by Kit Cox
Mrs Reed left the room promptly, underlining the fact that the responsibility for the boys now lay with the men of the orphanage.
When the boys realised that they were under no obligation to stay in the classroom they started to file out in groups until just Mr Reed and Ben remained.
‘Do you want to tell me about these cherries, young man?’ said Mr Reed, his voice calm and full of respect for the boy before him. He was aware that Ben had made a stand even though it would cause him trouble, purely because he felt it might help.
‘Not really.’ It was the most honest thing Ben had ever said. He had indeed taken a stand, hoping it would make him the hero and win him friends but instead it had simply put up a bigger wall between him and the other children. ‘Can I stay in here?’ he practically whispered. ‘I think I want to be alone.’
Mr Reed nodded once and stood to leave. ‘I think you’ve guaranteed that,’ he said, practically under his breath, though Ben still heard.
Nanny Belle
The funeral of Miss Charity Poppy had taken place at St David’s church on a day full of clouds and sorrow. It wasn’t an overly long ceremony but was well attended by the pious folks of Whitgate, and the children of the orphanage had all made the effort and dressed in their Sunday finest. They watched silently as the small, simple, wooden coffin was carried by the imposing figure of Mr Reed from the cart to the graveside. Reverend Luck gave a good service and everyone shed the right amount of tears and sang the appropriate amount of hymns before parting to continue with their lives. Ben stood at the back of the group of children, clearly set in his position of outcast, allowing him the freedom to observe the whole proceedings unhindered by connections or emotions. As impartial observer, he was made aware at how dark and sombre the funerals of England could be. The funeral of his mother, by contrast, had been a celebration of her life, not an expression of regret at her passing. Death was just part of the Sinhalese way of life and their funerals were colourful festivals recalling the joy the person had brought while they had been alive.
Ben was still struggling with the concept as the children walked from the church to the orphanage. It seemed to him that their sorrow would not lift from either their minds or their hearts for a long time. However, children are fickle and often when one door closes another opens. The next event was to be one of those moments.
As the children rounded the wall to enter the grounds of the orphanage, they were met by the figure of a young woman. The clouds had literally followed them all week but as their eyes met the figure of the lady who stood patiently waiting by the door of the orphanage the clouds parted and the sun shone through brightly, making the red-brick building shine like a ruby as sunlight found every colourful surface. The colour theme continued down to the woman who was wearing a sensibly cut crimson dress and jacket with a white blouse and green hat. If she hadn’t been so slight of figure, she would have resembled a shining red apple, and her ready smile seemed to have been produced by a steady diet of the self-same fruit. Around the woman were a selection of heavy bags, worn travelling trunks and, most unusually, a covered birdcage of some size.
Mrs Reed approached the stranger and held out a friendly hand, which was promptly taken and shaken.
‘You must be Mrs Reed,’ said the woman cheerily, in a happy singsong tone that could have penetrated even the heaviest heart.
‘And I’m guessing that would make you Nanny Belle. We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,’ said Mrs Reed happily. She had always been a big fan of punctuality, and unwarranted tardiness was her biggest gripe so a woman who was early got Mrs Reed’s seal of approval on the spot.
‘Oh, I know but I thought what with today being… well, today, you could possibly do with the help a trifle early.’
The smile she gave to Mrs Reed held just the right amount of compassion and friendliness, and Ben knew at once there was something special about Nanny Belle.
Before Ben had arrived at the orphanage they had had a fulltime schoolteacher, a lovely well-educated, patient woman by the name of Miss Snow and along with the help of Mrs Reed the tutoring of the pupils had been first class. The marriage of Miss Snow to a London master stonemason had robbed the orphanage of its best teacher. Reverend Luck had eagerly stepped in to fill the void until they found a new tutor, but this, alas, had soon become a permanent arrangement as Mrs Reed was so stringent in what she demanded of any candidate.
