‘You tell them what I told you. No dereliction of duty done by me. I’m upstanding.’ Boxty pointed a crooked, thin finger at his hollow chest.
‘I’ll be back to interview the other turnkey,’ Solomon warned him.
‘He’ll say the same.’
Of course he will, Solomon thought. ‘I’ll head off so. Good night.’
‘Right.’ Boxty feebly returned the cork stopper to the slender bottle of whiskey and held it out for Solomon to take back.
‘Keep it,’ Solomon said, keen to leave the oppressive nunnery.
‘Bless ye,’ Boxty mumbled, watching Solomon climb the steps and disappear. ‘Ponce,’ he hissed as the door closed.
Solomon paced quickly, moving down the gloomy corridors following a thin trail of candlelight, listening to the inmates mumbling and shouting and crying. He was keen to exit the building, to get away from all the destroyed lives, the oppressive monolithic walls, the pervading sense of agitated gloom, the stench of mould and excrement. He hurried up steps and was on a second-storey floor when he realised he was lost. He stood a moment looking down the grim, dimly lit corridor, his heart beating curiously in his chest, the grey-slabbed floor reflecting the pallid light cast by the wall braziers and for a moment everything was silent. No wailing, no whispering, no clang of metal or raucous laughs, instead a creeping silence seemed to slide thickly from the cold grey stone. He stared along the line of shut doors. The distant darkness at the end of the corridor seemed to coil with black shadows and unfamiliar nuances, the light of the braziers unable to penetrate the morbid gloom. Solomon’s skin prickled. His scalp bristled as he gazed at the faraway pitch black and imagined Olocher’s ghost stumbling from the inky air. A small man, his gaping throat bubbling blood, his white face twisted in the agony of death throes, his small eyes bulging as he reached out with dripping fingers, staggering towards Solomon crying, ‘Devil’s here. Devil’s here.’
Solomon shivered and recoiled his head, spooked by his own imagination.
‘Stupid,’ he mumbled, backtracking.
He pinched back a half-smile; if Boxty’s stories about Olocher were having this effect on him, think what a craftily written broadsheet could do. He heard the muffled peel of the Christ Church bells. It was eleven o’clock.
‘Damn,’ he cursed, thinking of Merriment locking up. ‘She’ll bar the door.’
He looked forlornly up and down the narrow passage. He recognised a brazier; an iron prong hung loose from its base. He ran towards it.
‘Come on,’ he hissed.
He maddeningly rounded a corner and stared at the black door that led back down to the nunnery.
You fuckin’ eejit, he thought, clenching his jaw angrily. Solomon flung the door open, ready to ask Boxty how the hell you got out of this place, when he jolted to a stop. There was something down the steps, crawling on the floor, an enormous creature, its spine undulating, rising and falling, inching forward, masked by shadows. Solomon couldn’t move. The walls seemed to oscillate, softening like melted wax. He fixed his eyes on the creature heaving its weight along the ground, a dull red spreading across its broad back as the orange candle flames caused shadows that danced over the earthen floor. Solomon’s eyes flared. Rigid with fear, he froze, a single thought burned a funnel through his reason.
It’s Olocher, slithering.
There was a limb. A searching antennae, probing the gloom. A spread of skeletal fingers. Solomon’s knees buckled. It was a hand, deathly white like a corpse. The vault of the nunnery reverberated with a miserable, chilling groan. Solomon’s body drained. He couldn’t run.
Olocher was slithering.
A long, thick trunk of torso dragged itself into the pool of flickering light beneath the brazier and, weak with fear, Solomon swallowed back the gorging nausea that shot up his oesophagus. Below him the grey head painfully lifted and a terrified face luminous with horror contorted in a dreadful spasm and let out an appalling shriek.
A cold sweat burst through Solomon’s pores.
Boxty was on the floor, crawling towards the steps, the orange torchlight throwing macabre shadows across his back. He dragged his left side like half of him was dead. When he looked up his face was distorted, grotesquely malformed – half his mouth weighed down, his left eye drooping, traces of blood dripping from his lips, a dark bruise forming on his cheek. He looked like he had been beaten.
