Hiding From the Light (19 page)
The children, neat in their grey school uniforms, were hurrying down the High Street. Each child had a clipboard and a pencil, each a list of questions. Sally Mason lagged behind, keeping an eye on them, wondering if anyone would notice if she took a couple of puffs at a ciggie before she shepherded the children into a group and allowed them to go and sit on the wall overlooking the river to eat their sandwiches and crisps. This was always a popular day out. The Manningtree witch hunt. Normally Judith organised this excursion as a prelude to her virulent anti-witch propaganda lesson next term, but this time she had had to step back from the visit. Something about a specialist’s appointment in Colchester. Sally didn’t mind. She enjoyed days out of the classroom and this one was easy; it was a small school and the classes were manageable. She had tried to keep the questions simple. Most had been answered when they piled into the tiny museum in the back of the library. Now all they had to do was collect some pub names, find a rowan tree, draw a broomstick – it was still leaning there outside the hardware store, she had checked. After lunch they would walk along the river to Mistley, stand and stare at the Thorn Inn, with its wonderful picture of the Witchfinder on the pub sign, and then at long last they would pile back into the minibus and she could think about going home.
Emma had not been to Colchester Castle before. The man at the little museum in the library at Manningtree had told her to go to the museum there when she had expressed her disappointment that the exhibits about witches over which he presided were aimed more at children than anyone else; he had known nothing about Liza’s.
It had been a shock the first time she realised that Liza had not been the old lady she had watched through the hedge as a child. Liza had lived in the cottage in the seventeenth century; a witch, she had been burned at the stake by Matthew Hopkins.
No, not burned. Witches weren’t burned in England. That was the first thing she discovered. They were hanged. But not before they had been horribly tortured. Torture as such wasn’t allowed in England either; but the single-minded, thorough Hopkins had a series of little refinements with which to torment the suspects he had rounded up. Refinements and tricks. He pricked them with a vicious pin set in a wooden handle. As it was known that the Devil’s marks for which he searched the old ladies were insensible to pain, the pin was retractable. When the victim had screamed enough a spring was pressed, the pin slid upwards into the handle and low and behold, the fierce jabbing of the witch pricker produced silence. No pain. Therefore guilt. Case proved.
She followed the signposts down a long flight of stairs towards the castle prison. It was quiet down there, away from the shouts and chattering of the children visiting the Roman exhibits upstairs. She was the only visitor down here and she could see why. A notice at the top of the stairs suggested the exhibits through the door in the darkness might not be suitable for children.
She stood still at the bottom of the stairs and looked round, half nervous, half expectant. The exhibits were minimal. Disappointingly so. An old wooden stocks stood near the staircase. A small box on the wall held a collection of broken clay pipes and that was it. What was scary about that? Slowly she walked past a series of information boards which told the story of the prison and the people who had passed through its doors and then, there they were. Three panels about witchcraft and the Witchfinder. She read each one carefully, conscious of an increasing sense of anticlimax. They spelt out the minimum of detail about the subject, showed three reproductions of contemporary scenes about witches and their familiars and witches being hanged, and there was a picture of him – a caricature showing him with curly hair and beard, both fair, deep set eyes, aquiline face. Nothing like the man she had seen in her dreams.
Beyond the picture there was a doorway leading into the darkness. She was about to walk in when three girls from one of the school parties upstairs raced down, pushing past her, giggling and shouting, to hover in the doorway staring in. Their shrieks intensified as they pushed each other forward, no one wanting to be first; afraid to go in. Emma stood back and watched, half amused, half irritated, as they dared one another to go through the door. It didn’t work. Suddenly all three turned and ran for the stairs. They were going for reinforcements.
Emma took her chance and stepped forward. The notice by the door said, ‘On your way in, feel the wood of the door grille worn smooth by the hands of countless prisoners’. She glanced at it and with a shrug put her hands deep into her pockets. Then plucking up her courage, she stepped forward into the strange, all pervasive silence of the darkness beyond the door.
She found herself standing opposite two cells and as she waited in the dark, holding her breath, a low, sinister light appeared in one to reveal a small empty dungeon. The silence was broken as the commentary began.