Nanny Belle, however, fitted the bill perfectly. Within days it was all the orphanage could talk about. The lessons had moved from dull Bible readings to dramatic science experiments that filled the room with pyrotechnical flashes and colourful smoke, from the dry, repeated diction of Latin verbs to laughter-filled conversations in French.
After all the practical learning was done, Nanny Belle would turn her attentions to the Bible readings, and the biblical stories that had seemed so cold and sterile from the lips of the ordained Reverend were suddenly full of giants, warrior kings, wise men and fallen angels.
It wasn’t just the children that were buoyed up by the appearance of Nanny Belle. Mr Read seemed to enjoy the presence of a new lady at the Garden and when she was sitting reading in the garden Mr Reed often seemed to be just passing on some errand and would became tangled in conversation with the pretty teacher. Mrs Reed was also happy, as she suddenly had someone who was prepared to muck in and make sure that the children were well looked after and suitably educated as well as being a friendly ear that Mrs Reed could just unload her problems on to, without criticism or judgement.
Perhaps to an outsider it would have seemed heartless how quickly they had bounced back from the tragedy, but as Nanny Belle would say: ‘Life is for the living.’
However, for all that the household’s spirits had been lifted by the new tutor, it didn’t prevent the four sickly children remaining so for a long time. Ben found himself often sitting in the same room as the sick boys, quietly reading. He had certainly burned all his bridges by revealing the secret about the cherries, even though it had not been acted upon, and he was certain cherries were still eaten by all.
As he listened to one of the boys vomiting, it occurred to him that the infection hadn’t spread. His books clearly said that isolation was needed to prevent an epidemic and he noted that these boys had shared the same room as all the others without incident. The only thing that could follow this path of natural isolation was poisoning, but that had been ruled out, or so it seemed. All that Farley had proven with his statement was that cherries weren’t to blame for the poisoning; he certainly hadn’t ruled out the possibility of poisoning altogether. The children all ate the same lunches, so it had to be something different, as whatever it was had clearly affected only five of the orphans.
Ben just had to work out what they all had in common. He spent three days working with Buddy and his oysters and three in the classroom, so the final day was his and he wanted to get to the bottom of the sickness. The doctor merely treated the symptoms; Ben wanted to find the source.
On Sunday the classroom was always empty and Ben had made it his own personal study, spreading his notebooks and reference material as far as he wanted as he tried to find a link. His first eureka moment came when he realised that the five children were the only ones not apprenticed but still old enough to walk around unaccompanied, which meant that they could have picked the poison up anywhere. He was giddily congratulating himself at making his breakthrough when he was interrupted by a female voice.
‘I guess it’s going well then.’
It was Nanny Belle. She moved across the room from the door that led to her private office and rooms above, to the desks on which Ben’s notes were laid out. She moved books and papers about, raising her eyebrows as she read scrawled messages and turned pages. Ben felt awkward as if he had been caught red-handed planning some dastardly crime. He couldn’t help watching how the nanny worked, linking notes and references together as if she was seeing patterns he had never considered. His mother would always
be the most beautiful woman he would ever see but this lady, with her soft pale skin and intelligent eyes, looked like an angel…
… and for a moment he considered how timely her appearance had been at the orphanage but before his mind wandered too far she turned towards him as if reading his mind and wishing to interrupt his thoughts before they came to close to the truth. She was holding in her hand a map of the area that had been among Ben’s papers. ‘I think this is your most important find.’ She spoke softly as she handed it to him as if humouring a much younger child. Ben looked at the map blankly. He looked up questioningly at the nanny but she was already disappearing back through her door.
As if guessing his question, she simply said: ‘You will find more out in the field than in in a stuffy room surrounded by books. You just have to find the strength to go out and look, like the people who wrote all these words in the first place.’
Ben looked around at the many books that had seemed to contain so many answers but none of them for the right questions. He knew that Nanny Belle was a good teacher – possibly one of the best – and that the best teachers didn’t simply tell you the answers – they pointed you in the right direction and let you find the answers yourself. How could she know what question he was asking, though, and which questions couldn’t be answered by books? He wasn’t even sure whether he knew the questions he was asking himself.
