The Guardian Stones (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

Edwin hoped Emily didn't wonder why he was looking for chocolate. What had he been thinking? What would Grace have thought if he'd presented her with chocolate, like a schoolboy with a crush?

As he passed Jack Chapman's house he abruptly decided to speak to the man, notwithstanding his earlier unpleasant encounter. Isobel's father could tell him more about her than Emily could, if Jack could be persuaded to talk. The house fronted the High Street. The smithy sat behind. He went down the alley leading to the smithy. Yokes, rusted wheels, and axles littered the hard dirt yard. All the scene lacked to resemble the site of a multiple wagon collision was a dead horse or two lying against the smithy's brick wall.

The disarray inside the building was worse. A welter of work benches and crude wooden boxes overflowing with inexplicable, to Edwin, pieces of metal, hid the floor. Enough hammers, tongs, and other nasty-looking tools to equip an army were displayed on sooty walls. Jack himself sat on an anvil in the middle of the chaos. A long, heavy leather apron hung from his massive shoulders, but the forge was cold. He was drinking from a big metal mug. Cider, Edwin guessed.

Jack looked up bleary-eyed, then he spat on the floor. “What do you want with me?”

“Just a word.”

“A word, eh? I'll be generous and give you two. Get out!”

For a moment Edwin regretted his snap decision. Jack was angry and sitting in the middle of dozens of potential weapons, not only the hammer he'd carried when Edwin ran into him before. “I want to help, Mr. Chapman.”

Jack stared at him. “Help?” He looked genuinely puzzled.

“Yes. Help you. Help your daughter.”

“Meddle, you mean.”

“It strikes me that not enough effort is being made to find Isobel.”

Suspicion hardened Jack's features. “Why should you care?”

“Why shouldn't I care? Why wouldn't anyone care?”

Jack set his mug down but made no effort to stand up. “It's Green put you up to this again, ain't it? Didn't find out what he wanted when he sent you to quiz me before. He thinks I killed her. Killed my own daughter!”

“He doesn't know I'm talking to you and he wouldn't be pleased. He doesn't seem to be doing much. It's almost as if he doesn't want to find out what's happened to her and the others.” Edwin wasn't sure he should have voiced his doubts, but it got Jack's attention.

“Green don't want to know. You've got that right. What can I tell you I haven't told him?”

“I'm not sure. Do you have a photograph of Isobel?”

Jack's expression, which had softened, immediately twisted into that of a sneering gargoyle. “Now I see what you're up to. A pervert, are you?”

“Of course not. But everyone in the village is keeping an eye out for her while I don't even know what she looks like.”

Jack grunted. Whether it signified that he accepted the explanation or considered it a transparent lie, Edwin couldn't tell. “Ain't got a picture of her. She weren't nothing to look at. Not that there weren't them that looked at her. Big for her age, you know.”

“Would anyone have wanted to harm her or take advantage of her?”

“If anyone had tried I'd have killed him. She was just a child. She was a good girl. She arranged flowers at the church every week.”

Edwin remembered Jack originally described Isobel as a bad girl who would have benefited from a beating. She'd killed her mother in childbirth, he had said. Was he a clumsy liar, trying to act the part of the loving father? Did he want to persuade people he hadn't hated his daughter because he actually had killed her, by accident or not? Or because he was afraid that's what people suspected him of doing, and what that might lead to?

Jack wiped tears off his cheeks with a meaty hand.

Perhaps he wasn't being devious. If the blacksmith attributed his wife's death to Isobel's birth, couldn't he love and hate his daughter at the same time? How would anyone handle that?

“Was Isobel acting differently than usual before she vanished?” Edwin ventured. “Were there any signs that she might run away?”

“If you mean did I give her a beating…”

“That's not what I mean. I know that's what people say. That's why I wanted to talk to you, to find out what you had to say yourself.”

Jack shrugged. “I didn't notice anything different.”

“Did she spend time with any of the others who are missing? Reggie Cox or the Finch boys?”

“She ran around with them Finch boys. She thought I didn't know. Issy wasn't the type to play with dolls. Looking for trouble with those boys suited her.”

“Trouble?”

“Not real trouble. Smoking a fag on the sly, stealing sweets from Emily's shop. You know.” The look Jack gave Edwin suggested the blacksmith thought that a retired professor probably did not know—had never known—what normal kids got up to when out of sight of their parents.

