The Wolf in the Attic (8 page)

‘Un, deux, trois,’ I murmur, and step into the Great Wood.

T
HE WIND DROPS
at once, down below, though it keeps coursing through the trees overhead like the sound of the sea. I look up, and can see the branches moving across the grey sky. It is darker here, but I can still see my way. I have become used to the night, and my eyes are wide open, taking it all in.

T
HE FOREST FLOOR
is covered in dead bracken and brambles, lean as wire. I pick my way through it, always uphill, and I am warmer now, puffing, even hot under Pa’s big shapeless cap. I knock snow from the brambles as I advance, and tear myself free of the thorns. The undergrowth is worn down by winter, but it still rears up like a cloud all around me, blocking my way. I am about to give up and turn back, when all of a sudden a path opens out in front of me, paler in the gloom, a white lane through the trees. I stumble onto it, scratched and breathing hard. I bend down and look close at the ground, like Hawkeye, and I see tracks in the snow, cloven marks left by deer that have punched through the snow and left frozen slots in the earth below.

Happier now, I follow the track as it curves and meanders like a stream round the foot of the trees.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep…

I read that once, somewhere. It seems to fit here, as though there were power in the words.

‘Dark and deep,’ I whisper aloud as I stride along, faster now. I feel almost as though I am here for a reason other than my own, as though the trees themselves have something in store for me. I wanted to get clear of Oxford, the Meadow, the sounds of the city and the walls of the house. And my father, too. I wanted to leave them all behind and just be myself for a while. Anna Francis, intrepid explorer.

It seemed all so very simple when I left Walton Street, but now it as if I have stumbled into quite another world, in which I am not even a spectator. I am barely here at all. The woods ignore me, and I feel oddly at home in them. There is no fear in this dark. After that last day on the burning quayside of the city, there is not much more to fear in life at all. The very worst thing has already happened.

That is what I tell myself as I make my way deeper into the woods.

F
OR A WHILE,
I think it is my own heartbeat I hear thumping in my throat, a soft rhythm. But after a while I realise that the sound is beyond me, in the trees up ahead where the land rises. The path is narrower here, the brambles and dead bracken starting to choke it, and when I look up I can see the sky darkening beyond the treetops, and here and there the glimpse of a star.

The cloud is clearing, and it seems with that the cold deepens, and the snow begins to crunch under my feet like barley sugar between the teeth. A light grows in the forest, soft and silver. The moon must have risen, and though it is nothing like full it seems incredibly bright. The snow seems to take on a glow of its own, glittering like crushed glass. And still, I hear that strange thumping beat off in the wood ahead. A drum, tapped lightly, now slow, now fast.

And I hear a woman laugh.

The sound is shocking in the moonlit wood, a noise that does not belong there. It brings me up short, breathing hard, my heart beating as fast as the drum.

And there is light, a yellow flicker of it in the deep part of the trees.

Another fire, another night of moon.

Now I am all at a stand. I want to go back. I do not want another adventure in the night, with a knife at the heart of it. But I am angry at myself for the fear I feel now. I am angry in general, at father, and Miss Hawcross, and the bloody Turks, and the memory of running across Port Meadow and wetting myself like a baby. The anger is stronger than the fear.

I start walking again, but now I leave the path, and pull father’s old cap around my head like a hood, and move at a crouch, zigzagging through the trees towards the far flickering light. The knife is cold in my pocket. It feels ugly to the touch, and there is no reassurance there.

Closer. And now I see that the fire is bright and tall, much bigger than the one that was on the Meadow. And the drum is being tapped light and fast. And the woman’s voice starts up again, but now she is singing, a rippling, soaring song in a language I do not understand, and yet it is familiar too. Her voice is beautiful, and the song is old and foreign and like nothing I have ever heard in England before, sometimes almost tuneless, sometimes as piercing and beautiful as a sunlit shard of ice.

Closer, the trees hiding me, the moonlight fading as the firelight grows, until at last I hunker down behind a mound of snapping ochre bracken, and I can take it all in.

There are perhaps a dozen people around the fire, some sat upon bedrolls, as comfortable looking as though they were lying down on sofas in a warm room. I see the shine of the flames on metal pots, on earrings – the men as well as the women – on jewellery, and there is a lovely savoury smell. A big blackened pot is hung over the edge of the fire by a single bent branch and a stout woman with a blue headscarf is stirring it.

An old man taps a little drum he holds between his knees, his big brown hands almost hiding it, and another woman with long skirts and a fringed shawl is singing the beautiful song. She is very pretty, with eyes as large and dark as a horse’s, and heavy eyebrows. She looks something like the people who come to the Committee meetings – foreign, eastern – but there is none of their defeat in her face, and her teeth are white and perfect. I feel a sudden rush of memory, as though I had seen her before somewhere, but it passes as quick as a bursting bubble.

They look so similar, all of them. Dark, lean men with sharp faces, dressed shabbily, with kerchiefs tied round their necks, their trousers out at the knee. Some of them are barefoot, despite the icy cold. The women are better clad, the older ones with bright headscarves and dangling necklaces that glitter and gleam in the firelight. They have long rings in their ears, and the one tending the pot has a jewelled chain sparking low on her forehead, hung with little coins that jingle as she moves.

Somehow, these people remind me of the long-lost city where I was born. They are exotic, out of place here in the cold northern wood. I can tell just by looking at them that they are from so far away.

As I am.

Something else, moving in the firelight. I thought it was low-hanging branches but now I see that dangling from the trees surrounding the campsite are lots of little shapes made of twigs, and as I frown and study them I see that they are all the same. They are stars, five-pointed, bound with roots – crude, but rather lovely too. And somehow disquieting here in this place. These people have ornamented the trees, hanging these symbols up like somebody decorating their drawing room. How odd.

