Sandlands (26 page)

 

On the Saturday of the August Bank Holiday weekend, Kathy invited Nick over for supper in her garden at Parmenters. His work on the house was complete, the floors and roof damp-proof and watertight, and the rendering renewed to a spanking fresh – and one hundred per cent vegetarian – Suffolk pink. The roses on the garden wall drenched the air in their sweet-shop perfume, as thick as Turkish delight, and the lawn hummed torpidly with insects and the musk of fallen fruit. Scalding late-summer sun looked set to hold for a few days yet, but storms were forecast for the following week. It might be the last chance for a proper outdoor summer feast, and she wanted to share it with Nick. Besides, she had another discovery to show him.

‘It's indoors, in the inglenook.'

‘Again? Not another genie in a bottle?'

‘No.' No bottle this time – these were different ghosts.

‘What were you doing in the fireplace, anyway? It's hardly the weather for laying fires.'

She pulled a face. ‘Scraping up crap.' Her clawing hell-fiend had turned out to been nothing less ordinary than a starling that come down the chimney and been trapped. She had managed to drive it from the fireplace and out through the open French windows, but it had left behind a mess of droppings and snapped feathers.

‘No wonder. Scared shitless I expect, poor thing.'

‘It wasn't the only one. I felt like Tippi Hedren on set with Hitchcock.'

It was a joke now, but still brought a residual clench to her stomach: the confined space, the blind beating panic.
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing
.

‘I really must fit you that spark guard,' said Nick.

‘Anyway, come and see what I found when I was cleaning up. I want to show you.'

It was with some reluctance that they left the fragrant garden, but it was dark now and they had finished the Roquefort and the raspberries; they brought the remains of the Prosecco with them. Inside the house it felt sultry after the freshness of the outdoor night. They'd carried bottle and glasses through to the sitting room; Kathy drew deeply on hers
and Nick refilled it.

‘Here. Come and see.' She stepped inside the inglenook, lowering her head to duck under the mantelpiece. On the other side, there was height enough for them both to stand upright between the lintel and the smoke hood which hung behind. The space, as before – though mercifully empty now of birds – was dark as soot and heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. Kathy had a torch.

‘There are two wooden beams, you see – two lintels. One behind the other.' She shone the beam as she spoke. ‘It looks as if the back one is older.'

‘Yes. I remember – I noticed when I was working on the floor. It looks as if they put the front one in later to strengthen the chimney breast. Nineteenth century, by the look of it.'

‘Right. But look what I found on the old mantel beam. Here, in the gap.'

She pointed the torch into a cavity a few centimetres wide between the back of the Victorian lintel and the front of its Tudor predecessor, which would once have faced into the room above the fire. He had to lean his face very close to hers to see inside the narrow opening.

‘It's a pair of carved initials, you see.' She moved her hand inside and outlined the ridged contours of the two swirling shapes. K and D.

‘It's them, don't you think? It has to be them. Katherine and Daniell.'

He nodded, and above her torch beam, uplit, she watched his lower lip curve into a smile. ‘It's them,' he agreed. ‘And it's also us.'

‘Us?'

‘K is you. Katherine, Kathy. And D is me.'

‘Nick? Aren't you Nicholas, then?'

A shake of the head. ‘I'm Dominic.'

In the soft chiaroscuro of the inglenook, in the warm secret space between the two lintels, his hand joined hers in tracing the carved wooden lettering. ‘It's the two of us,' he said, ‘entwined.'

The final word hung between them, thick and smoky and charged. The heat and proximity were suddenly a heady potion; the torchlight trembled with her fingers. Her face was already tilting up to join him as his lips came down and found hers. The torch fell. They were in darkness, and there was only his mouth, still sharp with the fizz of raspberries, and the scent of his skin in her nostrils, hot and human and alive against the smothering staleness of old ashes.

