Four British Mysteries Page 6

  The memory served as a constant reminder of what lay beneath the skin, waiting to escape, should she let her guard down for but a moment. For weeks afterwards she clung to the commonplace, becoming a regular face about the village, where before she would have walked Eaton through the trees. The routine of Sunday service was unsettled but she didn’t let this deter her from the church grounds. And if she thought there were more headstones of late, more graves than she could ever remember seeing, this could surely only be a good sign; the village becoming clearer and more solid around her, grounding her in the real, the now?

  Her dream too began to change, as though subject to the turning seasons. The trees shed their leaves, branches seemed to twist and the dulcet song of the water fell silent beneath sheets of opaque ice. Winter had come to the dream-brook, and each time she glimpsed the thirsty figure opposite, with its hands dipped into the chill waters, it seemed thinner and less-kindly, until she began to doubt its motives by the pleasant brook, and dreaded the moment their eyes, for that one second, met.

  * * *

  The Knightwood Oak, two miles walk from the village across heathland, stood for all that was ancient and enduring about the Forest. From where Freya waited with her daughter beside the small picket fence that surrounded the monstrous tree, the sanctity of the scene could not have been more apparent; the enormity of the wild, maternal edifice, reaching into the sky as it had done for hundreds of years, surrounded by a court of saplings; its children, cut from its own flesh and blood.

  Even this mighty tree was not exempt from man’s influence. Men dressed the practice up as pollarding, they validated their actions with reason, but this did not detract from the violence of their axes as they stripped back branches and brought the tree low for another hundred years. As though the tree would not have endured, not procreated, without their ‘help’, their ‘encouragement’.

  In that moment, staring up into the branches, she felt ashamed to be human. If it was the beasts who lived alongside the tree, who nested in its branches and hunted in its shadow, then let her be a beast, not the other; desperate to rise above the wilderness so inherent to man’s heart. She could see that now.

  Stepping closer, Freya took her daughter’s hand in her own. Lizzie looked frail, as though the breath of wind that touched her hair might blow a little stronger and take the rest of her away with it. Freya hoped that she was happy. It had been so long since they had spoken properly, never mind laughed, or baked together, or played as they had used to, when Lizzie was little.

  * * *

  The blue light of winter shone through the kitchen windows, revealing an uncluttered room, sparsely filled, save for ingredients massed in one corner of the worktop. A calendar hung from the wall, beside the AGA cooker, marking December in all its festive glory. The year was 2004, though it could have been any winter’s day; barely the afternoon, darkness already encroached on the village. A string of fairy lights hung from the ceiling beams.

  “What are we making?” said Lizzie, her face caught in the glow of the lights. “Are we making cakes? Are we making mince pies for Father Christmas?”

  Looking down at her daughter, Freya smiled. The girl’s cheeks still shone from the cold. They had not long returned from the market, where it had begun to snow. Some of the flakes still lingered in her hair. “It’s a bit early for mince pies, darling. We’ll make some tomorrow, or the day after, so they’ll be fresh when he visits. They taste the best when they’re freshly-made.”

  “What are we making now, then?”

  “Bread,” said Freya, “using an old family recipe. Your grandmother taught me how to make it when I was a little girl, and her mother before her.”

  “But bread...”

  “Special bread,” she said. “It’s extra tasty, you’ll see. Here, help me weigh out the ingredients. It’s important we measure everything just right.”

  They went through the ingredients one by one, sifting them into bowls and filling measuring jugs. Freya had weighed out everything beforehand; seven grams of yeast, a pinch of salt, fifteen grams of softened butter and one cup and a half of wholemeal flour, but that wasn’t the point. It was the process that mattered. The activity.

  “What next?” said Lizzie, her hands white, face powdery with flour. Against the redness of her cheeks she resembled a porcelain doll; one of the old-fashioned Victorian types, made up like proper ladies.

  “You have to be patient,” said Freya, “we’re nearly done.”

