by Joan Aiken
‘Oh, devil take the silly fellow. Pay no heed to him.—But, listen, Bill, now here is a point that has been troubling me; tell me, how in the wide world are we to get the ship home again? With all the crew perished and gone? This, I must confess, has me quite in a puzzle. What can we do? You are so much more ingenious than I at solving these practical problems.’
Bill said: ‘I have two thoughts about that. But let us proceed on our walk, or the day will be gone. Besides, my mind always operates more cannily when I am in physical motion.’
They left the bridge, strolling, and took their way westwards.
I could not help myself; I followed them as if drawn by a powerful magnet.
Up the steep cliff path I pursued them, and squatted nearby when they paused at the top to get their breath and admire the light on the calm blue autumnal sea. Far across the channel the mountains of Wales dangled like a gauzy frill bordering the skirts of the sky.
‘Hollo!’ said Sam, noticing me. ‘It seems we have a follower.’
‘A little cottage girl.’
‘Are you a Home Office agent, my little maid?’
‘No, please, sir. I don’t know what that is.’
‘Never mind it. How old are you, child?’
‘Please, sir, I don’t rightly know that either. I am an orphan.’
‘No parents?’ inquired Sam.
‘None, sir. I’m a bastard, do you see, from Byblow Bottom.’
‘And who provides for you, then?’ asked the man called Bill, bending on me a sad, solicitous look. ‘I, like you, was orphaned when young. It is a hard fate.’
‘Please, sir, a gentleman called Colonel Brandon provides, but he never comes to see me, only writes letters, not very often, telling me to be a good girl and read my prayer-book.’
‘And do you read it?’ put in Sam.
‘Oh, yes, sir, and a deal of other books besides.’
‘Such as what? Cinderella?’
‘Oh no, sir, but Cicero and Sir Roger de Coverley.’
At that both men burst out laughing and gazed at me, I suppose, with astonishment.
‘And who gives thee such reading matter, thou little prodigy?’ inquired Will.
‘Dr Moultrie, sir, he teaches me, but he has the gout at present. So, please, sirs, may I come along of you?’
‘But we walk too fast, my child; besides, it is not well advised that a little maid of your tender years should roam at large all over the country with two great grown men.’
‘Oh, bless you, sir, I’ve always roamed; Mrs Wellcome don’t care a groat, so be as she don’t want me to feed the chicken. Please let me come, sirs; I won’t hinder or plague you, indeed I won’t.’
They looked at one another and shrugged. ‘She will soon fall behind after all,’ said Mr Sam.
But I knew I would not. Sometimes I joined the boys at hare-coursing. And although I always hoped that the hare would get away, it was the sport of theirs that most pleased me, because I could outrun nearly all of them. At a steady jog, over the moors, I could outlast all, even the biggest ones.
‘I won’t pester or ask questions, truly I won’t. Dr Moultrie won’t have that,’ I offered. ‘It’s just, sirs, that your talk do be so interesting to I. ’Tis better far than looking at pictures.’
‘Whose heart could remain unmelted at that?’ said Mr Sam, laughing. So they let me follow.
And indeed it was true that their talk – specially that of Mr Sam – was like nothing I had ever heard before, or have since, up to this very day. So many subjects were covered – Nightingales, Poetry, Metaphysics, Dreams, Nightmares, the Sense of Touch, the difference between Will and Volition, between Imagination and Fancy – on, on, flowed the talk of Mr Sam the black-haired stranger, in a scintillating torrent of only half-comprehensible words. Sometimes his companion, Mr Bill, would put in a rejoinder; his contributions were always very pithy and shrewd. And sometimes they would be tossing back and forth some project that they were hatching between them – a plan for a tale of a ship, it seemed to be, and a ghostly voyage.
Now and then, for a change, they asked me questions.
‘Is it true, child, that in these parts hares are thought to be witches?’
‘Oh yes, for sure, sir; why, everybody knows that. Only last August the boys coursed and caught a black hare over there on Wildersmouth Head; and that very same week they found old Granny Pollard stiff and dead in her cottage with her dog howling alongside of her; she’d been the hare, don’t you see?’