I hear something close by in the briars, a rustle, and I turn.

And right beside me the thin dark boy with the wedge-shaped face is crouched, the firelight playing on his long nose and lighting up his eyes.

I start to leap away with a sharp cry that I cannot hold in, and once more, I feel the hard grip of his hand as he seizes my arm, harder even than before.

‘No, no no!’ I hear myself scream, though I am barely aware of anything except his face, and the eyes.

The singing stops. There is a spatter of exclamation around the fire, words I do not understand. With my free hand I reach into my pocket for my knife, but it takes two hands to open it, and he is holding my other arm fast.

‘Leave me alone!’ And I punch him with my free fist, my knuckles lighting with pain as I strike his cheek. He growls, and grabs my other arm, pinioning me, throwing me on my back in the bracken and the snow. I try to kick him, but he sets his weight atop me and crushes me down. I struggle harder than I ever have in life before, but he is far too strong. Our faces are mere inches apart and I raise my head to try and bite him, but he butts me back with his hard skull, and lights go off in my head and I taste blood at the back of my throat.

‘Luca,’ a voice says, ‘Let her up.’

It is the young woman who was singing. I blink away the tears and see that they are all standing around us now, silent. The dark boy looks at me, and all of a sudden he gives a grin and lets go my wrists and springs up, and I am lying there in a circle of strangers on the edge of the firelight, and overhead the moon is bright and fat and the trees are black as veined coal beneath it.

6

T
HEY LOOK AT
me as though I am some insect which is set upon a pin, like those I have seen in the glass cases of the Pitt Rivers in Oxford.

A quick gabble between them in a language I don’t understand, and then the older woman, with the coins on her forehead, says;

‘What you doing spying on us, girl?’ Quick and sharp. There is more authority in her tone than I have ever heard in Miss Hawcross’s, and I answer at once.

‘I wasn’t spying.’

‘I calls it spying,’ she snaps, and to the dark boy she says, ‘Bring her to the fire Luca. Gentle, mind.’

Luca holds out his hand to me with his head cocked on one side. I slap it away. ‘I can get up by myself.’

No knives at least. They stand around studying me again.

‘Just a child,’ a young woman says in English. ‘No harm here, Queenie.’

And to me she says, ‘Come to the fire me dear. No-one will hurt you.’

I rub my throbbing head where Luca’s skull clipped it, and decide that I have nothing to lose. It would be just too absurd to turn around and run away now. It would be childish. And I am not a child, whatever they say.

‘All right.’

The warmth of the fire is very welcome, as I have begun to shiver; and the smell of the food in the pot is something to relish, whatever it is.

‘Sit by me,’ the young woman says with her bright, white-toothed smile. She is really rather beautiful, and her black hair falls in long curls down her back. I sit beside her on a lumpy bedroll of canvas and old carpet, and about the fire the others resume their seats, except for Luca and one of the older men, who talk quietly in their unknown language. Luca looks at me, then nods to his elder, and without another word he sidles off into the dark woods as quietly as a fox, to disappear in a twinkling.

What a sneak, I think, and I rub the bump on my head again.

‘Is you alone?’ the older woman, Queenie asks me, hands on hips. Her eyes are dark as sloes and she has a strong face, as broad as any man’s. The coins glint on her forehead. She looks like a figure from some strange faraway past.

‘Yes.’

She studies me a second, and then grunts, and leans down by the fire. She ladles some of the stuff out of the cooking pot into a battered pewter bowl and it is passed around the fire to me. The young woman retrieves a beautifully worked wooden spoon out of her skirts and places it in the bowl. ‘Eat, me dear. You look half starved.’

I am hungry, and though I cannot see what it is I am eating, I begin scooping it out of the hot bowl with a will. Some kind of beef stew, and there is wild garlic in it, and thyme, and the taste transports me for a moment to another, warmer world. I wolf it down while they all watch, silent as the trees.

‘Where be you from?’ Queenie asks me in a softer tone.

‘From Jericho, in the city,’ I answer between steaming mouthfuls.

Queenie frowns. ‘That ain’t right. You ain’t no more English than me, my girl. I sees it in your face. You is from somewheres far south o’ here.’

‘I am Greek,’ I tell her. I look around the fire as I say it, and I realise with something of a pleased shock that I must look just like these people here. I am dark and olive-skinned with brown eyes and black brows, just like them.

‘Are you Jews?’ I ask them.

Queenie laughs, a rasp of humour, and it travels round the fire.

‘We’m of an old and wandering folk girl, a tribe as ancient as you Greeks – or the Jew-folk too, comes to that. The ignorant calls us Romani, but we ain’t the same as the travellin’ people, though we has dealings with ’em. Egypt is where our kind hails from, in the old, old part o’ the world.’

‘Then what are you doing in England?’ I am quite unafraid now, with the good food in me and the warmth of the fire and the beautiful smiling girl leaning against me.

‘What is you doing here?’ Queenie darts back.

I set down the empty bowl, and decide that the truth cannot hurt. ‘The Turks drove us out, and killed my family and took our home.’

There is a buzz of talk at this, the men speaking among themselves. Queenie gives me a long hard look. I can’t keep her eyes. There is something in them that is as sharp and shrewd as a black crow.

She gives a snort, and then turns back to the fire. Kneeling down, she sets some more sticks upon it, placing each one as carefully as though it were made of glass. Then she blows softly into the heart of them, and the flames lick up and dance yellow and blue, and the heart of the fire glows bright and hungry. She waves her hand through the flames as though she is caressing them, and it seems for a second that the light jumps up brighter to meet her fingers.