The Haunting of Bellamy 4

by Monica Dickens

  ‘And I mean everybody!’ He fixed the nervous professor with a glittering eye, and Rose escaped to the kitchen with plates and started to load the dishwasher.

  She came back when it seemed safe. Through the door, she had heard Mollie recite her favourite funny poem, and her father, who had wandered down in slippers to see what was going on, persuaded into his famous rendition of ‘Viva Espana,’ with spoons for castanets. Mr Vingo was going to play the junky piano, which wasn’t worthy of his talents.

  ‘What shall I play?’ There was some discussion. He was so involved with the music he was composing for The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse, that it was hard for him to concentrate on anything else. Rose came in to ask him if he’d like more coffee, and bent over and whispered, ‘Play some more of the Ballad.’

  ‘Should I?’ He looked up at her innocently, as if she were the boss. ‘Suppose they don’t—’

  ‘They will. Play a new bit, something I haven’t heard.’

  ‘It may not be—’

  ‘Please play it.’

  Rose was amazed to find herself influencing him, but she had discovered, since she was thirteen, that sometimes she had to go by instinct, not reason.

  Mr Vingo went to the piano and bowed. The people at the tables applauded, as if it were a nightclub in a film.

  ‘This is for the Rose of all the World,’ he said, nodding at Rose, who had retreated to the doorway that led to the kitchen. ‘It’s the latest part of my music for the narrative poem of the ancient local legend that some of you may know. Rose will tell you what’s happened so far.’

  Rose shook her head.

  Mr Vingo said, ‘Rose. You got me into this.’

  She came about halfway between the doorway and the piano, stood firm with her toes turned in, took a deep breath and told them:

  ‘Well, it’s about this incredible horse, you see, who had been coming and going on the earth since – oh, ages, sort of like a spirit, but sort of like a real horse, too.’

  She had been looking at the place where the wall met the ceiling, but she risked a glance at the audience, and saw that they were listening.

  ‘He was called Favour, because he was the favourite charger of the wicked Lord of the Moor, who was a horrible tyrant to the people of the valley and did, sort of – all sorts of bestial things like black magic and conjuring with dead men’s souls.’ She took a breath. It was strange to be talking about the Lord in this casual way, as if he were only part of ancient history and no more dangerous than Old Nick.

  ‘He also cut down all the trees on the banks of the river and sold them for shipbuilding. So because of what he did, you see, there was a terrible flood, you see, and a boy called Alan galloped on Favour to warn the people of the valley. Well, you can’t see the valley now, of course. It got filled in by the flood, and now it’s called Noah’s Bowl, and – well.’

  She ran out of steam, and Mr Vingo said, ‘That’s where we’ve got to,’ and plunged into the rolling chords and arpeggios of the storm music, with the wind howling first in the base, and then keening through the tortured trees among the high notes of the piano. Then somehow he brought forth from the yellow keys an amazing gallop music. You could hear drumming hoofs on turf, the splash through water, the rain falling ceaselessly, the wind in your ears.

  Rose leaned against the doorway and let the music carry her to the swollen river. She wasn’t in the scene. She watched it like a film. Down the side of the valley, Favour galloped into view in a showering spray, his mane blown straight out by the wind-driven rain, with Alan clinging to his back.

  The rising water was quite far behind them. Ahead, the river still ran within its banks. Chimney smoke wavered up through the rain. Rose could see cattle in an enclosure, huddled with their backs to the storm, and a man and a dog driving a small flock of sheep under cover.

  Favour was galloping with a lowered head, the wet ground sucking at his hoofs, floundering through marshy places and scrambling over rocks, shortening stride and tiring, because he was not a super being now, but only the horse that he had chosen to be for this part of his destiny. Alan on his back looked like a limp bundle of wet rags, hanging on somehow, encouraging Favour with hoarse cries.

  Looking far behind them, Rose could see the surge and crest of a tidal wave, rolling through the flooded river and spreading it out like a lake, above and beyond its banks. If the people did not flee with their animals, they would be engulfed.