‘Hlp me,’ he groaned. ‘Hlp me.’
Solomon bolted down the steps.
‘Boxty. Are you all right, man? What happened?’
Solomon rolled Boxty over, lifting his head onto his lap. The old man’s chest was covered in a brackish-coloured blood.
‘Have you been shot?’ Solomon searched, patting down Boxty’s heaving chest. Boxty clawed at Solomon’s jacket, his whole body arching, desperate to say something. Half his mouth opened, his right eye bulged, bloodshot.
‘De . . . Devil.’ He pushed the word out, the dead side of his face ashen.
Solomon looked frantically up the steps, but there was no one to hear him if he shouted for help.
‘You’ve taken a turn,’ he told Boxty. ‘You’ll be all right. We have to get you out of here.’ Solomon went to get up.
‘No,’ Boxty shouted, grabbing him back down.
‘I have to get help.’ Solomon tried to prise himself away.
Boxty thrashed in distress, trying to stand up, desperate not to be left alone.
Solomon supported him. ‘I have you.’
He reached under the old man’s back and helped him to his feet, taking his paralysed left arm and hauling it over his shoulder. Boxty stumbled forward, intermittent grunts of fear bursting from his shattered mouth. He was heavy. Solomon dragged him up every step, aware of the pervading acrid smell emanating from the bowels of the dungeon. He fumbled with the door and pulled Boxty out into the passageway, leaning the old man against the grey oozing wall and wiping his brow with the edge of his sleeve. Boxty began to cry. His breeches were stained with urine and filth.
‘You’re going to be all right,’ Solomon tried to reassure him. ‘Come on now, I’ll look after you. Get you to a hospital.’
‘I was . . .’ The words came a little clearer. Boxty’s left eye blinked. He was improving.
‘There, see, you’re getting better already,’ Solomon grinned painfully.
Boxty shook his head, his good hand clawing at the air, his whole body craning forward trying to tell Solomon something.
‘He’s back.’
Solomon just wanted to go.
‘This is his blood.’ Boxty’s voice dragged, every word pushed urgently out of his distorted mouth. ‘He’s back from the grave.’
Solomon looked along the dark corridor, unnerved by Boxty’s illness and disturbed by the strange turn of events. He wondered if he should chance calling out. Where the hell was the other turnkey?
‘I’m telling you.’ Boxty grabbed Solomon’s arm, squeezing it tight. ‘He’s back.’
A line of foamy spittle slid from the left side of Boxty’s mouth.
‘Who?’ Solomon’s heart teetered on the edge of his ribs.
When Boxty spoke, the word came out mispronounced, but there was no mistaking what he was trying to say.
‘Dolocher,’ he gasped. ‘And he has the head of a black pig.’
6
The Dolocher
Merriment opened her eyes. Janey Mack stood at the side of the bed staring down, her pale face ghostly white, her huge eyes blinking expectantly. She smelled of sweet dog rose soap. She had been scrubbed clean in a tin bath the night before and dressed in an old shirt Merriment couldn’t throw away. A thin shaft of morning sunlight slipped through a narrow slat in the bedroom shutters. It cast a shaft of ruby light over Janey Mack’s puzzled face.
‘Morning.’ Merriment sat up in the bed. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Just checking.’ Janey Mack grinned, her little face suddenly bursting with an excited light. ‘Thought ye were dead.’
Janey Mack shrugged.
‘I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was dead,’ Janey Mack said, implying there was nothing unusual about mistaking life for death. ‘The bed was so soft and I was so warm and cosy I thought God had carried me off.’
Merriment glanced over at the crumpled makeshift bed before the small fireplace. She’d thrown a couple of cushions down on the floor and folded an old blanket in half and Janey Mack thought she’d died and gone to heaven.
‘And this isn’t a dream,’ Janey Mack told her. The little girl unhooked the long latch fastening the shutters and pushed them open. A blazing red sunrise flooded into the spartan bedroom. The grey painted walls blushed, the embroidered throw shone, and crimson sunlight fell in a rectangular pattern across the varnished floorboards. Merriment puffed up the pillows behind her, not for one moment regretting her spur-of-the-moment decision to take on an eight-year-old assistant. Janey Mack climbed onto the window seat and stood looking down at the street below.
