The Icicle Illuminarium

by N. J. Gemmell

  ‘The brakes!’ Basti yells, pumping his leg on a pedal. ‘They’re not working properly.’ He keeps pumping but can’t slow the car down quick enough. He’s swerving but can’t do it sharply. ‘Evacuate! Evacuate!’ he yells to everyone.

  ‘Quick, out!’ Bone shouts as he leaps and tumbles in the grass, followed by Bert. ‘Come on!’ Bone yells furiously; Scruff’s next and I’m literally throwing Pin out, he’s clinging on tight as if I’m the best bet here of the lot but I’m absolutely not and over he goes, flung. Rolling in the grass, bobbing up. Safe. Phew.

  ‘I can’t get …’ Basti’s scrabbling at his seatbelt. ‘It’s stuck. In the clasp. Quick, Kick. MOVE. GOOOoooooooo!’

  Bucket’s whining and barking and refusing to jump, she’s nudging at my neck – Dad’s hunting knife – of course, where it always is, and I’m scrambling for it and get it out and saw and saw and saw at the belt, cutting my hand in the process and ripping Basti free and he jumps up into the air like a diver scrabbling for a last breath as I dive out just as the jeep turns, turns, then careers over the edge of the cliff.

  Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

  Basti leaps up to a branch of a tree growing stubbornly on the cliff edge, grabs it and holds tight.

  He’s okay.

  I laugh. He’s all right.

  He swings around on his two hands like a monkey, checks we’re all accounted for in the long grass and yells cheerily, ‘I told you I was once the number one Master Tree Climber of the Universe, troops.’

  ‘Bucky!’ Pin cries in anguish.

  What?

  Oh. Bucket’s not here. SHE’S NOT WITH US.

  No, please no.

  We look wildly around. Nope, she’s not in the grass, bobbing up like the rest of us, not anywhere in sight.

  I feel sick. The jeep. She’s in the fallen jeep. Still.

  We rush over to the edge of the cliff. Darius’s van has just arrived. The three of them get out and peer over, too.

  The jeep has landed upside down. No sign of our beautiful girl on the sand.

  No, no, no.

  ‘What are we looking at?’ Hebe asks.

  None of us Caddys can answer.

  Our hearts too full in our mouths.

  At the bottom of the steep cliff, the smoking wreck of the jeep.

  Silence. A long way down, the black prows of rocks jutting out of the water like battleships. The sand almost black, as if a permanent smear of coal has been stained into it. Flat, grey waves.

  And Bucket?

  No sound.

  ‘Where is she?’ Bert whispers.

  ‘She must be under the car.’ It’s really hard to speak here, to push words out.

  ‘Get her, Kicky.’ Pin tugs at me.

  I nod. But this is something I quite possibly can’t make right, little fella, and how do I tell him that? That I don’t want him to see her broken.

  Gone. Perhaps.

  A lone bird calls from a wide slit in the cliff like it’s trapped in a high room but it can’t be, of course; it’s the saddest, most forlorn cry I’ve ever heard in my life. But there’s no bark, no whining, no whimpering. No sound of the most beautiful, smartest, bravest dingo in the world. Who shouldn’t be in this world in the first place.

  The steep, slippery cliff will be hard to get down. It’s as tall as a double-decker bus. Even the rocks are tinged a moss green.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Uncle Basti looks at me soft like he’s reading my thoughts. He’s down in a flash – the golden boy of Campden Hill Square once, of course – grabbing on to tree branches that are growing almost horizontally out of the rock face. He looks up at us with infinite sadness when he gets to the smoking wreck of the car, takes a deep breath, then peers underneath.

  ‘She’s alive! Quick.’

  ‘We’re coming!’ ‘Hang on!’

  Uncle Basti dashes back up the cliff and leads us Caddys down one by one – ‘Careful, careful’ – showing us footholds and branches to cling to, guiding and lifting where he can. We peer under the upturned jeep. Alive, just, yes. Our darling girl. Hurt. In terrible pain. I can see it in her eyes, which stare out at us, pleading. For what?

  She whimpers. I hold my hand across my mouth in horror. ‘Keep her close, she’ll look after you,’ they were the last words Dad spoke to me about our Bucky girl and look what I’ve done. What I’ve lured her into.

