The Children of Green Knowe Collection

by Lucy M. Boston

  *

  HOLIDAY-MAKERS IN launches were venturing out again. The river bank was thick with people carrying picnic baskets and wireless sets. The children decided to go to the millpool and from there to explore a mere crack of a waterway that could only float a boat when the water was high. They found the punt cumbersome to manage, but it had the advantage that one could lie down in it to sunbathe, or sit facing one another to talk and eat, and move freely fore and aft.

  The little tributary seeped between an avenue of bulrushes, whose handsome chocolate maces bowed to them as the ripple that the punt pushed before it reached their stalks and set them in motion. Ping said he felt like a mandarin approaching his palace. But it was not a palace that they came upon, but a second and totally secluded pool on whose circumference three little weirs tinkled like musical boxes. Their waters lost themselves in the bulrushes which quickly hushed them, leaving the central expanse still.

  The delighted children stopped paddling and every crease faded off the surface. The punt lay as if on a mirror which itself lay in empty space, for above and beyond the frame of bulrushes they could see nothing at all. There were white clouds above them and white clouds below, floating in a complete orb of hyacinth blue. When the swallows dipped, they disputed each fly with the swallow that came up to meet them from below. The flies themselves in alighting on the surface met foot to foot with their doubles. Even an ice-cream carton alone in the blue space had a twin soul leaning towards it with the same enticing words in pink written upside down. And all the doubles were mysterious, both more shadowy and more brilliant than the originals because of an azure varnish that alone distinguished them. Ping lay over the end of the punt with his arms in the water up to the elbow and considered the black and golden Ping that considered him. Ida was twiddling above the surface with her fingers as if they were mosquito legs, to watch the precision with which the other fingers came to touch them. Oskar was standing, tall and sunburnt, and the other Oskar stuck down into the water exact and beautiful.

  ‘It makes me wonder which is you,’ said Ida.

  ‘This one and I are sharing arms,’ said Ping. ‘He’s got me up to the elbow and I’ve got him, like Siamese twins.’

  Oskar said: ‘It’s only if we stay above the water that there are two. If I were to dive in I should slip right inside him and there would only be one. Doesn’t that prove that the one underneath is the real one, and I’m only a sort of water ghost? I’m going to try.’

  He neatly dived in, and Ida saw the two Oskars meet and fuse till there was only one swimming away underwater. She was surprised how wretched she felt. ‘I wish he would come up again,’ she said looking anxiously all round. Oskar’s head bobbed up some distance away.

  ‘There he is,’ said Ping. ‘Unless it’s only a water ghost coming up to climb in the punt with us.’

  ‘Let’s all be water ghosts then, in case,’ said Ida, and in they flashed.

  When after struggling up over the side with elbows bent up like grasshoppers’ legs, they were all in the punt again and getting their breath, Oskar said: ‘I was right, you see. That was the real one.’

  ‘Which one are you now, then?’

  ‘I still feel the real one.’

  ‘Then what’s the one that’s in the water now, underneath you?’

  ‘Oh, I expect that’s just the one that thought he was me.’

  ‘We shall get horribly mixed up,’ said Ida, diving in again. When she came up, she turned on her back and floated among the reflected clouds. The sun beat on her eyelids which looked to her crimson like pieces of stained glass.

  They never had a more delicious day. There was no sound except the splash of their dives and the drip off their hair and elbows as they sat in the punt, and their own happy nonsense. The pool was a world as much their own as their most private thoughts. Ida’s nicest dreams for a long time afterwards were ringed with a palisade of swinging bulrushes.

  Towards the end of the afternoon she saw Oskar, who had gone exploring, standing among the bulrushes with something in his arms. ‘Bring the punt,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got something here I don’t want to drop.’ Ida paddled across to him and he climbed in with his treasure. ‘I found it bedded in the rushes.’ He was hugging a green glass bottle. It was thick and balloon-shaped with a long neck and a rim at the mouth. It had a cork tied with wire and covered with sealing wax. It was not heavy enough to be full, but it had something inside.

  ‘It was bedded in the rushes and all grown over. I trod on it by mistake and it went right down in the mud. I expect it came down once in a flood and was left in the rushes when the water went down. Isn’t it a splendid shape.’ Nobody had a corkscrew to open it. They must wait till they got home.

