The Piper (7 page)

She shakes her head. ‘No, please. Go on. What happened next?’

Grandad Peter thinks for a moment, as though trying to remember. Then his eyes widen slightly, as the details return to him.

He continues with his story.

Peter woke with a gasp and, for a few moments, he didn’t know where he was. He lay there, his heart thumping like a steam hammer in his chest while he told himself repeatedly,
It was just a dream. It was just a dream
…

Then bit by bit, it all came back to him … the station early that morning, the train journey, the Friends’ Meeting House, that nightmarish ride across the Marsh to Sheldon Grange …

He looked quickly around the little room. Sunlight was streaming in through the skylight and he could hear birds singing out there in the world.

He realised that somebody had just knocked on the door of his room.

‘H … hello?’ he murmured.

‘Time to get up, Peter,’ announced Mrs Beesley’s strident voice. ‘The day’s almost over. And give that sister of yours a shout while you’re at it. I knocked on ’er door but I didn’t get an answer.’

‘Er… right, Mrs Beesley. I’m on my way.’ He flung aside the covers, got out of bed and dressed himself hurriedly, realising that his hopes for a leisurely holiday in the country were clearly not to be. He went down to the next floor and after a visit to the lavatory, he walked along the landing to Daisy’s room. He tapped on the door but there was no sound from within, so he turned the handle and went inside.

Daisy was lying on her back in the huge bed, her blonde hair fanned on the pillow. As he drew closer, he could see that she was still asleep, her eyes closed. She had a doll cradled in her arms, hugged in close to her face and Peter was surprised to see that it wasn’t Eva, but one of the ‘valuable’ dolls from the window seat, a tiny figure with black hair and a white, china head. The bright-green glass eyes of the doll looked somehow too big for her face. Peter frowned, wondering what Mrs Beesley would have to say about it if she knew. He reached out to try and prise the doll carefully out of Daisy’s grip, but as he did so, Daisy spoke, making him start.

‘No, it’s not,’ she said, sounding rather cross. ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

Peter smiled. She was talking in her sleep, but quite clearly, as though in the middle of a conversation.

‘Daisy?’ he murmured.

A pause. ‘But I’m not
supposed
to go out at night. It’s not safe.’ Another lengthy pause, as though she was listening to a reply. Then: ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll see what Peter says.’

‘Daisy!’ Peter reached out a hand and shook his sister’s shoulder. She awoke suddenly, looking startled.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked crossly, glaring at him.

‘Time to get up, sleepyhead. You were talking in your sleep,’

‘Was not.’

‘Were too!’

Now Daisy was looking in surprise at the doll in her hands. ‘Why did you put this here?’ she asked. ‘Mrs Beesley said I wasn’t to touch the dolls. She’ll be angry if she finds out.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he assured her. ‘I just came in the room this minute. Here.’ He reached out, took the doll from her and walked over to the window seat, where he slotted it into an empty space amongst the others. He looked out of the window. It was a bright, sunny morning but the grounds of the Grange appeared to be deserted. He turned back to look at Daisy.

She struggled into a sitting position and stared slowly around the room, blinking like an owl. She looked dazed, still half asleep.

‘Where’s Eva?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He looked around the room and then saw Daisy’s regular doll lying face down on the wooden floor beside the bed, half hidden by a fold of bedcovers. ‘Here she is,’ he announced, and he stooped to pick her up. ‘Oh,’ he said, dismayed.

Eva’s black face had a big jagged crack across the middle.

Daisy glared at him. ‘What have you done?’ she shrieked.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ he protested. ‘She must have fallen off the bed in the night.’ He stepped forward and handed her the damaged doll. ‘What a shame,’ he said.

Daisy cradled the doll in her arms and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Poor Eva,’ she wailed. ‘I promised I’d look after you and now see what’s happened.’

‘I expect Mum and Dad will buy you a new doll as soon as we get home,’ Peter assured her.

‘I don’t
want
a new doll. I want Eva.’

Peter sighed. This morning wasn’t going very well so far. He studied his sister for a moment. ‘Daisy, were you dreaming just now?’

She shook her head sullenly. ‘Why?’ she muttered.

‘It’s just that when I came in you were … well, it was as though you were talking to somebody.’

She didn’t say anything, so he added, ‘You’d better get up and dressed.’ He smiled, made an attempt to be jovial. ‘You’re not in Lunnen now!’

‘It’s
London
,’ she corrected him, her face arranged into a scowl.

‘What’s wrong with you this morning?’

‘I didn’t get much sleep.’

