Long Lankin (40 page)

Cora sinks into herself. “Poor Mum,” she sobs. “Poor Mum . . . did you send a letter?”

“No . . .” I say, numb with remorse, “I didn’t send any letter.”

Auntie hid her face in her hands and moaned.

I mopped my own tears, my running nose, on my cuff. Nobody ever told Mum she wasn’t to blame, and every day since Annie was lost, she has suffered for it.

“It was all my fault,” said Auntie, “and I still don’t learn, Cora — I didn’t tell you, either. I hoped and prayed that Lankin was finished.”

“How can he be finished, Auntie Ida?” I sobbed. “What is he?”

“He has ruined life after life,” she said, bringing her hands down from her swollen, red face and staring at the far wall. “Not just the lives of the little children he stole away, but many, many others.”

“Then what can we do?”

“The only one who has ever come close to an answer was Jasper — Jasper Scaplehorn. You read some of his research — I don’t know how much.”

“I — I don’t know how much there was.”

“I went to see him at Glebe House not long after Annie disappeared. I was desperate, consumed with misery. I hoped that Jasper, with all his knowledge, could help me, that together we could do something, but — but the poor, dear soul had burdens of his own.”

It was one of those still, warm summer evenings. Jasper and I sat together in the drawing room at Glebe House.

On the floor, in front of the two tall windows, rectangles of light stretched themselves out over the fat, faded pink roses on the worn carpet. Between the windows, the French doors stood wide open, framing the lawn as it sloped down the hill to the woods. Beyond the treetops, the land swept away across the wide, flat marshlands to the shimmering estuary in the far distance. There was no way of knowing, on that hazy horizon, where the earth finished and the sky began, or what was water and what was not. Over this vast expanse of grey, thin rosy pink fingers were feeling their way from the west, where the sun was beginning to go down.

It was a rare hour of respite from the constant drumming of British or enemy planes, wheeling like great black birds in and out of the clouds.

Jasper sat as always, legs out and ankles crossed, in that old, scratched leather wing chair of his, with the bowl of his wineglass cupped in his long fingers. Beside him on a small leather-topped table was a jumble of papers; some had spilled off the pile and fallen onto the carpet.

Jasper was tall, with a striking nose, hooked like a Roman emperor’s, and thick wavy hair. In the First World War, Jasper was a young chaplain, hardly older than some of the lads he’d had to pray over. I think he went out to Flanders with dark brown hair and came back with grey.

If you’d happened to peep in through the window that evening and had chanced upon us sitting there with the long shadows spreading over the grass just outside and the warm sunshine sparkling on our glasses, you might have thought we made quite a contented, comfortable couple. But after a little while, if you’d stayed there long enough, and looked closely enough, you might have noticed how tense we were. I remember the loud slow ticking of the slate clock on the mantelpiece, and how I anxiously turned towards it as, on every quarter-hour, it chimed with a soft rolling peal of bells.

“Jasper . . .”

Jasper drew in his legs, then nearly spilled his wine as he put the glass down on the floor beside his chair.

“Let me warm up the soup I’ve brought,” I said. “It’s carrot — really good.”

He pulled his jacket straight, gave me a quick, nervous smile, and shook his head.

“When did you last eat?” I asked gently.

He didn’t answer.

“Or sleep?”

“Sometimes, in the afternoons, I find I have drifted off in this chair. It’s enough.”

A warm draught lifted the fringes on the flowered curtains that draped a full ten feet from their iron rail. I left my chair and moved to the open French windows. He joined me with his glass and the bottle of wine.

The shouting and whistling coming from the upper field meant that Peter Bardock had his men out on manoeuvres. They would wind up soon and finish their evening in the Thin Man.

It grew steadily darker. The deep, blue vault of the sky arched above us, and the moon hung there in a sprinkling of stars, but to the southwest all the heavens were aflame. Jagged bars of scarlet partly hid the low golden ball of the setting sun. As we stood looking out at the garden, our faces were flushed with its light.

“Is he sleeping — out there — Lankin?” I wondered.

“Maybe it’s a kind of sleep,” said Jasper, “but it’s an existence we can’t even imagine, a hovering between worlds. I think if a baby or a very young child comes close to his dwelling place, then he somehow connects with this strong life force. He begins to hunt for the child.”

Jasper filled his glass again.

The dusk deepened, until a band of turquoise across the horizon was all that was left of the day. A few bats swooped and darted in their scattered flight over the garden. Jasper lit a couple of lamps, but the glow around them was pale and cold, intensifying with greenish shadows the pallor of his face.

It was getting late. The breeze that had been so comfortable before was now chilly. I reached for the cardigan I’d slung over the back of my chair, and Jasper, taking the hint, partly closed the doors, then went back to his armchair.

“But is he properly alive?” I asked.

“He is alive, but not in the way that you or I are. He straddles the plane between the living and the dead. Lankin can’t be wholly spirit. He needs some kind of sustenance to preserve his immortality in the physical world. Of course, the bodies of very young children are full of the energy of growth. In theory, I suppose their flesh could sustain a creature such as Lankin for many years in this half-world he inhabits. We can be pretty sure that he had already drunk the blood of the infant John Guerdon as part of a ritual spell to cure his leprosy.”

