by Robin Jarvis
'What else?' Edie encouraged.
Miss Celandine drifted to the windows and blew absently upon the ice. ‘I don't think even Ursula knows what they really were,' she breathed. 'But they were with Nirinel long before us. They'd guarded it for simply ages and were filled with wild magic. I used to love them so very dearly. It was they who carried the Loom from the court and when that dreadful day came, when the ogres of the cold destroyed the poor World Tree, it was the handsome great stag who led us through the forest.'
Staring at the branching pattern of frost upon the glass, she hugged herself and looked away.
'What happened to the Loom?' Edie persisted. 'Do you remember?'
A vacant look had settled over Miss Celandine's face and she began chewing the end of one plait. 'Ursula said it was broken,' she mumbled.
'When?'
'Ask Veronica, I can't remember. We never saw it again.'
'Where did Ursula put the pieces? Are they down in the caves?'
The old woman sucked her bottom lip as she considered. 'There was such a commotion...' she began, plundering the vague, crumbled store of her thoughts. 'Veronica was so cross—or was it me? I know we both looked but we didn't find it and Ursula would never tell.'
Lowering her face so that it was close to Edie's, a faint gleam shone in her eyes and, in a confiding whisper, she said, 'If you ask me, I always thought—'
Suddenly, Miss Celandine drew a sharp breath and sealed her lips with a quick, zipping mime.
‘I was told to mend the window,' a man's voice intruded.
Edie whipped around and saw, to her annoyance, Brian Chapman standing in the doorway with his tool kit in his hand and Josh at his side.
'I must go!' Miss Celandine cried, lifting up the skirt of her velvet gown and revealing her hole-ridden petticoats beneath. 'Veronica will claim all the dances if I don't stop her—I must, I must!'
In a sprightly dash, the old woman fled from The Separate Collection, leaving a bellicose Edie Dorkins to glare at the scruffy man.
Brian gave her a clumsy smile. 'I'll put a board across it,' he said, nodding at the window.
Edie watched him as he advanced to the broken pane. 'It's mine, all this,' she told him flatly. 'Not yours.'
'You're welcome to it,' Neil's father answered.
Keeping her eyes upon him, Edie paced across the room, pretending to peer into the cabinets. That man didn't belong here as she did; this was her home.
Sitting on the floor by his father, Joshua Chapman stared at the girl shyly. He longed to run over and play, but she ignored him. Covering his face with his hands, the little boy decided that he would take no notice of her either and rolled backwards, kicking his legs in the air.
Leaning upon an empty wooden crate a short distance away, Edie saw Josh rocking on his back and scrutinised him curiously. The boy sat up again and caught her looking. With a squeal, he darted beneath one of the cabinets and peeped out again. Forgetting herself, Edie laughed and Josh scuttled under another display case, a little closer this time.
Brian Chapman began to hammer a square of wood in place, but the girl was oblivious to him now and ducked down to see his young son go scudding along the floor.
From the room beyond The Egyptian Suite, the faintest of noises began, yet no one in The Separate Collection noticed. Josh was squeaking happily like a mouse under the cabinets.and Edie was now on her knees pretending to be a cat.
With three nails still clenched in his teeth, the caretaker finished the task and surveyed the work critically.
Then he heard it.
The sound had risen to a rhythmic, clicking whirr and even Josh crawled out from beneath the cases to listen.
Leaping to her feet, Edie held her breath as the monotonous, mechanical beat grew ever louder.
'Don't say the heating's playing up,' Brian prayed. ‘I haven't a clue about that old boiler.' Spitting out the unused nails, he picked up his tool kit and strode towards The Egyptian Suite, calling for Josh to follow him. The four-year-old gave Edie one last, playful glance then ran after his father.
But Brian never reached that windowless room.
Even as he approached the entrance to The Egyptian Suite, there came a grunting snarl and the man let the tool kit fall to the ground with a crash.
'God's sake!' he mouthed.
Inside the gloom of The Egyptian Suite a short, squat figure was creeping, a threatening growl gargling in its throat.
'Gogus...' it gibbered. 'Gogus ...Gogus.'
