along the Clitheroe Road but bumping and jolting along the lane that led beyond the lodge up to Cotes Hall. And just like rabbits, they froze in position, Brendan’s one hand on Polly’s cheek, his other on her arm. There could be no real mistaking his intentions.

“Brendan!” Polly said.

He dropped his hands and put a careful two feet between them. But it was too late. The car came upon them slowly, then slowed even more. It was an old green Land Rover, mud-spattered and grimy, but its windscreen and windows were perfectly clean.

Polly turned her head away from the sight of it, not so much because she didn’t want to be seen and gossipped over — she knew that nothing would spare her that — but so she wouldn’t have to see the driver or the woman next to him with her blunt greying hair and her angular face and, Polly could see it all so vividly without even trying, with her arm stretched out so that the tips of her fi ngers rested on the back of the driver’s neck. Touching and twining through that slicked-back, undisciplined, ginger hair.

Colin Shepherd and Missus Spence were having another lovely evening together. The Gods were reminding Polly Yarkin of her sins.

Damn the air and the wind, Polly thought. There was no justice. No matter what she did, it came out wrong. She slammed the door behind her and drove her fist into it once.

“Polly? That you, luv-doll?”

She heard the roll of her mother’s heavy footsteps trundling across the sitting room floor. The sound of wheezing accompanied this, as did the clink and clatter of jewellery— chains, necklaces, gold doubloons, and anything else her mother saw fit to deck herself out with when she made her wintertime morning toilette.

“Me, Rita,” Polly answered. “Who else?”

“I dunno, luv. Some good-looking chappie with a sausage to share? Got to keep yourself open to the unexpected. ’At’s my motto, that is.” Rita laughed and wheezed. Her scent preceded her like an olfactory harbinger. Giorgio. She sprayed it on by the tablespoon. She came to the door of the sitting room and filled it, so large a woman that she ballooned out in a shapeless mass from her neck to her knees. She leaned against the jamb, working hard to catch her breath. The entry light glistened against the necklaces on her massive chest. It cast a grotesque Rita-shadow on the wall and made a fleshy beard of one of her chins.

Polly squatted to unlace her boots. They were thick-soled with mud, a fact that did not escape her mother.

“Where you been, luv-doll?” Rita jingle-jangled one of her necklaces, an affair of large cat heads fashioned in brass. “You go for a hike?”

“Road’s muddy,” Polly said with a grunt as she forced off one boot and worked on the other. Their laces were sodden, and her fi ngers were stiff. “Wintertime. You forget what it’s like?”

“Wish I could, I do,” her mother said. “So how’s things in the metropolis today?”

She pronounced it metro-POH-lis. Deliberately. It was part of her persona. She wore a guise of spurious ignorance while in the village, an extension of the general style she adopted when she came home for her winters in Winslough. Spring, autumn, and summer, she was Rita Rularski, reader of tarot, thrown stones, and palms. From her shopfront in Blackpool, she foresaw the future, expounded on the past, and made sense of the troubled, fractious present for anyone willing to part with the cash. Residents, tourists, holiday-makers, curious housewives, fine ladies looking for a giggle and a thrill, Rita saw them all with equal aplomb, dressed in a kaftan big enough to fit an elephant, with a bright scarf covering her grizzled brambles of hair.

But in winter she became Rita Yarkin again, back in Winslough for a three-month stay with her only child. She put her hand-painted sign on the verge of the road and waited for custom which seldom developed. She read magazines and watched the telly. She ate like a docker and painted her nails.

Polly glanced at these curiously. Purple today, with a tiny strip of gold crossing each one diagonally. They clashed with her kaftan — it was pumpkin orange — but they were a decided improvement over yesterday’s yellow.

“You tiff with someone this evenin’, luvdoll?” Rita asked. “You got an aura shrivelled to nothing, you do. That a’nt good, is it? Here. Lemme take a look at your face.”

“It’s nothing.” Polly made herself busier than she needed to be. She banged her boots against the inside of the woodbox next to the door. She took off her scarf and folded it neatly into a square. She put this square in the pocket of her coat and then brushed the coat itself with the flat of her hand, removing both speckles of lint and nonexistent splatters of mud.

Her mother wasn’t to be easily sidetracked. She pushed her huge mass from the door-jamb. She waddled to Polly and turned her round. She peered at her face. With her hand palm-open and an inch away, she traced the shape of Polly’s head and her shoulders.

“I see.” She pursed her lips and dropped her arm with a sigh. “Stars and earth, girl, stop being such a fool.”

Polly stepped to one side and headed for the stairs. “I need my slippers,” she said. “I’ll be down in a minute. I can smell supper. Have you done goulash like you said?”

“Listen here, Pol. Mr. C. Shepherd a’nt so special,” Rita said. “He got nothing to offer a woman like you. Do you not see that yet?”

“Rita…”

“It’s living that counts. Living, you hear? You got life and knowledge like blood in your veins. You got gifts beyond anything I ever had or seen. Use them. Damn it all, don’t throw them away. Gods above, if I had half what you have, I’d own the world. Stop climbing those stairs and listen to me, girl.” She slammed her hand down on the banister.

Polly felt the stairs tremble. She turned, blowing out a gust of resigned breath. It was only the three months of winter that she and her mother were together, but in the last six years, day tended to drag upon day as Rita used every excuse she could find to examine the manner in which Polly was living her life.

“That was him went by in the car just now, wasn’t it?” Rita asked. “Mr. C. Shepherd his precious self. With her, wasn’t he? From up at the Hall. That’s what you’re feeling the pain of now, isn’t it?”

“It’s nothing,” Polly said.

“And there you’ve got it right. It’s nothing. He’s nothing. Where’s the sorrow in that?”

But he wasn’t nothing to Polly. He never had been. How could she explain this to her mother, whose only experience of love had ended abruptly when her husband left Win-slough on the rainy morning of Polly’s seventh birthday, headed to Manchester “to get something special for my extra-special little girl,” and never came home.

Deserted was not a word Rita Yarkin ever used to describe what had happened to her and her only child. Blessed she called it. If he didn’t have the sense to know what kind of women he was walking out on, they were both better off without the ugly toad.

Rita had always seen her life in those terms. Every difficulty, trial, or misfortune could be easily redefined as a blessing in disguise. Disappointments were wordless messages from the Goddess. Rejections were merely indications that the most desired pathway was not the best. For long ago, Rita Yarkin had given herself — heart, mind, and body — into the safekeeping of the Craft of the Wise. Polly admired her for such trust and devotion. She only wished she could feel the same.

“I’m not like you, Rita.”

“You are,” Rita said. “You’re more like me than me in the first place. When did you last cast the circle? Not since I’ve been home, surely.”

“I have done. Yes. Since then. Two or three times.”

Her mother raised one sceptical, line-drawn eyebrow. “You’re the discreet one, aren’t you? Where you been casting?”

“Up Cotes Fell. You know that, Rita.”

“And the Rite?”

Polly felt prickly heat on the back of her neck. She’d have chosen not to answer, but her mother’s power was becoming stronger every time she made a reply. She could feel it quite distinctly now, as if it were oozing from Rita’s fingers, slithering up the banister and through Polly’s palm.

“Venus,” she said miserably and tore her eyes from Rita’s face. She waited for the mockery.

It did not come. Instead Rita took her hand from the banister and studied her daughter thoughtfully. “Venus,” she said. “This i’n’t about making love potions, Polly.”

“I know that.”

“Then—”

“But it’s still about love. You don’t want me to feel it. I know that, Mum. But it’s there all the same and I can’t make it go away just because you’d have me. I love him. Don’t you think I’d stop it if only I could? Don’t you think I pray to feel nothing for him…or at least to feel for him nothing more’n what he feels for me? D’you think I choose to be tortured like this?”

“I think we all choose our tortures.” Rita lumbered to an ancient rosewood Canterbury made lopsided by the absence of two of its wheels. It leaned against one of the walls in the entry beneath the stairs, and with a grunt to rock her weight to one side, Rita bent as much as her legs would allow and wrestled open its single drawer. She brought out two rectangles of wood. “Here,” she said. “Take ’em.”

Without question or protest, Polly took the wood. She could smell its unmistakable odour, sharp but pleasant, a permeative scent.

“Cedar,” she said.

“Correct,” said Rita. “Burn it to Mars. Pray for strength, girl. Leave love to those who don’t have your gifts.”

CHAPTER THREE

MRS. WRAGG LEFT THEM immediately after making her announcement about the vicar. To Deborah’s dismayed “But what happened? How on earth did he die?” she said guardedly, “I couldn’t quite say. A friend of his, are you?”

No. Of course. They hadn’t been friends. They’d only shared a few minutes’ conversation in the National Gallery on a rainy, blowing November day. Still, the memory of Robin Sage’s kindness and his anxious concern made Deborah feel leaden — struck by a mixture of surprise and dismay — when she was told he was dead.

“I’m sorry, my love,” St. James said when Mrs. Wragg closed the door upon her own departure. Deborah could see the worry darkening his eyes, and she knew he was reading her thoughts as only a man who had known her all her life could have possibly read them. He didn’t go on to say what she knew he wanted to say: It isn’t you, Deborah. You haven’t death’s touch, no matter what you think…Instead, he held her.

They finally descended the stairs between the bar and the office at half past seven. The pub was apparently in the process of serving its regular evening crowd. Farmers leaned against the bar engaged in conversation. Housewives gathered at tables enjoying an evening out. Two ageing couples compared walking sticks while six noisy teenagers joked loudly in a corner and smoked cigarettes.

From the midst of this latter group— among which, accompanied by the ribald comments of their mates, one couple necked heavily, with an occasional pause from the girl to nip at a flask and from the boy to drag deeply on a cigarette — Josie Wragg emerged. She’d changed for the evening into what appeared to be a work uniform. But part of her black skirt’s hem was falling out and her red bow tie was hopelessly askew, dribbling a long, unravelling string down the prairie expanse of her chest.

She ducked behind the bar where she scooped up two menus, and she said formally, with a wary eye in the direction of the balding man who pulled the pub’s taps with the sort of authority that suggested he had to be Mr. Wragg the proprietor, “Good evening, sir. Madam. You’ve settled in good?”

“Perfectly,” St. James replied.

“Then I expect you’ll want to have a look at these.” She handed the menus over with a low-voiced “But mind you. Don’t forget what I said about the beef.”

They skirted past the farmers, one of whom was shaking a monitory fi st, red-faced and talking about “telling him tha’s a public footpath…public, you hear me” and wound their way through the tables to the fi replace where flames were rapidly working on a cone-shaped pile of silver birch. They met curious glances as they crossed the room — tourists were unusual in Lancashire at this time of year — but to their pleasant good evening, the men nodded brusquely in wordless greeting and the women bobbed their heads. And while the teenagers remained in their far corner of the pub, happily oblivious of everyone but themselves, it seemed less group-egocentricity than it was interest in the continuing entertainment provided by the blonde fl ask-nipper and her companion, who was at this moment busy snaking his hand under the bright yellow sweat shirt she wore. The material undulated as his fist rose like a mobile third breast.

