Cold Shoulder Road

by Joan Aiken

  As they climbed down the ladder they could hear Pye’s indignant shrieks, and Ruth’s patient, instructing voice. It’s a bit hard on Arun, Is thought, that when he does find his Mum again, she’s so taken up with teaching that little monkey.

  As they neared the farm buildings – a big brick half-timbered house, and a group of thatched barns – Arun halted warily.

  “I feel,” he said in thought language, “there’s trouble. Do you get it, too?”

  “Yes I do. Someone’s in awful pain or grief – someone we know. Wait. I know who it is. Oh, mercy, Arun, it’s poor Window Swannett! She’s there, in the house. And she’s in bad trouble.”

  Arun nodded. He had got the message, too.

  They crept forward warily, skirted the hay-barn, and went, without waiting to be invited, through the back door of the farmhouse, which stood open. A passage led to the spacious farm kitchen, which they found filled with people, and also with a feeling of wretchedness, so thick that it was like smoke.

  Later, Is came to know the people well, and had them sorted out. There were two Mrs Lees, two Mrs Warrens, three Lee daughters, and two Warren daughters. There was also Window Swannett, with a black shawl over her head, sitting on a footstool, racked with sobs, drowned in tears. Jen Braeburn was there, too, in her red dress.

  But the person who took all the attention of Is and Arun, when they first entered the room, was the woman in the armchair beside the glowing range, at whose knee Window Swannett was sitting.

  She was by far the biggest human being that Is had ever seen. She must weigh as much as an ox – no, more, Is thought. I wonder they could find a chair to hold her! And how old she looks! She could be a hundred, easy.

  This monumental woman wore loose black clothing, a black headscarf wound tight, and gold hoops in her ears.

  Her hand was on Window Swannett’s shoulder, comforting her.

  She was blind.

  But, for all that, highly alert.

  She turned her head as Arun and Is came into the room, and her thoughts picked them up in a flash. “There you are, then! And not before time!”

  Other heads now turned to look at Is and Arun.

  “We’re from . . . from the tree—” Arun began explaining, in halting words. “My Mum’s Mrs Ruth Twite—”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” said the massive woman. Now she, too, spoke aloud. “Trouble’s coming up to a head, here. And it’s you two who have to untie the tangle.”

  “Why us?” demanded Arun. But Is cried, “What’s happened?”

  A middle-aged woman, who bore a strong resemblance to the huge old lady, said, “I’m Mrs Hannah Lee. That’s my mother there, Mrs Nefertiti Lee. Mrs Swannett, here, she’s come to us, because they took off her husband—”

  “Micah? Who took him?”

  “Men in black. First they dragged the poor devil behind a cart, with his hands tied, all along the road through Seagate. Then they dumped him in a boat, hoisted the sail, and sent it out to sea.”

  “The Gentry did this?”

  “Who else?”

  “But why? Why should they take Micah? What harm had he done them?”

  “It was to make an example,” whispered Window. “To frighten the rest.”

  But Is had a miserable feeling that it was because of her and Arun; that Micah was punished for taking them into his house and befriending them.

  It’s our fault he was taken.

  Dominic de la Twite is connected in some way to the Gentry. I thought it when I heard those whispering voices in the wood. Maybe the Silent Sect don’t realise that their Leader is mixed up with the skellums. But I’m certain of it.

  But what to do about him?

  “You must work on his weaknesses,” the voice of Mrs Nefertiti Lee broke in on her thoughts. “All men have weaknesses, and wicked men have many more than others.”

  “But what are his weaknesses, Missus?”

  Is looked at the pale, massive old face, which was like a mask cut from rock.

  “He loves pretty things. Colours. The Silent People don’t approve of such things. So he must keep that failing of his a secret.”

  Is thought of the Admiral, hiding away Ruth’s pictures in his cave. What kind of thing would Dominic de la Twite choose to hide away? And where would he hide it?

  Arun spoke suddenly, surprising everybody.

