The Well (48 page)

‘Aren’t you going to ask how I did it, why I did it?’ she whispers.

She is licking her lips, her face is ashen. She retches. She is suffering. I could hold her beautiful hair away from her sickness, rest my hands on her heaving shoulders. She suddenly looks so weak, but now she is scrabbling again for the bag, shaking it. It rattles and I catch a glimpse of white enamel and realise she has a mug. She crawls towards the pond, dips it in the water, drinks and drinks and retches and drinks again. When she has slaked her thirst, she gives thanks to the Rose for the water and offers me the cup.

When I shake my head and refuse her communion, she sags, apparently exhausted, and I have a moment to think. Now I understand what Dorothy has done for me. She created this moment, produced and directed this scene from afar, her letter auditioned Amelia for the part and she took it. I know my lines, I just need to get over the stage fright and speak them.

‘Why?’ I ask.

The sound of the water being poured back from the mug into the Wellspring is loud, but the silence is even louder. Slowly, very slowly, she stands, the last drops fall from the cup and the candle goes out.

‘Why?’ I repeat, but the question frightens me and I move away from her answer, around the other side of the pond which is less familiar to me. I don’t know where the roots lie or where the badgers’ sets open beneath your feet.

She follows me, calling. ‘Because of how the Rose meant it to be. Because it was the truth. Because of you.’ She catches up with me, but stops short of my arm’s length and drops her voice, pushing
her sentences out one by one. ‘I’m not a murderer, Ruth. Does the world count God a child-killer because he sacrificed his only son?’ She swallows, wets her mouth, labouring her words. ‘I didn’t kill Lucien, Ruth, I freed him. He didn’t suffer. I gave him more than you could ever give him. When the water closed over him, that was the moment The Well was free, and like the Rose of Jericho he was dead but then he lived, he flowered. Happy, Ruth, he is so happy now, I know. The Rose loves me for that.’ Again, she has to pause, again she struggles to breathe. ‘And you. The Rose loves us both.’

Amelia plunges into the black font that is the Wellpond and it resists her, slapping the mossed stones in anger at the disturbance. ‘Today is the day of the Assumption.’ She cups the water, scoops it, throws it into the air over and over again, but this is a sunless chapel, there is no light to catch the falling drops and this time, there is no rainbow. ‘And you, you were free, Ruth, to be who you are meant to be, to be with the Rose, with me.’ Like a decaying statue in a fountain, lit by an uncertain moonlight, she stands with her arms raised in the air, her head pulled back by the river of her hair in that familiar ecstasy.

‘O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall she be, that rewards thee as thou hast served us
.

‘Happy shall she be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’

As if someone has cut the strings, it is suddenly over and she lurches and slugs herself back out of the pond, leaving a wet trail glistening, a pale hump sludged with mud from the pond floor and smeared with weed. She has no weapons left; I am still standing.

‘Amelia, he was just a little boy.’ I look down at her, all drama gone, just the one fact left. ‘That wasn’t right. By the laws of any God, that cannot have been right.’

She reaches out to grasp my ankles, but I am too quick.

‘And do you know what? I don’t know what happened to me when I met you, what I felt for you, but I can tell you this, it was never love.’ It cannot be hate now either, I think, as I listen to her
sobbing, otherwise there will be nothing left of me. I squat down beside her. ‘Amelia,’ I start, ‘we were all mistaken . . .’

But she is not listening to me. She is staring through me, into the gloom. She interrupts me. ‘Look at them all coming, between the trees.’

There is no one there, no one at all. Not even the sound of anyone.

Amelia continues to call and point. ‘They are all coming because they believe. The Rose of Jericho is flowering for them. Do you still believe in me?’

Ignore her, I tell myself, this is all madness, but she repeats her question again and again, becoming more and more agitated, reaching for me, grasping, clutching.

‘Do you still believe?’

The fear I felt when I first saw her returns. I need help, I need the guards down here, but if I go to get them, even if I go just far enough up the hill to scream for them, she will be gone when they arrive. She will have slid back under the surface and no one will believe me that she was ever here at all. It seems impossible that she could escape, but everything she has ever done has been impossible.

