Читать книгу The Devil's Footsteps - John Burke - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

In mid-morning the village paused for breath. The parish constable had sauntered his usual unobtrusive path round to the side door of The Griffin and gone inside for his pint of ale. The milk cart clattered down the slope through the old stone arch, horse’s hoofs slipping on the cobbles, empty churns clanking together. Autumn sunshine coaxed rosy undertones from the damp plaster of cottages along the west side of the square. A dog barked once and then was silent. There came one of those timeless hushes in which nobody moved in the lanes or square, when conversation in the tap-room languished until someone predictably said, ‘Must be an angel flying over,’ and even the wind off the sombre unsheltered miles of fenland was stilled.

No angel flew over. But a figure emerged on to the slope below Hexney. It was the figure of a girl, naked, her flesh a hazy whiteness against the grey of the priory ruins. She stepped out across the grass, quickening her pace towards a crumbling buttress. In its shadow waited a darker shadow.

A hundred yards up the hillside Will Jephson watched, unable to look away and unable to move.

Now she was running, but it was an eternity before she reached the crooked finger of the buttress. Will tried to call her name. No sound would come. The scene before him was real, he could swear to it, yet his ankles were trapped in some clinging swamp of nightmare. She ran, her arms spread wide in greeting; but not to him.

She was his wife, who had never showed herself to him like this. His wife, who tormented him with her shyness and prim little voice; who insisted on darkness in their bedroom, reproved him when he tried to coax her into taking off her nightgown in the full glow of the oil lamp, said she loved him but they were married now and folk didn’t go on talking about it like that. How could Sarah have become this creature, flaunting herself for the world to see? The world—or just himself and that waiting shadow.

The shadow stepped out to meet her.

It was a dark, stocky man, his skin olive against her paleness, with a swathe of hair running black down his spine from the black helmet of his head. Will Jephson saw only the back of him: thickset shoulders with almost no neck, jutting elbows, swaggering buttocks. He sprang like a goat. Sarah cried out as she was weighted down upon the ground. Her slim legs waved, twisted, and clutched. Will heard the howl of her pain in his mind: a pain of ecstasy such as she had never allowed him to know.

His own limbs refused to obey him. His fists clenched but could not strike. Harsh in his throat, his voice could not burst from his lips. Fire burned in his loins as he watched, motionless and speechless, the contortions on the grass, the rise and fall of dark flesh and pale flesh, the pounding and twisting of it. And heard, on and on, the silent shriek of the voice he knew to be his wife’s.

A wisp of cloud drifted across the sun. Shadows trembled. Stones seemed to shift a fraction of an inch and were bathed in a cooler light. Sarah was now only a wraith, and the pulsing dark that had covered her was blotted out by a more intense blackness.

Will’s feet escaped. He stumbled down the slope. At last he was able to shout her name over and over again. But when he reached the spot on which the foulness had been played out, only grass and shattered stone sighed under a sudden flurry of awakening wind off the levels.

It must have been a dream. Must, after all, have been a trick of the light.

He didn’t believe that.

Sick inside, he turned and hurried home so that he could be there to confront Sarah when she got back.

As he pushed open the door into the stone-flagged kitchen he could hear her singing quietly to herself. She was bending over a pot on the kitchen range, but straightened up to greet him with her usual shy, sidelong smile. She wore her everyday blue and white cotton dress with the cuffs pinned well back, and a dark blue apron. Her face was flushed—from the fire?

He leaned, baffled, against the doorjamb. ‘How did you get back so soon?’

‘Back?’

‘From Priory Hill.’

‘But I’ve not been anywhere near Priory Hill. Haven’t set foot outside the house all morning.’

Will looked round the kitchen. It was so normal. And Sarah sounded so truly puzzled. This was all much more real than the wicked vision which had possessed him out there on the grass. Still the scene was vivid in his mind and wouldn’t be got rid of.

‘Will,’ she ventured, ‘Whatever’s wrong with you, then?’

He went past her into the front parlour. She came after him but stopped, unertain, in the doorway. Will pressed his brow to the windowpane. There was nobody in sight until Gregory Morritt stumped across the end of the lane. The thickset shoulders jarred Will’s memory—the broad back, squat head, lank black hair, dark skin. Gregory’s wife had left him, and he had never been one for friends: a solitary drinker, not the kind to joke along with other men. But with that cottage all to himself down along the sluice, there was no telling what he might get up to, no telling about women with more time on their hands than was good for them when their own menfolk were out in the fields or the waterways.

