The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements is a seventeenth-century
ghost story . A story in which the oppression and wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors provides a
compelling backdrop, where a sense of encroaching malevolence seeps like a ‘winding sheet of fog ... silent, still,
watching’ through the very stones of Scarcross Hall, and the fates of all
who live there.
Scarcross Hall is claustrophobic, grim and
gothic to its core, with its “... days of
grandeur long faded. There are slates missing from the roof, cracked panes in
the leads, and a crumbling central chimney. A high wall lends poor protection,
pocked and lichen-stained, ravaged by years of storm and gale. It has the air
of a shipwreck, abandoned and disintegrating amid the great wild ocean of the moor.”
At the centre of the story, and residing in
this wreck of the house, is the admirable character of Mercy Booth who, almost
from the very start when walking on the cold dark heath has a sense that she is being watched by
something that chills her to her soul ~ that perhaps her family is cursed by
the treasure of three ancient coins, ‘worn
and warped, decorated with pagan symbols’, that her father says he found
one day within The White Ladies circle of standing stones ~ “the rugged stones pale on the skyline,
heights pointing to Heaven, roots buried Devil knows how deep.”
Mercy’s father used to tell his child that
the coins held the magical gift of protection. In those days she had often
played with them, rattling the coins in her two cupped hands. But now, as the
years of youth have passed, Mercy thinks of darker tales, of ... “folklore and fancy, handed down to us young
ones, whispered by firesides on dark winter nights. After that I sometimes
wondered if, rather than protection, the coins offered an ill omen.” She
also thinks of chanted songs known to the local community. The warnings she
perhaps should heed...
“One
coin marks the first to go.
A
second bodes the fall.
The
third will seal a sinner’s fate.
The
Devil take them all.”
Mercy’s fate is to run her father’s farm, enduring
the personal agony of witnessing his rapid decline into old age and dementia while
also striving against the elements and the cruelty of the landscape. Her hands
are hardened, stained with mud. Her nostrils are filled with the stench of
blood, and yet she is utterly at one in this world to which her soul belongs,
revelling in the feel and the odour of peat and moss beneath her feet, and
describing such glorious visions as: “Silvery
water ... a thousand year path...dropping from the fells, freezing into
icicles, glazing the mosses and hazing into fine mist where it meets the valley
bottom.”
The
Coffin Path’s settings are beautifully drawn, with the
book divided into parts that echo the seasons of the year, and in which Clements’ vivid
and visceral landscape provides a reflection of Mercy’s soul. There is almost an animal
element to the wildness of her existence ~ whether washing her own bloody rags
in a stream, or delivering a lamb out on the moors; even in the moments when
she finds a dead sheep blown with maggots and flies exuding the putrid stench
of death.
Such connections with flesh, with birth, and death are described with
the rawest honesty. Indeed, many aspects of the lambing work was so vividly
described I felt compelled to ask Katherine Clements if she’d ever experienced
such things first hand. She had, which did not surprise me, because this novel exudes authenticity, with even the
yeasty scent of dough rising in the kitchen bowls imbued with a stench of sour
dread, rather than being comforting. Candles stink of mutton fat. The
night-time house is unnerving, whether in its abandoned dusty rooms with the lingering
memories of the dead, or in the terrifying fireguard, carved and painted to
look like a little boy. And then, there is also the real child, Sam, often visiting the house, who is
frail and in need of protection, and yet with a presence increasingly linked to our own chilling sense of dark unease - such as when
Mercy watches him one day and thinks ~“Our
Sam has his eyes open, staring into the far corner, smiling to himself as he
watches cloud patterns dance across the plaster. Something in his expression is
unnerving - knowing, almost triumphant. Is he laughing at us?”
Added to this growing fear is the spiralling
tension we witness resulting from Mercy’s sensuality. She is no longer the
carefree girl who once ran wild across the moors. Neither is she the virgin
with naive hopes to be wed one day, to produce a family of her own. Here is a real woman who
experiences real sexual needs, even if she does not live in an era when such behaviour is admired.
This is an age of political turmoil, with the aftermath of the
Civil War causing enormous social distrust and economic turmoil. A time when
many women are still accused of witchcraft, when people believe whole-heartedly
in the existence of a Heaven and Hell ... and perhaps even damnation for one
whose independent life and power as a landholder is poisoned by evil suspicions and fears, by sexual tensions and jealousies.
Mercy's peace is then unsettled more by the unexpected arrival
of a stranger known as Ellis, who Mercy employs as an extra hand when the farm is beset by troubles, and to whom she is strongly attracted despite
an initial sense of distrust ~ though never for one moment can she begin to
imagine the influence he will come to exert on her future life.
The starkness, the gritty honesty, the
often alluring brutality at the centre of this novel has many echoes of Wuthering Heights. Scarcross is also a
house that’s cursed, set alone in a rural setting where Nature is raw in tooth
and claw. From the moment we enter its doors we are immersed in a sense of
impending doom where simmering tensions and darkness of shadows gradually
reveal the truth in a violent and moving climax.
Oozing with gothic symbolism, this brooding
and beautiful ghost story is guaranteed to haunt your dreams long after the
cover has been closed.
The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements will be available in February 2018, published by Headline Review.
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