The Beggar's Curse

by Ann Pilling

  Oliver tucked the book under his arm and followed Jessie along the lane. He was very thoughtful. Miss Webster’s crisp, no-nonsense manner hadn’t been at all convincing. It was as if, deep down, she was frightened of something. What on earth was it?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There had been no sign of a bonfire when they walked up to Winnie’s, but now the lanes were full of scurrying children lugging bits of dead tree up the hill, and rooting about in the hedges for branches and sticks. Rose Salt was there, helping some boys push an old pram full of rubbish. A loud argument was going on in the field next to George Massey’s new house; the Edges were building their fire there, and he said it was too close to his fence.

  “You’ve got the whole field,” they heard. “Why build it here, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Whole field’s no good,” Tony Edge said cheekily. “It’s all waterlogged, that’s what. This bit’s the only place we can build it. Any fool can see that.”

  But George wouldn’t be shouted down, and, very grudgingly, they started to dismantle their fire. Sid turned up, with the Puddings in tow, and Our Vi appeared soon afterwards and helped to heave great branches about. The grumpy man who’d yelled at Colin from his bedroom window stood in the gateway and directed operations in a loud, harsh voice. This was Uncle Harold, brother of Uncle Frank. Together they ran the village stores, and they were also the stars of the play, according to Winnie.

  “Seen enough?” Sid Edge bawled at Colin, who stood watching outside Molly’s. He turned, and walked up the garden path. The Edges weren’t doing anything constructive, they were just shifting their wood about six feet from the fence. That was no good. When darkness fell, and George Massey went indoors, he wouldn’t put it past them to creep out and move everything back to its original place. They were like that.

  “How was Winnie?” Molly Bover asked them at tea. “Did she give you all a carrot juice cocktail?”

  Colin and Prill exchanged embarrassed looks, but Oliver said, “Yes, it was awful. And the lunch was pretty awful, too. It tasted most peculiar.” He was totally unpredictable. In some moods he was maddeningly polite to grownups, at other times he said exactly what he thought. Aunt Phyllis wouldn’t approve, but Oliver was clearly enjoying a little taste of freedom.

  Molly grinned. “Good old Winnie. I expect you’re all genned up now. I expect she gave you her lecture about Stang, and the play, and old Cheshire customs. Am I right?”

  “Well, yes,” Oliver said slowly. “But I’m still not sure about Blake’s Pit.”

  “What about it, dear?”

  “She said it was supposed to have a town at the bottom, and that there was a curse on it. She said you knew all about it too, but that it was a load of old rubbish,” he ended tactlessly.

  “Ah yes,” Molly said quietly. “Winnie rather likes that word. She just means an old poem, I think, one I’m rather fond of:

  “He has cursed aloud that city proud,

  He has cursed it in its pride;

  He has cursed it into Semmerwater

  Down the brant hillside;

  He has cursed it into Semmerwater,

  There to bide. . .”

  Her voice was rich and deep, like a great river. What a pity women couldn’t be in this play, Prill thought. Molly would be marvellous.

  Oliver had listened very carefully. “Semmerwater,” he said accusingly. “But what’s that got to do with it? It’s in Yorkshire. I’ve been. My father took me rowing on it.”

  “Full marks, Oliver,” Molly said patiently, thinking that the persistent, pernickety Oliver was rather like a dentist’s drill. “But there are legends like that about lots of places, you know, with little variations. Didn’t your father tell you?”

  “No. He’s not very keen on poetry.”

  “Well, in the poem, a beggar is turned away from the gates of a great city, and he curses it. And the floods rise and drown everyone.”

  “Yes, she told us that,” he said impatiently.

  “And did she tell you that people have actually seen the city, shimmering through the water?”

  “No, no she didn’t. I don’t think she likes poetry much either.”

  “Ah well,” said Molly.

  “King’s tower and queen’s bower,

  And a mickle town and tall;

  By glimmer of scale and gleam of fin

  Folks have seen them all. . .”