  The music in Rose’s head changed to an abrupt staccato crash of dramatic chords. Favour slowed abruptly and stopped, front legs out stiffly, skidding in slimy mud. In front of him, a tributary stream from the hills was swollen with rain, too deep to splash through, too wide to jump; an impossible barrier.

  Alan shouted with all his strength, but the people beyond were all indoors sheltering from the storm, and his voice was driven back in his face by the rain.

  ‘Favour, good horse Favour.’ He leaned forward on the horse’s neck. Rose didn’t know whether he spoke, or whether she heard his thoughts. ‘We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to warn them.’ He turned the horse and urged him once more towards the torrent. ‘You can do it, my beauty, I know you can—’

  His voice broke on a gasp of fright, as the exhausted horse suddenly gathered up his strength and leaped at the water with an amazing surge of power that landed him up to his knees and hocks in the stream – but on the other side.

  He staggered up the far bank, stumbled and stood still, his dark, drenched sides heaving, eyes desperate, nose blowing wide, low to the ground. Alan slid off his back and ran on towards the little barns and houses. He beat on a door, and the clatter was the sound of clapping as Rose woke, leaning in the doorway, and pushed herself upright.

  Mr Vingo was exhausted and out of breath with the urgency of his music. He slumped on the hard piano bench and mopped his face with a napkin.

  ‘That was a good story you told.’ Toby came over to Rose. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said dully. Her head was still full of the wind and rain and the rushing water.

  ‘What happened? Did he save the people?’

  Rose nodded. ‘The horse made an impossible leap to get Alan over the stream, and then he—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rose couldn’t tell him that the bold heart of Favour had broken in the effort, and he had died.

  He wasn’t really dead anyway, only the concept of him that had been there for Alan, at the time. He was alive for Rose, and all the messengers who had been before her and would come after. He was waiting for her in the valley – he must be, because she had to find out what happened to Eric.

  Chapter Seven

  Rose had sometimes wondered what would happen if she heard Favour’s tune when she was at school, and couldn’t possibly duck out of what she was doing and ride her bike all the way to the moor.

  So far, he had never called her when she absolutely couldn’t go. But there had to be a first time, and this was it.

  She was in the cafeteria at lunch. She and Abigail were eating chicken drumsticks fried by Abigail’s mother and apple turnovers baked by Rose. They both hated the school food, so they took turns bringing enough for two, or pooled what they had.

  The radio in the kitchen behind the serving counter was playing rock music, then all of a sudden it changed to the fluting, ascending notes of that irresistible tune. Only for Rose. Everyone else still heard the beat of the rock.

  Rose wiped chicken grease off her hands and stood up.

  ‘Where to?’ Abigail asked, head down to her drumstick.

  ‘I just thought of something.’

  ‘Bit late to go and look up answers for the history test.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s something I’ve just got to do. Look, Ab, I won’t be long, but cover for me, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Abigail couldn’t resist a challenge like that, even though she didn’t know the reason. ‘But if you’re late for the test, Nell the Hell won�
�t let you take it again.’

  ‘I’ll risk that.’ Nothing mattered, with that tune calling her. Rose pushed her way through the crowded cafeteria, nipped along some corridors and down a flight of stairs, grabbed her jacket from the cloakroom, and went out to the bike shed.

  To get to the moor, she would have to cross a busy street and ride through the traffic of Woolmarket until she could turn off on to the long straight road that would take her inland out of town, to skirt The Bluffs where the rich houses were, and climb up to the moor.

  At the busy crossing, she stood by her bike, waiting for the lights to change. When she looked up at the red light, it looked back at her like a great glowing eye and seemed to zoom closer, until it blotted out the traffic, the hurrying people, the noise, the buildings, like the great orb of the sun, devouring the earth. It passed on, and Rose was standing alone in a doleful barren place that was no place, staring into the cruelly gleeful face of her enemy.

  The Lord of the Moor. He had never waylaid her anywhere but in the mists of the valley. What was happening? Was his power increasing? Had he summoned her to where he was, or had he brought his own empty landscape to blot out the crowded street scene?