On to one of the sarcophagi the wooden imp leaped—its claws raking the air. The peg-like teeth champed and gnashed in its wide, chattering mouth and, behind it, the long tail switched in agitation. With those large eyes trained upon the caretaker, the creature started to bark ferociously.
Hearing those familiar sounds, Edie ran forward. 'Hello, Gogus!' she cried.
But the imp ignored her and snapped all the more savagely.
'Stop it!' Edie ordered.
At that, the carving clamoured even louder, drumming its claws upon the side of the sarcophagus and bobbing up and down on its bow legs.
'What... what is it?' Brian asked in fearful disbelief.
The sound of the man's voice seemed to incense and enrage the creature even more. Yammering and shrieking, it threw up its arms and then, without warning, it sprang.
Too horrified to cry out, Brian Chapman blundered back as the Gogus leaped into The Separate Collection and pounced upon him. On to the man's chest the stunted terror threw itself, its claws thrashing in a barbarous frenzy of scratching and tearing.
'Dad!' Josh screamed.
Recoiling beneath the vicious onslaught, Brian Chapman went crashing into a display counter and the glass exploded around him. Gogus' tail lashed madly as the caretaker battled to break free, and its unwieldy head lunged and darted between his panicking blows, nipping and biting with its teeth.
'Get off!' Edie demanded, stamping her feet.
But the creature only fought more rabidly and the girl jumped up at it. Catching hold of the churning tail, she pulled hard. A discordant yowl issued from the wooden throat and Gogus glared down at her.
The distraction was enough for Brian. Using all his strength, he ripped the hooked claws from around his neck and, before the imp could stop him, hurled it across the room.
Wriggling helplessly in the air, his assailant yowled and went bouncing over the cabinets to land with a clatter upon the floor. But at once it was up again, its troll-like legs scampering over the ground, wheezing and gurgling as it raced towards Brian Chapman.
'Gogus...' it cackled. 'Gogus...'
Cut and bleeding, Neil's father gasped for breath, his eyes trained upon the fiend's scuttling return. The Separate Collection rang with Josh's screams and the caretaker motioned frantically for Edie to get him out of there.
'Quick!' he shouted.
Shuffling backwards, the man stumbled, tripping over his tool kit. Then, giving a glad cry, he eagerly snatched up a hammer. 'Now!' he shouted, feeling a shade braver as he brandished the weapon before him. 'Come and have a bite of this!'
Gogus let out a hate-filled hiss as it watched the hammer swing to and fro, and the creature somersaulted with fury.
Taking hold of Josh's arm, Edie lingered by the entrance to The Egyptian Suite, anxiously watching what would happen.
‘I said get Josh out of here!' Brian bawled.
The girl scrunched up her radish-shaped nose with displeasure, but Josh's face had turned an alarming scarlet and she hauled him into the darkness of the adjoining room.
Gogus' demented yammering escalated even further and, with its mouth gaping open, the creature shot forward—caterwauling at the top of its guttural voice.
Within The Egyptian Suite, the uproar of The Separate Collection faded swiftly and, above Josh's howls, Edie heard the racket of machinery. A putrid reek of sweat and squalor filled her nostrils, and she spun around in the darkness. The room had changed; the hieroglyphs had been replaced b
y mouldering green wallpaper and only sawdust covered the floor where the sarcophagi had been.
Not a murmur could be heard from The Separate Collection now, and when she stared at the entrance, an impenetrable murk met the girl's eyes.
'Where'd it go?' she muttered. 'Where are we?'
At the girl's side Josh could only shriek in reply.
Chapter 12 - The Well Lane Workhouse
Edie shook the boy and told him to be quiet, but it only made him worse. Letting go of his arm in disgust, she began to retrace her steps back to the doorway. The repetitive rumble thrummed upon the air and the shadows closed in around them.
Suddenly, from the blindness in front, a figure no taller than herself came barging into the small, unlit room.
His feverish glance cast over his shoulder, the stranger ran stumbling into Edie Dorkins.
'Shift it!' a desperate voice cried out. 'Now look! You made me go an' drop 'em all.'
