When Farbody told me this, there in that warm and pleasant room, the sunlight on the books and the domestic pipe-smoke mild in the air, the hair rose on my neck.
‘In heaven’s name,’ I said.
The scholar smiled again, pleased with himself and with the peculiar tale he had memorized so well. ‘Yes, something in that gives you a turn, doesn’t it? She seems to be speaking so charmingly, innocently, and it makes the skin creep. I can tell you, sir, I read this story first when I was a boy of eleven, and I was awake nights after, until my mother scolded some reason into me and hid the volume I’d been reading. Which may explain,’ he added amiably, ‘my lifelong quest for such hidden trifles of knowledge.’
Farbody then went on with the narrative.
Josebaar turned quickly from love to shrinking horror at his young wife. At first he tried to arrange a separation between them, but she would have none of this; then he had thoughts of escaping her by going overseas. But she guessed his course, and is said to have assured him she loved him too well to let him go. If he must leave, she would find and follow him, and he did not doubt that she had the powers to do so.
In the end, Hawkins, pale and harried, went to his friends, among whom was the priest, and confessed he was in such fear that he should not ‘soon remain alive, since the woman eats me up from the inside out’. By what grim stages the others came round to Hawkins’s state of mind, Farbody said one might only conjecture, and similarly if any money was involved in it. ‘But those were ignorant and superstitious times,’ he reflected. ‘Alas, they are still.’ Whatever went on, whatever the span of its duration, a plan was presently devised to rid Josebaar Hawkins of the woman.
‘He pretended to her that he had only been testing her with his talk of going off, to see how much she loved him. And finding her so faithful, he meant to reward her. He told her he had put by an especial gift for her, an heirloom of his family, kept in a wooden chest in the attics of the house. But it would amuse him if she would go up and look first through the wood of its lid, and so say what she saw, before he unlocked the chest and gave her the trophy. Well, it seems she could easily see through wood but not through her husband, and up she went. No sooner was she in the room with the empty chest than he slammed closed the door and secured it. And then at once came a gang of men and bricked the door up, and others came along the roof to seal and brick up the window.’
The bizarre quality of Farbody’s recitation was added to, for me, by a sense of historical fact that seemed to underlie the whole. I found myself asking abruptly, ‘Could she not have opened the window — or broken the pane, before the roof-gang reached her?’
‘No, dear sir. Remember, the glass in those days was of much thicker and sturdier stuff than the flimsy crystal of our day. Besides, Hawkins had previously pinned the window shut. I mean, he had driven iron pins through the frame to the brickwork, and hammered in longer pins lengthwise all across.’
‘Hence the horrible rhyme: a brick and a pin.’
‘Just so. Besides, too, she was very high up, and the men anyway would have thrust her back — she was physically no match for them. They must have been a harsh crew. All the while they were doing it, blocking her in to die the slow death of starvation and thirst, Amber Maria was shrieking, imploring them. And after they had finished, she screamed and howled in her prison for uncountable days and nights, before she fell silent for ever. There are many reports of this.’
I shuddered. ‘In God’s name, you speak as if it really happened.’
He looked at me. ‘My dear sir, it did. I can make no claims for her sorcery, but the facts of her death are undoubtedly true. Some years after, Josebaar Hawkins was hanged for her murder. For he confessed to it, having had not a quiet hour since.’
‘And then? Did they unlock the room?’
‘That they did not. The story concludes with that asseveration. No one would go near the house, let alone pull bricks away from any part of it. That they left, and leave, to the mercy of God.’
I sat some while in silence. Perhaps, very likely, I looked grim or rattled, for the scholar came and refilled my glass and moved the biscuit plate nearer my elbow.
‘The children’s rhyme,’ said Farbody, ‘as you’re aware, has its own oddities. The brick and the pin relate to the window and door, the sealing of the room. I’ve come across one text which states that Amber Maria could see only through natural substances, and that therefore a brick, which is man-mixed, would defeat her gaze, just as would refined metal; obviously the very reason why she could detect coins in the ground, rather than see through these also. But do you recall that other line, She leaps at the moon?’
I said that I did.
‘Salter’s Lane,’ said the scholar, ‘has nothing to do with the salting trade. Indeed, one wouldn’t expect it, so far as we are here from the sea. No, the word salter relates to the Latin saltare, to leap. In medieval times, that area of the woods was known to be a place where witches held their revels and danced the Wild Dance for their lord, Satan, “leaping high as the moon”. Which moon, of course, is a calendar feature of the sabbat, whether full or horned for the Devil.’
Just then the doorbell jangled. My aunt had returned for me. I was astonished to see, glancing at Farbody’s clock, that only half an hour had elapsed. But then, I suppose I was struggling back to my own time, across the centuries.
I thanked him and, going out with my aunt into the summer street, I resolved to shake myself free of the unnaturally strong emotion that had dropped upon me. And so we went to our luncheon.
Three or four days later I, reluctantly but evincing cheerfulness, accompanied my aunt to a church tea party, held in honour of the new bell which had recently been installed, and for which everyone had, the year before, been engaged in fund-raising. Here the social classes mingled with uneasy and ill-founded camaraderie, and I was revealed to a succession of people of all types, to whom it seemed my aunt wished to show off her nephew. Touched by her pride in me, I did my best to be jolly.
‘And look,’ said Aunt Alice, ‘there is Daffodil Sempson. Or rather, Mrs King, as she is married to a hotel-keeper at St Leonards now, and has come for the first time to visit her sister. They are a somewhat estranged family. None of them is in service now, but in her youth, Daffodil was lady’s maid to the Misses Condimer, and travelled all over Europe with them, before she was even seventeen. A great advantage for any girl.’
Struck, I admit, by the name Daffodil, I turned, and saw a very pleasing young woman, dressed most stylishly, a trick no doubt learnt during her travels with the minor aristocracy.
‘By all means introduce me to her,’ I told my aunt, with a more genuine enthusiasm.
But neither of us was able to catch the lady’s eye. She seemed to be fixedly interested in something that was going on at the far end of the room, where several people were walking about, and the tables groaned beneath their loads of cakes and lemonade.
‘I wonder what has engaged her attention so,’ speculated my aunt.
Mrs King, nee Sempson, was staring now almost unnaturally. Then I saw her turn her pretty head, seem to check, and then once more compulsively gaze back towards the tables.
Suddenly she quite changed colour. I have been witness to several instances of abrupt illness, slight or extreme. Mrs King seemed in the grip of the latter. Her face took on not a white but a thickly shining, greenish pallor. Without thinking I moved towards her. But in that moment she dropped to the ground.