Cold Shoulder Road (15 page)

The mist had begun to thicken again, as dusk fell, so that the bulky shape which was lodged in the middle of the central tree could hardly be distinguished until they were right underneath it.

They had taken the precaution of leaving their horses tethered a quarter of a mile off, and going the last part of the way on foot, very quietly, hand in hand, Is with a finger at her lips.

“Well I am blest!” observed Arun in thought-speech, looking up through the boughs. “A whole genuine naval frigate, guns and all, lodged up there, snug as a hen in a nesting box. I reckon even the First Lord of the Admiralty couldn’t fetch it out of there.”

“No, he surely couldn’t,” agreed Is. “But what d’you bet there’s somebody a-lodging up in there? And who d’you bet it is?”

He had no need to answer. And she herself had no further possible doubt, for a furious
“Morow!”
snapped the silence, a small form, hard as a bullet, butted against her leg, and a frightfully sharp set of teeth gouged into her calf.

“Figgin! My cat Figgin! My cat!”

But Figgin was extremely angry, and had no intention of stopping for a friendly exchange with his long-lost mistress. He growled and spat at her, and scurried up the trunk of the chestnut tree into the obscurity above.

F
IRST OF ALL THEY HAD AN ARGUMENT ABOUT
the horses.

“Why don’t we just set ’em free,” argued Is. “They’ll wander their own way home. Everybody round here will know they come from the King’s Head at Seagate. They’ll take no harm. After all,
we
didn’t hire ’em.”

But Arun said that the Merry Gentry might steal the horses, and why should poor Tom the landlord be the loser. “I’ll take them back tomorrow,” he said. “For tonight they can bide where they are, tethered under the oaks; there’s plenty of pasturage.”

From above, a voice hailed them. It was high and weary, rather sarcastic; it was a voice which, at many desponding moments in the past year, Is had been afraid that she would never hear again.

“Well, you two! Are you coming up? Or are you going to stand parleying there all night?”

Now they noticed that a rope-ladder had been let down. For the lowest branches of the huge chestnut tree were well out of reach.

“I’ll go first,” said Is. She had spent a great part of her life in trees, and felt comfortably at home in them. She shot up the ladder as nimbly as a squirrel, until she arrived at where the boughs began. Here it was necessary to push one’s way through a kind of thicket, for the ship, when hurled by the gale into the midst of the tree, had smashed and torn a great many branches. These had not fallen to the ground, but jammed criss-cross among the framework of the tree, so that the frigate was gripped in a regular cage of branches, some alive, some dead, pointing in every possible direction. They helped very much to screen the hull from view, besides making it most unlikely that it could ever be removed from the tree.

Is found that the last part of the climb entailed pushing through a mass of twigs and dead leaves which still clung doggedly on to the parent branches.

“Well – stranger!” said Penny, receiving her sister over the ship’s rail with a tight, cross hug. “It took you long enough to come up with me!”

“Blame it, Pen! Hold hard! I only
found
your message last night! We come as quick as we was able. Before that we’d took a wrong cast; went to Seagate, looking for Arun’s Mum there . . . This here’s Arun, Penny,” she added, as he came over the rail.

Penelope gave Arun a scrutinising, cousinly nod. “Y’Mum’s been worrying herself threadbare about you,” was all she tartly said. He gave her an equally cool stare, and saw a skinny, freckled, fair-haired woman who looked as if she’d stand no nonsense from anybody. But – “Welcome aboard the
Throstle,
” she added in a more friendly tone. “She makes a right handy nest for us fly-by-nights, don’t she? And I reckon we can use a feller like you aboard; you make up songs, don’t you?”

“Is my Mum really here?” asked Arun, looking about him.

Penelope had brought a horn lantern. She picked it up and threw a dim light over their surroundings.

The quarterdeck of the frigate
Throstle
was about twenty-one feet long, very narrow, and the space along it even more reduced by some guns on one side and various ring-bolts on the other. The ship’s masts and rigging had been smashed and battered by its arrival in the chestnut tree, and hung in a tangle overhead, still further obstructing passage along the deck. But somebody had painstakingly sawed through branches and spars, and coiled up ropes, clearing paths through the jungle. Along one of these paths two people now made their way.

Two people.