Deborah sat on a bench beneath a faded and decidedly unpointillistic needlepoint rendering of A Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte. St. James took the stool opposite her. They ordered sherry and whisky, and when Josie brought the drinks to their table, she positioned her body to block the young entwined lovers from their view.

“Sorry about that,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose as she placed the sherry in front of Deborah and adjusted it just so. She did the same with the whisky. “Pam Rice, that is. Playing tart for the night. Don’t ask me why.

She’s not a bad sort. Just when she gets with Todd. He’s seventeen.”

This last was offered as if the boy’s age explained all. But perhaps thinking it might not have done, Josie continued. “Thirteen. Pam, that is. Fourteen next month.”

“And thirty-five sometime next year, no doubt,” St. James noted drily.

Josie squinted over her shoulder at the young couple. Despite her previous look of disdain, her bony chest rose tremulously. “Yes. Well…” And then she turned back to them with what seemed like effort. “What’ll you have, then? Besides the beef. The salmon’s quite good. So’s the duck. And the veal’s”—The pub’s outer door opened, letting in a gust of cold air that puffed round their ankles like moving silk—“cooked with tomatoes and mushrooms, and we’ve got a sole tonight done with capers and…” Josie’s recitation faltered as, behind her, the hubbub from the Crofters Inn patrons dissolved with remarkable speed into silence.

A man and woman stood just inside the door, where an overhead light shone down upon the contrast they made. First hair: his roughly the colour of ginger; hers salt and pepper, thick, straight, and bluntly cut to touch her shoulders. Then face: his youthful and handsome but with a pugnacious prominence to the jaw and chin; hers strong and forceful, untouched by make-up to hide middle age. And clothes: his a barbour jacket and trousers; hers a worn navy pea jacket and faded blue jeans with a patch on one knee.

For a moment, they remained side by side in the entry, the man’s hand resting on the woman’s arm. He wore tortoiseshell spectacles whose lenses caught the light and effectively hid his eyes and his reaction to the hush that greeted his entrance. She, however, looked round slowly, making deliberate contact with every face that had the courage to hold her gaze.

“…capers and…and…” Josie appeared to have forgotten the rest of her prepared recitation. She poked the pencil into her hair and scratched it against her scalp.

From behind the bar, Mr. Wragg spoke as he scooped the froth off a glass of Guinness. “Evening to you, Constable. Evening, Missus Spence. Cold night, in’t it? We’re in for a bad snap, you ask me. You, Frank Fowler. Another stout?”

At last one of the farmers turned from the door. Others began to do the same. “Wouldn’t say no, Ben,” Frank Fowler replied, and knuckled his glass across the bar.

Ben pulled on the tap. Someone said, “Billy, you got some fags on you?” A chair scraped against the floor like an animal’s howl. The double ring of the telephone sounded from the office. Slowly the pub returned to normal.

The constable went to the bar where he said, “Black Bush and a lemonade, Ben,” while Mrs. Spence found a table set apart from the others. She walked to it without hurry, quite a tall woman with her head held up and her shoulders straight, but instead of sitting on the bench against the wall, she chose a stool that presented her back to the room. She removed her jacket. She was wearing an ivory wool turtleneck beneath it.

“How’s things, Constable?” Ben Wragg asked. “Your dad get settled into the pensioners’ home yet?”

The constable counted out some coins and laid them on the bar. “Last week,” he said.

“Quite a man, your dad was in his day, Colin. Quite a copper.”

The constable pushed the money towards Wragg. He said, “Yes. Quite. We all had years to get to know that, didn’t we,” and he picked up the glasses and went to join his companion.

He sat on the bench, so his face was to the room. He looked from the bar to the tables, one at a time. And one at a time, people looked away. But the conversation in the pub was hushed, so much so that the sound of banging pots in the kitchen was quite distinct.

After a moment, one of the farmers said, “Guess that’ll be it for the evening, Ben,” and another said, “Got to pop round to see my old gran.” A third merely tossed a fi ve-pound note on the bar and waited for his change. Within minutes of the arrival of the constable and Mrs. Spence, most of the other patrons of Crofters Inn had vanished, leaving behind one lone man in tweeds who swirled his gin glass and slumped against the wall, and the group of teenagers who moved to a fruit machine at the far end of the pub and began to try their luck with its spinning dials.

Josie had stood by the table during all of this, her lips parted and her eyes wide. It was only Ben Wragg’s barking, “Josephine, be about it,” that brought her back to her explanation of dinner. Even then, all she managed was, “What’ll…for dinner?” But before they had a chance to make their selections, she went on with “The dining room’s just this way, if you’ll follow me.”

She led them through a low door next to the fireplace where the temperature dropped a good ten degrees and the predominant scent was of baking bread rather than the pub’s cigarette smoke and ale. She put them next to a simmering wall heater and said, “You’ll have the place all to yourselves this evening. No one else is staying here tonight. I’ll just pop into the kitchen and tell them what you’ve—” whereupon she finally seemed to realise that she had nothing at all to tell anyone. She chewed her lip. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not thinking right. You’ve not even ordered.”

“Is something wrong?” Deborah asked.

“Wrong?” The pencil went back into her hair, lead first this time and twirling, as if she were drawing a design on her scalp.

“Is there some sort of problem?”

“Problem?”

“Is someone in trouble?”

“Trouble?”

St. James put an end to the game of echo. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local constable clear out a public house so quickly. Without time being called, of course.”

“Oh, no,” Josie said. “It’s not Mr. Shepherd. I mean…It’s not actually…It’s just that… Things’ve happened round here and you know how it is in a village and…Gosh, p’raps I ought to take your order. Mr. Wragg gets himself in a real fret if I chunter too much with the residents. ‘They haven’t come to Winslough to have their ears gnawed off by the likes of you, Miss Josephine.’ That’s what he says. Mr. Wragg. You know.”

“Is it the woman with the constable?” Deborah asked.

Josie flicked a look towards a swinging door that appeared to give access to the kitchen. “I really oughtn’t talk.”

“Perfectly understandable,” St. James said and consulted his menu. “Stuffed mushrooms to start and the sole for me. And for you, Deborah?”

But Deborah felt reluctant to be put off. She decided that if Josie was hesitant to talk about one subject, a switch to another might loosen her tongue. “Josie,” she said, “can you tell us anything about the vicar, Mr. Sage?”

Josie’s head flew up from her writing pad. “How’d you know?”

“What?”

She flung her arm in the direction of the pub. “Out there. How’d you know?”

“We don’t know anything. Except that he’s dead. We’d come to Winslough in part to see him. Can you tell us what happened? Was his death unexpected? Had he been ill?”

“No.” Josie dropped her eyes to her writing pad and gave all her concentration to the writing of stuffed mushrooms and sole. “Not exactly ill. Not for long, that is.”

“A sudden illness, then?”

“Sudden. Yes. Right.”

“A heart condition? A stroke? Something like that.”

“Something…quick it was. He went off quick.”

“An infection? A virus?”

Josie looked pained, clearly torn between holding her tongue and spilling her guts. She fiddled her pencil across her pad.

“He wasn’t murdered, was he?” St. James asked.

“No!” the girl gasped. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was an accident. Really. Honest and true. She didn’t mean…She couldn’t have…I mean I know her. We all do. She didn’t mean him any harm.”

“Who?” St. James asked.

Josie’s eyes went towards the door.

“It’s that woman,” Deborah said. “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t murder!” Josie cried.

She offered them the story in bits and pieces between serving the dinner, pouring the wine, bringing the cheese board, and presenting the coffee.

Food poisoning, she told them, December last. The story came in gulps, fits, and starts, with frequent glances in the direction of the kitchen, apparently to make sure no one would catch her in the midst of telling the tale. Mr. Sage had been making his rounds of the parish, visiting each family for afternoon tea or an evening meal—

“Eating his way towards righteousness and glory, according to Mr. Wragg, but you got to ignore him if you know what I mean because he never goes to church ’less it’s Christmas or a funeral.”

— and he went to Mrs. Spence on a Friday night. It was just the two of them because Mrs. Spence’s daughter—

“She’s my best mate Maggie.”

— was spending the evening with Josie right here. Mrs. Spence had always made it clear to anyone who asked that she didn’t think much of going to church as a general rule despite its being the sole, dependable social event in the village, but she wasn’t one to be rude to a vicar, so when Mr. Sage wanted to try to talk her into giving the C of E another chance in her life, she was willing to listen. She was always polite. That was her way. So the vicar went out to her cottage for the evening, prayer book in hand, all ready to bring her back to religion. He was supposed to be at a wedding the next morning—

“Tying up that skinny cat Becca Townley-Young and Brendan Power…him that’s out there in the bar drinking gin, did you see him?”

— but he never showed up and that’s how everyone found out he was dead.

“Dead and stiff with his lips all bloody and his jaws locked up like they was wired shut.”

“That certainly sounds like an odd bit of food poisoning,” St. James remarked doubtfully. “Because if food’s gone bad—”

It wasn’t that kind of food poisoning, Josie informed them with a pause to scratch her bottom through her threadbare skirt. It was real food poisoning.

“You mean poison in the food?” Deborah asked.

The poison was the food. Wild parsnip picked down by the pond near Cotes Hall. “Only it wasn’t wild parsnip like Missus Spence thought. Not at all. Not — at — all.”

“Oh no,” Deborah said as the circumstances of the vicar’s death began to take on more clarity. “How dreadful. What a terrible thing.”

“It was water hemlock,” Josie said in breathless summation. “Like what Socrates drunk with his tea in Greece. She thought it was parsnip, did Missus Spence, and so did the vicar and he ate it and…” She grabbed her throat and made appropriate death noises after which she glanced round furtively. “Only don’t tell Mum I did like that, will you? She’ll tan me if she knows I made light of his dying. It’s sort of a black joke ’mongst the blokes in the village: See-cute-a-now and see-you-dead

in-a-minute.”

“See-what?” Deborah asked.

“Cicuta,” St. James said. “The Latin name for its genus. Cicuta maculata. Cicuta virosa. The species depends on the habitat.” He frowned and absently toyed with the knife that he had used to cut a wedge of double Gloucester, pressing its point into a fragment of the cheese that was left on his plate. But instead of seeing it, for some reason he found himself teasing a memory from the edge of his subconscious. Professor Ian Rutherford at the University of Glasgow, who insisted upon wearing surgical garb even to lectures, whose bywords had been y’can’t take a scunner to a corpse, lads and lassies. Where the hell had he come from, St. James wondered, swirling like a Scots banshee out of the past.

“He never showed up for the wedding next morning,” Josie was continuing affably. “Mr. Townley-Young’s still got himself in a twist over that. It took till half past two to get another vicar, and the wedding breakfast was a total ruin. More’n half the guests had already left the church. Some people think it was Brendan’s doing—’cause it was a forced marriage, and no one can imagine any bloke facing a lifetime of marriage to Becca Townley-Young without trying to do something desperate to stop it — but then that’s making light of things again and if Mum knows I’m doing it, I’ll be in real trouble. She liked Mr. Sage, did Mum.”

