The Village Fate

“I’m sorry, I just haven’t got it in me tonight.”

“Come on Gertie, it’ll be worth it, I promise you.”

“Let me be Greg, I’m simply too tired to manage it.”

Greg was at a loss. He wanted to be respectful of Gertie’s boundaries, but Jackie had told him on no account to accept no for an answer. Which, now he came to think about it, didn’t really seem well aligned to the prevailing wisdom that no means no. He sighed deeply and looked down at Gertie, laying atop her bed in some kind of brightly patterned muumuu which may have flowed exotically about her had she been of a more exotic inclination.

“Gertie, Jackie will be here in a minute and if you’re still dressed in that….” but it was too late. Jackie’s Birkenstocks slapped against the tiles of the entrance hall below.

“Gertie? Greg? Gertie darling, your front door was wide open. Are you upstairs?”

Greg caught Gertie’s eye, and squared his shoulders. “We’re in the bedroom Jackie” he shouted, “up here.” Gertie shrank further into her kaftanesque covering as Jackie strode into the room, assessing the situation before her without pausing to acknowledge her disappointment.

“Come on,” she bustled, “you’ll feel better once you’re out, it’s far too hot to be cooped up in here.”

Outside, Mira and Linda leant against the stone gateposts and watched a bee buzzing in and out of speckle throated foxgloves, his furry bottom protruding as he unwittingly pollinated flower after flower. The evening was unusually sultry, and the women perspired in damp silence.

The plan had been Mary’s, and though none of them were entirely against it, it was only mutual accountability that had got them this far. "I’m tired of keeping secrets,” Mary had said, flushing a little at her own bravado, so close to where her husband sat in his study preparing his sermon for the Saturday service. As unlikely a venue as the vicarage seemed, it was Mary’s turn to host the weekly coven meeting. “It’s time we stepped into the light. No one burns witches anymore.”

“I think you’re confusing witches and pagans” Mira had admonished “but I’m sure both will be welcome in the church.”

Linda looked up from her beadwork. “Actually there need not be a separation between the two, and many believe that Jesus was himself a witch.” Mary glanced aghast at the closed door, and Helen, noticing, changed the subject.

The ritual seemed to matter to Mary though. There had been a building pressure in the coven since Jackie had gone on a last minute break to Montenegro and ruined the prosperity spell for Mira’s nephew, who was opening a used tyre business. Then there had been a dispute about whether to do the prosperity spell at the next waxing moon, or stick with the fertility spell they had planned for Gertie’s god-daughter. Sides were taken and in the end Helen had suggested they divide and do both, and Greg had said that was the beginning of the end and Mary had gone home crying.

“I don’t know what’s in the air lately” Helen had huffed, “but it’s like the whole bloody village is at loggerheads.”

She was right. The trouble had started when Maureen Foster had published Giles Walker’s plans to convert his barn in her weekly newsletter. The piece had been a chisel blow to the fault lines of Little Writtham. In the six months since, the social club had become a staging ground for feuding factions to cast aspersions from either side of the snooker table, before emptying as folk chose to stay home rather than dredge up generations of buried bitterness over felled trees, infidelities and deceased cats.

Bitterness is contagious, and within the coven barbs turned to snipes and snipes to squabbles, and no one could really blame Jackie for running away to Montenegro if they were honest. When Mary suggested a unity ritual, resentment had made the idea unwelcome, and fear had made it undesirable, but loyalty had made it impossible to reject.

Gertie stomped out of the house and down the garden path, Greg and Jackie ushering her on from behind. Mira and Linda fell in at the gate, and the party processed along the road like witchfinders following a tip off, attracting more attention than any of them were wholly comfortable with as they went. But this had been the point, hadn’t it? To pique the collective curiosity of the villagers? Still, when Mira caught sight of Helen and Mary waiting on the village green in their white robes, she wished she had pushed harder for casual attire.

They had decided, since it was her idea, that Mary would lead the ceremony, but the vigil before fell to them all. From sundown to sunup, they would pass from one to another a burning flame, so that the light would never dip below their heads.

“It wont work, it'll just burn out” Helen had warned, and Gertie had protested that she would get dizzy holding her arms above her head all night, but Mary had been so much in earnest that they agreed perhaps it could be done, and Greg had set about shopping for heat resistant gloves, whilst Mira had broken six old pallets from the farm into burnable chunks. Now together on the green, as ridiculous as they felt, even Helen had to admit there was a sense of something special in the gathering gloom.

It was midnight when Richard Entwhistle strode out from the shadow of the great oak. People had been congregating for a while, drawn by the spectacle of seven middle aged folk clad in white and bickering over how to feed a small fire in a bowl above their heads, but they had stayed well back until Richard approached.

“Mira. Linda. Do you want some help with that?”

“Richard! How’s you mum?” Linda asked. “Would you mind taking a turn?”

After that, others started to come forward, stepping into the glow of the fire, and the coven explained again and again what was needed, until those who had already taken a shift were explaining to those who had just arrived, and those who had just arrived were inviting others to come too. Perhaps it was the restless warmth, perhaps it was something more, but mothers lifted damp haired children from their beds, and grandparents exchanged slippers for shoes and shuffled into the softness of the shortest night, pulled to the green, and to the fire.

By the time the black segued to grey dawn, the heart of Little Writtham was dotted with camp chairs and picnic blankets, and scarcely a soul remained indoors. At half past four, a ripple passed through the throng, and on it, the bowl, burning still, found its way back to Mary. Exhausted, she held the fire high, turning her face some way north of east, and began to hum, a low, steady, wordless incantation. To her left, Greg, Helen and Linda took up the hum, each in their own key, and to her right, Mira, Gertie and Jackie added their throats to the song. As they had held the fire through the dark, so now they held the hum, unceasing yet allowing each to breathe as they needed. Behind them, the vibration spread, and beneath the whispering trees, a thrumming suffused the air as each person felt its resonance bloom in their chest and, unconstricted, allowed it to flow onwards past their own lips.

Then, before them, the slimmest line of fire was glimpsed, cresting Main Street and rapidly growing to an arc, bridging the road in burning gold. Perhaps it was the spontaneous key change that did it, but Mary, still holding the fire, started to tremble, her arms quivering and her elbows folding beneath the weight of the bowl. Privately, she feared her vigour would fail, but as the muscles of her arms began to give, she felt them lifted, pressed upwards by strong hands and girded by fresh limbs. Behind her, her husband, black robed to her white, held her in her fatigue, his strength supporting hers, so that as the sun rose on the solstice morning, light met light unbowed.

*

It was not widely talked about, but by mid-July, the social club was full again, and the fete, cancelled in May, had been rearranged for August. Neighbours exchanged pleasantries, and at the coven coffee morning, there was a unanimous agreement to try a banishment spell on Elspeth Blair’s unwelcome rats before she called pest control.

“It’s funny to think this time last month she wouldn’t even have asked us” Gertie observed.

“This time last month people were barely talking” Helen pointed out. “Now I can’t walk five feet without someone stopping for a chat.”

“The ritual has changed everything, don’t you think?” asked Linda, needing no answer.

“Well” said Mary, leaning her head into her husband’s shoulder, “we were lucky with the weather.”