Already Fishamble Street was busy. She could see hawkers making their way up to the Christchurch market, some had barrows stacked high with barrels of winkles and cockles, others had hot pies and freshly baked bread. She saw a milkmaid coming in from the country. The maid drove two cows before her and carried a stool, a pail and a quart jug to measure out her milk.
‘Two whole pounds, miss,’ Janey Mack said, not taking her eyes from the view. ‘I can’t get my head around it.’
‘You know what I can’t get my head around. That there was a little girl underneath all that muck.’
‘Are ye a bit touched, miss?’ Janey Mack swung round. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted you’re not the full shillin’ since I benefit hugely from your ailing mind, but two pounds, miss, for me . . . it beggars belief.’
Merriment nodded.
‘Well, try and believe it.’
‘Oh, no doubt I’ll get over the shock of it, in time. But Hoppy John, I think he thought all his Christmases had come at once. His head nearly fell off when you suggested the exchange.’
‘I see it as a prime investment.’
Merriment bounced out of bed and grabbed her breeches, tugging them under her nightdress and rummaging underneath the bed for her stockings.
‘See, there ye’ll be sorely disappointed, miss.’ Janey Mack jumped down and stepped across the brightening floor. The sky turned pale pink and yellow.
‘Why will I be disappointed?’ Merriment pulled on her shirt, shivering a little in the sharp morning air.
‘There’s no way for me to sweeten the salt in me words, miss, but ye’ve set a high expectation with the price ye paid for me and I can’t help but fall short of all the grand things you think that two pounds measures in my person.’
Merriment laughed.
‘You’re serious in the morning, Janey.’ Then she added, ‘You don’t think you’re worth two pounds, is that it?’
Janey Mack frowned, fiddling with the brocade fringe on the bed cover. ‘On reflection,’ she announced, ‘and according to the church scriptures, a person is a priceless thing, worth more than money and possessions.’
‘There we are. Exactly.’
‘But.’
‘There’s a but?’
‘What the scriptures say and how it turns out to be are two very different things.’
‘You’re worth two pounds, Janey.’
‘It’s like Solomon’s mother.’
‘King Solomon?’
‘No. Solomon Fish, with his mother calling him Solomon on account of her expecting him to become rich and move to Babylon to play the harp and pick fruit in the garden.’
Merriment laughed, bewildered. She dragged on her boots and buttoned up her waistcoat.
‘I’m going to have to teach you to stick to the point, Janey. Although on the other hand I do like your circumvent ing.’
Janey Mack wanted to ask if her circumventing was near her head. Instead she made her point. ‘Solomon’s mother thought by giving him a fancy name he’d have a fancy life. And you think by buying me for two whole pounds you’ll get the fairness of your price out of me. But I’ll never fulfil the task and you’ll quickly realise that I don’t concentrate and that will set your teeth on edge and then you’ll sit and consider. And the long and the short of it is, miss, ye’ll regret the overpayment for my purchase and resent the burden of my employment and be forced to conspire to be rid of me.’
‘I see.’ Merriment stopped making the bed. ‘Is it always an opera with you, Janey?’
‘I say it as it is, miss.’
‘You say it as you perceive it to be. How you see it and how it is may not be one and the same thing, and anyway that’s not the point. You think all of this is too good to be true. Well, it’s not. I mean, it is true, and you are now an apprentice to an apothecary and you’ll have chores to do. It won’t be all dilly-dallying and pleasantries.’
‘But, Janey Mack, two whole pounds. How will I live up to the price of it?’
‘I’ll decide that.’
‘We’re doomed.’
Merriment laughed, her whole face radiant and suddenly youthful.
‘We are not doomed. You have the most baroque imagination. Well, you know what they say.’ She brushed her long auburn hair, clawing in the wayward silky curls and fastening it with a leather thong. ‘If it’s not baroque don’t fix it!’ Merriment laughed warmly at her joke, showing the gap in her neat teeth. ‘Get it?’ she asked Janey Mack.
‘No, miss. And that will be another thing that will gall you and turn you against me. I won’t get your jokes.’
