A Taste for Nightshade (34 page)

I picked up my sketches of Delafosse Hall. There stood the long drive crowded with unkempt trees, the grand entrance as I had first seen it, choked with leaves that rattled in the breeze. I had thought it a living entity then, its sighing breath exhaling like a weary beast. There was the long view of the Hall at dusk, like a stately doll's house with its toy of a woman standing at my studio casement. Was she the lady of the Hall, or a prisoner? I tried to remember my thoughts as I had painted her in a silent, trance-like reverie. Was she intended to represent me, or someone else who had once inhabited the Hall? I could no longer remember. What I did recollect was Michael's despondency over his father's relics. He had said he felt unworthy as a man and that he longed to leave.

Here, beneath, were the sketches I had made after my accident. There were the sinuous limbs of the statues in the summerhouse, once the scene of sensuous pleasure, but since fallen into decay. There was my sketch of Harpocrates, silent in his recess, pointing to the tunnel that led deep beneath the heart of the Hall. The story of Michael's mother and Ashe Moncrieff making their lovers' assignations now seemed unbearably sad. No wonder there had been so many old tales of footfalls at night in the Hall. I thought of my mother-in-law's youthful hopes, casting a blight that still fell on her love-begotten son.

FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS
, I read on the drawing of the tower and its sundial. The York bookseller had translated the motto as ‘The rod is of iron, the motion of shadow.' I had felt distaste at the motto that day in York, and the engraving of Death's shadow, descending on the sleeping lovers. Shadows, shadows, I urged myself. What iron figure casts these shadows?

Lastly, I picked up a hasty sketch I had made when ill, after my fall. It was that dreadful scene that had overwhelmed me, of two faceless lovers leaving the tower together. I studied it closely, at the same time resurrecting the event in my inner eye, trying to amplify the scene from every angle. My view had been limited, but even from a back view Michael had not looked at all like the conquering lover; he was slump-shouldered, not even touching the woman.

The black-haired woman, on the other hand, the woman who was neither the lost and faded matron, Mrs Harper, nor the ancient recluse, Sybilla Claybourn, was upright and imperious. The soft swish of metallic jewellery resurrected itself, too; a slinking, chain-like sound. I stared at the drawing, but there was no answer in the grain of the paper or the image flickering in my memory. My head hurt. I took a sip of water from the jug. Beside it stood Mrs Harper's thimble.

Like a distant echo, I remembered the captain saying of the thimble-rigger, ‘A good conjurer will get you to see what was never there. It is all done with directing you to look the other way.' With every particle of my intelligence I did my best to turn the story about, inside out and back to front. Who was it cast the shadow? What was it I had seen that was never there?

Then I saw it. And instead of a house of collapsing cards, I saw that same pack of cards new-configured, as if by magic, into a cruel and cunning game.

 

 

The hungry ghosts were gathering for the feast tonight. Ma Watson was whimpering for her plum cake. Janey was leering her glass-ragged smile. Brinny couldn't sit still for the weals from her final public flogging. Granny sat nodding in the corner, a dribble of blood staining her chin. And the final one lurked somewhere in a dim corner of the room. Hanging from the ceiling she was, spinning slowly this way and that.

Mary, alone of all of them, had survived. She gazed triumphantly about the glorious dining room. Only she had possessed the crazy mettle to make a bolt for it. Only she now chewed that devilish sweet morsel: vengeance.

‘Here's to you, Mrs Grace Croxon.' She raised her glass, slopping a few drops on the linen. ‘The most open-handed pigeon ever caught.' She drained the glass of ruby-rich claret. ‘Go ahead, help yourselves, girls.' She waved a bountiful hand at the table. The dishes were laid with each dish exactly in its place, like the nine of diamonds on a playing card. Now this is grand, she thought, the white linen well-pressed, the warm light glimmering from a score of candles, the silver plate polished like mirrors. It was a feast in a picture book, a queen's banquet in a fairy castle.

At the centre rose a vast Desert Island moulded from sugar-paste, just as Aunt Charlotte had used to make it. A stockade of liquorice crowned the peak, and a pathway of pink sugar sand stretched to the shore. The whole was surrounded by a sea of broken jelly, swimming with candied fish. First off, she ate the two tiny sugar castaways from the lookout on her island – very sweet and crisp they were, too. She stood to make a toast. ‘To you, Jack, my own truelove,' and took a long draught.

Sugarplums next; a whole pyramid to herself, of every colour: raspberry, orange, violet, pistachio. She was eating dinner back to front, and she recommended it heartily. Next, her teeth sank into a sticky mass of moonshine jelly – it was good, very good. Refilling her glass, she made a toast to Aunt Charlotte. ‘You old she-toad,' she grinned. ‘See you in hell, you hang-in-chains bitch.'

