At the churchyard gate, relief for both of them, him going one way, to his church, not looking back; Ma the other, down towards the street. Sky like lead crushing her into the brown ground.
Top of the street, Ma stopped and squinted. Two people. Willie and a woman. The woman from the funeral, the woman from the Moss, the woman with the Gift.
Bugger!
Couldn't be doing with it. Questions. Concern. Sit down, Ma. have a cuppa, put thi' feet up, tell us all about it. Tell me how I can help.
Pah!
Ma turned back up the street, waited at the opening to the brewery road till they'd gone past then took the path round the back of the cottages so nobody else would see the state of her. 'This?'
Water trickled dispiritedly from under the rock and plopped into the pool.
'Used to be a torrent,' Willie remembered.
'This is the holy well?'
The pool looked flat and sullen in the rain.
'There should be a statue,' Willie said.
'Of whom?'
'The… Mother. On that ledge. She had her hands out, blessing the spring. There's a ceremony, every May Day. Flowers everywhere. You can see it for miles. Then the lads'd come up from t'brewery, fill up a few dozen barrels, roll um down the hill. At one time, all the beer'd be made wi' this water, now it's shared out, so there's a few drops in each cask.'
Willie kicked a pebble into the pool. 'I'm saying 'now'. Gannons'll've stopped it.'
'Aye,' Moira said, 'there's no life here.' She bent down, dipped her hands in the pool. It felt stagnant. If Ma Wagstaff had come up here hoping for some kind of spiritual sustenance, she'd have gone away pretty damn depressed.
'Used to take it all wi' a pinch of salt,' Willie said, 'I mean… bit of nonsense, really. But we come up here. Every May Day we'd come up here, whole village at one time, all them as could walk. Then back to The Man, couple o' pints… bite to eat…'
Willie smiled. 'Good days, them, Moira. When you think back on it.'
'Hang on,' Moira said. 'There's something here.'
With both hands, she lifted it out, the spring water dripping from her palms. Dripping like tears from the eyes of the battered plaster head of the Mother of God.
'Oh, hell,' Willie said sorrowfully.
'The Mother?'
Willie nodded. 'There's three of um. Three statues. The young one, the Virgin, she's brought up on Candlemas – St Bride's day, beginning of February. Then the Mother – this one – at Lammas. Then, at All-Hallows, they bring the winter one.'
'The Hag,' Moira said.
Willie nodded.
'The Threefold Goddess,' Moira said. 'Virgin, Mother, Hag.'
'Summat like that. Like I say… pinch of salt. Women s stuff.'
'Your ma… she'd never be taking it with a pinch of salt.
'No,' said Willie.
'What about Matt?'
'He were different,' Willie said, 'when he come back. When we was lads it were just the way things were, you know? One of us'd be picked to collect stuff for t'seasonal crosses, collate it like, sort out what were what. We didn't reckon much on it. Bit of fun, like.'
'As it should be,' Moira said, pushing her sodden hair back to stop it dripping down her jacket. 'How else d'you get kids into it if it's no' fun?'
'Matt come back… wi' a mission. Know what 1 mean? Horridges had sold off brewery to Gannon's and Gannon's didn't want t'pub – it were doing nowt, were it? Local trade and a few ramblers of a Sunday. Perked up a bit when t'bogman were found, but not for long – nine day wonder sorta thing.'
'So Matt returns to buy the pub. Local hero.'
'Exactly. Spot on. Local hero, I tell thi, Moira… honest to God, he were me mate, but I wish he'd not come. You know what I mean?'
'I do now,' Moira said, hearing the tape in her head. 'He was an emotional man. An impressionable man. An obsessive man.'
Willie snorted. 'Can say that again.'
'But not a bad man,' Moira said.
'Oh no. I don't think so.'
'So somebody – or something was using him. He was a vessel. Willie, this bogman…?'
'Oh, bugger.' Willie looked up into the sky, now putting down water with a good bit more enthusiasm than the Holy Spring. The coins in his pocket chinked damply, 'I'm saying nowt. You've gorra talk to Ma.' He heard her creaking into the hall below. 'Gerrout from under me feet, Bobbie.'
The cat.
Heard her feet on the bottom stairs and slid himself into a room which, as he'd ascertained earlier, was a box room full of rubbish, tea-chests, heaps of old curtaining, a treadle sewing-machine shrouded in dust.
Took her a long time and a lot of laboured breathing to reach the top of the stairs. Heard her in the bathroom, the dribble and the flush and the old metal cistern filling up behind her with a series of coughs and gasps.
He brought a hand to the crown of his head, felt his emergent, urgent bristles one last time, for luck. Luck? You made your own. He put his glove back on. For a moment, a while back, someone hammering on the front door had flung him back to that night last summer in the stolen car. The police! But then he'd concentrated – go away – and the knocking had stopped.
Flexing and clenching his powerful, leathered hands, he moved out onto the landing as the old woman sighed and braced herself to go downstairs.
Not much left of her. Old bones in a frayed cardigan. Hair as dry and neglected as tufts of last summer's sheep wool caught in a wire fence.
Some witch, he thought, rising up behind her.
Quite slowly – although he knew he'd made no sound – she turned around and looked up at him, at his fingers poised above her bony, brittle shoulders. Then at his face.
And he looked at hers.
They'd always said, in the village, how fierce her eyes were. How she could freeze you where you stood with those eyes, turn you to stone, pin you to the wall.
Shaw Horridge grinned. Come on, then.
Wanting her to do that to him. Focus her eyes like lasers. Wanting the challenge, the friction. Wanting something he could smash, like hurling someone else's Saab Turbo into a bus shelter.
Wanted to do it and feel better.
But her eyes surprised him. They were as soft and harmless as a puppy's.
For a moment, this froze him.
'Come on,' he said, suddenly agitated. 'Come on, witch.'
She stared calmly at him, heels on the very edge of the top stair. Wouldn't take much of a push. That was no good.
He said, 'Where's your magic, eh? Where's your fucking magic now?'
She bit her worn-down bottom lip, but otherwise didn't move. 'Don't you know me?' she said. 'Do you not know me?'
He shook his head. 'You're going to die,' he said. 'Don't you realise that?'
The withered old face crumpled into an apology for a smile. 'I'm dead already, lad,' Ma Wagstaff said, voice trickling away like sand through an egg-timer. 'Dead already. But it's nowt t'do wi' you. You'll be glad of that, one day.'