Janey Mack looked troubled. She stood twirling the brocade, mulling things over. Once all the silt was washed out, her hair was honey gold not dirty brown. Her features were small and pert. But her eyes were her most haunting attribute; beneath all their innocence they were filled with a shocking depth of wisdom. She stood in a square of yellow sunlight, trying to explain to Merriment that this arrangement was going to fall apart.
Merriment tipped the end of her hair brush, pushing it further onto the narrow table.
‘Janey,’ she said, choosing her words carefully, ‘you’ve had an uncertain existence. It has made you unsteady. So here’s my promise. You’re going to live here and train with me, and come under my care. And every day you will work with me and soon it will be so familiar that you will forget you were ever worried about me throwing you out and leaving you to fetch for yourself. The only way I can reassure you is to keep you safe and in a routine. That will quieten your insecurity.’
‘But . . .’ Janey Mack didn’t want to tempt fate but it was her training – no stone could be left unturned. First rule of scavenging – you root and poke and make certain you’ve missed nothing.
‘But?’ Merriment said softly.
‘Why would you be so kind?’
‘No reason. Kindness can exist in and because of itself. We are human beings, Janey, not animals. Kindness is in our nature.’
‘All I know, miss, is people are self-pleasing. All good things come with a price.’
‘That just isn’t true.’
‘That’s ’cause you’re a romantic, miss, ran away to sea because you thought that lad downstairs was worth it. What good did it do ya? Where’s he now? Off dallying with his shipmates and here you are parting with good money to buy my company.’
‘You think I bought you because I’m lonely?’ Merriment smarted under the little girl’s keen observation. ‘I’m not lonely, Janey. I’m not sad. I’m content and ambitious. I like my studies. I like dry land. I like my life. For God’s sake, I like you, Janey.’
‘What’s to like? Hoppy John says I’ve a blistering tongue clacking about in my head and I’ll never have any friends on account of it.’
‘Hoppy John’s a bitter man. You’re a very bright, lovely girl. Now, have a little faith that sometimes good things just happen.’
; ‘Suppose.’ Janey Mack scratched her knee. ‘If such a bad thing can happen like what happened to Jo-Jo Jacobs then . . .’ Janey Mack paused and looked about the brightly lit bedroom, taking in all its spare and elegant details. ‘Then maybe a good thing can happen too for no rhyme or reason.’
Merriment tried to quash the sudden pang of pity she felt. Life was hard, for everybody, and Janey Mack was not fooled by soft cushions and scented soap. She knew that the fragile balance between relative happiness and desolate, unremitting despair could be disturbed by a light breeze at any moment. Merriment wanted to reassure her, but she understood that words would not do the trick. Only the gentle, repetitious familiarity of being kind and thoughtful would help Janey Mack to believe that sometimes good things just happen.
‘After breakfast,’ Merriment said, flinging a shawl towards the little girl, ‘we are going round to the pawnshop and buying you some clothes and a pair of shoes.’
Janey Mack bounced, jumping from one leg to the other, throwing off her previous mood. She clenched her fists and squeezed them to her cheeks, her whole body shaking. She spun around in circles and squealed with delight.
‘Really? Really?’
She was just checking the air with a question; in reality she wasn’t listening. Instead her imagination was already full of elegant shifts with neat ribbons and long sleeves. She even allowed herself to dream of a cream-coloured petticoat trimmed with broderie anglaise.
‘I can’t have you working in the shop in a tattered old shirt. I threw your dress into the fire last night.’
Merriment flung the door open and tripped lightly down the stairs, followed by Janey Mack, who was laughing because she’d never known good fortune and she was drunk on the experience. She patted the wallpaper saying hello to the yellow canaries trapped in brown cages and ran after Merriment through the shop and into the anteroom.
They had bread and butter for breakfast. Merriment stoked up the fire and Janey Mack sat with her feet extended, roasting her soles in the delicious heat. Merriment washed Janey Mack’s hand, reapplied a nettle salve for the burn and wrapped it in a fresh bandage. She brushed Janey Mack’s hair and took a look at her prescriptions, beginning to make up the simple recipes.
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