by Penny Dolan
‘Shankbone,’ I said, ‘the boys are starving.’ The man hesitated, swaying on his heels. ‘Truly,’ I added.
Slowly Shankbone turned, grinned and plodded over to the vat of broth. Swiftly he took a knife from a drawer and skinned and gutted the carcases. Soon both rabbits had sunk into the grey liquid. The vat boiled and seethed, and the good meat dissolved in the broth, but not completely.
We found this out later, when Bulloughby descended the stairs. He grasped a thick walking stick, and waved it as if he was as scared of Shankbone as Shankbone was terrified of him.
Puffing himself up, Bulloughby reached into his waistcoat pocket and held up a delicate bone. ‘Did you do it? Did you put meat in the boys’ broth?’
We said nothing.
‘Haven’t I told you before? Meat is bad for boys, Shankbone. Makes them rebellious.’
Shankbone glowered and swayed to and fro.
‘If you had put meat into the broth,’ Bulloughby continued, ‘I might not be pleased. I might even let the constables know the bad things you’ve done. It’s a long, long list, and I know it all, don’t I? Button told me, didn’t he? Of course, you can explain all that to the constables. You’re so good at explaining, aren’t you, Shankbone?’
They faced each other. Shankbone was silent.
Bulloughby darted forward, seized my ear, and twisted it hard. ‘Boys are good at spying,’ he cried. ‘So did old Shankbone use meat? Has he been wasting our money? Tell, boy. Tell!’
‘Meat?’ I gasped. ‘Meat? Yes, there was meat.’
A shiver crossed Shankbone’s face.
‘I was watching the pot last night,’ I stuttered. ‘You know old Rag-Eared Tigg?’ I waved my arm towards the scrawny cat that sat on a potato sack, scratching its fleas. ‘Well,’ I explained, ‘Tigg came creeping under the table and suddenly he started up a pair of rats. They scooted up across the table and jumped over on to the cooker and up, ready to race across the saucepans. But the lid was off, sir, so those rats couldn’t keep hold and – whoomph! – one went in and – whoomph! – in went the other! There’s where we got the meat, sir. Perhaps I should have told you straight away, sir?’
As I finish this story, a smile filled Bulloughby’s face. He was pleased to think of the boys sucking at rat bones.
‘Did you want some, sir?’ I suggested, keeping my face as straight as a starched cloth. ‘There’s some left.’
Bulloughby whirled round and glared at me, suspicious-like. He wagged a threatening finger at Shankbone. ‘Take care! I’ll get you both one day.’ He hurried away to his own territory.
Shankbone and I looked at each other. He lunged at me and ruffled my hair, and laughter wheezed from him like a pair of old bellows.
‘Mouse and rats!’ he roared. ‘Mouse and rats!’
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CHAPTER 18
AN AGREEMENT
‘The kitchen? Explain!’ Button folded his arms and pursed his lips. ‘Since when have you done things without asking my advice?’
‘If you weren’t here, I couldn’t ask, could I? Did what seemed right.’ Bulloughby challenged him, scowling back. ‘I’m just making sure the boy gets the care he deserves, aren’t I? I reckon that if I don’t get much for him, he should get little from me. You of all people, Button, should understand that.’
Button scratched his chin, unwilling to rearrange the profits within his own coffers.
‘The brat’s useful down in the scullery,’ Bulloughby stated, ‘which he’s not up here – and no more likely to come to any harm, not unless it’s his own stupid fault. I’ll write news of him, same as usual.’
‘But what would you say if the child was asked for?’ Button’s eyes narrowed.
‘Huh!’ Bulloughby held up one hand, spreading out his fingers and thumb. He thrust them at Button. ‘See them? Five! That’s how many times a Murkstone boy’s been truly asked for, been truly Returned in the last three years. Boys get sent here so people can forget ’em, don’t they? You knows that as well as I do, Button. So I’m not worried. Are you?’
Button silently weighed up the situation. Maybe, with Bulloughby so unpredictable, it was best to let the boy stay where he was.
