Edmund took another drink and swallowed with difficulty. ‘A little boy on the children’s ward,’ he said quietly. ‘Only concussion, but then he fell out of bed and fractured his skull. I set up my first blood transfusion by myself. It was going well, I thought. But there was pressure on the brain, and there had been too much loss of blood already, I suppose. We did everything we could – coramine, oxygen. I didn’t do anything wrong, I know I didn’t, but the—’ he looked down at the tablecloth, his mouth working in pain. ‘The child died.’
Shocked murmurs round the table. His father slapped him on the back and brayed, ‘Cheer up, Doctor, you’ll never make a doctor at this rate. Better get used to it. You’re going to lose lots more patients before you’re done, ha ha.’
Rose and Josephine wished Edmund would bash him, but he said in a shaken voice, ‘The worst of it was, he was the nephew of the Sister of Bellamy ward.’
Eric! That was why Rose was being shown this scene.
‘She was so cut up about it, she didn’t even try to help.’
No, she wouldn’t, Rose thought. Aunt Sister Maddox. Murderess.
Josephine stood up and went round the table to stand by Edmund’s shoulder.
‘Oh – hullo, Jo.’ He looked up.
‘You promised to dance with me.’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘To please little Josie?’ She stroked his arm with a finger, and wheedled and coaxed in a way that was very embarrassing to straightforward Rose, who couldn’t imagine herself carrying on like this with Ben, or him allowing it.
But Edmund smiled his beautiful smile at last, and got up. Josephine pranced ahead of him to the dance floor. He put his arm round her waist and she put her hand on his shoulder in the way they used to in those days, and they were off, foxtrotting and turning among the brightly dressed dancers.
Rose lost the rhythm and stumbled over her invisible feet, and stumbled out of the scene and into her own bed, which seemed to be going up and down a bit jazzily, until it settled down and she could open her eyes on her real life.
The journey to the pier seemed to have shocked the fever out of her. In the late afternoon, she got up, and went in search of Mr Vingo.
He was always a good audience for astonishing tales. Hearing his piano, Rose ran up the spiral stairs to his turret room, knocked, and said, ‘You’ll never believe it,’ as she went in.
He swung round on the piano stool at once, his eyebrows up at the ready. ‘I am all ears. Amaze me.’
‘Well …’ Rose took a deep breath and told him all the things she had found out. How Eric’s aunt hated him and he detested her; how the aunt’s meanness caused the bike accident, although that was really Eric’s fault; how her taunting had made him try to get out of bed, although that was his fault too, because she had told him not to.
‘If you could have seen his face! He’d have killed her, if he could. But she won. This was her final triumph over her sister.’
‘What a harridan.’ Mr Vingo breathed heavily, caught up in the drama of it.
‘And it all happened in that room, Stavingo.’ Rose used the short form of Mr Vingo’s name. ‘Eric and the room, that’s the clue to it all, you see, because now that the room is being used again, things could still happen there.’
‘What sort of things?’ Mr Vingo leaned his elbows on his thick knees, with his stomach between.
‘I don’t know. That girl only said she hated it, and that could have been just her feeling miserable because she was ill. But – evil things. Dark powers. I have this feeling of something really sinister lurking in the wings. The Lord has been closer. He’s involved with Eric in a horrible way. He’s not just a hostile barrier I have to fight past to get to Favour. He wants to win this, Stavingo, I know he does, but – oh hell.’ Mr Vingo was sitting there looking inscrutably at her like a buddha. ‘You think I’m feverish.’ She put her hands up to her cheeks. ‘Perhaps I still am.’
‘No, no.’ Mr Vingo shook his head and jowls. ‘I think you may be entering into the most deep and crucial part of this mission. You said it yourself: the forces of darkness are gathering in the wings. Don’t take it lightly. I warn you. This is no children’s game.’
‘I am not a child.’ Rose stood upright and bumped her head against the lower curve of the ceiling near the wall. ‘I know what I’m getting into.’
‘You can’t,’ Mr Vingo said. ‘No one can. That’s half the thrill of being a messenger. But I like your attitude. Go and get into it then, brave Rose of all the world.’
