A 15th‑century notebook hides a heretical message.

EXRACT FROM GROW WILLOW

‘It’s getting late Mr Lockhart. I didn’t realise’

He stood clutching the folder of pictures and looked a little alarmed.

‘I’m sorry. I was lost in the pictures. It’s getting dark. You should go, of course. Or perhaps even stay here. With the danger, I mean’

‘I think there’s an hour or more of daylight left. I don’t think it’s really so late. It’s just that the fog is very dense’

‘I’ll walk with you to the lane. It’s only half an hour to Earls Court from there. We should go now. Or you can stay here’

‘No. I should go’

She felt a little sorry. He seemed to have reached out to her. She would visit him again, she thought. But Howard would be worried if she was late, or if she didn’t come home. She had to go now.

He put a coat over his shoulders and put the folder under his arm.

He looked about for his cattle as they left the yard. He’d have to bring them in before dark. At the junction with the lane he shook her hand and held out two pennies.

‘For you’ he smiled. ‘And this…’

‘Oh I can’t take it’

It was one of the landscape pictures. A winter scene showing a wide field with trees to the left. There was a field behind and then a low hill. It was a very simple drawing but there was a feeling of infinity in it, as well as a feeling of desolate winter. But it was a human vision of winter, and so therefore perhaps not so desolate.

He insisted that she take it. She rolled it carefully and put it in one of the deep pockets of her coat. She’d hang it in the living room of the cottage.

‘My wife drowned you know’ he said suddenly. ‘She was always strange when the wolves came – sleepy and absent. She would disappear and sometimes fall asleep in the fields, even in the winter. She went one day and drowned in the river. They found her’

He wasn’t looking at Mrs Van Dijk but at the grey trees across the lane.

He left her and scurried quickly back to his farm. She heard him calling his cows in the gloomy trees.

Extract from The Cheadle Devil

Peter Bass lay back in the grass. He looked up at the Doctor’s wife, shielding his eyes from the low sun with his hand. She looked uneasy.

‘Irene’ he said.

He liked saying her first name –– but in the proper Spanish pronunciation. He remembered when he had first heard her name said in the English way - it had seemed so genteel, a name of the complacent middle classes. The way Dr Sable had said it took away all its sharpness - the muscular vowels and consonants of Spain.

This was typical of Sable. He made everything a joke. He seemed a symbol of the country middle classes, and Peter despised them – the landowners, the vicars, the doctors – for their lack of intelligence, their lack of courage. They would never take what they wanted, do what they wanted. Everything was so polite.

He said again.

‘Irene, we can stay here for a while. What are you worrying about?’

She picked grass and straw from her skirt and smoothed her hair. She thought she probably looked very untidy.  She thought they should move as quickly as they could south or perhaps east. There were boats to Holland and Spain. It was a wild coast in the east, grey sea and miles of white sand. It was an easy place to hide. Soon the constabulary would be looking at ports, perhaps in towns with coach traffic.

Peter stood and looked around. There was a tiny lane over the hedge where they’d stopped, and in the hour or so while they had rested there had been no traffic, nothing. In the sun it was beautiful too. They could stop here, find a barn or a farmhouse – somewhere remote - and pay the farmer. No one would even know who they were. No one read newspapers out here.

Irene continued to pick straw from her dress and leaned back, her elbows high, to tie her hair back.

She was beautiful. He’d liked her from the start. He remembered once when he’d been talking to Dr Sable about geology and the doctor had made one of his stupid childish jokes. She had actually raised her eyebrow at him, Peter, in an ironic way – making fun of her own husband. From that moment they were linked in their disdain of the country Doctor. There was much more to her than met the eye. Before she was married, she was Gonzalez. Irene Gonzalez! This had appealed to him – because she was originally Spanish – and because she wasn’t much older than him. But years younger than Dr Sable. He could never work out why she had married him.

‘Do you feel guilty?’ she asked squinting in the sun at him.

‘For what?’

‘Running away. For killing your brother. For disappointing your father?’

She smiled crookedly at him. She was making fun. But she thought he looked handsome and older than his years, an old hat pulled over his eyes. He was strong, so clever, so ruthless.