  “Why do I have to be patient?”

  “Because some things take time, darling.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be patient,” said Lizzie decisively.

  “When?” said Freya.

  “When I grow up. It sounds boring.”

  A controlled burst of water, unleashed for one maddening moment, swirled inside the measuring jug, then Freya set to work. Taking Lizzie’s hands in her own they mixed the ingredients together, as another girl had with her own mother, nearly four decades earlier. The gentle sighs of the mixture, as she worked it with her hands, filled the kitchen. The emerging dough felt soft, almost spongy, beneath her fingertips.

  Nobody had made bread like Harriet, especially when generously spread with one of the Allwood’s jams. The blackberry was always Freya’s favourite as a girl. She remembered her mother’s cakes, laden with succulent fruits; swollen blackberries, bursting raspberries, sticky and shiny with glaze under the afternoon sun. Though Freya had always been her father’s daughter, the hours spent baking with Harriet were instrumental in their bonding. The act of creation, of making something out of nothing, was one close to every girl’s heart, no matter her age, especially when those creations were crumbling scones, loaves of springy bread and glazed fruit tarts, sharp and sweet against the tongue; sheer sensuality, real and regenerating.

  “Am I doing it right?” said Lizzie.

  “You’re a natural, darling. Much better than I was, when I was your age.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!” said Freya. “Maybe you’ll become a baker one day. Then you could sell your cakes at market, like we saw today.”

  From where Lizzie stood, between Freya’s arms, she snorted: “I’m not going to be a baker.”

  “You’re not?”

  Shaking her head, Lizzie looked up from their hands. Her eyes were sharp, bright, and suddenly there was nothing porcelain about her. “I’m going to be a runner,” she said. “I’m going to run through the trees, faster than anyone else, and I’m going to keep running, just like Dad.”

  Freya’s fingers sunk into the dough and remained there a moment. “Your father’s run too far,” she said. “He’s run so far that he’s got lost, somewhere in the Forest. Promise me you’ll never run that far.”

  Lizzie promised. “You know, it seems to me a lot of people get lost in the Forest.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the dough. When they finally finished, and Freya withdrew her hands from her daughter’s, she noticed a faint red imprint where her wedding ring had pressed into Lizzie’s skin. For a whole hour afterwards Lizzie pranced around the house, a dishcloth over her face, humming wedding songs and pretending she was to be married.

  Only when the dogs began howling did Freya draw the curtains and usher Lizzie upstairs, mimicking the wolfish sounds as she chased her shrieking daughter into bed.

  * * *

  The Forest had grown dark this year, intimidating, alive with the movement of dead trees and memories, but when Lizzie had asked to see the Oak, Freya had been only too happy to oblige. She savoured this fleeting moment, in which the beauty of the trees was restored, this abused tree towering over its saplings, mother and daughter beneath it. She would think of it often, in the weeks ahead, when so much else became ugly and unkempt.

  Presently they grew cold and hungry. As the afternoon set in and the light began to leave them, they set off for the village across the heathland, where the ponies ran wild as they pleased...

  * *
*

  “I’m worried about Merlot,” Catherine said, when Freya visited her old friend that evening for drinks. “She hasn’t come home. Not since last night.”

  The cottage itself was beautiful. Freya had often thought it belonged in a fairy tale. Scarlet ivy crawled across the grey brick outside, stretching around the door to the first-floor windows. The roofing was dark slate that shone a gorgeous black in the rain and warmth suffused the inside of the cottage, so that on cold winter evenings there was nowhere nicer or more welcoming in the village. Beams lined the kitchen ceiling, from where wicked witches would hang their cauldrons. Catherine had opted for spice baskets and begonias. The room filled with the oaky scent of red.

  “Spill the beans,” Freya said, when her friend risked yet another glance at the window. Catherine’s distress was palpable.

  “What do you mean?” said Catherine.

  “I haven’t seen you this anxious since your father caught us swigging that expensive fizz the afternoon we finally finished school.”