  Smearing away furious tears I crawl under the smoking wreck. ‘Kick!’ ‘No!’ ‘Careful!’ everyone’s shouting behind me but I have to get to her, hold her, feel her warmth. I’ve got her, I’m here, Kicky’s with you, lovely girl. She can still lick, oh yes. She licks my face like she wants to lick it right off, like she always does.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ I murmur, laughing, crying. ‘It’s okay, I’m getting you out of here.’ I gather her huge, floppy weight and push and drag her through tears into the open air and Bert and Scruff take her the last bit into it, then we all drop to her, stroke her and kiss. One of her hind legs hangs limp; it’s been crushed. Her speaking brown eyes look at us, pleading, then close in agony to mere slits. I hold her tight, we all do; tell her we love her; she’s so brave, our girl.

  ‘Kicky? No, Kicky, no,’ Pin shakes his head, stepping back, not believing it, not understanding.

  I shake my head, crying, ‘I don’t know, Pinny. I just don’t know.’

  As my head is turned to my brother’s anguish, a soft lick on my neck.

  Then another.

  I turn to Bucket, and as I stare into her soft eyes she licks me again, on the lips, as if to say, ‘Hey, shhh, I can do this. Come on.’

  ‘Actually, Pin, actually –’ a whole smile is filling me up here ‘– we might be okay here. We just need to get her out. Get her fixed.’ Cheering all around me. And from Bucket, a bark that turns into a yelp, but it’s enough: our girl is with us, she’s back. Just. I close my eyes in thanks.

  Then glance up to the empty, milky sky. The cliff the jeep careered over. The three people peering over, but not the one who led us into all this. Of course.

  The dragon inside me is roaring up. Because this one person needs to be here. To explain, to apologise, to show his face; to show us he’s okay if nothing else. But it’s one person who’s completely, spectacularly gone – and why would we expect anything else? As soon as Commander Bone leapt from the jeep and rolled through the long grass he was out of here, vanished. Lord of this place who led us to this cliff – deliberately or not, mortifed or not. Where is he now?

  ‘Boooooooooooone,’ I howl furiously, to the sky, the wind, the trees, summoning him forth.

  Only the gentle slap of the sea answers me. And Bert’s soft keening, as she cradles Bucket’s head in her lap.

  ‘Bone!’ Scruff stands strong next to me. ‘Where are you? Are you all right?’

  ‘Who’s Bone?’ Adora yells down at us.

  ‘Wait, we’re coming,’ I say. Basti lifts up the injured Bucket, ever so gently; we all help him.

  ‘So sorry, sorry, your poor dog,’ Lady Adora says as we near the top. ‘Oh dear. This cliff. Back, back. We should bail out, don’t you think? Don’t like it here, no. Ghosts. Shouldn’t be here. Hasn’t changed. And your jeep, the chase, and here we are. Goodness, all of it. Ropey, ropey to be in this place. Haven’t been back –’ She nods to Basti. ‘Sebastian Caddy! What was I thinking? Foolish, what?’ She’s distracted, jittery, staring at all of us, counting in her head. ‘I’m quite beside myself here. Actually. Everything, too much. But Bone. Who is that? What a singular name. Is he that boy? With you, who popped up in the jeep. Bone. Where did he come from? Where is he now? Can someone kindly tell me what’s going on.’

  We’re silent. Can’t get words out. Too brimmed up with tears and tired and shock and hurt, the lot of us. None of us can engage with Lady Adora right now, this broken woman whose life is falling down all around her; yet she’s the entire reason we’re in this predicament. I pity her, oh yes, but want to push her hard at the same time. So I just stand there, fists clenc
hed and furious, as all her questions go unanswered.

  ‘That boy. With the blond hair. Who is he?’ Lady Adora shouts in frustration. Darius tries to soothe her – ‘Adi, Adi’ – to draw her away, but she won’t budge. Hebe is as still as a statue. Her eyes are squeezed shut, her hands clamped over her ears, as if she can’t bear any of it.

  ‘He’s just Bone, Your Ladyboat – ship,’ Pin says finally, always the peacemaker. ‘From your house.’

  ‘What? There’s no one else in The Swallows but us.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Squeedly know him,’ Pin prattles on. ‘He’s Bone. He’s our friend.’

  ‘Who? How is this possible. Where did he come from? The Squeedlys? How old is he?’

  ‘Eleven,’ Bert replies reluctantly.

  ‘Eleven. Eleven. Oh …’ She’s going off into somewhere else here, we’re losing her. ‘I see. Anything else? What’s his real name? I’m sorry but “Bone” is not a name. Pray tell.’

