Playing Beatie Bow (12 page)

Abigail froze. Could this tottering ruin of a woman be only twenty-three? Doll pushed herself half upright, fell into a fearful paroxysm of coughing, and subsided once more. Her breath rattled in her chest in a frightening way; she seemed in a stupor.

‘Aunt Hannah,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘she put me to work. I didn’t starve, you know.’

Abigail slipped to her feet. There was an iron bar across the two shutters that formed the window. It took her a long time to work it out of its rusted sockets. As she tried to open the shutter, it squawked alarmingly. Doll opened one glazed eye, but seemed not to have the strength to open the other. A trickle of bloodstained dribble came from her mouth.

‘A person will do many things rather than starve,’ she murmured. ‘That’s what the parsons don’t understand. Empty bellies speak louder than the Ten Commandments.’

She closed her eyes again. In the uncertain light her face was that of a skull.

Abigail was frightened out of her wits. ‘Mum!’ she thought. ‘I want you, Mum!’ She wanted to pray but couldn’t think of any words, so instead she put forth all her strength and shouted silently, ‘Granny! Help me, help me!’

But it was to Granny Tallisker and not her own grandmother that her thoughts had turned. The shutter moved, and opened, and a gush of damp, kerosene-laden air came into the room. A glaring yellow light, broken by dancing shadows, fanned up from the little court below.

She had guessed right. There was a small wooden platform, supported on struts grown rotten and flimsy, in front of the window, and above it projected a rusty pulley and a frayed rope. She closed the shutter behind her, in case the cold air awakened Doll from her drunken slumber, and crouched on the platform. It groaned and dipped under her weight.

Nervously she gazed over the edge. Dark, shapeless things like bears or trolls gyrated about a brazier; coarse braying music from a tin whistle and a paper-covered comb filtered upwards. She could see above the lower roofs the gaslights of George Street, and she heard the chunk-splosh of the Manly ferry’s paddlewheels as it left the Quay.

She saw now that the thread-like alleyway into which she had ducked to hide from Beatie and Judah led from Harrington Street to George Street. Half-way down this wretched short-cut was a yard upon which opened the back doors of two taverns. It was plain that they catered for the violent and degraded. A ragged thing flung out of a tavern door, to lie unconscious on the cobbles, had a face that might have belonged to a bulldog. The ruffians gyrating drunkenly around the brazier instantly fell upon this victim, and in a few moments it was naked. Abigail watched, paralysed with horror.

The platform creaked and shuddered. She could climb neither down nor up, unless the rope and pulley were usable. Some time towards morning, surely, the revellers below would be either asleep or dead drunk, and she could let herself down into the courtyard?

After a while she thought of testing the dangling rope. Cautiously she rose on tiptoe and seized it. The frayed ends fell almost into dust in her hand. The rope had not been used for years and was completely perished.

Her eyes filled with tears. There was no hope. As she stood there, looking up at the askew, rusted pulley, and the edge of the roof above it, a small patch of the sky suddenly lost its stars.

Someone was lying on the warehouse roof looking down at her.

When Abigail realised that she was being spied upon, her first horrified impulse was to get back into the room with Doll and bar the shutters. Her hand was on the pin when a voice said, very hushed, ‘Dunna be feared, lass – it’s me, Judah.’

She could see nothing but the shape of a head. She stood very still.

‘Aye, that’s bonny,’ said the voice. ‘That contraption ye’re standing on might go any moment. Now, d’ye hear me all right?’

‘Yes,’ she breathed.

‘I’ve some of the lads from the ship wi’ me. I’m droppin’ you a line with a loop in it. Put your foot in the loop and hold tight wi’ all your might.’

A rope tumbled down to her. She seized it, did as she had been told, and whispered, ‘I’m ready.’

As her chin rose above the roof slates, sturdy arms reached down and caught her under the armpits. In a few moments she was lying, limp and sweating, on the dewy slates.

There were several boys, two of them as small as Beatie, on the roof. They had bent the line around the stump of a chimney, and were now swiftly untying and coiling the rope. Barefooted and silent, they moved with the monkey-like nimbleness of apprentice seamen.

‘How did you know where I was?’ she asked.

‘It was Granny,’ said Judah, matter-of-factly. ‘Go ahead, lads, and take care, for the roof’s as rotten as them that own it.’