‘No,’ said Button, ‘I’m not. But if there’s any trouble, Bulloughby, I’ll swear it was all your fault, and that I knew nothing about it. Understand?’ Button drew himself up as tall as he could, and leaned over the seated Bulloughby. ‘Just don’t rearrange things without checking with me. Never again!’
Bulloughby gave a careless shrug.
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CHAPTER 19
HIDDEN WORDS
I was scrubbing away at the kitchen table when I felt someone behind me.
‘Hello, Mouse,’ said Jarvey. ‘How are you?’
My scrubbing brush shot to the floor. ‘What are you doing here? When did you come back?’
‘Only this morning, Mouse,’ he said. There were dark rings beneath Jarvey’s eyes, but the visit to his family, wherever they were, had brightened his smile. ‘Niddle told me that you didn’t come to classes any more, so I came to find you.’
I begged. I pleaded. ‘Don’t take me back upstairs, Mr Jarvey. Don’t know what I did wrong, but it’s all right down here. It’s better.’
Shankbone shuffled forward out of the gloom. He raised a ladle protectively and made his odd grumbling sound. ‘Who’s this, Mouse?’
Jarvey understood. He pointed upwards. ‘I teach the boys,’ he said. ‘Upstairs.’
‘Heh-heh! Hard job,’ Shankbone chuckled. ‘Bulloughby don’t want boys to eat much, and he don’t want them to learn much either.’
‘I think you’re right there,’ agreed Jarvey.
‘Sir? Why’d you come back?’ This mystified me.
‘A man must do something, and not be a burden,’ Jarvey said. He glanced cautiously back up the stairs and leaned towards me. ‘I discovered something before I left, Mouse.’
‘What?’
‘I went into Bulloughby’s parlour to get the wages he owed me.’
Shankbone clapped his rough worn hands against his thighs, laughing noiselessly. ‘Money? From him?’
‘Wait! That’s not the story,’ whispered Jarvey. ‘He flew into a foul temper, saying he had no money left to give me. He dragged out desk drawers and scattered papers everywhere.’ Jarvey looked at me strangely. ‘I picked up a handful to give back – and they were about you, Mouse.’
‘Ma?’ I cried, as if I’d fallen. ‘Were they from my Ma?’
‘No. These were scribbled reports about you, to be sent to somebody else.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s it. The papers were only drafts with no names. Bulloughby grabbed them from me and thrust them away.’ My face must have shown Jarvey how I felt. ‘Sorry. Not much information,’ he added, ‘but I thought you should know.’
I turned away. I didn’t answer. I honestly didn’t care about whoever it was that Bulloughby was writing to, because I’d had – for a moment – such hope of hearing from my Ma. To find there was not a single word filled me with such a homesickness and longing that I could not bear it. I stomped away into a corner of the kitchen. I did not even want to look at Jarvey. How could he have disappointed me so?
‘Mouse, come and speak to me.’
I did not. I’d tried to get over everything, to survive these endless days, but Jarvey’s information had made my heart feel as raw as the day Button brought me here.
‘Take good care of him, Mr Shankbone,’ said Jarvey at last, and left.
I stacked up logs for the fire, furiously asking myself why I hadn’t questioned Jarvey further. He might have recalled a word, a phrase. He might even have seen an address. I did not ask because I was angry with him, and angry with myself for letting Bulloughby have power
over me.
I thumped the basket down by the oven and went back to scrubbing away at the stone flags. As the grey suds bubbled around my boots, I thought about Bulloughby’s words as he sent me down to the kitchen: ‘An imposter in our midst, boys.’
That dull-brained, orange-wigged oaf had some sort of secret about me, and I didn’t know what it was. All I had was a single stupid medal that stuck into my bony ribs whenever I pulled the sacking around me in the cold of the night. That night I truly felt lost.
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CHAPTER 20
STRANGE FRUIT
The days struggled on. I sloshed around below the stairs, preparing the everlasting school gruels and broths, and the greasy chops that Bulloughby crunched through each day. I waded through peelings and bones and swill and ash. I measured out cupfuls of damp flour and slapped the grey bread into shape.