‘You were doing a pretty good job of it when I came in,’ he assured her. ‘And talking to somebody.’

‘Was NOT!’

He sighed. He wasn’t going to get into that again. ‘Well, anyway, you’d better move yourself, before the old battle-axe comes looking for you. I’ll see you downstairs.’ He walked to the door and then turned back to look at her. She was still cradling Eva. Beyond her, the other dolls watched her in silence. There was something about the intensity of their concerted gaze that unsettled Peter. ‘Don’t be all day,’ he said and he went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Just as he was about to walk away, he quite distinctly heard Daisy say, ‘Why did you do that? That wasn’t very nice!’

A shiver of apprehension went through him. He hesitated, on the point of opening the door again and going back inside, but something stopped him. Because he knew that if he went back in there, Daisy would look at him with those big, innocent eyes and ask him what he was talking about. He felt a strange sense of foreboding within him and he thought about the dream he’d had, that hideous pale face rising up out of the water…

He shook his head to dispel the last traces of sleep and went downstairs to face a new day.

He found Mrs Beesley in the kitchen, standing at the cooking range over a sizzling frying pan. The room was rich with the appetising aroma of bacon and he felt his stomach gurgle in anticipation. She looked up from her work for a moment and nodded him towards the kitchen table. ‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘Where’s that sister of yours?’

‘She’ll be down in a moment,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she slept too well.’

Mrs Beesley grunted. ‘First night in a new house, that’s not unusual,’ she said. She cracked open an egg with an expert one-handed flourish and dropped it into the frying pan. ‘An old place like this, there’s all kinds of noises at night. Creaks, rattles … and then there’s outside. Owls hooting, winds a-blowing … noises you might never identify.’ She cracked a second egg and dropped it in beside the other one. She took a spoon and drizzled hot fat over the yolks, then lifted her head as Daisy trudged into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. ‘Ah, now here’s madam,’ she observed. ‘I ’ope you’re feeling hungry. Got a good old country breakfast for you.’

Daisy took a seat next to Peter. ‘Eva got broken,’ she said moodily.

‘Eva?’

‘Her doll,’ explained Peter. ‘I think it fell off the bed.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame. Perhaps I’ll get Adam to look at it for you. He’s very handy with a tube of glue, that man.’

‘Where
is
Adam?’ asked Peter.

‘He has his breakfast out in the stable,’ she told him. ‘Sleeps out there as well. We don’t allow him in the house too often.’

Peter frowned. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘He’s just a hired hand,’ said Mrs Beesley, as though that explained everything, but Peter didn’t really understand what she meant. Surely, if
she
wasn’t part of the Sheldon family, then she was a hired hand too?

She served up two plates of sausage, egg and bacon and brought them over to the table, setting them down in front of the children.

‘That’ll stick to yer ribs,’ she assured them.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He picked up his knife and fork and set to with gusto, but he knew that Daisy was more finicky than him. She sat there, staring at her plate but making no attempt to eat.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Mrs Beesley. ‘It’s eggs and bacon. You have that in Lunnen, don’t you?’

‘Mummy always breaks my yolk for me,’ said Daisy quietly, and Peter nudged her under the table with one foot. He reached over and sliced open her egg with his knife, causing the yolk to ooze across the plate.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All done.’

Daisy continued to gaze at her plate. ‘But now it’s all runny,’ she complained. She looked at Mrs Beesley. ‘Do you have any ketchup?’ she asked.

‘I should think not!’ said Mrs Beesley, as though she’d asked for something illegal. ‘I don’t ’old with that new-fangled stuff. That’s how we eat ’em on the Marsh, take it or leave it.’

Daisy sighed and picking up her cutlery, she began to pick half-heartedly at the food.

Mrs Beesley returned to the range and busied herself for a few moments. She came back with a cup of tea for Peter and a glass of milk for Daisy. She watched as Peter spooned sugar into his cup.

‘Enjoy it while you can,’ she advised him. ‘Everyone’s saying that stuff’ll be rationed before very much longer.’

‘What’s
rationed
?’ asked Daisy.

‘It’s when they only let you have so much of something,’ said Peter. ‘Like one lump of sugar a day or one slice of bacon a week.’

‘I shouldn’t like that,’ said Daisy, lifting a dainty scrap of bacon to her mouth. Peter placed a whole rasher onto a slice of bread and butter, folded it across the middle and began to eat it in large hungry bites.

‘You eat like a wolf,’ complained Daisy and he was reminded of his dream.