‘Hmn,’ said Mr Bill. ‘It seems odd that a woman who spent half her time as a hare would keep a dog; don’t you think so?’
‘I don’t see that, sir; every witch has her familiar. So why not a dog, just as well as a cat?’
Mr Sam asked me about changelings. ‘In a village where so many children lack parents, is it not supposed that one or another might be a fairy’s child – yourself, for example?’
I answered readily enough. ‘Nobody would take me for a fairy’s child, sir, because I am so ugly, my hair being so red, and because of my hands – you see.’ I spread them out, and both men nodded gravely. ‘But yes, Squire Vexford as lives in the Great House up on Growly Head – ’tis thought his granny was a changeling.’
And I told the tale, well known in Othery, of how the nurse, all those years ago, had been giving suck to the Squire’s new-born daughter, when a fine lady came into her cottage carrying a babe all wrapped and swaddled in green silk. ‘Give my pretty thing to suck also!’ says the lady, and when the nurse does so, she vanishes clean away leaving the child behind. And the two infants were brought up as twins, and when one of ’em pined and dwined away, no one knew whether ’twas the human baby or the elf-child that was left lonesome. But from that day to this in the Vexford family, each generation there’s allus been a girl-child that’s frail and pale, fair-haired and puny, unlike the rest of ’em that are dark-haired and high-complexioned, like the Squire hisself.
‘That is a bonny tale, my hinny,’ said Mr Bill. ‘And is there such a girl-child in the Squire’s family at present?’
‘No, sir, but Lady Hariot is increasing, and they do say, because she carries it low, that the child will be a girl.’
Mrs Wellcome’s daughter Biddy was also with child, and I knew it was hoped by both women that the honour of rearing the Squire’s baby would be theirs; and I hoped so too. The Squire’s great house, Kinn Hall, up on Growly Head, with its gardens and paddocks and yards and stables, was forbidden ground, but most dearly I wished to explore it, both inside and out. If Biddy Wellcome had charge of the Squire’s baby, I foresaw there might be comings and goings between the village and the Hall, there might be errands and messages to run and a chance to get past the great iron gates. This was my hope.
***
I cannot now remember for how many weeks or months I had the extraordinary joy and privilege of accompanying Mr Bill and Mr Sam on their rambles and explorations. I believe that the space of time might have extended over as much as a year. The memory of my first meeting with the two men remains sharp and clear, like a picture in my mind, but later events blend together in a gilded haze. I was not – by any means – invariably successful in my efforts to escape and join the two strangers on their walks. Nor could I always find them. Their houses lay some distance apart, and they did not go out together all the time. Mr Sam had a wife and babe, Mr Bill, a sister. Sometimes the weather proved my enemy and northerly gales lashed the coast and kept me housebound. Sometimes Dr Moultrie was exigent. But, despite these hazards, it seems to me that I succeeded in accompanying the two men on at least seven or eight occasions, and these were long excursions – for both men were prodigious walkers – along the coast to Hurlhoe, or over the moor to Folworthy, or up the twisting Ashe Valley to Ottermill. Both friends doted upon rivers and brooks and cascades; they would at any time go substantially out of their wa
y if beguiled by the sound of falling waters, and were always ready to sit or stand for hours together gazing at spouts or sheets or spirts of spray. Indeed our very first walk – which I do remember clearly because it was the first – took us along the steep wooded cliffs for several miles to a little lonely church, St Lucy’s of Godsend, where I would never have ventured to visit alone as it was reputed to be haunted. And such a tale was easy enough to credit, for the church stood at a most solitary spot, in a deep coign of precipitous and forest-covered hillside, with tall oaks all around it, and a stream which splashed down between high and fern-fringed banks to empty itself into a narrow cove, far, far down below. Because of the trees, the sea was not visible, and yet its restless presence could be felt; the sough of the tide like a heart-beat, and, from time to time, a deep and threatening boom or thud as a larger wave than usual cast its weight upon the rocks at the cliff foot.