  “I think . . . that Micah is not dead,” he said. “Just then I had a faint . . . faint touch from him – like a nod, over miles of emptiness—”

  “You are strong for receiving such messages,” said old Mrs Nefertiti Lee with approval. “Go back to your tree and throw yourselves wide open – try to find out where Micah has gone. Then it may be your task to go in search of him.”

  Is could almost have laughed, Arun looked so appalled.

  He mumbled, “But my Mum wants us to teach that brat to talk—”

  “Do that first, then! But lose no time about it. Now, go. Hurry—”

  Her thoughts almost pushed them out of the farm kitchen.

  “Missus,” said Is. “Just a moment. Feel these—”

  She pulled the string of brown beads from her pocket. Window had wrapped them in a scrap of oilskin. She unwrapped it, wiped off some of the dust, and handed them to Mrs Nefertiti. The old hands, gnarled as tree-roots, held the baubles for a moment, pouring them to and fro like sand.

  “Tangerines!” said the aged voice unexpectedly.

  “Tangerines, Missus?”

  “They will do especially well. They must have been sent. I think this is a sign that the current has turned, and is now running in our favour.”

  “But . . . but what am I to do with ’em, Missus?”

  “That is for you to discover, child,” said the old voice with impatience. “But now leave me to comfort this poor one.”

  Already, though, Window Swannett was beginning to show a look of faint hope. She was not quite so drenched in misery.

  “You’ll stay here with us, now, dearie,” Mrs Warren was saying comfortably. “Till matters mend, you stay here.”

  Croopus, what have Arun and me got laid on us, thought Is, trudging back to the chestnut tree with her share of a load of eggs and milk.

  They soon discovered that teaching Pye was harder work than any job they had done before in the whole of their lives.

  “Chopping out coal in the mines was easy as daisy-chains compared to this,” growled Arun after the first day.

  Pye would not sit still for more than about three minutes at a stretch; she was off chasing Figgin, always happy to be chased – or hanging upside down from the yard-arm, pulling faces at her would-be teachers, or weaving strange little basket-work mats out of twigs, or drawing criss-cross patterns with charcoal twigs on bits of canvas – apparently taking not the slightest notice of the thoughts they kept launching at her. But, just the same – every now and then – they knew that a streak of thought had slipped past her guard.

  “Leave me alone!” she would hurl back. “I’m not going to talk your stupid words. I’m never going to talk. What good has talking ever done you?”

  “It’s done us a whole lot of good,” asserted Arun. And Is said:

  “Arun wasn’t allowed to talk when he was your age. And that made him wholly miserable. He’s ever so much better now.”

  “If he’s better now,” rudely retorted Pye, “he must have been rotten awful before!”

  And she scurried into the rigging, with Figgin in enthusiastic pursuit.

  Is picked up their lunch of rolls and cheese and went after the pair.

  “You want a bit of bread and cheese, Pye?”

  Pye nodded, and made a grab. Is dodged it.

  “Say bread, then! Say cheese!”

  Pye glared at her, and made another unsuccessful grab. Thoughts came hissing out of her like red-hot arrows.

  “You tyrant! You beast. You big bully! Why should I say words because you tell me to?”

  “Because you might get to like it, once
you start. You like drawing pictures. Don’t you? You like weaving those mats. Using words is like weaving mats. You can make poems with them. You can make songs. You can make patterns.”

  Pye furiously stuck out her tongue.

  “Keep doing that,” teased Arun, who had climbed up beside Is. “Your tongue might learn to speak all by itself.”

  Pye hastily snatched her tongue in again.

  “Give me a bit of that bread and cheese,” she ordered in thought language.

  “All right. But first you must say ‘bread’. Say ‘cheese’. Say ‘bread and cheese’.”

  Arun suddenly began to sing:

  “High up in the trees

  we’re singing bread and cheese

  as tuneful as the finches

  under leafy canopies . . .

  High up in the trees

  easy as we please

  we’re munching as we gaze across

  unbounded distances . . .”

  He took a bite and chewed it with a look of tremendous relish, then sang, with his mouth full:

  “High up in the trees

  we picnic at our ease

  we wouldn’t change a banquet for

  our lunch of bread and cheese . . .”

