by Babs Horton
She wished now that she’d paid more attention to Miss Naylor’s geography lessons. She did remember a little about Italy though; it was warm and they ate loads of tomatoes, had good singing voices and ice creams as big as your head. Why had Thomas Greswode come all the way from sunny Italy to gloomy old Killivray?
Maybe he had sat right here in the schoolroom at one of these desks, looking out through the windows at the grey skies and dreaming of Italy.
It was so sad if he really had died like the boy Archie Grimble had said, drowned when he was only twelve years old.
When she could escape again she was going to go back to the attic and find out as much as she could about Thomas Greswode. Maybe she’d get an exercise book and write down anything she found out about him and when she met up with Archie Grimble again, if she ever did, she would tell him everything she had learned.
What was it that Nanny Bea had said about Thomas? He was your grandfather’s cousin and he wasn’t a nice boy, not a nice boy at all!
Romilly didn’t care what Nanny Bea said! In the photograph he looked like a nice boy, in fact he looked like a very nice boy indeed. Anyway, if he wasn’t the sort of boy that Nanny Bea would like then Romilly was bound to like him.
Archie Grimble wouldn’t be the sort of boy that Nanny Bea or Papa would like one little bit. A grubby-faced boy with scruffy clothes and hair that looked as if it had been cut with a bread knife. A real, live, rough boy from the Skallies! Romilly hugged herself with excitement.
She had found a friend. Her first ever friend was a funny little boy with round spectacles, enormous blue eyes and a skinny leg in a cage.
Romilly replaced the atlas, closed the desk and looked up in alarm to see Madame Fernaud standing in the doorway watching her.
Romilly blushed and looked down at the desk.
“You are very keen, Romilly,” Madame Fernaud said smiling.
“Not really, I was just looking something up in the atlas.”
“Anything that I may be able to help you with?”
“No, thank you.”
“Tomorrow we shall begin our work together, Romilly, won’t that be good, eh?”
Madame Fernaud suppressed the desire to laugh for she could see from Romilly’s carefully controlled face that she could barely disguise her dislike of her new governess. Madame Fernaud smiled her sweetest smile and thought that she would soon have Romilly Greswode eating out of the palm of her hand and then the fun would start.
Part Two
It began to snow in the Skallies; large, feathery flakes drifted down from a sky the colour of navy chiffon.
Archie Grimble stood alone looking up in wonder at the moon that glittered above the ragged rooftops while all around him a strange white silence fell.
In the candlelit windows of the houses in Bloater Row the tinsel on makeshift Christmas trees glistened. Christmas was almost here and there was a hint of the smell of tangerines and sticky dates in the icy air.
He heard the howl of the wildcats in the yard of the Pilchard Inn and the tinkle of wistful piano notes from Periwinkle House.
In the distance the stable clock of Killivray chimed the hour and an owl called out timidly from the woods. He wondered if the ghost animals were on the move in Killivray House. He imagined Romilly Greswode caged in behind the frosted windows of the old house while the ghost child Thomas Greswode peered in from outside or padded about up in the attics.
He waved up at Cissie Abelson who was looking down from her bedroom window above the Pilchard Inn. She grinned down at him, her face a pale moon; waved a podgy hand and then blew him a puckered kiss.
He’d called for Cissie earlier but Nan said she had found a hidden selection box and stuffed herself stupid. She’d been sick twice and put to bed early.
Archie lingered outside the door of Skibbereen where Mr and Mrs Galvini lived. He closed his eyes, sniffed up the host of glorious smells that drifted out from the house and licked his cracked lips.
The Galvinis’ house breathed out the smells of food.
Ham and sausage; cheese and pastry; marzipan and almonds; oranges and lemons.
It was such a happy house, full of chuckling and laughter, nothing like Bag End where he lived.
A sound startled him and Archie opened his eyes. Mrs Galvini stood wedged in the doorway of Skibbereen, hands clasped across her ample bosom, looking down at Archie.
“I didn’t see you standing there,” Archie muttered.
