Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (37 page)

Their hearts in their mouths, the other children watched me crouching there, and waited to see what Mrs. Muggerage was going
to do.

She said nothing for a long time, while my unguarded oath resonated in our terrified souls. She said nothing, just stared
down at me, for what seemed an eternity. The walls towered around us, cold, dirty and cracked, with barred windows in them
so high above our heads that all we could ever see through them was the sun, the clouds, or the night sky. They were that
high up on purpose, of course, to prevent us from seeing what was outside and dreaming or devising plans for escape; but quite
often, when we were unsupervised, we used to form acrobatic towers by climbing on top of one another. Four children standing
on one another’s shoulders meant that the person on top could grasp the bars and peer out over the wide sill, and we used
to take turns being the one on top. Looking down, we could see the flagstones of the dank little orphanage yard far below,
and part of the high brick gateway that led to the outside world; but of much more interest to us was the rooftop view, at
eye level: the vista of chimneys and church spires receding into the distance and, beyond the city’s rooftops, a glimpse of
hills to the north. We didn’t know any names for the places we were looking at: it was just “Out.” When we scrabbled our way
up to look through the grimy window, we could see Out; we dreamed constantly of being Out, and staying Out, and never coming
back.

And, although I thought about it almost every minute
of every day, I had never longed more to be Out than I did at that moment.

Her teeth bared, Mrs. Muggerage leaned slowly down and pressed her incensed face into mine.

“Do my ears deceive me?” she hissed. Some other child in the room echoed her hiss with a sharp, frightened little intake of
breath. The huge, terrible woman clenched the foul wet rag she’d been holding in her left hand, which, I now saw, was smeared
and dripping with the contents of whatever disgusting corner of the orphanage she’d just been cleaning. It only seemed to
occur to her at this moment that the rag was just the object she needed to make her point, and humiliate me at the same time.

“A mouth as filthy as that,” she snarled, “wants a good clean.”

“
Don’t
,” I moaned, “don’t…
please
don’t…” But there was no escaping it, and the next thing I knew she had grabbed me by the back of the neck with a clawlike
hand to stop me from moving my head, and the vile-smelling thing was thrust into my face, and squeezed hard until it oozed
its slime between my lips and into my nostrils and made me choke and gag.

“Don’t!”
I repeated,
“Please
don’t…
please
don’t…”

“Mog,” said a familiar voice, “Mog, it’s me. Mog! Wake up!”

There still seemed to be something tremendously wet in my face, but, as I came to, I realized it was the eager tongue of my
dog, Lash; and the voice was that of Nick, my twin brother, sitting on my bed looking down at me with an expression of urgency
in the yellow light of a flickering lamp.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

I reached up my hands in relief, and grabbed my dog’s furry head on both sides, both to greet him and to pull him away. His
long snout continued to sniff excitedly at my face and I had to strain with all my strength to hold him back from licking
me.
“Stop
it,” I said, “you
ridiculous
dog.”

Lash was as ridiculous and lovable a dog as a child ever owned, a gangling golden-haired mongrel with a huge smile and a long
tail which was never still, and curly blond eyelashes so prominent they had given me no choice as to what to call him. I ruffled
his head as I blinked in the lamplight and exhaled with relief at the discovery that I wasn’t in the terrible orphanage after
all.

“I was dreaming again,” I said to Nick. “Sorry.”

“Must have been a bad one,” Nick rejoined, “to make you squeal like that. It sounded like you were being murdered. I came
in as fast as I could, but you were about to wake up the whole house.”

I was still coming to. “I was in the orphanage,” I said, the full horror of the dream coming back to me. “I
was being whirled around and around … and Nick, guess who was there? Mrs. Muggerage!”

“Well, that
was
a nightmare then,” said Nick with sympathy.

We may have been twins, Nick and I, but we hadn’t known each other all our lives by any means. We had been born at sea, on
a voyage back from India, to the most beautiful and virtuous mother who had ever lived. I had always thought of her this way;
and, although she had died when we were just two weeks old, I had pictures of her in my head and some small mementos of her
which had always been the most precious things I owned. I was named after her: Imogen was my full name, and I had only acquired
the abbreviated name of Mog in the loathsome orphanage to which I was taken as a baby. I lived there until I was six or seven,
when I had the good fortune to be taken away. The streets of London were no place for a little girl, on her own with no one
to support her; but there was no shortage of work for boys, and because I’d always looked like a boy, I got a job as a printer’s
devil for Mr. Cramplock, in Clerkenwell. It was a happy life and it contained lots of adventures, which is another story altogether.
But ever since I left the orphanage, I’d had dreams like the one from which I’d just awoken, and for several years I’d lived
in constant terror of being discovered and dragged back there.

