A Curse Dark as Gold (35 page)

I slumped to the floor.

"Charlotte!" Rosie flung herself to my side. "Charlotte!"

I reached for her hand; she squeezed me tightly, her eyes wide with terror.

"What are we going to do?" she whispered.

Father's atlas teetered off the edge of the desk, and fell to the floor with a sound that shook us both. Rosie grabbed my arms, and for one hysterical moment I thought she might start laughing.

Instead, we pulled each other upright, and I lifted William from his basket and laid him gently against my shoulder. Impossibly, he had fallen asleep. I patted his little backside and felt the warmth of his breath against my neck. I longed to do nothing more than clutch him to my breast and breathe in the sweet baby smell of him ... but that would not save us. I must use the days I had bought us wisely.

"Oh, it's bent," Rosie said mournfully, showing me Father's atlas. It had landed on its edge, crushing one corner and popping the binding loose. As she tried to mend it, it fell open to the drawing of the spinning jack. Wincing, I looked away, but a draft from the doorway swept in and fluttered the pages. They came to rest at the map of the Gold Valley. Rosie and I stared at each other, and then at the map.

Suddenly, like the walls of the mill reinforcing themselves brick by brick, everything began to fall into place. I slammed the album shut and shoved it at my sister.

"Here, take this." I swept to the shelves and wrangled out the pressboard box containing Stirwaters's journals and the papers I'd torn from the wall. I pushed it into Rosie's arms, gathered up William's basket, and threw my shawl round my shoulders.

"Where are we going?" Rosie asked.

"We're paying a visit to Biddy Tom."

By some miracle, Mrs. Tom was in, and answered my first set of demanding knocks. She eyed us with some surprise, but swung the friendship door open to admit us.
"I have three days to break the curse on Stirwaters," I said, and Rosie held out the carton of documents. "Here's everything I know."

Mrs. Tom fixed us tea with honey and listened attentively to our tale -- all our dealings with Jack Spinner, stretching back to last summer's first meeting. She came as close to ruffled as I'd ever seen her, holding William very tightly and rocking faster and faster in the old ladderback rocker. I sat at her feet and spread the journals and letters all round me on the floor. At Stirwaters, for a moment, I thought I could glimpse the answer, but in Mrs. Tom's cosy parlor at dusk, I could not seem to catch hold of it again.

"What must we do?" I kept repeating. "Spinner must be the man -- or the
spirit
of the man; oh, mercy -- who cursed Stirwaters."

"Aye, lass, there seems little doubt of that now." Mrs. Tom lifted the broadside account and read it over William's tiny shoulder, and I remembered sitting here with her, months earlier, talking of these matters over a casual cup of tea. "You've wandered into dark territory indeed, then, if there's witchcraft involved."

"But how can we stop him?" Rosie's voice was desperate.

Mrs. Tom pursed her lips. "You must know what brought about the curse -- and how it were laid down. Who cast it, and why."

"But we know who cast it," Rosie said.

"Do we? Truly? What do we
really
know of him -- of what happened to him?" I shook my head, sweeping through the papers. "There's nothing here." But there was. If I could only understand it -- if only I could marshal my thoughts and lay the pieces all in order, clear and plain, before me.

Idly, I flipped the pages of Father's book to the old map and traced my fingers over the odd names and inky figures. My finger came to a stop on simplecross , and I paused for a moment and peered in closer. Farther up the river was a bridge labelled hard crossing ; I had always assumed they were companions, comparisons:
Ford the Stowe here, where it is easier.
But the cold, still feeling in my heart intensified as I stared at Simple Cross and saw that it was nowhere near the river. It was the convergence of four roads -- one marked by parallel lines, the other by dashes.

"Oh, mercy," I said. "The crossroads."

Rosie peered in closer, and Mrs. Tom rocked thoughtfully. "Aye," the old woman finally said. "Powerful magic at work in a cross-ways. Folk've been known to make dark bargains there -- and worse."

