‘I exorcise thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy, the entire spectre… In the name of Jesus Christ… get out and flee from this creature of God,..’ The girl twined her fingers in her lap, compressing them to feel the knuckle joints grind into each other, and lowered her eyes. The Dutch lamp hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly, its flame leaping and flickering. There was no wind.
Father Edwardes paused and lifted his head quietly to stare at the lamp. The flame steadied, burning again bright and tall. A muffled sob from old Sarah at the foot of the bed; Tim Strange reached forward to squeeze her hand.
‘He Himself commands thee, who has ordered thee cast down from the heights of heaven to the depths of the earth. He commands thee, who commands the sea, the winds, and the tempests… Hear therefore and fear 0 Satan, enemy of the faith, foe to the human race…
Down below the loco chattered again, softly. Margaret turned back unwillingly. Strange how the very sound of oiled steel could evoke such a tapestry of images. The summer-night roads, whitish-grey ribbons trailing into darkness, warm still with the sun’s heat, owl and bat haunted; buzz of early insects in the air, churr of feeding birds; grass knee-long, rich as black velvet under the moon; tall wild hedgerows heavy with the blood-pouring scent of the may. She wanted in an intense flash of longing to be clear of the room and the house, run and dance, roll in the grass till the stars spun giddy sparks above her face.
She swallowed and made instinctively and automatically the sign of the Cross. Father Edwardes had counselled her very closely against any such levity of thought, any aberration that might herald the advent of a possessing and vengeful spirit. ‘For my child,’ the priest had warned solemnly, quoting from the Enchiridion of Von Berg, ‘they may approach mildly; but afterwards they leave behind grief, desolation, disturbance of soul, and clouds of the mind…’
A vein throbbed in Father Edwardes’s temple. Margaret bit her lip. She knew she should go to him now, join the force of her prayers with his, but she couldn’t move. Something stopped her; the same Thing that held her tongue at confession, wouldn’t have her near the box. It seemed, if such a thing were possible, that the long room was skewed; twisted in some strange way, its walls discontinuous, the floor curving and waving hinting at dimensions beyond the senses. As if the short distance that separated her from the group by the bed had become a gulf across which she had stepped to another planet. She shook her head, irritable at the idea; but the fancies persisted. She felt a moment of giddiness; the swinging over nothing, the awful fetch and check of the falling nightmare.
The room steadied on its new dimensions; ‘up’ was now clearly represented by two differing directions. The lamp, hanging still, seemed to be twisted towards her; at her back the window leaned away. She caught her breath, feeling stifled, and the scents and visions came again, soothing and lulling, profferings from hell. Sweet musk of the may, fresh brown stench of new furrows where bread and other things were buried in defiance of Mother Church…
She wanted to call out, take the robes of the priest and beg forgiveness, tell him to stop his mummeries because the fault and the evil lay in her. She tried to scream and thought she had but a deep part of her knew her lips hadn’t moved. She could still see Father Edwardes as if through darkened glass, the hand falling and rising, making again and again the sign of the Cross; she could hear the voice grind on but she herself was a million miles away, out among the cold burning of the stars and the balefires on the mounds of the dead where the Old Ones watched for a time. She was conscious dimly of a knocking and rattling rising to crescendo, the curtains flapping sudden and nauseating across the window. The lamp flame waned again, browning.
‘YIELD THEREFORE; YIELD NOT TO ME, BUT TO THE MINISTER OF CHRIST. FOR HIS POWER URGES THEE, WHO SUBJUGATED THEE TO HIS CROSS. TREMBLE AT HIS ARM…’
The clanging in the room was thunderous. Margaret fell upward, into night.
A voice calling in the darkness, strident and bright.
‘Margaret!’
‘Margaret!’
A waiting; then, ‘Will you come this minute…’
But the voice could be ignored, until its final utterance. ‘Margaret Belinda Strange, will you come…’ That, the mystic invocation of the second name, must never go unheeded. To defy it would be an open invitation to slapping, to bed-without-supper; and that was a terrible thing on a bright summer night.
The small girl stood on tiptoe, fingers clutching the edge of the desk top. Its surface stretched away from an inch before her nose, rich with wood grain, greasy, shiny, magical with the special magic of grown-up things. ‘Uncle Jesse, what are you doing?’ Her uncle put his pen down, ran his fingers through thick hair still black, touched with grey now at the temples. He shoved his steel-framed spectacles up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. His voice rumbled at the child. ‘Makin’ money, I guess…’ Nobody could have told whether he was smiling or not.
Margaret turned up her button nose. ‘Pooh…’ Money was an incomprehensible affair; the word made a shape in her mind, bulky and brown as the ledgers over which her uncle toiled. Something far-off and uninteresting yet vaguely sinister. ‘Pooh…’ The grubby fingers curled on the desk edge. ‘Do you make a lot of money?’
‘Fair bit, I reckon…’ Jesse was working once more, fist half obscuring the lines of the
neat figures crawling into existence on the thick cream paper.
Margaret cocked her head at him, trying to see his face, wrinkling her nose again. That last was a new accomplishment and she was proud of it. She said suddenly, ‘Do I annoy you?’
Jesse grinned, figuring in his head. ‘No, lass…’
‘Sarah says I do. What are you doing?’
Steadily. ‘Makin’ money…’
‘Why do you want so much?’
The burly man stopped openmouthed, arms half raised; an odd gesture. He stared at the low ceiling, the total lost now in his mind, then turned to scoop the child onto his knee. Grinning again. ‘Why? Well, I reckon little maid… I reckon I couldn’t rightly say now.’
Margaret sat watching, frowning a little and smelling the tobacco-nearness of him, chubby legs stuck out, well-picked scabs on the knees, the seat of her knickers black where she’d made a slide with Neville Serjeantson in the orchard behind the warehouses, out of some boxes and old steel rails. The yard foreman placed the rails for the children, to keep them quiet awhile. They were forever in the sheds, and underfoot when they backed the great iron engines; they were the bane of his existence.
‘I reckon…’ said Jesse. He stopped again, thinking and laughing. ‘Well, so’s one day I could put a hundred thousand where once there were only ten. Only you wouldn’t understand that, see?’ He shoved vaguely at her hair, frowning at a tuft that had been yellow, was stuck together now with a dob of axle grease. ‘You bin in they sheds again? Sarah’ll give thee summat, dang me if she don’t…’
‘Not going with Sarah. Staying with you.’ The child wriggled, reached out for a rubber stamp and plonked it onto the blotter; then lacking further damageable surfaces, the back of Jesse’s hand. Words showed faintly, bright blue against the brown seaming and wrinkling of the skin. Strange and Sons of Dorset, Hauliers… ‘Margaret Belinda Strange…’
Jesse swung her down and laughed, dusted her drawers for her as she ran.
The memory stayed with Margaret; one of those odd, arbitrary moments out of childhood that seem to become enshrined in consciousness, never to be forgotten. Her uncle’s lined, hard face, blue-jawed, close above her; the sunlight lying across the desk, Sarah calling, the stamp with its bulging black handle and the little brass stud that showed which way round it was when you pressed it down. A rare enough moment it was too, for Jesse was not an expansive man. His niece called good night to him later, standing at her window to see him leave the house, jacket slung across his shoulder, on his way to drink beer with his men at the Hauliers’ Arms just along the street. But he’d changed again then; all she got back was the faint sour pulling of the mouth corners, the grunt he’d use to answer anybody as he slammed the door arid tramped with a scraping and crunching of boots across the yard.