Starve Acre Read online

  ‘Do you have any answers?’ Juliette said.

  Calmly, Monk replied, ‘It’ll take time. But I’m sure we’ll get there.’

  ‘I thought you were going to help us.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m hoping to do.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you listening to me?’ Juliette said. ‘I’ve told you everything. Now, you tell me what the matter is with my son.’

  She began to sob, brushing off Richard’s hand as he insisted that they just had to be patient. Monk took her outburst as equably as she’d taken the glare of resentment Ewan had given her earlier and got up to fetch Juliette a glass of water from the cooler outside in the corridor. She left the door of the office open and carried on talking as she filled the tumbler, though Juliette wasn’t listening and neither was Richard.

  The place reminded him of Brackenburn. Behind the yellow paint it was damp-marked and peeling. Everywhere had the wet carpet smell of an institution. The rooms were too big. There were always traces of other conversations in the air. Voices carried, especially Ewan’s.

  Even separated by two doors, they’d heard him crying – no, screaming for them to come. Juliette left Monk’s office with Richard, found the playroom, and ignoring the nurse she hitched Ewan on to her hip and carried him away. Monk came after them, insisting that it wasn’t unusual for a child to react that way in a strange environment, and if they’d just let him calm down then . . .

  The double doors out to the car park cut off her voice.

  ‘What did she say to you, Ewan?’ said Juliette. ‘What’s wrong?’

  All the way out of the town, she asked the same questions.

  ‘What did the nurse do to make you so upset? What were you talking about? Wasn’t she a nice lady?’

  ‘It wasn’t a lady talking,’ Ewan finally answered. ‘It was Jack Grey.’

  Once past the rocks, Harrie sped up again, descending into a wide basin of heather and bogland. The country here was open and bleak and much of the winter snow remained, forcing the Drewitts’ sheep to eat from the manger of straw at the side of the road. Another bank of cloud brought hail and sleet which collected on the wipers in bars of freezing slush. Harrie shuffled forward in her seat wiping the fogged-up windscreen with her sleeve and peering along the lane which unspooled like a grey ribbon through the moor.

  ‘There she is,’ said Harrie, spotting Juliette a quarter of a mile ahead. ‘She must be drenched, the silly cow.’

  Accelerating harder, she overtook Juliette and pulled in some yards in front. Richard had been hoping to have the first word but Harrie was too quick and was out before he’d unbuckled his seatbelt.

  ‘Get in the car, Juliette,’ she said, taking her elbow. ‘I mean it. This is stupid.’

  Juliette shrugged her off and steered the pram away.

  ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Harrie said.

  ‘Be quiet. I’m trying to get him to sleep,’ said Juliette. ‘Leave me alone.’

  Richard stopped her with a hand on the pram’s hood. Inside, the hare lay staring.

  ‘Let us take you home,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to go home. I’m going for a walk,’ said Juliette.

  Harrie clutched her sleeve. ‘Jules, look at the weather.’

  ‘So?’ said Juliette. ‘I’ll only get wet. I’ll live.’

  ‘You’re miles from the house,’ said Richard. ‘If Harrie drives you back, we’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘What would I do with the pram?’ she said. ‘Leave it here, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harrie. ‘And that damn thing with it.’

  The hare shuffled and kicked under the blankets and Juliette reached in and covered it up again.

  ‘I don’t know what you think that is,’ said Richard. ‘But you have to let it go.’

  ‘Let him go? We invited him to the house, Richard,’ she said. ‘He’s here because we wanted him to be.’

  ‘I knew those fucking people would make things worse,’ said Harrie.

  ‘Worse?’ Juliette said. ‘They made everything clear, Harriet. Everything makes sense now. I’m happy.’

  Another swell of icy rain swept over the moors.

  ‘If you don’t want it to catch cold,’ said Richard, watching Juliette tucking the hare in tighter. ‘Then I suggest you come back with us now.’