"Dark bargains?" Rosie echoed, but I merely nodded, recalling Malton Wheeler's letter.

"I think that's what Harlan Miller did," I said.
And worse.
"And whatever he did there -- I have to undo it."

"Well," Mrs. Tom said gently, still holding the broadside, "from the looks of this, I'd wager your Mr. Spinner met a bad end there."

Rosie gasped. "You don't mean --"

Mrs. Tom continued. "There's no good to come of pairing a cross-ways and a witch, and only one thing that would bring God-fearing men into the mix, as well."

"I must go there," I said. My voice was very soft, little more than a thread through the lamplight, but I felt the Tightness, the certainty of it like a warm weight settling into my bones.
Biddy Tom nodded. "Tomorrow." The clock chimed the quarter hour, and as I glanced its way, I saw that Mrs. Tom's parlor was decked for autumn, in boughs of golden foliage, grape wreath, apples. They were fading now -- somehow we had reached the end of October without me realizing it.

"All Souls' Night. When the dead walk."

"Oh, truly!" Rosie said. "You're both mad, you are! There are --" she grabbed the map and counted. "One, two -- five crossroads outside Haymarket. What makes you think
this
is the right one? It could take days to cover all of them -- and then where will we be?"

It is always a bad sign when Rosie is the voice of reason.

"Look --" I spread the map Harlan Miller had drawn before her on the atlas, pointing to the facing page. The letters spread wide across the land Stirwaters was built on: simple. "This is the one it wants me to see. There's something about
this
crossroads I'm meant to understand."

"How can you tell? They're all on the same page!"

What could I tell her? There was no rhyme or reason to it -- I just
knew.
The way I heard the voice of the mill, the way the atlas had fallen open to that page, the way the pit had given me back Mam's ring. I had closed my ears and eyes to Stirwaters's messages too long; when would I believe
before
it was too late?

We stayed at Mrs. Tom's a few more hours, during which she told us dark things about restless spirits and the hold that great anger could have. Things I had glimpsed for myself already.

"When the old year draws to a close -- and I'm not talkin' about the calendar year, mind, but of
seasons
and nature, and things the elements of the land understand -- when the earth turns, it brings us round closer to the Other World. The wall between their world and ours is thinner, then, and all sort of things may pass between. The Fair Folk come down from their hills, and the ones who have gone before us sometimes come back."

"But Spinner's
been
back," Rosie said. "Why should tomorrow be different?"

Mrs. Tom stirred her tea with slow hypnotic strokes. I thought if I looked long enough, she might conjure a vision in the murky liquid. "Tomorrow he'll be drawn to the place where he died -- he won't be able to help it. All things return to their beginnings."

I listened to her, my thoughts turning hazy and indistinct in the shadows swirling round us. "My father --" I could not keep the wistfulness, or the grief, out of my voice.

Mrs. Tom set her teaspoon down with a snap. "Your father died a peaceful death, Charlotte Miller. He'll have no reason to come back, and don't you go meddlin' with them that's resting comfortable."

I rose from the table and lifted William from his basket. He murmured sleepily as I stroked his tiny plump hand. I whispered meaningless commentary into his wispy hair, and Rosie took a shaky sip of her tea.

"Very well," I said at last. "What must I do?"

It was decided that Harte would accompany me, for Biddy Tom pronounced the journey too dangerous to make alone,

"Understand -- this is not just a night when the spirits wander. They're also at their most powerful, their most unforgiving. Take that strapping lad what's so keen on Rosie; he's got a head on his shoulders."

Rosie would stay behind in Shearing, watching William at the Grange, Biddy Tom nearby.

But things never go smoothly in this world, not for the Millers of Shearing, not for those they love. Saturday morning, Harte and I both came first to Stirwaters, of course, to tidy up last-minute loose ends and, I suppose, have a sort of heroic farewell. I don't know how heroic Harte felt; I was only sick and desperate and angry.

