by Joan Aiken
“Hush! Here she comes now,” warned Is, as the garden gate clicked.
Mrs Boles, seen in daylight, was no great improvement on last night’s version: she had pale-grey skin, scanty grey hair done up in curl papers, and a well-used apron tied over layers and layers of grimy clothes. She was holding the pink mug.
“Took it for safe keeping,” she explained. “Ah hah! Getting the place a bit straightened up, are ye?” with an indulgent glance at their efforts. “Well, it does look a mossel better, I give ye that. You been trying your best. Not but what my best advice to you is leave here right soon – there’ll be nowt but trouble for you in this town. Like I was telling ye last night—”
“Mrs Boles, what is the Emjee?”
“Hush, will ye!” Mrs Boles’s eyes – still very red-rimmed – shot nervously hither and thither. She laid a skinny finger on her lips. Then, dipping the same finger in Arun’s pail of sea water, she drew ten letters in the thin layer of sand on the brick floor.
MERYJENTRY
“Merry Gentry? But what have they got to do with my Mum?”
“Quiet, boy, will you? You want them to come and poke you head first in a bog-hole on Romney Marsh? And me as well?”
“No; of course not; but why—”
“She took and went off with the Handsel Child!”
“She did what?”
“Y’Mum. Stole the Handsel Child.”
Arun was beginning to look frantic.
Is said quietly, “We don’t know what the Handsel Child is, Mrs Boles. We never heard of it. We have only just come from a long way off – Blastburn, way up in the north country. You’ll have to tell us about the Handsel Child.”
But this Mrs Boles seemed quite unable, or unwilling, to do. She clapped a hand over her china teeth, stared haggardly at each of them in turn, gulped, and muttered, “Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. Don’t know – How’m I supposed to tell ye? I wish now I’d gone off with my Meena – that I do. And then – and then there’s all y’Mum’s pictures . . . I’m sure I—”
“Did Aunt Ruth paint all those pictures?” Is asked with lively curiosity. She thought how very much she would like to meet a person who painted flowers in such a way. She had been up before breakfast to take another look at them by daylight.
“‘Oo else woulda done so, gel?”
“Did you watch her painting them?”
“Mercyme! Not on your Oliphant! I don’t want to turn dropsical – or come down with hot pulpitations.” Mrs Boles made the nervous gesture with her fingers of someone warding off bad magic. “‘Oo else woulda painted them if not Mrs T? Pictures don’t paint theirselves. Nobody else ’as bin in the ’ouse – only the skinny lady and she didn’t stop; she come axing questions after y’Mum took and scarpered—”
“The skinny lady? What skinny lady?”
“Come axing for y’Mum. She’d come here times afore – I remember her around Michaelmas a-colloguing with y’Mum. Tallish and sharpish-looking and bony as a hostrich; I showed her where the key is kep’ – ‘case she might want to take the pictures; dunno if I done right – but she never stopped—”
Mrs Boles’s voice dribbled away. She peered warily at her two listeners. Is wondered what other people she might have let into the house, and what they might have taken from it.
“You goin’ to get rid o’ them pictures? Take them outa here?” Mrs Boles asked hopefully.
It was plain that she feared and disliked the pictures; seemed to believe they had magical properties, might do her harm.
“Mrs Boles, will you please tell me about my Mum and the Handsel Child?”
But this threw Mrs Boles into a gibber of terror. “Na, na, me boy, na, na, I dassn’t do that. Mid as well chop out me own tongue, right here on the kitchen floor! Na, you hatta find some other body to ax about that. Ax – lemme think—” She visibly racked her brain. “Owd Mr Crockenden – nay, he won’t do. Miss Tinpenny – won’t do, she’s so deaf you hatta shout. Mrs Barefoot, in High Street. The dentist feller – no, he’s gone . . . I got it! You go see his cousin, the owd Admiral, Admiral Fishskin.”
She nodded at them triumphantly.
