Blonde Roots (2 page)

Great Ambossa is actually a very small island with a growing population to feed, and so it stretches its greedy little fingers all over the globe, stealing countries and stealing people.

Me included. I’m one of the Stolen Ones.

That’s why I’m here.

The note gave me only one hour to get to the disused Paddinto Station and directions on how to find the manhole hidden behind some bushes through which I could slip down into the subway. There I would be met by a member of the Resistance who would lead me through its dank subterranean tunnels. That was the promise, anyway, and if it wasn’ t the practice, I’d be done for.

But I am a firm believer in hope. I am still alive, after all.

The city of Londolo’s Tube trains had officially stopped burrowing many years ago when the tunnels started collapsing under the weight of the buildings above them. The city returned to the slower but more reliable modes of transport: carriages, horses, carts, camels, elephants, stagecoaches and, for the really nutty fitness fanatics, velocipedes. The only vehicle we slaves owned was called Shanks’ Pony.

But here’s the thing: at some point, a bright spark in the Resistance had a brainwave and the disused subway was put to use, enabling many to make their way out of the heavily guarded city of Londolo as far as the docks, where they began the long, hazardous trip back to Europa.

For the first time since I had been taken away, I could seriously consider that I might be returning home. Was it possible? I still had such vivid memories of my parents, my three sisters, our little flint cottage on the estate, and my beloved cocker spaniel, Rory. My family were probably all dead now, if they had survived the raids by the Border Lander men who had been my first captors.

The Ambossans called us tribes, but we were many nations, each with our own language and funny old customs, like the Border Landers, whose men wore tartan skirts with no knickers underneath.

The Ambossans also called Europa the Gray Continent, on account of the skies always being overcast.

But oh, how I longed for those cloudy gray skies.

How I longed for the incessant drizzle and harsh wind slapping my ears.

How I longed for my snug winter woollies and sturdy wooden clogs.

How I longed for Mam’s warm dripping sandwiches and thick pumpkin broth.

How I longed for the fire crackling in the hearth and our family singsong around it.

How I longed for the far northern district from whence I was taken.

How I longed for England.

How I longed for home.

I AM PROUD TO DECLARE
that I come from a long line of cabbage farmers.

My people were honest peasants who worked the land and never turned to theft even when it snowed in summer or rained all winter so that the crops miscarried in their pods and turned to mulch.

We weren’t landowners, oh no, we were
serfs,
the bottom link in the agricultural food chain, although no actual chains clinked on the ground when we walked around. Nor were we property, exactly, but our roots went deep into the soil because when the land changed hands through death, marriage or even war, so did we, and so tied we remained, for generation upon generation.

The deal was that we were leased some fields by our master, Lord Perceval Montague (Percy, behind his back), the umpteenth eldest son in the family to whom my family had an umbilical bond. In return all male serfs were conscripted to be foot soldiers in his battles, and believe you me it was a lawless society back then. It was pretty wild in the far north in those days. If someone wanted to raid your land or steal your flock, they did it through brute force, unless you were able to meet fire with gun-powder, or rally a private army to defend yourself, even if it was just a motley crew of shambolic farmhands.

So we worked our patch of land, as well as Percy’s.

Whatever we harvested, we had to give half to him.

He was supposed to offer poor relief, but rarely did.

We were charged for extras such as taking his cart to go to market or using his grain mill or bread oven, which, if we had poor harvests, meant a debt carried over on our annual accounts for several years.

Montague Manor was an imposing pile of granite, tomblike slabs framed against skies that shuddered beneath the chain mail of the north’s daily bout of rain.

It proved an irresistible attraction to us kids, yet I was the only one of my sisters with enough derring-do to risk succumbing to the lure of the big house.

Once, when everyone was at the annual summer fayre on the estate, my sisters peeping through some bushes as cowardly witnesses, I sneaked in through the manor’s heavy wooden door into the cavernous Grand Hall. I tried to tiptoe, but my clogs echoed around the high ceiling.

