The Ghosts of Heaven (7 page)

Tom didn't know what he was supposed to listen for, but he crept up to his sister and lifted two of her long thick ringlets of curling red hair aside, bending his head toward her face.

Then there was a sharp tap on the door, which opened.

Anna's head shot up. Her brother was by her.

“Tom…?” she asked, but Tom had scurried away to the kitchen door.

She stood and saw that there were people coming into the cottage.

The first of the mourners.

Joan Tunstall's funeral was about to begin.

 

3
THE TRYSTING TREE

Jack and Elizabeth Smith were first.

Anna bid them in, and she even smiled, though she knew Jack was only come because her mother owed him some money. Scared to let death cheat him of twopence.

At least they'd left their children to prattle outside, but nevertheless she could hear Harry bossing the twins around just beyond the garden wall.

Elizabeth's eyes had landed on Joan Tunstall. Anna had wrapped her in a winding sheet from her toes to her head, leaving only her face exposed to the hot room. Despite this tight wrapping, the heat had not been kind.

“She reeks,” said Jack to no one.

He wanted badly to let his eyes run over the redheaded Tunstall girl, so he could later imagine his hands doing the same. She was plenty old enough now to be looked at, after all, but the body of her mother made him uneasy.

“The house is terrible hot, Anna,” said Elizabeth.

Jack barked once.

“Hot! Spend all day in the smithy before you call this hot.”

Elizabeth turned to Jack.

“Yes, husband. You're right.”

“Acourse I'm right.”

Anna watched Elizabeth Smith cower before her husband, whose face, it was true, was permanently red as if scorched by his blacksmith's fire. Anna wondered how long he would manage to wait before asking for his twopence.

More people entered the cottage.

John Fuller, who'd been master to her father when he'd still lived, and John's wife Helen, thin and gray, who smiled at Anna.

“Hot in here, Anna,” said John, wrinkling his nose.

“Yes, but the windows must be shut,” said Anna.

Helen agreed.

“No breezes above a body. Where's little Tom?”

Anna started as if remembering her brother for the first time in days. She knew Helen was kindly to children, even though Anna's mother Joan, the village gracewife, had delivered four dead babies of Helen Fuller. No more had come, alive or dead, but still Helen Fuller smiled at the sight of a young child.

“There!” said Anna. “Tom, come.”

Tom stayed where he was by the kitchen door, and Anna let him alone. More people entered the door, and the small room became full, so that people edged closer to Joan.

With surprise, Anna saw that even Adam Dolen was there, though there was no sign of his wife, Maggie or their daughter, Grace.

Three empty days of silence and now this noise. Neither the emptiness nor the noise seemed real to Anna, but she wasn't aware of thinking that; it was only important to stop people passing anything over her mother's body. Sweat ran from Anna's neck and down her back, itching against the threadbare cloth of her long black dress.

She tried to speak, but found her voice too frail to be heard.

She tugged at John Fuller's sleeve.

He turned and his eyes softened.

“Anna?”

“Mother ought to go now.”

John nodded. His wife was trying to talk to the idiot boy. He wanted to touch Anna's skin, but he could feel her mother watching him from two feet off, even though her eyes stayed dead shut.

Instead, he turned to the room.

He clapped his hands and everyone stopped talking. Though he didn't own the mill, half of the room worked there, and therefore they worked for him. They did as he bid.

“We'll take Joan to the tree now.”

The villagers worked.

Helen Fuller and Elizabeth Smith opened the window that looked over Welden valley, while the Byatt brothers fetched in a single wide oak floorboard. They stood by as Anna finished winding the sheet over her mother's face, and then Tom was suddenly at her elbow.

“I want to say goodbye to Mother,” he said to Anna, and Anna died, wishing the room was empty of people and that she could wind her mother's face away alone.

But everyone was waiting.

She unwound the cloth a way, till Joan Tunstall's closed eyes showed.

“Go on,” Anna said.

Tom whispered something, and then as Anna began winding again, he reached up and tried to help his sister, his clumsy hands slowing her, but calming her some, too.