  All Arun’s tunes were as simple as ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. This one was too, and yet Is was sure that she had never heard it before, that it had never existed before. Is joined in:

  “High up in the trees,

  and rocking in the breeze

  we wouldn’t change our crust of bread

  for duckling and green peas—”

  “Come on, Pye! You sing too!”

  And Is tossed her a roll with cheese in it.

  Pye opened her mouth. Apparently without her permission, words poured out of it:

  “High up in the trees,

  Arun’s just a tease!

  Why should I be made to sing

  for measly bread and cheese?”

  And then she furiously flung the roll down on to the deck, where Ruth was standing, and jumped after it.

  They had been a good height up among the branches, and she might have hurt herself badly, had not Arun hurled himself downwards, grabbing at the shrouds as he went, and managing also to grab Pye in mid-fall.

  She was not a bit grateful, but struggled with him as fiercely as a wild-cat, pulled herself away, and grabbed a metal-ringed grommet from the deck. She flung it at Arun, hitting him in the face. Then she ran to Ruth and clung around her waist as if she would never allow herself to be prised loose again.

  “I won’t talk! I won’t!” she was shouting at the top of her lungs. “Pye won’t sing your silly song. Not ever! Breadandcheese! I won’t say it! I won’t!”

  “All right, my honey,” said Ruth, half-laughing and half-crying. “No one shall make you, I promise. No one can make you. You can talk or not, just absolutely as you choose.”

  “And that won’t be ever!” roared Pye, picking up her roll and taking a tremendous bite out of it.

  Arun was spitting teeth and blood on to the planking.

  “Little demon!” he gasped indignantly. “Look what she’s done to me!”

  “Oh dear me! You’ll have to pay a visit to the dentist now, my son. Aren’t you sorry, Pye, for what you did?”

  “Not a bit!” said Pye. “It’s his own fault.”

  And she took another bite of bread and cheese.

  Chapter Six

  RUTH WAS TERRIBLY DISTRESSED WHEN SHE heard the story of what had happened to Micah Swannett.

  “But he was a good man! That poor, poor woman! And she had lost her sons – what can she do?”

  “She’s going to stay on at the farm,” Is said.

  “Yes, Mrs Nefertiti will be able to help her if anyone can. Advise her.”

  “Aunt Ruth, who in the world is Mrs Nefertiti?”

  Ruth said, “She is Mrs Lee’s grandmother. She came to the farm a few months ago. Where she had been before, nobody quite knows; it seems she had walked the roads with her husband, Pharaoh, but what roads, and where, she has not said . . .”

  “Her husband Pharaoh? What happened to him?”

  “I think he died. She told me, ‘He went on ahead’ and she said something about setting fire to his ship and sending it out to sea.”

  Is shivered, thinking of Micah Swannett.

  “How can we stop these Gentry, Aunt Ruth?”

  Ruth pressed her hands to her forehead.

  “One day,” she said to herself, “men will learn to split the atom.”

  “What’s an atom?”

  “It’s the smallest grain of the basic stuff from which we are all made. As cakes are made from flour.” Ruth held up her slender, worn hand. Her fingers were transparent against the spring sunshine. “Pull that grain apart, you release a torrent of energy. Like . . . like an egg hatching. Crash! Out comes an eagle! In the same way, I think – out of each person, each simple, plain person – can come such power that, if properly used, it could shoot an arrow to the sun. Or sow a thousand oak trees and make them grow overnight to the height of a tower. All you need is to harness that force.”

  “Yes, but how d’you reckon to do that, Aunt Ruth?” Privately, Is thought that her aunt Ruth’s ideas were all a bit too far-away, not much use for the practical present.

  “That is the hard question! First we have to unlock the frightful cage of fear in which greedy, wicked men, for their own gain, have so many good simple people imprisoned.”

  Is remembered what Mrs Nefertiti had said.

  “‘Look for their weaknesses’, the old gal told me.”

