Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  He had started off on what was evidently a favourite subject, so Rose said goodbye and disappeared.

  ‘Excuse me.’ A policeman stood in the doorway of a shop she passed, as she was exploring in a rough square that would bring her back to the station in time for the bus home. ‘I’m looking for a friend who lives in a – in a sort of abandoned kind of street. Are there any places like that round here?’

  ‘Search me,’ the policeman said. ‘I’m new here. Just moved down from the city.’

  ‘It’s near a high railway wall.’ He looked at her as if she were talking an unknown language. ‘With a tunnel under the line?’

  He shook his head. The lack of an embankment wall was obvious to her anyway. From what she could see, the railway lines ran through a cutting at the end of some of the short neat streets she had looked at.

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘Are you lost?’ He saw disappointment in her face, and stepped forward, more interested.

  ‘Me? Oh no.’ She didn’t want him to question her. ‘I’m going to the bus.’

  The door of the record shop opened on a burst of rock music as two customers came out. When the door closed and shut off the music, another sound drifted through Rose’s head, the haunting sound of the crying child. She walked quickly away down the hill to the station.

  Gloria, one of the extra maids who came in the summer and at weekends, had brought her two-year-old grandson today, because her daughter was working. He sat at the kitchen table, fingering grubby balls of dough while Gloria rolled pastry for the fruit pies. He was the same age as little Davey Morgan, and he too had a runny nose and a cough that sounded like a bagful of rusty nails, as only a toddler’s cough can.

  Obsessed with following the clues of the crying child and the Morgan family, and terribly anxious about Davey, Rose decided to conduct an experiment to try to reassure herself that all toddlers with colds cried the same way, and that Davey’s crying didn’t mean danger.

  ‘Can I take Barry outside?’ she asked Gloria.

  ‘Help yourself. Heaven knows he needs the air, with that wicked chest of his. My daughter keeps him cooped up indoors too much, if you ask me.’

  ‘Come on then.’ Rose lifted Barry down and he followed her trustingly, not knowing what he was in for. She took him out to the back lawn, where Ben was practising his putting shots on the clock golf circle.

  ‘Ben.’ She interrupted his concentration on an easy shot into the hole from the four o’clock marker. ‘I need to try something.’

  ‘What?’ He missed the hole, and looked up.

  ‘Well –’ the sham casual voice again – ‘we’re doing this play at school, you see, and I’m sort of the noises off – you know – coconuts for horse’s hoofs, ringing the church bells, going “rhubarb, rhubarb”, to sound like an angry crowd at the gates, making the noise of a baby crying.’

  ‘Sounds like a star part.’

  ‘It’s fun, but I’m not quite sure about the baby. It’s supposed to be about Barry’s age, and it’s frightened.’ She did not look at him when she was inventing. ‘The mother – that’s my friend Hazel in a long black skirt of Miss Hennessy’s – is just going to betray her country to the enemy, but she hears her baby crying because the police are breaking in, and she rushes out of the room, falling over the skirt, good old Hazel, and the police rush in and capture the spy.’

  Ben half closed his eyes and looked at her tolerantly, as he did when his mother was babbling.

  ‘So you can see, the baby’s very important. I’ve got to get it right. Gloria’s got the radio turned up, so let’s frighten poor Barry and see what he sounds like.’

  ‘Poor little kid.’

  ‘He won’t mind. Gloria says he cries half the time anyway, just for the exercise of it, and I’ve got some sweets in my pocket. I’ll get his attention, and you come up behind and go “Boo”.’

  ‘It was your idea,’ Ben said. ‘You do it.’

  He knocked the ball neatly into the hole, and Barry plunged forward on to his knees to pick it out.

  ‘Boo!’ Rose cried behind him, and instantly wished she hadn’t. He sat down with his legs stuck out and the golf ball in his hands and bawled in shrill, sharp yelps. Normal two-year-old rage. Nothing at all like Davey Morgan’s hoarse terror. Rose picked him up and hugged him and gave him a sweet. He recovered immediately, and she didn’t think she had damaged him for life, but she felt guilty. That couldn’t be the way messengers were supposed to do the horse’s noble work.