The walls were hung with tapestries of fair maidens stroking the horns of unicorns, reindeer antlers spread out like the branches of trees, and a massive bear’s head with salivating gnashers was stuck up directly opposite the front door. Its wet, limpid eyes followed my every move.

When I heard moans coming from deep underneath the ground, I panicked, about-turned and charged out, bumping into a stuffed wolf by the front door, which looked ready to lurch and take a bite. The moans must have come from Percy’s s legendary dungeons where he imprisoned poachers and captives from the Border skirmishes. Eventually they’d be packed off for the long trek through the forests to the next ship docked on the coast bound for the New World—or so we’d heard.

To us peasants, the New World was a distant land far across the seas about which we knew nothing, except that no one wanted to go there, because those that did never came back.

Home was Apple Tree Cottage on the edge of the estate. A hotchpotch of timber beams and earth-packed walls. It was infested with rustling insects. Indeed the whole house was alive with vermin-from the wasps nesting in the straw-thatched roof to the body-hopping fleas for whom our blood was the elixir of life. A front door opened onto a tiny parlor with an earthen floor and a peat fire. Two sleeping spaces were separated by heavy green woolen drapes either side of the corridor that served as the kitchen. We couldn’t afford window glass because of the tax, and so with the shutters closed it was always winter inside.

Madge, Sharon, Alice and I shared a straw mattress. We slept under a multicolored quilt made out of cast-offs stitched by two great-aunts who’d died before we were born. I bagsyed the middle, kept warm by my sisters during those freezing northeasterly nights.

Then there was Rory the dog, who was always bounding around knocking things over even though he wasn’t “a puppy no more,” as Mam’d shout. Her foot would send him on an impromptu long jump from which he’d land with a squeal, legs comically splayed flat.

Our Pa and our Mam were
Mr.
Jack and Eliza Scagglethorpe.

Pa’s muscles clung to him in hard sinews because there was little fat to shelter his bones. He had a bushy scrag-end of a beard that he “couldn’t be arsed” to trim, and his cheeks were blistered from where the bitter winds had rubbed them raw. He had the stoop of a thin tree blown forward by a gale, because he’d been planting and digging up cabbages since he was a tiny kid.

Pa’s hair was the dark ginger of the folk from the Border Lands. It fell to his shoulders in spirals beneath the wide-brimmed farmer’ s hat he always wore when outdoors.

Before I was old enough to know better, he’d roll up his smock, instruct me to put a finger to the throbbing pulse of the veins on his arms and tell me centipedes lived inside them. I’d run away shrieking with him chasing me, both of us knocking over stools, pails and my sisters in the process.

Pa was passionate about his cabbages, said they had to be treated lovingly, like children. What didn’t I know about flaming cabbages! January King was “crispy and full of flavor,” the Autumn Queen was dark green and the Savoy King was “a tough little bugger.” What didn’t I know about the Cabbage Wars of old, when the Scagglethorpes had fought victoriously for the Montagues against the Paldergraves?

I hated eating cabbage in those BS (Before Slavery) days.

What I’d give for one now.

PA NEVER ONCE COMPLAINED about not having a son, but we all knew what was on his mind, because sometimes when he looked at us, his disappointment was undisguised.

Who was going to carry on the Scagglethorpe cabbage farming tradition?

He’d always shake it off, though.

“Go on,” he’d urge us girls. “Tell me I have one wish.”

“What wish?”

“Don’t be so stupid. Tell me I have a wish. That you can grant me.”

“But we don’t have special powers; we’re not fairy god-mothers.”

“It’s a game, you silly lot. Give me one wish or I’ ll throw a cabbage at your thick skulls.”

“All right then, Pa, you have one wish.”

“Well, now, let’s see. What would I want? Oh, I know what I’d wish for,” he’d say, scratching his chin like the thought was just coming to him.

“To see my girls in those crinolines with expensive whalebones that those ladies up there wear, pretty paste on your cheeks, pearls around your swanlike necks; to see you swirling around at dances with kindly gentlemen on your arms, winning smiles on your lips and glass slippers on your feet.”