She forced herself to stay and listen, intensely aware of the weight of the great building over her head, of the dark curved vaults, the bars, the claustrophobia, the pain and the suffering, the terror and despair which permeated every square inch of the walls around her.
At the end of the sequence she walked back towards the exit, numb with horror. It wasn’t the screams she had heard – they had been muted, censored – nor the detail which she had seen and heard laid out in those neat, unemotional, easily assimilable chunks. It was the memories it had awakened; memories deep inside herself.
Memories of her dreams.
Memories of the past.
Emma was coming out of the wholefood shop when Mike spotted her on the other side of the road. He had just been to visit the young widow grieving for her husband, lost when the car had left the road and hit the oak tree in the fog, and he was feeling depressed and angry at the waste of yet another young life with so much to give.
‘Hi!’ He lifted a hand in greeting as Emma turned and saw him. Crossing the road, he fell in step beside her. ‘No more midnight disturbances, I hope?’
She shook her head. She was looking pale and tired. ‘My latest midnight disturbances are self-generated, I’m afraid. Nightmares.’
‘As a result of Lyndsey’s activities?’ He frowned.
She shrugged. ‘Not really. I’m probably just over-tired; doing up a house is the most exhausting job known to man – or woman. There’s always that temptation to go on and on, trying to fit in just one more thing. Even watching the builder is tiring!’
He grinned. ‘Well, would you let me buy you a coffee as an enforced ten-minute rest?’ He indicated the coffee shop two doors down the road. ‘I would really appreciate the chance to stop for a breather myself. It’s been a bad morning.’
‘Bad?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Do vicars have bad mornings?’
Nodding, he opened the door and ushered her inside. ‘Oh, indeed they do. We’re glorified social workers in some ways, and sometimes things get a bit heart-breaking.’
‘I suppose so. I’m afraid if I thought about it at all I assumed that would only apply to inner-city parishes. I kind of pictured you as a cross between those wonderful rural clergymen Francis Kilvert and Gilbert White – with, after our last encounter, a touch of Father Karras out of
The Exorcist
thrown in!’
Mike let out a roar of laughter. ‘I wish! What a wonderful description.’ They sat down at a small table in the corner. He nodded to two ladies nearby and shook his head. ‘Oh dear. There starts the gossip. I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind being seen in public with me.’
Emma smiled. ‘I can live with it. I know so few people round here perhaps I can even qualify as a Mystery Woman. Would it add to your street cred?’
‘It certainly would.’ He glanced up and held her gaze for a moment. She looked away first.
‘So, how long have you been a vicar?’ She picked up the menu and opened it.
He grinned. ‘Technically, I’m the rector. Different animal.’
‘Really?’ She gave a disbelieving smile. ‘I thought they were the same thing.’
He shook his head. ‘Rector is a much more important chap. It’s all to do with tithes.’ He caught her eye and laughed. ‘OK. You’re right. They are interchangeable – as is that lovely word parson. And to answer your question, I’ve only been here a year. This is my first parish. I came to holy orders late in life.’
‘Late in life?’ She passed the menu on to him. ‘I would just like a coffee, please. So, what do you call late in life? You are going to tell me you are a well-preserved seventy next.’
‘Not quite!’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Let me get the coffees, and then I’ll tell you all about my strange and devious past.’
‘I started as a teacher,’ he went on as he sat down again. He had brought two coffees and two flapjacks from the counter. ‘That was a bit over-ambitious. I like kids, but not the kind I was encountering. I wanted to teach. To really teach, and all I could do was yell at them and try to keep order. They weren’t interested. So I thought I’d do something else; something that made a bit of money, a job in industry. What a revelation that was! I could afford food and even clothes.’ He grinned. She liked the way his eyes crinkled at the edges. There was enormous good humour and compassion in his face. He must, she found herself thinking, be very popular with his congregation.
‘So, what went wrong? You found God?’
He nodded. ‘Oh, God was always there, it’s just He started to get a bit pushy and I suddenly realised that was what the teaching had been about. Right instinct. Wrong turning.’
