The Beggar's Curse Read online

  “Can I have a look?” a little voice said. Rose Salt was standing behind him.

  “Yes, yes, of course, Rose,” Oliver stammered. “They’re not much good though.”

  When Rose saw the Stang photograph she dropped it quickly, then she pushed it away from her to the other side of the battered table, and they stared at one another in silence.

  “Room for improvement, don’t you think?” Oliver said at last, with a dry little laugh. But Rose, with her eye on the crumpled photo, was backing away, saying she was going to bed, and the look on her face was one of absolute terror.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As soon as Prill woke up next morning she opened the bedroom window and stuck her head out. It was raining and the field was misty, but she signalled as usual to Lucky Lady, Mister, and old William, and waited for them to come trotting up towards the house. Dad had taught her to whistle through her fingers last year, and it drove Colin mad. He couldn’t do it, because of the shape of his teeth. Aunt Phyllis would no doubt say it wasn’t “ladylike”.

  The three horses didn’t come. The village felt cold and dead, water dripped off the roof on to Prill’s head, and the rain poured down monotonously into the murky field. The leafless tree in the far corner where they sometimes stood, whisking their tails, looked like an old beggar woman in the thin light, her knobbled limbs frozen for ever in wild entreaty. The huge oak must be centuries old. Prill stared at its tangled branches. She sometimes saw faces in trees, and in the red of a dying fire, faces that frightened her. She gave one last whistle, listened, then shut the window. Then she pulled her clothes on and went downstairs.

  “Where are the horses?” she asked Molly. The kitchen had a rich yeasty smell. Rose Salt had been mixing dough that morning but she was out on one of her mysterious little errands. Molly was frying eggs and bacon.

  “Hello, dear,” she said. “You’re up early. Have some breakfast.” Then, “The horses?” she repeated, rather absently.

  “You know, the ones outside my bedroom, that lame old carthorse and those two chestnuts,” Prill said irritably. Something else was wrong with today, and it was only when she sat down to eat that she remembered what it was. Jessie was at the vet’s, and in an hour or so they’d know the worst. The sound of the poodles barking away in the studio made her want to scream.

  “I’ll just go and have a look in the field again,” she said tensely, looking round for her wellingtons. She was pulling them on when Molly said suddenly, “Oh, I remember now, dear. Jack Edge took them up to Big Meadow. Better grazing or something. There’s not much doing down here yet, it’s been such a wet winter.”

  “Why did Jack Edge take them?”

  “They’re his horses. The field’s his too.”

  “Where is Big Meadow?”

  “Just out of the village, up Coffin Lane. Quite a nice walk, if it would only stop raining.”

  Prill was torn. She wanted to go and look for them straight away, but there was Jessie to consider. Molly was phoning Bostocks’ at nine, and she ought to be around. She would have to wait till they got back from Ranswick. If it brightened up she could take Posie Massey with her; Brenda had been hinting that the child got bored and bad-tempered with nobody to play with.

  Jessie hobbled out of Bostocks’ unaided. She was very subdued and her leg and paw were swathed in thick dressings, but at least she was in one piece. When she saw the children she wagged her tail feebly. The vet gave Molly various pills and spare dressings, and also a bill. When she opened it she pulled a face, and the Blakemans exchanged embarrassed looks. Dad hadn’t been told about the accident yet. He wasn’t going to be too pleased. But Molly crumpled the bill into her pocket. “Don’t worry about it, loves. It can wait. Let’s just be grateful the old thing’s still with us, eh?”

  Oliver was sitting in the front of the car, irritated by the way his cousins were drooling over the dog. All right, so it would always limp, but it seemed chirpy enough to him. “At least it’s alive,” he pointed out. “I mean, it might have been killed.”

  “Oh, shut up, Oliver,” Colin said angrily. He’d had enough of these tactless comments; his cousin was too clever by half. “If that’s all you can say, I’d keep quiet. And Jessie’s a she, not an it.”

