The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  * * *

  My efforts with the Prebrezhenskys were not helped by the fact that only Zoya had anything like reliable English and so had to translate for the father and the girls, nor by the fact that it took me a good hour to realise that there were not, as I briefly imagined, a handful more Prebrezhenskys lurking unseen but that little Rosaliya was Alya, Inessa was Inya, Akilina was Ilya and ‘Nikolai’ was Kolya’s Sunday best name. With all of that established, amid much laughter from the parents and not a few quizzical looks as though they wondered what kind of detective could have trouble with it, it did not take too long to arrive at the conclusion that relations were cordial between this family and the rest of Cooke’s – indeed, unsurprisingly, Zoya and Ma had quickly discovered connections, or putative connections, which suggested that this family was yet another branch of the Cooke dynasty, by marriage anyway.

  As for Topsy, when I mentioned her, they all broke into smiles.

  ‘She is like a daughter,’ said Zoya.

  ‘Gutt, gutt gorrl,’ said Kolya, beaming.

  It was not until I touched on ‘Anastasia’ that any of the smiling faces grew stern.

  ‘What has happened in our beloved Mother Russia, it is not a joke,’ said Zoya. ‘It is not a … a silly for a silly girl to make silly fairy tale.’

  ‘No indeed,’ I agreed. One could almost become as rattled as poor Hugh if one thought about it for any length of time: to imagine our own King and Queen and all the children jostled into a basement at Sandringham as their cousins had been at Ekaterinburg and then … ‘No, indeed,’ I said again.

  ‘My Kolya he feels it in his big heart,’ Zoya went on. ‘He hopes in his heart we can go home again when it is well. We speak only Russian to the little ones, against a day when once more we go back and stay.’

  Kolya nodded and thumped his fist against his chest to drive the point home. I wondered if they had a source of more hopeful news than the rest of us – family letters perhaps, if these were not intercepted and expurgated on the way. Certainly, if Zoya were reading the same newspapers as Hugh over breakfast I could not account for any hope in anyone’s heart. Endless, dreary, muddy gloom and lots of shooting was all there was to see.

  ‘And have you actually ever had it out with Anastasia?’ I asked. ‘About this storytelling of hers.’ Zoya frowned, puzzled. ‘Have you quarrelled, argued?’

  ‘No,’ said Zoya. ‘She is here and we are here. She is new here and we are new here. Just one season. Pa Cooke find us in Glasgow, same time as Ana, and gave us jobs.’

  ‘Very happy,’ said Kolya. ‘No trouble with gorrl Ana.’

  ‘Very commendable of you,’ I said. ‘It must be difficult sometimes.’

  Zoya shrugged.

  ‘We circus,’ said Kolya. ‘Ana circus. So. We stay’ – he opened his arms wide and pointed down with both index fingers – ‘here and here and …’ At this his English gave out and he rumbled a torrent of Russian to his wife.

  ‘We keep out of her way and she keep out of our way and everyone stays happy,’ Zoya said.

  I nodded, thinking that for stoic endurance, Russians took the biscuit.

  ‘To practical matters then,’ I said. ‘Topsy thinks she had the swing two days before her fall, at around seven in the evening. Let’s try to work out when it can have been put here. What time do the little ones go to bed?’

  It did not take long to establish just how endless the opportunities were. The girls were tucked up in bed long before seven but the next day the wagon had lain empty and unlocked for two hours in the morning and another hour in the afternoon while the family practised with the mechanic. Someone might easily have sidled up to it with a bundle of ropes under his arm and the disarray of a pickle cupboard in his mind.

  As to the deed going unwitnessed, I could only too clearly remember the way Zoya had lifted the canvas walling of the back tent and how she and I had slipped under it and into the wagon, flitting across the few feet of shadow like ghosts. Anyone could have done the same and it gave me a cold prickle of dread, as I stood on the steps minutes after having taken my leave, to think of this faceless figure moving unseen around the winter ground, with its knife and its grievances, its threats no less chilling for seeming senseless.

  Something fluttered at the edge of my vision. I turned towards it and felt a cold prickle of dread, indeed, the dread of finding oneself suddenly pitched into intercourse with Albert Wilson, who was coming into the campground around the edge of the pond, almost at a trot, clearly bursting with a matter of some importance.

