Michael Stewart - Ill Will

There was no showing from the owl, nor was there much evensong to soothe my ears, but the night still felt young and I was not tired. Nor was I in the mood for my usual book-learning. So I walked through the wood and onto the moor, past my makeshift den. The ground became tussocked and sopping. There were paths made by rabbits and foxes across the morass. I thought back to our moor, patterned with these types of paths. Some days we would follow them, me and you, Cathy, and they would stop dead. We used to say that those paths led to another place, beyond the physical world. A witching place from where you drew your magic. Past cottages, barns and turbary roads, turf and peat cuts healing over like scabs. Packhorse tracks, homesteads, landholdings. When all signs of human life vanished, that’s where we would stop and sit. Sometimes we’d watch fox cubs play or hares box. Other times, we’d lie back and look at the paintings in the sky that were far superior to those done by human hand and brush, for they were ever-changing from one thing to another. I’d see a castle, but you’d see a dragon’s eye. I would see the branch of a tree stretch into a withered arm, which would change again into a fish, then a bear. I’d point out the shape and try and get you to see what I could see, but you’d already spotted another thing of wonder and you were pointing it out to me: a rat, a bat, a frog, a fox.

The sun was slipping down past the horizon and the sky was closing in. The grass had given way to heather and I could hear the grouse croak like old crones cackling. Wet green moss grew like a soft woollen blanket, leggy heather, bracken, moss and sedge. Tangled sphagnum. Cotton-grass and bilberry. It was a moor like our moor where we used to watch the hatching of the peewit, whaap and sea pie. I remembered the moor as the place we had lived in and by. To run away to the moor in the morning and remain there all day. The moor was our school and our refuge. It was a place of solace and a place of wonder. Finding the gamekeeper’s heap of dead crows, or his gibbet of weasels. Once we came across a stoat trap, with a stoat still in it, miraculously unharmed, and we let it go, watching it scurry through the grass. A morning chorus of uncountable larks, uncountable beauty. Watching glead soar and hawks hover. In winter, snowdrifts deep enough to blanket the bog. In summer, the white tufts of cotton-grass waving over the same marsh. Yellow gorse, red poppies, purple heather. Every moss, every flower, every tint and form, we two noted and enjoyed. Even the smallest waterfall or heather-stand was a world of joy. The moors were an eternity where life was boundless and our bliss was endless.

No punishment could rob us of those moments. No braying deterred us. You plucked some white stalks of gorse and said they were bones. Our bones, whitened by the weather. We watched a puttock wheel in the mist and listened to the cackling moorcock flap through redding heather.

I felt such a strong yearning for those days, when it was just you and me and the moor, Cathy, that I felt it as a physical pain. Why had you let Edgar come between us? What did he have that money couldn’t buy? I ached for you. It was a sharp pang in the middle of my breast. Sometimes the longing got so bad that I could hardly breathe. It felt as though a viper was coiled around my heart, squeezing the life out of me. And I couldn’t unclasp it. I was suffocating. I was drowning. I was choking. All I wanted in the world was you. Now you had left me, abandoned me, and for what? Gold and silver and trinkets that meant nothing to you. I wanted to scream out: No, please, don’t leave me. I cannot live without you. I wanted to tear myself in two. I lay on the ground, felt the tears sting and let the acrid water drip from my eyes.

It was fully dark when I eventually came around. I made my way back to the farm by moonlight, dropping down from the moor on the other side. As I scuttled along the path in the silver light of the moon and the stars, I heard a distinct screaming. Not the screaming a vixen sometimes makes when she calls her mate or the long harsh screaming of a barn owl, but another sound. I thought for a moment that it was the screaming of a wild cat.

I stopped and cocked my head, listening more intently. As I did, I realised that the sound could only be one thing: the piercing scream of a person in pain. I followed it and found myself outside the building where the hay was stored. There was candlelight leaking from a crack in the door. I placed my eye there and saw a peculiar scene. The girl with the white-blonde hair and grey eyes was standing in the middle of the room. There were two men: one was the farmer’s son, Dick Taylor, the other I did not recognise. He was stocky with a thick mop of yellow hair, like a corn rig. The farmer’s son had hold of the girl with one arm, and his other hand was over her mouth. The man with yellow hair was uncoiling a length of rope. He took out an axe and I saw the metal blade glint in the light of the tallow candle. He chopped two lengths of rope. The axe cut through the thick rope as though it were a single blade of grass. He took one length and tied it to a wooden pillar, then took hold of one of the girl’s arms. He tied the rope firm around her wrist. Then he took the second length and tied her other wrist to a wooden post on the far side of her. I could see the panic in the girl’s eyes.

When she was firmly tied, the man who had hold of her stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and tied another around her face, preventing her from screaming out. The man with yellow hair went to the back of the barn. I couldn’t see what he was doing but when he came back he had a black leather bull whip in one hand. The farmer’s son took out a knife and used it to cut the girl’s frock. He then tore it so that the entire length of her back was exposed. Then the man with yellow hair uncoiled the whip and cracked the air. He smiled at the farmer’s son.

‘Give it to me,’ Dick Taylor said.

‘Spoilsport.’

The man with yellow hair handed over the whip to the farmer’s son. The farmer’s son put the knife on the ground. He cracked the whip himself a few times and smiled. Then he walked up to the girl, turned around and counted his strides back. On the sixth stride he stopped and turned to face her. He stood quite still for a moment, then cracked the whip across the girl’s flesh. She flinched in pain and her eyes bulged. Her skin split where the point of the whip sliced at the flesh and blood leaked out. I saw it pour from the wound and felt a heat rise within. I thought about Hindley and the whip he had used on me. I knew how it could cut through flesh and I felt the girl’s pain as if it were my own. And then a kind of mania spiralled in my head. My thoughts were travelling upwards like a puttock in the sun, to be replaced by a cold, hard, black feeling.

I shouldered the door and burst through. Both men turned around to face me. I picked up the axe from the ground and ran at the farmer’s son, who was still clutching the whip. He pulled the whip back and tried to crack it across my face, but as he did I lunged at him with the axe, grabbed for the whip, and chopped his hand clean off at the wrist. He screamed and blood gushed from the wound. I went for the other man but before I could get hold of him he ran out of the barn, closely followed by the bleeding farmer’s son. Then I was on my own with the girl. The severed hand was on the ground on top of some straw, twitching. It was still clutching the whip. I untied the girl and removed the handkerchiefs from her face and mouth.

‘Are you hurt bad?’ I asked.

She was standing quite still, staring at me impassively.

‘I’ve had worse,’ she said.

‘Why were those men whipping you?’

‘They said I’m a witch.’