“And Reggie? I don't suppose he would have been much a playmate, being crippled.”

“You really have no idea about Issy, do you? She visited Reggie every day, helped him out. She felt sorry for the poor lad. See, she was a good girl at heart—I mean she is a good girl.” He lowered his head into his hands and sobbed. Edwin could see the man's pink scalp through his sparse, thinning hair.

He'd been a fool to think he could get anything useful out of Jack Chapman.

Jack suddenly straightened up. “I done my best by my daughter,” he said. “You tell Green that, Professor. It's the father's job to see that a child gets discipline. I ain't her mother. I still see her mother. It's like she's no further away than you are right now. She tells me, Jack, you have to teach Isobel right from wrong, like a father's supposed to do. But you got to give her a mother's love too. And how does a man do that, Professor? After what she done to my wife? And that after how much Lilly wanted kids. All she wanted was kids of her own. Not hardly a lot to want out from the world, and she couldn't even have that.”

“I'm sure you've raised Isobel as well as you could have. I'll insist Green investigate further. She's probably with the Finch boys. Three are easier found than one and I'm sure they'll be found soon.” Edwin could almost convince himself. Could he convince himself that the blood-stained clothes were merely a ruse?

Almost.

“The Finch boys!” Jack shook his head and laughed. “Everyone's always worrying about them. You'd think they was each one half of the devil himself. I wish she'd spent all her time with them and never visited Martha Roper. If you're looking for a bad influence, look at that old bag, filling a girl's head up with all kinds of crazy ideas.”

“What do you mean?”

Jack laughed again. “I don't know exactly and I don't want to know either. But whenever she came back after a visit to her she was awful restless. I reckon Martha put the idea of running away into her head.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Meg Gowdy's complaints greeted Edwin as he entered Grace's house. He recognized the grating tones of the publican's plump redheaded wife before he saw her seated with Martha at the kitchen table. Martha rubbed Meg's hand with a piece of bacon.

Was this a strange rural rite? It struck him as a waste of good bacon considering the difficulty in getting sufficient for a decent breakfast. Edwin's expression must have betrayed his thoughts.

“Get your notebook, Professor,” Martha cackled. “Never heard of bacon curing warts, have you?”

Edwin admitted he had not and sat at the table.

Meg acknowledged him with a nod, took the cigarette from between her reddened lips, and spoke. “Don't like warts on my hand. Puts the customers off, but nothing I tried rid me of them so I came and asked Martha.”

Edwin hadn't seen any warts when she'd served him breakfast. But then he tended not to notice things like that.

Martha beamed. “This'll do the trick, Meg. Now, you know that big ash tree behind the pub? Make a slit in its bark and slip this bit of bacon into it, see? Them warts will move right to that tree and your hand will be smooth as a baby's bottom.”

Meg looked at the greasy back of her hand, and then at the bacon and gave Martha a dubious frown. “You mean that tree with all the bumps on it?”

“Them bumps is warts I cured. Been doing it for years, and it works every time.”

Meg raised her eyebrows.

“Take a look at that tree. Right where the lowest branch comes out there's a big gnarled lump. That's the wart that was smack on the old vicar's nose, the vicar who was here before Mr. Wilson. He got the idea it looked like Satan. Weren't long before they retired the poor old chap, Satan on his nose or not,” Martha said. “And over a ways you'll see three bumps like a triangle. Them was from a very private place on the widow Smythe, bless her departed soul. The most proper widow what ever lived or so she let on, but you could hardly see them little warts with a magnifying glass and they was in a place nobody would ever see anyway. But, oh my, she was anxious to give them to that ash tree.”

Meg took a long drag on the remains of her cigarette. “Well, I don't care where my wart goes as long as it goes away. I'll do what you say. Thanks.”

After she had gone, Martha gave a grim smile. “She's a regular devil to her husband. He's clapper clawed night and day. So who does she want a smooth hand for, I ask you?”

“Maybe it's just vanity. People will make fools of themselves to look beautiful.”

“You don't think Meg's a fool for coming to me, do you?”

“It works, then?” Edwin asked with interest.