“I think for a minute you sleeping standing on your feets,” said Mrs Galvini, a wide smile jerking her eyes into twinkling stars.
“I was just thinking.”
“You stops thinking now. Too much thinking boils your brains. Come in, come a in. Mama Mia you must be freezed to death, Archie! It’s enough to freeze them kernackers off the china monkeys. Come see, I have made much food tonight. You must eat some and be full up and warm your bones.”
Archie stamped the snow off his boots and followed Mrs Galvini eagerly into Skibbereen, along the draughty hallway and past the door on the left that led into the front parlour.
Archie was fascinated by the Galvinis’ parlour; it was more like a grotto than a room. In a glass-fronted cabinet there were delicate flowers and tiny animals made from glass of every imaginable colour. On a polished sideboard there were intricate music boxes and fancy ornaments. On the walls there were framed Madonnas of every shape and form. There were fat ones and thin ones, miserable ones, and brazen ones with eye shadow and ruby lipstick.
The parlour in Bag End was brown and dowdy. Two mean-faced greyhounds with rabbits in their mouths guarded the window sill. An ugly king glowered from the front of a mug on a worm-eaten shelf. On one wall there was a picture of a faded pope and a china angel with a busted wing sulked on the mantelpiece. The parlour in Bag End smelled of polish and flypapers. And damp, rising fast.
The Galvinis’ parlour smelled of lemons and lilac and freshly starched antimacassars.
Reluctantly he drew his eyes away from the treasures of the Galvinis’ parlour and followed Mrs Galvini into the warm fragrance of the kitchen.
“Sit down and I gets you something to eat. Feed you up a bit, eh? Not enough of the fat on you to grease a blooming kipper.”
Archie smiled, rubbed the steam from his spectacles and sat down at the big scrubbed table.
“See this house I lives in is called a Skibbereen, eh? From this funny name of place there are starving people who come across the sea many years ago?”
“Ah yes, Skibbereen was in Ireland where they had the potato famine. Ireland is where my mammy was born, but just after the potato famine I think.”
“I says to my Alfredo, our house called after starving-people place but no one ever starve at the Galvinis’ now, eh?”
Archie giggled and looked around him. A kitchen dresser groaned beneath the weight of glass jars stuffed with all kinds of lovely things to eat. Fat red tomatoes and pears the colour of gold. Goooseberries and grapes. Peaches and plums.
Out in the pantry he could see the dark shapes of the smoked hams that hung from hooks and sausages dangling from the ceiling like meaty stalactites.
Mammy said even the woodlice in the Galvinis’ garden were giant-sized and the mice were as big as cats and too fat to get back through the holes in the skirting boards.
“Nearly a Christmas now, little Archie?”
“Only a few days away.”
“What you a want for Christmas?”
He wanted to say that he’d like a policeman to come and cart the porker away to gaol, but he didn’t.
“A book on Sherlock Holmes and a penknife with a tor-toiseshell handle.”
“You don’t want much. I ask that Kelly boy, the ugly one, and he tell me a list as long as a sausage.”
Archie giggled.
“Mrs Galvini, have you ever heard of a place in Italy called Santa Caterina?” he asked innocently.
Mrs Galvini wrinkled up her nose. “Santa Caterina? How you spell this place
, Archie?”
He spelled it out from memory.
Mrs Galvini spun around. “Ah! Not like you say Santa Kate-rina. Iss Santa Caterina!”
There was a trace of tears in her eyes as she spoke. “Santa Caterina. Oh, so beautiful a little place, I been there many times. How you know this word, Archie?”
“I…I looked it up in the dictionary,” he lied and blushed. He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice as he spoke, “Did you live there, Mrs Galvini?”
“No, me I come from Napoli.”
Archie tried to hide his disappointment. “Is Alfredo from Napoli too?”
“No, no, my Alfredo he is from island called Ischia but he has an aunt in Santa Caterina—she’s a, how do you say here, a nun, yes a nun. A holy sister. Now she very old but still got all her own teeth.”
Archie wondered if Alfredo’s aunt would be about the same age as Thomas Greswode would have been if he’d lived.