“And you?”

“I liked him as well. Everyone did ’cept for Mr. Townley-Young. He said the vicar was ‘too low church by half’ because Mr. Sage wouldn’t use incense and he wouldn’t tart himself up in satin ’n’ lace. But there’s more important stuff’n that in being a proper vicar, if you ask me. And Mr. Sage saw to the important stuff.”

St. James half-listened to the girl prattle on. She was pouring coffee and presenting them with a decorative, porcelain plate upon which lay six petit fours with remarkable and gastronomically questionable rainbow icings.

The vicar was a great one for visiting in the village, Josie explained. He started a youth group—she was social chair and vice-president, by the way — and he looked in on the housebound and he tried to get people to come back to church. He knew everyone in the village by name. On Tuesday afternoons, he read to the children in the primary school. He answered his own front door when he was home. He didn’t put on airs.

“I met him briefly in London,” Deborah said. “He did seem quite nice.”

“He was. Truly. And that’s why when Missus Spence comes round, things get a bit difficult.” Josie leaned over their table and made an adjustment to the paper doily under the petit fours, centring it carefully on the plate. The plate itself she pushed closer to the table’s small tassel-shaded lamp, the better to highlight the confections’ icing. “I mean, it’s not like just anyone made the mistake, is it? Crimminy-crimeny, it’s not like Mum did it.”

“But surely no matter who made the mistake, that person would have spent some time being looked on with a leery eye,” Deborah noted. “Especially as Mr. Sage was well-liked.”

“Isn’t like that,” Josie said in quick reply. “She’s a herbalist, is Missus Spence after all, so she should have bloody well known what she was digging out of the ground before she put it on the flaming table. That’s what people say, at least. In the pub. You know. They chew on the story and they won’t let it go. Doesn’t matter to them what the inquest said.”

“A herbalist who didn’t recognise hemlock?” Deborah asked.

“That’s what’s got them in a dither all right.”

St. James listened silently, tilting the fragment of double Gloucester with his knife, gazing at the crater-like surface of the cheese. Unbidden, Ian Rutherford returned, lining up on the worktable specimen jars which he removed from a trolley with a connoisseur’s care while all the time the smell of formaldehyde that emanated from him like a ghoulish perfume put a premature end to anyone’s thoughts of lunch. On to primary symptoms, my luvlies, he was announcing gaily as he produced each jar with a fl ourish. Burning pain in th’ gullet, excessive salivation, nausea. Next, giddiness before the convulsions begin. These are spasmodic, rendering the musculature rigid. Vomition’s precluded by convulsive closure of the mouth. He gave a satisfied rap on the metallic lid of one of the jars in which appeared to be floating a human lung. Death in fi fteen minutes, or up to eight hours. Asphyxia. Heart failure. Complete respiratory shutdown. Another rap on

the lid. Questions? No? Good. Enough of cicutoxin. On to curare. Primary symptoms…

But St. James was having symptoms of his own and he felt them even as Josie chattered on: disquiet at first, a distinct unease. Now here’s a case in point, Rutherford was saying. But the point he was making and the nature of the case were elusive as eels. St. James set down his knife and reached for one of the petit fours. Josie beamed her apparent approval of his choice.

“Iced them myself,” she said. “I think the pink-and-green ones look best.”

“What sort of herbalist?” he asked her.

“Missus Spence?”

“Yes.”

“The doctoring sort. She picks stuff in the forest and up on the hills and she mixes it good and mashes it up. For fevers and cramps, head colds and stuff. Maggie — Missus Spence’s her mum and she’s my best mate and she’s ever so nice — she’s never even been to a doctor, far’s I know. She gets a sore, her mum whips up a plaster. She gets a fever, her mum makes some tea. She made me a throat wash from creeping jenny when I was out to the Hall on a visit — that’s where they live, up by Cotes Hall — and I gargled for a day and the

soreness was gone.”

“So she knows her plants.”

Josie’s head bobbed. “That’s why when Mr. Sage died, it looked real bad. How could she not know, people’ve wondered. I mean, I wouldn’t know wild parsnip from hay but Missus Spence…” Her voice drifted off and she held out her hands in a what’s-a-body-tothink sort of gesture.

“But surely the inquest dealt with all that,” Deborah said.

“Oh yes. Right above stairs in the Magistrate’s Court — have you seen it yet? Pop in for a look before you go to bed.”

“Who gave evidence?” St. James asked. The answer promised a renewal of disquiet, and he was fairly certain what that answer would be. “Other than Mrs. Spence herself.”

“Constable.”

“The man who was with her tonight?”

“Him. Mr. Shepherd. That’s right. He found Mr. Sage — the body, I guess — on the footpath that goes to Cotes Hall and the Fell on Saturday morning.”

“Did he conduct the investigation alone?”

“Far’s I know. He’s our constable, isn’t he?”

St. James saw his wife turning to him curiously, one of her hands raising to finger a twisted curl of her hair. She said nothing, but she understood him well enough to realise where his thoughts were heading.

It was, he thought, none of their business. They’d come to this village for a holiday. Away from London and away from their home, there would be no professional or domestic distractions to prevent the dialogue in which they needed to engage.

Yet it wasn’t that easy to walk away from the two dozen scientific and procedural questions that were second nature to him and shouting to be answered. It was even less easy to walk away from the persistent monologue of Ian Rutherford. Even now, it was playing like a nagging, nameless melody inside his skull. Y’ve got to hae the thickened portion of the plant, m’ luvlies. Very characteristic, this little beauty, stem and root. Stem is thickened as y’ will note and not one but several roots are attached. When we cut into the surface of the stem like so, we have oursel’s the very scent of raw parsnip. Now, to review…who sh’ll do the honours? And under eyebrows that looked like wild plants themselves, Rutherford’s blue eyes would dart round the laboratory, always on the lookout for the hapless student who appeared to have assimilated the least information. He had a special gift for recognising both confusion and ennui, and whoever was experiencing either reaction to Rutherford’s presentation was most likely to be called upon to review the material at the lecture’s end. Mr. Allcourt-St. James. Enlighten us. Please. Or do we ask too much of you this fair morning?

St. James heard the words as if he still stood in that room in Glasgow, all of twenty-one years old and thinking not of organic toxins but of the young woman he’d fi nally taken to bed on his last visit home. His reverie disturbed, he made a valiant attempt at bluffi ng his way through a response to the professor’s request. Cicuta virosa, he said and he cleared his throat in an effort to buy time, toxic principle cicutoxin, acting directly on the central nervous system, a violent convulsant, and…The rest was a mystery.

And, Mr. St. James? And? And?

Alas. His thoughts were too fi rmly attached to the bedroom. He remembered nothing more.

But here in Lancashire, more than fi fteen years later, Josephine Eugenia Wragg gave the answer. “She always kept roots in the cellar. Potatoes and carrots and parsnips and everything, each in their separate bin. So a whisper went round that if she didn’t feed it to the vicar on purpose, someone might’ve snuck in and mixed the hemlock with the other parsnips and just waited till it was cooked and eaten. But she said at the inquest that couldn’t have happened ’cause the cellar was always locked up tight. So then everyone said all right we’ll accept that that’s the case but then she should have known it wasn’t wild parsnip in the first place ’cause…”

Of course she should have known. Because of the root. And that had been Ian Rutherford’s main point. That was what he’d been waiting impatiently for his daydreaming, negligent student to say.

Ye don’t have a prayer in science, my lad.

Yes. Well. They would see about that.

CHAPTER FOUR

THERE IT WAS, THAT NOISE again. it sounded like hesitant foot steps treading on gravel. At fi rst she had thought it was coming from the courtyard, and although she knew it wasn’t proper to be relieved at the idea, her fears were at least moderately soothed by the fact that whoever it was creeping round in the dark, he seemed to be heading in the direction not of the caretaker’s cottage but of Cotes Hall. And it had to be a he, Maggie Spence decided. Prowling about old buildings at night wasn’t the sort of behaviour a she would engage in.

Maggie knew she ought to be on the alert, considering everything that had gone on at the Hall over the past few months, considering especially the ruination of that fancy-pants carpet only last weekend. Being on the alert was, after all, the only thing aside from her school prep that Mummy had asked her to do prior to leaving with Mr. Shepherd this evening.

“I’ll only be gone a few hours, darling,” Mummy had said. “If you hear anything, don’t go outside. Just phone. All right?”

Which is, by rights, what Maggie knew she ought to do now. After all, she had the numbers. They were downstairs next to the telephone in the kitchen. Mr. Shepherd’s home, Crofters Inn, and the Townley-Youngs just in case. She had looked them over as Mummy left, wanting to say in mock innocence, “But you’re just going to the inn, aren’t you, Mummy? So why’ve you given me Mr. Shepherd’s number as well?” But she knew the answer to that question already, and if she asked, it would only have been to embarrass the both of them.

Sometimes, though, she wanted to embarrass them. She wanted to shout, March twenty-third! I know what happened, I know that’s when you did it, I even know where, I even know how. But she never did. Even if she hadn’t seen them in the sitting room together— having arrived home too early after a tiff in the village with Josie and Pam — and even if she hadn’t slipped away from the window with her legs gone all peculiar at the sight of Mummy and what she’d been doing, and even if she hadn’t gone to sit and think about it all on the weed-choked terrace of Cotes Hall with Punkin curled in a mangy ball of tabby-orange at her feet, she still would have known. It was pretty obvious, with Mr. Shepherd looking at Mummy ever since with his eyes all bleary and his mouth gone soft and Mummy being careful as careful not to look at him.

“They’re doing it?” Josie Wragg had whispered breathlessly. “And you actually in reality without a doubt in the world saw them doing it? Naked and stuff? In the sitting room? Maggie!” She lit a Gauloise and lay back on her bed. All the windows were open to remove the smoke so that her mummy wouldn’t know what she was getting up to. But Maggie couldn’t see how all the breeze in the world could come close to eliminating the foul odour produced by the French cigarettes that Josie favoured. She placed her own between her lips and filled her mouth with smoke. She blew it out. She hadn’t mastered the inhaling part yet and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“They didn’t have all their clothes off,” she said. “Mummy didn’t, at least. I mean, she wasn’t actually undressed at all. She didn’t really need to be.”

“Didn’t need…? Then what were they doing?” Josie demanded.

“Oh God, Josephine.” Pam Rice yawned. She tossed her head of perfectly bobbed blond hair and it fell, as it always did, perfectly in place. “Develop a clue in life, won’t you? What d’you think they were doing? I thought you were supposed to be the expert round here.”

Josie frowned. “But I don’t see how…I mean if she had all her clothes on.”

Pam raised her eyes to the ceiling in a display of martyred patience. She drew in deeply on her cigarette and exhaled and inhaled in something she called Frenching. “It was in her mouth,” she said. “M-o-u-t-h. Do I have to draw you a picture, or do you get it now?”