  The sheer music of it made Prill’s spine tingle. What a pity Molly Bover didn’t take them for poetry lessons. Their English teacher, old Mr Crockford, read things like that to them with all the feeling of an iron bar. “What about Stang, Molly?” she said.

  “Well, nobody’s ever bothered to write a poem about Blake’s Pit, but it’s got the same kind of story attached to it, only in our version it was only the rich people who drowned. The beggar survived and prospered, and built another town by the lake. That’s one explanation of why Stang village is where it is. Old Stang’s under the water, and the oldest houses are just above it.”

  “But I thought this house was the oldest in the village?” Oliver said.

  “Oh no, dear, Pit Farm’s the oldest, and it’s the third house on that site, apparently. The Edges do go back a very long way, and I suppose when your name’s in the Doomsday Book you can afford to feel a bit superior.”

  “They are awful though, Molly,” Colin said fiercely, thinking of Rose Salt weeping over her smashed eggs, and of Sid’s peals of laughter.

  “Yes, they are. Sometimes, though, I get the feeling that wretched family just can’t help itself. They were born awkward, somehow.”

  “Perhaps it was one of the Edges who cursed that palace into the pit,” Oliver said solemnly. “Perhaps they’re all descended from that old beggar.”

  “They claim to be, as a matter of fact,” Molly murmured. “It’s a local tradition. No way of proving it, of course, but the Edges are quite proud of their ancestry. Most people would keep quiet about it, if someone way back had been responsible for a curse, but not that lot. . . Now,” she said briskly. “If you’re going to this bonfire, wrap up well – and keep an eye on Rose for me. She gets rather excited on these occasions.”

  What she meant was that Rose Salt had a crush on Tony Edge. They could see her, standing in the shadows, peering at Uncle Harold as he poured petrol on the bonfire. She was still wearing her woolly pixie-hood and the long brown mack, and clinging on to her old shopping bag. Tony was surrounded by a group of giggling admirers. They watched him fit a big harness on to his shoulders, then slot a long pole into it, down a leather pouch, rather like a boy scout carrying a flag. Then he began to sway about, laughing and chasing after all the girls. The bonfire had blazed up already, and in the orange glare Prill saw the outline of a horse’s skull.

  “Old Hob, Old Hob, Give him a tanner, give him a bob,” Tony was shouting, and lurching round the field, careering up to little knots of people who stood warming themselves at the fire. Oliver was fascinated by the horse, and stuck very close to it as Tony charged about, but it was too spooky for Prill.

  The huge, grinning skull, hung with tattered ribbons, waved and dipped in the flickering light, and bonfire sparks showered up over it like gold rain. “Come on, Posie,” she whispered, skirting round the edge of the bonfire to avoid Tony and his horrible horse. “Your dad’s brought some sausages out. Should we have one?” Prill had acquired a little friend, George Massey’s two-year-old daughter. They had seen her that afternoon helping her father in the garden, and Prill had crossed the road to say hello.

  She was the complete opposite of their small sister. Alison was solid and dark, with a red face, and charged about in a state of perpetual stickiness. This child was doll-like and fragile-looking, with a mass of curly blonde hair. Colin had christened her Goldilocks. Her mother Brenda was at home, trying to get Posie’s six-month-old brother Sam to sleep. Prill was only too delighted to look after her while George Massey carried food round on trays.

  The Edges weren’t
at all grateful. “It’s not Bonfire Night, y’know,” someone grumbled, inspecting a baked potato, then putting it back. “We don’t normally have food. Any road, it’s burnt this is.” But the Puddings were out in force, all standing in a line and staring into the flames, the fierce light splashing their intense little faces. They grabbed all that was offered, sausages, potatoes, ginger parkin, and gobbled away in silence. “I don’t know,” George Massey muttered to the Blakemans. “There’s no pleasing some people. They might say thank you.”

  After about ten minutes the two butcher brothers dragged an old hamper up to the fire and opened the lid. From all over the field dark shadows flocked to it, like wasps to a jampot. Tony left Old Hob in the grass and shoved his way to the front. “Clear off, Rose Salt,” they heard. But the adoring little figure still trailed after him, keeping her distance, in the darkness.