I watched it happen, watched and did not move, merely held fast to William and shook my head as the ladder Harte was standing on -- his own perfectly sturdy ladder, hardly high enough to fall from, and from which he was certainly not overreaching himself -- simply
pulled
itself out from beneath him. I don't believe it, but that's what I saw -- Harte standing strong and easy no higher than the third or fourth rung, fixing a pulley into place, and then, for one sickening moment, hanging there in the air with nothing at all beneath his feet.

He was lucky not to break his neck. I saw him land, saw the look of surprise on his face as the leg buckled and bent. I saw Rosie screaming from the other side of the room. I saw her throw down her tools and run to him, as I had done, once, long ago when my father fell at that spot. My breath stilled in my chest and I could not move.

But then, there I was -- at his side, barking orders. "Ian Lamb!" I bellowed, and the boy, running toward us, froze in his tracks. "Fetch Biddy Tom. Now!" Was I even thinking it was
medicinal
aid we needed?

Harte lay stunned, a distorted heap of a body, one leg bent up under his back, his face twisted with pain. Rosie had hold of one hand, up close to her lips, and her fingers brushed at his forehead as if she were a little afraid to touch him. But her eyes, wide and blue as the Stowe, were on me. If Rosie never looks at me that way again, I may one day forget what it was like; as if the sum of every strange and awful thing of the last two years was in that look -- the accidents and deaths, the magic we
had
to believe, and above all, the Stirwaters Curse.

Mrs. Lamb took Rosie round the shoulders and moved her gently aside as two strong men came and lifted Harte from the floor. He screamed then, a raw, awful sound that could not have come from our Harte. They got him half to his feet, the broken leg dangling sickeningly at his side.

"Take him to the house," Rosie said, and her voice was clear and steady. With a slowness that was excruciating for everyone, they carried their burden down two narrow flights of stairs, across the rough shale yard, and into the Millhouse. It took them twenty minutes, for every few steps they had to stop and let Harte rest. I thought Rosie was going to faint, each time they paused, or jostled him, or bumped his leg against the stairway wall.

Outside in the yard, someone said at my elbow, "Here's the laddie, Mistress." I glanced back to see Tory Weaver holding a jolly, gurgling William.

"Merciful Lord," I said. "I'd forgotten. How --"

"You handed him straight to me, Mistress," Tory said. "No harm done. He's the picture of a prince, this a'one."

William grinned his drooling smile at good old Tory, gripping his collar in a tiny wet fist. And Tory beamed right back at him, proud as any grandfather. Fighting back hysteria, I took William from his arms as calmly as I could. It was all I could do to hold him normally, not grip him as tightly as I wanted -- tight enough to make him part of me again.

God help me, it was done so easily. One moment's distraction, and William was parted from me. How little would it take to make that parting permanent?

In the Millhouse, Harte was laid out awkwardly on the parlor sofa, blankets heaped up beneath his leg. Pilot and Rosie stood guard over him, keeping the crowd well back and offering gentle comfort where they could.

He looked like a man shot and dying, pale and sweating, his face a rictus of agony with every shallow breath. Rosie, at least, had recovered: She produced a knife and split Harte's boot and trouser leg apart as smoothly as I'd seen her gut trout from the millstream.

"Hold his hand -- hard," she said to me, and I grabbed Harte's fingers in a grip like iron. "I'm taking the boot off; it's going to hurt like the devil."

"Keep breathing," I whispered -- though to whom I am not certain. All the strength I wanted to pour into my grip on William was transferred to that poor man's hand. Harte's eyes rolled my way, but if he saw me, I have no idea.

Rosie made another cut in the boot leather, and then with no sympathy whatever, pulled it away from the foot. Harte gasped and squeezed me hard, nearly pulling me down beside him. It seemed I could hear his heart beating, even from where I stood, and new beads of sweat rose up on his forehead.