In the empty space left by her hallucinations and my indecision comes a strange warbling, a foreign, primeval sound like night-frogs or crickets in a hot climate. I can sense that Amelia is also unnerved and that the two of us are transfixed by this high, insistent song. It is not clear where it is coming from. It has moved. First above our heads, then silent, now there it is again. Whatever it is seems to be on the boundary fence which divides The Well from the rest of the world and its persistent call rises and falls without ceasing, like a siren. There it is, it is a bird, taking wing, silhouetted against the moon which has arrived like a visitor at the edge of the wood and I know from its flight song, the hawkish pitch and the glide that this is the nightjar, returned, the Puck of a bird, the goatsucker. It is gone. Instantly, I know what I must do. In an instinctive act of faith,
I run at that space, at the fence, I thrust my tagged wrists through the barbed wire, the electric shock thumps me and throws me onto my back, my head hits the ground, there is blood and gashes on my arms, but even through this pain and confusion I can hear the one thing that matters: across the fields, through the night, the alarms are screaming for attention.

Dizzy, disoriented, I use a low branch to pull myself to my feet. She is still down. ‘It’s over, they’re coming now.’ The sickness recedes and rises again and although my blood is dripping onto the rust-brown of last year’s leaves, I have found a sort of unfamiliar strength. I shout, ‘You’ll be arrested.’ I see her future, it is pathetic and its pathos feeds my reeling bitterness. ‘I’ll tell you what will happen then. You’ll serve your time in prison, but not like this,’ I throw my arms out to the forest, ‘not like my beautiful prison. You’ll have a toilet bolted to the floor and dinner on a plastic tray.’

She is laughing; I am right, so I am crying. The forest has never heard such a cacophony: two women, by a pond, in the darkness.

‘You’ll be nobody in there, Amelia. For years. Forgotten. No visitors. A nobody.’ I continue my damnation of her, but I am not sure she can hear me. My voice is weakening, my head spinning, but although I seem to be losing control, I am not imagining it, there is shouting. The guards. Two minutes at the most, they’ll be here. Has she taken some drug, to be like this, laughing so loudly, so sick? They are approaching, the beams of their torches are sweeping between the trees, lighting her up, darkening her again – now you see her, now you don’t. They will take her away and I will never see her again.

I realise that what I really want to do is to come face to face with her one last time. I trip over branches and stones to reach her before they do, I fall on her, bind my wrists with her long, wet hair, raise her head, pull her sick face close.

I spit at her lips. ‘Judas.’

The clearing was filled with light so hard I had to turn away, and behind the light were the shapes of the guards, guns raised,
commanding, demanding that I freeze, that I stand apart, that I let go. It is not that easy. I cannot let go. Out of the shadows, a boy steps forward as if to help, but I call out, ‘No!’ I will let go. One by one, I extract my blood-stained fingers until her hair falls free and I am left staring at the auburn strands in my hand which are all that is left. I have let go. We both get to our feet.

‘This,’ I say, ‘is Sister Amelia.’

There is confusion – Amelia says nothing, I have nothing left to say. Boy is explaining that Anon has brought only one set of handcuffs, which I suppose were meant for me, but on Three’s instructions he moves towards Amelia.

‘Wait!’ she commands and Anon steps back. Of course. She bends low. I step back. The men are tense. She is breaking off the ends of small branches from the undergrowth behind her, quite methodically, almost like a woman picking flowers for her table. She stands back up, very slowly; she is high again now, like she used to be, she has presence again now, like she used to have at those times of prayer and worship and I see it in the way we are all still and I feel it in the way we are all waiting for her next move. I am left in the wings, all the lights are on her, setting her hair on fire against the white marble of her face and neck, shining through her wet robe and illuminating her breasts, her ribs, her thighs. She picks berries from the branches, brings them to her lips, kisses them with her eyes closed and then smiles at me, holds the kiss out to me, unfurls her long fingers and offers me the fruit. I clasp my bleeding fists together, keep my dry mouth tight. I know what grows at The Well and where.

‘Goodbye Ruth,’ she says.