Edie jumped away, but the figure fell to his knees and scavenged over the floor, retrieving the precious food scraps he had lost.
'Didn't pilfer these jus' to fatten the rats,' the newcomer said hotly. 'Muzzle that tyke, can't you?' he rapped, indicating Josh. 'You want the beadle after me? If he tells Old Snotter, that's the end of Ned Billet!'
The girl watched in fascination as the boy continued to grub and scour the ground. Ned Billet was a scrawny stick of a boy. Scraps and shreds of filthy rags barely covered his rickety form and whatever he redeemed from the sawdust he clutched tightly to himself. In the exposed gashes which slashed his torn shirt, Edie could clearly see the bones of his spine pushing up through his starved flesh like a long row of knuckles, and his chest rattled as he gasped and panted from his recent exertions.
'I said sew up his stocking!' he hissed, stumbling to his bare feet.
'He won't shut up,' the girl answered. 'I tried before.'
Ned's eyes bulged from his skull like those of a famished frog, his skin was sallow and he was shaking. Anxiously he looked around them. 'Get you in here,' he told her, hastening through the gloom and pushing open a door covered in dirt and crackled varnish.
'Sharpish!' he entreated. 'He'll catch us for sure, he will!'
Taking hold of the wailing Josh once more, Edie followed him and found herself in a dingy, foul-reeking room. Drowned in a deafening, repeating din, she gazed about her, amazed. Even Josh ceased his shrieking and, through the blur of tears, he too stared.
Here, in the space where a collection of tapestries normally adorned the walls of The Dissolution Gallery, and the cases displayed fragments of exquisite stained glass and gold plate, all was altered.
Plaster blackened with damp flaked off the barren walls, exposing the brick underneath, and threadbare, moth-eaten curtains, through which the dirty daylight streamed, were strung across the large windows. In place of the cabinets and gleaming abbots' treasure, the frames of nine looms filled the room, each of which was clattering wildly as the shuttles darted through the warps.
The poverty of the weavers who operated the black-jarring mechanisms was painfully apparent. Many of them were wraithlike in appearance, wavering between starvation and death. In a dazzling contrast to the sordid surroundings, the fabric strung on the frames of the looms shimmered richly with silken threads.
Gathered around a central table, like a group of standing corpses, eight emaciated girls, aged between five and ten, were engaged in making trimmings and covering buttons. Even from a distance, Edie could see that their fingers were pricked raw.
‘I wants my Dad!' Josh whined.
Edie cocked her head to one side and contemplated the wooden frameworks before them. Her thoughts flitted to that other device, where the Websters had woven the Doom of the world, but according to Ursula, the Loom of Destiny had been broken for many years.
'We're too long aways back from your dad,' she told the infant mysteriously, 'but not far enough fer me.'
Closing the door behind Edie and Josh, Ned Billet hurried to the far corner where a haggard woman sat, jolting back and forth, slaved to her loom. The skinny boy offered up an armful of scraps to her.
'All I could collar without getting buckled,' he said. 'Hold off a while and eat a bite. You'll end up joinin' Father and our Meggie if you don't.'
Coughing, the woman turned her stark, skull-like face to him and gradually the tyrannical contraption clicked and smacked to a halt.
'Ned!' her cracked voice called above the row of the other rattling frames. 'Give some to Violet.'
The boy shook his head stubbornly. 'It's you what needs it more.'
Mrs Billet rested her head in her hand and tentatively stretched her tormented back. ‘I must finish this pattern today,' she wept.
'It's you what'll be finished if you stay off your peck and don't touch a morsel,' her son urged.
Relenting, the sunken-eyed woman took a small, bruised apple but had hardly the strength to break the skin with her teeth.
'I don't want you filching in the market no more,' she told him. 'It's 'prentice work I wants for you, not the life of a shivering jemmy.'
Ned deposited the squashed remains of a pie, two soil-clogged potatoes and a chunk of cheese upon the window sill before he answered. 'There's none such work for me!' he laughed mirthlessly. 'There's only this workhouse and you know it. A fine little line-up the Billets'll be in the ground, the life shaked out of them—an' all to make toffs new waistcoats for their roast meat best.'
