Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

I don’t understand what you want with me, Polly .

She buttoned her coat beneath her chin and blew grey steamy breath on her hands. The temperature was falling. It had to be less than five degrees. There’d be ice on the roads and sleet if it rained. If he didn’t drive careful coming round a curve, he’d lose control of the car. Perhaps she’d come upon him. She’d be the only one near enough to help. She’d cradle his head in her lap and press her hand to his brow and brush his hair back and keep him warm. Colin.

“He’ll be back to you, Polly,” Mr. Sage had said just three nights before his death. “You stand firm and be here for him. Be ready to listen. He’s going to need you in his life. Perhaps sooner than you think.”

But all of that was nothing more than Christian mumbo-jumbo, reflecting the most futile of Church beliefs. If one prayed long enough, there was a God who listened, who evaluated requests, who stroked a long white beard, looked thoughtful, and said, “Yesssss. I see,” and fulfilled one’s dreams.

It was a load of rubbish.

Polly headed south, out of the village, walking on the verge of the Clitheroe Road. The going was rough. The path was muddy and clogged with dead leaves. She could hear the squish of her footsteps over the wind that creaked above her in the trees.

Across the street, the church was dark. There would be no evensong till they got a new vicar. The Church Council had been interviewing for the past two weeks, but there seemed to be a scarcity of priests who wanted to take up life in a country village. No bright lights and no big city seemed to equate with no souls needing to be saved, which was hardly the case. There was plenty of scope for salvation in Winslough. Mr. Sage had been quick to see that, especially — and perhaps most of all — in Polly herself.

For she was a long time, long ago sinner. Skyclad in the cold of winter, in the balmy nights of summer, in the spring and fall, she had cast the circle. She had faced the altar north. Placing the candles at the circle’s four gates and using the water, the salt, and the herbs, she created a holy, magical cosmos from which she could pray. All the elements were there: the water, the air, the fire, the earth. The cord snaked round her thigh. The wand felt strong and sure in her hand. She used cloves for the incense and laurel for the wood and she gave herself — heart and soul, she declared — to the Rite of the Sun. For health and vitality. Praying for hope where the doctors had said there was none. Asking for healing when all they promised was morphine for the pain until death finally closed all.

Lit by the candles and the burning laurel’s flame, she had chanted the petition to Those whose presence she had earnestly invoked:

Annie’s health restor-ed be. God and Goddess grant my plea .

And she had told herself — convinced herself utterly — that her every intention was wholesome and pure. She prayed for Annie, her friend from childhood, sweet Annie Shepherd, darling Colin’s own wife. But only the spotless could call upon the Goddess and expect response. The magic of those who made the petition had to be pure.

Impulsively, Polly traced her steps back to the church and entered the graveyard. It was as black as the inside of the Horned God’s mouth, but she needed no light to show her the way. Nor did she need it to read the stone. ANNE ALICE SHEPHERD. And beneath it the dates and the words Dearest Wife . There was nothing more and nothing fancy, for more and fancy were not Colin’s way.

“Oh Annie,” Polly said to the stone that stood in the even deeper shadows where the wall of the yard skirted round a thick-branched chestnut tree. “It’s come upon me three-fold like the Rede says it would. But I swear to you, Annie, I never meant you harm.”

Yet even as she swore, the doubts were upon her. Like a plague of locusts, they laid her conscience bare. They exposed the worst of what she had been, a woman who wanted someone’s husband for her own.

“You did what you could, Polly,” Mr. Sage had told her, covering her hand with his own large mitt. “No one can truly pray away cancer. One can pray that the doctors have the wisdom to help. Or that the patient develops the strength to endure. Or that the family learns to cope with the sorrow. But the disease itself…No, dear Polly, one can’t pray away that.”

The vicar had meant well, but he didn’t really know her. He wasn’t the sort who could comprehend her sins. There was no absolution saying go in peace for what she had longed for in the foulest part of her heart.

Now she paid the three-fold price of having invited upon herself the wrath of the Gods. But it wasn’t cancer that they sent to affl ict her. It was a finer vengeance than Hammurabi could ever have wrought.

“I’d trade places with you, Annie,” Polly whispered. “I would. I would .”

“Polly?” A low, disembodied whisper in return.

She jumped back from the grave, her hand at her mouth. A rush of blood beat against her eyes.

“Polly? Is that you?”

Footsteps crunched just beyond the wall, gumboots snapping on the icy dead leaves that lay on the ground. She saw him then, a shadow among shadows. She smelled the pipe smoke that clung to his clothes.

“Brendan?” She didn’t need to wait for confirmation. What little light there was shone itself on Brendan Power’s beak of a nose. No one else in Winslough had a profile to match it. “What’re you doing out here?”

He seemed to read in the question an implicit and unintended invitation. He vaulted the wall. She stepped away. He approached her eagerly. She could see he held his pipe in his hand.

“I’ve been out to the Hall.” He tapped the pipebowl against Annie’s gravestone, dislodging burnt tobacco like ebony freckles on the frozen skin of the grave. He appeared to realise the impropriety of what he had done in the very next instant, because he said, “Oh. Damn. Sorry,” and he squatted and brushed the tobacco away. He stood, buried the pipe in his pocket, and shuffled his feet. “I was walking back to the village on the footpath. I saw someone in the graveyard, and I—” He lowered his head and seemed to be studying the barely discernible tops of his black gumboots. “I hoped it was you, Polly.”

“How’s your wife?” she asked.

He raised his head. “The renovation at the Hall’s been tampered with again. A bathroom tap left on. Some carpet’s got ruined. Rebecca’s worked herself into a state.”

“Understandable, isn’t it?” Polly said. “She wants a home of her own. It can’t be easy, living at her mum and dad’s, with a baby on the way.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not easy. For anyone. Polly.”

At the warmth of his tone, she looked away, in the distant direction of Cotes Hall where for the last four months a team of decorators and craftsmen had been pounding away at the long-abandoned Victorian structure, attempting to ready it for Brendan and his wife. “I can’t think why he doesn’t arrange for a night watchman.”

“He won’t be bullied into a watchman, he says. He’s got Mrs. Spence right on the grounds. He’s paying her to be there. And by God she ought to be bloody enough. Or so he says.”

“And does—” She worked at saying the name and betraying nothing as she said it. “Does Missus Spence never hear any mischief being made?”

“Not from her cottage. It’s too far behind the Hall, she says. And when she makes rounds, no one’s ever there.”

“Ah.”

They were silent. Brendan shifted his weight. Icy soil crackled beneath him. A gust of night wind soughed through the chestnut’s branches and blew at the back of Polly’s hair where the scarf couldn’t manage to hold it in place.