The Beggar's Curse Read online

  When Mrs Blakeman came out she gave Oliver a quick hug, but she kept her arms round Colin for a long time, staring past him into space. It was like being embraced by something half dead. He’d only seen his mother like this once before, last year, when Alison had been very ill.

  They all went to the hospital canteen and had cups of coffee, but Oliver and his uncle did most of the talking. Mr Blakeman asked a string of questions about the holiday, about Stang and Molly Bover, even about the riding stables, and Mrs Blakeman seemed to be listening quite intently to Oliver’s carefully considered answers, but with dead eyes. Oliver’s behaviour was eerie, too, he was much calmer than yesterday and there’d been no more tears. He’d withdrawn into himself, just like his aunt. You could tell them both that black was white now, and they’d listen.

  Just as Oliver was telling them about the Mummers, Mrs Blakeman drained her coffee cup and stood up. “That’s very interesting, Oliver,” she said politely, “but I must go back to Prill now, I’m afraid,” and she simply walked away in the middle of his sentence.

  Dad tried to gloss it over and went for some more coffee, but Oliver was bossily flapping him into silence. It was his uncle he really needed to talk to. “Prill’s very sick, isn’t she, Uncle David?” he said, the minute his aunt had disappeared. He wanted to add, “She’s going to die, isn’t she?” but he didn’t, not with Colin sitting there.

  For a moment Mr Blakeman didn’t answer. This child always disturbed him somehow. He was so adult, so knowing, you could never tell him half a story about anything. Their own children were so much more straightforward.

  “Head injuries are always tricky, Oliver,” he said at last. “I’m sure you know that. She’s not broken any bones or anything, and her skull’s not fractured. It’s just concussion, terribly severe, obviously, and doctors can’t make predictions in a case like this. They daren’t. She’s holding her own, and that’s all they can say.”

  “It was my fault,” Oliver burst out suddenly, in a strangled voice. “I made a fuss about the riding hats, and Prill ended up with the wrong one. That’s why it came off when she fell.”

  “Oliver, don’t, please. That’s ridiculous. I’m sure the hat had nothing to do with it. They don’t protect you in every case, you know. The whole thing was a freak, the steep hill, that boy’s bike going out of control. He’s in quite a state apparently. The mother keeps phoning up.”

  But Oliver’s glassy look told him that the boy wasn’t listening. “Look,” he said finally, “I think perhaps you two ought to go home for a bit. There’s nothing you can do here, and sitting around just makes it worse for everyone. Come on,” and he gave his son a pointed stare. Oliver was beginning to get on his nerves now, with these wild theories about the accident, and he needed all his reserves to cope with his wife.

  “Molly’ll be glad to have you at home for a bit,” he said, shutting the door of the taxi. “She can’t have had a very jolly morning.”

  “You’ll phone, won’t you, Dad?” Colin mouthed through the glass, as they drove away. It was the same taxi, the same old man, the same tortured Oliver sitting beside him. Yesterday had become today, and nothing was better.

  “I promise. Off you go now,” Mr Blakeman said.

  But there was only one phone call before bedtime, to tell them that there was still no change. Colin wouldn’t ring off until he’d got his father to promise that he’d come and collect them in the morning. “I don’t want to stay here, Dad,” he said in a whisper. “Can’t we stay with you at the hotel?” Then he went up to bed, taking Jessie with him, and fell asleep with his arms round her neck, dreaming about giant horses and riderless bikes, and shiny coffins being lowered into the ground in Stang churchyard.

  Oliver didn’t want to go to sleep, and he didn’t want to go back to Ranswick either, not now. There was too much to think about and plan, and he wanted to stay in the village. The riding accident had pulled all the blurred edges into focus at last. Everything that ghostly procession had foreshadowed was true, except for Prill’s end, and that too was happening, even as he lay there.

  Through his open window came snatches of song and laughter. The Mummers, wild and noisy after their final rehearsal, were being turned out of the pub. And tomorrow night they would perform their play. Tony would take the King’s part, an Edge would play it instead of a Wright, and the ancient pattern would be broken for ever, all because of Winnie Webster’s well-meaning arrangements. Did she really know what she had done? Did anyone?