  He stood crookedly in front of her, with the weasel on his shoulder pretending to be asleep. All round him on the empty spaces that were like the moon, Rose was aware of the soldiers muttering, of their sweaty, unwashed stench, and the tramp of boots and ring of steel.

  The Lord shook back his oily curls and laughed, and cruel laughter echoed round him in fading circles of sound, as if there were no limit to this bleak place.

  ‘Favour died, you know,’ he whispered, in his thin spiteful voice, ‘And you thought the Lord of the Moor wath dead, didn’t you?’ He drew his lips back from his crooked yellow teeth.

  In an earlier vision, Rose had seen him trampled in his blood on the stones of the castle courtyard, but he hissed at her, ‘The Lord of the Moor will never be dead!’

  ‘Nor will Favour!’ she shouted, and pushed her fist against his narrow chest.

  ‘Ere, ere,’ a man said calmly. ‘No need to shove, the light’s not gone green yet.’

  She was back among the traffic and the crowds, holding the handlebars of her bicycle with one hand, the other clenched into a fist.

  ‘I’m sorry. Someone pushed me.’

  But the light had changed and the man had already gone striding across the street. Rose pushed her bike after him and stopped on the other side to mount.

  As she raised her foot, the pedal was like a firm hand boosting her upwards. Where was the bike? The horse’s warm shoulder was there, and the movement of his muscles under the dark grey coat. She clutched at the mane and pulled herself up on to his broad strong back. The town was nowhere. The Lord and his nowhere landscape were gone. There was nothing but Rose and the horse and the flying joy of him that filled her soul.

  ‘Want to come over and play?’

  It was the voice of a girl much younger than Rose, and Rose was the girl whose voice it was. She was standing on an upturned box and calling over a clipped hedge to the boy next door.

  ‘You can play with my dog. If you’d like to come to my house, we’ll play anything you want.’

  The child seemed to be about six or seven. Rose could tell by the feel of her small body and the size of her hands. She remembered how helpless it felt at that age to try to get someone older to do what they didn’t want to.

  The boy next door was wearing a green and white diamond-patterned sweater and long shorts and green knee socks. He was sitting on a low stone wall by an empty fishpond, looking moody. When the child called again hesitantly, ‘Eric?’ he looked up and said, ‘Oh, go away, Eileen, you’re such a pest.’

  His face had grown to his big round glasses. They were still an owlish flaw, but his thin face had broadened bonily between sticking out ears, and lengthened to a weak chin and sulky mouth.

  He wasn’t a nice-looking boy. Eileen’s parents, who were rather priggish and suspicious and believed in keeping themselves to themselves, advised her to leave him alone, but Eileen felt it was her duty to be nice to him. Once when she was out at the back in the summer, she had heard his aunt shouting at him beyond the open kitchen door of the other house.

  ‘I never wanted you! You’re worse than your mother!’

  Eric had shrieked like a hurt animal and run out to their garden and cast himself on the ground.

  Eileen knew, because she had looked through a gap in the fence. She hadn’t told her parents, partly because they would scold her for poking her nose into other people’s business, and partly because the aunt had insulted Eric’s dead mother, a sin too grievous to tell.

  Reviewing these things through the memory of the child whose body she temporarily inhabited, Rose thought that Eileen was as priggish as her parents.

  ‘Pooh, then.’ Eileen stepped off the box and called to her curly black poodle, who was barking at a cat on the wall of the house on the other side. The cat made the mistake of jumping into Eileen’s gardens, and the dog chased it, barking hysterically, and went after it through a gap at the bottom of the hedge, into Eric’s garden.

  ‘Pongo! Pongo!’ Eileen’s voice was too young and high for proper dog-calling. It felt funny to Rose to have a little girly voice again that could go out of control and let you down. ‘Pongo, you bad!’

  Pongo didn’t come back. He yelped once in surprise, then yelped again more shrilly, and Eileen heard him snarling. She jumped on the box and saw Eric holding the dog by its collar and hitting it with a stick.

  ‘Stop it!’ Eileen shrieked.

  Pongo’s snarls changed to a strangling gurgle as Eric lifted him up by the collar and hit him again, knocking his curly black body sideways as he dangled helplessly.