  Juliette turned, poised to fight him off. ‘Don’t pretend you’re concerned for him. I know what you’ll do,’ she said. ‘You and her.’

  ‘Juliette, please.’

  She pushed away his hand and carried on along the road with her head down against the weather.

  Harrie got back into the car and Richard joined her, sopping and numb, his trousers plastered to his legs.

  ‘We should follow her,’ said Harrie.

  ‘She won’t listen to you.’

  ‘So, what do we do, wait here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Richard. ‘I really don’t.’

  Short of physically dragging her into Harrie’s car, there seemed to be no option but to leave her to go where she wanted.

  Harrie switched on the wipers again and said, ‘I’m going to have to call Mum and Dad.’

  Richard didn’t reply and she took this as disapproval.

  ‘Look, we need their help,’ she said. ‘Osman won’t come here, and I can’t get Juliette to leave. We have to do something, Richard. If we could only get rid of that animal,’ she went on, ‘that would be a start.’

  ‘Get rid of it how? Like you said, she won’t let it out of her sight.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Harrie. ‘We could lace its food. She’ll have to feed it at some point.’

  ‘Lace it with what?’

  ‘Poison,’ said Harrie. ‘You must have something. You live in the country. Don’t you get rats?’

  If they had ever bought poison, then Juliette would have insisted on it being kept out of the house away from Ewan’s reach, so when they got back to Starve Acre Richard and Harrie went to search the shed. It smelled wonderfully ordinary, of oil and creosote. On the shelves were unopened packets of seeds, plastic flowerpots, bottles of paint-thinner and methylated spirit. All covered in cobwebs and desiccated spiders.

  Harrie found a stepladder and Richard went to the far end of the shed where his father had stored bags of bone-meal and bottles of the home-made concoction he used to kill dandelions. Above the workbench, suspended horizontally on a pair of protruding nails, was the fishing net Richard had bought Ewan the summer before in an attempt to turn him into the little Huckleberry Finn Juliette had always pictured.

  After the way he’d been at the clinic, the thought of having the boy around the house all the time troubled Juliette. It was unlikely that he’d start at a new school before September, if he started anywhere at all. What was she supposed to do until then? She didn’t want to be left alone with him.

  Richard worked from home for the rest of the summer term and when the holidays came he made sure to take Ewan out of the house as often as he could.

  The boy still didn’t like going through the field but having the fishing net in his hand seemed to subdue his worries. Or at least his excitement generally outweighed his apprehension. As a further distraction, Richard instigated the ritual of reciting the names of all the freshwater species they could remember as they went hand in hand through the wood, as though by speaking their names they might be charmed into Ewan’s net. Then they’d sit by the beck for an hour or more patiently sweeping the mesh through the water. Richard never hurried Ewan. All the complaints they’d made about him at school – that he was idle and petulant – were remedied here. He was gentle too, lifting whatever he caught from the water to his yellow bucket with great care. If only the Burnsalls could see him like this, thought Richard, then they’d understand that he’d simply been unwell on the day of the fair, easily aggravated through no fault of his own. He hadn’t intended to hurt their animal at all. If they could come here and see how placid he was, then
he liked to think that they’d have some compassion for him.

  On a muggy August evening, a week before he would find the boy lifeless in his bed, Richard had taken Ewan down to the wood to see what he could catch. For a while, he’d tried his luck on the pebbled inlet by the willows but only raked up stones from the bottom of the stream. They were pretty enough, though: pieces of marble-sized limestone and quartz.

  Ewan selected the roundest and smoothest ones, washed them in the shallows, and wrapped them inside the handkerchief Richard always shoved into his pocket before he left the house.

  ‘Let’s try Willoughby Bridge,’ said Richard and Ewan smiled because it was him who’d given that name to the tree fallen across the water.

  It was a good spot for fishing. The maw of the net could be secreted in the shadow of the trunk and things would swim inside without even realising they’d been caught.