  And sure enough, as she put the child down and he trotted after Ben towards the marker for five o’clock, a rush and a roar and the thunder of galloping hoofs overwhelmed Rose, and she fell flat on her face, while Favour’s wrath swept over her.

  She got up and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ into the air.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Ben said. ‘But when you trip over the ten o’clock marker and pull it out of the ground, just put it back, there’s a good girl.’

  At least she knew. All two-year-old cries of fright were not the same. One experiment did not prove it exactly, and she wasn’t going to do another, even if she knew another toddler, but she knew now that those had been cries of terror in the deserted street, and that Davey was in danger.

  Why? When? In the past or in the future, or now this very minute? What did the horse want her to do about it?

  She wanted to discuss it with Mr Vingo, but he was out on the beach with Elisabeth Engel, looking for shells. He was trying to help her to get her nerves back into shape after her breakdown, and she was trying to help him to get his figure back into shape, although he said it was a lost cause, since he had been this shape ever since he could remember.

  Chapter Six

  Rose was clearing dinner tables with her mother, when Ben came back into the dining-room with that look in his eyes that meant he had a scheme going.

  ‘There’s a full moon,’ he said. ‘Jake and Julie and I are going up to the old castle ruins to look for ghosts. Want to come?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Rose said at once. She would have said yes to anything he suggested, because she had been afraid he was annoyed with her about making the baby cry. But then she looked at the state of the dining-room and had to say, ‘No, I can’t,’ because there was a lot of work still to do.

  ‘Can’t what?’ Her mother came by with a tray full of salt and pepper shakers to be filled.

  ‘I’m trying to get her to go ghost hunting,’ Ben said. ‘Jake and Julie want to go, but Rose doesn’t dare.’

  ‘Of course she dares. You go, Rose. Gloria and I can finish up here. Have fun. See ghosts. You’ve done enough work for one day.’

  Mr Vingo was finishing a late dinner at his corner table. He had come down late, because he had been playing the piano and forgotten the time.

  When Rose and Ben said goodnight to him, he asked Ben through a mouthful of Gloria’s blackberry pie, ‘Do you really think the ruins above the lake are haunted?’

  ‘No, of course not. I don’t believe in that stuff. It’s just a joke really. We want to play at spooks.’

  Ben was laughing, but Mr Vingo, leaning forward over his plate, with blackberry juice on his chin and his eyes turned up to them with the whites showing, looked serious. He swallowed, coughed and said, ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Oh, we will,’ Ben said.

  Rose said nothing, although the warning was directed at her.

  Jake and Julie were a bright and lively young couple, who both worked in offices in the city fifty miles away and used their Wood Briar weekends, they said, to preserve their sanity.

  In the city, they were quite important people who wore business clothes and carried briefcases and went to meetings where large sums of money were discussed, but at Wood Briar they wore terrible old clothes and were like children playing, always looking for new ideas for amusement.

  ‘Mrs Ardis says the man who once lived in the castle was the devil incarnate,’ Julie said in the car, with the brown dog on her lap and her arms round
its neck. ‘She says no one should go up there at night, and she doesn’t expect to see us in bed when she brings in the early morning tea tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rose said. ‘It’s Sunday. She won’t be on duty early. I’ll bring in your tea.’

  ‘She says –’ Julie hugged the dog and shivered, to try to get herself into a spooky mood – ‘that campers who pitch tents up there have been known to come down the hill in the morning with their eyes staring and their hair turned stark white.’

  ‘What did they see?’ Rose asked. She knew a lot about the castle ruins on the hill above the lake. Mr Vingo had told her the truth about the legend of the grey horse Favour who had been a charger of the Lord of the Moor, who lived there. She had even once glimpsed the spirit of the wicked Lord, as well as seeing and hearing his soldiers, in the swirling mists of the secret valley.

  ‘It was too dreadful to tell,’ Julie said, deep and solemn, like Mrs Ardis when she was using her doom voice, and burst into laughter.