  “That night...” Catherine smiled, her eyes flickering to Freya’s. “I thought we were never to speak of that night again. We swore, remember?”

  “We’re not,” said Freya, smiling back. “We’re speaking of tonight.”

  They moved with their wine into the sitting room. Freya poured fresh glasses while Catherine sorted them some finger-food. It was cosier here, nestled into the sofas. The air was laced with languor. Freya took a sip of her wine, relishing the full-bodied taste of it, the feel of it slipping down her throat, while Catherine voiced her concerns.

  Merlot was Catherine’s cat, one of three, named after her favourite French grape. The animals meant a great deal to the woman, who treated them like her babies in the absence of children of her own.

  “I’m sure she can look after herself,” Freya said. “Isn’t that the point of cats?”

  “The point of cats...” Catherine rolled her eyes. “That’s hardly fair. I don’t quiz you on the point of dogs, do I?”

  Freya laughed with genuine mirth. “I’m not sure dogs have a point, unless you count eating and trailing mud through the house, and I can hardly criticise him for that lately.”

  “You old bitch,” said Catherine, laughing with her now. “What a pair we make.”

  “To Merlot,” said Freya, raising her glass.

  “To Merlot!”

  They talked long into the night, Catherine’s worries drowned beneath a cocktail of wine and memories. Many bottles were drunk, until there was no more Merlot of any sort in the cottage and Freya was forced to return home, before she lost the ability to walk. Retreating quietly from the cottage, she left Catherine where she had passed out on the sofa.

  Only when Freya was outside did she trip, and curse her bra for being so restrictive, and almost fall into a flowerbed. The night seemed to swim around her. The alcohol had gone down well, she thought, as she stumbled home. Though she knew she would suffer tomorrow, she would drink again with Catherine soon. For Merlot’s sake, if an excuse was ever needed, which it wasn’t, in Lynnwood.

  CHAPTER TEN

  December settled silently over Lynnwood one night and with it an awareness; the worst kind, not of monsters or evil but the nature of the self, penned between the pages of a diary.

  Night emerged from the Forest. It spilled from the dark spaces between the trees as much as the skies, rolling out across the village. There were no carols to commemorate its arrival, no children playing in the streets, no sounds at all, in fact, save for the muffled coughs of lonely silhouettes, bent low as they struggled home. Counted among them, Freya moved swiftly through the night. Her old Parka was zippered to her neck, so that only the tail of her scarf fluttered with the wind.

  She should have returned home hours ago. She should have been there to meet George and Lizzie after school, to gather them up and lock the doors and comfort them. Instead she had remained at the Vicarage, poring over the books that Ms. Andrews had so diligently guarded all these years. Once she had begun, once she had deciphered the antiquated English with its wild scrawl and long-limbed lettering, she couldn’t seem to stop until she reached the last page of each volume and felt the maddening truth of their echoes...

  * * *

  They raised the issue of the Vicarage three days before, while meeting in the village hall. Fewer than were expected attended the gathering but then the morning frost had been especially black, the air savage to breathe. Mr. Shepherd was a notable absentee, though McCready’s sandwiches more than compensated for the matter, and Catherine arrived a little later with hot flasks of mulled wine to pass around. Gathered together beneath the exposed timber beams of the village hall, they ate and drank these offerings with abandon.

  “There’s always been an Andrews in Lynnwood to take care of matters such as this,” said Mrs. Morecroft, when they had consumed their fill and drank much more. “As we all know, life had other plans for our vicar, God rest her soul, and we aren’t afforded this luxury.”

  “We could hold an auction?” suggested McCready. “Happen we’d make a pretty penny, selling off some of the older items. Village heirlooms and such.”

  “That only raises more questions,” said Mrs. Morecroft. “Which of the Vicarage’s treasures were hers to sell, and which belong still to our church? There’s local heritage to consider. Then, supposing we make sales, where does the money go? She left no will, no inheritors.”