Nick, meanwhile, had somehow become separated from me in our tiniest infancy, and had grown up completely separately. For
as long as he could remember, he’d lived among the criminals and sailors of London, looked after by a violent ship’s bosun
who passed himself off as his father, and by Mrs. Muggerage, the dreadful woman in my nightmare. Together they treated him
even worse, if possible, than I was treated in the orphanage. We had only met for the first time, completely by accident,
last year, when we were both twelve. It turned out we’d been living less than a mile apart, both of us making our way in the
crowded streets of London without knowing one another. Neither of us had any inkling we had a brother or sister at all, let
alone that we were
twins
, living so close together all this time.

Of course, we’d been together ever since, Nick, myself, and Lash. I’d never known anything you might call a family, in my
entire life; dreams and contemplations of my mother had been the most comfort I could hope for. Now, for the first time, I
was getting used to the idea that I wasn’t alone. It meant more to me than anything else in the world; and, to be honest,
I still lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding it had all been an impossible dream.

I held Lash’s soft head firmly between my hands and gazed into his face, pretending to be stern with him.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think it would matter
how far away Lash’s face was; he could still stick out his tongue and lick my nose. How long do you think it is?”

“It probably never ends,” said Nick. “He could sort of
launch
it out of his mouth and lick absolutely anything at all, on the other side of the room, or on the other side of the street.
It probably curls up inside his mouth and down his throat and goes on forever, like a kind of snake.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s the middle of the night,” said Nick, and his voice was suddenly low and quiet as though he’d just remembered how late
it was, and how dark.

“Did I wake you up?”

“Yes …” He hesitated. “I was dreaming too,” he admitted. “I was glad to be woken up, actually.” We had both been having especially
vivid dreams in the past few weeks, and when we described our dreams to one another it seemed we were both dreaming very similar
things, again and again: dreams of being pursued, dreams in which people we knew were in danger and we were powerless to help
them.

“Can you hear something?” I asked suddenly.

“I can hear the wind,” said Nick.

“No, there’s something else,” I said, straining to listen.

I stopped making a fuss of Lash, and got out of bed, and went over to the window. There was no curtain or blind, and the window
didn’t quite fit the frame properly,
which meant if it was windy it often used to rattle and keep me awake. Nick had tried to fold some paper to the right thickness
to make a wedge to hold the window shut, but it had never really worked, and the wind still used to whistle through the gap
in an eerie way.

“Can’t you hear it?” I asked him. “A sort of—crying sound.”

“It’s just the wind,” said Nick, yawning.

“It’s not,” I said. The wind certainly was hissing violently through the trees tonight; and this house had turrets, and gables,
and roofs which sloped at crazy angles to one another, all of which hooked and snagged the wind and could make it sound like
thunder. But what I could hear was distinct from all that, like a sporadic distant sobbing. “There!” I said. “It’s someone
crying, Nick. A girl, or a woman.” We both listened hard, and every now and then I was sure it was there — somewhere amid
the wind, beyond the windowpane, or perhaps in another part of the house. But I could see from Nick’s face that he didn’t
believe me.

I climbed onto the window seat to look outside, but the only thing I could see in the darkness was my own reflection.

“Put the lamp out,” I said to Nick.

Now, the scene outside emerged. There was a bright three-quarter moon tonight, which only occasionally appeared between scudding
clouds. From where we slept
we could see the central tower of the castle, with seven tall chimneys in a row jutting out behind it like a lower jaw against
the sky. Rooks’ nests poked out from between and inside them, and at dusk the rooks would circle and screech for an hour or
more in great excitable flocks. This late at night, they were all roosting, oblivious to the wind which stirred their stiff
feathers as they huddled among the chimney stacks. At the foot of the tower, if I craned my neck to peer over the sill, I
could see the pale gravel of the courtyard. Behind that were the low stable buildings and the coach-house on the far side,
and beyond them the darkness of the forest. Everything was disappointingly calm and normal. I couldn’t even hear the sobbing
anymore.

“There’s no sign of—“ I began. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark outside, I could see the faint glow of lamplight
in one of the windows in the tower, immediately opposite.

“Nick, there’s a light!” I whispered.

It was Sir Septimus’s study. From this bedroom there was a perfect view across the courtyard into the side of his big oriel
window, and Nick and I could often see him sitting there at his desk, in profile, sometimes working, sometimes talking, often
just appearing to stare into space ahead of him; and, coming and going, the loyal dark figures of his servants, Bonefinger
and Melibee. Like a pair of old black ravens, they attended quietly to his
wishes, kept the affairs of the house in order, and were rarely far from his side. As I peered out into the night, there was
no sign of Sir Septimus in his customary chair, but tall shadows seemed to be moving in the lamp-lit tower room.

“I can’t see him,” I said, “but there’s
someone
in there.”

“He’s not normally up as late as this,” said Nick. He was kneeling on my bed watching me, still yawning. “Maybe he heard you
crying out, and he’s gotten up to investigate.”

“Come and
look
,” I said, impatiently. “It might be a robber.” And I pressed my face back to the cold pane.

He was the ugliest, most evil-looking man I’d ever seen
.

He glared up at me from the poster, his outline glistening as the ink dried, making him seem more alive and threatening. I
held him out at arm’s length to stop him from creasing….