  ‘My d— Mrs … Dan … Good morning,’ he called to me. ‘This is a surprise. A pleasant surprise, I should say.’ He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. ‘This is a very pleasant surprise, finding you here, Dandy.’

  My eyebrows shot up.

  ‘I’ve come clucking over my chicks, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘My boys. Did you know there were a couple of runaways added to the merry band?’

  ‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ he replied. ‘They’re very welcome. Think nothing of it.’

  I had not considered thinking anything of it, much less asking permission from Albert Wilson, who I always seem to forget is as much a landowner as Hugh. I bristled to think I had given him the chance to forgive an impropriety. Anyway, two more and a tiny shepherds’ hut were neither here nor there.

  ‘You seem in ebullient spirits this morning,’ I said, finding attack the best defence.

  ‘Verily,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to arrange the show. Saturday night, I think. You are invited of course. You and uhhhh … both of you.’ His high spirits, wherever they had sprung from, were not quite sufficient to let him drop Hugh’s name in cold blood and broad daylight.

  ‘This coming Saturday?’ I said. ‘That’s rather earlier than we were expecting. I trust Ina will be coming along?’

  ‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Albert Wilson. ‘She can sit quite separately from the rest of the company after all.’ I had never heard such airiness from him.

  ‘The rest of the company being …?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yourself and your menfolk.’ He inclined his head as though in recognition of the honour he bestowed. ‘Robin, of course, and he might bring a party. He said he might.’ He gave me a smile of beatitude the like of which I had only seen rendered in marble before and, with a slight bow, he left me.

  Robin, indeed! But at least I had an explanation for Wilson’s new air of sublime confidence and for his dragging the show out of quarantine already. Unable to believe his luck, he was willing to risk Ina spending two hours under canvas with heaven only knew what manner of exotic germs, if he could thus snag Laurie and a party of his chums before the strange acquaintance faded away.

  Ina, unsurprisingly, was livid when she telephoned to me again that evening.

  ‘He’s unmovable, Dandy,’ she said, her voice coming down the line with more strength than I had ever heard in it before. ‘And it’s so unlike him.’ I could see that while she chafed under Albert’s excess of care and delighted in outwitting him when she could, she had also grown used to the idea of the caring and had to be flattered in some way. Certainly, now that concern for her welfare had been so ignominiously knocked off its spot she was far from pleased. ‘And, apparently, we have a horde of hangers-on coming for dinner. He was quite adamant about that.’

  ‘Albert?’

  ‘Well, Lord Robin, really, but with Albert behind him all the way. So I shall have that to endure too. And after how rude he was last time.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was insufferable but I rather got the impression that you had made up your mind about him well before that, Ina. Could you not simply tell your husband whatever it is that makes you dislike the man so? Would not that nip this nonsense in the bud?’ There was a long silence on the line.

  ‘I’d rather not think about it,’ she said at last. ‘I shouldn’t have to. And I shouldn’t have to have a houseful of strangers come to stare and titter either.’

  I fel
t a sharp retort, referencing the Queen of Sheba, rise to my lips but I managed to swallow it. Albert Wilson, with all his pandering and fuss, really had created a monster. Nanny was right, and I wondered why it had never struck me over the years before now.

  The Cookes and what others of the circus I had a chance to speak to thought not much more of the sudden request for a show.

  ‘It had just better not be the thin end of the wedge,’ Pa Cooke said. ‘A winter standing, Mr Wilson told us, a chance to rest up, make our repairs and get the new acts ready for spring.’

  Bill Wolf, who was there at the time taking a glass of beer in the Cookes’ wagon, thumped his fist against his knee in agreement.

  ‘And I’ve got my costume all unpicked ready for making up again,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to wear for my strongman run-in, and my trumpet’s in fifteen bits for cleaning. I thought I had a week yet.’

  ‘But there, he always told us there’d be a show, Pa,’ said his wife. ‘We knew that wurr part of the bargain.’