  As they approached Green Knowe, they saw crowds of people stopping to look over the garden wall with amused curiosity. The drive was full of cars belonging to the archaeologists attending Dr Biggin’s meeting, which was taking place indoors behind wide open windows. Miss Sybilla Bun was standing outside with an expression of deep but muddled distress, lacing her fingers into her beads as if trying to tell half a dozen rosaries at once. She was eavesdropping, if it can be called that when people have forgotten everything but their desire to make themselves heard. For the meeting was in an uproar. The sounds that came across the garden were surprising in the extreme, as if only the most preposterous voices could force their way out from the angry buzz inside.

  Ida, Oskar and Ping were less squeamish than Miss Sybilla. They dropped their picnic baskets and ran to the open windows to satisfy their curiosity.

  Nearly all the guests were standing up, very red in the face. The chairman was shouting: ‘Order! Order!’ and banging the table with one hand while with the other he pushed his white hair on end, leaving his spectacles mislaid and useless on top. Some members were shouting at him, some at each other, some simply into the air which was already so full of noise it couldn’t absorb any more. ‘I protest!’ ‘Shame!’ ‘Sit down!’ ‘Outrage to the dignity of …’ ‘Impudent fake!’ ‘A plastic advertisement for the forthcoming Dental Conference!’ ‘All the more shocking because of the previous honourable record …’ ‘An insult to our revered chairman.’ One gentleman lifting his hand in a gesture of deep shock, accidentally knocked off the pincenez of another, and for a moment or two they snarled at each other like a couple of fox-terriers. Another crumpling his sheaf of papers into a ball hurled it down in front of the chairman, shouting: ‘I resign!’ and elbowed his way out of the room.

  All this time Dr Maud Biggin stood her ground and continued to make herself heard when she could. ‘This most startling piece of evidence … bewildering and stimulating lines of thought … no time as yet to submit laboratory tests … The necessity of an immediate charter to explore the gravel fields … probable proof on our own doorstep … duty of facing up to truth however unlikely …’ and so on. She was sorrowful but undaunted, and perfectly even-tempered under abuse. When however somebody pushed up opposite her and bawled: ‘I accuse Dr Maud Biggin of fraud,’ she replied almost casually: ‘You’re a silly old fool!’ and sat down.

  The three children applauded vigorously from the window-sill. The Committee appeared to notice them for the first time and even to see themselves as others saw them. The noise died down while the Chairman announced sternly that the meeting was adjourned indefinitely. He then made his way out, stopping to apologize to Dr Biggin for his inability to keep order. ‘Scientific passion ran very high, dear lady, very high indeed.’ The others put themselves and their papers in order and followed him out. Some marched past their hostess with a harsh inclination of the head, some shook hands and apologized for ‘bad behaviour in some quarters’ as if their own had been any better. Old Harry put a wax-white hand on her shoulder and after moving his thin wolfish lips in and out, said:

  ‘I would like it, Maud. I would like it very much. But it won’t do. Pity. It’s just a little ahead of the evidence.’

  ‘Evidence! This is the evi
dence,’ she retorted, angry at last, shaking Terak’s tooth under his nose. ‘It’s a giant’s tooth. All we need now is to find the gravel bed that it came out of and fix the date. Admittedly I don’t understand its almost perfect preservation, but analysis of the site will perhaps explain that.’

  Old Harry shook his head and patted her shoulder again. ‘A pity, Maud. A great pity. But you took it very well.’

  Dr Maud turned to the three children who were looking on all this time with profound sympathy and indignation. She winked at them.

  ‘Ever heard the proverb: “There’s none so blind as those that won’t see”? Anyway, I called one of them a silly old fool, didn’t I? There’s no pleasure like letting rip.’

  Meanwhile the departing guests, ashamed of their behaviour to one hostess, were thanking Miss Sybilla with extra warmth for her kindness and the most delicious luncheon. Really exquisite. They smiled, ‘we shall never forget it’. So Miss Sybilla came in and said: ‘There! After all, Maud, it went off very well, I think. I think they all enjoyed it. Perhaps just a little indigestion in the afternoon. The lobster was very rich. But it passed off.’

  *

  THE GREEN BOTTLE was taken upstairs to be opened in private.

  ‘It has been thrown out of a ship in the middle of the ocean, I expect,’ said Ida, ‘with a farewell message inside from the last survivor. But I can’t think how it got here. The tide couldn’t bring it up so far from the coast.’