That done, Anna stepped back, pulling Tom by the shoulders, squeezing them tightly.

She watched as the Byatts and Jack Smith and John Fuller lifted their mother onto the floorboard, and passed her out of the now-open window to the other villagers waiting outside.

Then came the cry of “to the tree!” and away they went.

Somewhere above thirty of the villagers had come out, come out from their homes dotted through the woods in Welden Valley.

Anna clung to Tom. They came behind the others. Tom's mind was empty. Anna wondered at the size of the wake; perhaps they'd come because they'd liked Joan Tunstall. Perhaps they'd come because they were afraid of her, even in death—the gracewife, the cunning woman. Anna had seen almost everyone there come through their door in the year before her mother's death; they all used Joan for this and for that. For swollen knees, or to bring a fever down, to take an ointment that would make a husband a better lover, or for some herbs to stop a wound going bad.

The Tunstalls' cottage was at the top edge of Callis Wood, near the top of the valley, above them were the tentergrounds, where Anna spent so much time working for John Fuller. Below them were the trees, lining the steep valley sides like green velvet in a rich lady's coffin.

The funeral party moved down the path that led beside Tunstall Cottage, zickzacking through the trees, left and right, left and right, to the valley floor where Golden Beck flowed.

The tall trees were towers around them; the floor was flat with flagstones where the narrow river ran left, artificially underground for a fifty-yard stretch before emerging at the wheel of Fuller's Mill.

They turned to the right, and a short walk led them to the trysting tree; not one tree in fact, but two that had grown close together, and somehow the trunks had fused near the bases, leaving a perfect neat archway between them. Above this natural arch, the two trunks grew apart again and thrust up to join the leaf top canopy of the forest.

No one alive had a memory of a time before the trysting tree, and thus it had existed forever. Therefore it had been made either by God, or one of the older sort. Therefore it was magical.

The villagers wasted no time.

Two of the men went to the far side of the tree, while the four who'd carried Joan through the woodland bent and passed the body, floorboard and all, through the hole, through the heart of the trysting tree.

Without touching the ground, Joan emerged from other side, a little safer than before she went through.

Tom clung to Anna's side as they watched.

Adam Dolen was there, then. Fat.

“Shame it is, to bury your mother while there's no vicar in the house.”

Helen Fuller heard him from where she stood.

“What difference does it make? We know our business as well as the vicar did.”

Adam said nothing else because he was too slow to think of anything to say before the procession moved off again.

Back down from the tree, they made their way over the flags that hid the river, then followed the path that led around beside the mill pool, past Fuller's Mill, along the valley bottom with Horsehold Wood on the left and the river on the right. Beyond the river, Arton Wood clung to the hillside, all the way up to Dolen's farm, where Grace's mother no doubt sat, stewing.

On the procession went, all the way down to Gaining Water, and as they turned to take the path back up through Horsehold Wood to St. Mary's Church, someone started to sing the song.

So it was, singing, that they carried Joan Tunstall's body into the churchyard, and placed her in the hole that Anna had paid Old Harry threepence to dig.

They left Joan Tunstall in the ground then, and while Old Harry started to pile earth in on top of her, the villagers went across the track to the field at the edge of the tentergrounds, to dance.

Anna hung back awhile, watching the earth go in.

She glanced at the little mound, much smaller, nearby; that was where Grace Dolen's baby had gone, a month ago. She wondered if it was just bones in the soil now, and she saw them in her mind—tiny white bones in the dark earth.

By the time she pulled herself away, saw that her brother had gone ahead, and went to join the others, the dancing was well started.

The villagers formed a circle, an open circle, holding hands all, but with a gap.

They faced inward, toward each other, and moved to the right, to the right hand, and stepped sideways, spinning the circle round and round, always to the right. Anna joined them, as she should, putting her left hand into Helen Fuller's right. Now Anna led, dancing and dancing, to the right, to the right, trying to meet the end of the open circle, but never, never reaching it.