‘A fearsome place,’ said Mr Sam, when the two men, removing their hats, had stepped inside the tiny church (I have heard said that it is the smallest in the whole kingdom) and come out again to admire the saw-toothed shadow which it flung, in the noonday sun, across its cramped little graveyard.
‘Here there would be no need to pray,’ said Mr Bill. ‘The sound of water would say it all.’
‘But at night,’ I objected, ‘the sound of the brook would be drowned by the voice of Wailing Sal.’
‘And who, pray, is Wailing Sal?’
‘She was a girl that used to meet her sweetheart here in the graveyard. But her father forbade her. And why? Because, unbeknownst to her, her sweetheart were the Wicked One. But she met him none the less, and gave him three drops of blood from her finger, and that made her his for all time. But after she done that, he never came to see her no more and she pined and dwined away. So they buried her under gravel, and they buried her under sand, but still her ghost comes out, lonesome for her lover and bitter angry with her father because he forbade her. So, ’tis said, her ghost is moving slowly up the hill, back to her father’s farm, at the rate of one cock’s stride every year.’
‘Merciful creator!’ said Mr Sam, pulling out his notebook. ‘One cock’s stride every year? And what happens when she gets to the farm?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Maybe ’twill be doomsday by then.’
‘And what about Wailing Sal’s father?’
‘Oh, he died many years agone; when Good Queen Bess were queen. Since then they’ve had six parsons with Bibles to try and lay the ghost, but Wailing Sal won’t be laid; not one of them could do it.’
‘What a sad tale.’
Mr Sam wandered away from us and leaned on the churchyard wall, staring down at the white water racing below in its narrow gully.
‘Sam!’ called his friend after a while. ‘It is high time we were on our way back. The sun is westering. And we promised not to be late. And this little maid’s friends will be growing anxious about her.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Mr Sam.
But still he lingered.
***
Lady Hariot did bear a daughter in the spring, little Thérèse. And Biddy Wellcome, being brought to bed about the same time, was given charge of the child, which she reared along with her own Polly. Biddy, like her mother, was a lusty, well-fleshed, red-cheeked woman, and of the same hasty temper. Polly’s father had been a Danish sailor (or so it was said; he never came back to contradict the tale). Biddy, again like her mother Hannah, earned herself a sufficient living as a foster-mother and had in her keeping just now two lads from an attorney’s family in Exeter, besides the misbegotten daughter of the Dean of Wells. This poor lass, Charlotte Gaveston, was touched in her wits (believed to be a result of the desperate efforts her mother employed to be rid of her before she came to full term); so she could never be left to mind the babes if Biddy went a-marketing. Nor could the boys; they were far too heedless. Therefore it became Biddy’s habit to step next door (for she lived just up the lane from us) and deposit her two infants in their rush baskets with her mother for safe-keeping, while she went to the mill for flour, or down to the shore for fish, if the men had been out after pollock. In consequence of which, on most occasions, the care of the two children devolved on me, and many and many a time have I sat rocking and hushing them in Hannah Wellcome’s back kitchen, or out among the cabbages and gooseberry bushes, as the new year began to open out and the weather to grow warm again.
Both babies were girls. But whereas Polly Wellcome was pink-cheeked and yellow-haired, like her mother and grandma, with round china-blue eyes, Lady Hariot’s daughter Thérèse had lint-pale flaxen hair, fine as thistledown; her cheeks were pale, her eyes had a glancing light in them, like the sea itself, so that you could never say if they were green or grey. She was a small-boned, slight little being; looking at her, it was easy to believe the bygone legend of the faerie visitor and her child from elf-land all wrapped in green silk. Yet though so small and frail in appearance she seldom cried (unlike fat Polly, who would bawl her lungs out on the least occasion); little Thérèse lay silent and thoughtful in her crib, with her great melancholy eyes apparently taking in every slightest thing that passed. From an early age she seemed to recognize me, and smiled her faint smile when I came to lift her, or wash her, or do what was needed. And I myself came to love her dearly.