Rose didn’t know what to do next. She needed Favour. She needed to know more. ‘Go and get into it,’ Mr Vingo had said, but where, and how?
When she went into the sitting-room of their own apartment at the back of the hotel, her father was home from the testing laboratory.
‘Hello Dad.’
He was reading the local paper, spread out on the table. When he was reading anything, even a comic strip, he didn’t always respond.
‘Dad.’
‘That’s my name.’
‘Have you had tea?’
‘I forget.’ He shrugged his bony shoulders, which were wearing the sagging brown cardigan he always put on when he came home after work. ‘Look at this.’ He sat back and jabbed the newspaper page with his finger. ‘Julie Brand weds John Oliver Wentworth – it’s absolutely unblievable.’
Rose looked over his shoulder at the photograph of the bride and groom, both faces dwarfed by large prominent teeth.
‘Because they’re so ugly?’
‘That’s nothing. There’s someone for everybody. Look at me. But they’re ugly in the same way, that’s what’s so bizarre. Look at all the couples on this page. “Johnson – de Vere nuptials.” “Margaret Dean and Peter Wookey exchange vows.” They all look like each other!’
‘Like people get to look like their animals,’ Rose said. ‘Do I look like Moonlight?’
‘But these people are only just starting out together. Look at em –Johnson and de Vere, long noses, eyes too close together. These two hapless goons here at the bottom, without a clue what they’re getting into– they both look as if they came out of a cave. No, here, at the bottom of the page.’
But Rose’s eye was fixed in the middle of the page, where a girl who hadn’t washed her hair before she put a white lace veil on it was coming rather timidly out of a church on the arm of a man with a roguish moustache and a piratical eye … underneath an arch of gargoyles.
The hideous stone face with the bulging human eyes and venomous serpent’s mouth was right above the bride’s limp, unfestive hair.
‘The wedding of Jane Goole and Brian Digweed took place at St Aubrey’s church, Ramsdyke, on …’
Ramsdyke! That was beyond the western edge of the moor, below the ancient ruins on the hill where the castle of the Lord of the Moor had once stood. That was where she must go now. She must go to the cemetery of the little country church with the gargoyles, to see whether Eric was buried next to his parents, and what date it was that he had died.
Rose stayed home from school for one more day. The sun was out and the storm had dragged all the clouds away with it, so Rose asked her mother, ‘Can I go riding?’
Mollie stopped rolling pastry to think. ‘Is it cheating to be not well enough for school, but well enough to ride?’
‘Cheating who?’
‘The school.’
‘They don’t care.’
‘Yourself then.’
‘Riding will do me more good.’
‘Some people get all the luck.’ Mrs Ardis paused on her way to the laundry room to cough, clutching the mound of sheets and towels to her as if it were the only thing that held her chest together.
‘You should take some time off too,’ Mollie said, ‘if you really don’t feel well.’
‘Some people can’t afford to.’
‘There’s such a thing as sick pay,’ Mollie called after her, but Mrs Ardis had turned on the washing machine and drowned her
martyrdom in a surge of hot water.
Joyce was busy with grown-up lessons, so she let Rose take Moonlight on the moor by herself. She set off towards the hill with the castle ruins, to find her way round it to Ramsdyke village and St Aubrey’s church.
Rose thought she knew the way, but she kept coming to places where the track divided. Hoof prints and puddled mud were in both directions, since a lot of people rode here. She would try one way, and it didn’t look right, so she’d go back and try the other. Moonlight didn’t help. The only way he wanted to go was back to the stable.
Sometimes Rose would get a glimpse of the hill, then it would be lost behind trees, or the path would take her down into a dip and round a boggy patch, and when she came up to the open ground again, the hill wasn’t ahead, where it ought to be.
‘Come on, Moon!’ The horse was so sluggish that she picked a stick from a tree and gave him a couple of whacks down the shoulder, which she didn’t usually do, because she had the feeling that he had been whacked enough in his life.