“In her…” Josie looked flustered. She touched her fingertips to her tongue as if doing so would allow her to understand more completely. “You mean his thing was actually—”

“His thing? God. It’s called a penis, Josie. P-e-n-i-s. All right?” Pam rolled onto her stomach and gazed with narrowed eyes at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “All I can say is I hope she got something, which she probably didn’t if she was wearing all her clothes.” Again, a toss of that perfect head of hair. “Todd knows better than to finish it off before I’ve come and that’s a fact.”

Josie’s forehead creased. She was obviously still trying to come to terms with the information. Always presenting herself as the living authority on female sexuality — courtesy of a dog-eared copy of The Female Sexual Animal Unleashed At Home (Vol. I), which she’d pinched from the rubbish bin where her mother had deposited it after, at the insistence of her husband, she had spent two months attempting to “become lidibinous or something like that”— she was out of her depth with this one.

“Were they—” She seemed to struggle for a word. “Were they moving or anything, Maggie?”

“Christ in dirty knickers,” Pam said. “Don’t you know anything? No one needs to move. She just needs to suck.”

“To…” Josie mashed out her cigarette on the windowsill. “Maggie’s mum? With a bloke? That’s disgusting!”

Pam chuckled languidly. “No. It’s Unleashed. Right and proper, if you ask me. Didn’t your book get round to mentioning that, Jo? Or was it all about dipping your tits in clotted cream and serving them up with the strawberries at tea? You know the sort of thing. ‘Make life for your man a constant surprise.’”

“There’s nothing wrong with a woman becoming attuned to her sensual nature,” Josie replied with some dignity. She lowered her head and picked at a scab on her knee. “Or to a man’s, for that matter.”

“Yes. Too right. A real woman ought to know what gives who a tickle and where. Don’t you think so, Maggie?” Pam used her unnerving ability to make her eyes look at once both purely innocent and bluer than blue. “Don’t you think it’s important?”

Maggie crossed her legs Indian fashion and gave a pinch to the heel of her hand. It was the way she reminded herself to admit to nothing.

She knew what information Pam wanted from her — she could see that Josie knew it as well— but she’d never sneaked on a soul in her life, and she wasn’t about to sneak on herself.

Josie came to the rescue. “Did you say anything? After you saw them, I mean.”

She hadn’t, not then at least. And when she finally brought it up, as a shrill accusation hurled half in anger and half in self-defence, Mummy had reacted by slapping her face. Not once but twice and as hard as she could. One second afterwards — and maybe it was seeing the expression of surprise and shock on Maggie’s face because Mummy had never hit her in her life — she’d cried out like she’d been struck herself, grabbed Maggie to her, and hugged her so fiercely Maggie felt her breath leave. But still, they hadn’t talked about any of it. “It’s my business, Maggie,” Mummy had said fi rmly.

Fine, Maggie thought. And my business is mine.

But it wasn’t, really. Mummy wouldn’t let it be. She had brought the sludgy tea to Maggie’s bedroom every morning for a fortnight after their row. She had stood and made sure Maggie drank every drop. To her protestations, she said, “I know what’s best.” To her whimpers when the pain cramped through her stomach, she said, “It will pass, Maggie.” And she wiped her brow with a cool, soft cloth.

Maggie studied the inky shadows in her bedroom and listened again, concentrating in order to discern the sound of footsteps from the wind jostling an old plastic bottle against the gravel outside. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights upstairs, and she crept to the window and peered out into the night, feeling secure in the knowledge that she could see without being seen. Below her in the courtyard, shadows from the east wing of Cotes Hall made great caves of dark. Cast from the mansion’s gables, they loomed like open pits and offered more than ample protection for anyone wishing to hide himself. She squinted at them one by one, trying to distinguish whether a hulking form against a far wall was only a yew bush in need of clipping or a prowler trying the window. She couldn’t tell. She wished Mummy and Mr. Shepherd would return.

She’d never minded being left alone in the past, but early on after their arrival in Lancashire, she’d developed a dislike of staying in the cottage by herself, either day or night. Perhaps it was baby-stuff to feel that way, but the minute Mummy drove off with Mr. Shepherd, the minute she slipped into the Opel to go off on her own, or headed in the direction of the footpath, or went into the oak wood on a search for plants, Maggie felt the walls start inching close about her. She was uniquely aware of being by herself on the grounds of Cotes Hall, and while Polly Yarkin lived just at the far end of the drive, it was nearly a mile away and no matter how she screamed and shouted, if she ever needed Polly’s help for any reason, she wouldn’t hear.

It didn’t matter to Maggie that she knew where Mummy kept her pistol. Even if she had used it before for target practice — which she never had — she couldn’t imagine actually pointing it at anyone, let alone pulling the trigger. So instead, when she was by herself, she burrowed into her bedroom like a mole. If it was night, she kept the lights off and waited for the sound of a returning car or of Mummy’s key scraping in the locked front door. And while she waited, she listened to Punkin’s soft feline snores rising like steady puffs of auditory smoke from the centre of her bed. With her vision fixed on the small birch bookcase atop of which lumpy old Bozo the elephant presided among the other stuffed animals with comforting grace, she clutched her scrapbook to her chest. She thought about her father.

He existed in fantasy, Eddie Spence, dead before he was thirty, his body twisted along with the wreckage of his racing car in Monte Carlo. He was the hero of an untold story Mummy had hinted at a single time, saying, “Daddy died in a car crash, darling” and “Please, Maggie. I can’t speak of it to anyone,” with her eyes filled with tears when Maggie tried to ask more. Maggie often tried to conjure up his face from her memory, but she failed in the effort. So what there was of Daddy she held in her arms: the pictures of formula-one race cars she clipped and collected, placing them into her Important Events Book along with careful notations about every Grand Prix.

She plopped onto the bed, and Punkin stirred. He raised his head, yawned, and then pricked his ears. They turned like radar in the direction of the window, and he rose in a single, lissome movement and leapt silently from the bed to the sill. There, he hunkered, his tail making restless, tapping movements as it circled round his front paws.

From the bed, Maggie watched him surveying the courtyard much as she had done, his eyes blinking slowly as his tail continued to tap in silence. She knew from studying up on the subject in his kitten-days that cats are hypersensitive to changes in the environment, so she rested more easily in the knowledge that Punkin would tell her the very moment there was anything outside that she ought to fear.

An old lime tree stood just beyond the window, and its branches creaked. Maggie listened hard. Twigs scratched in vibrato against the glass. Something rasped on the old tree’s furrowed bark. It was only the wind, Maggie told herself, but even as she thought this, Punkin gave the signal that something wasn’t right. He rose with an arching back.

Maggie’s heart thumped jerkily. Punkin launched himself from the window-sill and landed on the rag rug. He was through the door in a streak of orange locomotion before Maggie had time to realise that someone must have climbed the tree.

And then it was too late. She heard the soft thud of a body landing on the slate roof of the cottage. The quiet tread of footsteps followed. Then came the sound of gentle rapping on the glass.

This last made no sense. As far as she knew, housebreakers didn’t announce themselves. Unless, of course, they were trying to see if anyone was at home. But even then, it seemed more sensible to think that they’d just knock on the door or ring the front bell and wait for an answer.

She wanted to shout, You’ve got the wrong place, whoever you are, you want the Hall, don’t you? But instead she lowered her scrapbook to the floor next to the bed and slid along the wall into the deeper shadows. Her palms felt itchy. Her stomach rolled. She wanted more than anything to call out for her mummy, but that would be of less than no use. A moment later she was glad of the fact.

“Maggie? Are you there?” she heard him call softly. “Open up, will you? I’m freezing my bum off.”

Nick! Maggie dashed across the room. She could see him, crouched on the slope of roof just outside the dormer window, grinning at her, his silky black hair brushing against his cheeks like soft bird’s wings. She fumbled with the lock. Nick, Nick, she thought. But just as she was about to fling up the sash, she heard Mummy saying, “I don’t want you alone with Nick Ware again. Is that clear, Margaret Jane? No more of that. It’s over.” Her fi ngers failed her.

“Maggie!” Nick whispered. “Let me in! It’s cold.”

She’d given her word. Mummy had been driven close to tears during their row, and the sight of her eyes red-rimmed and full over Maggie’s behaviour and Maggie’s stinging words had wrung the promise from her without a thought of what it would really mean to give it.

“I can’t,” she said.

“What?”

“Nick, Mummy isn’t home. She’s gone into the village with Mr. Shepherd. I promised her—”

He was grinning more widely. “Great. Excellent. Come on, Mag. Let me in.”

She swallowed past a raw spot in her throat. “I can’t. I can’t see you alone. I promised.”

“Why?”

“Because…Nick, you know.”

His hand was against the window glass, and he dropped it to his side. “But I just wanted to show you…Oh what the hell.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Forget it. Never mind.”

“Nick, tell me.”

He turned his head away. He wore his hair bobbed, overlong on the top the way the rest of the boys did, but it never looked trendy on him. It looked right, as if he’d been the style’s inventor.

“Nick.”

“Just a letter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

“A letter? From who?”

“It isn’t important.”

“But if you’ve come all this way—” Then she remembered. “Nick, you’ve not heard from Lester Piggott? Is that it? Has he answered your letter?” It was hard to believe. But Nick wrote to jockeys as a matter of course, always adding to his collection of letters. He’d heard from Pat Eddery, Graham Starkey, Eddie Hide. But Lester Piggott was a plum, to be sure.

She flung up the sash. The cold wind gusted like a cloud into the room.

“Is that it?” she asked.

From his ancient leather jacket — long claimed to be a gift to his great-uncle from an American bombardier during World War II— Nick took an envelope. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Just ‘nice to hear from you, lad.’ But he signed it real clear. No one thought he’d answer, remember, Mag? I wanted you to know.”

It seemed mean-spirited to leave him outside when he’d come on such an innocent errand. Even Mummy couldn’t object to this. Maggie said, “Come in.”

“Not if it’ll make trouble with your mum.”

“It’s all right.”

He squeezed his lanky frame through the window and made a deliberate point of not closing it behind him. “I thought you’d gone to bed. I was looking in the windows.”

“I thought you were a prowler.”

“Why’n’t you turn on the lights?”

She dropped her eyes. “I get scared. Alone.” She took the envelope from him and admired the address. Mr. Nick Ware, Esq., Skelshaw Farm was written clearly in a firm, bold hand. She returned it to Nick. “I’m glad he wrote back. I thought he would.”

“I remembered. That’s why I wanted you to see.” He flipped his hair off his face and looked round the room. Maggie watched, in dread. He’d be noticing all the stuffed animals and her dolls sitting upright in the wicker chair. He’d go to the bookshelves and see The Railway Children along with the other favourite titles from her childhood. He’d realise what a baby she was. He wouldn’t want to take her about then, would he. He probably wouldn’t want to know her at all. Why hadn’t she thought before letting him in?

He said, “I’ve never been in your bedroom before. It’s real nice, Mag.”

She felt dread dissolve. She smiled. “Ta.”

