The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  A long silence met his words.

  ‘F-fell off her horse?’ said Andrew Merryman at last. He was still holding Harlequin by the bridle, just outside the entranceway, and both his and the horse’s breath were pluming in the cold.

  ‘And hit her head on the ground,’ said Pa Cooke. ‘It’s like iron, cold snap we’ve had. Even this close in to the tent, it’s frozen solid, see?’ He grasped the handle of his whip like a staff and banged down hard with it, the knock of stiff leather against the stony ground almost ringing out, thrumming into us through the soles of our shoes.

  ‘Even if Ana …’ said Tiny. Pa Cooke swung around to look at him and he faltered. ‘Even if she fell, she’d never let her head hit the ground. She fell out of a handstand last month and just rolled and got up again.’

  Ma Cooke spoke up then. Her voice was low, deadened, painful to listen to, but everyone turned to hear her.

  ‘They’re a pair of jossers, Tam, and the fright’s driven the circus-sense clean out of them there, but Mrs Gilver is right. If nobody saw it happen we need the police. Just to give the maid her due we need to do that much.’

  Slowly, the fire in Pa Cooke’s eye faded and his shoulders drooped.

  ‘Aye, right,’ he said. ‘I know it. I know, I know. But this’ll be the end of Cooke’s Circus. You just see if it’s not.’ Without warning, he rounded on Ma and brandished his whip at her. ‘You and your feelings,’ he said. I took a step back and I was not the only one. Harlequin shied away and Andrew had to grapple with him to bring him to a standstill again. ‘Strangers here, seeing it all. We could have …’ He threw me a disgusted look and pushed his way out into the darkness, shoving Harlequin viciously aside with an elbow.

  ‘Don’t you mind Tam there,’ said Ma Cooke. ‘He’s just upset. Takes it all on himself, does Tam.’ She smiled, rather a sad smile, looked down at Anastasia again and then put her hand to her mouth, her eyes filling.

  ‘Mrs Cooke,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t wait here until the police arrive. It’s bitterly cold already. Everyone, please. Do go back to your wagons and make yourselves comfortable. You’ve all had the most dreadful shock.’

  I expected a fight, at least from some of them, but they nodded glumly one by one and filed out. Charlie was the last to go, heaving himself to his feet and standing staring at Ma and at Anastasia on the ground for a long time before he moved away.

  ‘I’ll wait here with poor Ana,’ said Alec. ‘Until the police come.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Leave that to me, Alec. Perhaps you could go with Mr Cooke. He looks as though he needs some brandy.’

  ‘But I’ll stay too, though,’ said Ma in a tone that brooked no argument. Groaning a little, she sat back down on the ground and took one of Ana’s hands again.

  Out in the tent, the audience had passed beyond being restive and had begun to break up into little groups as though at a party, standing around smoking and sipping from flasks. Ina was back in her seat again, breathing hard, looking feverish, flushed, as though she had guessed there was trouble. I felt a faint fizz as I watched her but then my attention twitched away again as my eye landed on the two forlorn figures huddled in their borrowed coats on the ring fence.

  ‘What’s happened, Mummy?’ said Teddy, reverting to the comfort of childhood. ‘Mr Cooke won’t tell us a thing.’

  I started to sit down, thinking to put my arms around them. That ‘Mummy’ had worked its spell on me. Then I stopped.

  ‘Mr Cooke?’ I said. ‘Has he been round to speak to you?’

  They nodded.

  ‘And what could you tell him?’ I asked them. Clever old Pa; they were the only ones who could have seen what happened here at the back of the ring, behind the horses.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Donald. ‘What’s wrong? Who screamed?’

  ‘Miss … Anastasia has fallen off her pony,’ I said.

  ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, bluntly.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  ‘No,’ I told them. There was no way to keep the news from them for long and perhaps it was best not to fudge it, for I have had occasion to note that the imagination supplies grisly details usually far in excess of reality if allowed to. ‘What did you see? Why did she suddenly rush out of the ring?’