“'Course it works! There's a lot of good sense in old remedies, but you have to know what you're doing and if need be do it under the right moon. I mind the time years back when I helped a villager with a problem with her water. Used a special blend of broom plants and dandelion roots. Once she started to get better, she tried to make her own mixture but got it wrong and wound up spending a lot of time in her privy and serve her right.”

Martha paused, reflecting. “It's not like I charge for my remedies. It's up to them as benefits if they want to give me something in return. It's a service to the village. My mother served Noddweir before me, and her mother before and right back for generations.” A cloud passed over her face. “My persuasions will be missed when I'm gone, what with my stubborn granddaughter refusing to carry on.”

“And what about your daughter?” Edwin ventured, recalling the photograph in the front room Martha had identified by a name he couldn't remember.

The cloud crossing Martha's face turned into a thunderhead. “Caught religion, she did.” The old woman's anger was almost palpable.

“Well, I'm happy to hear you're so charitable, Martha.” Edwin hastily changed the subject. He wondered what the vicar thought about Martha's old remedies and the need to prepare them at the right phase of the moon. Wilson had said he made an effort to accommodate country superstitions. Had he sought out Martha's assistance for his bad lungs? “About that wart remedy. Why put the bacon in that particular tree?”

The old woman smiled and tapped the side of her nose. “I'll not be giving you all my secrets, Professor.”

That may have been true, but after he got his notebook she rambled on and on once again. Despite a great deal of repetition, he found plenty of new information to scribble down. Martha had not even begun to empty her well of wisdom during Edwin's initial interview.

“But you don't need to understand why it works,” she told him at one point in response to his prodding. “Why are any of us alive and walking around? Do we understand it? But we get up and walk around anyway.”

She fetched them tea from a pan on the stove. Edwin raised the cup to his face The brew smelled unusual. He set the drink down hastily.

“Don't fret,” Martha said. She sipped from her own cup. “It ain't poison.” She leaned toward him and whispered. “Nor a love potion.”

Edwin lifted his cup again and essayed a taste. “Quite good.”

“It's nettles. It purifies the blood.”

Edwin almost choked. He imagined suddenly having a mouth full of stinging nettles. But there was no such sensation. Apparently the prickles were left out.

Martha's recounting of local lore had occupied his mind, but as he sipped tea, Edwin thought again about his conversation with Jack Chapman and how Jack said his dead wife appeared to him.

“Do you think there are ghosts, Martha?”

“Of course there are ghosts! The question is, what are ghosts? And here in the shadow of the stones—”

“Grandma been telling you stories, Edwin?” Grace, her nap over, came into the kitchen, yawning.

Martha gave a disdainful sniff, got up, and shuffled out to the front room.

Grace sat and rubbed her eyes. “It must be hard to adjust to rural ways after living in London and coming from America. What's Grandma been up to, aside from telling tales? When she avoids talking to me that's when she's been busy.”

“She was curing a wart on Meg Gowdy's hand—with bacon.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Oh, and I was looking forward to having that bacon. It's not easy to get these days.”

“It will be stuck under the bark of that ash tree behind the pub.”

“I think I'll leave it there. Especially after it's been rubbed on Meg's hand. Probably tastes like a cigarette.”

“Smoked bacon, then.”

“You don't look like you believe in Grandma's cure, Edwin.”

“Do you?”

Grace pursed her lips. “Mmmm. I'm not sure. You'd be surprised how many things she's right about.”

“I'm surprised to hear you say that. Martha told me you refused to learn any of her secrets.”

“Did she? Oh, she bent my ear when I was a little girl. I learned enough to know that my mother was right—there are things better left alone.”

“It's hard for me to imagine you giving any credence to old wives' tales.”

She tapped Edwin's notebook. “You're interested in such tales.”

“Interested in it as folklore, not as fact. You're a sensible young woman. I don't understand what you mean.”

“Sensible or not, we think differently here in the countryside. The countryside is different. Why would you disbelieve everything Grandma tells you after you've walked through the forest in the dark?”

“I don't see what you mean.”

Grace smiled. “Isn't it obvious there's something out there in the dark forest, something you can't find in a city?”

Edwin wasn't sure if Grace was pulling his leg. “What, you mean fauns and satyrs and strange beings like that?”

She laughed, reached across the table, and patted his hand. “I always check paths nearest the village on my patrols. Come out with me tonight and you'll see what I mean.”