It didn’t make much difference, however. ‘The Mule has the hide of a rhinoceros,’ Joyce frequently said. Rose was annoyed with him. He ought to enjoy moving his limbs in the warm sun, and because she still felt a bit out of sorts after her day in bed, she gave him a sharp clout behind the saddle.
Amazing! His head went up, his back end gathered itself, and he bounded into quite a lively canter.
‘Hey, wait a minute!’ As they rounded a curve, she could see the top of the hill with the remains of the tower off to her left. It was supposed to be on her right. ‘Wrong way, Moon.’
She pulled on the left rein, but he cantered steadily along, as if his mouth was as tough as his hide. Rose leaned forward to take hold of the rein nearer the bit, but Moonlight lumbered ahead like a train.
‘What’s got into you?’ He had never been known to run away with anybody, except sometimes charging into the stable before you had time to get off.
O, blessed Moon. What had got into him was the spirit of Favour. He was answering a call that Rose, this time, couldn’t hear. He blundered round the corner of a broken wall, shied at the huge grey rock and stopped dead, to let Rose slide gracefully to the ground.
‘Thank you.’ She patted his neck.
‘That’s quite all right.’ She answered for him, as he couldn’t say it himself.
She tied him to a strong inner branch of a low bush, begging him not to break his reins, and pushed through the thicket towards the lake, which she knew would have once more become a valley.
The mists were very thick. They were not cloudy and swirling, but a solid blanket through which she had to step down cautiously, with her hands out and her feet feeling for the stony slope. She knew that the Lord would be there, waiting for her somewhere. He was involved in the dark forces of the hatred between Eric and his aunt, because this was the Lord’s perverted crusade – to foster and spread evil, just as Favour’s endless and glorious crusade was to fight it.
He tripped her up. He or one of his soldiers put out a booted foot and sent her sprawling, clutching at the thick mist for support that wasn’t there. She landed kneeling, her knees and the palms of her hands scraped and stinging from the stones.
‘Kneel before the Lord of the Moor.’ He stood over her. Rose looked up, shielding her head and face with her arm, expecting a blow.
None came. He laughed, a high laugh that would have been womanish, if it were not grisly. Around them both, Rose could sense the breathing and shifting of a group of still, silent men, waiting to see what would happen. Waiting to see Rose defeated and sent back to the world she came from, and the power of the horse unused, because his messenger had failed.
‘You cringe before me, like the dethpicable thing you are,’ the Lord said. ‘I hate you!’
‘And I hate you and what you are.’ Rose dropped her arm to look into his face.
His face wasn’t there, only the slitted ovals of his eyes. He wore a black mask with a hood over his head like a hangman. On his shoulder, the weasel’s claws Were hooked into the black fabric. Its wet, protruberant eyes transfixed Rose. It drew back its lips as Eric had done in a snarl of hate, as he tried to crawl across the floor.
‘No ethcape.’
Paralysed with fear, Rose thought the hissing lisp came from the weasel’s murderous jaws as it prepared to strike.
‘Favour!’ It was a feeble cry, with the black hood and the weasel’s head so close, but it was answered. From the other side of the mist, across the valley, a horse neighed, a trumpet call that freed her will.
Rose dropped flat to the ground and rolled over, away from the Lord, rolling and crawling among the legs of the soldiers. They tried to stamp on her, but she scrambled away. They grabbed at her clothes. Something tore. She got free and stood up to run out into the clear light, where the bridge was her escape and the luminous grey horse was poised on the rock above.
As she went to the ledge above him to climb on to his back, he turned his head to her. In his full grey eye, she saw herself shining too, her face and hair edged with light.
The Lord and the soldiers were like an evil dream. With the horse, she was free and safe. She wished that his flight would go on for ever, soaring through light and darkness, in and out of day and night, as they circled the universe.
But the sky was dark and stayed dark, as the dizzying descent began. It was night time. No stars. Just a hint of colour above the roofs, which showed it was nearing the end of night.
‘And the blooming day has to come,’ Rose was saying to herself in a monotonous drone, as she trudged up the street. ‘Day after day after rotten working day. I hate it, I hate it.’