  Richard watched him closely. Now that he was away from school, he seemed different. Replaced. And it hurt to think that he’d been so blinded by concern that he was only noticing now that the boy was growing up.

  ‘Look,’ said Ewan.

  He’d caught some writhing thing in his net. An eel, black and greasy.

  ‘Quick, Daddy, the bucket.’

  Richard filled it from the stream and Ewan lowered the eel into the water, where it sprang free, whacking the sides with its tail.

  ‘I’m going to catch another one,’ he said and went back to his spot on the bank.

  He caught three more in quick succession and sank them into the bucket where they slithered over one another like a knot that was always in the process of being tied.

  ‘Can we take them home?’ said Ewan, down on his haunches and studying the creatures intently.

  ‘I think they’d prefer to stay in the beck,’ Richard said.

  ‘But I want to show Mummy.’

  ‘I’m not sure Mummy would like eels all that much, do you?’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we can persuade her to come and watch you catch them here?’

  ‘But I might not catch anything when she comes.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘Can’t we take them home and show Mummy and then bring them back?’

  ‘The bucket would be very heavy, Ewan.’

  ‘But I’m strong now.’

  Yes, he was. And watching him there in the fluid light of the trees, Richard could, for a moment, imagine what he might look like at ten or sixteen.

  In time, when they became a mere moment in the larger pattern of his life, these last twelve months would dwindle in significance and perhaps be forgotten altogether. What Ewan had been didn’t have to dictate what he would become.

  That thought, above all, had haunted Richard in the weeks after the funeral. Ewan could have been different. He could have been made well. But they had run out of time. And now in other people’s eyes, he would always be unredeemed. He would always be a violent little boy.

  As Richard suspected, there was no poison in the shed but he was sure that Cannon’s would have something and promised Harrie that he’d drive down to the village once he’d packed up the tent.

  He’d resigned himself to the fact that if Juliette’s parents were coming, then they’d be coming to stay, and it would be difficult for him to carry on working in the field. He would be needed in the house, if only to mediate the arguments that would inevitably start as soon as they arrived. Like Harrie, Eileen wouldn’t give up until Juliette was away from Starve Acre and in a hospital bed. But Juliette was unlikely to go willingly.

  When he went out on to the lane, he watched for her coming back to the house. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. He waited two more and then headed down to the tent.

  In the lamplight, the hole he’d excavated looked even more tangled, as each root was doubled by its shadow.

  He had yet to dig out the whole length of the rectangle he’d marked and decided that he would try to unearth the final third of it and photograph what was there before he took down the tent and covered up the site with tarpaulin.

  The hole was deep enough for him to crouch in now, and if he carefully stepped between the lattice of stems, he could scrape away at the remaining soil with more control. There was no profit in rushing things. It was better to uncover a little cautiously than to go at it with a shovel just to get finished. Haste caused things to be lost for ever. He’d tell his students that the key was simply to adopt an attitude of respect. Time had a way of fixing things very firmly into the earth and relics often had to be massaged free. Though it was taxing on the fingers, especially here in the field where the mud was as thick as clay in places and came away in greasy lumps that stained his palms.

  One particular branch widened the more he scooped away and after another foot or so it connected into a span of wood that ran straight across the plot. As he carved off the dirt, it became clear that this was not one of the roots. It was covered in bark.

  He smoothed his hand along its length, peeling away the clotty soil and exposing it a little more with each pass. It was a hulk of a thing, thick and rugose like the trunk of a mammoth. His fingers found deep grooves scored into the meat of it that looked like rope marks. He’d seen them before. When he’d visited Jerusalem as a student, he’d been taken by a dozen different guides to see a dozen different trees, each one, of course, the true place of Judas’s suicide.

  Unless another giant gallows-tree had grown and died since the Stythwaite Oak stood here, then this had to be Old Justice.

