The Singing, page 23
‘What sort of things?’
Winsome nodded. That was good. That was better than a straight no. ‘I want to – and some of our old parishioners, as well – we want to…set up some initiatives.’
Julia’s eyes narrowed even further. ‘What sort of initiatives?’
‘Such as a prayer and meditation group,’ Winsome said, shifting slightly in her chair and wondering for roughly the hundredth time why she was trying to get Julia’s help. ‘Such as an exercise class, and perhaps also some computer classes, and the like.’ She gave a quick smile. ‘We haven’t decided on everything, yet.’
Julia’s head sank down and she looked at her hands, barely able to believe that Winsome was sitting here at her table asking her to help organise things with her. After what had happened, what Mariah had done…
And her. What she had done.
Julia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.
‘I thought I’d have to move from here,’ she said, looking under her lashes at Winsome. ‘That’s what I’ve been working myself up to doing.’
‘Moving?’ Winsome asked, wondering why she was surprised to hear Julia say it. ‘From Wellsford?’
Julia nodded. ‘After what Mariah did.’ She took a slow breath. ‘After what Mariah and I did.’
They sat at opposite sides of the table, simply looking at each other. Then Winsome reached over and put her hand on top of Julia’s.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, feeling how cold Julia’s hand was. ‘You didn’t go through with it. We can make mistakes, realise we were wrong, and get up again, start over.’
Julia drew her hand away, set it in her lap, looked out the window. Trees edged her small lawn. Because of course they did. This was Wellsford. The trees owned the village.
So did what walked between them.
‘I saw them,’ she said, the words dropping like small hard stones from her mouth.
Winsome looked sharply at her, then glanced at Cù, who was sitting now with his ears perked, listening.
‘Saw who?’ she asked.
Julia shuddered. ‘Them,’ she said, admitting what she’d refused to during their last conversation. ‘The Fae.’ She looked down at her hands, twisted her fingers into tight knots.
Outside, a thrush let loose a string of syllables.
Julia closed her eyes, shuddered, then looked across the table at Winsome. ‘You’ve seen them, haven’t you?’
Winsome’s mouth was dry. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have.’
Julia nodded. ‘They were beautiful,’ she said, and closed her eyes again, seeing them in her memory. The way they shone. She licked her lips. ‘One of them walked right by me,’ she said. ‘It even smiled at me.’ She looked out the window. ‘And heaven help me, the sight of it brought me to tears.’ She shook her head. Then looked at Winsome.
‘They took my aunt, didn’t they?’
‘Yes.’ Winsome didn’t know what else to say.
Julia nodded and looked down at her hands again. She sighed. ‘I knew they were there to stop us. Her.’ She twisted her fingers. ‘Are they hurting her?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Winsome replied. ‘She had met them before, your aunt. When she was young.’ Winsome paused. ‘If the stories about the village are to be believed.’
Julia stared at the remains of her lunch, cooling on the plate in front of her. She didn’t think she’d ever eat a pie again. Not a savoury one.
‘How can things so beautiful be an abomination?’ she asked, her voice strangled around the words.
Winsome shook her head. ‘They are not an abomination,’ she said. ‘They’re simply another species of being.’
‘What?’ Julia asked, spitting out a laugh. ‘Like owls, or lions, or something?’
Winsome shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It’s a big world.’
‘Bigger than I want it to be,’ Julia muttered. She sighed, pulled her hands apart and got up from the table, picked up her plate and slid the uneaten pie into the rubbish. The dish clattered in the sink, and she ran hot water over it, scrubbed it clean.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked on another sigh, coming back to stand by the table, avoiding the ghost dog, and staring at Winsome. ‘What do you really want?’
Winsome looked up at her. ‘I want you to be okay,’ she said.
Julia laughed out loud. ‘Is that a possibility?’ She shook her head. ‘Doesn’t feel like one.’
Winsome stood up, and Cù scooted out of her way, for all the world like a real dog. She grasped Julia’s hands and held them tightly. ‘It’s a possibility, Julia,’ she said.