Will swung round. ‘What were you up to with Gregory Morritt this morning?’

‘Will, What’s come over you? I told you, I’ve not gone a step outside this—’

‘Him and you. What’s he to you?’

Tears blurred her grey eyes. She put a trembling hand to her lips and shook her head.

The bell in the church tower began to strike. It chimed eleven o’clock in the morning of Saturday, the twelfth of September 1885.

* * * *

Three women sat in the spacious porch of St. Etheldreda’s preparing for Harvest Festival. In one corner was a stook of barley. Boxes and sacks of peas, beans and fruit had been spread out along the wide stone bench for sorting and assembly within the church.

Mrs. Rylot picked over a box of apples.

‘Trust old Sidney to send in all his bruised ones.’

Mrs. Morritt, with a cluster of crocks and tin vases beside her, snipped ends of chrysanthemum stems with a small knife. After a while she stooped to sharpen it on the step of the porch. When she raised her eyes again, her son Gregory was crossing the square. He caught her gaze, wavered, and looked away.

Mrs. Rylot glanced covertly at Mrs. Lavater. Mrs. Lavater’s fingers continued to plait the strands of a corn dolly. They wondered if Mrs. Morritt was going to confide in them.

Mrs. Morritt would not have dreamt of it. She jabbed a few sprays of fern into position behind a cream and gold cluster of blooms, and held the vase out at arm’s length to study the effect. They all said she had green fingers. She waited for them to say it again.

‘You do have the touch, Hannah.’ It was Mrs. Rylot. ‘How we’d manage without you I just don’t know.’

Mrs. Morritt’s lips tightened, as they always did when she had to accept a compliment. ‘I do what I can.’

And keep my sadness to myself, she thought.

What had she ever done to deserve such a burden? Other children respected her, and did as they were told. And loved her, a lot of them. This rector and the last one, and the one before that, had all said no one else could ever run a village school as wonderfully as Hannah Morritt. When the boys and girls left, whatever bad things might come to them later in life could never be blamed on Mrs. Morritt. Let anyone say different! Yet her own son, her one and only child, had wantonly turned away from her and let everyone in the neighbourhood see his ingratitude. Perhaps if his father had lived.... But no, it was no use dwelling on what might have been. The Lord gave and the Lord took away, and the Lord must have meant her to bear this cross. She did not complain. Nobody could ever say she complained or said a word against her boy or against anyone else; she just resigned herself to suffering, tightening her lips against sympathy and against pain.

It was not as though she hadn’t wanted him to marry. She had never wanted anything but what was best for him, and would never have stood in his way.

‘They say there’s a fine lot of eel down past the sluice,’ said Mrs. Rylot ‘Reckon we’ll be getting a few buckets up here by this afternoon. Best decide where to display them.’

It was the nearest she would risk to a sly invitation to talk about Gregory—an invitation, offered by a devious route, taking in the sluice gate and its cottage.

Bad enough that he should have married that shameless Leah.

Nigh on into his forties, going silly over a barmaid, and her already the talk of the village.

And even so I’d have made them welcome. I know my Christian duty, if some don’t. Enough room in the house for the three of us, and we could even have managed one or two more if they’d come along. But there he was, couldn’t wait to get out. A lot of nonsense, he ought to have been ashamed, about the noise the children made in the school, and all that hymn-singing, and feeling suffocated. As if he was ever there when the children were having lessons. It was her. Not much doubt about who put him up to it. All the years he had out of me, and all he could think of was getting out and taking her with him to that hovel down by the sluice.

When I was ill that time....

But no, I’m not the complaining sort, I’m not going to cry over what’s done with. A mercy there were others only too glad to help.

‘Always saying her leg’s killing her, but she’s not dead yet.’ That hussy Leah’s voice still echoed. Thinking I couldn’t hear her.

Or perhaps I was meant to hear. Nothing you’d put past that creature.

As for the food they served up if you went down there for Sunday dinner—never a Sunday I didn’t get the gripes, lying awake all Sunday night. And when I mentioned it, just mentioned it once, not trying to make any trouble between them, what did my own son have to say?