  They looked at one another, under their lashes. Was it a sly look or were they simply bewildered to have their mother fire such questions at them? I knew, in either case, that now was not the moment for a grilling.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told them, and walked over to address the company on the far side of the ring. ‘I’m afraid there has been an accident,’ I said. ‘There is not going to be a show after all.’ Albert Wilson was bustling forward, his face puckered with concern at the wreckage of his party. ‘Ina, my dear,’ I said, before he could reach me, ‘I think it would be best to lead everyone back to the castle.’ It worked; Albert Wilson swung around like a tram at the end of its route and forged back towards his wife. The very thought of her being swept up in a crowd of careless strangers wiped every other consideration clean away from him.

  ‘And perhaps you could telephone to the police station at Blairgowrie?’ I called to his back. He gave me one fearful glance over his shoulder and nodded, but kept going.

  9

  The police, as might be expected given the lateness of the hour, the treacherous icy cold of the night and the miles of twisting road between Blairgowrie town and Benachally, took an age to arrive. By the time the rather creaky old Belsize came rumbling into the clearing, Ma Cooke and I were frozen to our marrow by that slow, creeping chill which only comes from standing about in cheerless surroundings for purposes drear. I have most often felt it when following guns, tramping over wintry moors and standing statue-still pretending to watch Hugh blast away at grouse for hours on end, but the longest, darkest, dullest day of shooting in my memory or imagining could not produce even a fraction of the hopeless cold which engulfed me, engulfed both of us, in the dim corner by the doorway of the tent that dreadful night.

  Of course, it was not only the cold that was the trouble. On the ground between us, although the light was low and the huddled shape quite small so that one should have been able to overlook it lying there, Anastasia seemed to glow and even glitter as though with movement and one had to make efforts, over and over again, to look away. Perhaps there was movement; there must have been – her hair bright and soft in the lamplight might have settled gradually against the ground; certainly from the way her costume winked the sequins must have been shifting somehow although there was no breeze. And there were sounds, which was worst of all. Once, a sigh, unmistakable, and other sounds too, infrequent and faint, but they kept us silent, catching at our breaths and straining to hear any more.

  At each soft terrible sound, each hint of settling movements, impossible, unbearable, Ma Cooke moaned gently to herself and once I heard her whisper, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ almost too quiet to be heard.

  It was my first experience of spending this time – this slow and gradual dying time – with someone who, as Mrs Cooke put it, is leaving; my first lesson that we do leave gradually, the body rather more reluctantly letting go than the soul. I had seen people die before that night, several times in the officers’ convalescent home in the war when it turned out that some young man was not convalescing at all, but was dying of something so swift and inevitable that there was no reason, sometimes no time, to move him. I had even seen violent death before – twice since taking up this new occupation of mine – and it had its horrors, but I had never stood sentinel like this while the coil was left to its slow unwinding.

  No particular wonder, then, that the arrival of the police, far from striking the final note of despondency one might have expected, seemed rather more a welcome relief. Certainly the two large constables and the sharp-eyed sergeant did well to avoid having me fall upon their necks when they lumbered in.

  Inspector Hutchinson did not inspire anything like such conf
idence at first glance. His hair was rather long for a policeman and a kind of defeated grey in colour. His moustache was grey too and drooped down low on either side of his long mouth. Brows high in the middle and low at the ends and heavy pouches under his eyes only added to the impression, and the bluish mottled cheeks hinted not even just at weariness but positively at drink.

  Sergeant McClennan took care of the first formalities. Ma identified herself as Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Sergeant McClennan extracted a full measure of sighing and rubbing out before he had got it down, working off the frustrations of his own pointlessly elaborate name, I thought, which must have given him a lifetime of mishearings and misspellings even in his native land. (I have often wondered why anyone perseveres with the endless MacLellands and McLennans and MacClements, when they are obviously exactly the same thing, appearing distinct only because of the early – and let us face it, not so early – illiteracy of the Highland clans.)

  ‘And this?’ said the sergeant, pointing to Ana with the end of his pencil, once he had got Polina Ilchenko Cooke and Dandelion Dahlia Gilver printed out in neat letters and had got his eyebrows down again.

