Margaret turned up her button nose. ‘Pooh…’ Money was an incomprehensible affair; the word made a shape in her mind, bulky and brown as the ledgers over which her uncle toiled. Something far-off and uninteresting yet vaguely sinister. ‘Pooh…’ The grubby fingers curled on the desk edge. ‘Do you make a lot of money?’
‘Fair bit, I reckon…’ Jesse was working once more, fist half obscuring the lines of the
neat figures crawling into existence on the thick cream paper.
Margaret cocked her head at him, trying to see his face, wrinkling her nose again. That last was a new accomplishment and she was proud of it. She said suddenly, ‘Do I annoy you?’
Jesse grinned, figuring in his head. ‘No, lass…’
‘Sarah says I do. What are you doing?’
Steadily. ‘Makin’ money…’
‘Why do you want so much?’
The burly man stopped openmouthed, arms half raised; an odd gesture. He stared at the low ceiling, the total lost now in his mind, then turned to scoop the child onto his knee. Grinning again. ‘Why? Well, I reckon little maid… I reckon I couldn’t rightly say now.’
Margaret sat watching, frowning a little and smelling the tobacco-nearness of him, chubby legs stuck out, well-picked scabs on the knees, the seat of her knickers black where she’d made a slide with Neville Serjeantson in the orchard behind the warehouses, out of some boxes and old steel rails. The yard foreman placed the rails for the children, to keep them quiet awhile. They were forever in the sheds, and underfoot when they backed the great iron engines; they were the bane of his existence.
‘I reckon…’ said Jesse. He stopped again, thinking and laughing. ‘Well, so’s one day I could put a hundred thousand where once there were only ten. Only you wouldn’t understand that, see?’ He shoved vaguely at her hair, frowning at a tuft that had been yellow, was stuck together now with a dob of axle grease. ‘You bin in they sheds again? Sarah’ll give thee summat, dang me if she don’t…’
‘Not going with Sarah. Staying with you.’ The child wriggled, reached out for a rubber stamp and plonked it onto the blotter; then lacking further damageable surfaces, the back of Jesse’s hand. Words showed faintly, bright blue against the brown seaming and wrinkling of the skin. Strange and Sons of Dorset, Hauliers… ‘Margaret Belinda Strange…’
Jesse swung her down and laughed, dusted her drawers for her as she ran.
The memory stayed with Margaret; one of those odd, arbitrary moments out of childhood that seem to become enshrined in consciousness, never to be forgotten. Her uncle’s lined, hard face, blue-jawed, close above her; the sunlight lying across the desk, Sarah calling, the stamp with its bulging black handle and the little brass stud that showed which way round it was when you pressed it down. A rare enough moment it was too, for Jesse was not an expansive man. His niece called good night to him later, standing at her window to see him leave the house, jacket slung across his shoulder, on his way to drink beer with his men at the Hauliers’ Arms just along the street. But he’d changed again then; all she got back was the faint sour pulling of the mouth corners, the grunt he’d use to answer anybody as he slammed the door arid tramped with a scraping and crunching of boots across the yard.
Jesse Strange had few words, in those days; and nobody willingly crossed him. He was a driver; he drove his hauliers, he drove his machines, but most of all he drove himself. If he chose to drink, he’d put the best man under the table; that happened sometimes of a night down in the village inn. But he’d walk home steady; and the boys, rolling across the street at chuck-out time, would see the light burning in his office or in the sheds, where like as not he’d be stripping the valve gear on one of the locos or cleaning her boiler or mending her massive wheel treads. They’d wonder then if Jesse Strange ever tired, and when he slept.