“I have snapshot of Sister Isabella. Let me find for you while you eating. Una momenta.”
Mrs Galvini opened the door of the oven and lifted out a large plate-sized pastry in the shape of a big yellow sun. Archie stared at it in fascination as Mrs Galvini began to slice it expertly.
“Here for you some Napoli pizza. Eat and make you strong.”
Mrs Galvini left the room and he heard her rummaging about in the parlour and muttering to herself.
Archie ate hungrily, wondering as he did if this Isabella person might have known Thomas Greswode when he was little, in the days before he came to Killivray House.
Mrs Galvini bustled back into the room blowing and beaming, put down an old chocolate box on the table, pulled up a chair and sat down heavily next to Archie.
“Let me find for you. Ah, here we are. See, this is Sister Isabella.”
Archie looked down at a faded brown and white photograph of a young girl smiling cheekily at the camera. She was wearing a long, white party dress and her hair was tied in untidy pigtails.
He looked up at Mrs Galvini with a confused expression on his face.
“This is Isabella when she a little girl. Alfredo’s mama say she very beautiful and always very full of the mischief. One day she wants to join the circus and then one minute she in love and then, boom! All of a sudden she goes off to be a nun. God is calling her, you see. And when the good God calls you must answer him.”
His mammy always said the same, that when God called you must answer him but Archie had made up his mind that he wasn’t going to. If he heard God calling him he was going to hide under the stairs and cover his ears.
“See here is another one, outside the convent where she been many, many years a nun.”
Archie looked down at a photograph of an elderly woman dressed in a nun’s habit standing outside an ancient building with barred windows like a prison.
“How did you meet Alfredo?” Archie asked, changing the subject.
“Me and Alfredo we meet on ferry boat and he making big eyes at me like this.”
She demonstrated a lovesick Alfredo and Archie laughed and blushed at the same time.
“What’s it like, this Santa Caterina?”
“Iss very beautiful.”
“Is it a big place?”
“No, is very small.”
“So would Alfredo know everyone who lived there?”
“Si, si. Alfredo go there for the holidays when he a little boyl Know nearly everybody there then but now it’s a long time since he been there. Sister Isabella, though, she got a mind like the elephanto, she know everything go on in Santa Caterina even though she shut up in the convent.”
Archie sighed, how he’d love to go and talk to this old woman. Try and find out a bit more about Thomas Gasparini Greswode.
“You enjoy my cooking, Archie?”
“Oh, yes, ifs lovely.”
He eyed the pizza hungrily and Mrs Galvini ruffled his hair affectionately then cut him another large slice and pushed it towards him.
“One day, I say to my Alfredo, one day we open a shop or maybe a ristorante like we had in Napoli and we sell lots of Napoli pizza but he says, Lena, it will never catch on, eh. So we still living here in these Skallies,” Mrs Galvini said sadly.
“Don’t you like the Skallies, Mrs Galvini?”
“Ah, si, for me this is home for now; one day when it’s safe maybe I go back to Napoli though. Maybe even go to Santa Caterina again for holiday,” she said in a dreamy voice.
“Isn’t it safe in Napoli?”
“Not for my Alfredo, some bad men there, very bad.”
She motioned someone slitting a throat and Archie watched her with wide eyes.
He wondered how Mr and Mrs Galvini had found their way from Napoli to the Skallies.
He was about to ask her when the front door opened and Alfredo Galvini came hurrying into the house bringing with him a flurry of snow.
“Ah, Lena, I am freezed to the bloody bones. Hey, Archie boy, it’s good to see you.”
“I just telling Archie that in Napoli we have a little ristorantebut bad men make trouble and we have to go.”
Alfredo pulled off his overcoat and muffler then sat down at the table.
“Don’t be telling him all the bad things, Lena, he only a little boy.”
“Little boy maybe but very clever boy, he just asking me all about Santa Caterina. He seen it in a what you call it, dishionary.”
Alfredo Galvini scratched his head and looked long and hard at Archie.
“Not a dictionary exactly, Mr Galvini, an atlas, we have them in school.”