Jasper drained his glass and poured into it the remnants of the bottle. The hand that held the glass was beginning to tremble a little.

“Why don’t I get you some soup —?”

“No, no. I don’t want it,” said Jasper. “Let me go on.” He sipped the last of his wine. “I — I believe Lankin is a creature of the boundary between land and water, partly in the social world and partly in the untamed wilderness of bog and marshland, confined by the water that flows around the margins of his territory.

“Even as a living man, we know he dwelt on the edge of society, an outcast, a bastard, avoiding the habitation of normal men. Maybe the process of becoming this thing that he is started even before he died.”

I turned my empty wineglass around in my hand.

“As far as we know,” Jasper continued, “Cain Lankin was found on the marshes by Piers Hillyard, not long after Aphra Rushes was burned at the stake.

“The rector and the sexton’s men were so frightened of catching leprosy from the corpse that no thorough investigation was made, and I doubt whether they had the resources to determine the cause of death, anyway. We must assume that the body had all the appearance of death, but remember, it did not start to decompose when it was hung in the gibbet.”

“So possibly, at that point, for some reason, Lankin was on the verge of being taken up — fully — into this half-world?” I ventured.

Jasper shifted in his chair. “Well, yes, possibly,” he said. “During his life, he was partially assimilated, but then some cataclysmic event, some travesty of the accepted spiritual and social norm, might well have caused him to pass into it completely.

“Lankin’s transition may have come about as a result of many things. He must have been in a highly charged emotional state. He failed to rescue Aphra Rushes from the bell tower and probably saw her burned to death, even if from a distance —”

“Jasper,” I said, “Piers Hillyard himself was most specific. He seems to have been convinced that by allowing this body, the body of a murderer, to pass through the lychgate into consecrated ground, he was responsible for establishing Lankin’s permanent existence in this half-world. He had an unnerving physical experience, and a feeling of utter dread, if his account is to be believed, when he and this lad, Shem, dragged Lankin’s coffin into the churchyard. And it was only after that that Lankin began to move the box from inside. Could that be the cataclysmic event you mention?”

“Well, gates are definitely significant,” said Jasper, “even in ordinary, everyday places. But down here, where there are uncertain, shifting boundaries between one element and another, doorways and gates would be even more important — portals between the worlds, perhaps.”

“The villagers must have sensed there was something sinister about the lychgate. It has been abandoned and chained up ever since. They made another entrance to the churchyard farther down,” I said.

“Well, then, perhaps they would have done better to leave it open.” He stared into space.

“What do you mean?”

“As I said before, maybe Lankin was becoming this — this creature even during his lifetime. Possibly there was some kind of folk memory of something similar happening in the past that stirred up the villagers’ fear. They were desperate for Hillyard to let him rot in the gibbet, but he insisted on removing him on the third day. Maybe — maybe if he had been left in the cage after that third day and had not passed through the gate, his body would have started to decompose naturally. Or if he had been buried at the crossroads and riveted down, we would not be here together in this room today — but Hillyard’s compassionate heart prevailed. If what it took for the transformation to be complete was for Cain Lankin to pass through the ancient, elemental portal where the lychgate stands, I can only think . . . that maybe if he passed back through it . . . the other way . . .”

“But he would never do that, knowing it might be the end of him, would he?”

“You’re right, Ida. How on earth could it be done?”

The night had closed us in. Behind the windows, the living darkness crept around the house, and the weak light from the two lamps in the room was all that kept it at bay. An owl hooted from somewhere in the woods.

“I’m so weary, Ida,” said Jasper.

“You need to sleep.”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do!” he snapped suddenly. “What do you know? I see him everywhere!”

“He doesn’t come up here. He will not cross the stream —”

“I said I see him everywhere, Ida. Even when I shut my eyes, he is on the inside of my eyelids, inside my head. . . .”

The clock chimed the half hour. It gave me a moment to collect myself.

“What are you doing about the church services?” I said. “Apparently everyone was waiting for you at Saint Mary’s on Sunday. Where were you? It’s happening more and more. . . .”

Jasper leaned his elbows on his gaunt knees, lowered his head, and pushed his long fingertips into his hair, rocking gently backwards and forwards. I saw tears trickling down his face.

A part of me ached for him, but I had so hoped for comfort myself. Who would ache for me? Jasper had not slept in a long time, but neither had I. My nights were haunted by bleak despair over Annie and plagued by a fury at Susan that I could not bear to shake off. With Susan at the heart of my rage, I didn’t have to confront my own guilt.

After a while, Jasper sniffed, wiped his cheeks, and sat up straight.

“Sometimes I feel like two people,” he said, “one looking in a mirror at the other, and I’m not even sure which of those two men I am.”

I also saw two people, two little girls — one Annie on that last morning, with me tucking her in for her nap, a cup of warm milk and honey on the cupboard by the bed — the other a child in the graveyard in years to come — hollow-eyed, dry-skinned, wasted, ragged, old . . .

“Jasper,” I said, hoping to catch this fleeting moment of calm in him. “Why is my brother Tom less and less my brother? Why is my son Edward not quite my son? Although I can’t keep away from the churchyard because I long to see them, I am also afraid of them. As the years have gone by, they’ve become more — more like Lankin himself. Of course, they are no longer of this world, but they are also . . . not of heaven.”