Free Dolly by Susan Hill Page B

spade in my hands, the blunted, rusty edge with which I had dug into this same ground. I cannot have gone down far.
    I got up and went round the side of the church, finding what I needed almost at once – the shed in which whoever maintained the churchyard and dug the occasional grave kept his things. The padlock was undone. I found what I needed easily enough, wondering how much it was used; Iyot Lock was a hamlet of so few houses – there cannot have been many burials.
    Leonora had followed me, obviously not wanting to be alone, and now was beside the wall, looking down. I pushed the blade into the earth with all my strength but it was extremely hard ground and yielded little. I scraped away as best I could, and after a short time the soil loosened. There were some tree roots which must have spread in the many years since I was last here and which made my task harder but I did not have to go very deep before I bumped against something caught beneath one of them. It was not hard, but felt compressed. I threw down the space and knelt on the grass. Leonora was standing nearby, and as I glanced up I saw that she was looking with alarm at me, as if she feared I had gone mad.
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said, in a falsely cheerful voice, ‘I told you I would find it for you.’
    ‘Find what? What on earth are you doing, Edward, and should you be digging about in a churchyard? Isn’t that wickedness or illegal or some such thing? You could be digging up someone’s grave.’
    ‘I am,’ I said.
    It seems insane indeed, now I look back, but at the time I was possessed by the need to find out if I was right, and get Leonora what my aunt had willed her. She was right, as she had screeched in the solicitor’soffice, she had been cut out of the rest of the inheritance and only left the wretched doll in what was perhaps the one mean-spirited gesture our aunt had ever made. Her childhood behaviour over the birthday doll, her spoilt tantrum and violent rejection of it, when Kestrel had gone to buy it especially, to make up for disappointment, must have rankled for years – unless she had written her will shortly after it had all happened. Either way, she intended Leonora to be taught a lesson but I was not going to indulge in that sort of tit-for-tat gesture. I would tell Leonora that I planned to give her exactly half the money we eventually achieved.
    This had all become some sort of game that had gone too far. I knew that well enough as I knelt on the ground and felt around with both my hands in the space under the tree root. I soon came upon a damp lump of something and gradually used my fingers to ease it away from the soil.
    The white cardboard box had rotted away over the years and then adhered like clay to the contents, and as I took it in my hands, I could feel the shape beneath. It was a slimy grey mess.
    It was also almost completely dark and I laid the object on the ground while I hastily covered the soil back over the shallow place I had cleared.
    ‘Come on, back to the house. I can’t see anything here.’
    ‘Edward, what have you done?’
    ‘I told you – I have retrieved your inheritance.’
    I carried it carefully down the dark road back to Iyot House. It felt unpleasant, slimy and with clots of soil adhering to the wet mush of cardboard.
    I do not know that I had thought particularly about the state the doll would be in after being buried for so long. Certainly the way the box had disintegrated was no surprise – the very fact that it was there at all was remarkable. If you had asked me I suppose I would have said the doll would be very dirty, perhaps unrecognisable as a doll, but undamaged – china or pot or plastic, whatever it was actually made of, would not have rotted like the box.
    I went into the old kitchen, found a dust sheet and laid it on the deal table. Leonora seemed to be as intrigued as I was, though also distinctly alarmed.
    ‘How did you know where to look? What on earth was it doing buried