A Hint of Witchcraft by Anna Gilbert Page A

again.
    Inside the church it was dim and cool. Above her head as she entered by the west door hung Katie’s maiden garlands looped to a rail. They were made of white linen in the shape of crowns adorned with rosettes. Later they would be hung on the north wall.
    Margot’s heart leapt as the awesome silence was broken by a faint beating of wings on the St Oswald window. A bird, misjudging the level of its flight, had struck the stained glass. It clung for an instant, wings outspread as if balked of entry, then took to the air once more and was gone.
    Behind her the door opened. The garlands swayed in a current of air.
    â€˜Miles.’
    â€˜They said you had come this way.’ To conceal his delight in having found her, he looked up at the crudely made garlands.
    â€˜There haven’t been garlands since 1875,’ she told him, ‘when Mrs Dobie was a girl. It was her idea to bring them for Katie. You remember Mrs Dobie?’
    â€˜No one could forget Mrs Dobie. It was a good idea. So many customs have died out – and that’s how places change. I’d like things to stay just as they are’ – how lovely she was, her eyes pensive, her lips tremulous – ‘at this very moment.’ Conscious of having spoken ardently, he looked up again at the dangling shapes. ‘They used to hang gloves on them in the Middle Ages as a challenge to anyone who cast doubt on the innocence and purity of the dead girl.’
    â€˜No one doubts Katie’s innocence. She must have taken the beads instinctively because they were pretty. She didn’t realize that it was wrong – and she has paid for them, hasn’t she?’ Her voice trembled; she must find something else to talk about. ‘I’ve been looking at the memorial tablets. Thomas Rilston, Isabella, Henry … they’re all your ancestors.’
    He told her about them. All except Isabella had died in battle: Thomas at Corunna in the Peninsular War: Henry on the Northwest Frontier: another Thomas in the Boer War and the latest, Miles, his father, at Ypres.
    â€˜Must all the Rilstons be soldiers?’ She saw that the question troubled him.
    â€˜It’s been a problem.’ He opened the heavy door and motioned her to the seat in the porch. ‘I know it’s inconsistent after what I said about disliking change, but I don’t feel that I can carry on the family tradition of soldiering.’
    â€˜I’m glad. There have been far too many deaths. Mrs Dobie was right about that too. A wicked waste of flesh and blood, she called it.’
    â€˜Actually it’s unlikely that there’ll be another war in our time. The world is weary of slaughter. Killing on that scale must never happen again. I’d probably be safer in the army now than any of the earlier Rilstons but I’d still be out of my depth.’
    â€˜What would you like to do?’
    He looked out from the narrow porch at ancient yews and headstones so worn by time that no one could tell who lay beneath them. Long beams of late sunlight touched here and there a carved cross or the crooked lettering of ‘here lies…’ and the bolder lines of a lost name. He could have said that he would like to stay for ever in such a hallowed place beside the one person with whom he felt at ease; that in the few hours they had spent together she had taught him how lonely he had been before he knew her. It was too soon: she was too young, her future still unshaped.
    â€˜I’d like to take up flying,’ he said. He had a friend, an enthusiast with his own plane. ‘I’ve been up with him a few times and taken the controls. It’s a marvellous sensation – to look down on the earth. People shrink to pin-points in the sweep of the land – and all around you there’s the empty sky.’
    It’s people who worry him, she thought. He isn’t used to them. He doesn’t understand people.
    He was