The Wolf in the Attic (9 page)

‘I was askin’ what you are a doing in this here wood, creeping up on us like a little stoat,’ Queenie says. ‘Care to tell us that, Greek girl?’

‘I… don’t know,’ I say, keeping carefully to the truth. ‘The moon and the snow… I had to get out in it. And there was something about the woods that just drew me in.’

Queenie looks up at that, and I see her glance at the moon. One of the older men, the one who had exchanged words with the boy Luca, rattles on harshly in their language, shooting suspicious glances at me as he does. I don’t like him. He has grey whiskers, and looks like a bright-eyed rat in a flat cap.

Queenie frowns. ‘There’s more you ain’t told us, child.’

The girl beside me tightens her arm about my shoulders. Now it feels less like affection, and more like a restraint. ‘Speak up dearie,’ she hisses to me.

My heart is thumping fast again. They all stare at me. Who are these people, so strange and foreign, and why are they out in the woods on a night like this? The fear comes back, cold enough to make the food I have just eaten turn to a cold lump in my tummy.

‘I saw that boy before,’ I say, reluctantly. ‘Luca. I saw him on Port Meadow weeks back. He was with some other men, and they had a fight.’

I wish I had Pie to hold. Their eyes are all so sharp and cold now, and the firelight almost makes them seem to shine yellow, blank as glass.

‘You saw what happened then,’ Queenie says.

‘I didn’t tell anyone, I swear,’ I say, gulping. ‘Fat Bert started it. He had the knife. The boy was just fighting back. I won’t tell anyone.’ I feel the tears hot at the back of my eyes. There is no warmth in the fire now, and I am crushed by the darkness of the great wood around me, and the dark night, and the loneliness of it, here in the middle of these people. They could bury me here under the trees in a corner where I would never be found.

‘She’s shaking like a shitting dog,’ one of the men says, and laughs horribly.

‘Shut your mouth, Job,’ Queenie snarls. She has long brown teeth from which the gums have pulled back, and they look almost like fangs.

‘I believe her,’ the girl with her arm about me says. ‘There’s no harm in this one, Queenie. A proper little flat she is.’

‘T’ain’t for you to say, Jaelle. Job, call the boy back in, and we’ll get his word on it.’

The old rat faced man raises his head, and gives a yipping series of barks which make me jump, so high and sharp they sound. Then he shrugs, and begins filling a clay pipe, all the while shooting looks at me, at Queenie, and at the others around the fire, who sit as silent as a jury in a trial. Some of the men nod at me, but the women are all slab-faced and hard.

After a few minutes, Luca is there again, breathing fast. Steam rises from the open neck of his shirt, and his hands are covered in dirt, as though he has been scratching in the ground with them.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demands, quick and sharp.

‘This one saw you on the Meadow that night not a moon past when you had your trouble,’ Queenie tells him.

‘I know. I told you.’

‘So? What thinks you? Did she blab, or leave it be, like she says?’

Luca stares at me. ‘She’s just a little ’un, Ma. Ain’t no harm in her. She even had a doll with her.’

‘That makes no matter boy.’

The girl, Jaelle speaks up beside me. ‘Why would she be here if she had run to the peelers?’

‘She might be leading them on us,’ Rat-faced Job says, puffing on his clay pipe, eyes narrow as coin slots.

Luca laughs. ‘She ain’t leading no-one nowhere. The wood is empty but for us. I been coursing it like a hare. She’s on her own, Ma, I’d take an oath on it.’

Queenie holds my eyes with her own black stare. ‘Luca is my boy, and I taught him never to lie, ’cept to flats and peelers. What about you, girlie. Do you lie?’

‘Sometimes,’ I can’t help but say.

Queenie cackles. ‘Well, there’s truth at any rate. My boy didn’t mean to kill no-one, Greek girl, and was like to have been cut himself if he hadn’t done what he did. Even by law, what he did wasn’t wrong, though no judge would ever let it go at that.’

‘I saw it,’ I say. ‘He didn’t start it. It wasn’t his knife.’

‘No, it weren’t.’ Queenie looks at me with her head cocked to one side. ‘Our folk has enemies you know nothing of, girl.’ Then she raises her head, and it is almost as though she is sniffing the air. When she meets my eyes again I can’t keep her gaze, but drop my own.