‘It’s your own add that brings it on, Mam.’

Mrs. Morrit’s nose wrinkled above the funereal smell of chrysanthemums. She looked across the square at The Griffin. Well, the slut was back where she belonged. The only good thing about it, her being back and Gregory not spending so much time in the bar: that was how he had come to be trapped by her, but you wouldn’t be likely to find him in there now.

Gregory would come home sooner or later. Sooner or later he would know where he was best off. And his mother would forgive him. It was her duty to forgive.

From the corner of her eye Mrs. Morritt was aware of the old pillory on the green. That was the place for Leah. There was nothing in the Bible that said the wicked should not be punished. Far from it. Some transgressors deserved nothing less than being exposed to their neighbours, pelted with filth...flayed alive. Unexpectedly the square began to fill with people. Gregory, about to leave through the gateway, was swept backwards into the centre of the green, which was somehow larger than it had been a few moments ago. The pillory was no longer crumbling and neglected, as Hannah was accustomed to seeing it, but freshly tarred and with two gleaming padlocks. Gregory was jostled towards it.

‘No,’ cried Hannah; but found she was not uttering a sound. ‘No, not him. It was her I meant, that one, not....’

The top beam was lifted. Willing hands thrust Gregory’s head and wrists into their slots. Down came the wood, and the padlock rattled into place.

Hannah tried in vain to get up from the stone bench.

As if from beside her, from the sacks and boxes and heaps of vegetables in the porch, fruit and turnips and handfuls of earth were hurled into Gregory’s face. But they were not the crisp harvest offerings: they were mud, rotted matter, refuse. From every cottage in the square came women with slop buckets, running, laughing. Women: there were very few men at the scene.

Then coat and shirt were torn from Gregory’s back. A man appeared, stepping forward and waving the women to stillness. He raised a whip; and began skilfully lashing the hunched spread of flesh, pausing only to flick, every now and then, a few bloodied shreds of skin from the whip. A faint drizzle of warm rain seemed to sting Hannah Morritt’s cheek, but when she raised a hand to wipe it away there was nothing there.

The man did not stop until Gregory’s back was a scarlet pulp. Then it was all over as suddenly as it had begun. The scene faded, the crowd evaporated. The pillory was once more the decrepit framework fit only for children to climb upon and swing from.

‘Just as it was that last time.’

At last Hannah Morritt heard her own voice, escaping.

Mrs. Rylot turned her head enquiringly. ‘What was that?’

Dust motes danced in the sunlight. The square was deserted. Mrs. Morritt felt an odd sense of loss rather than horror.

‘Thirty years ago it must be. Thirty years since that last time—the last special time, I mean.’

The memory had been so immediate but was already slipping away. It had not happened. Nothing like this had happened, not then. When? Why should she feel so sure it was going to happen?

‘You didn’t see anything?’ she asked cautiously.

‘Only your lad.’ Anxious not to appear too prying, Mrs. Lavater looked down; and her busy fingers ceased their work.

‘The rector won’t fancy that,’ said Mrs. Rylot.

Instead of the cross that Mrs. Lavater had set out to make, her corn dolly had somehow turned into a leering demon with a mermaid’s tail.

* * * *

Joshua Serpell plodded along the edge of Kobold’s Fen towards the village. He was bent almost double, buckled by the ague and rheumatics. Sixty of his seventy-odd winters had been spent in wildfowling, sixty summers in reed-cutting. Today he ought really to have set about rounding up some mates to go on a starling shoot: hundreds of the damned things had descended on the fen this autumn, roosting in the reeds, bending and snapping them so they’d be useless for thatch. But he had something else on his mind. It had to be settled good and sure that he hadn’t been drink or dreaming this last night.

He clambered up the bank to the road, near the level crossing. Hexney Halt was more than a mile from the village. The railway embankment had been built up along the only rodham—firm earth of an old, silted levee—across this stretch of fen. A meandering causeway carried the road to Hexney itself, meeting an ancient drove road at the foot of the island on which the village stood. It was Joshua’s well-trodden route to the village and the inn. He had seen Hexney from this angle so many times in his life that he could tell just from the light on it what the weather was likely to be this day and next and a lot more besides. Sometimes the buildings on the tiny hill were as pretty as a picture, especially when the sun softened the flint and brown stone of the church tower, and there was a hint of red-tiled roofs above the wall. Other times, under a pile of clouds sagging down fit to drown the world, it might have been no more than a gnarled lump of bog oak wrested out of the sodden earth, with a spike here, an elbow there, and on that far comer something like an ogre’s nose and chin.