  Before the costumes were thrown on the fire people put them on and tore round noisily. There was a definite excitement in the air now; this was obviously much more important than spuds and sausages. George Massey was rather surprised. “I didn’t know this went on,” he said, watching faceless shapes struggle into flopping garments.

  Winnie had told them that the Stang Mummers’ costumes were rather special, very brightly coloured, and each one decorated with a special emblem to tell you who it was. On the night all players wore hoods that fell over their faces.

  In the dark everything was reduced to a black silhouette, and there was a lot of pushing and shouting. They watched two figures fight over something and eventually tear it in two. Then, quite suddenly, the bobbing shapes separated out like a line of paper men, and went dancing crazily round the bonfire, hand in hand.

  “I want to, I want to,” grizzled Posie Massey. She liked dressing up. Her father was feeling rather peeved. His wife had gone to all this trouble with the food, and they’d treated him like dirt. It was his field anyway, the Edges only rented it, and the bonfire was much too close to his fence. They couldn’t do anything properly.

  “All right, kid,” he said. “Let’s find you something pretty. Don’t see why those boys should have all the fun, do you?”

  “And I want ma horse,” the child whimpered. Posie Massey had a new playroom full of toys, and pride of her collection was a painted hobby horse on a wooden stick. She’d heard there was a horse at the bonfire and she’d brought hers.

  It was a night for horses. As they went over to the hamper, Prill heard whinnying in the field by Elphins. Did fire frighten horses, she wondered, or did they warm themselves against the flames, like great cats? She thought of the three horses in the field below her window, Mister and Lucky Lady, the two chestnuts, and William, the lame old carthorse. What had those peaceful creatures to do with this devilish dancing, with these hateful, snapping jaws? Prill longed to be clopping down a quiet country lane on old William’s back, far away from the Edges, Stang, and that brooding pit in the valley bottom.

  In helping to dress Posie, and getting her astride her tiny horse, George Massey made his first mistake. “Old Hob, Old Hob,” the child chanted in a little squeaky voice, and went tottering off towards the bonfire where the faceless black dancers were wriggling out of their costumes, rolling them into balls, and hurling them into the fire with hoarse shouts and squeals.

  Everything happened very quickly after that. A hand shot out of the shadows and stopped the child in its tracks; in seconds she was surrounded by thrusting figures, a yelling, jostling scrum, all trying to grab the pathetic little prize. She screamed, and a voice said, “You can’t wear that, chuck. Off with it, come on. Got to go on the fire, that has.” Then another voice broke in, a girl’s, hard and peevish. “It’s not fair, any road. Girls can’t be in this. Give it me, will you. I’ll throw it on. Ouch! Give over!”

  Costume, mask and hood were torn off the terrified toddler and thrown into the leaping flames, and the toy horse followed. With mirthless shrieks the dancers melted away into the dark, and Posie Massey was left alone on the grass, sobbing for her mother, and with Prill down on her knees, trying to comfort her.

  George Massey suddenly saw red. He left Prill and Posie together and stormed off. In less than a minute he was back at the bonfire with something held high above his head. It was Old Hob.

  Afterwards he swore that he thought it was part of the custom, that the horse was burned too, along with everything else, but nobody ever believed him. George simply wanted to take part in his own bonfire. They’d laughed at his food, hurt his child, and ignored his instructions about the fence. Nothing was left to burn now, except this great grinning puppet on a stick.

  He was a tall man. With one heave he raised the thing right above his shoulders like a dumb-bell, twirled it round twice, then hurled it into the heart of the fire. Tony Edge let out a scream, then he went mad. Gibbering like an idiot he looked round wildly, then he ran to the gate and pulled something out of the grass, an old ladder they’d used to build the bonfire.

  “Leave off, Tone!” someone shouted, but he was almost weeping with rage. He dragged his ladder to the fire and managed to lift it up on his own. The children stared, hypnotized, amazed at his brute strength. He was actually trying to crawl along it. “We’ll save him,” he was bellowing. “We’ve got to save him.” His voice was half a scream, half a sob, and for one crazy moment Prill felt quite sorry for him.

