All at once I knew I had to read everything I could find about the Pendle Witches and about these wide, wild acres of Lancashire too. There were books in my head and this house had put them there; books spanning the centuries and ending with two star-crossed lovers. I had two weeks left in which to do it, yet Firedance must be finished on time, as my contract with Harrier Books demanded. Somehow I had to close my mind to all else but that; only then could I, as Deer’s Leap demanded of me, write its story.
And by then it would belong to someone else. It would be too late.
I wrote steadily for two days, not needing to leave the house because I was able to exist on chicken and salad, thick slices of sticky parkin and left-over apple pie.
The words flowed. By Wednesday evening I had completed a chapter and roughed out another. I rotated my head. I had been sitting far too long. There was a tenseness in my neck and shoulders and my eyes felt gritty. The chicken was all gone; only the carcass left for soup, and I’d had my fill of saladings.
A beef sandwich and a glass of bitter beckoned from the direction of the Red Rose. I switched on the kettle to boil and took a bright red mug from the dresser, all the time looking at the world outside.
The sun was still high; it wasn’t six o’clock yet, and it wouldn’t be dark until almost ten. I could cycle to Acton Carey and if I left early enough, could manage to get back without lights. Though we had tried, neither Jeannie nor I could find any lamps, though it hadn’t worried us too much. The road between Deer’s Leap and the village wasn’t what you could call busy; we had decided we could manage without them.
Mind made up, I fed the animals then changed into slacks and a sweater. With luck, Bill Jarvis would be at the Rose and might, perhaps, tell me how I could get a look at the parish records. I was hopeful he would know everything I needed so desperately to know, if only he could be steered away from the Italian campaign.
Would Jack Hunter appear tonight? Perhaps, I thought light-headedly, he didn’t thumb lifts from cyclists. And why hadn’t he reacted to the red Mini, asked why it wasn’t camouflaged in khaki and green and black? Even I knew that much about World War Two motors; surely he couldn’t miss something so startlingly red?
Or did he only react to the sound of a car engine? Could ghosts see colours or was everything in black and white? Did Jack Hunter see only what he wanted to see – a car in which he might get a lift to Deer’s Leap? I found myself wishing him, willing him to be there, but I reached the Red Rose without seeing him.
I wondered what would happen if I asked him if he knew he were dead; if I told him the war had been over for more than fifty years, showed him today’s newspaper to prove it! Would he, shocked, begin to age before my eyes? Would he become an elderly, grey-haired man, then disintegrate as I watched?
‘Eejit!’ I made for the back door of the Rose. I was hungry, and brain-damaged into the bargain from a surfeit of words! I needed the earthy presence of Bill Jarvis to bring me down from the giddy highs of my imagining.
It was a relief to see him sitting there, and the smile that crinkled his face when I said, ‘Hullo, Bill! What are you drinking?’
And when he chuckled and said, ‘Nowt at the moment. I was just off home, though I dare say I could sup another!’ I knew that for the duration of a couple of pints, the world would be back to normal again.
‘It’s quiet in here tonight. No darts?’ I asked, when we had eaten a plate of sandwiches between us.
‘No. Folks is spent up till payday and, any road, they’re busy with the last of the harvest; be at it till dark. That storm at the weekend flattened some of the standing wheat, though we needed the rain, mind.’
‘I haven’t found time to see the church yet,’ I said when I had replenished our glasses. ‘Is there anything of interest there – like old tombs?’
Or the baptismal register!
‘Not that I know of. St James’s isn’t all that old. Were a cotton man from Manchester as built most of it. Name of Ackroyd. Bought the Hall in my great-grandfather’s time. Brass, but no breeding.’
‘Oh dear. It looks quite ancient.’ I was quite put out by the intrusion of brass into Acton Carey. ‘I really thought the church was as old as this pub.’
‘He didn’t make a bad job of it, I’ll say that for him. Added it on to the little church as was already there – or so I believe.’
‘But where is the Hall? Is it old?’
‘It was. Got pulled down in the thirties and the stone bought up by a mason. Weren’t no money in cotton no more, with all them fancy fabrics getting invented. The heir couldn’t sell the place so he upped and left it. All he hung on to was the land, and a few houses in the village.’
‘They wouldn’t be allowed to demolish an old house now-a-days, Bill. It would be a listed building. Elizabeth Tudor might even have slept there.’
It was a feeble joke which rebounded on me.
‘No. Seems she never got this far north; folk in these parts was a law unto themselves in those days and her kept well away. But talk has it that King James stayed there on his way from Scotland to London. Well, that’s what my dad once told me.’
‘And we’ll never know now, will we?’ I felt quite peeved that an old house could have been demolished, with people gathering like vultures to cart away timbers and fireplaces and almost certainly the staircase.
‘No. But like I said, them at the Hall wasn’t real gentry and they weren’t locals neither.’
‘Foreigners from Manchester, Bill!’
‘Aye. But if you want to see inside the church, there’ll be someone there on Friday mornings as can talk to you. They alus gives the place a sweep and a bit of a dust ready for Sunday. My sister, Hilda, goes; collects all the news. A right gossip shop, it is!’
‘Your sister still lives here, then – the one who knew Susan from Deer’s Leap, I mean. The one you said wasn’t allowed to go to the RAF dances?’
‘She does. Married an airman at the end of the war and he settled here when he got his demob. Got work with a plumber in Clitheroe.’
‘But how did they manage to meet if the girls round here weren’t allowed to fraternize?’
‘Like courting couples alus did – on the quiet, of course! All the lasses round these parts were at it. Creepin’ out. Our Hilda used to say she was going to her friend’s house.’
‘And her friend said the same?’ I laughed. ‘I suppose it added spice. I should think Susan Smith had a boyfriend too – on the quiet.’
‘You seem a mite interested in the Smith lass.’
‘N-no. Not really. Only because I’m staying at Deer’s Leap. I mean, her living all that way from the village.’ I took a drink from my glass, nonchalantly, I hoped. ‘Things were different then, weren’t they? Young women didn’t have the freedoms I take for granted.’
‘They didn’t and that’s a fact!’
He tilted his glass, draining it to the last drop and I felt irritated that I would have to go for a refill just when the talk was getting interesting.
‘But girls still got married, in spite of the way it was.’ I put the glasses down and beer slopped onto the tabletop. ‘In the end, they all made it to the altar.’
‘Aye, and some of them in a bit of a hurry, an’ all,’ he chuckled. ‘But as long as they got wed, they was forgiven.’
‘So some of them got pregnant beforehand, in spite of everything?’
‘Oh, aye. It’s the nature of things.’ He tapped his nose with a forefinger.