Joshua tried to straighten up to take a good look at the prospect this morning. It was getting harder and more painful all the time.

Just beyond the crossing gate stood a young woman in a brown smock with long sleeves, and a kilted skirt. She wore no bonnet but sported deep auburn hair drawn tightly back from her forehead into a gleaming knot above her neck. Her eyes were wide and green. Joshua had observed her a couple of times before, and avoided her, and in particular avoided the glance of those eyes: too much like a cat’s for his liking. Today, though, he was going to have a bit of a bother getting past her. She had planted herself and that contraption of hers right in his path.

The contraption was a large mahogany box camera on a sturdy tripod, with one staring brass-rimmed eye which Joshua found as disturbing as the girl’s. He had stood in front of some such thing only once before, in a shop in Ely where he had posed behind his daughter in her wedding group picture, and they had had to keep still so long he had thought his toes would go numb.

What this young woman thought she was up to, lodging with the widow at the crossing and then tramping off all over the place and taking picture after picture, he couldn’t imagine. At least they expected you to pay for wedding photographs. No one was likely to pay her for pictures of dykes and churches and tumbledown cottages. One thing, for sure: she wasn’t going to squeeze a penny out of him for having his picture taken, if that was her notion.

He edged to one side of the road, above the steeply shelving bank of the dyke. Still she had her eye on him: just like the eye of that gadget of hers, as if they were all set on drawing the soul out of him. Then her attention was distracted. Someone was coming the other way. Joshua recognized the widow’s eight-year-old Tommy, trudging back from the fields of stubble. Must have been at it since early morning. Like the other village children, he was off school until gleaning was finished. He had a sack over his shoulder, both his hands were scratched and raw, and he kept his gaze fixed on the road immediately before his feet. As he turned to the wicket gate beside the cottage, the girl called out:

‘Tommy.’

The lad came to a stop but hardly raised his head.

‘Can you spare me a minute?’

‘Well, miss, I dunno. I’m supposed to be—’

‘Just one minute. Stand where you are just for a minute, that’s all.’ As he began to shuffle sideways, she raised her voice. ‘I need a foreground figure to give scale to my composition. It really won’t take a minute, Tommy.’

He posed reluctantly, a tiny figure distorted into a hunchback by the sack over his shoulder. In the background was the rim of the embankment, and to one side the squat little cottage; still farther on, the hummock of the village sprouted its church tower.

Joshua had no intention of waiting about just in case this young madam picked on him after she had finished with Tommy. There was something not right about her. He felt it in his bones, along with all the other troubles and twinges. Things were building up this autumn that there was no accounting for. What she’d got to do with it he didn’t know and he wasn’t going to stay to find out. One thing at a time was more than enough. He kept to the edge of the dyke and quickened his pace past her. She was too busy stooping and squinting and sizing up her picture to pay any heed as he reached the gates and crossed the line.

The road made a long loop over the causeway, turning towards Hexney only by the long gash of Peddar’s Lode. A faint green scum was forming on the water, and on the far bank of the cut the old punt was pretty well rotted away where it had been left since old Egglington’s grandson drowned, that last time.

Last time...? Time for what?

Blades of sedge rasped together, dropping over the murky water. Peddar’s Lode looked just as bad under sun as under rain clouds. It was a place you didn’t want to get too close to, but couldn’t very well steer clear of, the road winding the way it did. Used to be queer stories about it in his grandad’s day, and long before that: a place where old heathens, they reckoned, had had a custom of throwing children in to ‘feed the fen’.

He reached the drove road, a cleft along the shallow hillside, making its way round the village and across the levels beyond to the rising ground on the Norfolk borders. Half reluctant to learn the worst, he stopped where he had stood last night.

The moonlight had not deceived him. Here were the marks in broad daylight.

He did not dare to bend too close.