  The moon was high, and its light lay on the hill like snow as they left the car and climbed up to the few remaining piles of stones and the solitary jagged wall that was all that was left of the old lookout tower.

  At the top, they sat on the stones and drank in the beauty of the night. Before them, the moor stretched away to the dark masses of the distant hills. Above them, the dark side of the tower wall reached like a finger across the moon, next to it, the broken arch of what had once been a gateway. Below them, a sheet of silver was the lake.

  ‘Why do they call it Noah’s Bowl?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Because it was a valley before the flooded river filled it,’ Rose said.

  ‘This is all much too calm and beautiful. It isn’t spooky at all.’

  To put that right, Jake slipped off the stone wall and disappeared behind some bushes that grew round the base of the tower, so they could wonder where he was and when he was going to pounce on them.

  After some hiding and dodging and chasing each other among the black shadows in the intoxicating moonlight, Julie disappeared too. While Jake was still making ghostly wails from behind the tower wall and his dog was howling, either at him or at the moon, a shrouded figure suddenly appeared under the archway.

  Rose’s heart leaped up into her throat, and she felt the roots of her hair stiffen. But the dog’s howls changed to barking and he leaped joyously at the figure and tore off the sheet that Julie had run back to get from the boot of the car.

  ‘Sorry, Rose.’ Julie shook out her hair and started to wrap herself in the sheet, while the dog still hung on to the end of it. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’ She wound the sheet tightly round herself. ‘Secrets of the mummy’s tomb,’ she intoned. ‘Where is the foul grave robber, Benjamin, who has been foolhardy enough to open my sepulchre and unloose the curse of a thousand ages?’

  ‘Over there. I heard him shouting.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ Ben suddenly dropped to the ground from the jagged top of the tower.

  ‘Jake!’ Rose called. She could still hear the muffled shouts. But Jake continued to wail away among the bushes.

  The shouts came nearer, and there was a clatter of hoofs on stone, and a rush of movement as a white blur sped past Rose through the remains of the arch, kicking up a pebble against her leg. Below her where the valley used to be, she heard a roaring, clamorous sound like a torrent of water. She heard dogs barking in frenzy, the bleating of lambs.

  ‘What’s up, Rosie?’

  She had fallen to her knees on the turf, staring down the hill towards the shining waters of the lake. Beside her, the brown dog was whining, his legs stiff, the hair on his back raised.

  Rose looked back at Ben over her shoulder. ‘Didn’t you see?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Didn’t you see him rush by?’

  ‘See who? Come on, you’ve got to do better than that, for a ghost.’

  ‘But the wind, and the dogs … Couldn’t you hear the water?’

  ‘No takers,’ Ben said, and Julie said comfortably, ‘She’s possessed, poor soul. Come on, Rose, it’s time to go home. There aren’t any ghosts here and the game’s over.’

  Jake whistled to the dog. ‘Stop looking for rabbits.’ He put a hand on the dog, who came out of his trance and cringed, yawning and licking his hand, his eyes confused.

  As Rose got up, she felt a sharp pain on her shin. Putting down a hand, she felt a trickle of blood oozing from a small cut where the pebble flung up by the hoofs had hit her.

  ‘I wish,’ Rose said to Mr Vingo’s broad back, ‘you’d stop playing and listen to me.’

  He lifted his right hand from the treble end of the piano and waved at her. She had to wait until he had finished the ‘March of the Dead Men’s Souls’, and played the last reverberating chord, which rattled the windows and made Rose fear for the stability of the sloping floor. One day, Mr Vingo and his marmalade piano were going to find themselves through the floor and down on to the side verandah, probably still playing.

  He swung round on the stool, and he and Rose both said together, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  She wanted to tell him about the clues and what she had seen and heard at the castle ruins, but he was full of his own news, so she had to let him tell it first.

