Trouble at the Little Village School (30 page)

‘No?’

‘No. I really value my privacy.’

‘I’d be no trouble at all.’ He looked appealingly at her.

‘I’m sorry, but I have to say no,’ replied Elisabeth. ‘I am sure Mr Massey will let you put it on one of his fields.’ And at a price, she thought to herself.

The young man smiled and tilted his head to one side. ‘And I can’t persuade you?’ He had a soft, strangely compelling voice.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

The young man persevered. ‘It wouldn’t be for too long. Just a few weeks and then I’ll be travelling on. I never stay for too long in one place. And I would be no trouble, no trouble at all.’

‘I do like my privacy,’ Elisabeth told him.

‘So do I,’ said the man. ‘I’d keep well out of your way.’

‘I really must say no.’

‘But sure, isn’t there a caravan there already?’ said the man, speaking softly and insistently.

‘Ah yes. I was doing a favour for a friend. He lived there with his grandson. Sadly the old man died last year. The caravan’s empty now.’

‘I’d be as quiet as a mouse and invisible as a ghost,’ said the man.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Elisabeth.

He smiled and placed his hands on his hips. ‘Now you don’t look like the kind of woman who would turn a poor, cold and weary traveller away on such a bitter miserable day as this,’ said the young man. ‘Sure don’t you have the kind face and the shining eyes of the Good Samaritan himself?’

‘And you sound as if you could charm the birds off the trees,’ replied Elizabeth, amused by the man’s doggedness, ‘but I really think you need to talk to Mr Massey.’

‘Ah well,’ he chuckled. ‘No harm in asking. I will bid you good day. Goodbye now. Take care.’

A small girl with large wide-set eyes and long rust-coloured hair, curly and  shining, appeared at the gate. She was wrapped up in a thick coat too large for her and wore yellow rubber boots.

‘Now didn’t I tell you to wait for me in the van?’ said the young man in a gentle voice.

‘But you’ve been gone for ages and ages,’ she replied. ‘I was getting worried.’

‘This is my daughter,’ the man told Elisabeth. ‘A young lady who doesn’t do as she is bid.’ His voice was soft and kindly.

‘Hello,’ said Elisabeth brightly.

The child’s smile was wary and uncertain. ‘Hello,’ she replied quietly.

‘And what’s your name?’

‘Roisin.’

‘A lovely name.’

The child gave a small smile. ‘It means rosebud,’ the child told her. ‘It’s Irish.’ She looked at her father. ‘Have we found somewhere, Daddy?’ she asked.

‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but we soon will. Now come along and say goodbye to the nice lady. We have a short walk across the fields to the old farmhouse you can see.’

Elisabeth watched as they set off, the child skipping and swinging her small arms.

‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Just a moment.’ She followed them into the paddock. ‘I don’t suppose it would do any harm to let you put your caravan here for a short while.’

‘Aren’t you a saint,’ the man said, smiling widely. ‘We will be no trouble at all and keep ourselves to ourselves, and any odd jobs you want doing, I’m the man to ask.’

‘You had better come into the cottage and out of the cold,’ Elisabeth told him, ‘and I’ll tell you where things are.’

‘And the rent?’ asked the young man with a twinkle in his dark eyes.

‘We’ll talk about that later,’ said Elisabeth, smiling and wondering what she had let herself in for this time.

‘It’s nice in here,’ said the little girl as she followed her father and Elisabeth into the cottage. She took off her boots in the hall and placed them outside the door. Her father did the same. Elisabeth noticed the child’s woollen socks were heavily darned, as were her father’s. Roisin stared wide-eyed at the long-case clock ticking loudly and rhythmically. ‘You’ve a grandfather clock!’ she cried. ‘I love grandfather clocks.’

‘It was my grandmother’s,’ Elisabeth told her. ‘It stood in the sitting-room in her house and when I was little I liked to listen to it ticking away and look at the coloured figures on the clock face. I used to imagine when I was in bed at night that they came to life and danced on the carpet when we were all asleep. One day the clock stopped. My younger brother Giles used to put his cricket bat inside and I don’t think it liked that too much and the pendulum stopped swinging. When I moved here it started working again. It was like magic. I think it felt at home.’