“He’ll be the feller to help ye. He’s a reel wonder, the owd boy, riding on his wheel-shay, flying his kite. He’ll tell ye all ye need to know. And, like as not,” added Mrs Boles, a brilliant idea striking her, “he’ll have some knobby notion what to do with y’Mum’s pictures. For they shouldn’t stay here. Ah, a great owd boy for pictures, the Admiral be! His house is full of ’em. I should know, I useter do for his lady – in the place, cleaning and such – afore she took and died, afore the Admiral retired. Pictures all up and down the walls, ’e ’as –’undreds of ’em.”
“Flying his kite?” asked Is.
“But why should the Admiral—”
“Thought a deal of y’Mum, the Admiral did,” went on Mrs Boles, “acos she nursed ‘is Missus. Now I gotta go.” She retreated hurriedly through the back door, wiping her hands on her grubby apron. Absently, she picked up the pink mug and took it with her.
“Where does the Admiral live?” Arun called after her.
“Up the East Cliff!” she hissed, removing herself even faster. “A big new ’ouse with a fancy garden sticking out on props.”
So, presently, Is and Arun abandoned the rather hopeless task of trying to clean the kitchen, and set off for the East Cliff.
“Folkestone is built over seventy hills,” Arun told Is, as they toiled up a steep slope, between grassy banks dotted all over with little hawthorn bushes.
“I can see that,” she panted, turning to look at the town lying scattered behind them, like a handful of dice dropped over a crumpled landscape of gullies and hillocks. Behind it frolicked the sea, blue and cheerful this morning under a frosty sun.
“Do you remember this Admiral? Admiral Fishskin?” she asked Arun.
“Only just. He hadn’t retired when I was at home. But sometimes he’d come into Dad’s shop, between cruises, I suppose, and chat. Dad would just sit quietly, nodding and listening. Do you think the Admiral would really have some notion of where my Mum has got to?”
“How can I tell?” said Is doubtfully, remembering that strange apparition on wheels. “I don’t see why he should. But it’s worth asking.”
“I can’t understand it!” burst out Arun after another five minutes’ steep climb. “Why should my Mum go off? Why wouldn’t she leave a message for me, at least, if she did? To say where she was going? She always used to do that – if she went out to nurse a sick person. She’d leave a note on the dresser. Or in the teapot—”
“The teapot wasn’t there,” Is reminded him. “Maybe Mrs Boles took it. Anyway, Arun! How long is it since you ran away from home?”
“I dunno, exactly.” He began to count on his fingers. “First I went up to London and sang songs in the street, and made friends with Davey. Then I went up north with Davey, then I was in the mines, then I ran off from there, and then I was out of my wits for a spell, because it had been so horrible in the mines—”
Is nodded. She had worked in the northern mines herself, and knew what they were like. And she knew that, for a while, Arun had believed he was a cat, so as not to have to remember the bad things that had happened to him and his friends. Particularly his friend Davey.
“Four or five years, I suppose,” he said at last. “Since I left Folkestone.”
“Well,” said Is, “why should your Mum ever expect you back? She must have thought you was gone for good-and-all. Dead, maybe. And your Dad was dead – why should she trouble to leave any message? Specially if she didn’t want folk to know where she was gone? Anybody might get into the house and read the message – or swipe it. Maybe Mrs Boles did that.”
“Mum would have hidden it in a secret place,” Arun said stubbornly.
He seemed hurt to the quick by his Mum’s faithless behaviour.
Is sighed at his unreasonableness. Then she said, “Look, there’s a baker’s cart. Reckon he
oughta know where this Admiral lives.”
The baker’s boy proved well-informed.
“Up to the very top, along the chalk track, and it’s the big red-brick place, all planted about with nut trees and poplars. With a garden that sticks out on a platform over the cliff edge.”
Indeed East Hill House was readily recognisable. The neat garden looked newly laid out. And at least half the garden extended out on a platform supported by girders. This platform – just like a regular garden – had grass on it, and gravel paths, and large earthenware pots containing plants and bushes.
“Coo!” said Is. “Looks mighty draughty out there! Suppose them props were to give way? I wouldn’t fancy picking daffodils outa those pots.”
“I suppose the Admiral must have known what he was about.”
They approached the house up a tidy path. Flowers bloomed in rows, not a leaf was out of place.