‘Why do you care?’ Julia stared down at their linked hands but didn’t pull away. ‘We tried to ruin you.’
‘I thought you had, for a while,’ Winsome said. ‘But nothing you did changed anything essential about me. I see that now.’
Julia pulled her hands away, went and stood against the kitchen bench, and folded her arms across her breasts.
‘You’re part of this village, Julia,’ Winsome said. ‘And so I care what happens to you. I can’t do everything in this world that I want to, but I can come here and offer my help in whatever way I can. I can care about those close to me. I can try to make a difference right where I am.’ She paused, took a breath. ‘Let us help each other, Julia. Let us shift past this and learn from it.’
Julia looked away. ‘I don’t want to move,’ she said. ‘I like my house. I liked my job, too. Now I don’t have that and I’m living off savings that are steadily dwindling.’ She rubbed at sudden goosebumps on her arms. ‘I don’t know what we were thinking,’ she said softly. Her forehead wrinkled. ‘I wanted what you had,’ she said. ‘I liked running things, being the one everyone looked at and turned to, especially when Alfred Robinson died.’
Winsome nodded, letting her talk.
Cù sat down again, listening.
‘It made me feel important,’ Julia said, her mouth turning down. ‘I didn’t have anything else. There was just the church, and my aunt, and Mariah was nasty. I never wanted to admit it to myself, but she was nasty.’
‘She carried a great burden,’ Winsome said.
‘What burden?’ Julia asked, scoffing. ‘She was just a sour old woman, who enjoyed needling me.’ She shook her head. ‘And I let her poison me because something inside me was just the same.’
Winsome picked up the electric kettle and filled it under the tap. ‘I think we need some tea,’ she said, and set it to boil. She plucked up two cups from the draining rack and looked for the teapot.
‘Your aunt met the Fae, for the first time or not, I don’t know, when she was about eighteen years old,’ Winsome said.
Julia stared at her. ‘How do you know that?’
‘It was mentioned as an old village story.’
‘You’ve been gossiping about me?’ Julia took a step back, outraged.
‘No,’ Winsome said mildly, finding the teapot and looking for the tea. She was used to fossicking around in other people’s kitchens now, while having the difficult conversations. A hot cup of tea always did wonders.
‘It was Mariah I was told about,’ Winsome said. ‘Not you.’
Julia looked at her.
‘Have you heard the story?’ Winsome asked, opening the cupboards.
Julia shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, and got out the teabags.
Winsome took them from her with a smile. ‘Like I was saying – and none of this is verified, of course, just an old bit of village history.’ She paused. ‘Have you always lived here, Julia?’
‘No.’
‘Ah,’ Winsome nodded. ‘So, it goes like this – your aunt went sneaking up to the stone circle one solstice, to watch the ritual there.’
Julia’s eyes widened and she slapped a hand over her gasp. ‘She wouldn’t,’ she said, her words muffled behind her fingers.
‘She was only eighteen, remember,’ Winsome said, switching off the kettle just as it began to boil. She poured the water in the pot, over the teabags.
‘And so, apparently, she was spotted there, spying,’ Winsome said. She put the cups on the table, folded up the newspapers and magazines strewn across the surface and looked for somewhere to put them.
Julia took them from her, stood holding them.
‘It was some of the Fae who saw her there.’
Julia’s breath whooshed out. ‘What happened?’ she asked, shuddering to think of it.
‘They danced together,’ Winsome said. ‘Which everyone seems to think means a lot more than just dancing, if you understand.’
Julia paled.
‘But that isn’t actually the part of the story that makes me feel bad,’ Winsome said, carrying the pot to the table and sitting down.
‘It isn’t?’
Winsome shook her head. ‘No, it’s that afterwards, when Mariah’s mother found out what she had done, she locked her in the house for a month.’ Winsome paused, looked down at the cups. ‘I think whatever went on in that house over those weeks changed your aunt irrevocably.’