Alfredo leant across and stroked Archie’s cheek. “It’s a good place Santa Caterina, very warm in the summer; you can swim all day if you want So many fish too, you can pull out a fish fresh for your supper from the sea. You would like it there, Archie. Maybe one day you go and see for yourself, eh?”
“I’d like to but I don’t expect I ever will. I don’t suppose I’ll ever even leave the Skallies.”
“When I was little boy, I never think I leave Italia and come all way here,” he said, but there was a wistfulness in his voice that made Archie feel sorry for him.
The Galvinis hadn’t chosen to come to the Skallies, they’d come to escape from the bad men of Napoli. He wondered for the first time ever why his mother had left Ireland behind. His father was English so they must have met after she left and then come to the Skallies together. He knew from some old photographs he’d found in a tin under his mammy’s bed that the house where she had grown up had been big and she’d had her very own pony. And her sister, the one with the whisper of a name, once had a dog called Pickles, who chased chickens and buried his bones in the rose bed. Why would his mammy have left all that behind to come to the Skallies? Was she running away from bad men too? She didn’t need to, he thought sadly, she’d brought one along with her.
“Mr Galvini, do you think that everyone who lives in the Skallies is here because they’re running away from something?”
Mr Galvini sighed and helped himself to a slice of Mrs Galvini’s Napoli pizza. He chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds and then said, “Maybe, Archie, maybe we all running away from something. Some of us knows it and some of us don’t. Somehow we finds this little place up here on the rocks. And for a while we all safe, eh? Then one day maybe we go away as quickly as we come. No one knows what the future is holding for us.”
“Do you think that Benjamin Tregantle was running away from something?” Archie asked.
Mrs Galvini laughed, “No, he was very brave, very brave man. Nothing ever frighten him! If he catch the bad men from Naples he tell them take a jump. Then he go Poof, poof and knock them down flying.”
Archie smiled at the thought of Benjamin fighting off the bad men from Naples.
“Did Benjamin live all his life here in the Skallies?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Mr Galvini said. “I think he live with his papa and mamma in ‘Ogwash ‘Ouse but then he away a long time then come back here to place where
he born when he much older.”
Archie was puzzled. Something was bothering him. Benjamin had left the letter for him in his jacket pocket so did that mean that he knew he was going to die? He couldn’t have, though, because everyone had said it was an accident, hadn’t they? Maybe it wasn’t an accident, maybe Benjamin had been murdered? Maybe Benjamin and Thomas Greswode had both been murdered.
And if that was true then the Skallies wasn’t a safe place to be at all.
“Well, I best be going, Mrs Galvini, Mr Galvini. Thanks a bundle for the food.”
“You welcome here any time, Archie. You come Christmas morning, eh, and I have little surprise for you,” Mrs Galvini said.
He took his leave and closed the kitchen door, pausing outside the parlour for another glimpse at the gaudy treasures inside. He heard Mr Galvini say quietly, “He asking many questions, Lena, be careful what you tells him.”
“He’s just a curious that’s all.”
“It’s not for us to interfere, Lena. We don’t know why his family comes to the Skallies, eh? Mrs Grimble keep herself very private. Never saying anything ‘bout where she come from. Maybe she got something secret she don’t want no one to know, like the rest of us.”
Archie stepped out into the icy night and closed the door to Skibbereen quietly.
The parrot in the Grockles squawked, “Shoot the bloody bastards!”
He wondered if everyone in the Skallies had something to hide. Did Nan? And the quiet Misses Arbuthnot? Even his own mother!
Maybe the porker wasn’t his real father. Maybe his real father was a prince or a rich man. Just a nice one would be okay.
That would be a great secret.
Archie walked towards the hole in the rock and stood looking down on to Skilly Beach. In the window of the Boathouse a candle burned fitfully. He wondered what mad Gwennie was doing in there all alone? She wasn’t a safe person to be around, that was for sure.
He looked up at the enormous moon that sailed above and drew in his breath. It was the sort of moon old Benjamin used to call a Wildcat Moon.