He’d made his hundred thousand a long time back, then his first half million. It seemed to him work was a sacrament, a panacea for all ills. The firm of Strange and Sons grew, spreading out beyond Dorset with depots as far away as Isca and Aquae Sulis. Jesse broke Serjeantson, his one competitor in Durnovaria, running his trains at cutthroat rates, stealing load after load from under the old man’s nose. They said at the height of the war no train showed him a profit for nearly a year; there were battles and beatings among the drivers, blood spilled on the footplates; but he broke Serjeantson and bought him out, added forty steamers to the huge Strange fleet. The sheds and warehouses that joined the old house at Durnovaria were extended again and again till they sprawled across more than an acre; and still it wasn’t enough. Jesse broke Roberts and Fletcher at Swanage; then Bakers, and Caldecotts, and Hofman and Keynes from over Shaftesbury way; and then he bought outright Baskett and Fairbrother of Poole, with more than a hundred Burrells and Fodens on the road, and Strange and Sons owned the West Country haulage trade. And after that even the routiers let their trains be; because money works wonders in high places, and one swipe at a Strange loco would bring a hornet swarm of cavalry and infantry down round their ears and the game wasn’t worth the price. The maroon nameboards with their oval yellow plaques were known from Isca to Santlache, from Poole to Swindon and Reading-on-the-Thames; drivers gave way to them, the Serjeants cleared the roads for them. In the end Jesse won respect even from his enemies. He paid his way, gave nothing; and what you stole from him, you were welcome to keep… A lot of men wondered what drove him. At college he’d been a dreamer, head in the clouds; but somebody somewhere had taught him what life was about. Some whispered he killed a man once, a friend, and the empire he built was somehow his atonement; there was even a rumour he was jilted by a barmaid, and this was his answer to the world. Certainly he never married, though there were women enough later on who found they could put up with his ways, and men who would have sold their daughters fast enough to tie their family to the name of Strange; but none of them got the chance. Nobody ever dared ask outright, except his niece; and though she remembered, as he’d warned her she didn’t understand.
Margaret seemed suddenly to be moved forward in time. She was going away to school, a whole twenty miles to Sherborne for her first boarding term. A half mile through the streets of Durnovaria, a little scrappet stumping along clinging to Sarah’s arm, wearing a new uniform, leather satchel swinging from her shoulder, apples in the satchel and sweets, pitiful little bits of home. Head stuck high, face set, sniffing to stop from bawling at the wrongness of everything, on her way to death and worse… Sarah seemed huge, the paving slabs huge and the cobbles and the old leaning houses, as afternoons and mornings had seemed huge, each bulking a separate entity in her mind as she crossed off the frightened days to start-of-term. The last night, last morning, an inevitability against which she seemed suspended, in a dream within a dream. The September dawn was blue with mist and cold, she buzzed with the chill of it while images floated unconnected and remote and her body was a machine, forgotten legs pumping her along. A road train passed at the end of the street and the light from the loco firebox glowed back on her steersman and driver and the child wanted in sudden bitterness to run forward and be swept away, snuggle under a load tarp in the rumbling and darkness to end some mysterious closed circuit in her own room at home; but instead she turned left mechanically to the station, still hanging onto her nanny’s arm. Old Sarah, hated often, seemed lovable now; but there was no help in her. The train was waiting, crowded and dank; Margaret was hustled onto it, stood pressing her face to the windows smudging the breath-steam with her fingers while Sarah and station and the whole of existence swept into a dot that dwindled behind her and vanished for all time.
And there was school, the big house dark and cold, and the strangeness of the nuns with their startling starched white cowls, the whisper and shuffle of them crossing the stone-floored rooms. A twilight of loneliness, sombre and unbearable, shot through at last with little gleams of hope; letters from home, a cake, a box of fruit standing on the table in the hall. Frosty vividness of games days, whispered dormitory co
nversations, first stirrings of friendship…
Time passed quickly while Africa became a continent and? r2 was forced to equal the area of a circle and Caesar fought the Gauls. Other days and months declined impossibly and Christmas was near. A concert, services for end-of-term in the great hall; candles burning in their sconces through the short December days, issuing of rail vouchers, excitement of packing and waiting; the last morning, when Margaret was taken mysteriously in charge by her house-mistress Sister Alicia. Shoutings in the grounds, noises rendered crystalline by the bright winter air; flapping and chuffing of the butterfly cars thronging the front of the school while Anne waited feeling lost, the Sister secretive and smiling. And the great surprise; first a rumbling, distant but known, a sound her blood could never forget; and a plume of steam, a wink of brass as the loco, hugely unbelievable, edged her way along the drive, rutting Mother Superior’s precious gravel with her great treads, hooting and shouldering and bluffing her way through the butterfly cars, her wheels as tall as the highest of their masts. She was towing a single trailer, its flat bed nearly empty, and her uncle was driving and Margaret knew he’d come specially for her and started, hating herself, to howl, while Sister Alicia muttered ‘ridiculous child… ridiculous child…’ and prodded sense back into her with painfully bony fingers.
