Ann Pilling - The Beggar’s Curse

Molly Bover was a great leaver of messages. Colin came down first next morning and found the kitchen table covered with little notes. One : She’d gone off at seven, with the poodles, and taken a carload of pots to a craft fair near Chester. Two : She would drop Oliver’s film into Kwik Flicks, a new rapid-developing place in Ranswick. Three : Breakfast was on the stove. Four : Her old friend Winnie Webster was expecting them for lunch at twelve-thirty sharp. Her bungalow was easy to find, they just had to follow their noses to Blake’s Pit. “DON’T BE LATE!” she’d added in curly capitals, decorating the exclamation mark with a skull and crossbones.

There were no notes for Rose Salt. Perhaps Oliver was right, perhaps she was a bit weak in the head. She probably couldn’t read. Colin looked all round, but there was no sign of her. The long brown mack had gone from its hook on the back of the door, and the carpet bag had vanished too.

He helped himself to porridge and buttered a pile of toast. If Rose had made the nutty brown bread she could certainly cook. Colin ate so much it was quite an effort to get up from the table. Then he remembered Jessie. Molly had put her in the shed in exchange for the poodles – quite a comedown, after queening it all night by the kitchen fire. She was overjoyed to see him and made a lot of noise. He clipped her lead on and they set off along the village street towards the church. Prill thought his fascination for graveyards was morbid, but Colin quite fancied being an archaeologist, and if you wanted to work out the history of a place you should begin with its church, according to Dad.

Every cottage seemed to have two or three cats and Jessie barked systematically at every single one. As he walked past the village shop a man flung open an upstairs window and bellowed, “Keep that dog quiet, will you!” The shop front was very shabby, and all the blinds were down. “Edge Brothers, General Provision Merchant, High Class Butchers and Poulterers” was written across them in white. It looked anything but “high class”. It was nearly nine o’clock but there were no signs of life at all, and it wasn’t Sunday.

The man at the window was still in his pyjamas. His eyes followed Colin along the street and watched him turn up into the lane that led to the church. The boy’s neck prickled. One quick, backward glance had revealed the Edge face again. It was as if some demon farmer had gone round Stang with a giant butter pat, stamping his mark. It was the same look, the same stare, the same eyes. Awful.

When he saw the church he did another double take. On top of a square, chubby tower there was an elegant steeple, but it was definitely crooked; in fact it was toppling to one side quite alarmingly, like the leaning tower of Pisa. The church was obviously under repair. There was a concrete mixer by the door, a litter of scaffolder’s poles, and some piles of newly cut sandstone blocks, all marked with numbers. A man in overalls climbed down a ladder to talk to him.

“Looks dreadful, doesn’t it?” he said with a grin. “Don’t worry, son, it won’t fall over.”

“Are you underpinning?” Colin asked, rather pleased with himself for knowing the right word.

“Oh no, now that really would mean rebuilding, digging into the foundations, and all that lark. No, the spire’s safe enough. They watch it, you know. Lots of buildings lean a bit, in Cheshire. It’s the old salt workings.”

“Yes, I know.” Cleverclogs Oliver had told them that.

“We’re just renewing some of the stonework on the tower. Some old woman died recently and left this place all her money. Good for trade, of course.” He started to go back up the ladder. “You could come up and have a look tomorrow, when the boss isn’t around ,” he added in a whisper, pointing a finger heavenwards to a pair of legs.

“I might. . . Thanks,” Colin said. But as he watched the man crawling spider-like up the underside of the toppling spire he felt quite sick and closed his eyes. It was such a delicate steeple and it leaned so horribly. He could see the weight of the cheerful builder dragging the whole thing down. . .

For a while he wandered round the churchyard, looking at the graves. Everything was very overgrown; daffodils had speared up through the grass but they were still tightly closed, and the trees remained a sullen brown. How cold and damp it all was. He had no gloves, scarf, or hat. Just for once he quite envied Oliver all those winter woollies.

The graveyard was dominated by three names: Edge, Wright and Bover. Others had come and gone, but these families had obviously been around for centuries. There were dozens of Wrights, and about twenty Bovers, but the Edges outnumbered everyone else. It was as if they had a stranglehold on the village.

Colin noticed that several people in Stang had lived rather short lives. One stone marked the death of James Weaver in 1803 “Whom Neptune Deprived of Life”. He was only seventeen. There was an Isaac Bostock and his son Samuel who had both died “pitifully”, in a drowning accident. Where? Could it have been Blake’s Pit? But there was nothing to say. Most pathetic of all was the grave of the three Massey children, “tragically lost” on the night of April 21st 1853. How and why they were “lost” the crumbling headstone did not reveal.

The Edge clan, on the other hand, had obviously enjoyed rude health. They’d had large families and most of them had lived into ripe old age. This dank, cold village in the valley bottom obviously suited them perfectly.

At ten o’clock Oliver was walking towards Blake’s Pit with a Thermos flask under his arm. Molly had left it out for Rose to take to a sick old lady in the village. “Now I’ll leave it ready on the kitchen table,” she’d said last night. “Rose? Are you listening, dear? Don’t forget it, will you? Miss Brierley likes her drop of soup. Now don’t forget it, Rose .” But she had, and Oliver had found the red flask still on the table. He didn’t mind taking it to Miss Brierley’s cottage, he was quite used to old people, and they didn’t bother him in the way they seemed to bother his cousin Prill. She’d pulled a face when Molly suggested they might drop in on this old lady, now and again.

Her tiny cottage was called Blake’s End. It was easy to find because it was the very last house in the village. The only other place anywhere near it was an untidy farmhouse, with an ancient caravan in a field at the front. This was Pit Farm where Tony and Sid Edge lived with their parents and their sister Violet.

The caravan was apparently let to a family of cousins. It was moored at the edge of a great sea of rusting machinery, old radiators, car tyres, and lumps of old iron. Oliver walked past slowly, to get a good look. In a place like Stang there might be some old farming tools. There might even be a man trap. . .

As he lurked in the lane the caravan door opened and three small children sidled out to inspect him. They were pale-faced and doughy-looking, overweight and squat, a bit like puddings. They stared at Oliver, all in a row, like a set of small toby jugs.

But he wasn’t going to be put off by three little kids. In the long grass he could see something quite promising, a cruel-looking cutting instrument with spikes. He bent down to look at it but the Puddings never took their gaze off him. They followed every move he made with their hard little eyes. Then one of them yelled, “Mam! Mam !” and a face popped out from the doorway. “Keep your hands off that!” the woman shrieked. “This is private property. So clear off!”

Oliver grabbed his Thermos flask and fled, hardly daring to look up at the cheerless farmhouse where the Edges lived, and he didn’t stop running till he was outside Miss Brierley’s door, at Blake’s End.