  ‘Aye, one show. One show. For his missus, and not till Hogmanay most likely. Now here we are not even Christmas and there’s a party coming. And Topsy’s hands could do with more of a rest. If this is him starting to take a lend of me, now he’s got me trapped here, he can think again.’

  ‘And what would we be doing else?’ said Ma. She turned to me. ‘Do you know, my beauty, even Hengler’s an’t doing the whole season this winter, after last year nearly broke them.’

  ‘It’s them damned picture shows,’ said Bill Wolf.

  ‘I mind when Moss’s Christmas Varieties was the highlight of the whole year,’ said Pa. ‘Even bigger than the summer tenting.’

  ‘You’re going back-aways there, Tam,’ said his wife. ‘Them days is gone. Let’s make what we’ve got all it can be, eh? Let’s go out with a bang.’

  ‘We’re not going out,’ said Pa Cooke fiercely. ‘It’s bad luck even to talk that way.’ Mrs Cooke looked uncomfortable but said nothing.

  In fact, the only voices raised in hurrahs at the news were Donald’s and Teddy’s, for the ring boys were off on loan to Newsome’s in Edinburgh for the Christmas season, Newsome’s being one outfit still clinging to the old ways by its fingernails, and so the tent staff were short-handed.

  ‘We’re to wear their uniforms,’ Teddy regaled me. ‘Well, their coats because the trousers are rather short – perhaps Nanny might run something up instead? – and we’re to do the ring fence. Andrew and Tiny are teaching us.’

  ‘Mr Truman and Mr Merryman,’ I said. ‘And what are you to do with the ring fence?’

  ‘Take the bit out to let the animals run in,’ said Donald, ‘and then put it back in sharpish so’s they don’t run out again.’

  ‘Don’t say sharpish,’ I said. ‘And don’t say so’s. And how on earth can you manhandle great blocks of wood?’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ said Teddy rolling his eyes. ‘It’s hollow ply. Even Inya P. can throw it over her shoulder.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell Daddy,’ I said, in desperation. ‘At least not yet. Until I’ve had a chance to look at these coats and check them for …’ I coughed diplomatically. If I said the word to them they would say it to someone at Cooke’s and there would be an end to cosy cups of tea in the living wagons.

  ‘He won’t stop us,’ said Donald. ‘He’s all for our circus adventure. You’re the old stick-in-the-mud this time, Ma.’

  I was less sure. Roughing it in a shepherds’ hut in winter might count as building character in Hugh’s book but cavorting around the ring in borrowed coats in front of society people was quite another thing; I could not guess which way Hugh would land on that question.

  ‘Don’t call me Ma,’ was all I said.

  8

  How strange it seemed that while Pa Cooke feared exploitation at the hands of his landlord, while Bill Wolf fretted over the disarray of wardrobe and wind section, while Ina Wilson resented the deluge of unwanted guests, almost no one except me suffered any foreboding from what I thought to be the obvious quarter: almost no one in Cooke’s Circus seemed at all perturbed about the prospect that the saboteur might take a hand in the show. The only other worried face was Anastasia’s.

  ‘Oh, any excuse not to work,’ said Pa Cooke, as Ana stood in front of him with her hands on her hips and her feet planted, staring him down. ‘Topsy’s the one should worry and there’s not a peep out of her.’

  ‘Now, Tam,’ said his wife. ‘That’s not fair. Ana’s a fine hard worker and you know it.’

  ‘Never heard the like,’ said Pa. ‘Not going on? I’ve gone on with broken limbs, ’flu so bad you could fry an egg on me. You’re in the spec and you’re doing one spot, my lass, and even at that you’re short, so less of the nonsense from you.’

  Ana smiled at that; a strange curling smile which did not quite reach her eyes and which made Pa Cooke shift in his seat.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I suppose it would be difficult to have a spectacular without me. I shall make your show for you – again.’ She turned on her heel and, with a last look over her shoulder, sauntered away leaving Pa spluttering.

  ‘You’ll do what you’re bid,’ he shouted to her retreating back. ‘The spec’s about all of us, not just you.’

  What he said about Topsy was true enough. She was a little hesitant about the state of her hands, but of fearfulness there was not a whisper.

