Cherringham--The Curse of Mabb's Farm (2 page)

And Tom turned, tossing aside the extinguisher with a noisy rattle, and walked back to his beaten-up car, a Fiesta with peeling paint and missing hubcaps.

As Caitlin and Charlie watched him leave, Charlie wondered about what he had just done.

Tom’s Fiesta shot up a spray of mud as he sped as fast as he could down the track that led back to the main road.

“Charlie,” Caitlin said. “What are we going to do now?”

Only then did Charlie turn to his wife, worry etched on her pretty face.

“We’ll carry on. Just … carry on.”

Charlie tried a grin but Caitlin’s face remained set.

“But Tom, he knew how to do things. How to work the machines, how to handle the animals.”

“I can do things,” Charlie said, though he could see from the look in her eyes that his words weren’t reassuring.

“And I can hire someone else.” He carried on. “Someone even better than Tom. There’s got to be a ton of people looking for work. Lots. I’ll get someone else who—”

“Part-time? At the pittance we can afford? Charlie, I don’t know.”

Charlie was about to say more reassuring words but stopped. If anything they seemed to have the reverse effect.

“Charlie, it’s this place.”

That stopped Charlie. He could see the tears forming in his wife’s eyes.

“All the bad luck we’ve had. You’ve said it yourself … it seems like something is wrong here.”

Charlie nodded at that.

Because yes, bad things seemed to happen all the time. Rats getting into the seed. Animals going sick. Machines that stopped working for no reason at all.

Lot of bad things.

Mabb’s Farm did seem cursed.

“I’ll find someone to help, Cait. Tomorrow, first thing. And I’ll keep looking till I get help. In the meantime we’ll manage … I’ll manage.”

Caitlin looked around.

“Charlie, where’s the herd?”

Bugger! He had left them on the hill, trying to get them to come back down.

But where were they now?

“Bloody—”

Charlie turned into the total darkness and raced back up the hill.

Unable this time to dodge the cow pats, he slipped his way up the hill, looking around desperately for his wandering cows, and, as sure as anything … feeling cursed.

Sarah had the radio on loud in the Rav-4, as the giddy weekend BBC host mined the catalogue of eighties and nineties hits, a time of big hair and big dreams, now being played for an audience for whom the hopes and parties had probably ended.

She had the volume up since the car felt far too quiet: Daniel and Chloe were sitting silently in the back, glumly staring out of the window.

Sarah was usually able to deflect most Sunday lunch invites from her parents, but they did have to make an appearance from time to time, and this visit was well overdue.

It wasn’t going there that was the problem, it was the fact that every time they did, her parents seemed intent on inviting some random single man from Cherringham or a nearby village, practising their own form of awkward matchmaking.

It could make for some terribly long Sunday lunches.

Though Sarah implored her parents to
please; cease and desist
! they carried on as if she was telling them quite the opposite.

Getting the kids to go was also an issue. They had friends, activities; their lives just didn’t stop on Sunday.

It wasn’t so bad for Daniel. He was still at the age where he could spend hours looking at her father’s massive collection of toy soldiers, all arrayed on life-like landscapes, many painted by her father, himself.

Daniel didn’t even mind the history lesson that came with examining the grenadiers with the long rifles, or the tiny Moorish invaders with silvery curved swords.

But Chloe?

Nothing much to engage a teenage girl there, though Sarah’s parents adored her.

Sarah’s mum’s one passion was cooking, and though she would try to enlist Chloe’s help, Chloe had less than zero interest in the intricacies of preparing a big Sunday lunch.

Now if Jamie Oliver was manning the Aga, that might be a different story.

“Mum,” Chloe said, making no show of hiding a tone of petulance, “can you
please
lower that. What kind of music is it anyway?”

Sarah lowered it, opting not to engage Chloe in a debate of David Bowie versus No Direction.

Or was it One Direction?

Funny, how when you become a parent you suddenly fall out of the ‘know’ so fast, all hipness vanishing at the birth.

“Almost there guys,” Sarah said with forced cheer.

She looked in the rear-view mirror but neither child gave a response.

And all Sarah could think was,
Lord — or someone! — give me strength!

