The Ghosts of Heaven (11 page)

She tried to speak to him, but he was lost somewhere.

She held him and kissed the top of his head and tried to speak to him again and there was John Fuller at the door of the mill house, shouting, “Anna! We don't pay you to nursemaid your brother!”

So she left Tom sitting by the water as the sound of the fulling hammers starting their day's pounding battered them both.

 

13
SIR GEORGE IS DEFEATED

“There is a pestilence here,” said Father Escrove, “but it is not a bodily one. It is a pestilence of the soul.”

He stood square in front of Sir George in the arching high hall of the manor, while Sir George, sitting in his dining chair, rested his leg. He'd been on it too long recently, and the heat didn't seem to help things. It ached terribly and whenever it did he relived the pike going into it as if it was happening now, and was not something that happened thirty years ago.

And to add to his trouble, there was this black creature in front of him, buzzing at him like a blowfly.

“These are good people,” began Sir George, but he was weary, and the minister's patience had run out.

“Good? There are no such people. That is something I have learned through my work. There are no good people. There are only people who haven't been caught at their wrongdoing yet. And this parish is full of them. There is wickedness on every side. Heathen dances on the high ground, right in the face of the church! I know of at least two burials that were conducted outside of Christian ceremony! There are bastards on every side; sins of lust and lechery!”

Here he looked with full meaning at Sir George, to give him to understand that a wife young enough to be his granddaughter was, in his eyes, a wickedness.

Sir George sighed.

“It is not so terrible as you say.”

“Not so terrible?” snapped the minister. “Nay, you are right. It is worse! How dare you lecture me on God's business? You have allowed such devilment to foster itself here, under your nose! Do you deny these things? Do you defend them?”

“No, of course not. But it is only dancing. Some license with the law…”

“You call these things acceptable?”

Sir George was being backed into a corner and he knew it.

“No,” he said. “No. Of course not. But these are simple people. They do things their own way, sometimes and—”

“And not the way of God?”

Sir George said nothing, because there was nothing he could say to that. But the minister was not finished.

“I have come here,” he spat, “to restore a priest to the church, to restore the name of God in this village and, by God, I will do that. You can either assist me in my work, or obstruct me, but I will do these things either way. And if you do not assist me I can promise you that life will be all the harder for you. This may be your land here, but the law of God trumps the law of England! Or had you forgotten that? Here, tucked away in this valley with your good people?”

Sir George Hamill hung his head and sighed. How his leg ached, and how he wished this devil would be gone.

“You are a Justice of the Peace, are you not?”

Sir George knew that Father Escrove knew that he was, so he didn't trouble to reply.

“You are a Justice of the Peace. You have the full power of the law in your hands, and a refusal to do so could be greeted with the deepest concern by the king, could it not?”

Sir George troubled himself to give the faintest nod of his head.

“So?” asked the minister. “I can count on your assistance?”

When Sir George lifted his head again, his eyes were glistening.

“Yes, Father,” he said.

 

14
WITNESS

There were screams.

Outside the mill.

Anna ran from the dark hammers and saw Tom in a fit, scraping himself on the flags, his head banging on the stone. The Smith twins were there, watching, and their brother Harry, as were Adam Dolen, Ma Birch, Anne Sutton, and others, all watching Tom on the ground.

Anna ran, pushing roughly past them to get to Tom, where she began to calm him, speak to him, settle him, hold him while the fitting passed. It took longer this time to bring him back and while Anna spoke she felt all the eyes around her, staring at her, staring at her brother, and she turned and shouted.

“Go away! I hate you. Go!”

Her shouting only upset Tom more. He struggled in her arms, so she clung to him whispering as calmly as she could.

“Tom. I'm here, Tom. I love you, Tom. I'm here.”

Over and over, until eventually the shudders became only shakes, and the retching and wracking let his muscles alone.

Now, Anna turned, and saw that the crowd had left her, just as she'd wished, though she saw Adam Dolen still watching her from the trees across the far bank of Golden Beck.

There was a voice at her shoulder.

She turned, looked up to see John Fuller.

His face was empty.

“Take him home, Anna,” he said.

“But there's still half a day's work to be done,” she said.

John shook his head.

“Not today. Take him home.”

*   *   *

It took Anna half an hour to get Tom back to the cottage. He ambled along, stumbling frequently. He said not a word, didn't even seem to recognize that Anna was speaking to him. Slowly, step by step, she got him up the track and back home, where she lay him on his narrow bed.

“I've something for you to drink,” she said. “Tom, did you hear? I've something for you to drink, that will make you well.”

Tom's eyes were pointing at the ceiling, and stayed that way.

Anna looked at him a moment longer, then went to the pot and began to get a fire going to let the tea warm before he drank it.

When it was ready, she propped him up on the bunk and held the cup to his lips, letting him sip it slowly, letting the tea slip into him steadily, and she prayed that it would make him be properly alive again.

He lay back down again when the tea was done, and then he slept, deeply.

*   *   *

They came for Anna that afternoon.

The sun had moved round to beat on the front of the cottage, pouring burning light into the dark space, setting bright squares on the earth floor inside, when there was a thump at the door.

Just one, and then the door flew open.

With the glaring sun behind them, Anna couldn't see who it was outside her house.

She could only see a raggle-taggle crowd, and from their silence, she sensed danger.

“What do you want?” she said, but she received no reply.

They came in to get her.

She tried to shut the door, but someone put a boot against it and they were inside the cottage.

By force they took her outside and she yelled, “What do you want with me?”

Again, there was no reply.

Now she saw who had come. There was Adam Dolen and his wife Maggie. There was Jack Smith. There were the Byatt brothers. There was William Holt and John Turner. And there was Grace, standing off to the side, glaring at Anna.