While we worked, Shankbone liked me to tell him stories, especially if there was food in them. So I told him all the old tales I’d heard from Ma and Isaac and from Jarvey, making the crusts into meals, and meals into feasts, and feasts into enormous banquets.
I told him about magical mixing spoons, and huge pies full of blackbirds, and gingerbread mansions, and vats of everlasting, ever-increasing porridge, thick with cream. I described great mayoral banquets put on by the rich Dick Whittington, and the feasts of the gods in Ancient Greece, and the celebrations at King Arthur’s Round Table. I even told him about that once-upon-a-time fruit dropping from the branches in the Garden of Eden.
There was a lot more food in my imaginary tales than in any versions you might know, but the happiness and plenty seemed to nourish Shankbone’s mind, and he hummed cheerfully to himself as he stirred the scum on his watery broths.
Now and again Mr Button liked to check on things around Murkstone Hall, including the kitchen. He usually appeared at the top of the kitchen steps, nose wrinkling in disgust, and flung a few coins towards Shankbone. This cash was for next Higgins’s day, which was when Shankbone was supposed to refill his bleak, empty larder.
Higgins, with his greasy cap and once bright waistcoat, must have been a proper trader at one time, but he had sunk to carting scraps and rotting vegetables – collected from who knows where – to places like the kitchen of Murkstone Hall.
Button liked to check on Higgins’s visits too. His round face appeared in the window above the yard, and his hard round eyes squinted down so he could see the contents of Higgins’s cart.
‘Nosy one, that!’ sniffed Higgins, as he haggled with Shankbone for old times’ sake, so we knew he did not like Button much.
Higgins was cursed by both his memory and his imagination. When he hauled sacks of woody carrots into the larder, he sighed for the sweetness they would have had when they were fresh-grown. As he swung sacks of wrinkled, rotted pippins, he remembered the scent of apple-blossom orchards. He knew his third-hand goods were fit for nothing but Murkstone’s mean vats, but Higgins was as much a dreamer as Shankbone, and as such they looked forward to meeting and sharing their grumbles.
Now it so happened that as Shankbone and I were outside, lugging in some logs, a window crashed open overhead. We heard yells and shrieks above, then a shower of illustrated pages fluttered down, crumpled and torn. Grindle and his gang were rioting up there in the library.
I ran and scooped up a batch of the pages, before the wind could carry them away, and pushed them inside my shirt to read later. Very slowly, Shankbone bent down and picked up a page. He cupped it in his hand as if it was a great mystery and then, bewildered, held the page out to me as if for help.
What Shankbone revealed was an illustration. It was of a strange fruit, spiked and golden, and crowned with a tuft of green leaf blades. Beside it, on a great dish, lay another such fruit. That fruit was cut through, and each slice was edged like the cogs that had once turned the roasting spit. Syrup oozed like honey from that painted yellow fruit, and our mouths watered just looking at it. No fruit like this had ever grown on Roseberry Farm.
Then the strangest thing occurred. I knew what this thing was, and not from one of Jarvey’s books or stories.
Suddenly I had a scent of this fruit in my nostrils, and a taste of it on my tongue. Sometime, somewhere, I must have seen one, eaten one, but where? I had never lived anywhere where such fruit grew, not that I knew about. Shankbone hid his picture greedily away, but I couldn’t hide away my mystery.
That night the dazzling dream came, as glorious as an Aladdin’s cave, a palace where I had and had not been. At first I resisted. I wanted my dream to be of the farm and Ma and Isaac and all I knew. I would not go where these thoughts were taking me.
But my feet pattered into the dream, across an expanse of black and white tiled floor. I looked up, entranced at this marvellous place. The sunlight burst through a canopy of wide, gently waving leaves and flickered through creepers cascading from a high glass sky. Brilliant birds screeched and flew from branch to branch, and small green frogs leaped into deep moss-lined pools.
As I pushed aside the soft ferns, each frond glistening with drops of moisture, my hands took hold of a wonderful iron ladder. Its narrow, white-painted rungs circled around a tall fluted pillar, rising up to where the cogs and rods and spokes were turning, shifting glittering panels of glass that let in the cool breeze. Up I went, one rung, two rungs, three, four, five. My feet seemed those of a much smaller child.