Where was Lady Hariot, meanwhile? Why did she never come to visit her daughter? Poor woman, she had been brought down after the birth, as many are, by the womb-fever, and lay for weeks between life and death, but with death, so said old Dr Parracombe, much the likelier outcome. For weeks he rode daily to Kinn Hall, and would sometimes call at our cottage to see how the babe throve; and seemed no little astonished, given the difficulties of her birth, that she prospered as she did.
‘But indeed, Mrs Wellcome,’ he always pronounced, ‘you and your daughter are a pair of notable foster-nurses.’ And Hannah Wellcome would curtsey, and beam at him, and say, ‘Ah, ’tis the love we give them, sir.’
Even after she had escaped from the danger of death, Lady Hariot was confined to her bed for many months, and was so terribly weak that it was thought the most dangerous folly for her even to be permitted to see her child – conducive to over-excitation and strain upon the faculties. And after that she was taken abroad to some island, Madeira, I believe, where she stayed with her sister, for the warm sun there to bring back her health. So, for months we heard no more of her.
Once in a great while, Squire Vexford might stamp in to inquire after the child. He was a hasty, hard-featured man with thin lips and small angry eyes; it was known in the village that the Vexford property was entailed on a male heir, so he was sadly displeased that the outcome of all Lady Hariot’s trouble was a mere daughter, and even more so when told that his wife might be unable to bear further children. He consequently paid scant heed to the child’s progress or welfare, but would thrust his head in, cast a brief glance at the cradle, snap out a question or two and then stamp on his way, after the otter-hounds or along the track to the salmon pools in the upper windings of the Ashe river. More often it would be the Squire’s man, Willsworthy, who called; and he was a close, silent customer who at all times kept his thoughts to himself. Only, once in a way, when his eye lit on Biddy Wellcome, a queer sudden glow would come into it, like the glimmer on a piece of fish that has lain in the pantry too long.
My frequent duty in minding the two babies meant a decided curtailment of my liberty to roam out and hope for a meeting with Mr Sam and Mr Bill; but, with a child’s sober-minded realism, I believe I had long since understood that my outings with those two men were not to be looked for as something I might depend on; they were not for human nature’s daily food. I was lucky beyond all deserts and expectation to have had them at all. And – I later understood – they had fed my mind with such thoughts and pictures and imaginings as would stand me in good stead through many troubles to come.
There remains one more singu
lar event that is connected in my mind with those happy rambles. It was after I had returned from one such outing – I think to the Cain and Abel stones, high up on Ashe Moor, which stones prompted Mr Sam to tell me a queer story about Cain and his little son Enos, a tale of the boy asking his father the reason why the squirrels would not play with him. Mr Sam’s stories all had some element of puzzle about them; I had to think and think, to ravel out their meaning.
I returned home late and, as was my habit on such occasions, crept in as quietly as a mouse through the kitchen door, for I knew that, on principle, if she heard me come in, Hannah Wellcome would give me a slippering. It was not that she greatly cared where I had been, but on account of all the tasks she had been obliged to undertake herself, lacking my services. Luckily I could hear that she and Tom and Biddy were in the parlour, fuddling themselves with green cider. I therefore crept up the narrow stair to the little crevice under the eaves which was my sleeping-place. It had no window, but plenty of fresh air came in through the thatch.
On the way, I passed the boys’ room where I could hear them tossing, thrashing and teasing one another, as they would continue to do for half the night.
‘Hollo? Is that you, Liza?’ whispered Rob, as I tiptoed by their door.
Rob was Rob Hobart, my chiefest friend among the boys. Hob, or Hoby, or Hobgoblin, I called him. His father, I believe, was the Post-Master General, his mother had sold cockles on the Strand in London. He was a lanky, freckled, yellow-headed fellow with a nimble tongue and bright wits; he was for ever leading the other boys into trouble, but then as often extricating them from their difficulties by some combination of bold inventiveness and shrewd sense. As a companion, if he was ever on his own, I liked him very well; but he seldom was on his own, being sociable and popular with the other boys. And in their company he descended to their level of teasing and abuse, would address me as ‘Liza Lug-famble’, or ‘Funny-fist’, or ‘Mistress Finger-post’.