  “Yes. Like splitting a rock; you study the grain, strike where a crack shows . . .”

  “But what’s the weak spot of the Gentry?”

  Ruth sighed.

  “The weakness of their Leader. Whatever that is.”

  Penny and Arun came out on deck. Penny had already started to work over Arun, to change his appearance so that he could go to the dentist in Seagate without being recognised by anybody. She had stained his skin light brown with walnut juice (which she used for dyeing dolls’ tippets). Now, out on deck, she cut his hair a good deal shorter, and darkened it with tar and grease until it was almost black. He had also been fitted out, from the ship’s stores, with a sailor’s canvas trousers, white drill vest, reefer jacket, black kerchief, and round black hat.

  He looked thin and changed and foreign.

  “You’d best tell the dentist that you are a midship lad who had his teeth knocked out in a gale by the swinging boom.”

  “Or somebody bashed me with a marlin spike. And I’m on my way to London port to pick up another ship,” mumbled Arun, recalling the sailors at Cold Harbour. His tongue was swollen and sore, he found it hard to speak, and quite impossible to sing.

  “Best not be too free with your tales of ships,” Is suggested. “If that Fishskin dentist is a rib-chum of his cousin the Admiral, he likely knows all the craft that puts in to Dover and Folkestone.”

  “I wish I needn’t go to him,” croaked Arun. “If only there were another—”

  “Phoo, phoo, boy, you can’t walk round for the rest of your days with two teeth busted and one missing,” said Penny. “You can’t talk, you can’t sing, and that broken dogtooth is wearing a hole in your tongue. Sooner that’s set right, the better.”

  Nobody had scolded Pye for the damage that she had done to Arun, since it was plain that she had not intended to hurt him so badly and was startled by what had happened. And it was clear, too, that she felt some guilt and dismay; instead of stumping noisily about the deck on her own concerns, as was her usual habit, she had retired into a corner of the galley and stayed there, curled up defensively, sucking her thumb, with Figgin huddled beside her.

  When Arun’s disguise was complete, and he was pronounced fit to set off to Seagate, Pye sidled up to him and pushed a dirty scrap of paper into his hand.

  “What’s this, then, cully?” he said in some surprise, peering at it.
>
  On the paper Pye had written with a stick of charcoal, PLES FOR GIV.

  “But, Pye!” mumbled Arun, coughing out a little more blood in his astonishment, “when did you ever learn to write?”

  “I been learning this while,” whispered Pye, with downcast eyes.

  “Well you are a proper little caution!”

  Everybody exclaimed over Pye, and Arun rumpled her spiky hair and gave her a bloodstained, gap-toothed grin.

  “You and me ‘ull have some parleys, I reckon, when I get back with my new teeth, young ’un.”

  “Try not to get into trouble, Arun,” Ruth said anxiously. “Penny has certainly done a notable job on changing your looks, but I shall worry—”

  Just so’s he don’t meet Old Domino in the street, thought Is, I’d back Old Domino to see through that window-dressing. But she kept that fear to herself.

  “Pye,” she said suddenly, struck by an idea, “what are tangerines?”

  Pye scowled and shrank away. Was she going to slip back into her old hostile habits?

  “Tangerines?” said Ruth. “Why should you ask Pye that?”

  “Something the old gal said about the things Twite is keen on.”

  Again, Is unrolled the dusty brown beads from their waterproof cover, and rubbed away a little of the dust with one finger. A brilliant golden gleam flashed out.

  “Bless my soul!” said Ruth. “From where had you those?”

  “From the Admiral’s cave,” said Is.

  “They must be worth a pretty penny!”

  And Penny, looking over Ruth’s shoulder, exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be dragged! Brown diamonds!”

  “Brown diamonds? What in tarnation are they? And how d’you know that, Pen?”

  “Remember Mr Van Doon, the Dutchman what used to lodge with us?” said Penny. “He knew a deal about gemstones. And he told me about brown diamonds. Showed me a tiny one once In the trade they are called tangerines. They come from High Brazil. They must be just about the rarest, most uncommon stones there be.”