They danced to the right “in the same way they believed blood spirals to the right,” through the generations, passed from parent to child, but always to the right.

They sang, and they danced the spiral dance, and three people watched them.

The first was Robert Hamill. Second son of Sir George, recently returned from France.

Watching Robert watch the dance was Grace Dolen, who had come across the valley from Dolen's Farm to scowl out of the woodland edge.

And watching all of them, from his stifling seat, was the minister, Father Escrove, whose carriage had just then arrived in Welden Valley.

 

4
A MIND SMEARED ACROSS THE HEAD OF THE MILL HAMMER

Grace Dolen's thirsty eyes were still on Robert Hamill as the Smith twins approached her. Hettie and Hester Smith weren't dancing with their brother and the others. They didn't want to dance. They were still and cool girls, who watched and whispered. Though barely eight, something dry in them had identified Grace Dolen as a source that they might be interested in. They latched on to her without knowing why, but now stood a few feet away, watching her watch Robert watch the wake dancers at Joan Tunstall's funeral.

Their brother Harry was dancing; he was a loud, energetic boy, tugging too hard at the hand to his left as he pulled to the right.

The sun was slowing the pace of the dance; foreheads ran with sweat and bare feet crushed the dying grass as they circled on.

Grace knew, as everyone there knew, that the dance had a purpose. Whoever was the first to fall could be asked a question, any question, and not only did they have to answer, they had to tell the truth.

Someone had fallen, and it was enough to distract Grace from gazing at Robert for a moment. From the distance at which Grace watched, it seemed a dream as Anna Tunstall stumbled in the heat haze and put her hands to the harsh grass. Young Simon Bill was the first to hop over in front of her.

Grace sucked her lip, wondering what question it was that Simon put to Anna. She knew what she'd have asked her, given the chance.

“You're Grace with the dead baby,” announced Hester Smith.

“Aren't you,” added Hettie, in an equally empty voice.

Grace shifted her gaze back to Robert Hamill. She was wondering how much she could see of him at the manor house. He was just returned, the week before, from France, where his father had sent him to learn something about trade and travel.

The twins didn't twitch so much as an eyelid as they considered Grace Dolen. She leaned against a tree at the edge of Horsehold Wood, slowly chewing a thin stalk of pale brown grass.

“Why did your baby die?” asked Hester Smith.

“Did you kill it?” asked Hettie.

Grace didn't appear to have heard either question.

She shifted her weight from one hip to the other and her fingers unconsciously stroked her belly where the baby had been. So something good had come of the death, then, she thought. How lucky for her that the boy had died just as Lady Hamill was looking for a wet nurse for her own son.

Lady Hamill, the second Lady Hamill, young wife to Sir George, with a child that needed milk, and there was Grace on the doorstep of the manor the following morning with her baby gone in the ground and milk hanging in her breasts, ready. What luck.

Of course Grace had taken a clip round the ear for being so bold as to stand on the front doorstep of the manor, but once she'd found her way to the back, she'd been installed in the nursery to feed Lady Hamill's son. That meant, from time to time, that she was even allowed in the house proper, even as far as her Lady's bedroom, to show the baby to its mother once in a while.

Grace knew where Robert Hamill's bedroom lay. She had seen the door, and though it had been closed, she thought powerfully about how to get beyond it. Robert was young and not half the men that the vigorous Byatt brothers were, whichever of them it had been who had given her a baby. But Robert was rich and, unlike his older brother Samuel, he was unwed, and Grace held unlikely desires of securing him.

The twins made one more try.

“Ma Birch says you killed your baby so you could let her ladyship's baby suck at you instead.”

That was Hester Smith.

Grace slowly turned her head to look down at the Smith twins, who stood upright in their rough, long white dresses, their eyes as unblinking as owls.

“Did you do that?” asked Hettie.

Grace spoke so quietly that the twins barely heard.

“It was Joan Tunstall that killed my boy,” she said, and then she pushed herself away from the tree and started back to the manor house, for she had only been home across the valley on an errand, and could not afford to be gone long. The Hamill baby would want feeding soon.