“Who’s
that?
” growled Arun to Is in thought-speech, and she answered, also without making a sound, “Had you forgotten? Why, it’s the Handsel Child.”

Ruth Twite was not so tall as Penny, but was very thin, so that she seemed tall. Her straight iron-grey hair was drawn back into a big loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her pale face seemed to be all made up out of triangles – thought Is – deep three-cornered eye-sockets, a pointed chin that stuck out, deep lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth. Is could see why people in Folkestone had taken her for a witch. She did look like one. The child who clung on to her hand was vaguely familiar. After a moment or two Is remembered why. It was the same child – boy or girl? – who had loitered around the street market in Folkestone, who had exchanged broom-twigs for fish.

Arun and his mother stood looking at one another without speaking.

That’s rum, thought Is. But then she remembered that, of course, they never
had
been allowed to talk to one another.

Mrs Twite spoke first, awkwardly, as if she hardly knew how to begin.

“Here you are, then, my son. At last! How many times had I given you up for lost . . . I hardly expected to see you again . . . This is Pye.”

Pye scowled horribly at Arun, squinting, sucking a thumb.

Pye is a right queer little goblin, thought Is. He – or she? – was a thickset, solid child, aged perhaps four or five, with a round face, a blob of a pink nose, and round, staring, squinting pale-coloured eyes.

“Wotcher, Pye!” said Is kindly. “My name’s Is.”

Pye made no answer, only sucked and stared and squinted the harder.

“Pye can’t speak,” Penny explained.

And Ruth added, “She screamed so much, while she lived with Dominic de la Twite, that we believe she screamed herself dumb. But we are hoping that time will mend this.”

“She ain’t deaf?” asked Is, wondering if it was kind to talk about the kid like this, to her face.

“Oh, no. She hears us very well.”

Pye put out a long pink tongue.

“Are you hungry, you two?” Penny asked quickly. “Why don’t you come below and see our quarters? There’s plenty of room for you on this craft. She used to carry a crew of fifty. I believe.”

She led the way down a companion ladder, along a passage past cabin doors and into quite a fair-sized panelled room, shaped to the curve of the ship, containing a mahogany table and chairs.

Why the
pest
, thought Is, following, don’t Aunt Ruth have a hug or a kiss for Arun? If she’d given him up for lost, if she’d worried about him so? What kind of a welcome is
that
? She talked to him as if he was the rent collector. These Silent Sect folk sure are a cussed lot.

As they sat down to a meal everybody – except Pye, perhaps – felt a good deal of awkwardness and constraint; the kind of curb on natural chat which falls when people have not seen each other for a long time, people to whom a whole lot of strange and drastic things have happened in the meantime.

Also – although they were related – Is had never met her aunt Ruth before, Arun had never met his cousin Penelope. Furthermore – Is noticed – Arun had taken a strong instant dislike to Pye, which she returned with interest. She often stuck out her tongue at him and scowled horribly; then he would give her an angry look, at which she clung even tighter to Ruth’s hand.

“We use the officers’ mess for eating,” Penny was explaining matter-of-factly. “And the galley next door we cleared out, too. Chock-full of chestnut burrs, we found it. There’s a plenty cabins with hammocks in em. But the hold down below is a real mess. Everything under this deck got pretty well mashed.”

“What was in the hold?” asked Arun.

“Gunpowder, mainly,” said Penny drily. “So don’t go poking around down there with a candle.”

While Penny spoke, she was ladling out a stew of rabbit, parsnip, chestnuts, and mushrooms – much tastier, Is thought, than what the sailors had provided last night in Cold Harbour. Pen always had been a right handy cook.

Ruth Twite fed little Pye with a spoon.

“Can’t she feed herself yet?” demanded Is, surprised and shocked.

“Not always.” Ruth raised her brows. “Some times better than other times.”

Pye clung to Ruth’s wrist all through the meal and insisted on being fed.

Afterwards, while Ruth put Pye to bed in the Second Officer’s cabin, Penny showed Is and Arun the rest of the ship.

“Pen – how long d’you reckon to
stay
here?” Is asked her sister.

She had told Penny about leaving de la Twite locked up in the barn, and her fear that he might have done the place some mischief when breaking his way out.