Julia was silent, her fingers white against the papers.
‘Mariah also carried the burden of her family history, and her own past life – being the one that charged another Lady of the Grove with witchcraft, resulting in a hanging.’
Julia sat down, still hugging the papers to her chest. ‘She always said, they’d got one once, and she’d make it happen again.’ She blinked. ‘I don’t believe in past lives, and nor should you. It isn’t Christian.’
‘I didn’t believe in lots of things I do now, since coming here,’ Winsome said. ‘Like spirits, for example.’
Julia glanced at Cù, then looked quickly away. ‘He’s not real,’ she said.
‘Then how come you can see him?’
‘I can’t,’ Julia said, wishing it was true. ‘I’m imagining it.’
‘Like you imagined seeing the Fae in the woods that night.’
Julia stared at Winsome, tears streaming suddenly down her face.
‘Shh,’ Winsome said. ‘I felt the same way when I realised.’ She smiled, and got up, went around the table and pulled Julia into her arms.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said.
‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
31
Erin glanced out at the windows of Ash Cottage, then hunched her shoulders and looked away over the garden. ‘Stephan,’ she hissed. ‘What am I going to do?’
Stephan straightened and wiped an arm over his forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How long is she staying?’ He wanted to tell Erin he was missing spending his time with her, but she could probably feel that, and really, it wouldn’t be a good thing to make her feel bad. Her mother was already doing a good job of that. ‘It’s only a few weeks until Midsummer.’
‘That’s just it!’ Erin said, then lowered her voice, even though there was no way Veronica could overhear them from the glasshouse. ‘I’ve no idea. She’s showing no signs of budging unless I go stay at the flat in the city with her.’
‘What?’
‘I know. I don’t want to, of course I don’t.’ Erin sighed and leant against the potting bench. ‘Stephan, she’s making it impossible for me to do any of my practices. She’s been here three days, and I haven’t got outside once in that time to do my daily devotions, let alone anything else.’
Stephan stepped over to Erin and wrapped his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ Erin said, her voice full of misery. ‘I don’t know what to do. She won’t go back home.’
‘Have you spoken to your dad?’ Stephan asked.
Erin shook her head. ‘What would I say to him? Hey Dad, how’s banging your secretary going, because Mum’s pretty upset about it and she’s cramping my style?’ Erin bumped her forehead against Stephan’s shoulder and groaned.
‘Yeah,’ Stephan said. ‘When you put it that way.’
‘I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’ Erin said.
Stephan cast around for an answer. ‘Remember the runes?’ he said after a moment. ‘They kind of talked about this, right?’
Erin just groaned again. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But the problem is, I can’t get any time to do the work in spirit, you know?’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no privacy. Mum is up in the morning at the crack of dawn, so she’s there before I go to work, and she’s there when I get home, and this is practically the first moment I’ve had away from her.’ Erin lifted her hands and tugged on her hair in frustration. ‘And she’s so weird,’ she said.
‘Weird?’
‘Awful. You know her mother brought her up on her own? They were poor.’ Erin rolled her eyes. ‘I never knew that. I always thought Mum’s family was well-off. That’s how she always acted. And now I find out that was a complete lie.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mum hated being poor when she was a kid, so she set out to marry someone with money. I mean, planned it all. She told me yesterday how she took secretarial courses at school and wrangled a job in a good company, and then set out to bag the boss’s son.’ Erin’s eyes widened. ‘It was so calculated. So cold.’
‘And it worked,’ Stephan said.
‘Yep. So, of course she can’t understand what I’m doing. It’s like a million miles away from what she thinks is important.’
Stephan tucked his chin down, deep in thought. ‘I think we have to reframe this,’ he said.
‘Reframe it?’ Erin asked. ‘How? And why?’
‘Because I think this needs to be an opportunity. It already is, if you think about it.’
Erin groaned. ‘I’ve done nothing but think about it, so how’s it an opportunity?’