  ‘Perhaps it could sail upstream before a strong east wind.’

  ‘It would have to go through hundreds of locks.’ Ida jerked the word ‘locks’ very loud, because at that moment the cork came free. ‘It is a message. I knew it would be.’ She pulled out a roll of parchment, kneeling on the floor to spread it out. It had been rolled up so long that it shot back like a roller blind. It took all three of them to hold it flat. It was closely written in a difficult handwriting. The paper was headed with an ink drawing and a title. The picture showed the silhouette of a tall house in a clearing among big trees. A full moon appeared to rest on the point of the roof. The title read: ‘The Island of the Throning Moon’.

  They all read it aloud with different degrees of excitement and disbelief in their voices.

  ‘He was marooned on an island,’ said Ida. But Ping pointed with his slim finger.

  ‘I think that house is this house.’ And so it could have been.

  After a gasping moment Ida’s brain began to work again.

  ‘One of these islands round here must be called the Island of the Throning Moon. And it must be somewhere opposite this house so that when the moon is full it looks like that, from there.’

  ‘We’ll have to go by moonlight, then,’ said Oskar.

  ‘A Yellow Chinese moon, like a lantern,’ said Ping lovingly.

  ‘Now let’s try to read what it says.’

  *

  ‘THIS IS THE CONFESSION of Piers Madeley Vicar of the Parish of Penny Sokey, written in the year of Our Lord 1647. It has been my Misfortune to undergo an Experience so far outside the Logic that should rule civilized Thought, that the whole Fabric of my Mind is suffering Strain therefrom. Inasmuch as I cannot disburthen myself of this Matter to any living Soul, neither to my Lord Bishop nor to any of my Parishioners learned or simple, for fear that they, being unable to believe me, should impute to me either Witchcraft or a Lunatic humour, Yet because of the Need that afflicts me to confide to some Human Being concerning that which I have seen, and been present at, I have devised to set it down in writing enclosed in a Bottle, entrusting it to the fearful Floods that now overwhelm the Land, that they may carry my Confession away from here, and haply after many Days it may come into his Hands who will give it Credence. And lest it fall into the Hands of ignorant or malicious Persons, during my Lifetime (which if such Trails continue cannot be long) I have writ it in Latin. Of which, though the Language may be faulty, for I have ever found Latin a difficult Tongue, being but an indifferent Scholar, yet every Word is true. And this I swear before the Almighty’s awful Throne.’

  ‘Oh, Blow!’ said Ida. ‘All that and we can’t read it.’

  ‘We can go and find out,’ said Ping in his little remote voice.

  ‘It’s obviously something pretty awful.’

  ‘Demons,’ Ping smiled deliciously, ‘by Moonlight.’

  Ida was still thinking aloud. ‘Flying Horse Island is exactly opposite here. Surely he can’t have been so frightened by them. I know they aren’t supposed to be here, but wouldn’t anybody think it a lovely secret to have? There’s an island beyond that. Perhaps we could see the house from there. We will have to go anyway. The moon will be full tomorrow. We will watch what time it rises tonight, and tomorrow it will be forty minutes later.’

  The next day, very early in the morning, when the moon was setting and queer enough for anything, they set off for the island lying north of Flying Horse, to find out whether Green Knowe could be seen from there. To their surprise it could not. It sank back into a belt of trees among which even the yews could not be distinguished. It was hard to believe that a house, which, when you were near it, cut into the sky so proudly and dominated the surroundings with the assurance of its stone-built corners, could from half a mile away efface itself completely. The children looked for it in vain.

  ‘We are on the wrong track,’ said Ida. ‘If we can’t see it by daylight we certainly couldn’t at night. But just in case the drawing is of Green Knowe, we will come out tonight and watch to see if the moon really does pass exactly over the gable point. Perhaps it doesn’t at all. I can’t imagine fearful things happening near Green Knowe. I know it is very old, but it feels like a refuge, something to be trusted.’

  ‘Green Knowe hasn’t been there always,’ said Oskar. ‘Perhaps whatever frightened poor Piers Madeley was older than the house. Something so old that it didn’t make sense, like the worst things in dreams.’

  They calculated that the moon should rise at eleven and might be over the house by midnight. There was a light in Maud Biggin’s room when the children crept out. ‘She’s still thinking about the tooth. She won’t hear us.’