“Oooh, don’t be so soppy,” I’d say, before going to fetch the looking glass to see if my neck really was “swanlike.”

That night I dreamed of a lacy yellow crinoline with puffed-up sleeves. My gown was so
exquisite,
my glass slippers so dainty, that when I ran across the meadows, hair flowing in the wind, everyone gasped at how elegant I’d turned out.

Then I ruined it by getting bunions because the slippers were too tight and one of them cracked and the glass cut into my foot, waking me up with the pain of it.

PA WOULD RISE BEFORE DAYLIGHT
had kicked nighttime into touch. He’d return after dark, when he’d be mardy until he’d eaten.

He liked a tankard of ale (only ever admitted the one) of a Friday night after dinner when he’d go to Johnny Johnson’s barn over at None-Go-By Farm for a “wee session” with “the lads”—all old men pushing forty. He’d come home reeking of the barley and herbs in his ale, singing a bawdy song, which we could hear from fields off, then catching his breath as he leaned against the opened door frame blasting cold air into our parlor, ranting on about how “the working man will have his day,” before staggering inside in his manure-caked boots and collapsing into his chair, legs sprawled open, head thrown back so that his bristly Adam’s apple stuck out and quivered.

“How are the
lads?”
Mam would say out loud once he was snoring, not looking up from her knitting needles, which clacked like warring swords.

I’ ll never forget the first time it was my turn to take Pa hot bread and dripping for lunch.

The clouds had sunk so low from the heavens I couldn’ t find him for ages, until there he was, looming out of the fog, one hand rested on his pitchfork, looking for all the world like a scarecrow, and I suddenly saw how all the backbreaking work had drained him.

He was singing, but not one of his usual smutty songs that made us girls giggle and our mam scowl. Instead he sounded like one of the choir boys at church whose voices hadn’t become coarse and mud-filled and angry from years of breaking up icy ground with shovels, slopping out donkey shit or chopping wood for hours in freezing winter dressed in rough sackcloth, with their bare feet shod only in clogs.

It was the voice of the boy inside the man. The child inside my father.

His heart was full of yearning, for something he’d lost or wanted to have.

My heart crumbled like stale bread.

On my tenth birthday it was my turn to go out onto the fields blindfolded to pull up the first cabbage of the season. Aged ten you’d already survived the pox, the sweat and just about every other disease that spirited children away early, so it was likely you might grow to adulthood. If the cabbage came up with a lot of earth attached, it meant you’d be rich; if not then you’d be poor.

That spring dawn we all trekked across the damp grass and past trees beginning to unfurl the tiny lavender-colored petals of blossom.

I’d already decided on my career path. I was going to become one of those rare silk-trading women, like that young Margaret Roper from the village at Duddingley who went off on the back of a cart and came back in her own carriage. Like her I’d be apprenticed for seven years; then I’d run my own business. First I had to persuade Pa to persuade Percy to let me go. I knew Pa would scoff at the idea of one of his silly daughters becoming a proper businesswoman.

It didn’t put me off.

The debt would take many years to pay off but eventually I’d be rich enough to settle it myself.

I had it all sorted.

As you do, when you’re ten.

The cabbage came up with a huge clump of sod attached.

I did a cartwheel, singing out, “Wey, hey, hey, the cat and fiddle and the cow jumped over the moon.”

Oh, so it really sodding worked then, didn’t it?

MEMORIES WOULD NOT GET ME
to the station on time.

I flew out of Bwana’s office like a leopard on kola nuts and rushed across the compound, the largest in the city. Across the freshly sprinkled, squeaky-green lawn, past the rockery studded with cacti, past the wide-hipped, big-mama palms of the pineapple grove, past the orange and pink slides and roundabouts of the adventure playground, past the saccharine scent of the mangosteen, pawpaw and vanilla trees, past the open-air swimming pool with mosquitoes buzzing over its stagnant surface, past the camel paddocks, and behind all that, finally, to the secreted slave quarters, which had been considerately built next to the sewage dump and pigs’ pen.