‘If we ever stopped travelling,’ said the child thoughtfully, ‘I think I would like a cottage like this one. It’s nice and cosy. I’d have a big grandfather clock like yours with little dancing figures and a fat cat and I’d grow lots of flowers and I’d feed the birds like you.’

‘She’s one for the words, is Roisin,’ said her father, gently touching the child’s head.

‘Well, come into the kitchen,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I’m sure you could both do with a warm drink.’

As they sat around the old pine table drinking tea, Elisabeth asked about the girl’s schooling.

‘If we stop in a place,’ her father told her, ‘Roisin goes to the local school, that’s if we like the look of it. It’s sometimes not that easy for her settling in, meeting new people and making friends and then having to move on again, but she’s used to it. Of course, there have been a few unkind comments about the sort of life we lead, and some head teachers are not all that welcoming. We are quite used to that as well. I’m not your conventional traveller, of course, more of an itinerant. I’m not a gypsy or a tinker and I have no Romany blood and I don’t travel around with others. It’s just that I’ve never been a one to settle. I like to be on the road. I’d feel cooped up in a house. I like the open spaces, the changing countryside, the freedom to go where I want and stop where I want and move on when I want.’

Elisabeth nodded and thought again of Danny.

‘I teach Roisin myself,’ said the man. ‘She’s a good little reader and writer, she plays the flute and can sing and she has a good general knowledge. There’s no child who knows more about the animals and birds or the countryside.’

There is one child, thought Elisabeth, picturing Danny striding across the fields. ‘And will you send her to the village school in Barton while you are here?’ she asked.

‘I will have to see it first,’ the man replied, ‘but I think I will. It has a good reputation.’

‘Really?’

‘I was speaking to the woman in the village store and she told me it’s a very good school. The head teacher is quite a formidable woman, I believe, but is good-natured and knows what she’s about.’

‘Is she?’ said Elisabeth, giving a wry smile.

‘Pretty strong-minded by all accounts and a bit out of the ordinary. She’s evidently turned the school around. Do you know her at all?’

‘Oh yes, I know her,’ said Elisabeth.

‘And she seems all right?’

‘Oh yes. I think you could say that.’

‘Well, thank you for the tea,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get settled in. I’ll park the caravan well out of sight so as not to spoil your view.’

‘Will you be warm enough?’ Elisabeth asked. ‘It’s going to freeze tonight.’

‘Sure we will,’ he told her. ‘We have a paraffin heater, a bit smelly but it keeps us warm, and we have a small stove. All a person could want.’

‘Well, if you do need anything you know where I am.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘I really do appreciate your kindness. Come along now, Roisin. Say thank you and goodbye to the lady.’

‘Thank you,’ said the child. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I’m called Elisabeth, by the way.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Elisabeth,’ said the young man, smiling and showing a set of remarkably white even teeth. ‘I’m Emmet, Emmet O’Malley.’

‘Gypsies!’ exclaimed Mrs Pocock. She was standing, arms folded tightly over her chest, before the counter in the village store with Mrs O’Connor.

‘Well, he looked like a gypsy,’ said Mrs Sloughthwaite. ‘He had long black curly hair and shiny white teeth and a big gold earring in his ear.’

‘Sounds like more like a pirate to me,’ said Mrs O’Connor.

‘Came in here looking for somewhere to park his caravan,’ the shopkeeper told them. ‘He was very polite and very good-looking. Reminded me of Errol Flynn, he did. He had one of those smiles that would melt snow. We had quite a conversation.’

‘I hope there’s not more of them,’ said Mrs Pocock, her eyes narrowing. ‘We can’t be doing with an encampment of gypsies in Barton. There’ll be all that mess and they’re such a nuisance.’

‘I sent him up to Fred Massey’s,’ said the shopkeeper.

‘You did what!’ cried Mrs Pocock.

‘I sent him up to Fred Massey’s,’ she repeated. ‘He’s got that many fields he doesn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t want him putting his caravan on the village green or on that glebe pasture by the church. I mean, they’re pieces of common land and if he sets his caravan up there he can’t be shifted.’