“What have I done?” screamed Anna as they began to drag her down the track.

Still they didn't answer. They didn't need to.

Grace stalked into the cottage as they went and wanted to burn everything.

She stared at Tom on his bunk, who seemed to have slept through it all, slept in some place very far from the waking world; his chest rising and falling slowly. She looked at the herbs hanging from the roof beam, and at the jars of remedies that Joan Tunstall had made. It was one of those things she'd smeared across Grace's sick baby, those things that had killed it.

She saw the pot of tea hanging above the fire and she kicked out at it, sending it flying, spilling the contents all across a wall and onto the floor.

She spat on the boy Tom as he lay on his bed, and then she hurried after the others, for she did not want to miss a moment.

 

15
THE WATER GIVES ITS ANSWER

They dragged her so hard and so fast that her feet barely touched the ground, and though she begged for answers, to know what they wanted and where they were going, and why, they all held their tongues.

Their hands however, were not still, and Anna screamed as Jack Smith for one let his hands visit places they had dreamed of at night as he lay in bed beside his wife. She fought all the more as he touched her and that only got her a slap across the back of her head, which made her want to be sick.

She wrenched her head round and one last time she screamed at them.

She looked Jack Smith in the eye as she screamed, but there was nothing there to see but hate, and then they were by the pool just above Fuller's Mill.

Anna cried out. There was not even anger left in her now; only wild wild fear.

“What are you doing?”

“The water will give its answer!” Adam Dolen yelled. His face wobbled as he flung his words at the woods beyond the pool.

John and Helen came out of the mill house and started toward the crowd, but Adam Dolen swung his fist at them.

“Get back!” he snarled, and they did. “We're going to swim her.”

Anna screamed, again, again, and then they had her on the ground. Hands grabbed her ankles and her wrists and she was lifted off the flags into the air, where they begun to swing her backward and forward.

She wailed, incoherent sounds pouring out of her, as they let her fly. She was in the air for an age it seemed, and all was silence but for the rushing of Golden Beck filling the pool. Next moment she hit the water, the shock of the cold gripped her, but the only thought in her head was of Tom, who could swim like a fish, where she had never learned, had never had time to learn.

Her woollen dress sucked itself into the water, and she went under straightaway. She fought against it and managed to erupt from the pool, screaming even as she tried to gasp at the air.

She batted her hands against the surface, sending great splashes into the mosquito air, but it was not enough to keep her up.

“If the water takes her…” slobbered Adam Dolen.

He didn't finish his words. They all knew what was happening.

Grace stood on the bank now, screaming at Anna in the water. She had managed to work herself into a frenzy, had even managed to convince herself that she cared that her baby had died, and she wailed as angry tears poured down her cheeks.

“You killed my boy! You killed my boy!”

She picked up a stone and hurled it at Anna, who had come up for a second time. The stone missed by a handsome margin, but it didn't matter. Anna was going down, and secretly Grace started to grin as Anna was about to die. Her drowning would prove her innocence, but Grace didn't mind about right or wrong, she only wanted Anna hurt and dead.

Anna went under for the final time.

She tried to hold her breath as she frantically flailed under the water. She'd seen Tom make the slightest movements, and glide along, whereas all her efforts did nothing.

She stared up at the sunlit surface of the pool, where the world shimmered through the water. She could see Grace leaping about, and then, as she sank deeper, Anna's gaze drifted dimly down, where, on the rock wall of the far bank of Golden Beck, under the water line, she saw a huge spiral line carved into the stone. A spiral.

Under the water, a spiral, illuminated by a single sunbeam that penetrated the depths.

The witch in the water was not yet dead.

She tried once more to fight against the weight of her clothes, as the last bubbles of air popped from her mouth, and she tasted the beck entering her mouth.

Then there were hands under her.

Too desperate now to even understand, she fought against them, but moments later felt herself being pulled up, and to the side. She was at the bank, with an arm under her, around her, a thin arm.

She coughed and choked and spluttered water. She heard a voice in her ear say her name.

“Anna.”

She turned.

“T-Tom!”

She clawed for the bank some more, and Tom pushed her, so that she managed to climb onto the bank, where she lay heaving and spewing the cold water from her.

Tom clambered out of the water after her, and sat by his sister.

The crowd stared.

Not moving, not speaking, they stared, not knowing what to do.

Grace shoved her father, and Adam Dolen took a step forward, but John Fuller put his hand out and held him by the elbow.

“No more, Adam,” he said, and he said it well enough for Adam to stop.

Anna lay on the ground still, Tom sitting there; his hand on her head, gazing at his sister.

“I'm here,” he said. “You'll be well soon, Anna. I love you, Anna.”

And then Anna began to cry, though she didn't want to in front of these people who had tried her in the water, but she did, she wept. The crowd, Adam, Jack, and all of them, turned their faces to the earth and slunk away, leaving only Grace to stand and hate Anna.

“You won't,” spat Grace. “You won't.”

But what it was that Anna wouldn't do, Grace didn't say. John Fuller came and shoved her in the back, sending her packing, and no one saw the black charcoal marks on her left palm.

Anna rolled onto her back and found Tom's hands with hers.

He laughed quickly and happily.

*   *   *

When they could stand Anna up on her feet again, John Fuller helped Tom to take her home, though they went in silence the whole of the way.

That night, Anna didn't sleep. All through the long hours, she expected the cottage door to burst open, and the crowd to come back.

All through the long hours, she lived again and again in the water; feeling the cold holding her, tasting the water in her mouth, the surge of panic as she knew she couldn't swim, and would drown. But for her little brother, who had somehow woken, and found strength, and run down the valley to throw himself straight into the water, she would have.