She tosses the berries into the Wellpond and, for a brief moment, a few slight ripples catch the light and sparkle and then the water is still and dim again. She brings her other arm up and holds her wrists out for the handcuffs. I am about to say something, but there is too much shouting, it is confusing, it seems hard to organise the words for what needs to be shared. I am ordered to follow, but I
hang back. Boy hesitates; I ask him to go. Three tells him to move and the moment is past. Amelia is manhandled out of the clearing, I hear them crashing their way out of the Wellwood and watch the swing and lurch of the torchlight fade. As she goes, I hear her singing.

And she is gone.

Wading into the pond, I am surprised by how warm it is and its warmth is seductive. I am in up to my waist. I reach out for the berries and they float beyond my reach. I inch forward, I grasp one, then another and another until I am sure there are none left and I hurl them from the spring. Then, with one deep breath, I plunge my whole being into the womb of the water and feel the weight and the cloak close over my head and hold me down until I think there will be no end to the pain and the pressure and the blindness, before I burst back out into the miraculous lightness of air and understand. That was how it was for him – my question is answered.

I
t is a very hot afternoon, the thick walls of the cottage have held the sun at bay, but the heat took my breath away when I stepped outside. I slept very deeply last night and right through the morning. I don’t know who put me to bed, I remember very little after they took her away, but now I am sitting outside under the shade of the oak. Boy has put up the little card table and has run a bowl of warm water and is bathing the cuts on my arms. I let him; he is gentle and intent in his care and as he dips the cotton wool and dabs my skin, he tells me that Angie has left a message: Mark is safe. He also fills me in on what happened last night, how they found me collapsed by the spring and carried me home and how it took two of them to hold Amelia, even handcuffed, how they took her away in a police van.

I wince at his first aid. ‘An ambulance would have been more appropriate – actually no, a hearse. That’s what she needed.’

‘She looked pretty rough,’ he agrees, ‘tachycardic, sweating, hallucinating. So did you for that matter.’ He takes the bowl and empties the stained water into the hedge. ‘But you have to be careful after an electric shock.’

‘No, you don’t understand. She’ll never stand trial.’ I have brought Lucien’s book of
Poisonous Plants of the British Isles
out with me and
I thumb through to find the right page. ‘That’s what she threw in the pond.’ The picture accurately depicts the deep purple flowers with orange stamens and the rich, dark berries hanging from their vine-like host.

‘Deadly nightshade? Are you sure?’ Boy turns the pages of the book in disbelief.

‘Devil’s herb, sorcerer’s cherry, call it what you will. It drives you mad with thirst.’ A woman by a Wellpond, holding out the offer of a tin cup of water and a fistful of fruit – I close my eyes to rid myself of the picture.

‘Belladonna, isn’t that the same thing?’

‘It is. Do you know why it’s called belladonna? Women used it to make their cheeks flush or their eyes look enormous.’

‘That’s right, her pupils were really dilated.’

‘But another myth is that sometimes the deadly nightshade takes the form of an enchantress of great loveliness who it’s dangerous to even look upon and fatal to kiss.’ A second recollection, tactile this time, touching and a tongue around the lips, the licking of lips. I wipe my mouth with the remaining cotton wool. ‘She will die.’

Boy gets out his phone. ‘I’ll call the police. There must be an antidote. She has to live to be charged.’

Leaning over the table, I put my hand on his. ‘There’s nothing to be done. She will never stand trial, never be found guilty.’

More than that, she has mugged me and run, left me full of hatred and robbed me of the chance to forgive her one day – people say that’s how you move on, but I don’t know if forgiving the dead has the same effect. She has snatched from me the possibility of pity, the quality of mercy.

Boy hammers the table. ‘But that can’t be allowed to happen, there’s no justice in that.’ He paces up and down. ‘Things need to be tied up, finished.’

‘Resolved?’ He doesn’t hear the smile in my voice. ‘She’ll confess first, she loves me enough to do that.’

‘But that won’t resolve anything.’

‘I’ve had my day in court, Boy, and the verdict was . . .’

Suddenly, Boy is on his feet and so am I, both incredulous, because the Land Rover is being driven down the drive at a crazy speed, thumping into the potholes, crashing against the ruts, horn blasting, radio blaring and Three is leaning out of the window, shouting, ‘Come and listen to this! You’ve got to hear this!’