The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Yes, it was hard to admit that I couldn’t go on with it. But I’d known all along that I might have to slow down, because of my heart.’

  ‘Your heart?’ In Rose’s present state of nerves and insecurity, she jumped into fear that Leonora would have a heart attack and die.

  ‘It’s nothing, as long as I’m careful. And I’ve got Martin to look after me.’ She put her head against his leg as she sat on the grass, and Rose wondered if she had invented the heart because she didn’t want him to feel guilty that she had given up her career for him.

  Mollie came out of the hotel and asked Rose if she had heard their good news.

  ‘I’m to have a week’s treatment at the clinic,’ Martin said. ‘I don’t want to stay there, I’ve had enough of hospitals, so we’re going to stay here and go in every day.’

  ‘Since we haven’t got a lift, I’ll put them in the downstairs room in the annexe,’ Mollie said.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Rose burst out, without thinking.

  ‘Why not?’ Her mother frowned at her: Don’t start that again.

  ‘Well … the Americans will still be here.’

  ‘No, they’ll be gone.’

  ‘Won’t it be fun?’ Leonora said. ‘We’ll love being here. I’ll teach you to dance, if you like. What’s the matter, Rose?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Rose stood up.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to. You’d be good, though.’

  Rose usually warmed to the smiling compliments that Leonora dished out, but she had turned back to go into the hotel, pleading to whatever gods might care, begging Favour, wherever he was: ‘Not them. Oh please. Not them. Don’t let the annexe do anything to them.’

  When Mr Vingo came back, he wasn’t quite the same. Not so helpful. He came whistling down the road one day, carrying that misshapen bag and swinging his stick in circles. Rose saw him from a window, and ran down to catch him before he came into the hotel.

  ‘More strange things have happened,’ she said urgently.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Hilda didn’t overcook the beef? Someone didn’t say, “Looks like rain again”?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I mean …’ She looked up at the people sitting on the verandah. One of them was the thin American woman, draped in a plaid rug. She had been ill for two days. ‘The horse,’ Rose whispered.

  ‘Been for a ride on old Moonlight, have you? That’s good. Getting some rest from your labours.’

  ‘No, listen!’ Rose stamped her foot at him, but he went on up the front steps and into the hotel, with the bag bumping his knee, raising his stick in a jolly salute to the guests on the verandah.

  She wasn’t going to let him get away with this. She tackled him after lunch. Before he went upstairs, she went ahead of him and opened the door of the big linen cupboard and waited behind it to confront him on the way to his room.

  ‘I think I’ve got the clue,’ she whispered. ‘I know what’s wrong.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘You know. The annexe house. I believe a man – it’s horrible, but I believe a man killed himself there once. See, first I found out about it bringing out the worst in people. I thought that was it, but then I had to go back and see why. Then I found out there really was something wrong with the cupboard. It wasn’t just me.’

  He leaned on his stick patiently, blinking at her.

  ‘And then I found out – I can’t tell you now, but I’ll tell you all about it some time, it was totally shattering – I found out exactly what it was about the cupboard.’

  ‘Did you indeed?’

  ‘It wasn’t just Michael’s shell-shock nightmare. It was true.’ Everything was becoming clear, except Mr Vingo. He was still evasive, as if he were not really there. ‘So that’s what I had to find out,’ she said flatly, her energy running out, because he was putting nothing into the conversation. ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Find out more, perhaps?’ he enquired mildly. ‘Excuse me, I have to go and say hello to my piano.’

  ‘Rose.’ Her father came through the door at the far end of the corridor that led to their own apartment. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Putting away towels.’

  ‘I need your help.’

  Mr Vingo had disappeared round the corner to his own little staircase, but as Rose turned to go with her father, she thought she heard him say, ‘Courage, Rose.’

  Philip Wood had plugged in a new type of electric pencil sharpener, which would sharpen different sized hard pencils and soft crayons at the same time, as long as you put them in the right slots, and he wanted to see if it was too difficult for a child. His work never seemed to be to find out what was good about new products, only what was bad about them, which did not improve his naturally gloomy view of life.