  He dropped the dog, and Pongo rushed back through the hedge, yapping and whimpering. Eileen went down on her knees to comfort him, but the dog wriggled free and ran to his kennel at the back of the house.

  Well, Eileen would certainly tell her parents that, mind your own business or not. Only the maid was at home, and she wasn’t going to tell her, because she didn’t like Pongo, so she waited by the front gate for the first sight of her mother walking up the hill with her shopping basket.

  The front door of Eric’s house opened, and the aunt came out and stood on the top step, pulling on her gloves. She was a nurse up at the hospital, someone rather grand, Eileen had heard, called Sister Maddox. She didn’t wear the short green cape with the red lining that the ordinary nurses wore when they walked down the hill to the town, but a long sweeping blue cape with a blue hat on top, turned up at one side and pinned with a cockade.

  ‘Come in now, Eric,’ Sister Maddox said. ‘I’m off, and Mrs Tait will get your lunch.’

  ‘What about my bike?’ Eric asked. ‘Are you going to give me money for the new brake blocks?’

  ‘Not now. I’ve got to go to work.’ The aunt came down the steps on to the front path, and Eric evidently dashed past her to the house, for he now appeared on the top step.

  ‘No one else’s people work on a Saturday,’ he shouted down at her. ‘Why can’t we go to the zoo?’

  ‘Eric,’ the aunt said quietly, ‘my work comes first.’

  ‘My work. My hospital. My children.’ He stamped his foot and raged at her, his glasses catching the morning sun. ‘You like those stupid brats on the ward better than me. You never do anything for me!’

  Eileen was transfixed, clutching the wrought iron gate. She had never heard anything like this.

  ‘I’ve given you a home,’ the aunt said icily. ‘Food, clothes – I give you everything.’

  ‘Give me the money for the brakes then.’ Eric had quietened down. He spoke more craftily. ‘I can’t ride it to the bakery for you if you don’t.’

  ‘Don’t ride it then. Walk.’ Aunt Sister Maddox turned and went triumphantly out to the street. Eileen and Rose shrank back as she passed their gate, with her cloak swinging as if she were going into battle,
and strode off up the hill towards the hospital.

  Eric had gone into the house. A few minutes later, while Eileen was still hanging on her gate, peering down the hill and feeling lonely, and wishing she had the nerve to say to her dawdling mother, ‘You never do anything for me,’ she saw Eric wheel his bicycle down the path. He opened the gate and went out on to the pavement.

  ‘I thought you hadn’t got any brakes,’ Eileen said.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  Eric made a terrible face at her, like a savage monkey wearing glasses, swung his leg over the back wheel and rode off down the hill.

  Stupid boy, Eileen thought. She didn’t seem worried, but Rose was in agony about how it was going to end. Sure enough – the scream of the car brakes, the crash, the shouts – it was almost as if she had heard it all before, it was so inevitable.

  The clamorous ringing of an old-fashioned ambulance bell shrilled through Rose’s head and became confused with the sounds of traffic in the street. She had one foot on the pedal of her bike. She turned the bicycle round, saw a green light, crossed over like a sleepwalker and went back to school.

  ‘Where you bin?’ Abigail grabbed Rose in the corridor as she was hurrying to their classroom.

  ‘I’m back, aren’t I? Let’s get in there.’

  Miss Nell Wilkie was already beginning to hand out question papers as they slid behind their desks.

  History. Rose sighed at the questions, which looked as boring as she knew her answers were going to be. What did Nell the Hell know about it? Rose had been in history. She had just come from there. Back in the nineteen twenties and thirties she’d been, watching Eric’s poor puny rotten life unfold in chapters. What next? Was Eric dead now? How was she to find out? They might have buried him next to his parents, but that church with the gargoyles and cypress trees might be anywhere on any side of the moor, even supposing it was the same moor that Rose knew.

  One thing was clear: the bitter hatred between Eric and Aunt Maddox. If she had killed him by refusing money for the brakes, or he had killed himself by refusing not to ride the bike – whichever way you wanted to look at it – what was Rose supposed to do about that?