Keeping low, for fear anyone should see them outlined against the sky, Abigail and the boys crawled to the edge of the warehouse roof, and down the steep slippery gable of the terrace house next to it. If Abigail had not been so numbed with her recent experiences she would have been nervous of falling. But she had lost her shoes, and her stockinged toes, though not as deft as those of the boys, gripped fast in the mossy irregularities of the slates.

The boys pushed and pulled her across the roofs of six or seven little houses, sometimes disturbing rats playing in the guttering, or birds nesting in disused chimney-pots. She began to feel more and more unreal. Sometimes she thought she must have gone to sleep in the attic and was dreaming.

At last they came to a high rock lavishly curtained with convolvulus. A meagre lane squeezed between house and rock. Abigail cleared this space with ease.

‘Why, she’s as good as a lad!’ said one of the boys. ‘My sister Mabel would just ’a stood there squalling like a stood-on cat.’

Abigail, having slid down into the lane, was about to say that Mabel couldn’t have been blamed when a curious thing happened. A wave of heat rippled up from her feet, leaving her legs boneless behind them.

She said feebly, ‘I’m awfully sorry … my legs are gone somehow … and I think I might be sick …’

So she was, shivering and ashamed. But Judah merely said heartily, ‘Chuck it up, Abby. It’s a living wonder you’re not in a dead swoon, what you’ve been through this night.’

She dimly heard the apprentice with the sister say, ‘My sister Mabel would be flat on her back a’kicking and screeching in a fit of the flim-flams.’

‘Poor old Mabel,’ she tried to say, but nothing came out. Judah gathered her up, and she remembered no more until she realised she was being carried through the door of Mr Bow’s shop. The other apprentices had vanished. She did not open her eyes again; it was too safe and comfortable against Judah’s chest. If only, she felt drowsily, she could rest there for ever. But she had caught a glimpse of Dovey and Beatie, hovering about anxiously, and Gibbie in his long trailing night-shirt, flickering around like a small grey ghost, mad with curiosity.

Judah took her upstairs and laid her on her own bed. He said to Dovey, ‘Granny?’

Dovey shook her head. ‘Low.’

Abigail tried to speak, tried to ask, ‘Is Granny Tallisker ill?’ But although her mouth opened, her tongue moved, not a word came out. Terror filled her. What was the matter now? She caught Dovey’s eye, pointed to her mouth, struggled to speak.

Dovey said soothingly, ‘It’s the shock, without doubt. Come the morning your voice will be back, as good as gold. Now then, so I can tell Granny when she’s herself again: Did those villains do anything bad to you?’

Abigail longed to say, they kidnapped me and slapped me and a foul little beast with no legs bit me, and then they locked me up with a drunken consumptive who might be dead, as far as I know; but, no, they didn’t do what I know you mean. But she could say nothing. She looked helplessly from Dovey to Judah and shook her head.

Judah said, ‘I’ll go take a keek at my granny, then.’ He came over to the bed, smoothed the tangled hair back from her forehead as if she were a child, and said, ‘All’s over now, Abby. Fret no more. Go to sleep and dream grand dreams, as you deserve.’

Abigail thought he had the most beautiful smile she had ever seen. The ruddy wholesomeness of his face contrasted so vividly with the fearful half-beast countenances of the inhabitants of the thieves’ kitchen that she wanted to say, ‘Thank you, thank you, Judah, for everything, not just for saving me. Thank you for being here.’ But she could do nothing but press his hand.

He laughed, patted her cheek. ‘You’re a game lass, no doubt about that.’

Abigail still seemed to have no bones left in her body. Once again she was undressed by Dovey, given a posset, and put under the quilts. Dovey kissed her forehead, and hastened out.

Abigail thought, ‘Mabel has the right idea. Lying on my back kicking and having hysterics is just what I’d do if I had any strength left.’

She became aware that Beatie was squatting on the end of the bed, like a malignant gnome. Abigail, already muzzy from the posset, had never seen her look so ferocious.

‘What came over you, you blanky rattlebrain, to go down the Suez Canal? Could you not see it was the abode of cut-throats and mongrels? And what were you doing, fleein’ away like that, when I’d given my solemn word to help you back to your ain time? Aye, and I wunna go back on it, neither, even though my poor granny is half dead on your account.’

‘How, why?’ Abigail wanted to ask. She managed a pitiful squawk.

‘Never mind yer greeting, yer numbskull! Oh, couldn’t I punch yer yeller and green!’

Abigail was only able to give a faint yelp of protest. She buried her face in the chicken-coop smelling pillow, and went unexpectedly to sleep. She awakened early, feeling stiff and sore all over. A faint daylight crept through the windows, early market carts grumbled over the cobbles. Dovey knelt beside her bed, her face in her hands.