  The Wrights had always been respected in this village. Most of them had been farmers but some had become schoolteachers, and one had gone into the church. His father knew the family history. He knew all about the Edges, too, with their history of lies and cheating, and about the two brothers centuries ago, two highwaymen who’d been hanged on a gibbet on Brereton Moss.

  Tomorrow Sid and Tony Edge would fight against each other, evil against evil, and it would be more than play-acting. The one would strengthen the other’s arm as they wrestled and hacked and slashed, and the hands that were already round Prill’s throat would tighten for ever, dragging her down. . .

  As Oliver drifted off to sleep his fingers loosened at last on the text of the play, and the crumpled pages dropped from his hand as consciousness left him. He knew now what he must do, and why they had come to Stang. He at least must stay there. Through the cold night, and on into the colder dawn, the boy slept peacefully.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Easter Sunday dawned, cheerless, cold. All over England village bells rang out with the message that Christ was risen from the dead, daffodils blazed in gardens, and here and there in Stang churchyard, half-opened buds gleamed pallidly. In her small room off Ward 5A, in Ranswick Hospital, Prill Blakeman lay motionless; her parents sat by her bed, side by side like two stone figures, blank-eyed as the grey light touched the windows. There was no change.

  Molly didn’t phone the hospital and she was less cheerful now. She ordered the boys to wrap up warm and get into the car while she took the dogs round the village. She was going to drive them into town herself, there was no need for Mr Blakeman to come. Rose Salt was left with a list of instructions about dogs and dinners, and they saw her looking rather pathetically through the front window as Molly reversed down the drive, peeping at Tony Edge who was letting himself into the Stores, with bulky coloured bundles under his arm, for the play no doubt.

  Molly seemed to have difficulty steering a straight course. On the main road several cars hooted at her and a van driver unwound his window and swore. All her calmness had gone and she seemed rigid with tension; her pleasant, low voice was now a tight whisper. Oliver hadn’t dared suggest he might stay at home for the morning, not with Rose slamming down plates of egg and bacon, and Molly snapping at her, and Colin all white and silent turning his food over, then pushing it aside uneaten.

  He would have to change his plan of campaign slightly, so he took his purse with him. He also took the precaution of unpinning the bus timetable from the back of the kitchen door and slipping it into his pocket. There was unlikely to be a bus on Easter Sunday, but if there was he didn’t want to miss it. If need be, he’d have to come back in a taxi.

  At the hospital Molly spent a few minutes in Prill’s room talking to Mr Blakeman; then she went home. She didn’t speak to the boys again, and her round, moon face was a mask, thickly-lined and old. “She seems so angry with us,” Colin whispered to his cousin, as the untidy figure vanished through the swing doors. “She’s almost behaving as if it’s her fault. . .”

  “Don’t worry about it,” advised Oliver, in a cool, contained little voice. “People often behave oddly when something like this happens. They feel guilty, you see, when there’s trouble.” He nearly said, “when people die”, but he bit it back.

  Mrs Blakeman was asleep in the hotel room. She’d been sitting by Prill’s bed most of the night and she’d nodded off in her chair. Oliver decided to find out where Porky Bover was. They might let him int
o the ward for a few minutes and he could try and get to know a little more about the accident. Besides, there was no point at all in staring at Prill hour after hour. The Blakemans would cope better if they stayed away for a bit, in his opinion, but he didn’t dare say so.

  Mr Blakeman thought how sensitive Oliver was being, stealing away somewhere so he could be on his own with Colin for a few minutes. He’d not told Molly but there’d been an alarm during the night, a hideous few minutes when bells rang in Prill’s room and doctors and nurses came running, and they’d been asked to go and wait outside.

  But she’d “stabilized” again, whatever that meant. “I know they mean well,” he told Colin wearily, “but I wish they wouldn’t treat us as if we were subnormal. I’d rather know exactly what’s happening, however bad it is.” They were sitting together by Prill’s bed. Surrounded by all those tubes and wires she looked like something from a monster pop-up book. Colin glazed his eyes so he didn’t have to look at her. “How bad is it, Dad?” he said at last.