Finally she throws up a hand.

‘She ain’t lying. Whatever she saw or didn’t see, the girl is straight, just a babe in the woods. And unless I miss my guess, there’s old blood in her. I can smell it plain as paint. Let her be, Jaelle.’

The girl at my side looses her grip on my shoulders, and I half-see something disappear into the folds of her skirts, a shine of metal barely glimpsed before it is gone.

‘I knew you was all right,’ she whispers to me, her white teeth close to my face.

‘She can’t be staying here all night though,’ Queenie goes on thoughtfully. And she turns back to tending the pot above the fire

‘You no home to go to?’ she asks without turning round. ‘People to miss you this time o’ night?’

‘We have a house in Oxford, Pa and me. We’re all that’s left,’ I say, and as I do, I feel a moment’s panic as I think of father looking at his pocket-watch, and I wonder how long I have been gone, and how I am ever going to get back through the dark woods on my own, for I have been quite turned around by events, and I cannot even tell if I am facing back towards Oxford, or into the heart of Wytham Great Wood.

‘Time a girlie like you was warm in bed,’ Queenie goes on. ‘The deep wood is no place for your like. Not tonight.’ More sharply, she says; ‘Luca, see her home. All the way, mind’

‘Aw, Ma!’

‘Do as you’re bid. She don’t know which way she’s turned. I seen rabbits in a trap with more sense.’

‘I can find my own way home,’ I say, stung by her words.

‘Not this night, you won’t, girl. The moon is up, and the snow is deep, and will be deeper yet before morn.’ Queenie turns to Luca.

‘This is no place for such as her. And if she’s missed, then there’ll be questions asked, and things kicked up that are better left buried. You see her to her doorstep, and no mischief on the way neither. You hear me boy?’

Luca nods sullenly.

‘Then be off, the pair of you, and keep the moon at your backs, and move quick and quiet.’

‘I know what to do,’ Luca says, and he jerks his hand at me.

‘Come on then, you. Time’s a passing.’

I stand up, and the girl Jaelle rises with me. ‘You be careful now dearie,’ she murmurs, and her dark eyes take the light of the fire and seem to shine with it, and her grin is very white and not altogether pleasant.

I turn to go, and the rest of them around the fire all watch, and say nothing.

‘What are you doing out here?’ I ask Queenie on an impulse. ‘Out in the cold and the dark?’

‘We’m living life as we see fit to do it, dearie,’ she replies. ‘We’ve been this way since your folk was young, and the Christ-man was unborn, and the world was wide and full o’ marvels. This is what we is, and like as not this is how we’ll die.’

There is a murmur around the fire at her words, like the Amen at the end of a prayer. I stumble out of the firelight after that, baffled, and I am glad to be going but sorry to be leaving, all at the same time.

I look back once, and Queenie is still watching me as I go, standing as still as a stone. I think I see her shake her head.

But there is nothing to do except follow Luca’s back as the moonlight takes back the night, and down the hill we go amid the black and silent trees, and the frozen snow crunches under my feet like burnt toast.

L
UCA GOES VERY
fast, and it seems that he glides by every grasping briar, and even his footsteps seem quieter than mine. Soon I am gasping, unable to keep up with that easy lope, and I have to beg him to slow down.

He looks at me as I stand panting before him, his face in darkness. ‘Girl, you came to the wrong shop tonight,’ he says.

We continue more slowly, always downhill, and through gaps in the trees I can see the lights of Oxford, but they seem far away, and the wood is dense and still and in the more open spaces the snow is deeper yet, still falling in skeins across the moonlight.

‘My name is Anna,’ I say to him, annoyed. No-one bothered to ask back at the fire, which seems strange, not to mention impolite. And Luca does not reply, but keeps walking, his head turning from side to side, up and down, as alert and searching as a deer.

‘Don’t you want to know where I live?’

‘I knows where you live,’ he says carelessly. I am dumbfounded.

‘How –’

‘I followed you home last time, on the Meadow. I saw you meet up with the big man outside the pub. I watched you all the way, girlie.’

‘My name is Anna!’

‘All right, then. Anna, watch where you put your feet. You make more noise than a lame cow.’

