The Mistletoe Bride(43)

I changed into my boots as I left the library, wrapped my indoor shoes in brown paper and put them in my handbag, then set off along the same path. It was a blustery day and the gulls were shrieking out at sea. Only as I got out onto the marshes did I realise I’d been half looking out for the girl I’d seen the week before. I suppose I’d been hoping we might talk. All the women my own age were married and had children or husbands to keep them occupied. The neighbours were nice enough, to pass the time of day with in the post office or the shop, but I had no friends. I kept hoping, but there was no sign of her and, as I climbed up to the flint sea wall, I had a knot of disappointment in my stomach.

Just someone to talk to.

That afternoon, I walked all the way to Oak Pond, where an old rowing boat lay abandoned in the silted water, and the trees hung low. I smoked a cigarette and thought about some domestic worry or another, before turning back. I’d been gone longer than usual and so I hurried, knowing Mrs Sadler would be ready with her lips pursed and her hat and coat at the door. Four o’clock. I remember glancing at my wristwatch.

Then, on the far side of the silent expanse of water, I saw something flash. At first, I thought it was the library, but realised it was too far over for that. A light, right out in the middle of the marshes where Cornmill House had been. In Victorian times there had been several mills on the eastern side of Fishbourne Creek, powered by wind or by the sea, though they were mostly gone now. The water cornmill and the house attached had all but burned down during the First World War and the high tides each spring had done the rest. Its black and rotting features had been a childhood landmark, a draw for brave or foolish boys to explore.

By the time we were back in Fishbourne, it had gone. Pulled down last year, Mrs Sadler had told me. After fifteen years, it still attracted too many gawpers, too many ghouls. A shrine, of sorts. And I remembered back to how newspaper reports at the time claimed Cornmill House was being used as a rendezvous long before it became notorious. Smugglers evading the excise men, ghosts, enemy spies. It was another occasion I’d taken refuge in the library, poring over a local history book and mugging up. Drawings, maps of underground passages, rumours, I knew the history of the house backwards though I’d never been inside. My brother Harry boasted he and his friends used to go in, dare each other to stay all night. Seen writing on the walls and blood on the stairs, he’d said, smears on the glass where smugglers had kept their prisoners in the old days.

At first, I thought he was making it up to scare me. I didn’t believe him. Later, when the police came, he denied he had ever been there. He’d only been home on leave for a few days, he said. A few pints in the Woolpack, sleeping in a proper bed, no time. But as I listened through the crack in the door and heard him wriggle like a fish on the line, I knew for certain he had been in the house at some time or another and knew the worst it had to tell. I told no one. No one asked me anyway. Harry rejoined his unit and was posted to France. His luck ran out. When he died a couple of weeks later, his secret died with him.

Another flash, bright, gone, then another. I pulled my coat tight around me. There should not have been a light there. Another flash. A signal of some kind? The sight of it, on that cold December dusk, and the past fifteen years fell away and I was back there again in our old kitchen, with the fug from the stove and the condensation on the inside of the windows. My mother’s worn, housewife’s red hands twisting at her pinny and the look of calculation in my stepfather’s eyes as the copper questioned Harry.

I took a deep breath, in, then out. No sense in raking it all up again. That house was gone. Harry was gone, Mum too. My stepfather no longer knew who he was. And if I had seen a light where Cornmill House used to be – and already I was no longer sure – odds on it was only someone carrying a lantern over the fields to Apuldram or to the church. Nothing iffy about it.

All the same, I looked for the book in the library the following Monday, but it had been taken out of circulation and there was nothing else in the Local History section that caught my fancy. Besides, it was ever so busy. I had no time to think about the light on the marshes or Cornmill House. We put up the Christmas decorations. Children from the village school came to sing carols around the tree. We made paper chains.

The nights were bad that week, though. My stepfather woke two or three times between midnight and six. A bad conscience, Mrs Sadler said, when I told her. So by the time the next Thursday came around, I was tired to my bones and tempted to go straight home from work. But, telling myself the fresh air would do me good, I set off once more along the path. A mist had come in from the sea and everything was muffled, suspended, though I could hear the suck of the tide and the call of black-headed gulls massing in the harbour. It was cold, proper December weather, and the chill seemed to soak through my woollen hat and mittens.