  “All right, all right, pardon me for living,” and Oliver didn’t say another word. But when they reached the big roundabout on the edge of the town he asked Molly to stop. “I think I’ll go to the library while I’m here,” he said, getting out. “There’s something I want to look up.”

  His cousins looked at each other. “Sulking,” Prill mouthed.

  “Oh, let him,” Colin muttered as Oliver wrote down Molly’s directions about getting to the bus station in a large notebook.

  “What is this ‘research’ he’s doing?” she said, as they drove away.

  “Dunno. First I’ve heard of it,” Colin answered.

  “Uncle Stanley sometimes gives him projects and things to do in the holidays,” Prill explained. “It might be something to do with that.” In another mood she’d have felt rather sorry for Oliver, but just at the moment she was mad with him.

  Ranswick had a brand new library housed in an ugly concrete building several storeys high. There was only one bus a day to Stang, so time was short. Swallowing his nerves Oliver got into the lift and was catapulted to the top floor. First he went to the enquiry desk and asked for details of the Ranswick and District Natural History Society. The secretary lived a few minutes’ walk away from the town centre, so it would be easy to find. He checked that the photograph was still in his back pocket, then went to the local history section.

  The Blakemans reckoned there was nothing about Stang in the guidebooks, but Oliver knew that you had to do a bit of detective work to get the really interesting information. His cousins didn’t stick at anything. He hunted along the shelves and soon found what he wanted. Then he opened his notebook and put his glasses on.

  In a book called “Stang – Portrait of a Village” he found that Molly’s story was quite true. Blake’s Pit was described as “dark and brooding”, and compared to Wastwater in the Lake District. “Both”, the author went on, “have been described as ‘the last place that God ever made’.” It said that ill luck was supposed to have dogged the people of Stang ever since “that fatal turning away of the beggar at the gates, all those centuries ago”, that the survivors of the flood had “lived and died in sorrow”, and that the beggar’s curse had been passed down, from generation to generation. “The Edges of Stang”, the book went on, “who have been associated with the area for centuries, have often claimed to be descended from this shadowy figure who is supposed to be responsible for so much death and destruction, but other locals have affirmed that this poetic tale has no basis whatever in fact! Indeed, Stang is one of the prettiest villages in this part of Cheshire”.

  Oliver jotted all this down, then turned to “Cheshire and Its Churches”, and found Stang. He discovered that St Elphin was unique to this village church, and that nothing at all was known about him. But there was a fascinating footnote: “It is just possible that St Elphin may be connected with St Elfin’s Eve, a moveable feast which always falls on the day before Good Friday. Legend has it that anyone brave enough to sit in the churchyard between twelve and two that night will see the ghosts of those that are to die within the year, and of those that will suffer misfortune. The end of the procession is always brought up by someone on the point of death”. The note ended with two lines from an old Cheshire poem:

  “Harmes be to all who over churchyard pass,

  Grim Death himself shall take the first and last.”

  Oliver scribbled furiously. His father had told him quite a lot about Stang, but he was more interested in the salt mining and the old timbered houses. These spooky stories about ghosts and curses were much more interesting, even if they were “a load of old rubbish”, in the words of Winnie Webster.

  His father hadn’t actually given him a project to do this holiday
, but Oliver wanted to know more about Stang for his own reasons. There were one or two things he wanted to discuss with Colin and Prill. For a start, he didn’t really believe the story about the pile of sandstone blocks collapsing on the dog’s foot. His bones told him that Colin had lied about that. There was more to it. But after his remarks in the car they weren’t speaking to him. He would have to wait till relations improved a little.

  The office of the Natural History Society was just a set of dusty filing cabinets in somebody’s front room, guarded by an unfriendly turbaned woman who was hoovering the carpet and gloomily dusting stuffed birds in cases. The secretary, her husband – a Mr Bill Stott – was out at work and wouldn’t be home till six.

  Oliver was polite, but very determined. He made her look at the photograph and watched her closely as she squinted at it through thick glasses. “Mmm. . . a nest, did you say? And you think it’s a what?”

  “A dunnet,” said Oliver. “They’re quite rare.”