 

The lovers spent the night on the old Persian rug in front of the fireplace. At some point, in between spells of touching and talking and laughing and loving, and another bottle of Prosecco, Kathy had fetched down the duvet from her bed upstairs; it was almost four before they finally fell asleep, half on and half under it, their spent limbs still slackly intertwined.

By six she was awake again, her body and mind far too alive, too stimulated, for more than those short snatched hours of rest. Taking care not to wake the slumbering Nick, she extracted her lower body from the weight of his legs, her arm from under his head, and slipped out to the kitchen, where twice she filled a mug to the brim with cold water from the tap and drank it down. Already – or still – the breeze from the open kitchen window was shot through with heat. Picking up from the table her book on witchcraft, she walked out naked into the garden, and over to the bench beneath the apple tree. It was odd, she suddenly thought, how even thus alone she would normally have been too self-conscious for this display, yet this morning there was a simple, heedless pleasure in it; how strange, too, that she should feel completely at one with this body, for all the unfamiliarity of her stretched muscles, battered limbs and sensitised, tingling skin.

The editors of Kathy's book had not, in 1935, done much of a job on the indexing. There were entries for neither Blaxhall nor Parmenter, or else she would surely already have discovered the page towards the end of the book which contained the final reference to the case of Patience Spall, who was arraigned and convicted at the Bury St Edmund's assizes on the last day of August 1656 and burned in the village of Blaxhall the following morning.

She found it now, and this is what she read.

There seems to have been little local sympathy
for Patience, described in one contemporary account as ‘a sallow
, skelly-boned maid', ill-favoured, and as having a face
like wormwood. For her victim and his young widow, by
contrast, there was widespread compassion, heightened by the tragic circumstance
that Daniell Parmenter should have died on the very night
of his wedding to Katherine.

It may be that Patience
was indeed responsible for the fire, or perhaps the villagers
were primed to attest against her, for the prosecution case
did not rest solely upon the usual supernatural signs which
so many witches were convicted – the milk which curdled at
her touch, the noontime flight of a nightjar – but upon
the testimony of two separate witnesses who both claimed to
have seen her out abroad that night in the proximity
of the Parmenters' barn.

If Patience was truly at the
barn; if she saw Daniell go inside; if she did
light the flame which set the place alight, and, if
so, why – the answers can only be a matter for
conjecture. Why would a young girl burn to death a
bridegroom on his wedding night? To the modern psychoanalytic mind
, some explanations may of course suggest themselves. Had Patience, perhaps
, a morbid hatred of the sexual act – some say, as
a result of incestuous abuse at the hand of her
father? Or might she have had an obsessive sexual fixation
on Katherine Parmenter which, frustrated, impelled her to kill the
new-wed husband in a jealous rage? Whatever the truth
of it, we shall never know, for Patience Spall took
the secret with her to her unconsecrated grave.

 

By now it was nearly seven o'clock, and inside the house, at the French windows, the morning sun slid between the curtains which last night they had never stopped to close. There it warmed the single pair of naked feet which were flung uncovered from beneath the quilt – but the exhausted Nick never stirred. The sun burned strongly for such an early hour, its brilliance unfiltered by the heat haze that would build up later on; it was going to be another blazing day. A minute more, and its rays crept round to fall across the witch bottle, which still lay on its side where Kathy had left it, on the rug beside the base of the chimney breast. Sunlight glinted on the smooth, pellucid glass, palely tinged with green.

 

In the garden, heavy with outdoor morning scents and the lassitude of the night's expended energies, Kathy's mind turned round and round in slow, soporific circles, while the print drifted in and out of focus before her eyes.

...the tragic circumstance that Daniell Parmenter should have
died on the very night... the tragic circumstance... the newly-
wed husband... the very night of his wedding to Katherine...