  But the uncles had taken over and were pulling him back. “Don’t be stupid, Tone! Leave off, will you!” Then – “Look at the fire, man!” No one had been watching it, and the weight of the ladder had made it slump over towards the freshly creosoted fence. Slowly the bonfire fell to pieces, there was no heart to it and it was shoddily built, like everything the Edges had a hand in. The crowd gasped and George Massey shouted hoarsely “I knew it. I knew something like this would happen.” The fence was alight already, and the flames were spreading right along. It was like watching the fuse go up on a huge firework.

  There were buckets of water lined up behind the fence. George had made his preparations, he wasn’t born yesterday. He bellowed instructions to Harold and Frank Edge, then tore off to dial 999. Then he got into his brand-new car and backed it down his drive. Thank heaven my insurance is in order, he was thinking, as he ran back to the field. Let’s hope I won’t need it.

  But he hadn’t reckoned with the wind. It was sucking burning brands out of the fire and hurling them into the air. One of them landed on the garage roof, and it was timber. He rang the fire brigade again and told them things were getting out of hand. “Don’t worry, sir,” a calm country voice said on the end of the phone. “They’re on their way. They’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  Oliver, Colin and Prill were told to keep out of the way, with Posie. They stood back and watched, but it was no good telling the Edges what to do. They were all trying to help with the chain of buckets, but there were so many of them and it was so dark. All they succeeded in doing was wreaking havoc. Several buckets got spilt, a child was burned when something fell out of the fire, and Prill heard Sid arguing with his sister about who should help Uncle Frank as he beat at the flattened embers with a broom.

  “Sometimes I think that family can’t help it.” Molly’s words came back to Colin, as he watched their hopeless efforts. Were they really trying to help George Massey? Or were they deliberately being stupid? Half of him suspected that they were quite enjoying themselves, almost willing everything to go up in flames.

  The first call had been answered immediately, and an engine had been dispatched to Stang within minutes, tearing with screaming sirens down the misty April lanes. It wasn’t an easy village to find, but one man on board knew this part of Cheshire like the back of his hand and he guided them.

  But somehow the driver kept missing his way. Two miles out of Ranswick they got lost in a tangle of roads and had to turn back. Then they reached a dead end. “Road Up” one sign said, and another, “Road Closed, Due to Flooding”. The chief fireman was getting frantic because calls kept com
ing through on his radio. Where were they? Couldn’t they hurry up? Couldn’t honest ratepayers expect more than this from an emergency call? Were they making their wills?

  “This is beyond me,” the man at the wheel said dumbly, turning round yet again and tearing back up a hill. “It’s just like the war. It’s like the day they took all the signposts away because of Jerry.”

  It took them a good half-hour to find Stang, and when they arrived it was all over. The fence was gone, George Massey’s new double garage was a charred ruin, and his wife Brenda was weeping quietly at the kitchen table.

  CHAPTER SIX

  If the Edges were hoping that George Massey would pack his bags and go, they must have been very disappointed the next morning. Colin could see him out of the bedroom window, clearing up last night’s debris quite cheerfully. It would take more than a fire to shift him. He’d never been happy with that garage anyway and he was already planning a new one, with a games room on top.

  Winnie Webster pedalled past on her bicycle and Colin heard them discussing the new costumes. “I’ve ordered the material,” she was saying to George, “and I’m going into Ranswick later to collect it. But surely, now. . .”

  “Don’t let’s discuss it out here, Winnie. Get them to send me the bill, as we agreed. See you at tonight’s rehearsal,” he called after her, as if nothing had happened.

  Colin got dressed and took Jessie out for a walk. Sid was lolling against Edge Brothers’ shop window, and inside Tony was serving someone with sausages. “Why aren’t you at school, Sid?” said Winnie. “You’ve not broken up yet, have you?”

  The boy gave a big sniff. “Coldansorethroat, miss,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “Use your handkerchief, Sid. I suppose that means you’ll miss the rehearsal?”

  “Oh no, miss,” he replied, with another almighty sniff.