So it was quite a shock, after they rang the bell, and the door was opened by a smallish, oldish round-faced man, with a bald head and a bad limp, to find that the inside of the house was unbelievably untidy, with its floors and contents coated in what looked like seven years’ dust. And mixed objects of every conceivable kind piled all over the floor.
“Admiral Fishskin? Yes, certainly I am he,” the small man told them in a soft Welsh accent. “What is your business, pray?”
He had on a grey morning coat and a grey waistcoat and white trousers. His cravat was very neat. His eyes looked in different directions. They were large, round, like pale pebbles. He wore rimless glasses.
Arun now seemed unsure of how to begin, so Is said, “Arun here is looking for his mother, Mrs Ruth Twite. From Cold Shoulder Road. I dunno quite why, but the neighbour, Mrs Boles, seemed to think you might have a notion where she’d gone?”
“Oh, dear me. Mrs Twite. Well, now, indeed. And you are her boy, Arun Twite? You left home, I seem to recall, some years ago. Yes, yes. And now you are back. And naturally you wish to find your mother. My goodness me.”
The Admiral reflected in silence for a moment or two, while his confusing eyes moved slowly back and forth between Is and Arun. Then he said, “At this time of the morning I generally have a mug of grog. Will you join me?”
Taken by surprise, they nodded. He nodded gravely in return, then led the way across a hall filled with sundials and orreries, along a wide passage piled knee-deep on each side with books and newspapers. There was a narrow gully in the middle. The walls of the passage were hung with pictures, five or six deep, mostly ships and seascapes. Open doors of rooms revealed more articles of every possible kind, piled in amazing disorder.
They entered a large kitchen which was quite as messy and chaotic as the one in Cold Shoulder Road, though plainly here there had not been any flood. There was a smell of many bygone meals, stale food, rancid fat, sour milk.
“Take a seat, pray take a seat,” said Admiral Fishskin, dipping milk with a mug from a pail that stood on the floor. The milk was then transferred to a pan that had been used many times for the same purpose and never washed. The pan was placed on a big iron range that glowed and kept the room stuffily warm. Cobwebs thick as clothes-lines stretched from wall to wall above, and lined the corners of the room. Various kites, of many different patterns, hung from hooks.
Is and Arun looked about them warily, then moved some pots, plates, baskets of eggs, letters, golf balls, sides of bacon, strawberry nets, and bunches of turnips from a pair of chairs, and, finding nowhere else to put these things, set them down on the floor.
“That’s right, that’s right, make yourselves quite at home,” said the Admiral absently, pouring dark-brown liquor from a pot-bellied bottle into the hot milk. “There, now, that should put a bit of red into your noses.” And he handed them a mug apiece.
The drink was boiling hot and amazingly powerful. Is, after one sip, unobtrusively poured hers into a thick mat of cobweb which screened the top of a log-basket.
“Now then – hmn.” The Admiral took a swig of his own drink. “Yes; your good Mother. She was most distressed when you ran off, my boy – most distressed indeed. And so was your father.”
Arun’s mouth set in an obstinate line. “I had to go,” he mumbled. He set his mug down on the floor.
The Admiral looked at him with his large, odd eyes, and waited.
“They planned to apprentice me to Amos Furze the wig-maker,” Arun went on, after a moment’s silence. “Making wigs! I’d have been obliged to keep quiet, twenty-four hours a day, hold my tongue, like the rest of the Sect. And make wigs.”
The Admiral nodded slowly. “Hard discipline, that,” he said. “Silence – yes. Yes, indeed. Good in its own way, but certainly does make conversation devilish difficult. I used to talk to your father – when I took him my boots to repair – or sometimes I could persuade him to play a round of golf with me – he was a first-class golfer – but speak, no, he would not. At the most he’d write replies to what I said in a notebook. I’d ask him about his wanderings round the countryside . . . sometimes he’d write a note on a scrap of paper. Got some of ’em still lying about, I dare say—” The Admiral gave a rather doubtful look round the cluttered room, but instantly seemed to abandon any notion of hunting for one. “And your mother the same. Capital nurse she was – looked after Maria, m’wife, when . . . But – no use. Then, after Maria died – and after your father died – Mrs Twite would sometimes come to me for advice. Write down a question on a bit of paper. Troubles with neighbours, y’know. Prickly folk, that Sect of yours.”