From out of the boggy area which swallowed up a section of the ancient track ran a line of deep footprints, trodden into the dry surface of the abandoned droveway: not old prints solidified in dry mud, but fresh and dusty. Footprints; or hoofprints; or what? He could not identify them. Roughly triangular, eight or nine inches long, they were set in a nearly direct line one in front of another. Surely not made by any four-legged beast. A man, then, for some reason playing a drunken tightrope game, a wobbly heel-to-toe? But the line was straight and determined and not at all wobbly. And the prints weren’t human. To the old fenman’s eye they looked like nothing so much as the imprint of a distorted, magnified eel’s tail.

Then he realized something—something even more outlandish.

The footsteps had advanced during the night.

There wasn’t a doubt about it. He was positive the marks had stopped level with that twisted hawthorn last night. Now they had trodden their way another couple of yards.

Joshua hurried into the village and into The Griffin.

Constable Rylot was firmly planted by the doorway to the snug, along with two older men and a youngster who dropped in from time to time to collect advertisements and local announcements for the Wisbech Advertiser, and who was known to supplement his income by contributing the occasional news paragraph to the paper. They greeted Joshua with nods and a routine mutter of ‘Josh’.., ‘Mornin’, Josh’..., ‘Well then, well, Josh.’

The barmaid, Leah Morritt called Joshua ‘Mr. Serpell’. The landlord, whose wife was safely in the scullery, heating up the copper, took the opportunity of squeezing his bottom past Leah’s on his way to get Joshua’s old tankard from its hook.

‘Hear as they’ve got a plague of adders under Sowder’s Hythe.’

‘Been bitten yet, Josh?’

‘Wouldn’t reckon much on the adder’s chance of surviving.’

Joshua drank half a pint without stopping to reply, then began to recount what he had seen last night and this morning. Leah sniggered, and then at a glance from the landlord wilted into sullen silence. ‘Great big marks,’ Joshua emphasized, ‘comin’ on, gettin’ closer since last night.’

Fortrey, the landlord, leaned on the counter and mopped up a beer spillage and asked the constable very loudly whether there was any news about that poacher who had hidden out here a month ago without anyone getting a sniff of him. Joshua faltered as the men moved away and leaned towards each other over the far end of the bar.

The young Wisbech man said: ‘This is interesting. You’re really telling us that—’

‘I swear to you they’re on their way,’ said Joshua. ‘Them footsteps, they’re comin’ up the track, comin’ up this way.’

Leah was beckoned to fill Joshua’s glass. Thus encouraged, Joshua talked across the other conversation. ‘If they go on beside the hill and out over the level, maybe that’s all right. None of our concern. But if they turn off, like I got the feeling they will do, like turnin’ up Tinker’s Lane, then they’ll be in amongst us.’

Leah winked at the young man. Fortrey stubbed his right foot against the inner planks of the counter and glared, but not at anybody in particular.

‘Go and make yourself comfy in the corner, Josh,’ he said, ‘and let’s hear a bit less.’

‘’Specially at night, when you’re on your way home.’ Constable Rylot forced a laugh. ‘Happen I’d have to steer you into the lock-up.’

The young man said: ‘But aren’t you even going to go and see? Isn’t it your duty to follow up a report like this?’

There was an uneasy silence, broken by the constable with a thunderous clearing of the throat. ‘We know as well as needs be how to manage the affairs of our own parish.’

‘I’m certainly going to see for myself.’

‘Nobody to stop you, young feller. Us, we know what to take seriously, and what not.’

Joshua had reached the end of his second pint. ‘But there’s something brewing—’

‘And as long as there is, you’d best be content.’

‘You know what I’m talking about. Like those times before. Specially that last time, the special one.’

The landlord began noisily to blame Leah for a dirty pot he had just found by the sink, and made a great to-do about mopping the counter yet again. Constable Rylot finished his drink and, with a final admonitory glance around the other occupants of the bar, went out.

‘You’ll see,’ said Joshua.

‘And tidy up them bottles while you’re at it, girl.’

‘It’s not just the footsteps. There’s a sight more to ’ut than that. Somethin’s comin’. Somethin’...comin’ for all of us.’

When the young man had left to make his own inspection of the footprints, nobody else spoke to Joshua and nobody answered his increasingly aggressive questions. Grumpily he left the inn long before his usual time.

Five days later a boy’s dripping corpse was dragged out of the weed and slime of Peddar’s Lode.