She was lifted up wincing with expectation to pull the cord that woke the Burrell’s huge deep voice; while the children clustered round the wheels ogling and laughing till Jesse drove them back with shouts and thrust forward reversing lever and regulator and they were on their way with a fussing of valves and crossheads, a great jetting of steam. Margaret clung to the hornplate staring back and waving as school receded, swept away by the windings of its drive to be lost and forgotten for a lifetime of three whole weeks. Often after that her uncle fetched her, or told off one of the men to detour. If he came it was always with Lady, the old Burrell that was still the pride of the fleet, and Margaret would boast endlessly to her friends and the mistresses that the loco had been named after her, she was her own special train. Jesse would laugh at that sometimes and shove her hair and say it were funny the way things worked themselves through. For the child’s mother too had been called Margaret; her dad kept a pub out Portland way and when he died and left her no place to live she’d been glad enough to settle for a man years her junior. Though it had cost Tim Strange his job and his home…
But it hadn’t taken the woman long to tire of being the wife of a common haulier; two years later she’d run off with My Lord of Purbeck’s jongleur, and Tim had come trailing back with his scrap of a kid and Jesse had laughed quiet and long, and made over to him the half of his business. But that had been in the long ago, before Margaret grew a remembering brain. Other later things were still fresh to her, other facets of her strange and wayward uncle. She remembered how one day she’d gone running to him with a shell, told him to listen and hear the waves inside. He’d taken time off from his endless making of money and driven her way up into the hills and found a quarry and dug a fossil out the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. She kept the stone a long while after that; and when more time had passed and she knew the whispering and piping were only echoes of her blood she didn’t care because she’d still heard what she heard, the sound of trapped eternities.
The making of the firm had aged Jesse a lot; that and a bursting steam union that poached the skin half off his back before he could stagger clear. The locos took their toll odd times of the men who used them; he’d been up and about far too soon, passed out on the footplate trying to haul a load of stone single-handed to Londinium. Margaret had been a gangling thirteen then, all legs and arms, her nipples already pushing marks into her dress. She’d nursed him well, sitting reading through the long quiet evenings of a summer holiday while Jesse lay and frowned and brooded at the ceiling and thought God alone knew what. But the thing had changed him for all time; and so soon it seemed he was an old man on a bed, clammy and yellow and waiting to die, and the priest waving thin hands across him in the stink of incense, saying the grumbling words… The falling stopped. Margaret looked round dazed; she’d lived through years, but the room was quite unchanged. Her father watching down, thin face haggard in the lamplight, old Sarah sitting pudgy and anxious twining her fingers in her lap. Father Edwardes still intoning book in hand, the stole stretched tight; the lamp flame was steady again now, clear in the spring dusk. She wiped her face furtively then, her hand on her dress, pressed her knees together tight to stop the trembling.
This last week had been bad. The house shadowed, haunted… Margaret’s mind shied away from the word. ‘Possessed’ was a worse one it hadn’t till now occurred to her to use. The noises, the rattlings and tappings, night sighings and unease; like the shadows of an ancient wrong, unrequited and unchangeable. While death stepped closer, inexorable, like the flowing of the rivers, the red night plunge of the sun behind the standing stones of the heaths.