  Mr Blakeman couldn’t speak, but a tear rolled slowly down one cheek. “I don’t know. They don’t really tell you anything. They can’t. You know what it’s like, they watch her all the time, they keep checking those machines. I. . . I feel like pulling all the plugs out and smashing them up sometimes.”

  He looked at Prill, tiny in the high bed, and suddenly saw Judge Cameron. When you spent long hours concentrating on one face everything about it became etched in your memory. He’d not enjoyed doing the portrait much, the look in those small, hard eyes was proud and self-assured, and there was a harshness in the mouth. Why hadn’t he painted Prill instead?

  He stared helplessly at the pale white oval against the big pillows, at the thick red hair straggling down. A nurse had come in and brushed the ends of it this morning, and she’d chattered to Prill about Easter eggs, as if she could hear her. There she lay, hour after hour, like a sleeping statue, innocent, lovely, slipping away from them.

  Colin squeezed his father’s hand. “I’m hungry, Dad,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel, it’s ages since I ate anything.” He really wanted to get his father away from the hospital for a while. He’d been quite cheerful yesterday, but now he was becoming distant and preoccupied, like Mum, only hearing half of what people said, and only half responding.

  He went to fetch Oliver from Porky’s ward on the floor below, but the patients were eating their lunch and the nurse told them he’d gone twenty minutes ago. “Perhaps he’s at the hotel,” Mr Blakeman said, but Colin was suspicious, and when they got to his mother’s room he wasn’t really surprised to find a note from Oliver propped against the bedside light. “Didn’t feel very well,” the spindly handwriting informed them. “Went back to Molly’s for a bit. Will come in later if possible. Sorry. Oliver.”

  Mrs Blakeman was coming round after the doctor’s sedative, complaining that she felt a bit sick but wanting to get straight back to Prill even so. Mr Blakeman was hovering round her anxiously. Colin crumpled the note in his hand. He was disgusted with Oliver and he knew why he’d sneaked back to Stang. It was the play.

  He simply didn’t understand this weird cousin of theirs. Since Prill’s accident Oliver had been through every mood in the book, quite hopeless when it had first happened and a bag of nerves for hours afterwards, unable to stop blubbering on about it. Then he seemed to have pulled himself together again, he’d become calm and thoughtful, trying to jolly the others along with his rather trite remarks. Even Molly had asked him to be quiet.

  Now he’d deserted them. He’d done his level best to secure a part in that play, but when he’d failed he’s started laying plans to get there early. He was going to sit right at the front, he said, and take some action shots for his father. Prill’s accident had put going to the play out of the question, of course, and to Colin’s amazement Oliver had actually said so, last night, and rather wistfully too. He simply didn’t behave like normal people.

  Oliver Wright was no better than the Edge family. Grown-ups were often quite impressed with him, but deep down, Colin thought he was callous and calculating. He told lies sometimes, to get what he wanted. This note was a lie and it meant he’d deserted the Blakemans, with Prill in that ghastly hospital, lingering between life and death. Colin never wanted to see or speak to him again.

  Oliver was lucky; there was just one bus going to Stang that day and he’d caught it in the old market place. It got stuck though in a big traffic jam, just beyond the roundabout, and after that everything crawled along at a snail’s pace. When the police eventually waved them on, Oliver could see a car crash involving three vehicles, and a van lay in a ditch, hopelessly flattened like an old tin can. How could anyone come out of that alive? He wished he’d not seen it, not with Prill so desperately sick in Ranswick Hospital. It was more than he could bear.

  The bus didn’t hurry, and its leisurely progress down the country lanes gave him more than enough time to think of all the strange things that had happened in Stang since they’d come to Molly’s. He didn’t want to think of them at all, but they wormed their way into his head like a life’s memories when someone goes under the water for the last time, asking all the useless questions that nobody would ever answer. Why had Sid Edge’s bike hurtled down the hill at that precise moment in time, and why couldn’t Prill have fallen another way, on to soft grass? Why had that silly poodle crept into the kiln and what had prompted Sid to shut it in? Would the police ever find out what had happened to Posie Massey? Who closed the door on Colin, and how had his dog been hurt when there’d been nobody on the tower? His mind revolved endlessly and grew tired, and he could make no sense of it.