  “The village,” said someone else. “We could turn it back into the village. Get some decent roads down –”

  “Roads! Through-traffic’s the last thing we need –”

  “We can’t sell,” said Catherine, blowing wisps of steam from an unscrewed flask on the table. Her eyes, filled with wisdom and wine, wavered through the heat. “These were Joan’s things. This was her life. Have some respect for the woman.”

  They fell silent at these words, each afraid, as if they might have revealed too much of themselves in the presence of their neighbours. With some visible effort, Mrs. Morecroft roused herself to speak further. “This still leaves us with the question of what is to become of the Vicarage.”

  “We should clear it of her things,” said Freya. She hadn’t spoken yet, content to listen as the meeting unfolded, but she found herself talking then. The words moved through her mind like a swarm of tiny gnats, dancing above the surface of Mawley Bog in the ragged red of autumn dusk. “Give them away. The Vicarage’s not her home anymore, and it’s what she would’ve wanted.”

  “You’re sure, Freya?”

  “Yes, I think so. We spoke often enough. I knew her better than most, in the end.”

  Tension gripped the men and women of the village hall. Freya remembered the tightness of her bra against her flesh, the night outside Catherine’s cottage. The feeling extended to the rest of her clothes; a second cotton-skin she sought to shed, revealing the real underneath. She knew the mounting urge to run, break free; to drop low, like dogs or ancient man, and race from Lynnwood into the half-light of the trees, as they imagined Joan Andrews to have done, and she knew she was not alone in feeling this. Some of the villagers, she would later learn, dreamt they had seen the old woman in the woods since; a wiry figure, naked and shrivelled, scrabbling through the trees.

  The tension about the room grew tighter until she thought it might shatter like a stressed branch and splinter into a hundred pieces. Somehow, Mrs. Morecroft spoke. They voted in favour of clearing the Vicarage. Freya chose to tackle the study and the literature housed within.

  * * *

  She fled through the village. The night pressed down on her, a numbing blanket. She found relief in that numbness; a deadening of spirit and body, as though she drifted through the streets, born by the wind and nothing more. The sound of her boots as they knocked against the cobbled streets formed a frantic rhythm into which she was absorbed.

  She should never have delved into the diary. But it had lain open on Ms. Andrews’s desk, in that tired study filled with the accumula
ted dirt of ages. Crisp white pages had caught her attention, offset by the wide, frantic scratches of black ink across them, where so much else was dark and dusty with abandonment. The room itself looked as though it had not been used properly for many years, save certain marks, made recently in the dust. She followed these tracks, the lingering echoes of Ms. Andrews’s last movements, and had found the diary, so innocuous as to be monstrous given the truths of which it spoke. Even as she had read it, curious at first, then with wide eyes and quivering lips, she knew them to be just that; truths, written and forgotten but remembered with the coming of the cold and the snow and Winter Solstice...

  * * *

  Taking the diary from where it lay on the desk, she turned the book over in her hands. The cover bore no name. Nor did its pages contain any obvious dates. Indeed, no effort of time-keeping had been made, as though that was unimportant. She leafed through the leather booklet slowly. Where the ink was older and more faded she discerned the earliest entries, but it was the most recent additions, in that long, hurried lettering, which were of interest to her. She read steadily at first, then with increasing quickness, as one who has glimpsed the horror of something and is thereafter unable to look away, both enthralled and afraid that they might miss something, or that the same horror should be worse only half-known.

  Joan had written of her dreams; the clearing, the dusk, the fly-faced woman through the trees. Something about reading these visitations made them more real, certified by shaking hand and scratchy ink; the dreaming thoughts of a frightened woman, committed to paper. She wrote of other things too; the encroaching cold, the sounds of the Vicarage, the yellowing of the leaves of the alder trees by the church. Freya deduced from these things that it was October, though they were fleeting mentions. Always, it seemed, Joan returned to the dreams, as they returned to her each evening, when the sun fell and shadows filled her home.