‘It must be wonderful to find you have a vocation.’ Her voice was wistful suddenly. ‘I wonder if I’m about to find mine. As a gardener and a herbalist.’ The tone was self-mocking, but he caught the undertone of worry.
‘It is frightening to make such a huge change to one’s life, isn’t it?’ He glanced up at her again. ‘And lonely.’
It had been a shrewd guess. He saw the pain in her eyes for a moment as she bent her head to her coffee. ‘Let’s change the subject, Mike. Can I call you Mike, or should I call you “vicar” or “reverend” or something?’ She rolled the two words with an attempt at a rural burr.
‘Mike will do fine.’ He was still watching her face. She was sitting with her back to the window, a slight shadow playing over her features; her hair had tangled in the wind and the cold had touched colour into her cheeks but as he watched he saw her face change before his eyes. The hair was constrained for a moment by a white cap, her eyes narrowed and grew sharp, her wide generous mouth tightened into a snarl. He pushed his chair back sharply, jerking the coffee cups so that they slopped into their saucers.
‘Mike? What is it? What’s wrong?’
Emma was staring at him, her eyes wide. She was herself again.
He looked away and took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry. I … I don’t know what happened. I suddenly…’ He closed his eyes. ‘Emma, I’m most frightfully sorry.’ He laughed. ‘You must think I’m mad!’ He shook his head. ‘I thought I saw someone beside you.’ He didn’t mean beside, but he could hardly tell her what he had really seen.
Emma was half smiling, intrigued. ‘A ghost?’ The idea did not seem to frighten her. ‘There seem to be lots of ghosts round here. There is one in the shop next door.’
‘Ah.’ He paused, glad to change the subject. ‘So, you know about that.’
She nodded. ‘It’s a spooky place. I went in there a couple of days ago to buy some things for the kitchen and it still feels weird.’
‘Still?’
‘I went in there on the day I first came to view my house. There were some chaps there making a film about the ghost.’
‘Mark Edmunds.’
‘You know him?’
Mike nodded. ‘He wanted me to be in the programme. The church’s view.’
‘And did you agree?’
He shook his head. ‘He’s coming up here again, I gather, to do some more filming. But if he asks me again, I’m still going to say no.’
‘You should do it. It would make it more interesting to hear what you have to say about it. Do you believe in ghosts?’
Mike looked up and held her gaze for a moment. ‘Oh yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I believe in ghosts.’
Anxiously, she scanned his face. ‘That sounded heartfelt.’
‘It was.’ For a moment he was tempted to tell her what had happened to him in the shop, but he thought better of it. He shrugged. ‘Sorry. That’s part of the job, too.’
‘So, off limits?’
‘ ’Fraid so.’
‘Being your confidante is quite tricky, isn’t it.’ Suddenly her eyes were sparkling again. ‘What can you talk about? If I’m going to be the femme fatale in your life we’ve got to talk closely and animatedly about something.’ She rested her chin in her hand, tapping her fingernails gently against her teeth. The look was nothing if not provocative. ‘You could ask me to do the church flowers.’
His face broke into a smile. ‘Unfortunately you would have to go on a waiting list.’
‘You’re kidding!’ She was genuinely astonished.
‘No. There are lots of ladies lining up to do the flowers.’
‘So, you’re in big demand?’
‘Of course.’
‘Surely you’ve got a gorgon of a wife to chase us all away?’
‘Unfortunately not. Or perhaps, fortunately.’ He laughed. ‘Actually I do have a gorgon, but she’s not wife material.’ He paused. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Please forget it!’
‘Deeply unchristian thought, eh?’
He laughed softly. Tearing his eyes away from her face he reached for his coffee cup. ‘Going back to the subject of ghosts, do you mind if I suggest you don’t go near that churchyard? I don’t think any of us should be there and it worries me.’
‘Bad vibes?’
He nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘I wasn’t planning on going there.’
‘Good.’ Standing up, he pushed back his chair. ‘I’m going to have to go. I’ve enjoyed our brief encounter, Miss Dickson.’
‘Emma, please! After all, I am your mystery woman.’
‘Emma.’ For a moment he hesitated and she wondered if he were going to shake her hand or kiss her cheek. He did neither. Briefly he touched her shoulder and then he had gone.