  Oliver was nervous of dogs, but Jessie was rather a beautiful one and she limped now. It was not meant to be, no more than people were meant to hobble about with sticks, or to have withered limbs, or to become mortally sick and die.

  “Ta ta, George,” the driver shouted, as an old man got off the bus by a lonely gate. Through the open door Oliver caught the scent of a wild flowering tree, and he could hear the birds singing. Just for a minute his heart lifted. These were the lovely things. But in that dark village the poisoned waters of the pit were tainting man’s very existence. The old curse lived on, and through one family, so that everything people did was fated to go horribly wrong. Nothing flourished in that valley any more, not even spring.

  He knew he must keep out of Molly’s way for the afternoon, in case she pounced and asked him awkward questions, but his luck was in. Aunt Elsie Dutton always came to the play, and Molly was going to keep her promise and had gone over to Brereton Cross to fetch her. “She’ll stay to her tea,” Rose said. “They won’t be back till half-past six. That’s what she told me, any road.”

  It was perfect. Oliver now had all the time he needed to go through his lines and to find out exactly what the Mummers did on the day. There’d be ritual attached to that too. Rose knew the drill precisely. At about four o’clock they would all go to Pit Farm for a big high tea. On a fine day they’d jazz around the village in their costumes and knock on people’s doors with their collecting boxes, scaring the children with Old Hob. But just after two it began to pour down. “They’ll not come out in this,” she said sadly, peering through the window. “They won’t want to get wet. We’ll have to wait now.”

  She disappeared into her bedroom and didn’t emerge for an hour and a half. Oliver stayed in the kitchen with the dogs, going through the play and trying to keep warm. Then a little cough in the doorway made him turn round. Rose was standing there shyly. Or was it Rose?

  This young woman was rather beautifully dressed, she had a long skirt of red wool and a dark pink blouse. “Molly gave me these,” she whispered, fingering the patterned sleeve. “She knows I like nice things.”

  “You. . . you look fabulous, Rose,” Oliver stammered. Everyone laughed at Rose Salt, but just at that moment he felt more like crying. The Edges would be too busy trying to remember their lines to take much notice of her tonight.
But don’t let them laugh at her, he pleaded silently. He had realized what was different. She was no longer wearing the knitted brown pixie-hood. Dark brown hair, soft and quite curly, had fallen down on to her thin shoulders. “Do you think she’s bald, Oliver?” Colin had said, that first night, and they’d sniggered away up in the bedroom.

  “There’ll be a queue to get in,” she said solemnly, looking at the clock. People come from all over to Stang Play. I’m going across at about half six. Are you coming?”

  Oliver hesitated. “No. . . well, not quite so early anyway. You go, Rose, when you’re ready. Get a good seat.”

  He was glad of the rain. It fell steadily into the valley hour after hour, as if someone up on the Heath was pouring it out of a bottomless bucket. The wind got up and howled, the sky was thickly overcast, and Stang suddenly went into hibernation. Children were called home, cottage doors were shut, and it became a dead village as people lay under hatches and waited for the play. “Won’t make no difference,” Rose assured him, smoothing her skirt. “Folks’ll still turn up, you see.”

  The most crucial element in Oliver’s plan was the monstrous red bike. All afternoon he was on tenterhooks, willing Tony not to move it from the rusty shack behind the Stores where he usually tinkered with it on his free afternoons. And luck was on his side. When he stole down Molly’s path, just after five, it was still there.

  He’d had dreams about what he might do to that great grinning machine; he’d like to attack it as if it was all the Edges that had ever been. He’d like to stick red-hot pokers into its wheels, and dent all its shiny chrome fittings, and cut a great hole in its petrol tank to see all the petrol gush out. But he knew he couldn’t. The police might get involved if he did anything like that, then there’d be real trouble.