She was wearing a scarf round her head like a turban, and a skimpy coat too short in the sleeves. Fagged out before she even started work, she reached a group of dark buildings, with slits of light showing at the edge of window shades. It looked like the hospital, although much smaller than the one Rose knew.
As she went in at the staff entrance, a man in porter’s overalls was raising some of the blinds.
‘Damn blackout,’ he grumbled. ‘What’s the point? Hitler’s bombers aren’t never going to bother with this dead-and-alive town.’
‘It’s in case of enemy invasion.’ Rose, or rather the young woman who Rose was, told him. She read the papers. She followed the course of the war. She liked to tell people facts.
‘We all know that, Ruby. Clock in and get up to the ward, or Sister Maddox will have your liver.’
Ruby took a card from a rack and dropped it into a slot above a clock to stamp on it the time she came in.
She hung up her coat and put on a grubby pink overall from yesterday, and trudged up three flight of stairs, pulling her tired body up by the rail, because ward maids weren’t allowed to use the lift.
The night nurses were still on duty, their aprons limp and stained after taking care of twenty children and babies all night. They were scuttling round like weary chickens, trying to get all their jobs done.
‘Hurry,’ they told Ruby. ‘Clear the sink in the kitchen. Dust Sister’s office. Start the sweeping. She’ll, be here before you know it.’
Ruby did the washing up and cleared the clutter in the kitchen. It was wicked how much mess nurses could make. She flicked a duster over Sister’s tidy office, and pulled from behind a pile of ledgers the picture of Sister’s poor little nephew in his owlish spectacles, who Ruby understood had died on this very ward about ten years ago. She put it on the desk, where it should be.
‘Get a move on, Rube.’ Staff Nurse Bates stuck her head round the door, morning-fresh in a clean starched apron, high white collar and stiff cuffs. ‘Sister will raise hell if there’s fluff on the floor when she does rounds.’
Ruby got the broom and started to sweep the long ward, down the middle and under all the cots and beds, stopping to chat with every patient. She tickled the babies and made funny faces for the toddlers and comforted a boy in pain from a broken arm by telling him, ‘Kno
ck off that silly grizzling, Bruce. I hear the footsteps of the avenging angel.’
Sister Maddox entered the ward with her white sugaricing cap high on her head, looking older and greyer, Rose thought, but still upright as an iron rod. Ruby was leaning on her broom at the far end of the ward, telling a funny story to some of the older children.
While Sister sat at the ward desk to take the report from the senior night nurse, a junior nurse came running in from the corridor.
‘Walk, don’t run, nurse.’
‘But Sister, there’s a terrible mess in Room 4. Broken glass again, I’m afraid. It wasn’t my—’
‘Calm down, nurse. What will you do in a real crisis?’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ the nurse finished.
‘Who said it was?’ Sister Maddox said icily. ‘Ruby!’ Having eyes in the back of her head, she knew exactly where Ruby was and what she was doing. ‘Stop wasting your time and mine, and go and clean up Room 4.’
Again? Ruby thought. What’s going on in there? Windows flying open and knocking down flower vases. Trays crashing, medicine spilt. Nurses breaking thermometers.
Sister tweaked her skirt as she went by the desk. ‘I want a clean overall every day.’
‘There’s a war on.’ That was Ruby’s standard remark to standard criticism.
She got the brush and dustpan and went down the corridor, saying to herself, Old cow, old cow, old cow.’
Rose was afraid to go into Room 4. She half expected to find Eric still there. If she had not been in the person of Ruby, it would have been hard for her to open the door, but Ruby barged in with her brush and dustpan and said to the frail child in the bed, ‘Now then, now then, what’s going on here?’
The child didn’t speak. He lay on his back, very flat under the covers, and watched Ruby with large feverish eyes.
‘Just took off by themselves,’ said the nurse who was by the bed. ‘We were making Johnny’s bed, and there was a kind of swishing sound and I looked up and the medicine glasses and bottles were just – just sliding along the shelf as if it was sloping.’
‘Earth tremors,’ Ruby said.
‘Not in England.’
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 9