Staggering to the looking glass, she preened herself at her own reflection. She was still a beauty, so long as she had her bits and bobs to dib and dab upon herself. Hold – what was that behind her? A sack-like body swinging low? She turned her head slowly to try to catch it out, but it was nothing at all; only a shadow chased by a draught from the chimney.

Food for the dead. Aunt Charlotte's tales of the Hangman's Supper had always held her spellbound. The finer the supper, the more fast-binding the oath, they said. Tom Rout had worn his pea-green coat and starched ruffles to feast with Jack Dempsey, and invited seven bonny whores besides. And Rob Foster had stopped at every inn on the road to Tyburn to drink his pleasure and say his farewells to the back-slapping crowds.

‘But why do they do it, Auntie?' she'd asked, one night by the kitchen fire.

‘It's the oldest gift since Eve was a girl. When he dines from your plate, you free the hangman of the black stain of murder,' Aunt Charlotte said.

But would it work? It had worked once before, when she'd fed Piggott on beef and claret the night before she should have swung; she had warded off the hangman's evil. ‘Come, take a bite with me,' she called, to the dark corpse that swung at the very edge of her vision. But whenever she stared it full in the eye, it vanished fast away.

That vexatious Harper woman hadn't had the sense she was born with. When Michael had tried to dismiss the woman, the housekeeper had holed herself up in the kitchen with a bottle, making threats to get a coach directly to call on his mother, old Mrs Croxon, in Greaves. Not having a notion what to do next, he had sent for Peg at her lodging house across from the George. She had followed him downstairs and observed the old baggage from behind the kitchen door. ‘If I am to go,' the gin-biber had warbled, ‘it will only be 'pon Mrs Croxon's word. She gave me a guinea an' I stand 'pon my word.'

‘She's a danger to us,' Peg had whispered up the stairs to Michael. ‘You go. I'll see her off.'

Once alone she had played the part of a former pot companion from the George. Producing a bottle of Geneva, she coaxed Mrs Harper to the kitchen fireside. Between numerous bumpers, Mrs Harper confided her tiresome troubles: an expensive son, employment that stranded her far from home, her loneliness, her lack of ready coin.

‘It's all that handsome young dog's fault,' she hissed loudly, spraying spirituous spittle from a pinched face, as she pointed at the ceiling. ‘He is keeping a trull about the place – and 'im about to be married any day. I've heard the filthy pair. Creeping and moaning. Thinks I don't know—'

Just then footsteps shuffled towards them from the passage. Gingerly, Peg pulled her bonnet down over her brow and turned aside from the dying fire. The old mopsy, the one she later knew as Nan, hobbled into the kitchen and helped herself to something from the table.

‘This is my friend,' Mrs Harper announced shrilly. ‘She 'grees with me.'

Peg kept her head low and her tongue still. Nan mumbled something and disappeared back where she had come from. Once all was quiet again, she took Mrs Harper's arm, leaning in to whisper, ‘Got any more tipple down in the cellars? To see me home, like?'

Mrs Harper sniggered in a parody of complicity. ‘Tipple? There's tipple all over the place around here.' She lifted a bunch of keys attached by a chain to a grand iron chatelaine fixed at her waist. It made a slithery metallic sound that conjured a ferment of visions in Peg's head: of power over antique locks, of restraining chains and binding cuffs. Her fingers itched to have a closer look at its array of keys, scissors, and knives.

The two women rose, Mrs Harper leaning unsteadily against Peg's side, heady fumes souring the air. Peg's mind was as clear as crystal. While Mrs Harper lit the lantern, she looked about the kitchen for a tool to accomplish her task. Then, almost laughing out loud, she remembered that Mrs Harper was already carrying all she needed hung at her waist. Once the lantern was lit they wove their way merrily to the head of the stairs, and climbed down into a gust of grave-cold darkness.

She broke some more of the Desert Island off and nibbled rock candy and sugar comfits. Devil take it, she could eat to win a wager. Did she have a worm, perhaps? Granny had once paid a half-a-crown for a box of vermifuge pills after watching a quack doctor cure a fellow who retched into a pail. The false worms hidden in the pail were only chicken's entrails; she knew it for a common trick. But as for herself, it was not a worm perhaps but something just as ravenous inside her guts, clinging fast with angry barbs.

Was it the serpent that writhed upon her back perhaps, entwined with those Bible words: ‘The Serpent Tempted Me And I Did Eat'? Had it slithered inside her now, devouring her inside out? It was as sly as Old Harry himself. ‘The mark of a murderess,' she heard herself say in a leery sing-song voice as she flung herself down on the sofa. She closed her giddy eyes.