  After they had wasted time going through, ‘I’m not a child …’ ‘Well, pretend you are, for heaven’s sake. Just this once, do something for me without arguing …’ etc. etc., Rose disappointed him by finding the right slots. As the motor whirred and spun, eating up the pencils and crayons, there spun through it the sound of Mr Vingo’s piano, which Rose had never heard from this room, playing the tune of the hidden valley.

  She went to the door.

  ‘Just one more thing, Rose.’

  ‘Can it wait?’ She opened the door.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said resignedly. ‘I suppose so. Oh yes. Everything can always wait till someone else has got time.’

  Rose’s bicycle was leaning against the garage. She rode through the wood, leaned the bike against a tree and headed out towards the moor.

  The rock was there. The secret path through the trees and thick undergrowth was there. The valley was there – it must be, although its edge was obscured by the swirling mist. Rose put out a foot, feeling for ground that wasn’t there. It took tremendous courage to go down into that pit of unknown demons. If only there were some other way to reach the bridge and cross it on to Favour’s sunlit slope. Why did he put his messengers through this terrible ordeal? To prove he could protect them, or to test whether they had the fire and spirit to do his work? What happened if they failed?

  I’m not brave enough to go down there. Rose stepped back towards the safety of the trees, and at once the insistent tune in her head became the thunder of hoofs and the ringing scream of a horse enraged and fighting.

  ‘Forward!’ the ringing noise called to her. ‘Come to me – hurry!’ And she knew she was more afraid of Favour’s wrath than of the voices and ghouls that she must struggle through to reach him.

  She shut her eyes and plunged down into the mist. The guttural voices and the laughter were somewhere around her, but they kept away. She stumbled against a stone and opened her eyes, full into the crafty, darting eyes of a man no taller than her. Spindly and crooked, he wore a black robe trimmed with spiky black fur, and on his shoulder, nestled against his yellow sneering cheek and wiry hair, a tiny brown weasel with huge protruding eyes crouched with bared teeth and hissed at her like a snake.

  The Lord of the Moor!

  Rose screamed and flung out her arms, but there was nothing there to hit. She ran right through him into the bright air and the gleam of the swift-running river. Favour did not appear until she was across the bridge and half way up the other side, and then he suddenly charged out right above her in a blaze of light that shook sparks off his mane as he tossed his head – hurry, hurry – and flicked his ears back and forth, and trampled to be off.

  Hurry, hurry. He carried her away, and they were part of the rushing wind. Hurry, hurry. The wind, roared in her ears, and ‘Hurry!’ a voice echoed, and a small bell rang, tinkle, tinkle. ‘Hurry up, girl, for the dear Lord’s sake do, or they’ll have our livers.’

  She picked up the heavy silver dish of meat and potatoes and carried it across the hall and into the dining-room.

  ‘What took you so long, Winnie?’ a woman with a handsome, disgruntled face asked sharply. She was sitting at the table with a man and three children.

&nb
sp; ‘Dunno, mum.’ Winnie was very young to be a maid, so it must be ages ago, before child labour laws. She was wearing a black dress with a cap of some kind, and an apron with frills on it. She handed round the food. The dish was heavy and hot. The children fussed and picked as they helped themselves, and kept her standing, taking the heat and weight of the dish first on the flat of one hand, then the other. Even the little boy, who looked about three, was allowed to take too many potatoes, and mess the meat and gravy about.

  His mother had leaned over to correct him, but the father said, ‘Don’t hold him back, Catherine. Let him be a man.’

  There was a boy of about ten and a girl of about seven or eight. The girl said impudently to her mother, ‘When are you going out to buy another baby? Billie isn’t any fun to play with any more.’

  ‘Oh, spare us,’ the older boy said. ‘Not another baby.’

  ‘Hush, children. It’s not your business. If I want to buy another baby, I will. If not, I won’t.’

  ‘We won’t,’ the father said. ‘There’s enough trouble in this world already, without bringing another child into it.’