‘Oh, kind Lord in heaven, let my grandmother come to herself again, let poor Abby be as innocent as she was when she came to our care.’

Abigail managed a faint croak, and Dovey jumped up and came over to her. Abigail’s voice still seemed to belong to someone else, but she whispered, ‘Granny?’

‘She’s come back to herself, but she’s no’ well at all,’ said Dovey evasively.

Abigail could not help it. Tears trickled down her cheeks.

‘I’m just so tired of not understanding anything,’ she said plaintively. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I weren’t mixed up in it, but I am, and no one will tell me anything. It’s not fair at all.’

Dovey looked both dubious and conscience-stricken. Across her childish face flitted a variety of expressions.

‘Poor dear, poor child. ’Tis Granny herself who should tell you, as she meant to do. ’Twas a terrible effort for her, finding you last night. Aye, she was like a dead woman for two hours.’ She sighed. ‘’Tis sad, for there ne’er was such a spaewife as Granny in her young days; past and present were as clear as water to her eye. And Beatie, and myself – we dunna ha’ the power. Except Beatie a little, when she was wandersome with the fever.’

Abigail said, ‘I’m the Stranger, aren’t I?’

‘Aye,’ said Dovey. ‘Granny is certain of it. The signs are right.’

‘Tell me,’ begged Abigail. ‘It’s very frightening, Dovey. To be me, I mean. Not understanding anything at all.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Beatie creep in and sit on the rag rug beside Dovey’s bed. Her sallow face was both fascinated and repelled. Dovey looked at her warningly.

‘I’ll not have any jeering, Beatie,’ she said, severely for her. ‘We all know verra well, for you’ve told us a thousand times, that you dunna want the Gift and won’t have it; but nevertheless you and your children, should you have any, are in the way of it.’

‘Babbies!’ cried Beatie disgustedly. ‘Who’d want the puling, useless things?’

The Gift was not in the Bow family, but in the Tallisker clan. Mrs Tallisker as a girl had borne the same surname. She had married her cousin, for young men were scarce on Orkney where the sea took so many. It had been the ancestress of both these young people who had been whisked away to Elfland for several years, and then reappeared as mysteriously as she had vanished.

‘You see, Abby,’ explained Dovey, ‘Orkney is a queer old place, where dwarfies and painted men, Picts you might call them, lived long ago, and built great forts and rings of stone where a shepherd might wander and ne’er be seen again. And there are trolls, and spells to be said against them, and the children of the sea who dance on the sands on St John’s Eve … and it was Granny’s seventh grandmother, Osla, who was elf-taken while she was watching the sheep and came back from Elfland with a wean about to be born. And with that wean came the Gift.’

This precious legacy was the gift of seeing the future, of healing, of secret wisdom. The Gift could be handed down by the men of the family, but never possessed by them. With the Gift, Osla’s child, fathered in Elfland, had brought the Prophecy.

Granny was the greatest spaewife and healer of them all, explained Dovey. But as she grew older the Gift left her, coming only in erratic, puzzling flashes that she could not always understand. She could not, for instance, correctly interpret the Prophecy, although she was sure that Abigail herself was the Stranger.

‘It’s this way,’ explained Beatie gruffly. ‘Whenever the Gift looks like breeding right out, a Stranger comes. You can tell the Stranger because he or she always has something belonging to the Talliskers.’

‘Well, I haven’t,’ thought Abigail. ‘Granny’s barking up the wrong tree this time. It can’t be my dress, because Mum said that was an Edwardian curtain I made it from and she’s never wrong about fabrics.’

‘And the Stranger makes the Gift strong again,’ said Beatie. Her turbulent, troubled little face was solemn. ‘The blanky thing!’

‘Beatie,’ reproved Dovey, ‘how can you speak that way?’

‘Because,’ Beatie said crossly, ‘even though I dunna want the Gift myself, I know it’s true. Oh, aye, I’m dead afeared of it; but I know it’s true.’

For an instant Abby thought Beatie was going to confess that several times she had gone unvolitionally into the next century, but instead she muttered, ‘You mind when I was sick, Dovey, and I had the dream of Mother’s funeral and the yellow fever rag on the door …’ Here Abigail started, for she, too, had dreamed of a door with a yellow rag tied to the knocker. ‘And my three sisters that died of the smallpox came to me, looking as bonny as angels’