“He musta been as mad as a hornet by the time he got loose. I’m right sorry, Pen.”

“And he’s a nasty chap to tangle with at best, by all accounts.” Penny shrugged and sighed. “No, I’ve not met him, but I’ve heard plenty about him, and that sister of his, from Ruth. Well – it’s too bad about the barn, but it can’t be helped. So long as Pye’s with us, I reckon we’ll have to keep on the run.”

“But, Penny – does Aunt Ruth mean to keep Pye for
ever
?”

Arun had wandered off to investigate the rigging; he had climbed up the shrouds and now was high in the chestnut tree’s upper branches looking out over the forest into the night sky.

Is went on: “Pye’s such a spooky little chavey! And there’s such a
lot
of trouble rising from her: the Merry Gentry taking other folks’ kids – two, at least we’ve heard on – and everybody scared to put a foot out of doors. Is it
worth
it, Pen, just for that little hobgoblin?”

Penny said in a dry voice, “You mean it’d be better worth it if Pye had long gold hair and taking ways, then she’d be more value for people’s trouble?”

“Well, no. Perhaps not that—”

Penny said, “Ruth ain’t one to turn back off a job once she’s begun it. And she reckons it’d be a big step forward if the kid can get back her voice and learn to talk. Or write. Then, d’ye see, she could tell what she’s seen. The Gentry had her as a hostage, you know, before she were handed back into Twite’s keeping; only, it seems, the Gentry found her own folks didn’t want her, so then, as no one cared what became of her, the Gentry passed her back to Twite, when Uncle Hose said there should be a Gentry hostage. Of course Twite was sore as a bear when he found out she’d no folks to care, for that lowered her value. But the Gentry said she’d
the knowledge
, and could lay information about many of them. Only, of course, she can’t talk. That’s why Ruth is trying to teach her to write. Then, maybe, there’d be enough evidence to cop the Gentry.”

“On the word of a little dumb kid? Teach her to
write
?” said Is dubiously. “Ain’t she a bit young for that?”

“Young she may be,” said Penny, “but she’s sharp as a needle. Make no error about that! De la Twite, though, he gave her a real hard time. Hung up in a basket, she were, all day, every day, over the rail track where it goes into the Channel Tunnel – so they say, for I’ve never seen it—”

“Croopus,” said Is, who had. “
Why
?”

“As a warning to the Gentry. She could be dropped down any time. Under the train, you see.”

Is remembered the round, black entrance, the red gate with its criss-cross bars. She shivered.

“And at night he shut her in a box.”

“A
box
?”

“So’s she couldn’t escape. She’d tried, ever so many times. That was when Ruth used to hear her screaming every night – when they lived next door in Cold Shoulder Road, you know. So, well, Ruth couldn’t stand it. Happened I come down that way from Blackheath Edge, selling dolls to the fancy shops in Folkestone Parade, and I called in on Ruth, which I’d took the habit of doing, to ask if she’d news of you or Arun, and she said to me, ‘What shall I do? I can’t abear it any longer.’ She’d asked the neighbours, she’d asked the parson, everybody said it wasn’t their business, and it wouldn’t do to rile the Gentry, and what did it matter about one halfwitted kid? Dead scared, everyone was. Didn’t want to meddle. So I said to Ruth, it’s none of my affair either, but if you want to snatch her, you and she could hole up in my barn, and no one the wiser. No one visits there, not above twice a year. And I’m just off westwards, to buy wool in Dorset and china clay in Cornwall. I give her a key to the barn . . . So that’s what she done.”

“You weren’t there when she flitted?”

“Me? I was away in St Ives. Didn’t I just say? Then, as ill luck would have it, along came that pesky gale, and done a lot of damage, and all the Silent Blokes took and moved up the coast to Seagate. Ruth mighta stayed where she was, and wouldn’t have had Twite next door no more.”

“But she’d still have thought of Pye screaming every night,” said Is, half to herself. She asked, “What made you leave the barn, then?”

“We found one day a stranger had been, while we was out. Footprints. And your cat Figgin was real gnarled in his temper. It worried Ruth. She didn’t want to take no chances. Little Pye had just begun to act a bit more human. And we heard about this-here ship, lodged in the tree, reckoned it might make a good place to perch. So we come and give it the once-over. And moved in.”