  ‘Anastasia,’ said Ma.

  ‘Oh aye?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘I can’t tell you her surname, for I never knew it myself,’ Ma went on, ‘but it’ll be with her papers in her wagon there and someone’ll find it for you.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘What my sergeant means is we’ll take care of that, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson rather more diplomatically. He stepped forward and crouched beside Ana, lifting her hair and shining his electric torch into her eyes. I looked away.

  ‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘Just a girl, isn’t she? Twenty? Twenty-five?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been much more, if that even,’ said Ma, and her voice was tremulous. The inspector stood up again.

  ‘Well, how about we away somewhere into the warm and let my lads take over watching her?’ he said gently. ‘I think you could do with a cup of tea, Mrs Cooke, at least. Let’s away and you tell me all about it, eh?’

  In the Cookes’ wagon, over strong, sweet tea laced with whisky, which made me retch and shudder but certainly warmed me, Inspector Hutchinson drew the story of the evening out of Ma, Pa, Alec and me. Sergeant McClennan sat with his notebook in one hand, pencil in the other, looking like nothing so much as a small boy with a net and jar waiting for butterflies to flutter into range, but the inspector’s questions were quite benign.

  ‘Mr Truman, Mr Merryman and a Mr Cooke,’ he said. ‘A relation?’

  ‘My brother,’ said Pa, ‘but you must understand, just because they were behind the doors, that doesn’t mean they saw her. They’d just as easy have been in their wee place, getting propped for the first spot, and Ana – well, she’ll have gone straight through most like. There’s a horse tent by the back doors. Not the proper stalls, they’re down away separate, but a strawed tent where the prads go between spots, and Ana will have trotted Harlequin straight there, straight past the clowns. They’ll not have seen nothing.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll have a word with them anyway, though. Anyone else?’

  ‘I was back there,’ said Ma. ‘And Bill Wolf too. He wun’t in the spec tonight, but he was running on and he was waiting ready. Lally Wolf too, getting little Tommy togged to run on with his pa.’

  ‘And what did you see?’ said the inspector. ‘What can you tell me?’

  Ma Cooke looked at him for a long time before she spoke, and the hesitation was so out of character for her, the slow careful look so unlike her, that I found myself watching her closely. I saw her considering her answer, screwing herself up towards courage and then, at the last chance, with her breath already gathered in to begin speaking, subsiding again, sinking back into her chair, shaking her head a little even.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was in by Zoya’s trunks there, getting the shawls ready for them little maids. Cold as it was, I’d thought to put them round hot bricks and so I was unwinding them again ready for the spec coming off. I din’t see nothing.’

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ said the inspector.

  ‘Heard the clowns come off,’ Ma said.

  ‘Anything else, Mrs Cooke?’

  Once again, Ma Cooke took her time to answer.

  ‘You must understand,’ she said at last, ‘that it was noisy from the ring all this while, see? I can’t be sure, but I think – think, mind – I think Tiny and Andrew went straight to their table and so they wun’t have seen nothing. That right, Pa? They take care of the props, most usually, ’count of Charlie is the boss, see?’

  ‘Boss of the clowns, she means,’ said Pa. ‘I’m the boss of the circus.’

  ‘Well, I beg your pardon, Mrs Cooke,’ said Inspector Hutchinson, ‘but it’s no use telling me what should have happened, according to the rules. I really need to know what you heard. What you actually heard, see?’

  ‘And in’t that what I’m saying?’ said Ma. ‘I heard two of them go to the props table. Two sets of boots on the boards. All I’m telling you there is what two it was, most likely.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘Charlie? I can’t say where he was. I din’t hear him passing and he din’t call out to anyone. Most likely,’ she held up her hand as if to acknowledge the inspector’s objection before he raised it, ‘I wun’t put my hand to a bible on it, you’re right there, but most likely he’d go to the back door and have his smoke.’

  ‘And when you say the back door, you mean the door where she fell?’

  Ma opened her eyes very wide and put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I din’t mean nothing by it. I din’t see him nor hear him. I shun’t of spoke up at all there, really.’