  ‘Listen, Rose of all Roses.’ His dark protuberant eyes glistened. ‘Your friend R. V. Vingo is going to be famous at last.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to people at the music department of the University, getting some ideas from them to help me with the orchestration of the Ballad. And you know what?’ The intense, dramatic chords of the march had shortened his breath. He panted for a moment before he went on. ‘They’ve asked me to give a performance of the first part of the Ballad of Favour at the University, in front of an audience.’

  ‘How wonderful.’

  ‘A small audience, you understand. My nerves couldn’t stand playing before a large concert hall group. But they want me, Rose, just think of it.’

  He was amazingly modest for such a knowledgeable and talented man. Somehow Rose felt as if she were older than him, and had to say, ‘I’m proud of you,’ as if she were his mother. ‘Now I’ve got something –’

  Before she could tell him her news, feet clattered on the winding stair that corkscrewed up to the turret room, and Abigail knocked on the door. She came in wearing a thick cable-knit sweater and jodhpurs and boots, her lively face flushed with colour from the chilly day.

  ‘Where you been?’ Rose asked, although she had seen her at school this morning.

  ‘Riding over. Crackers is tied to the drainpipe behind the toolshed.’

  Rose looked at her watch. ‘O.K. Dad won’t be home for a bit.’

  ‘Mr Vingo and I are going to practise our duet.’ Abigail had her flute in its case in a satchel on her back. ‘We’re getting better at it. When we’re ready, we’re going to perform for you.’

  ‘We’re going to do better than that,’ Mr Vingo said. ‘We’re going to perform it in front of a small but select audience.’

  ‘At the concert?’ Rose asked in delight.

  ‘Why not? The “Dancing Song of the Valley People” belongs in the first part of the Ballad.’ He told Abigail about the plans for the concert.

  ‘Hey, I’m not good enough yet,’ she said, but Rose could see that she was longing to give it a try.

  ‘Then we shall practise some more.’ Mr Vingo swung back to the piano and shuffled the music about on the stand, then flexed his fingers while Abigail took out her flute and poised it to her lips. Then he beat his foot and counted, ‘One, two, three –’ and they plunged together into the gay music.

  Mr Vingo swayed slightly to the rhythm of the dancing beat. Abigail looked charming in her riding clothes with her hair in a thick pigtail down her back, and her whole face concentrated into the flute. Listening entranced, Rose forgot her impatience at not being able to tell Mr Vingo what had been happening to her, and was filled
with happiness, because she had two friends like these.

  Chapter Seven

  On the night of the concert, Abigail looked even more charming. Her thick chestnut hair was loose round her shoulders, rippling with deep waves where it had been plaited. She wore a sort of peasant dress with a wide low neck and full sleeves.

  She and Rose sat near the front of the small hall, so that she could go up to the piano at the right time. Everyone was there. There were about twenty people from the University. Abigail and her parents, Rose and her parents. Sam, Mollie’s catering friend from Newcome Hollow, who had brought refreshments. From Wood Briar, Elisabeth Engel; two German women who were doing a tour of English cathedrals; a doctor and his wife who were waiting to move into a flat near the hospital; a travelling salesman who always played Draughts with Mr Vingo when he stayed at the hotel.

  There were no programmes, but Elisabeth Engel was to speak the introduction. Mr Vingo had written it for her, and encouraged her to do this for him, as part of the building up of her self-confidence, which was what she needed after her illness.

  As she stepped on to the low stage, the audience grew quiet. She wore a pale dress with a blue pendant, and her ash blonde hair was brushed out long and loose behind her ears and behind her shoulders.

  This was the night for loose hair, it seemed. Rose had washed hers and rinsed it twice, once in beer and once in lemon juice, to make it light and fluffy, but when she saw Elisabeth, she whispered to Abigail, ‘Shall I grow my hair?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Abigail whispered back out of the side of her mouth.

  Behind Rose, Philip Wood sighed and muttered, ‘I hope she’s not going to recite poetry.’

  Rose pretended not to know him.

  Holding the papers, but not looking at them, Elisabeth looked at the audience, blinked her pale lashes several times and started to speak. Only Rose and Abigail saw that her hands were trembling, and that underneath the skirt of her light dress her legs were trembling.