A Hint of Witchcraft by Anna Gilbert

towards the chimney, had not seen her. A curve in the path or a thickness in the hedge might for a moment or two have limited her view.
    But suppose Katie had seen Linden, conspicuous in her white skirt and blouse and coming towards her. They would soon be face to face, just the two of them in empty fields under a wide sky. Margot knew as surely as if she had been there, how Katie would have felt. Could it have been the sight of Linden that drove her panic-stricken to the nearest hiding place? How strange if her unaccountable fear of Linden had been in some weird way a forewarning that Linden would be the cause of her death, indirectly of course. Margot shivered in the grip of a superstitious fear as irrational as Katie’s. There were already reasons, suppressed or unacknowledged, for the gradual change in her attitude to Linden. The possibility that she might unintentionally have driven Katie to her death at the very time when Katie most needed help seemed actually to change Linden herself. For the time being she didn’t want to see her.
    Nor did she. Linden left immediately after breakfast on the fateful morning and judiciously stayed away. The atmosphere at Ashlaw for the next week or two would not have been to her liking. Among other things she missed Katie’s funeral.
    Never in living memory had there been such a funeral in Ashlaw. For Jo Judd’s sake as well as for his daughter’s, the Hope Brass Band turned out to a man and led the cortège. It was felt that the Dead March from Saul, customary for men killed in the pit, was less suitable for a young girl. Abide With Me fell more kindly on the summer scene she had so abruptly left. The procession included every adult capable of following the hearse. Others lined the main street and Church Lane. Boys clinging to railings or peering through bushes took off their caps as Katie passed, the flowers on her coffin lying almost as deep as the earth that would soon cover it. The publicity surrounding her death had moved sympathizers to send donations to her family. Some of the more generous remained anonymous: neither the coal company, the landowner, or the Mining Association would wish to accept responsibility, but as individuals they were not without heart.
    The Judds were gratified. Their prestige had never been higher. Their resentment against the world was appeased – for the time being – by the inquest, the crowds, the wreaths, the band and not least by the service in church. It was Mrs Dobie who urged the revival of the old custom of hanging white garlands in church when a young girl died. It had not happened for over fifty years and she was the only person who remembered it. Then, afterwards, the sit-down tea in the British Legion hut was photographed and the pictures were published in the Elmdon Gazette. The funeral did all that funerals are supposed to do in dignifying grief and making it bearable. The folk of Ashlaw, drawn together as they had been in other disasters, knew how to look after their own.
    On the second day after the funeral, Margot made a private pilgrimate to Katie’s grave. The little twelfth-century church of St Michael stood isolated from the village on a rise overlooking the river. Late sunshine gilded the gentle slopes beyond the churchyard wall. A mountain ash leaned over from the neighbouring pasture to shade the spot where – unbelievably – Katie lay in quietness unbroken save by the murmur of the river below.
    Margot knelt to replace a fallen spray of flowers. She smelt the dying fragrance of wreathed lilies and the sharper scent of new-turned earth, and gradually there came to her in the hush of the June evening the sense of a mysterious yet natural wholeness: the transition from life to death was perhaps no more than the gentle flow of water between green banks in the valley below. The distress of the past days yielded to blessed relief. Katie was safe: nothing would harm or frighten her