  What was she playing at? I was not fooled for a moment by the hand clapped to the mouth and the look of surprise. She had deliberately dropped Charlie Cooke right in it. I was not alone in being troubled. Pa’s chest was rising and falling rather rapidly, the spangles on his lapels winking in the lamplight, and he chewed on the ends of his moustache as he watched her.

  ‘I’ll start with Mr Cooke then,’ said the inspector. ‘He might be able to clear all of this up and let us away to our beds, eh?’

  ‘He never said a word, Poll,’ said Pa, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘When we were all together with the poor lass. He said not a word.’

  ‘Aye, but still,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘he wurr shaken up bad, wun’t he? He might have been too upset by it all to speak. Mind you,’ she went on, ‘if it wurr me I’d start by asking myself why she come off when she did. I’d start by asking them ring lads and little Sal on the Panatrope what they saw, cos of no one else could see what happened behind them liberty horses, could they?’

  Now it was my turn to catch my lip. What was she doing? She had set the inspector on to Charlie Cooke as surely as pointing her finger and crying ‘J’accuse’ and now my poor boys were to be tossed into the fray too.

  ‘And where might I find those three?’ said the inspector.

  ‘Little Sallie Wolf’s in the second wagon before the pond over the ways there,’ said Ma, ‘and …’ She looked over at me, rather belatedly it seemed to me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, for there was no use trying to avoid it. ‘The ring boys. My sons, as a matter of fact. I’ll show you their wagon, Inspector, and I shall stay while you question them too, if you don’t mind.’ I am not proud to admit that as well as a deal of confusion, shock, a little cold still and more motherly concern than is my usual measure, I was feeling a surge of angry delight that, when one got right down to it, my boys being woken in the night to answer police questions could be laid fairly at Hugh’s door. I was almost looking forward to telling him about it.

  ‘Your sons,’ said the inspector in a carefully blank voice. Sergeant McClennan had looked up from his notebook too. ‘I see. Yes, I had been wondering how you fitted in exactly, Mrs Gilver. Y
our sons, yes, I see.’

  I attempted an explanation as we crossed the ground, Alec hindering rather than helping with his tuppenceworth, and Inspector Hutchinson could hardly be blamed if he formed the opinion that Donald and Teddy were spoiled brats, I was a clinging fusspot, Hugh was indifferent to all three of us, and Alec was so lost to decency that he not only trailed around the countryside after me to dinner parties, married woman or no, but did not trouble to keep away from my impressionably aged sons, who thought of him as a kind of uncle. Actually, the last of these points was not too far from the truth, but it is always a bother to have such people as the inspector cast an eye over one’s perfectly blameless existence and draw their own thrilling conclusions, for the shopkeeper class – being by far the most rigidly proper and as a result the most filthy-minded – do tend to gasp and fan themselves at the very ideas they alone are entertaining. As Grant says about the seamstress in Gilverton village who makes her frocks: shocked to the core, tell me more.

  The touch of Alec’s hand to my arm as we neared the shepherds’ hut was especially unwelcome, then, but when I ignored him he tugged quite urgently and I could see his eyes flash. He jerked his head backwards the way we had come and I turned just in time to see a shape moving along behind the wagons on the far side of the ground. It was a shortish, roundish shape, moving swiftly. At a guess, I should have said it was Ma Cooke and the steps she slipped silently up and the door she eased silently open were Charlie’s.

  ‘Now then, Mrs Gilver,’ said the inspector, stopping at the shepherds’ hut. ‘You had best go in first and wake them. We don’t want them alarmed.’ The alarm, though, was all mine for the little hut was empty, the stove cold, the bedrolls nowhere to be seen.

  At least that should convince the inspector that I was not the clinging type, I thought to myself, but I did feel a growing sense of something or other. Had I even given them a glance as I made my way back to Ana earlier? Had I simply swept past? Was it possible that hours later they were still sitting there on the ring fence as I had told them to? Words cannot express the surge of relief I felt at the sound of a door latch lifting and Zoya’s voice calling gently from the nearest wagon pair.