‘Because the finger points at me,’ she said, ‘and for what reason I cannot know.’
The woman sat on a wooden stool, rocking back and forth, the arm still rigidly outstretched, but the hand now a tightly balled fist that made the knuckles glow white and fierce. ‘See, but a single kiss from the Devil’s mouth breathes evil into the body, to course through the body and to consume the soul. See standing before you the Devil’s handicraft, for behold, why, in the face of time’s passing is her beauty undimmed? Why hast not time chipped away at the thin shell of youth to reveal the ageing woman beneath?’
‘Please do not say such things!’ Elizabeth begged, her hand to her chest. ‘Son, make your wife stop!’
‘When God so wills it so will she stop,’ he said. ‘And I am no true son of yours.’
‘What is it you say?’ she asked.
‘What she says is true,’ said her husband. ‘Thou art still young, unchanged. Many remark upon it behind their hands, behind closed doors. Where are the lines of old age? Where is the skin that sags and hairs of grey?’ he put a hand to his own head.
‘Wouldst thou have me haggard and bent?’
‘I would have thee free from possession.’
She gasped. ‘Possession? I am no more possessed than thee!’
‘Look! Look!’ cried the young woman. ‘She grows horns!’ She covered her eyes with both her arms.
‘That is not true!’ Elizabeth defended.
‘She sees a vision,’ said the young man. ‘A vision sent by God to unmask thy true self.’
Elizabeth rushed forward and put her hands on the woman’s shoulders, shaking her wildly. ‘Stop this! Stop this blasphemy at once!’ she demanded.
It was the young man who struck her. A glancing blow with his fist to her head that saw her reel groggily backwards, her hand to her throbbing cheek. ‘Robert!’ she said, shocked. ‘What is it that you do? Thou wilt strike one that looks upon thee as thine own mother?’
‘I strike the Devil!’ he said breathlessly, standing between Elizabeth and his wife. ‘And I would do the same again if you once more lay your vile hands upon this the godliest of women!’
‘You will leave this house at once,’ said Elizabeth’s husband, ‘for thou hast brought shame upon it.’
‘It is my home!’ she cried, tears beginning to fall. ‘Please, Robert, think upon what it is you do! Have I not been a dutiful wife and mother?’
‘To enter my heart and corrupt it thou hast done many things.’ He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to a tiny looking glass, forcing her to gaze upon her smeared reflection. ‘See? See? The Devil grows not old and you grow not old. It has been the talk in the village for a long while and I have refused to believe the evidence of mine own eyes. But it was all along a trick and finally you have been unmasked by my son’s wife.’
‘She grows scales! She grows scales as those of a fish!’ moaned the young woman in the chair as if in response.
He released her as though frightened, wiping his hands on his tunic as if to remove dirt. ‘Leave!’ he demanded. ‘Leave now, Elizabeth. I will delay denouncing you till first light tomorrow, but no longer.’ She stood immobile before him, her eyes beseeching. He appeared to soften. ‘Elizabeth, do as I say, for your own good. I appeal to the last dregs of the woman that used to be my wife.’
‘I am your wife! I am the woman who has loved thee since first we met.’
‘I do not recognise thee as such anymore,’ he said flatly and turned his back on her. ‘Thou art the Devil’s vessel and my true dear wife is now dead to me.’
She was bundled out onto the street and the door slammed closed behind her. She fell to her knees her hands clasped before her, and begged them to reconsider. Then a stone hit her between the shoulder blades and she yelped in pain. When she rose to her feet and turned she saw a small number of villagers scowling at her, keeping their distance, people she had known all her life. She held out her hands imploringly, but they bent and picked up more stones and pelted her with them till she could take the hail no more and ran from the village covering her head. She ran till she was beyond the village boundary and took shelter in a wood, collapsing in grief and exhaustion by a stagnant pool of water. She eventually lifted her head, peered into the pool with her hand poised to dip into it so that she could drink. But she saw her reflection and screamed, pounding the mocking image into a thousand sparkling pieces with her balled fist. But it settled and the image came back. It would always come back and it would never change.
The memory was painful; Charles Rayne could read it in her eyes, in her heavy words. They all could. Baxter and Wood were hanging onto her every breath, Baxter’s mouth hanging open fractionally. Time had not diminished the impact, diluted the sting of the tale, and the room was heavy with its implications. She took a sip from a glass of water, a pause in which her gaze played on some far memory, before she started again.
‘I was taken in by a convent eventually,’ she said. ‘And here I thought I might find peace. I might dedicate my life to God’s work, to put to rights the wrongs that I had obviously done to incur His displeasure. But it was not to be. As others grew old so I stayed young and I was forced to run away before I was denounced as a witch, sent by the Devil to corrupt the women of the convent. Only then did I truly realise I had been cursed. I do not know what I would have done if it had not been for Stephen de Bailleul finding me.
‘He shared my curse. He did not grow old. He had already seen two hundred winters. He had fought as a knight in the Holy Wars against the Moors; told me that as penance for the many he sins committed abroad he had been forced to wander the earth for all time. He told me that there were others like us, too. But time had given him the skills needed to survive and he taught me how to live life like he had done, in short bursts, moving from place to place, creating a different identity, carrying our wealth with us only in the form of gold and silver. But he also taught me about the Church of Everlasting Bliss and to be forever wary of them. He taught all of us. At first there were ten people. Ten immortals. We would never come together all at once, but Stephen was to become our leader of sorts. We knew we were not alone. We had each other and we had Stephen to lead the way. But one by one, over many years, we were hunted down by Doradus, till all that remained of the ten were Stephen and me.
‘Doradus finally caught up with Stephen de Bailleul in Suffolk in the year 1929 and with his death I was left completely alone.’ She looked across at Charles Rayne. ‘The body in the barn was Stephen,’ she said. ‘But you already knew that, didn’t you?’
Charles remembered how she looked all that time ago as plainly if it were only yesterday. All of them gathered in this tiny room to listen to the words of someone who had lived more than anyone else on earth, perhaps. As young, as unaltered, as if she had lived but twenty-odd years. A beautiful casket with the dead weight of many tragic years inside it. And he remembered how he had fallen in love with her, though in truth he’d fallen in love long before he’d even met her. Fallen in love with her from the moment he read about her in his grandfather’s journals and saw her photograph taken in the Shelter at Gattenby House.
But how could she love him? How could anyone love him? Yet that did not stop the fire within him. He would do anything for her. He even endangered his own friends’ lives to save her. He knew the risks. He knew more about Doradus and the Church of Everlasting Bliss than he’d let on to Baxter and Wood. Poor Baxter. He should not have put pen to paper about Doradus. He may have needed the money, but word obviously got out about his Return to Eden, maybe through the publisher, who knows? But he paid the price for his foolishness; they found him and killed him. As they did with Carl, too. Next it would be him. The net was closing on him fast and he had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, even if he could set foot out of the house, which he couldn’t except at night. He was trapped like a fish in a drying-out puddle of water.