A Half Forgotten Song (43 page)

Wilf frowned. “No. But it’s as far as I can afford to travel just yet. I’m not stupid, Mitzy. And I know I’m not as exciting to you as . . . some others might seem. But this is
real,
not some impossible dream. This is a real life I’m offering you. We can save up . . . I can start saving and take you overseas, too. It don’t cost too much to cross the Channel . . .”

“No.”

“No?”

“That’s my answer, Wilf. I won’t marry you. I don’t want you.”

Wilf was silent for a while; put his hands in his pockets and seemed ready to wait, as if waiting might make her change her mind. Eventually he took a long, heavy breath.

“He won’t marry you, Mitzy. I can promise you that an’ all.”

“What do you know about it? You’re just like everyone here! Watching and chattering and thinking you know my business!” she said, anger flaring at his words.

“I know enough to know he won’t marry you. He can’t. He—”

“Just shut up! You know nothing about it!
Nothing!
” The words were ragged, savage; put tears in Wilf’s eyes as he looked at her.

“I know enough. I
love
you, Mitzy. I could make you happy . . .”

“You could not.” She turned away from him and folded her arms, and for a long time she could sense him there, standing behind her, waiting. She heard him sniffle a bit, blow his nose, clear his throat. At some point she realized that he’d gone, and could not say for sure when he’d left. She glanced over her shoulder and couldn’t see him on the beach or on the path up through Southern Farm. For a second she felt panic grip her, but she ignored it, and took the inland path towards the village.

Wilf had said Charles was in the pub, so that was where she went. She walked right up to the window, nervous excitement making her teeth chatter. She caught the tip of her tongue between them, and tasted blood. The inside of the pub was shady and dim, but she could see that it was almost empty. Two men were seated at the bar, but neither one was Charles. She walked across to the village stores and peered inside; then walked a short distance along each of the little lanes that made up the village center. She could not think where else to look, could not think why Charles had not come to find her, to reassure her. She knew he must have some plan; some scheme by which they would soon be together. But she wished, how intensely she wished, that she could find him and hear what it was. Her need to see him was giving her a pain behind her eyes, a pain that built all the time. She gave up on the steep track that led to Northern Farm, and came back down it into the village past the rear elevation of the pub. And then she saw him.

He was in one of the pub’s upstairs rooms, she could see him through the little window, half buried in the tiled eaves. The view was restricted—through the cramped pane she could see his arm and shoulder, his lower jaw.
Charles!
Dimity wasn’t sure if she had shouted aloud in elation, or if her throat was too tight to make a sound. She waved her arms above her head, but then she stopped and let them fall. Charles was not alone. He was talking to somebody—she could see his mouth moving. And then that somebody stepped into view, and it was the tourist woman.
The one who has to touch herself each time she sees you.
Celeste’s voice was so clear that Dimity whirled around in confusion, looking for her.
Milksop skin.
The words were in the hiss of the breeze. The woman appeared to be crying; she dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her blouse. Dimity stared at her, tried to make her not exist. A vast, bottomless chasm had opened at her feet, and she saw no way that she would not fall. There was nothing to save her. Charles took the woman’s hand and raised it to his mouth, pressing a lingering kiss onto the skin.
Have you ever seen them together?
Celeste whispered in her ear, and the pain in Dimity’s skull spiked unbearably. She clasped her hands to the sides of her head, whimpering in agony; then, with a cry, she fled from the Spout Lantern.

She walked blindly, as the crow flies, across fields and tracks, through the coppice of beech and oak on top of the ridge and down the other side. She soaked her feet in runnels of water, splashed her trousers with reddish mud, got covered in sticky buds, burrs, and gnat bites. She picked as she went, using her shawl as a sling; gathering familiar plants almost without thinking. Sorrel for salad; nettles for tea and kidney tonics, and to feed the blood; milk thistles and pig nuts for stewing; fern to kill tapeworms, dandelion for rheumatism, chicory for a bladder infection. The task was so familiar, had such a natural rhythm that it hypnotized her, silencing the turmoil inside her head.

