Roots of Evil(8)

There was a pause, as if Mother was trying to decide whether to answer this. Then she smiled, and said, ‘Yes, I do know. It’s a place called Mowbray Fen. That’s in Lincolnshire. You have to go through Rockingham Forest, and along by Thorney and Witchford, until you come within sight of Wicken Fen.’


The names were repeated softly, as if they might be a spell; a charm that would take you on to a golden road. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or like the children who went through a wardrobe into a magic land.

‘There are marshes there, with queer darting lights that the locals call will o’ the wisps – they say if you can capture one it must give you your heart’s desire.’

‘What’s a heart’s desire?’

‘It’s different for everyone. But once you’d gone through all those places,’ said Mother, still in the same far-away voice, ‘you’d come to the tiny, tiny village called Mowbray Fen. There’s a house there standing all by itself and it’s called the Priest’s House because it was built at a time when people could be put to death for believing in the wrong religion, and there are legends that priests hid there before being smuggled out of England and across to Holland. We’ll find the places on your school atlas in the morning.’

The names had been like a litany. Thorney and Witchford and Rockingham Forest. Rutland Water with the place called Edith Weston that sounded like an old lady, who knitted things and smelled of lavender water. And there was Whissendine and Thistleton.

‘They’re like the places in that book I read at school. The Hobbit.’

Books could only be read at school, because there were no books in Pedlar’s Yard. But the school had a small library where you could sit at dinner-time or in between half past three when classes finished, and four o’clock when the teachers went home and the school was locked up. It was quiet and there was a nice smell from the books and on Mondays there was a polish smell from the weekend cleaning. When I’m grown up and when I have a house of my own it will always, always smell of polish.

‘You’re a hobbit,’ said Mother, smiling.

One day they really would run away: they would probably do it at midnight which was when people did run away. They would go to the house where the will o’ the wisps danced, and the lady from the stories would be there.

It was a good thought; it was a thought to hold on to when he came slinking into the bedroom, and when he said that if you told anyone what he did to Mother with his belt and with his hands, he would break your fingers one by one, or maybe hold your hand over the hotplate in the kitchen. And so you never told what happened, not once, not even on the night you were physically sick, doing it in the bed because you were afraid to attract his attention by going across to the bathroom.

When he did these things, all you could do was lie there with your eyes tightly shut and pretend not to know what was happening on the other side of the bedroom wall, and cling on to the knowledge of the house where the will o’ the wisps danced. One day you would find that house.





CHAPTER THREE




Lucy thought it was grotesque for the sun to shine at a funeral. Funerals ought only to happen in the pouring rain, so that the weather became part of the misery and the dreariness. It would not be any use trying to explain this to Edmund, of course.

Still, at least he was putting on some kind of hospitality after the service, although he would probably measure the sherry with a thimble. He had told Lucy on the phone that he was still searching for the title deeds to the house, and also for the will.

‘Is there a will?’ said Lucy in the sepulchral tones of one of their elderly great-aunts who, with true Victorian relish for all things funereal and fiscal, unfailingly asked this question whenever anyone died. But Edmund had no sense of the absurd, and he merely said that of course there would be a will and it would eventually turn up. He would see Lucy at twelve o’clock sharp, he said, and they had better drive to the church together. Lucy thought that by the time she arrived Edmund would have found the deeds and the will, and have everything else filed and indexed and colour-coded.

She was taking along a copy of Jenny Joseph’s poem, Warning, hoping that there could be a reading of it. ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn’t go…’ It was purest Aunt Deborah, and Lucy thought Deb would have liked it read today. She would ask Edmund about it when she got to the church; she thought she might manage to read it herself if no one else would, although she might dissolve in floods of tears halfway through. But Deb would not have minded that.



Edmund was certainly not going to let Lucy or anyone else read some outlandish modern rubbish today. They were going to have a proper decent service, with Bach for the music, a reading from the New Testament, and ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ and ‘Praise my Soul the King of Heaven’ for the hymns. It had all been arranged with the vicar, and it would all be very tasteful and entirely suitable.

‘Oh, very,’ said Lucy, and Edmund looked at her sharply because she had almost sounded sarcastic. Still, at least she was dressed more or less conventionally; Edmund had had a bad few moments last night visualizing the kind of outfit Lucy might wear today. But it was all right; she had on some kind of silk two-piece which he had to admit looked very well-cut and also very expensive. It was not black, but it was suitably dark – a deep rich brown, the colour of an old mahogany table. It made her hair look very nearly auburn, and if you bothered to notice such things you might say it emphasized her good figure as well, not that Edmund was really noticing such things on the day of Deborah’s funeral. And now that he looked at Lucy again, he had to say it was a pity she had added that trailing tortoiseshell-coloured scarf to the outfit.