“Dimple,” he said and touched his index finger to the small depression in her cheek. “I like it when you smile.” Tentatively, he dropped his hand to her arm. She could feel his cold fingers, even through her pullover.

“You’re ice,” she said.

“Cold outside.”

She was acutely aware of being in the dark in forbidden territory. The room seemed smaller with him standing in it, and she knew the proper thing to do was to take him downstairs and let him out by the door. Except that now he was here, she didn’t want him to go, not without giving her some kind of sign that he was still hers in spite of everything that had happened in their lives since last October. It wasn’t enough to know that he liked it when she smiled and he could touch the dimple in her cheek. People liked babies’ smiles, they said so all the time. She wasn’t a baby.

“When’s your mum coming home?” he asked.

Any minute was the truth. It was after nine. But if she told the truth, he’d be gone in an instant. Perhaps he’d do it for her sake, to keep her from trouble, but he’d do it all the same. So she said, “I don’t know. She went off with Mr. Shepherd.”

Nick knew about Mummy and Mr. Shepherd, so he knew what that meant. The rest was up to him.

She made a move to close the window, but his hand was still on her arm, so it was easy enough for him to stop her. He wasn’t rough. He didn’t need to be. He merely kissed her, flicking his tongue like a promise against her lips, and she welcomed him.

“She’ll be a while then.” His mouth moved to her neck. He gave her the shivers. “She’s been getting hers regular enough.”

Her conscience told her to defend her mummy from Nick’s interpretation of the village gossip, but the shivers were running along her arms and her legs each time he kissed her and they kept her from thinking as straight as she’d like. Still, she was in the process of gathering her wits to make a firm reply when his hand moved to her breast and his fingers began to play with her nipple. He rolled it gently back and forth until she gasped with the hurt and the tingling heat and he relinquished the pressure and started the process all over again. It felt so good. It felt beyond good.

She knew she ought to talk about Mummy, she ought to explain. But she couldn’t seem to hold on to that thought for longer than the instant in which Nick’s fingers released her. Once they began to tease her again, she could think only of the fact that she didn’t want to risk any discussion standing in the way of the sign that things were right between them. So she finally said from somewhere outside of herself, “We’ve got an understanding now, my mum and I,” and she felt him smiling against her mouth. He was a clever boy, Nick. He probably didn’t believe her for a moment.

“Missed you,” he whispered and pulled her tight to him. “God, Mag. Give me some hard.”

She knew what he wanted. She wanted to do it. She wanted to feel It through his blue jeans again, going rigid and big because of her. She pressed her hand against It. He moved her fingers up and down and around.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus. Mag.”

He slid her fingers along Its length to the tip. He circled them round It. He felt heavy against her. She squeezed It gently, then harder when he groaned.

“Maggie,” he said. “Mag.”

His breathing was loud. He tugged her pullover off. She felt the night wind against her skin. And then she felt only his hands on her breasts. And then only his mouth as he kissed them.

She was liquid. She was fl oating. The fi ngers on his blue jeans weren’t even hers. She wasn’t the one easing down the zip. She wasn’t the one making him naked.

He said, “Wait. Mag. If your mum comes home—”

She stopped him with her kiss. She groped blindly for the sweet full weight of him, and he helped her fingers stroke down and round his globes of flesh. He groaned, his hands went under her skirt, his fingers rubbed hot circles between her legs.

And then they were on the bed together, Nick’s body a pale sapling above her, her own body ready, hips lifted, legs spread. Nothing else mattered.

“Tell me when to stop,” he said. “Maggie, all right? We won’t do it this time. Just tell me when to stop.” He put It against her. He rubbed It against her. The tip of It, the length of It. “Tell me when to stop.”

Just once more. Just this once. It couldn’t be such a horrible sin. She pulled him closer, wanting him near.

“Maggie. Mag, don’t you think we ought to stop?”

She pressed It closer and closer with her hand.

“Mag, really. I can’t hold off.”

She lifted her mouth to kiss him.

“If your mum comes home—”

Slowly, deeply, she rotated her hips.

“Maggie. We can’t.” He plunged It inside.

Scrubber, she thought. Scrubber, slut, tart. She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Her vision blurred as tears slid from her eyes, forking across her temples and down into her ears.

I’m nothing, she thought. I’m a slut. I’m a tart. I’ll do it with anyone. Right now it’s only Nick. But if some other bloke wants to stick It in me tomorrow, I’ll probably let him. I’m a scrubber. A tart.

She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She looked across the room. Bozo the elephant wore his usual expression of pachydermatous bemusement, but there seemed to be something else in his face tonight. Disappointment, no doubt. She’d let Bozo down. But that was nothing compared to what she’d done to herself.

She eased off the bed and onto the fl oor where she knelt, feeling the ridges of the worn rag rug pressing into her knees. She clasped her hands together in the attitude of prayer and tried to think of the words that would lead to forgiveness.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean it to happen, God. I just thought to myself: If only he’ll kiss me then I’ll know things’re still right between us, no matter what I promised Mummy. Except when he kisses me that way I don’t want him to stop and then he does other things and I want him to do them and then I want more. I don’t want it to end. And I know it’s wrong. I know it. I do. But I can’t help how I feel. I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. Don’t let bad come out of this please. It won’t happen again. I won’t let him. I’m sorry.”

But how many times could God forgive when she knew it was wrong and He knew she knew it and she did it anyway because she wanted Nick close? One couldn’t make endless bargains with God without Him wondering about the nature of the deal He was striking. She was going to pay for her sins in a very big way, and it was only a matter of time before God decided that an accounting was due.

“God doesn’t work that way, my dear. He doesn’t keep score. He’s capable of endless acts of forgiveness. This is why He’s our Supreme Being, the standard after which we model ourselves. We can’t hope to reach His level of perfection, of course, and He doesn’t expect us to. He merely asks that we keep trying to better ourselves, to learn from our mistakes, and to understand others.”

How simple Mr. Sage had made it all sound when he’d come upon her in the church that evening last October. She’d been kneeling in the second pew, in front of the rood screen, with her forehead resting on her two clenched fists. Her prayer had been much the same as tonight’s, only it had been the fi rst time then, on a mound of paint-stiffened wrinkled tarpaulins in a corner of the Cotes Hall scullery. With Nick easing her clothes off, easing her to the floor, easing easing easing her ready. “We won’t actually do it,” he’d said, just like tonight. “Tell me when to stop, Mag.” And he kept repeating tell me when to stop Maggie tell me tell me while his mouth covered hers and his fingers worked magic between her legs and she pressed and pressed herself against his hand. She wanted heat and closeness. She needed to be held. She longed to be part of something more than herself. He was the living promise of all she desired, there in the scullery. She merely had to accept.

It was the aftermath that she hadn’t expected, that moment when all the nice girls don’t’s came rushing through her conscience like Noah’s flood: boys don’t respect girls who…they tell all their mates…just say no, you can do that…who steals my purse…they only want one thing, they only think of one thing… do you want a disease…what if he gets you pregnant, do you think he’ll be so hot for you then…you’ve given in once, you’ve crossed a line with him, he’ll be after you now again and again…he doesn’t love you, if he did, he wouldn’t…

And so she had come to St. John the Baptist’s for evensong. She’d half-listened to the reading. She’d half-heard the hymns. Mostly, she’d looked at the intricate rood screen and the altar beyond it. There, the Ten Commandments — etched into looming, individual bronze tablets — comprised the reredos, and she found her attention helplessly riveted on commandment number seven. It was harvest festival. The altar steps were spread with an array of offerings. Sheaves of corn, marrows of yellow and green, new potatoes in baskets, and several bushels of beans fi lled the church air with the fertile scent of autumn. But Maggie was only imperfectly aware of this, as she was only imperfectly aware of the prayers being said and the organ being played. The light from the main chandelier in the chancel seemed to glitter directly onto the bronze reredos, and the word adultery quivered in her vision. It seemed to grow larger, seemed to point and accuse.

She tried to tell herself that committing adultery meant that at least one of the parties had to be in possession of wedding vows to break. But she knew that an entire school of loathsome behaviours rested beneath the awning of that single word, and she was guilty of most of them: impure thoughts about Nick, infernal desire, sexual fantasies, and now fornication, the worst sin of all. She was black and corrupt, headed straight for damnation.

If only she could recoil from her behaviour, writhing in disgust over the act itself or how it made her feel, God might forgive her. If only the act had made her feel unclean, He might overlook this one small lapse. If only she didn’t want it — and Nick and the indescribable warmth of their bodies’ connection — all over again, now, right here in the church.

Sin, sin, sin. She lowered her head to her fists and kept it there, oblivious of the rest of the service. She began to pray, making fervent supplications for God’s forgiveness, with her eyes squeezed shut so tight she saw stars.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Don’t let bad happen to me. I won’t do it again. I promise. I promise. I’m sorry.”

It was the only prayer that she could devise, and she repeated it mindlessly, caught up in her need for direct communication with the supernatural. She heard nothing of the vicar’s approach, and she didn’t even know the service was over and the church empty until she felt a hand curving firmly round her shoulder. She looked up with a cry. All of the chandeliers had been extinguished. The only light remaining came in a greenish glow from an altar lamp. It touched one side of the vicar’s face and cast long, crescent shadows from the bags beneath his eyes.

“He is forgiveness itself,” the vicar said quietly. His voice was soothing, just like a warm bath. “Never doubt that. He exists to forgive.”

The serenity of his tone and the kindness of his words brought tears to her eyes. “Not this,” she said. “I don’t see how He can.”

His hand squeezed her shoulder, then dropped. He joined her in the pew, sitting not kneeling, and she slid back onto the bench herself. He indicated the rood atop its screen. “If the Lord’s last words were, ‘Forgive them, Father,’ and if His Father did indeed forgive— which we may be assured that He did — then why wouldn’t He forgive you as well? Whatever your sin may be, my dear, it cannot equal the evil of putting to death the Son of God, can it?”

“No,” she whispered, although she had begun to cry. “But I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway because I wanted to do it.”

He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “That’s the nature of sin. We face a temptation, we have a choice to make, we choose unwisely. You aren’t alone in this. But if you’re resolved in your heart not to sin again, then God forgives. Seventy times seven. You may rely upon that.”

Possessing resolution in her heart was the problem. She wanted to promise. She wanted as much to believe in her promise. Unfortunately she wanted Nick more. “That’s just it,” she said. And she told the vicar everything.

“Mummy knows,” she finished, plaiting his handkerchief back and forth through her fi ngers. “Mummy’s so angry.”

The vicar dropped his head and seemed to be examining the faded needlework fl eur-delis on the kneeler. “How old are you, my dear?”

“Thirteen,” she said.

He sighed. “Dear God.”

More tears rose in her eyes. She blotted them away and hiccupped as she spoke. “I’m bad. I know it. I know it. So does God.”

“No. It isn’t that.” He covered her hand briefly. “It’s the rush to adulthood that disturbs me. It’s taking on such troubles when you’re still so young.”

“It’s not a trouble to me.”

He smiled gently. “No?”

“I love him. He loves me.”

“And that’s generally where the trouble starts, isn’t it?”