 

There must have been a crack in the bottle: the merest whisker – no doubt the result of Nick's invading spade – snaking its filigree path through the ancient glass. It was only a hair's breadth, but sufficient to let in oxygen. The sun seared through the glass and on to the twisted cloth inside which, desiccated by the centuries, was cracking and crisped to tinder, impregnated with its long-dried sulphurous cocktail; it scorched the knot of fabric through the glittering glass, bringing to a simmer the anhydrous witch's brew.
In the cauldron boil and bake
. The curve of the bottle's flank served to focus and intensify the light, concentrating the rays on a single point, a pinprick, deep in the blood-dark folds of cloth.

A soft, plosive pop, inaudible beyond the confines of the bottle, released the first gauzy wisp of smoke and with it a smouldering, acrid odour.
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble
. Then came the flame. Bluish and tentative at first, it began to lap along a ridge of fabric, but quickly grew bolder, darkening to purple and rich red, then leapt, hungry and orange, to lick the inside of the glass. Finally, it found the crack, the way to the outside air and life-giving oxygen – where, invigorated, it bucked and swayed its wild banshee dance, until it met the threads of Persian wool.

Fire burn...

 

It was the scent which jerked Kathy to wakefulness. It caught unmistakably at her throat – the sour, dry, abrasive rasp of fresh smoke. The book fell and, blindly, barefoot, she was running across the dew-wet grass, running towards the smoke which scrolled from French windows, towards Parmenters, and Nick.

This is such a brilliant place, Mum. I'm going to love it here, I know I am, even though I'm stuck out on my Larry lonesome with just an old lady for company and everybody thinks I'm crazy. I can actually see the salt marshes from my bedroom window if I lean out a bit and look eastwards towards the estuary. Well, not the mudflats when the tide is out, but the reed beds, anyway – the feathery tops of the reeds. And at high tide you can see the water, too, when the sun's on it, shining through in little silvery strips. Now I'm lying here in bed sending this before I go to sleep and all I can hear is curlews. Imagine – actually dozing off to the sound of curlews! Night night. Love you.

 

Sorry about the short and rather incoherent message last night. Honestly though, Mum, I was so knackered by the time I'd got here. Crossing the Underground took for ever with my massive rucksack, up and down all the escalators bashing people and having to apologise, and I missed the train from Liverpool Street that I was supposed to get and that meant a longer wait at Ipswich for the connection to get up here, and it stopped at every bush and cow shed all the way and there wasn't a buffet car or even one of those trolleys to get a Twix or something. But I had just enough battery left to ring Miss Keble, who says to call her Agnes, and she said not to worry at all, my dear – she always says ‘my dear' – and the last bus wouldn't have gone yet and she'd wait the tea. That was how she said it, ‘I'll wait the tea', which I think is brilliant, like something out of
Miss Marple
or
Downton Abbey
.

She gets about the house like a demon in her wheelchair – the ground floor at least. She's had all the old wooden steps between the rooms levelled off, even though she says she had to keep quiet about having it done because the house was built in the reign of Henry VIII and she'd have needed listed buildings consent. Her bedroom is downstairs and a shower and loo and this little room that she calls her studio, which actually when I caught a glimpse looks full of books, but then so is the sitting room which she says we're to share. There's a telly that looks as if it ought to be in black and white and have newsreaders on it in bow ties who talk like the Queen and say ‘This is London'. So I hope it works OK and gets all the Freeview stuff at least so I can see
Autumnwatch
, and Agnes doesn't insist on us sitting down together to the
Antiques Roadshow
or
Songs
of Praise
or something dreadful. But anyway, she seems nice, and she's a good cook as well. We had smoked haddock for this tea that she'd ‘waited', two huge fillets each with parsley sauce plus a poached egg on top and proper bread from a loaf, not the pre-sliced plastic kind. Granary – always my favourite, as you know. And it really was tea in the old-fashioned sense, because she made us a pot of Earl Grey with it, which was a bit weird – I mean, Earl Grey with fish! – but not as bad as you'd think, and better than just tap water. When I find out where the shop is I'm going to lay in some Diet Cokes.