Mary had learned that the owner of the tartan gown and bonnet was imprisoned in a nearby hut. She was another
pakeha
, a foreigner, but too valuable to be a
mokai
pet like herself. A band of
pakeha
traders were willing to exchange miraculous muskets for her, the very next day. She worked on this news carefully, stripping and refashioning it, like a bunch of
harakeke
flax being woven into a useful cloak.

That evening she complained of a belly-ache, until Areki-Tapiru gave her a kick and told her she must miss the night's feast. Once alone, she pulled a rush-stemmed rain cloak over her head and crept secretly to the hut where the prisoner was being held. It was easy to tempt the crone who guarded the door with food, a supposed gift from Areki-Tapiru. Once she had taken half the
kai
for herself, the old woman gratefully unlatched the door.

The
pakeha
girl was naked inside a sort of cage of branches. Skeleton-thin she was, with bedraggled brown hair and a pink tear-stained face. The girl appeared remarkably ugly, recalling the tribe's initial bemusement at her own blanched appearance. Hesitantly, she lowered her cape, but the girl was too stupid to even notice her own white skin and red hair.

‘
Pakeha
girl,' she said haltingly. ‘You want
kai
?' The girl snatched the cold kumara and devoured it. Mary was alarmed to find that her English speech was as rusty as an old lock. She tried again.

‘Good evenin', miss.' That sounded mighty odd – but chirpy.

‘What is that ye're sayin'?' the girl babbled in – yes, that was it – a Scottish voice. She pushed her snotty face toward the bars. ‘Bless ma soul – be you a white woman lurkin' under that heathen costume?'

‘Aye,' she said, then wondered at the slippery sound. ‘White
pakeha
. Aye, I mean – I am.'

‘Ma name is Flora Jean Pilling, an' I pray, if you have an ounce o' goodness in your heart, you will help me flee from these heathen devils!' The girl was trying to poke her pink fingers through the spars and make a grab at her. She backed away nervously.

‘My name is—' She racked her brainbox. Her name was Kehua, but that was not right. She groped back into the past, as if burrowing in ancient mud for something long abandoned. ‘My name is Mary Jebb. I was catchered here.' She knew it wasn't quite right, but it worked.

‘Och, you poor dear lamb. What suffering you must ha' endured. Ma own dear family were also murthered by these devils. Can you get me away from here?'

‘Tonight – bad night. I go talk to
pakeha
fellas,' she said slowly. ‘I tell 'em you here.'

‘You would do that? Oh, bless you. Thanks be to God for sending you to me.'

‘You give me—' What was the word? ‘Thing. Token you Flora.'

Flora groped in her tangles of hair, and pulled out a brooch she had hidden there. It bore a tiny painting of a bearded man in a white neck collar, framed by an oval of silver. ‘Here, take this. Look – ma father's name.'

‘You talk it,' Mary mumbled.

The girl obliged. ‘Reverend Henry Pilling. We were sailing to the missionary station at Hokitika on the
Pilgrim
. Father, Mother, little Robert, and me. And here on the back, a Bible verse.' Her speech was hard to follow, but she listened hard, screwing up her eyes and pressing her lips together. Once she'd got the gist, Flora pushed the brooch through the bars with slippery pink fingers.

‘We must both pray for deliverance. Hurry now, and send the white folks to fetch me as quick as you can. You are an angel sent by the Lord. God bless you. Go!'

Back at the empty hut, she looked at the brooch. Part of her knew it was
tapu
, a magic stone, an object of power. It had been given to her to guide her future. Another compartment of her mind knew it was a brooch, a clasp to be pinned on a gown. Like turning a rusty key in a lock, she started to move the tumblers in that neglected
pakeha
half of her mind. She counted hours and assembled facts. The making of a scheme was painfully hard, for her reasoning power had shrunk to the size of the
Pa
on the hill. Outside, the singing was still raucous and the dancing had begun.

She pulled on the tartan gown, fastening buttons that nipped her like ants. All she took with her was her flute and the brooch. Throwing the rain cape over her head again, she let herself out of the hut. Keeping far back below the hut eaves, she saw agile silhouettes flickering before the great fire, their voices joined in song. As silent as a rat, she crept down to the sea path, feeling her way, inching forwards.

Halfway down, she glanced back up towards her old
farnow
, at the captors who had for so long been her family. She was surprised to feel the pull of them, as strong even as the pull of Charlie's family of thieves. Pa folk were of the same ilk – as proud as any robber band, quick to laugh and be merry, lovers of the sentimental song and vicious oath. They were superstitious too, running to their
tohunga
priest for their dreams to be unravelled; they were weavers of love spells, casters of curses. She looked back at the Pa, and imagined Areki-Tapiru like a queen tonight on the royal platform.