“You’re making fun,” she said stiffl y.

“I’m speaking the truth.” He moved his gaze from her to the altar. His hands were on his knees, and Maggie saw his fingers tense as he gripped them more firmly. “Your name is?”

“Maggie Spence.”

“I’ve not seen you in church before tonight, have I?”

“No. We…Mummy isn’t taken much with going to church.”

“I see.” Still he held the grip on his knees. “Well, you’ve come upon one of mankind’s biggest challenges at a fairly young age, Maggie Spence. How to cope with the sins of the flesh. Even before the time of our Lord, the ancient Greeks recommended moderation in everything. They knew, you see, the sort of consequences one faces through giving in to one’s appetites.”

She frowned, confused.

He caught the look and went on with, “Sex is an appetite as well, Maggie. Something like hunger. It begins with mild curiosity rather than a rumble in the stomach, to be sure. But it quickly becomes a demanding taste. And unfortunately, it isn’t like overeating or intoxication from drink, both of which provide a rather immediate physical discomfort that can later act as a reminder of the fruits of impetuous indulgence. Instead, it provides a sense of well-being and release, one that we come to wish to experience again and again.”

“Like a drug?” she asked.

“Very much like a drug. And just like many drugs, its harmful properties aren’t immediately apparent. Even if we know what they are — intellectually — the promise of pleasure is often too seductive for us to abstain when we should. That’s when we must turn to the Lord. We must ask Him to infuse us with the strength to resist. He faced His own temptations, you know. He understands what it is to be human.”

“Mummy doesn’t talk about God,” Maggie said. “She talks about AIDS and herpes and warts and getting pregnant. She thinks I won’t do it if I’m scared enough.”

“You’re being harsh on her, my dear. These are far from unrealistic concerns on her part. Cruel facts are associated with sexuality these days. Your mother is wise — and kind — to share them with you.”

“Oh, too right. But what about her? Because when she and Mr. Shepherd—” Her automatic protest died unfinished. No matter her feelings, she couldn’t betray Mummy to the vicar. That wouldn’t be right.

The vicar cocked his head but made no other indication that he understood in what direction Maggie’s words had been heading. “Pregnancy and disease are the long-term potential consequences we face when we submit ourselves to the pleasures of sex,” he said. “But unfortunately, when we’re in the midst of an encounter leading up to intercourse, we rarely think of anything save the moment’s exigency.”

“Sorry?”

“The need to do it. At once.” He lifted the fleur-de-lis kneeler from its hook on the back of the pew in front of him and placed it on the uneven stone floor. “Instead, we think in terms of it couldn’t, I won’t, and it can’t. Out of our desire for physical gratification comes the denial of possibility. I won’t become pregnant; he couldn’t give me a disease because I believe he doesn’t have one. And it is from these little acts of denial that our deepest sorrow ultimately springs.”

He knelt and gestured that she was to join him. “Lord,” he said quietly, eyes on the altar, “help us to see Your will in all things. When we are sorely tried and tempted, allow us to realise it is through Your love that we are so tested. When we stumble and sin, forgive us our wrongs. And give us the strength to avoid all occasion of sin in the future.”

“Amen,” Maggie whispered. Through the thick fall of her hair, she felt the vicar’s hand rest lightly on the back of her neck, a comradely expression that imparted the fi rst real peace she’d had in days.

“Can you resolve to sin no more, Maggie Spence?”

“I want to.”

“Then I absolve you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

He walked out with her into the night. The lights were on in the vicarage across the street, and Maggie could see Polly Yarkin in the kitchen, setting the vicar’s table for dinner.

“Of course,” the vicar was saying, as if in continuation of a previous thought, “absolution and resolve are one thing. The other’s more diffi cult.”

“Not doing it again?”

“And keeping yourself active in other areas of your life so the temptation’s not there.” He locked the church door and pocketed the key in his trousers. Although the night was quite cool, he wasn’t wearing an overcoat and his clerical collar gleamed in the moonlight like a Cheshire smile. He observed her thoughtfully, pulling on his chin. “I’m starting a youth group here in the parish. Perhaps you’d like to join us. There’ll be meetings and activities, things to keep you busy. It might be a good idea, all things considered.”

“I’d like to, except…We’re not members of the Church, actually, Mummy and I. And I can’t think that she’d let me join. Religion… She says religion leaves a bad taste in the mouth.” Maggie dropped her head when she revealed this last. It seemed particularly unfair, considering the vicar’s kindness to her. She went on to add in a rush, “I don’t feel that way myself. At least I don’t think I do. It’s just that I don’t know much about it in the first place. I mean…I’ve hardly ever been. To Church, that is.”

“I see.” His mouth turned down, and he fished in his jacket pocket to bring out a small white card which he handed to her. “Tell your mummy I’d like to visit with her,” he said. “My name’s on the card. My number as well. Perhaps I can make her feel more comfortable with the Church. Or at least pave the way for you to join us.” He walked out of the churchyard at her side and touched her shoulder in farewell.

The youth group seemed like something Mummy would agree to, once she got over her disapproval of its being tied to the Church.

But when Maggie pressed the vicar’s card upon her, Mummy had stared down at it for the longest time, and when she looked up, her face was pasty and her mouth looked queer.

You went to someone else, her expression said, as clearly as if she’d spoken. You didn’t trust your mummy.

Maggie tried to soothe her feelings as well as avoid the unspoken accusation by hurriedly saying, “Josie knows Mr. Sage, Mummy. Pam Rice does as well. Josie says he’s only been in the parish for three weeks now, and he’s trying to get people back to the Church. Josie says the youth group—”

“Is Nick Ware a member?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Don’t lie to me, Margaret.”

“I’m not. I just thought…The vicar wants to talk to you about it. He wants you to phone.”

Mummy walked to the rubbish basket, ripped the card in half, and buried it — with a savage little twist of her wrist — among the coffee grounds and grapefruit rinds. “I have no intention of speaking to a priest about anything, Maggie.”

“Mummy, he only—”

“This discussion is over.”

But despite Mummy’s refusal to phone him, Mr. Sage had come three times to the cottage. Winslough was a small village, after all, and discovering where the Spence family lived was as easy as asking in Crofters Inn. When he’d shown up unexpectedly one afternoon, doffing his trilby to Maggie as she opened the door, Mummy had been alone in the greenhouse repotting some herbs. She’d greeted Maggie’s nervous announcement of the vicar’s visit by saying tersely, “Go to the inn. I’ll phone when you can come home.” And the anger in her voice and the hardness of her face told Maggie it was wiser not to ask any questions. She had long known Mummy didn’t like religion. But it was just like trying to gather the facts about her father: She didn’t know why.

Then Mr. Sage died. Just like Daddy, Maggie thought. And he liked me just like Daddy. I know he did. I do.

Now in her bedroom, Maggie found she had run out of words to send to heaven. She was a sinner, a slut, a tart, a scrubber. She was the vilest creature God ever put on earth.

She got to her feet and rubbed her knees where they were red and sore from the rug’s digging into them. Wearily, she wandered to the bathroom and rustled through the cupboard to find what Mummy kept hidden there.

“What happens is this,” Josie had explained confidentially when they’d come upon the odd plastic container with its even odder spout, deeply buried among the towels. “After they have sex, the woman fills this bottle thing with oil and vinegar. Then she sort of sticks this nozzle part up inside and pumps it real hard and then she won’t have a baby.”

“But she’ll smell like a tossed salad,” Pam Rice put in. “I don’t think you’ve got your facts straight, Jo.”

“I most certainly do, Miss Pamela Know-itall.”

“Right.”

Maggie examined the bottle. She shuddered at the thought. Her knees weakened a bit, but she would have to do it. She carried it downstairs and into the kitchen where she set it on the work top and took down the oil and vinegar. Josie hadn’t said how much to use. Half and half, most likely. She uncapped the vinegar and began to pour.

The kitchen door opened. Mummy walked in.

CHAPTER FIVE

THERE WAS NOTHING TO SAY, so maggie kept pouring, keeping her eyes on the vinegar as its level rose. When it reached halfway, she recapped the bottle and unstoppered the oil. Her mother spoke.

“What in God’s name are you doing, Margaret?”

“Nothing,” she said. It seemed obvious enough. The vinegar. The oil. The plastic bottle with its detachable, elongated spout lying next to it. What else could she be doing but preparing to rid her body of all the internal traces of a man? And who else would that man be but Nick Ware?

Juliet Spence shut the door behind her with a snick of the lock. At the sound, Punkin appeared from the darkness of the sitting room and glided across the kitchen to rub against her legs. He mewled softly.

“The cat wants feeding.”

“I forgot,” Maggie said.

“How did you forget? What were you doing?”

Maggie didn’t reply. She poured the oil into the bottle, watching it bob and swirl in graceful amber orbs as it met the vinegar.

“Answer me, Margaret.”

Maggie heard her mother’s handbag drop onto one of the kitchen chairs. Her heavy pea jacket followed. Then came the sharp plit plot of her boots as she crossed the room.

Never had Maggie been more aware of the advantage her mother had in height than when Juliet Spence joined her at the work top. She seemed to tower above her like an angel of vengeance. One false move and the sword would fall.

“What exactly are you planning to do with that concoction?” Juliet asked. Her voice sounded careful, the way someone spoke just before he was sick.

“Use it.”

“For?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m glad of it.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re developing a bent towards feminine hygiene, you’re going to have quite a mess on your hands if you douche with oil. And I take it that we are talking about hygiene, Margaret. There’s nothing else behind this, I’m sure. Aside, of course, from a curious and rather sudden compulsion to be certain your private parts are fresh and clean.”

Maggie studiously set the oil on the work top next to the vinegar. She stared at the undulating mixture she’d made.

“I saw Nick Ware pedalling his bicycle along the Clitheroe Road on my way home,” her mother went on. Her words were coming faster now, each one sounding as if her teeth clipped it off. “I don’t particularly want to think what that — combined with this fascinating experiment you’re apparently conducting in emulsification — might actually mean.”

Maggie touched her index finger to the plastic bottle. She observed her hand. Like the rest of her, it was small, dimpled, and plump. It couldn’t possibly be less like her mother’s. It was unsuited for housework and heavy toil, unused to digging and working with the earth.

“This oil-and-vinegar business isn’t connected with Nick Ware, is it? Tell me it was purely coincidence that I should have seen him heading back towards the village not ten minutes ago.”

Maggie jiggled the bottle and watched the oil slip and slide across the surface of the vinegar. Her mother’s hand clamped over her wrist. Maggie felt the immediate answering numbness in her fi ngers.

“That hurts.”

“Then talk to me, Margaret. Tell me Nick Ware hasn’t been here tonight. Tell me you haven’t had sex with him again. Because you reek of it. Are you aware of that? Do you realise you smell like a whore?”

“So what? You smell of it, too.”

Her mother’s fingers contracted convulsively, her short nails creating sharp pressure points of pain on the soft underside of Maggie’s wrist. Maggie cried out and tried to pull away but only succeeded in flinging their locked hands against the plastic bottle so that it slipped into the sink. The pungent mixture arced out to form an oleaginous pool. As it drained away, it left red and gold beads against the white porcelain.