Just as I thought I would reach the top and understand everything, I was lifted down, and someone with a gentle voice popped a thin slice of this yellow fruit into my little mouth.
‘Pineapple!’ I said, as my eyes flickered open on that stinking, greasy kitchen.
The exotic fruit had enchanted Shankbone too. Each night, when the worst of our work was done, he took out the crumpled page and gloated over it. As weeks passed, he became miserly and watchful. He snarled at me if I wasted the tiniest scrap or peeled any vegetable too thickly. He had a plan.
The next time the cart arrived, Shankbone pulled Higgins close under the outside wall, out of sight of the nosy-parker window. He whispered urgently, desperately. Higgins nodded briefly. His wrinkled-walnut face broke into an amused smile. Higgins had heard the voices and sounds of Murkstone Hall on his visits, and would not want to work here, not he. He was happy to help.
Eventually, another day came, and another Higgins’s cart. As the usual delivery of shrunken turnips and withered greens took place, Shankbone glanced warily up at Button’s usual window.
‘Now,’ he rumbled.
Higgins grabbed a bundle of stained sacking from under the cart and handed it across. Shankbone held the bundle as carefully as if it was a baby, and I saw tears in his eyes.
‘Right then, my old mate. See you next month. There’ll be more rotten apples about by then,’ Higgins said, winking, trundling his cart away. Shankbone, trembling with anticipation, carried his prize indoors.
We went through the scullery, into the kitchen, and there was Button, gloating and smiling. He stepped forward, intending to discover whatever was inside Shankbone’s bundle. As his pink fingertips felt the knobbly ridges beneath the sacking, I spoke up brightly.
‘It’s a fine sheep’s head, sir!’
Button recoiled, disgusted. He glared at us, then whirled on his heel and left.
I heard a deep grumbling noise behind me. ‘Thank you, Mouse,’ said Shankbone.
That night, when all above was still, Shankbone uncovered his jewel, his golden fruit, his prize of the orient.
‘P is for Pineapple,’ I said, suddenly, and that was odd, for the voice in my ear was not Ma, who would have had her P for simple Plum Pie, nor was it Madam Claudine, for her P was for Porcupine. Whose voice was it?
The honeyed scent was strangely familiar. As we sucked at the shreds of the great fruit, I knew it was a taste I had met before.
‘’Tis a gentleman’s fruit,’ mumbled Shankbone, sipping the sweet-sour juice.
But I was too young to have been a gentleman without noticing, so how had I got this knowledge? If ever I got back to Roseberry Farm, I would ask about this, and the thousand other questions that had been piling up in my mind. What else had Ma never told me, and why?
Soon enough, Shankbone’s magical fruit was gone and our hopeful excitement ended. The days trudged on, wearying me as sorely as Shankbone’s cast-off boots. The weeks, in their greasy grey aprons, arrived and departed.
One dawn I lay and tried, as I often did, to remember the places I’d passed on my long-ago journey. So many days I’d travelled through that list, but now the names and pictures were fading, and my imaginary map was full of empty spaces. Would I ever – and this shocked me – be able to find my way back home again?
Maybe the desperation of that moment was why things started to break apart. One thing certainly broke most dramatically.
For years the huge vats had been hauled up and down the service shaft by chains clanking round an ancient pulley wheel. This device wound and ground, taking up food, returning discarded dishes to the depths where Shankbone and I toiled in our grubby contentment.
One night, as I waited at the foot of the shaft, listening to Bulloughby’s voice ranting above, everything halted. The descending tray tilted, sending crockery and cutlery clattering down. Then, with an awful grating sound, the great wheel above gave way. Worn chains broke free and came rattling down the shaft swift and deadly as an iron snake.
I leaped back just in time, as the rusted links slashed at the brickwork and cracked the flagstones on the floor. Grease and shredded food came splattering after.
Above, Grindle and his gang howled down the shaft, mocking the mess. Then Bulloughby joined in, shouting curses, while Shankbone and I toiled to clear what we could, dragging the chains away into the corner by the swill buckets.