‘Nothing wrong with a healthy appetite,’ said Mrs Beesley. ‘That boy’s going to need his energy if he’s to make himself useful around the place. Peter was telling me you didn’t sleep too well,’ she added, reaching for another cup.

‘Not really,’ said Daisy. ‘The girls woke me up.’

Mrs Beesley didn’t turn, but Peter noticed how her body tensed at this. ‘Girls?’ she muttered.

‘Yes, the ones who were dancing in the garden last night.’

Peter saw the china cup slip from Mrs Beesley’s fingers and fall to the tiled floor. It seemed to fall for a long time, long enough for him to anticipate the sound of it breaking to pieces and yet it still made him jump. Mrs Beesley looked down at the scattered pieces at her feet, as though she was completely surprised to see them there.

‘Now look what I’ve gone and done,’ she reproached herself. ‘Bone china, that was.’ She turned and glared at Daisy. ‘Fancy saying such a silly thing,’ she snapped. ‘Girls, indeed!’

‘But there
were
girls,’ insisted Daisy. ‘They were dancing to the music out in the garden. I saw them.’

‘You couldn’t have,’ Peter told her. ‘You must have been dreaming.’

‘I wasn’t even asleep,’ she insisted. ‘I heard that funny music playing again, so I got out of bed and I looked out of the window and there were two girls dancing on the lawn.’

‘But that’s silly,’ insisted Peter. ‘It was really late when we went to bed. You must have imagined it.’

Daisy responded as she usually did when challenged in this way. She started to cry. ‘But I s-s-saw them,’ she wailed.

Peter reacted instinctively. He put a hand on Daisy’s shoulder and leaned closer to her. ‘You know how you get bad dreams sometimes? And afterwards, you can’t always tell what’s a dream and what isn’t.’

Saying this made an image flash through his mind – a bleached white face bobbing up to the surface of the canal. He had to close his eyes for a moment to try to rid himself of it.

‘What’s up with her?’ demanded a gruff voice and Peter opened his eyes to see that a man had just strode into the room, the grey-haired man that Peter had glimpsed in the sitting room yesterday evening. He was short and stocky, dressed in a tweed jacket and trousers. Up close, Mr Sheldon looked ill, Peter thought, his face thin and haggard, his eyes rimmed with dark, fleshy pouches. He took a seat at the head of the table and sat there, gazing crossly at Daisy, as though the sound of her crying was annoying him. ‘We don’t want crying in this ’ouse,’ he told Daisy. ‘The wind might change and you’ll be stuck like that.’

Daisy’s mouth dropped open and she sat there regarding the man mournfully, gasping for breath as she tried to stop herself from weeping.

‘She had a nightmare,’ said Peter and was aware of Daisy looking at him, an expression of betrayal on her face.

‘Is that all?’ The man attempted a reassuring smile, but just like Mrs Beesley’s earlier efforts, it was no more than a tightening of the muscles around the mouth. His eyes remained blank and expressionless. ‘You’ll be all right, my dear. I expect you’re just homesick. Once you get used to the way we do things, you’ll be right as rain, won’t she, Mrs B?’ He turned to look at his housekeeper to see that she was on her hands and knees, sweeping up the bits of broken crockery with a dustpan and brush. ‘What happened there?’ he asked.

‘I dropped a cup,’ she replied, not looking up at him. ‘It was from the best set. I’m sorry, sir.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not the end of the world,’ he observed. ‘There’s worse things than a bit of broken crockery, a lot worse.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He turned back to look at the children. ‘I’m Mr Sheldon,’ he told them. ‘I own the Grange.’

‘We’re very pleased to meet you, sir,’ said Peter, minding his manners, as he’d always been taught. ‘This is my sister, Daisy.’

Daisy nodded silently.

‘I thought I’d eat my breakfast with you this morning,’ said Mr Sheldon. ‘So we can have ourselves a little chat.’ He tried the unconvincing smile again, then looked expectantly at Mrs Beesley. ‘Mrs B?’

‘Oh, of course, Mr Sheldon, I wasn’t thinking.’ In a flash, she was on her feet and back at the range, where she took a round metal cover off a plate and brought it to the table, holding it with an oven glove. It was a full English breakfast with sausages, bacon and two fried eggs. Mr Sheldon glanced at his plate, as though he couldn’t be less interested and then, picking up his cutlery, he proceeded to push the food around, without actually putting any of it into his mouth. Peter noticed that his hands shook rather badly. After a few moments, Mr Sheldon lifted his gaze to Peter. ‘So, how old are you, boy?’ he asked.