  Outside, had there been street lights or headlights you would have thought it was dark. There were massed shadows on the earth, but the sky was aware of the moon just under the horizon, and was catching a reflection of its light and relaying it to the river. Seen from the punt, the world was a symmetrical but unfamiliar pattern of bulky blacknesses jutting on to quicksilver. The daylight line between reality and reflection was gone. All the shapes were equally black, equally dense, and hung like clouds whose position in space is unknown, so that it was only if the punt passed through it, instead of bumping on it, that a reflected shadow could be known as such. The water, that is, as much of its surface as could be seen, wound among looming masses which at one moment, if one put out a hand to ward them off, were found not to be there, at another would be lowering, smothering and catching on one’s hair. The course of the river that they thought they knew so well was as mysterious as a foreign language. They had to keep touching the surface with their paddles to reassure themselves that it was there, that they were on it, that it was the river they knew.

  When at last the moon, heralded by a coppery haze, appeared above the flat earth and rolled behind the cottages like an immense orange beach ball, the enchantment was complete. Moonlight alone was a breathtaking adventure. The Amazon could not have bettered it.

  At its first coming the moon seemed almost to bounce up, its movements could be watched. But once properly in the sky it hung like time. The children were so much under its spell that anything which might happen in its wild and ancient light could only seem in keeping. They were afraid only of missing the magic moment when the moon should sit throning on the point of their bedroom roof. They paddled up and down the home stretch, passing repeatedly.

  ‘Of course!’ said Ida suddenly. ‘Green Knowe itself is on an island! It happens here.’

  They moored the punt in their
boathouse, and stole back hesitantly on to the lawns, for once hand in hand. There was no denying that it looked very strange. When the sun is in the sky every eye turns away to escape the blaze, but the moon compels sight and thought to follow its course up towards the zenith, with the result that by contrast the height of trees and buildings seems dwarfed. Green Knowe seemed smaller, but at the same time charged with awe. It had changed its friendly old fairy-tale quality for something far older and terrifyingly different. The house drew and held their attention so that the transformation of the moonlight-flattened garden went unnoticed. The bone-white walls were streaked with shadow patterns of leaves that were rhythmic and interlacing like patterns left by the ebb tide on sands. It had a curious look of wickerwork, which the rippling unevenness of the roof repeated. By daylight Green Knowe looked planted on the earth deliberately for all time, but now the glimmering outline before them looked as if it grew out of the earth, lightly springing up. No windows showed, but the house had a kind of dim glow. If Ida allowed herself to think of the walls as woven of rushes, instead of stone-built three feet thick, then the hollow interior was so much the bigger, and having no upper floors must be imagined, by the marvel of its being constructed at all, as a sort of cathedral.

  ‘Doesn’t it look queer,’ said Ping. ‘Almost as if the moon shone through it!’

  ‘It’s built of rushes,’ said Oskar as though that were not a matter for disbelief.

  The moon was going up like a kite. She had cleared the trees and was moving above the slant of the roof, just short of the finial. A drift of silky cloud was moving along to meet her ascent. The children approached the apex of the shadow of the building where it lay across the ground. Quite suddenly the cold brilliance above and the darkness into which they were walking filled them with a sense of fear as limitless as the night. They all had the same thought – while their eyes had been mesmerized by the moon they had forgotten to watch out. In that moment they became aware of a figure just in front of them, standing immobile at the point of the shadow and gazing up at the point of the house as they themselves had done a second before. The dark form was tall and roughly cloaked. It seemed to have a stag’s head with antlers, and long naked human legs. The children dropped to the ground and backed into the nearest clump of bushes, from which they looked out like foxes. In the unnatural silence they could hear each other’s teeth chattering. It sounded loud enough to give them away but they could not control it. It grew, as if in a nightmare the volume had been turned up. It seemed to shake the shadows and fill the open spaces, to materialize in figures that had not been there and now were. They grew out of the milky darkness and showed as silhouettes with deer’s horns, with skins flapping over their shoulders as they moved. Each carried a spear which he shook high as he leaped repeatedly in salute to the moon, a wild homage which took place in absolute silence except for the unexplained rattling which increased as the leaping grew more furious. It had grown out of the chattering of their own teeth but was now something quite outside themselves and very threatening. Meanwhile the leader, wearing the stag’s antlers, remained motionless like an inspired sorcerer proud with power.