Once Jesse sat up terrified and stark, moving his hands, seeing things that weren’t there to see; once a maid shrieked at the icy fondling of the empty kitchen air; once the landing reeled under Margaret, an accident of Time maybe that let her see flitting ahead the doppelganger, shadow of herself, alien in the warm night. Margaret was the name on the old man’s lips now and his niece thought for a while he meant her, but it wasn’t so. His hands waved, pushing at nothingness; his eyes watched frightened as the spring breeze passed through the room, setting swaying the brasses on the beams, moving the lamps so the spindles’ yellow gleams shifted on mantel ornaments and bed rail. The steamer, Sarah thought he meant; poor old thing to be frightened of her now, see her shadow in the swinging lamps and brass. But no, there was a rumour…
Watching alone, the girl sat shuddering; she’d lived with the hauliers long enough to soak their daft tales in through her pores. The Burrell wouldn’t fetch her master, she was down below locked in the engine sheds, fires drawn, tarps across her boiler, oak chocks hammered under her wheels. There was a steamer that came though, that was how the legend ran; Cold Bess, swaying and black in the night and tall, hell in her belly and her running lamps for eyes.
There’d been a real Cold Bess once, far down in the west, and her driver strapped her safety valve to win a bet and she blew him to kingdom come; but after that you still might hear her homing, her flywheel clanking and the rumble of the train wheels, her whistle shouting nights out on the hills. That was years back, nobody could say how long; but the rumour stuck, grew into a silly story to scare the kids to bed with. When the hauliers spoke of Cold Bess, they meant Death. Margaret, educated, still crossed herself hopelessly and shivered. Cold Bess was in the room…
They took the brasses out and the candlesticks and ornaments and draped the bed rail top where it caught the light, and the silly old man lay quieter; but the Presences wouldn’t leave. Margaret could feel them tugging and whispering; cold spots floated on the stairs, once her shoes were snatched from her hand and slammed against die wall. That was when they sent for the priest; and Father Edwardes made his feelings clear by the service he chose to read. Prayers existed for the exorcism of the Noisy One, the Poltergeist; but he had ignored them. The good Father had no doubt where the trouble lay; he was conducting the rite for the expulsion of a devil. But he’s wrong, Margaret told herself, wrong; and cried inside silently…’ Therefore I adjure thee, draco nequissime, in the name of the immaculate lamb, who trod upon the asp and basilisk, to depart from this man.. to depart from the Church of God…’ The voice faded, lost beneath more dreaming.
Margaret, sweating again, tried to fight back because nightmare was coming and as in all such dreams she drifted closer and ever closer to the thing she most wanted not to see. She asked herself could they then, the Things that knocked and fretted, the haunters, the Old Ones her mind whispered, the Old Ones… could they do thi
s thing? Snatch her out of Space and Time, from under the very fingers of the priest? Dare they? She groaned helplessly. These were the People of the Heath, the Fairies; they who once had known an ancient power.
She was sitting on a beach. The sun, pouring and hot, struck her shoulders and arms and her knees under the little tabard that was the season’s fashion must. Fair, she still tanned easily, the freckles exploding round her mouth and nose and across her back. She liked herself brown, she liked to loll on the beach and soak in warmth and light; she’d fought for her day out, haggling with Tom Merryman to detour his Foden, drop her and pick her up. Sarah, faithful and complaining, had tagged along, jounced on the flat bed of the trail load, half choked by dust from the rutted white roads. Behind them the cars careered, veering and jostling, tiny engines sputtering, striped lateens filling in the puffs of breeze; Margaret swung her long legs and laughed at the drivers all the way down from Durnovaria.
At Lulworth Tom offloaded a case of machine tools before turning along the coast to Wey Mouth. Beyond the town the Foden swung inland again, routed for Beaminster; Margaret had dropped down, lugging Sarah, intent on her day on the beach, stood and waved till the Foden vanished under its own trailing cloud of dust. Then Sarah had come over queer because of the heat and been taken to sit down under a tree and hear a band, and Margaret scampered off to the water and sat by herself till the boat came in and all the people started running.
She asked herself then, why she always had to head into the centre of trouble. Privately she believed she must be a coward; reality was never as bad as the horrors of her imaginings. The time old William lost half his fingers in a workshop lathe: she’d heard the dreadful sound he made, seen the countershafts stop spinning as the foreman hit the emergency brake and had to run fast into the dimness to where Will stood ashen-faced holding his wrist; and seeing the blood pump bright from the finger stumps, patter and ribbon on the floor, was nearly a relief. They’d told her later how good she’d been, she might have basked in the praise and enjoyed it but she knew it wasn’t deserved. She hated, she sickened, but she just had to see…
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