  ‘Children don’t bring the trouble,’ the girl said demurely. ‘The grown-ups do that.’

  ‘That’s enough, Alice,’ the mother snapped, and the father said, ‘Let the child talk.’ It seemed that they had to contradict each other.

  In the kitchen with the cook, there was another woman called Margery who was a maid and a nurse, but she was grumpy and crossed in love, which was why Winnie had to do most of the waiting in the dining-room today. ‘Give you some practice, girl.’ The family called her Winnie. The other maids called her ‘girl’.

  ‘I don’t like being in the dining-room. I don’t like what they say to each other.’

  ‘Don’t criticize your betters,’ Cook said, but she added, ‘I don’t blame you. If that’s marriage, Margery, you may be better off without it.’

  ‘Those children are paying for it.’ Margery pouted. ‘When there’s trouble brewing, they play up. They’ll get spoiled.’

  The little boy had been allowed to get down from the table without finishing his potatoes and climb on his father’s knee, where the father caressed him, not smiling, but as a man might caress a small dog, with a yearning fondness.

  ‘Billie is spoiled,’ Cook declared, ‘but he’s the Master’s treasure. His pride and joy. His only joy, you might say. He’s like a week of wet Sundays.’

  ‘I think there’s money worries.’ Margery dropped her voice and talked behind her hand. ‘Now, girl, you shut your ears.’

  ‘Gambling?’ Cook narrowed her eyes.

  ‘You never know. But he’s been so gloomy lately, and one day when he come home out of spirits, I heard the Mistress ask him for money for something, and he asked her if she thought she could get blood out of a stone.’

  Cook and Margery went off to put their feet up, leaving Winnie to wash up and sweep the kitchen. The water that came out of the stiff brass tap was brownish and not very hot. Her hands were chapped from the winter, and it made her back ache, leaning over the low sink. As she toiled away, using a bar of yellow soap to try to get the grease off the plates, she was so tired and homesick that she cried a little. The tears that dropped into the sink were hotter than the scummy water. After she dried her sore hands, she put them under her arms to try to warm them before she got out the broom.

  There was a braided rag rug where the meal trolley had stood when this house was a hospital. She picked up the rug to sweep under it, and saw a dark stain on the wood floor. She got the yellow soap and went down on her knees to scrub it. No use, so she put the rug back down over it before Cook could see.

  Winnie slept in a sort of cupboard off the kitchen, where there was room for just a bed and some hooks for her clothes. She did not take off anything except her shoes, because it was cold.

  She was up early, sweeping, dusting, bringing in coal. Outside in the frosty morning, Rose saw that the fruit trees were young and newly planted. The agent who sold the house to Mollie Wood had said that the apple trees were about eighty years old. There were little fences round the new trees, because two ponies with winter coats were in the orchard, a good looking bay and an old white cob with a short tail. Next door, where her own house ought to be, a large cellar hole, and piles of planks and bricks and slates showed that it was going to be built.

  Winnie knelt to clean out the grates in the downstairs rooms and lay fires. Brushing the stairs, also on hands and knees, which was where a lot of her time was spent, she heard voices from behind a bedroom door.

  ‘Where are you, Catherine?’ the Master said sadly. ‘I can’t reach you any more.’

  His wife gave him an abrupt answer in her sharp, impatient voice.

  ‘I had such a bad night,’ he said. I dreamed I was caught in a dark pit. I stretched up my hand, but I couldn’t reach yours.’

  Winnie heard the Mistress say something sarcastic about too many glasses of port. ‘You’re not the only one whose night was disturbed,’ she said. ‘I woke and heard someone crying. I got up to look at the children, but they were asleep.’

  When Winnie, in a print dress and apron, went in with a brass jug of hot water and drew the curtains, the Mistress asked her, ‘You don’t cry in the night, Winnie, do you?’

  ‘No, mum.’

  ‘You’re such a quiet girl. You see everything and say nothing.’

  ‘Yes, mum.’