  ‘He’s been in your house forever, I think,’ Pin explains. ‘Like he owns the place.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His real name is Lachlan. Lachie,’ Scruff adds. ‘He told us that right at the start. He knows your house like the back of his hand.’

  ‘Better than you!’ Pin adds.

  Lady Adora is very still. A clenched fist is pressed into her cheek. ‘Where is this … Lachie?’ Her voice has dropped, is sapped of life.

  We all look around.

  He’s completely, magically disappeared. As always. Like he never existed, he’s a ghost. He wasn’t with us at the cliff or with Bucket; wasn’t with us from the moment he leapt. ‘He’s a master at disappearing,’ Bert explains. ‘He knows every hidey-hole in your house. In fact, he says he’s never leaving it because he knows it too well. He says he’ll be lord of the manor one day.’

  ‘He says he’s just waiting and waiting, Your Ladyship.’ Pin’s face cracks in wonder. ‘Ship– I got it!’

  ‘Waiting for what?’ Hebe asks.

  ‘Back to the house, yes,’ Lady Adora says weakly. ‘All of us. Darius? Right now. I need to think. Think.’ She’s speaking in a voice utterly drained, utterly tired, like she’s barely listening anymore, to any of us. ‘Your dog, I’ve got bandages. Good, good. Splints. Morphine syrettes – that’s painkillers, mousies, hundreds, left over from the war. In the medicine cabinet. Mr Squeedly can fix your dog, he’s good with animals. Yes. Quick.’

  Basti is speechless with sorrow. We all are. But Lady Adora is right: Bucket is the priority here and she’s in a lot of pain. So. We’ll get her fixed and then head out of here, fast. We all troop over to Darius’s van and pile in the back. Leaving Lord Bone alone to his sea, his sprightly air, his cliffs. Just as he wants it, no doubt.

  I stare out of the scratch in the window’s paintwork once again. So, Bone Boy. Master vanisher – and storyteller. ‘Bone, you are in so much trouble,’ I yell furiously to the trees as we pull away, but only the sighing of the wind answers back.

  ‘Where are this boy’s parents? His family?’ Lady Adora yells at us from the front of the car. Can’t let it drop.

  ‘He doesn’t have any,’ Pin answers.

  ‘Of course …’ she murmurs, ‘of course he’d tell you that.’

  We drive in silence, no fight in us left. But halfway down the long gravelly avenue to the great house, we see Mr and Mrs Squeedly, worried, panicked, as though in search of something lost. Darius stops the van. The elderly couple, in their faded and much patched service uniforms, brisk forward. Help us all out. Lady Adora motions them to stop. Holds her head like it hurts, like her thinking is threatening to spill out here and she needs this world immediately sorted out.

  ‘Mrs Squeedly. Mr Squeedly. What is this I hear about a boy named Bone? Real name: Lachie. Aged eleven.’ She comes right up close, too close, claws a finger at them. ‘Bone? Bone? Eleven, mind. In my house. Right under my nose.’ She laughs bitterly. ‘Apparently he’s been living here for years. Years.’ A pause. Her voice drops to a kernel of coldness. ‘With your help.’

  Mrs Squeedly goes white. Mr Squeedly’s eyes shut and remain shut. As if he’s blocking out everything in his life from this point.

  ‘Tell. Me. Everything.’

  Lady Adora’s fists are clenched.

  ‘I … I …’ Mrs Squeedly can barely speak. She looks around, at all of us, but there’s no one to help her. We all want to know here; despite an injured Bucket we have to find this out. Her husband comes up close and lays his hand on her shoulder and it’s as if a charge of strength flows through her. She steps forward. Takes a deep breath. Eyes at the ground, like the very earth’s helping her to get things straight.

  ‘We found a boy. A wee bairn of a thing. Eleven years ago. A little more. At the base of the cliff here. It was winter. The very dead of it. Bitterly cold. He was freezing, poor thing. Skin like marble to touch, no warmth. Such a tiny little mite. A shock of white blond hair, even then.’

  Her eyes turn to Lady Adora and lock on her. ‘We had no child, as you know. We’d lost our Kenneth.’ Mr Squeedly squeezes her shoulder. ‘I couldn’t have another after his birth. I almost died bringing him into this world.’ Her eyes prick up with tears. ‘You do not know the anguish, m’lady, of the childless. The daily, nightly torment. When they’re wanted so much and then God – in his wisdom – takes them from you. And never gives one back. Oh we tried, tried.’ She is breaking as she speaks, trying to get the jumble of words out. ‘One can go quite mad with it, the pain of it.’ She looks Lady Adora square in the face. ‘And then your foundling child, well, he was a gift. That is how we saw it. Still do. God’s gift. To love. Just that. That’s all they need.’

