Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Of what?”

Maggie couldn’t put the rest into words. She stood in the courtyard with the night wind whistling through her filthy clothes, and she couldn’t move forward and she couldn’t go back. Because there was no back, as she knew quite well. And going forward meant devastation.

But apparently, she would not need to go anywhere, for Juliet said, “Oh my God, Maggie,” and seemed to know it all. She said, “How could you ever think… You’re my life. You’re everything I have. You’re—” She leaned against the door-jamb with her fi sts on her eyes and her head raised up to the sky. She began to cry.

It was a horrible sound, like someone was pulling her insides out. It was low and ugly. It caught in her breath. It sounded like dying.

Maggie had never before seen her mother cry. The weeping frightened her. She watched and waited and clutched at her coat because Mummy was the strong one, Mummy stood tall, Mummy was the one who knew what to do. Only now Maggie saw that Mummy was not so very much different from her when it came to hurting. She went to her mother. “Mummy?”

Juliet shook her head. “I can’t make it right. I can’t change things. Not now. I can’t do it. Don’t ask me.” She swung from the doorway and went into the house. Numbly, Maggie followed her into the kitchen and watched her sit at the table with her face in her hands.

Maggie didn’t know what to do, so she put on the kettle and crept round the kitchen assembling tea. By the time she had it ready, Juliet’s tears had stopped but under the harsh overhead light, she looked old and ill. Wrinkles reached out in long zigzags from her eyes. Her skin was blotched with red marks where it wasn’t pasty. Her hair hung limply round her face. She reached for a paper napkin from its metal holder and blew her nose on it. She took another and blotted her face.

The telephone began to ring. Maggie didn’t move. Which way to head was mystery now, and she waited for a sign. Her mother pushed back from the table and picked up the receiver. Her conversation was emotionless and brief. “Yes, she’s here…Frank Ware found them… No…No…I don’t…I don’t think so, Colin… No, not tonight.” Slowly, she replaced the receiver and kept her fingers on it, as if she were gentling an animal’s fears. After a moment in which she did nothing but look at the telephone, in which Maggie did nothing but look at her, she went back to the table and sat once again.

Maggie brought her the tea. “Chamomile,” she said. “Here, Mummy.”

Maggie poured. Some sloshed into the saucer and she reached hastily for a napkin to soak it up. Her mother’s hand closed over her wrist.

“Sit down,” she said.

“Don’t you want—”

“Sit down.”

Maggie sat. Juliet took the teacup out of its saucer and cradled the cup between her palms. She looked into the tea and swirled it slowly round and round. Her hands looked strong, steady, and sure.

Something big was about to happen. Maggie knew. She could feel it in the air and in the silence between them. The kettle was still hissing gently on the cooker, and the cooker itself snapped and popped as it cooled. She heard this as background to the sight of her mother’s head lifting as she made her decision.

“I’m going to tell you about your father,” she said.

POLLY SETTLED INTO THE tub and let the water rise round her. She tried to concentrate on the warm wash of it between her legs and the gush of it across her thighs as she sank, but instead she caught herself in the midst of a cry, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She saw the negative image of her body fading slowly against her eyelids. Tiny pits of red replaced it. Then black swept in. That’s what she wanted, the black. She needed it behind her eyelids, but she wanted it in her mind as well.

She hurt more now than she had this afternoon at the vicarage. She felt as if she’d been stretched on the rack, with her groin ligaments torn from their proper housings. Her pubic and pelvic bones seemed beaten and raw. Her back and her neck were throbbing. But this was a pain that would recede, given time. It was the other pain that she feared would never leave her.

If she saw only the black, she wouldn’t have to see his face any longer: the way his lips curled back, the sight of his teeth and his eyes like slits. If she only saw the black, she wouldn’t have to see him stagger to his feet afterwards, with his chest heaving and the back of one wrist scouring his mouth of the taste of her. She wouldn’t have to watch him lean against the wall while he stuffed himself back into his trousers. She would still have to bear the rest of it, of course. That endless, guttural voice and the knowledge it provided of the fi lth she was to him. The invasion of his tongue. His teeth biting, his hands tearing, and then the last when he scourged her. She would have to live with that. There was no memory pill she could take to wipe it away, no matter how much she liked to hope there might be.

The worst of it was that she knew she deserved what Colin had done to her. Her life was governed, after all, by the laws of the Craft and she had violated the most important:

Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfi l: An it harm none, do what ye will .

All those years ago, she had convinced herself that she cast the magic circle for Annie’s own good. But all the while in her most secret heart, she had thought — and hoped — that Annie would die and that her passing would bring Colin closer to herself in a grief he would want to share with someone who had known his wife. And this, she had believed, would lead them to loving each other and lead him to an eventual forgetting. Towards this end — which she called noble, unselfish, and right — she began to cast the circle and perform the Rite of Venus. It was no matter that she had not changed to this Rite until nearly a year after Annie’s death. The Goddess was not and had never been a fool. She always read the soul of the petitioner.The Goddess heard the chant:

God and Goddess up above

Bring me Colin in full love

and She remembered how three months before Annie Shepherd’s death, her friend Polly Yarkin — with sublime powers that came only from being a child conceived of a witch, conceived within the magic circle itself when the moon was full in Libra and its light cast a radiance on the altar stone at the top of Cotes Fell — had stopped performing the Rite of the Sun and had switched to Saturn. Burning oak, wearing black, breathing hyacinth incense, Polly had prayed for Annie’s death. She had told herself that death wasn’t to be feared, that the ending of a life could come as a blessing when the suffering endured had been profound. And that is how she had justified the evil, all the time knowing that the Goddess would not let evil go unpunished.

Everything until today had been a prelude to the descent of Her wrath. And She had exacted Her retribution in a form that exactly matched the evil committed, delivering Colin to Polly not in love but in lust and violence, turning the magic three-fold against its maker. How stupid ever ever to think that Juliet Spence — not to mention the knowledge of Colin’s attentions to her — was the punishment that the Goddess intended. The sight of them together and the realisation of what they were to each other had merely acted to lay the foundation for the real mortification to come.

It was over now. Nothing worse could happen, except her own death. And since she was more than half dead now, even that didn’t seem so terrible.

“Polly? Luv-doll? What’re you doin’?”

Polly opened her eyes and rose in the water so quickly that it sloshed over the side of the tub. She watched the bathroom door. Behind it, she could hear her mother’s wheezing. Rita generally climbed the stairs only once a day— to go to bed — and since she never made that climb until after midnight, Polly had assumed she would be safe when she’d fi rst called out that she’d be wanting no dinner as she entered the lodge, hurried up to the bathroom, and shut herself in. She didn’t reply. She reached for a towel. The water sloshed again.