She passed by the watery ditch at the edge of the woods, where a thick patch of water hemlock grew. Cowbane, it was also called, since it killed the cows that browsed it by mistake. She crouched down amid the tall, deadly plants, surrounded by their innocent-looking umbrellas of white flowers. Their roots wound down into the sandy soil at the bottom of the ditch; long, serrated leaves with the tempting smell of parsley. Water fleas scudded around her feet and a banded demoiselle flew in wide arcs above her head, watching curiously. Dimity wrapped her hand around one woody stem and pulled gently, careful not to bruise it, until the tuberous root came free from the ground. It would taste almost sweet, like parsnip, if eaten. She rinsed it off and laid the plant carefully in the sling, away from the others. Kept apart, reviled, not to be trusted. Separate from all the rest, just as she had always been. Dimity took a slow breath; her mind was quite empty. She went back to pull another stem.

H
ours later, with her shawl heavy and cutting into her shoulder, Dimity was still walking. Her legs felt too long, and though everything she saw was familiar to her, still she felt as though she didn’t know it, didn’t belong to it. On the beach she kept bruising her toes and shins by walking into rocks, and could not work out why. Some way farther along the shore she stopped walking altogether, and realized that it was nighttime. She could not see to walk, because the sky was as black as the inside of her mind, without a moon to light it. If this darkness was natural, or because the light had gone out of the whole world, she could not tell. She sat down where she’d been standing, feeling the stones prod her, cool and damp, through her clothes. There she stayed, in the dark, not hearing the waves, because her own crying drowned them out; sobs tearing at her, convulsing her. And all the time she felt like she was falling, like she had stepped into that fathomless chasm and would never reach the surface again. She did not sleep.

In the cold light of the morning, the rising tide roused her, lapping at her feet with icy little ripples. Dimity scratched at her face, itchy with salt, and stood up shakily. She started walking again, with little idea where she would go; just following her feet like before until eventually they brought her to the top of Littlecombe’s driveway. There she paused and stared down at the regular, compact shape of it. There was no sign of the car in the driveway, no sign of anybody in the garden; the windows were all shut. Charles was there. This was where she had first seen him; where he had first drawn her. This was where he slept, where he ate. This was where he
had
to be. Dimity felt hollow, insubstantial, and a sudden lightness washed through her head, the lightness of joy tempered with something else. Something nameless and bleak; something that had come up from the depths of the chasm to be with her. She stumbled on her bruised feet as she walked down to the kitchen door.

She knocked loudly, with conviction. Charles would open the door and gather her up; slide his arms around her waist like he had in the alleyway in Fez, and she would feel the firm touch of his mouth and the hardness of him, and she would taste him and fold into him and everything would be right. Nobody else would exist. When Celeste opened the door, frowning and wiping her hands on a towel, Dimity blinked, bewildered, and Celeste’s face darkened.

“Dimity. Why have you come? Why do you persist?” she said. Dimity opened her mouth but there were no words within it. The air whistled in and out of her throat. “Tell me, do you honestly think he would leave his daughters to be with you? Do you think that?”

Her voice was flat and angry. Dimity stayed silent. She felt faint, hazy; not quite real. “He’s not here, if that’s what you were hoping. He’s gone with the girls to Swanage, to ride the donkeys on the beach and to shop and play on the amusements.”

“I wanted to . . .” Dimity started to say, but she didn’t know what it was that she had wanted. The woman in front of her was the sum of everything she would never have. In a hindquarter of her brain, Dimity gazed at Celeste and despised her. “I brought these for you. For all of you,” she said, putting a hand on the plants she had collected.

“There is no need.” Celeste tapped her toe against a basket on the doorstep, already full of leafy plants. “Delphine went early this morning. Without you. She left me these herbs to make a soup for my lunch.”

“Oh.” Dimity struggled to focus her eyes, struggled to think. There was a shrill humming sound in her ears, and Celeste’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. She squinted up at the Moroccan woman and wondered how she had ever thought her beautiful. Celeste was shadowy and cruel, a figure to be feared and loathed. A stubborn blight, an open sore that refused to heal.

“Now listen to me. No more of this.” Celeste sighed abruptly, through her nose. “Leave us alone,” she said, and closed the door.