“I suppose you think I deserve that remark,” Juliet said. “You’ve decided sex with Nick is the perfect way to get an eye for an eye. Which is what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it what you’ve been wanting for months? Mummy’s taken a lover and you’ll fix her good if it’s the last thing you do.”

“It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t even care when. I love Nick. He loves me.”

“I see. And when he makes you pregnant and you’re faced with having his baby, will he love you then? Will he leave school in order to support the two of you? And how will it feel, Margaret Jane Spence — motherhood before your fourteenth birthday?”

Juliet released her and went into the old-fashioned larder. Maggie rubbed her wrist and listened to the angry pop and snap of airtight containers being opened and closed on the chipped marble work top. Her mother returned, brought the kettle to the sink, set it to boil on the cooker. “Sit down,” she said.

Maggie hesitated, running her fingers through the oil and vinegar that remained in the sink. She knew what was to follow — it was exactly what had followed her fi rst encounter with Nick in the Hall in October — but unlike October, this time she understood what those two words presaged, and the understanding was a sickness to her that quickly ran ice down her back. How stupid she’d been just three months ago. What had she been thinking? Each morning Mummy had presented her with the cup of thick liquid she passed off as her special female tea, and Maggie had screwed up her face and drunk it obediently, believing it was the vitamin supplement Mummy claimed it to be, something every girl needed when she became a woman. But now, in conjunction with her mother’s words this evening, she remembered a hushed conversation that Mummy had had with Mrs. Rice in this very kitchen nearly two years ago, with Mrs. Rice begging for something to “kill it, stop it, I beg you, Juliet” and with Mummy saying, “I can’t do that, Marion. It’s a private oath, to be sure, but it’s an oath nonetheless, and I mean to keep it. You must go to a clinic if you want to be rid of it.” At which Mrs. Rice began to weep, saying, “Ted won’t hear of it. He’d kill me if he thought I did anything at all…” And then six months later her twins were born.

“I said sit down,” Juliet Spence repeated. She was pouring the water over the dried, crushed bark root. Its acrid odour wafted up with the steam. She added two tablespoons of honey to the drink, stirred it vigorously, and took it to the table. “Come here.”

Maggie felt the angry cramps without use of the stimulant, a phantom pain that grew from her memory. “I won’t drink that.”

“You will.”

“I won’t. You want to kill the baby, don’t you? My baby, Mummy. Mine and Nick’s. That’s what you were doing before, in October. You said it was vitamins, to make my bones strong and to give me more energy. You said women need more calcium than little girls and I wasn’t a little girl any longer so I needed to drink it. But you were lying, weren’t you? Weren’t you, Mummy? You wanted to make sure I didn’t have a baby.”

“You’re being hysterical.”

“You think it’s happened, don’t you? You think there’s a baby inside me, don’t you? Isn’t that why you want me to drink?”

“We’ll make it un-happen if it’s happened. That’s all.”

“To a baby? My baby? No!” The edge of the work top dug into her spine as Maggie backed away from her mother.

Juliet set the mug on the table, resting a hand on her hip. With the other hand, she rubbed her forehead. In the kitchen light, her face looked gaunt. The streaks of grey in her hair seemed at once duller and more pronounced. “Then what exactly is it that you were planning to do with the oil and vinegar if not try — no matter how ineffectively — to stop a baby’s conception?”

“That’s…” Maggie turned miserably back to the sink.

“Different? Why? Because it’s easy? Because it washes things away without any pain, stopping things before they start? How convenient for you, Maggie. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it’s going to be. Come here. Sit down.”

Maggie pulled the oil and vinegar towards her in a protective and largely meaningless gesture. Her mother continued.

“Even if oil and vinegar were effi cacious contraceptives — which they are not, by the way — a douche is completely useless much more than five minutes after intercourse.”

“I don’t care. I wasn’t using it for that. I just wanted to be clean. Like you said.”

“I see. Fine. Whatever you wish. Now, are you going to drink this, or are we going to argue, deny, and play with reality for the rest of the night? Because neither of us is leaving this room until you’ve drunk it, Maggie. Depend upon that.”

“I won’t drink it. You can’t make me. I’ll have the baby. It’s mine. I’ll have it. I’ll love it. I will.”

“You don’t know the first thing about loving anyone.”

“I do!”

“Really? Then what does it mean to make a promise to someone you love? Is it just words? Is it something you say to get you through the moment? Something without meaning mouthed to soothe feelings? Something to get what you want?”

Maggie felt tears building behind her eyes, in her nose. Everything on the work top — a dented toaster, four metal canisters, a mortar and pestle, seven glass jars — shimmered as she began to cry.

“You made a promise to me, Maggie. We had an agreement. Shall I recall it for you?”

Maggie grabbed on to the kitchen sink’s tap and shoved it back and forth, having no purpose for doing so other than experiencing the certainty of contact with something that she could control. Punkin leapt to the work top and approached her. He wove in and out of the bottles and jars, pausing to sniff at some crumbs on the toaster. He gave a plaintive mew and rubbed against her arm. She reached for him blindly and lowered her face to the back of his neck. He smelled of wet hay. His fur adhered to the trail her tears were making on her cheeks.

“If we didn’t leave the village, if I agreed that we wouldn’t move on this time, you’d see I never regretted it. You’d make me proud. Do you remember that? Do you remember giving me your solemn word? You were sitting at this very table last August, crying and pleading to stay in Winslough. ‘Just this once, Mummy. Please don’t let’s move again. I’ve got such good mates here, special mates, Mummy. I want to finish school. I’ll do anything. Please. Let’s just stay.’”

“It was the truth. My mates. Josie and Pam.”

“It was a variation on truth, less than a half-truth if you will. Which is no doubt why within the next two months you were having it off on the floor in Cotes Hall with a fi fteen-year-old farmboy and God knows who else.”

“That isn’t true!”

“Which part, Maggie? Having it off with Nick? Or pulling down your knickers for any one of his randy little mates who wanted to give you a poke?”

“I hate you!”

“Yes. Ever since this started, you’ve been making that clear. And I’m sorry about that. Because I don’t hate you.”

“You’re doing the same.” Maggie swung back to her mother. “You preach about being good and not having babies and all the time you’re doing no better than me. You do it with Mr. Shepherd. Everyone knows.”

“Which is what this is all about, isn’t it? You’re thirteen years old. During your entire life I’ve never taken a lover. And you’re bound and determined that I won’t take one now. I’m to go on living solely for you, just as you’re used to. Right?”

“No.”

“And if you have to get pregnant to keep me in line, then that’s just fi ne.”

“No!”

“Because what is a baby after all, Maggie? Just something you can use to get what you want. You want Nick tied to you? Fine, give him sex. You want Mummy preoccupied with your concerns? Good. Get yourself pregnant. You want everyone to notice how special you are? Open your legs for any bloke who sniffs you up. You want—”

Maggie grabbed up the vinegar and hurled the bottle to the floor where it exploded against the tile. Glass shards shot the length of the room. At once the air was eye-stingingly sour. Punkin hissed, backing into the canisters, his fur on end and his tail a plume.

“I’ll love my baby,” she cried. “I’ll love it and take care of it and it’ll love me. That’s what babies do. That’s all babies do. They love their mummies and their mummies love them.”

Juliet Spence ran her eyes over the mess on the floor. Against the tiles — which were cream coloured — the vinegar looked like diluted blood.

“It’s genetic.” She sounded worn out. “My God in heaven, it’s inbred at your core.” She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sank onto it. She cupped her hands round the mug of tea. “Babies aren’t love machines,” she said to the mug. “They don’t know how to love. They don’t know what love is. They only have needs. Hunger, thirst, sleep, and wet nappies. And that’s the end of it.”

“It’s not,” Maggie said. “They love you. They make you feel good inside. They belong to you. One hundred percent. You can hold them and sleep with them and cuddle them close. And when they get big—”

“They break you in pieces. One way or another. It comes down to that.”

Maggie rubbed the back of her wrist across her wet cheeks. “You just don’t want me to have something to love. That’s what it is. You can have Mr. Shepherd. That’s fi ne and good for you. But I’m not supposed to have anything at all.”

“Do you really believe that? You don’t think you have me?”

“You’re not enough, Mummy.”

“I see.”

Maggie picked up the cat and cradled it against her. She saw defeat and sorrow in her mother’s posture: slumped into the seat with her long legs outstretched. She didn’t care. She pressed the advantage. What did it matter? Mummy could get comfort from Mr. Shepherd if she felt hurt. “I want to know about Daddy.”

Her mother said nothing. She merely turned the mug in her hands. On the table lay a packet of snapshots that they’d taken over Christmas, and she reached for this. The holiday had fallen before the inquest, and they’d worked hard at good spirits and happiness, trying to forget what frightening possibilities the future held for them both if Juliet stood trial. She fl ipped through the pictures, all of the two of them. It had always been that way, years and years of the two of them, a relationship that had brooked no interference from any third party.

Maggie watched her mother. She waited for an answer. She’d been waiting like this for all of her life, afraid to demand, afraid to push, overcome with guilt and apologies if her mother’s reaction verged upon tears. But not tonight.

“I want to know about Daddy,” she repeated.

Her mother said nothing.

“He isn’t dead, is he? He’s never been dead. He’s been looking for me. That’s why we’ve kept on the move.”

“No.”

“Because he wants me. He loves me. He wonders where I am. He thinks about me all the time. Doesn’t he?”

“This is fantasy, Maggie.”

“Doesn’t he, Mummy? I want to know.”

“What?”

“Who he is. What he does. What he looks like. Why we’re not with him. Why we’ve never been with him.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“I look like him, don’t I? Because I don’t look like you.”

“This sort of discussion won’t do anything to make you miss having a father.”

“Yes it will. It will. Because I’ll know. And if I want to fi nd him—”

“You can’t. He’s gone.”

“He isn’t.”

“Maggie, he is. And I won’t talk about it. I won’t make up a story. I won’t tell you lies. He’s gone from both our lives. He’s always been gone. Right from the fi rst.”

Maggie’s lips trembled. She tried to control them and failed. “He loves me. Daddy loves me. And if you’d let me find him, I could prove it to you.”

“You want to prove it to yourself. That’s all. And if you can’t prove it with your father, you’re set to prove it with Nick.”

“No.”

“Maggie, it’s obvious.”

“That isn’t true! I love him. He loves me.” She waited for her mother to respond. When Juliet did nothing more than give the mug of tea a half turn on the table, Maggie felt herself harden. A small black place seemed to grow on her heart. “If there’s a baby, I’ll have it. Do you hear me? Only I won’t be like you. I won’t have secrets. My baby’ll know who her daddy is.”

She swept past the table and out of the room. Her mother made no attempt to detain her. Her anger and righteousness carried her to the top of the stairs where she finally paused.