“Sarah!” her mum said, “We’d nearly given up on you. Just about to sit down.”

Sarah had, of course, timed her arrival so that they could smoothly segue into the actual dinner
prontissimo,
minimizing the time spent with any male straggler roped into the free meal with an available, if completely unwilling, female.

But when she walked into the dining room — set formally, two tapered candles on the table, the good silverware as usual, with gleaming white plates and carefully folded napkins — she saw that the attendees today were different.

“Sarah, just in time!”

Tony Standish was here, the family’s good friend and solicitor, someone who had been of help not just to her parents, but lately to Sarah and Jack with their informal sleuthing.

Sleuthing.

Such an archaic word.

“Tony, so good to see you,” she said warmly.

Chloe and Daniel took their places as guided by their grandmother. Such things as place-settings were important for this meal.

But also sitting quietly at the table were the Vicar, Reverend Hewett, and his wife, Emily.

Now
that
was unusual.

Her parents weren’t the biggest of church-goers. But they knew that at least a couple of times a year they were expected to extend a lunch invitation to the Vicar and his wife.

More than once, her dad, Michael, had said to her, laughing, “Might as well hedge my bets with Deity, hmm Sarah? You never know!”

However, she had never known the Vicar to come to lunch on a Sunday, of all days. Sarah smiled, and sat down in the middle facing the Vicar and his wife while her father poured the wine.

“Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” Michael announced with pride. “Been saving it.”

A bit of wine would be nice,
Sarah thought.

If she didn’t have to drive home. Not only that but she also had an evening of washing and cleaning to endure. She’d been busy at work all week and as usual all her real-life chores had piled up. Sunday in Sarah’s house was rarely a day of rest.

Her mother emerged from the ground zero of her kitchen with, not the usual roast beef girded with potatoes and Yorkshire puddings, but something else entirely.

“Mum,” Sarah said, “what is
that
?”

It looked like a design for a modernist football stadium, except instead of being covered with shiny, silver sheets of metal, it was covered in crackling.

“Crown Roast of Pork,” she said proudly, putting it down, a spaceship landing.

“Really?” Sarah gave her kids a smile as they studied the dubious-looking item.

“Yes! Saw Ramsay do it on the telly, tracked down the recipe, had the butcher cut it properly, then bound it into a circle—”

Her mother would have then continued with every detail of the pork chops’ epic journey if she had not been gently stopped.

Which luckily Michael did, raising his glass of wine to the gathered crowd.

“To friends, to family,” he said.

“Hear, hear,” Tony said.

And everyone clinked, even the kids with their minute amounts, a family tradition that Sarah remembered from when she was a young girl.

And yes — the red wine would indeed be delicious, thought Sarah as she raised her glass of sparkling water and prepared to suffer for the next two hours.

“So anyway,” said Daniel, “when the Romans had chopped all the Druids’ heads off, they stuck them on pikes in a big circle on top of the hill to scare off the Ancient Britons. But the Druid leader laid a curse on the Romans, and he turned all the heads to stone and the Romans were scared and that’s why they made their town here in Cherringham and not on Mabb’s Hill.”

“Bravo, Daniel!” said Michael, slapping his grandson on the back. “A fascinating story and beautifully told too. Don’t you think, Vicar?”

“Very entertaining.”

Sarah assumed that the Vicar was unused to eleven-year-old boys chatting about executions and curses. In fact, she’d noticed that throughout the conversation about the strange goings-on up at Mabb’s Farm, he and his wife Emily had said nothing.

Sarah’s mum had started it — number one topic on her usual “hottest Cherringham gossip” list.

And to Sarah’s surprise — since she had been out of the loop working all week — it seemed that not just the village but every member of her own family had an opinion on “the Curse of Mabb’s Farm”.

And while everyone had an opinion, there was no argument about the facts. Within the last month alone there’d been two unexplained fires up at Charlie Fox’s farm. His cattle had somehow escaped through a supposedly stock-proof fence and trampled a field of wheat. His slurry tank had sprung a leak and polluted a stream that ran down into the river. And Charlie himself had been involved in a punch-up with another farmer at the Ploughman’s over an unpaid debt.