  A thick silence.

  ‘We made him ours. Raised him. We knew he was a distant cousin of your Hebe. That you’d travelled to the Barnardos home in London to bring him into the fold of the family, so you told them; a blood rift, long ago, the father long lost to the Ellicott dynasty. He’d walked away in disgust, hadn’t he? And how grateful the Barnados people were to have you visit them. You hadn’t told anyone here, of course. But we knew. We servants often know.’

  Lady Adora’s hand is clamped in horror at her mouth. Stepping back, like she can’t begin to take in what’s coming next.

  ‘He was the only male heir, set to inherit it all – The Swallows, everything. And you lost him, didn’t you? Most careless, m’lady. You went for a walk just after arriving here with him. But we knew, oh, we knew. Nothing must stand in the way of your daughter. Her rightful inheritance. Yet you underestimated us. We couldn’t have a wee bairn left out in the cold, to be washed away to sea, couldn’t have nature – your nature – taking its course. When we found him, we were going to go to the police, of course we were, but then we had a thought, Mr Squeedly and I.’

  She gives Silent Mountain a furtive glance, can hardly bear it. ‘As we looked after that wee bairn, fed him and held him, we got thinking, oh yes, cuddled him like.’ She lurches into a sob. ‘The days just went on. We called him our little Bone because he was as skinny as one at the start, all skin and bone. But we didn’t tell anyone else. And then we thought … we thought …’ She can’t go on. Mr Squeedly holds her tighter, his head is bowed. ‘We’d wanted a child so much. The need ate me up.’ She’s whispering now. ‘It was beyond anything, the want. It took over my life. My senses. Our senses. That then suddenly we had a child.’

  Mrs Squeedly is shrunken, all her fierceness gone as she stands before us. ‘I do not want him lost to me. He is mine now. Our son. Our only son. You leave him alone.’ Mr Squeedly does nothing but inch closer so that they’re shoulder to shoulder, touching her, facing all of us; becoming one.

  ‘We saw everything. My husband was going to fetch you with an umbrella, to tell you a dreadful storm was coming and you had to get home. But there was a flash of lightning and you reeled and the pushchair careered over the edge of the cliff and you just left him and ran, mad like. Yes, you did. Abandoned him on the rocks, at the base of
the cliff. To die. Don’t shake your head at me.’ She points furiously. ‘You had one of your “episodes”, and presumed you’d gotten away with it. It was easy to hide him on such a large estate, wasn’t it? In a storm, tide coming in. You, the mistress of this place, you could tell anyone anything and get away with it. You assured Barnardos and his very poor London family that he’d be taken care of, that you’d be honouring his father who’d passed away in estrangement from the Ellicotts. Then you told them that he was lost to you, to everyone … a sickly baby … a great tragedy … and left it at that.’ Lady Adora’s shutting her eyes, on everything. ‘As Bone grew up he played in this house – the best playground in the world for a young boy. Knew every nook and cranny.’ Lady Adora is cowering now. ‘As he should.’ Mrs Squeedly snaps back into something like her own self.

  I look around at the trees, at the house. Feel the stillness, the silence. Know Bone’s here somewhere, listening in.

  ‘All the army men said it was haunted,’ Mrs Squeedly continues. ‘We didn’t discourage that, didn’t explain. Didn’t want anyone around. Couldn’t have anyone finding out about him. Our big secret. Whether it be visitors, or Hebe, or you. And the only way Bone could survive here – as our son, with us – was to stay hidden and quiet. It was to keep him safe. To keep him alive.’ Her voice drops into hatred. ‘He haunted you most of all, Your Ladyship. Who tried to get rid of him all those years ago. He knows who’s really meant to have this place.’ Lady Adora lets out a cry of distress. ‘You were just like me, of course. More similar than you could imagine. You could only have one child, oh yes, because she came so late in your life. Your little miracle. Your little miracle of a … girl. And she wouldn’t inherit if there was a male heir somewhere, however distant. But you wanted her to. Couldn’t bear some commoner, with common blood, to get it. But the world’s changing, m’lady. Your Illuminarium is illuminating a big, bold new world. The old order is being swept away. People should be earning the right to be in such a place.’ Her Ladyship gasps in horror; Mrs Squeedly turns to us, to me. ‘Where is Bone now? Is he all right?’