“Not mine,” said Arun. “I left. Didn’t agree with it.”
The Admiral shot him a sharp, pale glance. “Well, well – nobody here was sorry when they moved up the coast to Seagate,” he remarked.
“But my Mum didn’t move with the rest of them – Mrs Boles said.”
“No. Well. Affairs are a bit topsy-turvy in the town. Y’see—”
The Admiral looked from Arun to Is, carefully and attentively.
“You’ve just arrived here from some way off, that right? Don’t know how matters stand here?”
“Up north, we were,” said Arun, nodding.
“So you’ve not been in Folkestone since the Tunnel opened?”
“It is open, then? It’s being used? It wasn’t harmed in the flood?” Is cried with lively interest.
Admiral Fishskin snorted. “No. No harm came to the Tunnel in the late flood. Most regrettably! The Tunnel entrances, both here and in France, are so far inland that they were not affected by the tidal wave. And the Tunnel is sunk so deep beneath the sea-bed that it was not damaged. A pity! A pity!”
“You don’t like the Tunnel, sir?”
“Huf! It is a disaster. Why, pray, was this island surrounded by sea? If not to protect it from continental influences of the most pernicious kind? In the old days there would be a bit of Free Trade – a few pipes of brandy and such matter were fetched over from France, a few pairs of silk stockings – but now this scandalous group has been formed, these Merry Gentry as they style themselves – Merry Gentry! Murky Devils, I’d call them! – bringing goods through the Tunnel in outrageous quantities – positively outrageous, I assure you – and the whole countryside is being held to ransom. It is a positive reign of terror!”
“Are the Merry Gentry something to do with the Handsel Child?” Is asked.
“Indeed they are, my girl.” The Admiral sipped his drink thoughtfully. Arun surreptitiously kicked his over so that it leaked away into the black greasy matting.
“The Merry Gentry, you see,” went on the Admiral, “keep a hostage, a child, as a surety for the good behaviour of the people who live in these parts.”
“Good behaviour?”
“So they will not dare to lay information with the Excise Men.”
“You mean, so they won’t blab on their neighbours?” said Is. “But who are the Merry Gentry?”
“Ah! Nobody knows, my child,” said the Admiral. “Nobody has the least idea. Or, if they do, they
take care not to say. When the Merry Gentry ride out at night to collect a load of smuggled goods from the Tunnel, they blacken their faces with tar. And their leader always wears a white mask and a big, broad-brimmed white hat. So nobody can ever see their faces or recognise them.”
“But what about this-here kinchin? The Handsel Child?” Is asked, as the Admiral came to a stop.
“Ah, well, there are supposed to be two Handsel children. After the Merry Gentry first took a hostage, somebody from the local people here said it was unacceptable that one side should have a hostage and the other side should not. (It was your father, by the bye, Arun my boy, who said this, when he came back from one of his field trips and heard what had transpired; he wrote his opinion on a sheet of paper and stuck it up outside the Bluejackets’ Rest, where everybody would be sure to see it.) And, it seemed, the Merry Gentry agreed that his idea was a fair one, for, only a few days later, a completely unknown child was found sitting on the harbour front, one foot shackled to a bollard, and a note pinned on its back: ‘This is the Gentry child for a Handsel.’”
“But—!”
“But—!”
Both Is and Arun exploded at the same time. Is went on: “Couldn’t the child say where he had come from? Whose he was?”
“No. He was very small. Only about two, or thereabouts, I believe. He could not speak, knew no words. And has never learned any since then. It is thought he must be dumb.”
Now where, Is thought to herself, where in the last day or so have I seen a child who didn’t speak?
Arun was asking, “Who took charge of the child? Where does he live?”
“The head of the Silent Sect – a man respected in the locality – he took the child into his home. His sister cared for the child.”
“So now the kid has moved with the Sect to Seagate?”
“In fact, no. That is not the case. The child vanished. Disappeared, out of Mr Twite’s house, a few days before the move to Seagate.”
“Mr Twite’s house?”