He started stacking up the books and returning them neatly to the rough wooden shelves of the schoolroom. His little study den had been discovered once now and he did not wish it to be discovered again by one of the other children, who would not be so tolerant as Miss Belle. Soon all the desks were clear, apart from the map of Whitgate, which he had rolled out flat and which he was now studying for the very first time.
It was a simple map drawn by the hand of a company-employed cartographer with the initials A.N. several years previously. Its initial purpose had been to find top-quality gravel and shale for mining and the original skilled hand had marked out the land with blue circles where the sought-after materials were most likely to be found. A latter hand, in a heavier black ink, had carefully added on the streets of Whitgate and the farms and orchards of the area. There was only one other mark on the whole map, a tiny grey egg-shaped spot. It fell almost directly at the centre of one of the original cartographer’s blue circles and was in turn surrounded by an irregular ellipse in the black ink.
Why had this spot been highlighted by three different hands? Ben was racking his brains. He wanted to knock on the teacher’s door and ask the answer, but he realised that she had been deliberately cryptic and would refuse to help him, though naturally in the most good-humoured of ways. To Miss Belle it was all about learning and you did that best at your own speed. He might also just be looking for clues where there were none; she might simply have been telling him to go outside.
Then he looked again and it struck him all at once. The blue circle was like all the other blue circles on the map – a potential source of aggregate for the building industry. The ragged ellipse was the shape of the subsequent quarry that had been mined and which was now spent, for Ben knew that mining no longer took place in the area. The small grey egg was the final piece of the puzzle. He smiled as he placed his own index finger on it to prove to himself that it was in fact the smudge of a fingerprint. It was smaller than even his own, so it could only be that of a young child, a child who was choosing a destination.
The Gravel Pit
Ben stood at the lip of the old gravel pit, in his hand a field guide to the local plants and flowers, for he was still convinced that the sick children had eaten something untoward. The sides of the quarry were deep and steep, with a simple fence running around its perimeter, presumably intended to keep out livestock. Any child could easily have climbed the fences and walked down into the quarry itself. The quarry was quite small and looked like a deep ring cut into the countryside. At its centre stood an ‘island’ whose chalk-white sides jutted up from the quarry’s base and with a copse of short stubby trees growing at its top. Even from where he stood Ben could clearly make out several paths leading down into the quarry, but the island, he assumed, must be an oasis of calm for birds and insects as not one route led up its chalky sides.
Ben climbed the fence and walked down one of the paths into the quarry’s depths. It was strange to think that he was looking for something that had made the other children ill for it felt so peaceful in the pit. The moment he started to descend the slope he had moved out of the breeze and he felt the warmth of the sun on his skin for the first time in months – he almost felt like he was back home in Ceylon, he wasn’t aware how much colder the constant movement of air made the English coast but it was nice to be outside and feel the warmth again of a gentle sun. There was a deep silence, too, broken only by the birdsong of the surrounding orchards and the gentle hum of insects.
It turned out to be a long day – a very long day. Botany was certainly not Ben’s strong point and he often found that he had to return to a plant to identify its leaves as they all started to look similar. At first, he had only examined the bushes with berries on them and he couldn’t help thinking it would have been quicker if he had grown up with the hedgerow fruits. But then again, maybe a mistrust of any berry was a better place to start; the others had obviously trusted something and it may have been a misidentification born from over familiarity. It turned out that there were no berries that weren’t edible in the quarry and Ben began to wonder whether they hadn’t just eaten leaves or flowers as a dare. Ben realised that the quarry had become cold as the sun was low enough in the sky not to shine in and warm the chalk walls. He decided to call it a day and head back to the orphanage. Maybe it hadn’t been the quarry at all that was the source of the poison. Just because they had set off there didn’t mean they had found something to eat there. Ben was at a loss and realised that he might have to call it quits on his whole investigation; after all, that was exactly what the doctor had done.
