The Mistletoe Bride(51)

‘I pulled up in the square,’ I said, ‘and she just hopped out. Five minutes ago, ten at most.’

Again, the drunk bellowing from the front room.

‘Who the hell is it?’

‘Go, please go,’ she said, desperate this time. ‘She’s not here.’

I didn’t want to cause trouble between this downtrodden woman and her husband.

‘At least tell me if she’s not here, where else might she be?’

For an instant, the haunted look in her eyes gave way to something else. Grief, perhaps. Resignation, maybe.

‘The church,’ she said softly.

This caught me out. ‘So late?’

‘Where else would she be?’

I heard the sound of a bolt being shot, then a heartrending sob. I raised my hand to knock again, then let it drop. The woman was clearly terrorised by her brute of a husband. Perhaps Mary was too scared to go home?

I walked back to the High Street. The Ship Inn and the White Hart had called last orders and one or two rag-taggle farm workers were calling their goodnights into the damp night air.

One of the black wrought-iron gates into the churchyard was ajar, as if someone had recently slipped through. I pushed it open, thinking Mary might have taken refuge here after all. But the door stayed shut when I rattled the heavy cast-iron handle. I stepped out into the graveyard. Neat headstones closer to the church, rather more overgrown in the corners. Yew and mulberry and evergreen hedges. By an imposing flint wall, a row of older gravestones like broken teeth, a little crooked and sinking back into the earth.

I sensed movement. I narrowed my eyes and tried to adjust my vision to the darkness. Another fox? A sound in the undergrowth, little more than that.

‘Mary?’

I skirted the building and walked towards the sound. The bottom of my trousers grew damp with the dew from the grass and the cold night air slipped beneath my collar, but I paid no attention.

‘Mary, is that you?’

I rounded the corner and found myself in a more secluded section of the graveyard. Stone angels and crosses, the flat tombs of an older age, and a few modern headstones. I could see no one, just shadows, phantasms in the intermittent moonlight.

No one.

But there was something moving, swaying in the breeze, something hanging on one of the gravestones. My jacket. I walked forward, then leant down to take it from the headstone. Forced myself to read the inscription, though I feared what it was going to say.

MARY STARR

3rd OCTOBER 1931 – 27th OCTOBER 1951

IN GOD’S CARE

Bill tells me they found me there in the morning, clutching my jacket to my chest. I had a slight fever, a chill from spending the night out of doors. I wasn’t ill, but not quite right either.

A local had seen my car still parked in the square, remembered me asking for directions to the Starr’s house and put two and two together. It wasn’t the first time, you see.

Bill came to fetch me – his number was on the map still lying on the passenger seat of the car. I stayed with him for a few days until I felt well enough to drive back to town. He told me the whole story. Mary had been seen before, always on the same stretch of road, always on the anniversary of her death. A local girl, Mary Starr, killed on Harting Hill ten years before. Hit and run in the days before there were such things. Or had she simply lost her footing and fallen? No one was sure. A sweet girl, innocent, who had gone for a drive with a local boy and without her father’s permission. When the boy wouldn’t take no for an answer and put her out of the car, Mary had no choice but to walk home in the worst storm they’d suffered for years. He raised the alarm when rumours spread that Mary had never arrived. Rain and mudslides, flooding on the lower roads, her body not found for days.

This happened some time ago. And although I was haunted by thoughts of Mary lost on the hillside, the memory of that night and my role in bringing her home is less troubling now.

Several years have passed. I married again, happily this time, and we have a wonderful daughter. Bright, charming, works hard at school. My wife says I am overprotective, and perhaps I am. From time to time, when we drive down to spend a weekend with Bill and his wife, he teases me about it too, though he understands.

I don’t believe in ghosts, never did. All the same, each time I pass through South Harting, I stop at the church. To lay flowers on the grave of a girl I once met.



Author’s Note



This story, written for the collection, was inspired by an experience I had more than thirty years ago.

I was driving home to Chichester, in Sussex. It was late at night, I hadn’t long passed my driving test and as I went through the village of South Harting, The Specials were singing ‘Ghost Town’ on the radio.