All these incidents, combined with a rumour that he’d sacked his only farm-hand, had led the village to the inescapable conclusion that the ancient Curse was doing its evil worst again.

“Anyway — who’s to say Daniel’s story isn’t true?” said Michael, opening another bottle of wine. “The old Roman road runs along the crest of the hills there. And there’s plenty of evidence that the Romans faced stiff resistance when they moved into these parts.”

“You may be right, Michael,” said Tony Standish. “However — excuse me, Vicar — I’m more inclined to believe the witches are behind the Curse.”

“Witches?” said Chloe. “You mean we had witches here in Cherringham? Brilliant!”

“I’m not sure witches are ‘brilliant’, Chloe,” said Helen, giving what may have been an embarrassed smile to the Vicar and his wife.

Oops,
thought Sarah.
If we offend the Vicar, I’ll be the one getting it in the neck from Mum …

But like Chloe, she couldn’t wait to hear more.

“It’s a fascinating story,” said Tony. “In the seventeenth century, Mabb’s Farm was owned and run by three sisters. Run well by all accounts. They took over the farm after the death of their father in the Civil War.”

“What kind of magic did they do?” asked Daniel.

Sarah realised that this lunch was far exceeding the expectations of her two children — and she had to admit that even without the red wine, she was enjoying it too.

“Oh, any magic was of a strictly herbal variety, Daniel,” said Tony. “According to the records they ran a pretty good sideline in health-cures.”

“You mean eye of newt, and rats’ tails and stuff?” said Daniel.

“More like valerian and garlic, I expect,” said Tony. “Ancient knowledge — actually pretty effective most of the time, I expect. And usually harmless. However — it appears that one day one of their ‘clients’ died unexpectedly — at which point the village turned on them in a fury and pronounced all three of them to be witches.”

“How awful,” said Sarah’s mother.

“Yes, I rather imagine it was,” said Tony. “They were taken away to Oxford, tried, found guilty—”

“And hanged by the neck until they were dead!” said Daniel gleefully.

Now Sarah shot her son a look. He could barely suppress his grin.

“Precisely,” said Tony. “But before they died, they said that the fields of Mabb’s Hill would — exact words here — ‘run with blood and that the fires of Hell would wreak their revenge’. Hence we have the Curse of Mabb’s Farm, which seems to be capturing the imagination of the whole of Cherringham this month.”

“Awesome,” said Chloe.

“Gruesome,” said Daniel, grinning.

There was a pause while Helen dished up seconds and Michael poured more wine and passed down Cokes for Daniel and Chloe.

“What do you think, Simon? Can a place be cursed?” said Sarah to the Reverend Hewitt, genuinely interested in what he might have to say.

“We know a place can be blessed,” he responded instantly. “Few of us would therefore doubt that places where real evil has been committed can exude an air of evil themselves.”

“So you think the Curse could be real?” said Sarah, putting down her knife and fork.

“Never underestimate the power of Darkness,” he said seriously.

The table went quiet. Suddenly the light-hearted chatter about Druids and witches had become a discussion about the reality of evil.

“Ooh! I forgot the crackling! Who wants seconds?” said Sarah’s mother, instinctively filling the silence in the only way she knew how.

With relief, Sarah saw that everyone suddenly wanted extra crackling in lieu of more banter about the power of Darkness, and in the flurry of plates and demands it seemed that the awkward moment had passed.

But then the Vicar’s wife surprised her.

“Simon and I have agreed to differ on this one, Sarah,” said Emily Hewitt, seriously. “You see, he believes that prayer is the answer when evil is afoot. I don’t disagree. But I also believe one can take physical action too. In fact, I believe that one must.”

“I’m sure,” said Sarah, not at all sure what the Vicar’s wife was getting at.

Emily held Sarah in a long gaze, and Sarah felt that the she was delivering a message directly to her.

But what? And why here, at Sunday lunch of all places? After all, she hardly knew the woman.

She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

After lunch the Vicar left early to prepare for an Evensong service. Sarah dispatched Daniel to her father’s study to help him paint a new batch of Napoleonic soldiers, which had just come in the post, and Chloe and Tony went to help Helen with the washing up.