  “Never heard of it. But as I say, my husband’s the bird fanatic. I just dust them, as you see.” And she glanced disapprovingly at two moth-eaten owls perched on top of a cabinet. “Now, I’ve got your name and address. That’s all I need. He’ll contact you, I expect. I must get on.”

  Oliver walked slowly down the path as the hoovering started up again. The face was still there, and it was clearer now; the thick, hard mouth was more clearly defined against the branches, the eyes were fiercer, and he thought it was bigger too. That woman hadn’t seen it, but Rose Salt had. For all her odd behaviour he felt closer to Rose than he did to the Blakemans. Perhaps she was like him, rather sensitive to the moods of places, and more aware of what had happened in them centuries ago.

  The photograph frightened him. Half of him wanted to tear it into small pieces and throw them in the nearest litter bin. But a voice inside him said, “No. That’s what They want you to do. Don’t you understand anything?” But who were They?

  He was still looking at the photograph, his fingers sweaty and shaking, when the Stang bus whipped round the corner, turned right, and disappeared into the fog. “Hey!” Oliver yelled, dancing about in the road. “This is a request stop. You’re supposed to stop here.” But all that remained of the bus was a distant rumble of wheels, and the memory of two faces, grinning at him out of the back window.

  Oliver started to walk home. If he passed a phone box he’d ring Molly, otherwise he’d thumb a lift. It was absolutely against his mother’s rules, but she was miles away, in London, not trudging along an empty road battered by a howling wind and already soaked to the skin as the rain bucketed down from the heavy skies.

  He eventually turned off the main road at a finger post marked “Stang”. This was the way the fire engine must have gone; in this tangle of lanes it had got well and truly lost. At least he could work out where the driver had gone wrong. Who had ever heard of a fire engine not finding a fire? It was incredible, to him.

  Several cars swished past, spattering him with mud. Each time he heard an engine he automatically thrust his thumb out. But nobody stopped, or even slowed down. It was as if the skinny little figure in the dripping green anorak was totally invisible.

  Then someone screeched to a halt without being asked. “Want a lift, mate?” said a voice. “I’m going down Stang way. That’s where you’re goin’, i’n’t it?” Oliver knew who it was without looking. He’d recognised the spanking red motorcycle, the leather trousers and the whiney voice. It was Tony Edge.

  He hesitated. He’d never been on a motorcycle, and he wasn’t at all sure he could keep his balance. “Er, thanks. But I think I’ll walk. It’s, er, all fresh air and, well, I’m quite enjoying it.” And he stood shivering in the road, looking like a little drowned rat.

  Tony Edge gave a loud, unpleasant laugh. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, mate. Get on, fer Gawd’s sake. You’ll be home in five minutes.” He leaned down, took Oliver by the arm, and pulled him on to the broad leather seat. “No, no. Let me get down,” the boy stammered. He didn’t like the way the hard fingers gripped his scrawny arms through the great gauntlets, or the hard eyes burning into him with their queer, twisted gleam of triumph, or the awful mouth below the black moustache.

  But it was as though the man hadn’t heard him. “Hold tight, and keep your knees in,” he bellowed above the scream of the engine, and they roared off down a hill, plunging into a thick green mist broken by the tops of bare trees that clutched at them as they tore past, like drowning hands.

  It was the longest journey of Oliver’s life. Tony Edge careered through the dripping lanes like a thing possessed; fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, the great machine bucking and rearing like something in pain, and the dark figure hunched over it, lashing it with streams of foul abuse, screaming curses into the tearing wind, as if the thing were a horse and he was whipping it up to greater and greater speed.

  All Oliver could see was a broad, shiny back. As the bike hurtled on, screeching round terrifying bends with a hot smell of rubber, squealing to sudden halts inches away from looming blank walls, he closed his eyes even on that. But the face was in his mind. He could still see those eyes glaring at the road ahead as it leaped and twisted away from him; he could see the awful mouth curve with satisfaction as the wheels sent stones flying in all directions, as birds flew up, and frightened rabbits scuttled for cover.

