The Devil's Footsteps. John Burke
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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