  Later, Winnie was called up to the bedroom to help the dressmaker, who came for a fitting. The dress was an ugly green, which did not soften the Mistress’s hard good looks. Winnie was on her knees again, measuring the hem three inches from the floor and putting in pins, while the dressmaker fussed about with tucks and seams above her.

  ‘So you really do like this house, madam.’ The dressmaker was a sharp-faced, gossipy woman, hissing through a row of pins she held in her mouth. ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that, I must say, under the circumstances. They say houses have an atmosphere, don’t they, but I’m glad to know that isn’t the case with your beautiful home.’

  ‘Why should it have an atmosphere?’ The Mistress moved impatiently, and Winnie had to reset some of the pins.

  ‘They didn’t tell you anything? Oh well then, it’s all for the best, isn’t it, and no doubt you’ll be hearing some local stories as you get to know people in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I doubt that. So far, I haven’t met anyone I’d take the trouble to know,’ the Mistress said. ‘And please don’t start talking foolish nonsense to my husband if you see him downstairs. He’s gloomy enough as it is. Nothing is right these days.’

  ‘He looks jolly enough now, madam.’

  They were standing near the window. Finishing the hem and getting up, Winnie saw the Master with Billie on the drive outside the stable. He was harnessing the bay pony to a two-wheeled dog-cart.

  His wife flung open the window and called down. ‘Be careful, James! That pony’s not to be trusted.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ the father called back. ‘Billie loves him. We’re going to drive down to the village.’

  ‘Take Snowball then.’

  ‘He’s lame.’

  ‘It’s too cold for Billie.’

  ‘He’s bundled up.’

  ‘The roads may be icy. Oh – he’s too tiresome for words.’ She shut the window with a bang. ‘Winnie, run down and bring Master Billie inside this instant.’

  When Winnie went outside, Billie, wrapped in a coat and a huge red muffler, was already on the high seat of the cart with his father, squirming with excitement, his eyes bright.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, the Mistress says Master Billie is to come indoors.’

  Billie set up a wail, and his father looked down at Winnie and said coldly. ‘You won’t understand this, but she doesn’t want the children to like me.’

  Winnie stepped quickly back as he laid the whip across the pony’s back and drove off round the side of the house. As Rose listened to them clattering away do
wn the frosty road, she wanted to go away too. A sense of foreboding filled her. She wanted to get out of this. Perhaps if she slept, she might sleep her way out of it, as before. God knows, she was tired enough. She would lie down and sleep and wake up on the moor.

  She dodged Cook and went to her room. She slept, and woke thinking she was in her own room at home. Where was the window? Why was it so dark? There was no light switch by the bed. She sat up, and her long greasy hair straggled over her face. She was still Winnie.

  The kitchen was empty. She opened the back door to see if the bay pony had come back, and saw the dejected old white horse looking at her, with his head down. As she returned his stare, all at once his head went up, and he grew and quivered and was splendid and graceful with his flowing tail and his shining dark grey eyes, staring and staring.

  ‘Take me away!’, she called to him. She did not know if she actually spoke the words, nor whether it was his word or his thought that gave her back the answer.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Shut that door, girl. Do you want to freeze us all to death?’

  ‘No, Cook.’

  ‘And go and see who that is at the door. Margery is out with Tom and Alice.’

  A man was at the door in a leather coat and heavy boots. Beyond him in the road stood a tradesman’s van with two horses. The man said nothing, but looked beyond Winnie to where the children’s mother was coming into the hall from the sitting-room.

  ‘What is it?’

  The man did not speak. Behind him, the father climbed out of the van and walked slowly towards the house, carrying across his arms the bundled-up child, with the long red scarf trailing.

  The mother blamed the father, and he bowed his head and accepted the guilt. She had told him the pony was not safe. She had told him not to take Billie. The pony had shied, and Billie was thrown out on to the road.

  ‘You killed him.’ She kept on and on, hysterically. In the kitchen they did not know how the poor man could stand it.

  The mother’s sister came, and they stayed upstairs, weeping in the little boy’s room. The grandmother came and took the older children away. When the father went upstairs to sit beside the dead child, his wife would not let him go into the room.