  ‘We’ve checked everything thoroughly now,’ said Andrew Merryman, when I asked if he could account for it. ‘And no one has been here to make any more mischief. We’ve all been keeping an eye out for “unsavoury characters hanging around”.’ There was a faint laugh in his voice. ‘Makes a ch-change,’ he explained, ‘from shopkeepers and village bobbies keeping an eye on us.’

  ‘Do they really?’ I said. My short sojourn with the circus folk had already rendered them ordinary in my eyes and I could not imagine it, could barely remember that first impression: the smoking child, the giant and the bear.

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I can sometimes face them down with my best Old Harrovian’ – as he spoke, the circus fell away from his voice and a haughty, icy drawl replaced it – ‘but I get t-t-t—’ He flashed his eyes furiously and pointed to his mouth.

  ‘Tongue-tied?’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, letting all of his breath go in a rush. I could not decide whether, like Tiny, he was teasing me. He had not seemed sufficiently at ease with himself to do such a thing but perhaps he was perfectly at ease with himself and now getting that way with me too. I gave him the same stern, governess-ish look that I used on his friend and returned to business.

  ‘And are you keeping your things under lock and key?’ I asked. ‘Are you keeping all your ropes and poles and whatnot close by you?’

  ‘No need,’ said Andrew. ‘No one in the circus would ever tamper with another man’s props.’

  There it was again, the wilful, blinkered and infuriating refusal to look at the plain facts and call them by their name. I heard the same thing from Topsy and Ma. No one circus would do such a thing; no one circus would even dream of it.

  ‘But it happened, Mrs Cooke,’ I said when I could not listen to it in silence any longer. ‘The rope, the swing, the flour, the balloons and the whip. You told me Ana did it.’

  ‘I said I was wrong there, didn’t I?’ she replied. ‘She’d never have swapped that rope like that. She couldn’t have. So then the whip wun’t her neither.’

  ‘Well, if no one in the circus can possibly be up to anything, then all these strange happenings have been the work of elves and pixies and I am wasting my time,’ I said, not even trying to hide my exasperation.

  ‘Oh, somebody’s up to something,’ she said. ‘I can feel it in my … well, in my water there, pardon me for mentioning it in your presence. It’s worrying our Ana half to death, the poor maid, and I’m vexed as a hen she won’t talk to you, my beauty, no more than she’ll talk to me. But all them tricks wurr a flatty what come round making troubl
e. Must have been.’

  ‘Somebody’s up to something, but not the very things that have happened?’

  ‘Never, not no way,’ she said.

  ‘And the rope switch was hardly a trick,’ I said. ‘I’d have called that attempted murder.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘That proves it. ‘Nobody cir—’

  I held up my hand; if I heard it again I should scream.

  ‘You know your business, my beauty, but I know mine,’ said Mrs Cooke and she sat back in her chair, folded her arms under her considerable bosom and began nodding, very slowly, as though she would never stop.

  I gave a sigh and left her. All I could say was that I was glad I was not dangling from the rafters, or galloping around on a bare-back pony jumping through hoops. I was glad that Donald and Teddy were signed up for no greater a commission than to lift a section of ring fence up and slot it back into place again, and even at that I told them to stay well back when the horses were passing and not to stand under anything tied to a beam.

  Dinner with the Wilsons before the show was every bit as excruciating as might be expected. Hugh declined to attend and not even the clamour of the boys as they told him in shrill and outraged detail what he was missing could sway him, but Alec was there looking almost as stony as Hugh might have as the rest of the assemblage was introduced to him.

  Gathered in the hall of the castle, where two sumptuous fires of apple wood crackled and flickered in the grates and the shadows of holly branches danced on the plaster walls, were every raffish younger son, every disgraced wife and discarded husband, every overly merry widow which Perthshire and points north could muster. The hall, usually as calm as a chapel, rang with laughter and glittered with jewels – they had all opted for a fair amount of finery this evening, even to go and sit on wooden benches in a tent – and the smell was an ever thickening fug of French scent, hair oil and that new top note at all the parties just then: the smell, unidentifiable at first whiff but unmistakable ever after, of feathers and metal threads warming as the women in the fringed dresses grew hot and raucous, cocktails in hand.