  “Let me get off, Tony,” Oliver begged. He felt horribly faint and sick, and his head was swimming. “I’m going to fall off,” he whimpered “. . . I’m slipping.” But all the man did was to get up more speed, as they screeched down the hill towards Stang. Then Oliver saw something that might save his life; a man placidly cutting a hedge in the pouring rain, with a green “Ranswick and District” lorry parked in a gateway, and a sign, “STOP, when the light is on red”.

  Tony rammed his brakes on, and Oliver bided his time, waiting till the cycle was going slowly enough for him to jump off. But something inexplicable was happening. The bike was approaching the red light in slow motion, and Oliver, trying to unstick his trembling fingers from the heavy leather back, found he was slowing down, too, and stopping altogether. His hands slid limply down the black jacket, then froze, stuck to the leather, and he sagged forward, closing his eyes again, not with relief, but because he was unable to move.

  A curious tingling was rippling through him now. In a calmer mood he’d have worked out a formula, something involving static electricity, and magnetic forces being drawn towards each other. But all Oliver knew was that he couldn’t separate himself from the motorcycle or from Tony Edge, and that if he didn’t break free he would die.

  He started to cry, and the rider turned round. When the cruel dark eyes met Oliver’s a stab of pain surged through him, and a lump stuck in his gullet. It was nothing to do with feeling sick, or the fact that his throat was raw after all his useless pleading. The pain was in the terror, and the terror was in that face.

  “Nearly home, mate,” a voice said from far away, but not kindly. The innocent remark sounded more like a curse, and the second the light turned green the motorbike surged forward in a final massive explosion of noise and fumes, almost taking off as it breasted the last dark hill, before dropping down into the black valley like a great gout of blood.

  “Sorry, kid. Some people can’t take speed. Allus makes ’em throw up. Our Sid’s the same. See you then. Ta ta.” And Tony Edge roared off towards Blake’s Pit, leaving Oliver outside Elphins, vomiting into the long grass.

  He was there for a long time, heaving and retching, till there was nothing left. His eyes were blurred now, and he had a splitting pain in his head. He stumbled up the garden path and went in at the kitchen door. He was beyond feeling embarrassed about Colin, Prill and the dog, he just wanted to talk to somebody. Anybody.

  But the kitchen was empty, and only Jessie lay by the smoking fire. When she saw who it was she stopped wagging her tail, put her nose in her paws and closed her eyes again. Oliver looked round helplessly. W
here was everyone? Where was Molly? And where was Rose Salt?

  He felt abandoned. Slumping down on to a rickety chair he buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Prill didn’t hear him because she was snooping about in Rose Salt’s bedroom, a little attic up some creaky stairs. They’d heard her shuffling about at night when everyone else was in bed. Rose had her own times for doing everything; no one ever seemed to know when she was going out, or when she might be back. Not even Molly.

  Wednesday was her day for cleaning the upstairs, and she’d done the children’s rooms while they were at the vet’s. Prill knew something was different the minute she opened the door, but she couldn’t work out what it was at first. Everything was as usual except that it was tidier, and there was a smell of lavender polish. Then she noticed the bed. Her nightdress lay neatly folded on the pillow, but Amy had gone.

  She crept up the attic stairs and pushed Rose’s door open, startled by the violence of her own emotions. It was only a doll, and Prill was twelve years old, well past the age for teddy bears and pink rabbits. But her mood came from something much deeper. It was part of the cold, barren feeling that was slowly creeping over her face as she stared round Rose’s bedroom, remembering all that had happened since they’d come to Stang, and trying to make sense of it.

  Horrible pictures crawled through her head: Rose’s ghostly figure on the very first night, plucking at the little doll; the bonfire that nobody put out, and that hideous snapping skeleton; the Edge family with their hard, cruel faces, all living near the evil-looking pit. And Jessie? Just what had happened to her? She didn’t really believe what Colin had told Molly. It didn’t ring true, somehow. Prill knew there was something else, something he hadn’t told her.