The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick Read Free Book Online Page A

Tunstall’s closed eyes showed.
    â€œGo on,” Anna said.
    Tom whispered something, and then as Anna began winding again, he reached up and tried to help his sister, his clumsy hands slowing her, but calming her some, too.
    That done, Anna stepped back, pulling Tom by the shoulders, squeezing them tightly.
    She watched as the Byatts and Jack Smith and John Fuller lifted their mother onto the floorboard, and passed her out of the now-open window to the other villagers waiting outside.
    Then came the cry of “to the tree!” and away they went.
    Somewhere above thirty of the villagers had come out, come out from their homes dotted through the woods in Welden Valley.
    Anna clung to Tom. They came behind the others. Tom’s mind was empty. Anna wondered at the size of the wake; perhaps they’d come because they’d liked Joan Tunstall. Perhaps they’d come because they were afraid of her, even in death—the gracewife, the cunning woman. Anna had seen almost everyone there come through their door in the year before her mother’s death; they all used Joan for this and for that. For swollen knees, or to bring a fever down, to take an ointment that would make a husband a better lover, or for some herbs to stop a wound going bad.
    The Tunstalls’ cottage was at the top edge of Callis Wood, near the top of the valley, above them were the tentergrounds, where Anna spent so much time working for John Fuller. Below them were the trees, lining the steep valley sides like green velvet in a rich lady’s coffin.
    The funeral party moved down the path that led beside Tunstall Cottage, zickzacking through the trees, left and right, left and right, to the valley floor where Golden Beck flowed.
    The tall trees were towers around them; the floor was flat with flagstones where the narrow river ran left, artificially underground for a fifty-yard stretch before emerging at the wheel of Fuller’s Mill.
    They turned to the right, and a short walk led them to the trysting tree; not one tree in fact, but two that had grown close together, and somehow the trunks had fused near the bases, leaving a perfect neat archway between them. Above this natural arch, the two trunks grew apart again and thrust up to join the leaf top canopy of the forest.
    No one alive had a memory of a time before the trysting tree, and thus it had existed forever. Therefore it had been made either by God, or one of the older sort. Therefore it was magical.
    The villagers wasted no time.
    Two of the men went to the far side of the tree, while the four who’d carried Joan through the woodland bent and passed the body, floorboard and all, through the hole, through the heart of the trysting tree.
    Without touching the ground, Joan emerged from other side, a little safer than before she went through.
    Tom clung to Anna’s side as they watched.
    Adam Dolen was there, then. Fat.
    â€œShame it is, to bury your mother while there’s no vicar in the house.”
    Helen Fuller heard him from where she stood.
    â€œWhat difference does it make? We know our business as well as the vicar did.”
    Adam said nothing else because he was too slow to think of anything to say before the procession moved off again.
    Back down from the tree, they made their way over the flags that hid the river, then followed the path that led around beside the mill pool, past Fuller’s Mill, along the valley bottom with Horsehold Wood on the left and the river on the right. Beyond the river, Arton Wood clung to the hillside, all the way up to Dolen’s farm, where Grace’s mother no doubt sat, stewing.
    On the procession went, all the way down to Gaining Water, and as they turned to take the path back up through Horsehold Wood to St. Mary’s Church, someone started to sing the song.
    So it was, singing, that they carried Joan Tunstall’s body into the churchyard, and placed her in the hole that Anna had paid Old Harry threepence to