I have no response to that, but am outraged. I would much rather be called a guttersnipe. Luca’s deft sureness in the woods is infuriating. I have always thought of myself as quick and agile, but he makes me feel like a clumsy toddler.

But there is clearly no point in talking, and I do my best to tread more carefully. Luca is following no path but his own, and so quiet is he that more than once I am sure I have lost him in the play of moonlight and shadow and drifting snow amid the trees.

In fact I come to a halt at one point where the wood is especially thick, because it seems he has completely disappeared. I feel a moment of cold panic, but then there is movement ahead, perhaps forty or fifty yards away in the wood, and I start off for it.

Only to be grabbed from behind. I utter a squeak before a hand clamps over my mouth and in my ear a hot breath says, ‘Don’t move.’

It is Luca. He has one arm around my chest and the other is under my nose. It smells of soil and tree-sap and sweat. I can taste the salt of it as the fingers hold firm against my lips.

I struggle for a moment and he gives me a shake, like a terrier with a rat, and his hands tighten on me. ‘Quiet,’ he hisses, and I can feel his mouth make the word against my skin.

We stand like that, locked together. I can feel his breath on my ear. I know now that he is going to stab me. He brought me into the heart of the wood to kill me and dispose of the –

The movement I saw becomes more obvious. Someone or something is picking its way through the trees ahead and downslope of us. I see a dark shape move, brindled with light and shadow. A deer, I think, but it is the wrong shape, too low to the ground. And it has a bulk which is like nothing I have ever seen before. A black lion, a tiger, a panther. No, it is none of these, and yet it is a big animal of some sort, padding quietly through the undergrowth.

I catch a blink of eyes, silver green, reflecting back the moon, and I begin to shake. Luca holds me closer.

The thing veers off, and I swear I can hear it sniffing the ground as it draws away again. More than that; I am sure that at one point it rears up and walks on two feet, like a man, before dropping down again. But that cannot be right.

Luca and I stand stock still for a full ten minutes after it disappears, until my nose is running down his fingers and I have pins and needles from standing so still, and I am desperate to go to the toilet and the cold only makes it worse.

At last Luca releases me, but he takes my shoulders and turns me round, and lays a finger on his lips. I nod, wiping my nose on my sleeve, wishing more than ever that Pie was here to hug, or that father would suddenly appear with a torch and a big revolver – or even that someone big and cheerful like Jack would turn up smoking his pipe, to rescue me again.

But there is only the dark silent wood, and the strange boy whom I know to be a murderer, but who may have just saved me from something unknown and terrible.

‘What was that?’ I say in a tiny whisper.

I see his teeth as he answers. ‘No business o’ yourn, girl. Just be thankful I was with you. Now let’s be off out of here, lessen you wants to sleep under a tree tonight.’

I keep close behind him as we pick our way onwards, and at times I even reach out and seize the back of his coat for fear of losing him when the slivered moon goes behind cloud and the night darkens as though someone has just blown out the wick of a great lamp.

It seems an age before I see the lights of Wytham village through the last of the trees, and we finally come out from under the canopy and are crunching through calf-deep snow in open fields. It is the familiar world again, icy cold, white and stark, but a world I know. And the jagged ice-cold terror I felt in the woods slips back again. Into the half-denied space where what we have seen and heard cannot be true.

We climb a last fence, and are on the road once more, though it is almost lost in the snow, a tunnel between white blasted hedges. My toes are numb in my galoshes and I have fragments of briar and bracken clinging all over me by thorn and hook, and I desperately need to pee. We trudge along until I can bear it no longer and I am shuddering and shivering as I call on Luca to halt.

‘Look away.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Just do as I ask.’

His eyes widen. ‘All right then, but be quick about it.’ And he stares resolutely at the lights of Oxford as I squat shaking in the snow, and the steam rises around my legs, and the sharp smell of it too, and my face is burning as I straighten and rejoin him but I am sure he cannot notice in the darkness.

We walk for what seems a long time, and I am barely aware of the distance, my numb feet setting themselves down one after another like the workings of a clock. At last, though, I stop shaking, and begin to feel more normal again.

‘So Queenie is your mother,’ I say at last to break the silence.

‘Aye.’

‘That stew was very good. What was it?’

‘That were rabbit. Ain’t you never had rabbit before?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Queenie can make rare vittles out of anything. She could make a stew out of rat if she chose.’