That evening Ben was back in the boy’s dorm; except for the two or three who continued to be confined to their beds with their illness, all the other boys were outside playing football. Suddenly Ben heard a voice ask for water. It was Charles Pinchin, a scruffy-haired lad of seven who for a time had been expected to go the way of Miss Poppy but who was now on the mend. Ben walked over and poured a glass of water from the jug and sat on the bed beside Charles while he drank.
‘Thank you,’ he said, handing the half-drunk glass back to Ben.
That was the way of the orphanage – away from each other any of the children could be polite to Ben even friendly in their nature but as a group it had certainly been decided to make him the black sheep. Ben chose to make the most of the opportunity.
‘I went to your quarry today,’ he said, trying to sound as friendly as he could without sounding needy.
Charles smiled not raising his head from the pillow. ‘I miss the quarry,’ he said with a voice devoid of all strength. ‘Did you make a wish?’
‘Not this time. I was looking at the plants,’ Ben said, hoping his comment would prompt a response about berries or leaves while also wondering what on earth making a wish had to do with going to a quarry.
‘That’s nice,’ the boy whispered, his eyes closing. ‘Next time make a wish – they’re fun.’ And he fell asleep.
Ben was tempted to wake him again to ask more questions but it seemed that sleep was a far more sensible option for recovery. Ben tucked Charles back into bed properly and wished the boy and his friends a speedy recovery.
Over the next few days all the children recovered and the mysterious poison no longer seemed to be a burning issue. Ben kept Buddy up to date with what was going on at the orphanage and his employer was glad to hear that everyone was making a full recovery and that his favourite worker hadn’t succumbed to the illness. Nanny Belle was happy to welcome the children into her class and soon everyone was enjoying her inspirational lessons and for most healthy colour was returning t
o cheeks.
She inquired only once whether Ben had found his treasure and seemed disappointed with his answer of ‘It sorted itself out in the end.’
It was two weeks after the children’s recovery when Ben, dressed in his waterproofs and ready to go to the oyster factory, spotted four of the children who had been ill, walking down the lane. His curiosity got the better of him and he changed quickly into more suitable clothing and followed them. He would apologise to Buddy the next day but he just had to find where the younger children had been going during the days before their illness. He caught sight of the group quite quickly. The most boisterous among them – and most assuredly their leader – was Christian Green; he would be in an apprenticeship next season so these were his last moments of true freedom. He wasn’t a big lad and the illness had made him pale and thin as well. He had found himself a stick and was attacking foliage as if it was a sword as they walked. The only girl was Abigail Smith, who was the same age as Ben and thus the eldest of the group – girls didn’t go into an apprenticeship until sixteen or seventeen depending on their skills and this would most likely to be as a maid to a big house so would often account for them leaving the orphanage all together. The other two members were two younger boys, the small, polite Charles Pinchin to whom Ben had given a glass of water and the floppy hat-wearing Thomas Baker.
The friends skipped and frolicked along the lanes, occasionally chasing each other or giving piggybacks that soon collapsed in untidy heaps. It was clear that they were travelling in the direction of the quarry. Soon he watched them all descend into the depths of their hidden, chalky playground and wondered how long he would have to wait before they gave some clue as to what they had eaten. To his surprise, however, instead of staying on the quarry floor they started to climb up on to the ‘island’.
It hadn’t even occurred to Ben to do the same on his earlier visit and from what he could see it was actually fairly easy going. There was so much undergrowth up there that anything could be growing, and it looked as if the group hadn’t learned their lesson. Ben hurried down into the quarry and ran over to the chalk island. Now that he looked closely he could see how the chalk had handholds – jutting flints and ledges up its entire length. He had climbed the rigging of the Hallowe’en on more than one occasion in churning seas so the sturdy chalk wall held no fear for him.