Stephan shrugged. ‘Well, you’re already learning more about what makes your mother the way she is. How she ticks, you know.’
Erin pulled a face. ‘True, but I’m not exactly liking what I’m learning about her, you realise?’
‘Should you be judging her?’ Stephan asked. ‘Should we really be judging her?’
Erin opened her mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. She just looked at Stephan instead.
Stephan shook his head and relaxed back against the potting bench. He looked at the scatter of pots and seedlings over its surface.
‘I’ve spent hours standing at this bench,’ he said.
Erin frowned.
‘I came here when I was sixteen and bugged Teresa to teach me what she knew,’ Stephan said. ‘I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, not really.’ He wrinkled his nose, thinking about that. ‘Or maybe I did, a deep part of me, at least. I mean, everyone knew what she was – the local witch. She didn’t make a secret of it. She didn’t shout it from the rooftops, but this is a small village. Everyone knew.’
Erin folded her arms, waiting to hear what Stephan was trying to tell her. She thought about her mother, about the way she’d plotted and planned, clawed her way up the social ladder. She rubbed her arms. It made her feel dirty – the sheer calculation of it. Had there ever been any love?
‘Anyway,’ Stephan said. ‘She taught me a lot more than how to make smoke blends and teas and pretty nasturtium salads.’ He looked at Erin. ‘Are you listening?’
She straightened. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I am. Truly.’
Stephan smiled at her. ‘Okay. So, I was about to say that one thing she taught me which was really hard to learn, actually, was that everyone you meet is just the same as yourself.’
Erin blinked. ‘What?’
Stephan repeated it. ‘Everyone you meet is just the same as yourself.’
‘No,’ Erin said and shook her head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Everyone you meet has a spirit and a body and a deep inner life of which you know absolutely nothing.’
Erin looked at him. ‘What do you mean by a deep inner life?’
Stephan shrugged. ‘Think about it for a moment,’ he said. ‘Everyone has their fears, and their needs, and their desires, and most of the time we never recognise that. We all think about the world, and our place in it, and the way we think about it is influenced by so many things – our upbringing, where we lived, what happened to us as kids, the health or otherwise of our spirit, our body, so many things.’ Stephan paused, blushing slightly, then shrugged. ‘People generally have reasons for acting the way they do, is all I’m really saying. And most of the time we know nothing about those reasons, or how it feels inside to be them.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Teresa told me that when you meet someone, you have to give them space to have an inner life, just like you have one.’
Erin was slowly shaking her head. ‘I’ve never thought of my mother as anything but shallow,’ she said.
‘Except that can’t be true, can it?’ Stephan asked, picking up a folded envelope of seeds and checking the label on it. ‘She might have what we see as a shallow view of the world, but she still has an inner life underneath that.’
‘You mean dreams and fears and so on?’
‘Yep,’ Stephan said turning to Erin and drawing her into his arms. ‘You said she grew up poor?’
Erin closed her eyes against Stephan’s neck and breathed the scent of him in. ‘I never knew until now,’ she said.
‘Maybe that explains some of the reason she’s so set on financial security.’
Erin nodded. She’d not thought of it like that, but it made sense. Veronica’s fixation on having a nice home, all the trappings of wealth, her insistence that Erin make choices that wouldn’t leave her vulnerable.
‘It’s sad,’ she said. She snaked her arms around Stephan’s neck and pressed her lips to his. They were warm, comforting. ‘You’re wonderful,’ she said. ‘You know that, right?’
Stephan smiled into her eyes. ‘I’m just me,’ he said. ‘Just like anyone else. I’m lucky though,’ he said, picking Erin up and swinging her around to sit on the potting bench. ‘Having you. You make me wonderful. You make everything magical.’
Erin tucked herself around him, pulling him closer so that she could feel the lean strength of him, so that she could taste his clean, citrussy scent.
Veronica cleared her throat behind them, in the doorway to the potting shed. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, eyebrows arched, eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’