Below in the kitchen, she heard a chair scrape back. The water went on in the sink. The cup clinked against the porcelain. A cupboard opened. The patter of dry cat nibbles poured into a bowl. The bowl clicked on the fl oor.

After that, silence. And then a harsh gasp and the words “Oh God.”

Juliet hadn’t said a prayer for nearly fourteen years, not because she had been without the need for theurgy — there had, in fact, been times when she was desperate for it — but because she no longer believed in God. She had at one time. Daily prayer, attendance at church, heartfelt communication with a loving deity, were as much a part of her as were her organs, her blood, and her fl esh. But she’d lost the blind faith so necessary to belief in the unknowable and the unknown when she began to realise that there was no justice, divine or otherwise, in a world in which the good were made to suffer torments while the bad went untouched. In her youth, she’d held on to the belief that there was a day of accounting for everyone. She had realised that perhaps she would not be made privy to the manner in which a sinner was brought before the bar of eternal justice, but brought before that bar he would be, in one form or another, in life or after death. Now she knew differently. There was no God who listened to prayers, righted wrongs, or attenuated suffering in any way. There was just the messy business of living,

and of waiting for those ephemeral moments of happiness that made the living worthwhile. Beyond that, there was nothing, save the struggle to ensure that no one and nothing endangered the possibility of those moments’ periodic advents in life.

She dropped two white towels onto the kitchen floor and watched the vinegar soak through them in growing blossoms of pink. While Punkin observed the entire operation from his perch on the work top, his expression solemn and his eyes unblinking, she dumped the towels in the sink and went for a broom and a mop. This latter was unnecessary — the towels had managed to absorb the mess and the broom would take care of the glass — but she had learned long ago that physical toil alleviated any bent towards rumination, which is why she worked in her greenhouse every day, clambered through the oak wood at dawn with her collection baskets, tended her vegetable garden with a zealot’s devotion, and watched over her flowers more with need than with pride.

She swept up the glass and dumped it in the rubbish. She decided to forgo the mop. Better to scrub the tile floor on her hands and knees, feeling the dull circles of ache centring on her kneecaps and beginning to throb the length of her legs. Below physical labour on the list of activities designed to serve as substitutes for thought, resided physical pain. When labour and pain were conjoined by either chance or design, one’s mental processes slowed to nothing. So she scrubbed the floor, pushing the blue plastic pail before her, forcing her arm out in wide sweeping motions that strained her muscles, kneading wet rags against tile and grout with such energy that her breath became short. When the job was completed, perspiration made a damp semicircle round her hairline and she wiped it away with the arm of her turtleneck. Colin’s scent was still on it: cigarettes and sex, the private dark musk of his body when they loved.

She pulled the turtleneck over her head and dropped it on top of her pea jacket on the chair. For a moment, she told herself Colin was the problem. Nothing would have happened to alter the substance of their lives had not she, in an instant of egocentric need, given in to the hunger. Dormant for years, she had long ago stopped believing she had the capacity to feel desire for a man. When it came upon her without expectation or warning, she found herself without adequate defence.

She railed against herself for not having been stronger, for forgetting the lessons that parental discourses from her childhood — not to mention a lifetime of reading Great Books — had laid before her: Passion leads inescapably to destruction, the only safety lies in indifference.

But none of this was Colin’s fault. If he had sinned, it was only in loving and in the sweet blindness of that loving’s devotion. She understood this. For she loved as well. Not Colin — because she would never be able to allow herself the degree of vulnerability necessary to allow a man to enter her life as an equal — but Maggie, for whom she felt all her lifeblood flowing, in a kind of anguished abandon that bordered on despair.

My child. My lovely child. My daughter. What wouldn’t I do to keep you from harm.

But there was a limit to parental protection. It made itself known the moment the child struck out on a path of her own devising: touching the top of the cooker despite having heard the word no! a hundred thousand times, playing too near the river in winter when the water was high, pinching a nip of brandy or a cigarette. That Maggie was choosing — wilfully, deliberately, with an inchoate understanding of the consequences — to forge her way into adult sexuality while she was still a child with a child’s perceptions of the world, was the single act of adolescent rebellion that Juliet had not prepared herself to face. She’d thought about drugs, about raucous music, about drinking and smoking, about styles of dress and ways of cutting hair. She’d thought about make-up, arguments, curfews, and growing responsibility and you don’t understand you’re too old to understand, but she had never once thought about sex. Not yet. There would be time to think of sex later. Foolishly, she didn’t connect it with the little girl who still had her mummy brush her hair in the morning, fixing back its long russet mass with an amber barrette.

She knew all the governing principles behind a child’s progression from infant to autonomous adult. She’d read the books, determined to be the best possible mother. But how to deal with this? How to develop a delicate balancing act between fact and fi ction to give Maggie the father she wanted and at the same time set her own mind at rest? And even if she was able to do that much for her daughter and herself — which she could not do and would not even consider doing, no matter the cost — what would Maggie have learned from her mother’s capitulation: that sex is not an expression of love between two people but a powerful ploy.

Maggie and sex. Juliet didn’t want to think about it. Over the years she’d grown more and more adept at the art of repression, refusing to dwell upon anything that evoked unhappiness or turmoil. She moved forward, she moved on, she kept her attention on the distant horizon where existed the promise of exploration in the form of new places and new experiences, where existed the promise of peace and sanctuary in the form of people who, through centuries of habit and custom, kept their distance from taciturn strangers. And until last August, Maggie had always been perfectly happy to keep her eyes on this horizon as well.

Juliet let the cat out and watched him disappear into the shadows cast by Cotes Hall. She went upstairs. Maggie’s door was closed, but she didn’t tap on it as she otherwise might on another sort of night, going in to sit on her daughter’s bed, smoothing back her hair, allowing her fingertips to graze against that peach-soft skin. Instead, she went to her own room across the landing and took off the rest of her clothes in the darkness. In doing so on another sort of night, she might have thought about the pressure and warmth of Colin’s hands on her body, allowing herself just fi ve minutes to relive their lovemaking and recall the sight of him etched above her in the semidarkness of his room. But tonight, she moved like an automaton, grabbing up her woollen dressing gown and making her way to the bathroom to draw a bath.

You smell of it, too.

How could she in conscience counsel her daughter against a behaviour she engaged in — looked forward to, longed for — herself? The only way to do it was to give him up and then to move on as they had done in the past, no looking back, cutting every tie. It was the only answer. If the vicar’s death had not been enough to bring her to her senses about what was and was not possible in her life — had she actually believed even for an instant that she might make a go of it as the loving wife of the local constable? — Maggie’s relationship with Nick Ware would.

Mrs. Spence, my name is Robin Sage. I’ve come to talk to you about Maggie.

And she’d poisoned him. This compassionate man who had meant only good to her and her daughter. What kind of life could she hope to have in Winslough now when every heart doubted her, every whisper condemned her, and no one save the coroner himself had had the courage openly to ask how she had come to make such a fatal mistake.

She bathed slowly, permitting herself only the immediate physical sensations attendant to the act: the flannel on her skin, the steam rising round her, the water in rivulets between her breasts. The soap smelled of roses, and she breathed its fragrance to obliterate all others. She wanted the bathing to wash away memory and to free her of passion. She looked to it for answers. She asked it for equanimity.

I want to know about Daddy.

What can I tell you, my dearest love? That running his fingers through your downy hair meant nothing. That the sight of your eyelashes lying like feathery shadows against your cheeks when you slept did not make him want to hold you close. That your grubby hand clutching a dripping ice lolly would never have made him laugh with delight and dismay. That your place in his life was quiet and sleeping in the rear seat of a car with no muss and no fuss and no demands, please. That you were never as real to him as he was to himself. You were not the centre of his world. How can I tell you that, Maggie? How can I be the one to destroy your dream?

Her limbs felt heavy as she towelled herself off. Her arm seemed weighted as she brushed her hair. The bathroom mirror wore a thin skin of steam, and she watched the movements of her silhouette in it, a faceless image whose only definition was dusky hair fast going to grey. The rest of her body she could not see in refl ection, but she knew it well enough. It was strong and durable, firm of flesh and unafraid of hard work. It was a peasant’s body, made for the easy delivery of children. And there should have been many. They should have tumbled round her feet and cluttered the house with their mates and belongings. They should have played, learned to read, skinned their knees, broken windows, and wept their confusion at life’s inconsistencies in her arms.

But there had been only one life given into her care and one chance to mould that life into maturity.

Had it been her failure, she wondered not for the first time. Had she let parental vigilance lapse in the cause of her own desires?

She set her hairbrush on the edge of the basin and went across the landing to the closed door of her daughter’s room. She listened. No light shone from beneath the door, so she turned the knob quietly and entered.

Maggie was asleep, and she did not awaken when the dim oblong of light from the landing fell across her bed. As she so often did, she’d kicked off the blankets, and she was curled on her side, her knees drawn up, a child-woman wearing pink pyjamas with the top two buttons of the jacket missing so that the crescent of a full breast showed, the nipple an aureole flushed against her white skin. She’d taken her stuffed elephant from the bookcase on which he’d resided since their coming to Winslough. He lay in a lump bunched into her stomach, his legs sticking straight out like a soldier’s at attention and his old mangled trunk prehensile no longer, but loved down to a stub from years of wear and tear.

Juliet eased the blankets back over her daughter and stood gazing down at her. The first steps, she thought, that odd, teetering baby walk of hers as she discovered what it was to be upright, clutching onto a handful of Mummy’s trousers and grinning at the miracle of her own awkward gait. And then the run, hair flapping and flying and chubby arms extended, full of confidence that Mummy would be there with her own arms outstretched to catch and to hold. That way of sitting, legs splayed out stiffly with the feet pointing northeast and northwest. That utterly unconscious posture of squatting, scooting her compact little body closer to the ground to pick a wildflower or examine a bug.

My child. My daughter. I don’t have all the answers for you, Margaret. Most of the time I feel that I’m merely an older version of a child myself. I’m afraid, but I cannot show you my fear. I despair, but I cannot share my sorrow. You see me as strong — the master of my life and my fate — while all the time I feel as though at any moment the unmasking will occur and the world will see me — and you will see me— as I really am, weak and riven by doubt. You want me to be understanding. You want me to tell you how things are going to be. You want me to make things right — life right — by waving the wand of my indignation over injustice and over your hurts, and I can’t do that. I don’t even know how.

Mothering isn’t something one learns, Maggie. It’s something one does. It doesn’t come naturally to any woman because there is nothing natural about having a life completely dependent upon one’s own. It’s the only kind of employment that exists in which one can feel so utterly necessary and at the same moment so entirely alone. And in moments of crisis — like this one, Maggie — there is no sagacious volume in which one looks up answers and thus discovers how to prevent a child from harming herself.

Children do more than steal one’s heart, my dear. They steal one’s life. They elicit the worst and the best that we have to offer, and in return they offer their trust. But the cost of all this is insurmountably high and the rewards are small and long in coming.

And at the end, when one prepares to release the infant, the child, the adolescent into adulthood, it is with the hope that what remains behind is something bigger — and more — than Mummy’s empty arms.