Dimity rocked slightly on her heels. The ground was a queasy blur at her feet and a sudden sickness filled her throat with a foul, acid taste.
If he was free, he would be with me.
She shut her eyes and pictured Charles rescuing her, saving her, as she lay on the ground, ready to be torn apart by wild men in Fez; she thought of his kiss in the alleyway, the touch of his hand as he helped her up; the flowers like a wedding bower arching over them as they had sat together at the Merenid Tombs. That desert place where everything had been as perfect and glorious as a dream. Dimity opened her eyes and looked down at Delphine’s basket. She saw wild garlic and parsley; celery, lovage, and caraway. It was a good forage, the leaves all young and tender, nothing picked that might have gone woody or bitter. And caraway was a rare find, a delicious one. Delphine had been an attentive pupil. Dimity stood and stared down at the herbs for a long time. She looked at her own collection, in the sling hanging at the end of her numb arm. The weight of it was suddenly too much and she set it down at her feet, bending low over it.
Garlic, parsley, celery, lovage, caraway.
The blood thumped in Dimity’s head, painful and insistent. The greenery swam in front of her eyes, half hidden by her own trailing hair.
Garlic, parsley . . .
There was the water hemlock, the cowbane, in her own pile. Carefully kept apart, carefully bunched together; leaves, stems, sweet thick roots. Dimity could hardly breathe for the pain behind her eyes. She stood up at last and walked away with jerky, wobbling steps. And somehow the cowbane was no longer in her sling. It was in Delphine’s basket.

CHAPTER TEN

T
hree days after Ilir had fought with Ed Lynch in the pub, Zach began to pack up all his things. A catalog slipped from his fingers onto the floor, the spine cracked by the number of times he had looked at it so that it fell open at a picture of Dennis, the young man who’d brought him to Blacknowle in the first place. Dennis, and Delphine: the daughter who disappeared. He pictured her face, hanging on the gallery wall; all the hours he had spent studying it and coveting it. He’d been so sure, for a while, that he would find out what had happened to her. That Dimity Hatcher would know, and would tell him once he had fetched hearts for her, and charmed her with portraits of herself she had never seen before. Now he had to choose between Charles Aubrey and Hannah Brock, since Hannah was somehow involved in cheating the man to whom Zach felt a fierce, if nebulous, loyalty. Hannah who had shut him out, and lied to him, and possibly felt nothing for him. Soon, he would have to drive out of Blacknowle with a destination in mind. Soon, but not quite yet. He breathed a small sigh of relief as he gave himself this stay of execution.

The Watch was silent and lifeless, the windows blank, betraying not even a flicker of movement from within. Zach stood beneath the small window in the north-end wall and stared up at it. This was the room from which the sounds of movement had always come. The glass pane was broken in one corner, a small hole at the center of a starburst of cracks, as though somebody had thrown a pebble through it at some point. He could see pale curtains hanging inside, half open, half closed. One of them shifted slightly in the breeze, and the sudden movement made Zach jump, made him duck for cover nearer the wall, before he realized what it was. Was there something in that room that Dimity Hatcher wanted to hide? Something, or someone? Just then he heard the quiet, dry sound of paper sliding against paper, coming from the window. The turning of a page; the discarding of one piece from a pile. Zach’s scalp crawled peculiarly, and he hurried away from the window.

He knocked several times on the door, but there was no answer. He couldn’t think where else Dimity could be, except inside. He pictured the way her gaze drifted into the distance, the way she seemed to vanish into her thoughts. He thought of her oddness, her charms and spells. He thought of a kitchen knife in her hand and the way her light sometimes stayed on late into the night, as though she never slept. He thought of blood beneath her fingernails, staining her disheveled mittens. Shivering slightly, he knocked again, more softly; suddenly almost afraid to rouse her. This time, he heard movement from within.

T
here was a pitch-black thing, crowding the room; swelling like a huge and deadly wave, waiting to break. Dimity cowered from it. It did no good to shut her eyes. When she shut her eyes, she saw rats. Rats twisted up with their eyes bulging and their bodies twitching and jerking into death. Rats that had eaten Valentina’s hemlock bait. She went from room to room, murmuring all the charms she knew, but the threatening darkness kept after her.
What happened to Celeste?
she heard Zach ask, and she spun around, wondering how he’d got inside, how long he’d been there, listening. But no, just another echo, the echo of a question he’d asked before. Recently, or a long time ago? She couldn’t remember now. Time was behaving oddly; day and night had blurred. She could no longer sleep at night, only in fitful snatches during the safety of the daylight hours. Too many visitors, too many voices. Élodie doing handstands against the living room wall; Valentina laughing, mocking, waving her finger; Delphine’s sad, sad eyes. And now this dreadful black thing, too, which had no name, which refused to identify itself. But in the writhing rats, scrabbling in the corners of the room, Dimity understood what it was, and she feared it more than anything. It was the thing that she did. The awful thing.