  Climbing out of the pit, Richard cleaned his hands on his trousers as much as he could and then moved the camera so that he could photograph what he’d found. If this was the hanging bough then he could only speculate about why it was here. If it had simply fallen or been cut down then it would have decayed in the field. It was possible that it had sunk into soft mud and gradually been swallowed up by the earth, but it seemed much more likely that it had been deliberately buried. Perhaps the incidents involving the three boys had been so distressing that all reminders were removed afterwards. Perhaps all traces of legal irregularity too. For it wasn’t unknown in those days for lynch mobs to circumvent the work of the assizes, or for a conceited JP to proclaim himself judge, jury and executioner. But whatever the process, the hearing of the boys’ transgressions would have been swift and the verdict incontestable. With Jack Grey as their only defence, they would have been laughed out of the dock and strung up all the quicker.

  An hour later, Juliette came back to the house. With the front door wide open, she reversed the pram into the hallway leaving tracks of rainwater and mud along the floor. She was drenched, her face ruddy with the cold. But the hare was her only concern and she lifted it out from the blankets and rubbed its fur.

  ‘Mum and Dad are on their way,’ said Harrie, standing next to Richard in the doorway of the kitchen. ‘I’m going to collect them from the station this evening.’

  Juliette ignored her and, still in her raincoat, she carried the hare upstairs.

  ‘You can lock yourself away in that room if you like,’ said Harrie, moving to the newell post. ‘But Dad will break the door down if he has to. He’ll wring that animal’s bastard neck too. You know he will.’

  She shouted Juliette’s name up the stairwell but decided against pursuing her and took her frustration out on Richard instead.

  ‘Aren’t you going to the village?’ she said.

  Thankfully, it was Neville Cannon on the counter rather than his wife. If Audrey had been serving, then Richard would have been stuck there for half an hour while she asked about Juliette and how things were at the house and if she would be going back to work, before passing on her wisdom about the eradication of rats. Neville, on the other hand, liked to spend as little time with customers as possible and exchanged the box of poison pellets for Richard’s money with only a brief nod.

  On his way out of the shop, Richard watched Gordon coming along the street in his van. He flashed his lights and stop
ped behind Richard’s car.

  ‘Please tell me you’ve found her,’ he said, unrolling the window and leaning out. ‘I’ve been going up and down the dale for hours.’

  Having been sent out so abruptly by Harrie and consumed with the thought of what would happen when Eileen and Doug appeared at Starve Acre, it had slipped Richard’s mind to let Gordon know that Juliette had come back home.

  ‘I should have phoned you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise. I just hope she’s all right.’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  He noticed what Richard was carrying. ‘Problems?’ he said.

  ‘I think there’s a nest in the garden,’ said Richard.

  Gordon looked doubtful. ‘Why don’t you come to the house,’ he said. ‘I’ve hardly seen you in days.’

  ‘Another time,’ said Richard. ‘Juliette’s parents are coming. I need to get back home.’

  ‘Her parents?’ Gordon said. ‘What for?’

  ‘Parents do visit their children from time to time.’

  ‘Tell them not to come. No one should be in that house.’

  Richard moved away towards the car.

  ‘I’m not interested in Mrs Forde’s stories,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever’s wrong at Starve Acre,’ said Gordon, eyeing the packet in Richard’s hand again, ‘it’s not Mrs Forde’s doing.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Richard replied, trying to work out if there was enough room to reverse past the van.

  ‘Let me talk to you,’ Gordon said.

  ‘I told you, I need to get back.’

  ‘A few minutes, Richard. You can spare me that, can’t you?’

  He held the passenger door open and after hesitating for a moment Richard climbed in and sat next to him.

  His wool suit smelled damp, and there was a little sweet alcohol on his breath.

  ‘I know you’ve found something in the field,’ said Gordon and held up his hand to cut short Richard’s insistence that he hadn’t. ‘And I know that you won’t tell me the truth about it. I don’t want to argue, I want you to listen to me.’