Moving further into the squalid room, Edie drew closer to Ned and his mother. The wasted, weary woman turned her tired eyes upon her and Josh. 'Who's this you've brought?' she asked her son.
Edie stared at the woman, muted and wary. She could see that her death was very close and a horrible thought formed in the girl's mind. Her fey, fatal instincts told her that this was a scene from the museum's past. This had all happened before, but now she and Josh were bound up in it. The atmosphere inside the room was hideously oppressive and charged with a ponderous anticipation, as though it was waiting for some imminent drama and she could only watch it unfold around them.
'Bumped into her out there,' the boy piped up. 'Must have gone a-wanderin'.'
His mother smiled weakly. 'Poor mites,' she said. 'Lost your family have you? Not hard that isn't, not in this warren. Ned'll take you back, don't fret now. He knows this unholy lair better than the rats themselves.'
'I ain't steppin' outa this sweat den,' Ned objected. 'That little'un was making a devil of a stir. Old Snotty Hanky's already—'
Before he could finish, there came a thundering crash as the door was kicked open and into the festering, clanking room stormed a heavily-built man.
Like quicksilver, Ned dived under his mother's loom and cowered there, as she swiftly surrendered herself to the jolting cruelty of her labour once more. The cadaverous girls around the table suddenly applied themselves to their tasks with renewed vigour and the operators of the other looms bent their heads over their crippling work.
Edie stared at the invading, arrogant man as he booted the door shut again and came stalking through the stinking room. It was plain that everyone was mortally afraid of him and she despised him instantly.
His size and girth made him an imposing figure of towering menace. A revolting leer contorted his red, swollen face and his rodent eyes slid malignantly from one broken soul to another. He wore no jacket but a brown waistcoat, festooned with a silver watch chain, spanned the bulging curves of his ample belly, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his fat elbows.
In one of his large hands he carried a brutal-looking stick and on the right side of his face was a great, crescent-shaped scar.
'Where is he?' the lout roared, barging past the quailing girls and swaggering towards Ned's mother.
'I said where is he?' he demanded, striking the loom's wooden frame with his cudgel.
The frail woman brought her toil to a lurching halt and raised a distressed, imploring face to the foul, bullying man.
'Mr Hankinson,' she spluttered. 'I'm sure I don't—'
'The devil you don't!' he raged, swiping his cane across the window ledge, splattering Ned's precious plunder.
'Your young dog's been out thievin' again!' he yelled. 'He was seen—and this time Obediah Hankinson will whip him proper.'
The woman cowered, coughing as she shook her head. ‘I haven't seen our Ned all day,' she lied piteously.
Obediah seized her fragile face in his powerful, grimy fingers and squeezed until the woman emitted a gasp of pain.
Beneath the loom, the silken fabric forming a gorgeous canopy above him, Ned heard his mother's whimpering cry and his bulging eyes streamed with tears. Baring his teeth, the scrawny boy gave a yell and lashed out, kicking the despicable taskmaster hard in the shin.
'Get your filthy paws off her!' he shrieked.
Obediah Hankinson bawled in agony then reached into Ned's crouching space with grasping, clutching hands. But Ned was too quick for him—he had already scampered clear and was dodging beneath another silken ceiling.
Like a charging bull, Obediah gave chase, hurling the weavers from their stools to jab his stick under the wooden frame and thrash it viciously.
'Run, Ned!' his mother called. 'Run and never come back!'
Between the swinging arms of the looms the boy darted and ducked, but the overseer was never far behind. His murderous club stabbed and pounded into the cramped spaces, cracking against the upright timbers in a frantic onslaught as Ned slithered and sprinted through them.
'I'll beat the life out of you!' Obediah cursed, smashing the stick into the shadows and lashing out with his enormous boots. 'I'll kick your ribs in and snap the twigs of your arms!'
In the corner of his eye, the boy saw the man's lumbering bulk gaining on him and, as he sprang across the gap between one loom and its neighbour, he felt the frame judder and tilt as the weapon thumped in behind. Only one more short dash and he would reach the door. Once through, he would flee from this hellish place and the overseer would never catch him.