‘I never thought of that,’ said Mrs Pocock.

‘By the sound of it I don’t think this man will be any trouble,’ said Mrs O’Connor.

‘You should have told him to move on,’ said Mrs Pocock to the shopkeeper.

‘It’s not up to me to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do,’ said Mrs Sloughthwaite in a peevish voice and with a heave of her bosom. ‘Anyway, as I said he was a likeable sort of chap and he had a little girl with him. Bright as a button she was and well-behaved with it.’

‘And light-fingered as well, I shouldn’t wonder,’ added the customer. ‘I don’t hold with having gypsies in the village. Things will go missing, you mark my words, and not just from the village store.’

‘I once had my tea leaves read by a gypsy fortune-teller, so I did,’ announced Mrs O’Connor. ‘Everything she said would happen, did.’

‘Nonsense!’ snapped Mrs Pocock.

‘It did, as true as I’m standing here.’

‘I mean, it’s all nonsense this fortune-telling lark, all hocus-pocus,’ said Mrs Pocock dismissively.

‘Well, I think there’s something in it,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘They have what’s called second sight, do gypsies. I have a bit of it myself. I had my hands read by a fortune-teller once in Whitby.’ She placed her chubby hands on the counter, palms upwards. ‘She told me that the left hand showed my destiny in the stars and my right hand showed what I was making of it. She said I was a very kind-hearted woman and that I could look forward to a long and happy life.’

Mrs Pocock shook her head. ‘They always say that,’ she remarked. ‘They tell you what you want to hear. It’s not likely she’d tell you that you were mean and obnoxious and that you’d be dead before the week was out.’

‘And I always read my horoscope in the Gazette,’ continued the shopkeeper. ‘Here,’ she said, opening the paper on the counter, ‘listen to what it says is in store for me this month: “The presence of Saturn, your planetary ruler, indicates that this is a time of challenge and excitement for you”.’ She lifted her bosom from the counter where it had been resting. ‘“You need to be upfront and not give in to compromise. Magnetic Mars reveals that January will go with a bang and not a whimper. A young stranger will be a potent influence in your life before the month is out, but one who needs to be watched with caution for he could spell danger”.’

‘They always go on about meeting a stranger,’ said Mrs Pocock. ‘You being a shopkeeper it’s very likely you’ll meet lots of strangers in your line of work.’

‘Does it say this stranger will be tall, dark and handsome?’ asked Mrs O’Connor.

‘No, it doesn’t, more’s the pity,’ replied the shopkeeper. ‘I can’t say as how I like the sound of this potent stranger so I shall be keeping my eyes peeled.’

‘I don’t like the sound of him either,’ said Mrs O’Connor, putting a hand to her throat. ‘What sort of danger?’

‘It doesn’t say,’ replied Mrs Sloughthwaite.

‘Huh!’ snorted Mrs Pocock. ‘Anybody could have told you you would meet some stranger. They pluck things out of the air, these horoscope writers. It’s all vague and airy-fairy. You weren’t told anything pacific.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘but it’s keeping me on my toes all the same.’

The tinkle of the doorbell made the two customers jump. They turned sharply, almost expecting to see the troublesome stranger who had been predicted in the horoscope walk through the door.

A young woman entered, carrying a baby. She was a large, healthy-looking girl with lank mousy brown hair, large watery blue eyes and prominent front teeth. A dewdrop sparkled at the end of her nose like a diamond.

‘Hello, Bianca,’ said the shopkeeper in a cheerful voice.

‘Hello, Mrs Sloughthwaite,’ replied the young woman, her voice doleful and plodding.

‘It’s quite a while since you’ve been in.’

‘I’ve had the baby to look after,’ she said, approaching the counter.

‘Well, let’s have a look at the little lad,’ said the shopkeeper, reaching out and taking the baby from his mother’s arms. She moved the bit of blanket which covered half the child and beamed widely, two great dimples appearing on her round rosy cheeks. The baby’s little face peered up at her. ‘Why, he’s a bobby-dazzler and no mistake.’ Bianca smiled and sniffed. The two customers came over to have a look.