Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

Stephen was asking Miss Scales about Casper.

‘Whenever I see a picture of the Green Man, I think of Casper,’ she said. ‘It is his beard, I suppose, but also he has that light in his eyes and that thirst for the spaces and hills. He seems part of them to me.’

‘Witches talk to him, Miriam told me,’ Stephen said.

‘Certainly someone does,’ Katherine said a little sadly. ‘I have seen it. He’ll look fierce, or sometimes you are speaking to him and suddenly it appears he can hardly hear you. Sometimes they are kind and sometimes cruel to him, I think. There have been periods when he has disappeared into the hills for weeks on end, and come back very weak. I am sure it is they that drive him to distraction at those times. It leaves him a little strange, but he is a good man and I think he knows what can harm and heal in these hills.’

‘When did they begin to talk to him?’ Harriet shifted her son’s weight, and hoped her dress would not become too badly crushed.

‘Soon after his father died, I believe. It was 1754. Ruben was taken in the same illness that took my mother and sister and left me as you see me now. Poor Casper was still very young.’

Stephen looked concerned. ‘I hope they shall not start talking to me.’

Harriet wondered what she might say to reassure him, but Miss Scales was already patting his hand. ‘Do not trouble yourself, young man. Not every boy who loses a father is haunted in such a way.’ Miss Scales lifted her face and Harriet followed her gaze to where Crowther was standing on the lawn with Mr Askew. He looked severe.

It was at that same moment that Harriet became aware of a disturbance coming from where the lower lawns reached the lakeshore. She saw heads turning, the ladies covering their mouths then huddling together. Gently shifting Stephen from her lap, she stood. At the foot of the little wooden jetty she saw Felix, shoulders hunched, standing with an older man she did not recognise. He appeared to be shouting at Felix. To their left, a pair of younger men were helping a third man, soaked to the skin, out of the water. The third man was Mr Quince.

‘Stephen, stay here with Miss Scales, please.’ And when he looked as if he might be about to protest, she repeated, ‘Stay here,’ and before he could argue she began to walk briskly between the groups of staring guests, reaching the little group just as her son’s tutor managed to set foot on shore again.

Mr Quince was in a sorry state. He had lost one of his shoes, his hair was flattened to his pink face, and his pale coat was dirty, and clinging to him. He was gasping a little and his chin wobbled. He sat down on the bank and began to shiver, wrapping his arms around his thick waist and keeping his back to the staring crowd.

Harriet came to a halt by him. ‘Are you injured, Mr Quince?’

He looked up quickly and saw her. ‘No, I thank you, Mrs Westerman.’

‘What happened here?’ she asked.

An older gentleman stepped forward and pointed at Felix. ‘He pushed him in!’ He spoke with emphasis and passion enough to fill a theatre. ‘I saw it all. That gentleman,’ he indicated the unfortunate Mr Quince, ‘joined him on the jetty. They exchanged a few words. He bowed and turned away, then this damned boy pushed him in — just like that! I have never seen such a thing.’

The head-shaking and murmuring that followed this statement flowed up the lawn in ripples. The fierce gentleman’s words were being repeated and exclaimed at, all the way to the house.

Harriet glanced down at her shivering employee. He looked utterly miserable and she felt her palms itching to slap Felix’s face. ‘Felix?’

Before he could lift his eyes, they were interrupted by the trill of the Vizegrafin as she came down towards them almost at a run. Mrs Briggs followed behind her with a towel over her arm.

‘It was an accident! A silly accident. No doubt Mr Quince slipped. A narrow jetty for a big man.’

The witnesses’ looks were speaking. Mrs Briggs said nothing, but laid the towel around Mr Quince’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. He turned his blotched red face towards Felix with a look of loathing. ‘I did not slip.’

‘Wasn’t it, Felix, dear? An accident?’ The Vizegrafin put her hand on her son’s arm and smiled at the world in general, but Harriet noticed her fingers tightening round his wrist. Felix seemed to shake himself awake.

‘Naturally. I am so terribly sorry. It was I that lost my footing and stumbled against him. Please accept my apologies, Mr Quince. Unforgivably clumsy of me.’

He stepped forward and put out his hand. Mr Quince looked at it but made no move. Harriet was keenly aware of the total silence around them and the fixed attention of Mrs Briggs’s guests.

‘Mr Quince?’ she said, very softly and not moving her head. Mr Quince took Felix’s hand and shook it without a word. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Quince glanced at her, water still dripping from his hair onto the towel round his shoulders, then allowed himself to be shepherded by Mrs Briggs up the slope. The groups of people made way for him as he hobbled past, and stared, then as he passed began to whisper.

Felix watched his progress up the lawn, a slight smile on his lips, then turned to Harriet. ‘I am sorry your son’s tutor got a drenching, Mrs Westerman. These larger fellows can be rather unsteady on their feet.’

The Vizegrafin fluttered her eyelashes. ‘True, Felix, very true.’

Harriet moved away from them both without a word and followed Mr Quince up the lawn. Had Crowther renewed his offer to horsewhip Felix at this moment, she would have taken him up on it with delight.

Casper Grace did not travel as far from the lake as he had intended. He heard word as he left Keswick that one of the farmers between that village and Naddle Bridge had been asking for him, so he retraced his steps past the Druidic circle to call on him. The farmer, Kerrick, was a tall man with thick knuckles and the grave demeanour of a man who trusted neither his luck nor his land not to play a trick on him. He consulted Casper in a regular way, so Casper was welcomed into his kitchen with respectful friendliness. While Mistress Kerrick served them with house cheese, oatcakes and beer, her husband told Casper slowly that he was thinking on the purchase of a piece of land on the edges of what he already owned. Casper listened to the terms and when the beer was done, walked the ground with him. Casper thought it a fair price and he said so. He was ready to make his way off again, his eye on the progress of the red disk of the fogged sun, when Kerrick put a hand on his arm.

‘There’s also the matter of our lass, Mr Grace.’

The man had three daughters. The two younger ones were still infants, and if it were a matter of fever or shakes, Kerrick would have said so at their first words.

‘Agnes?’

Kerrick nodded and studied his thick boots. ‘There’s something in her manner these last weeks. She’s off and away in her head half the time, been out late in the evenings when she’s no right to be, and there’s a twitch to her. The livestock are nervous of her.’

Casper heard the rising whisperings of the witches in the still air. No wonder that Kerrick looked so wary. Casper liked Agnes. He had watched her grow from a stumbling toddler to a fine dark-haired girl of sixteen wearing the shape of a woman like a new dress. She had a certain wit and manner and had been quick to learn from him whatever he had thought to tell her. She was a wanderer in the wild places, like himself. He had seen her as he walked up to the stones with the boy from the Hall and his friends, and had thought the genteel company had made her shy when she did not come to meet them. Now he wondered if she had been shy of him .