by Holly Webb
Cassie was expecting to find her mother in the kitchen. Once they’d come back home she had given the maid, Margery, the evening off to go to the fair, so Mother would be preparing supper for Cassie’s father and Will herself. But the kitchen was empty, the fire just a few embers and no lamps were lit.
Cassie whisked back to peer into the parlour and saw that her mother was by the fire – asleep, with a piece of embroidery sliding off her lap. Cassie hesitated in the doorway. She ought to wake her mother and show her the fox, that was why she’d come downstairs. But what if Mother woke up in a bad temper? She did sometimes, especially if she hadn’t meant to fall asleep.
“Mother?” Cassie whispered, but her mother didn’t stir. Cassie tiptoed past her to look out of the parlour window on to the street. The fox gazed back at her and, from this close, Cassie could see the pleading look in her golden-brown eyes. She made that strange barking cry again and Cassie bit her lip, wondering what the creature wanted.
“You got me into trouble before,” she murmured and then she sighed. The fox looked so cold out there in the snow, even with her thick fur. What was she doing here in the city? Her parents had been so certain that foxes didn’t belong here. “You should go back home,” Cassie whispered through the glass. “If you stay, someone might set a dog on you.” Or perhaps someone would turn the poor animal into a pair of fur mittens…
“Shoo!” Cassie hissed as the fox barked again. Someone else was going to hear that soon. She darted back past her mother and went to the front of the house, lifting the latch and peering around the heavy wooden door. The fox pattered over to her through the snow and Cassie stared down at her, surprised. She seemed almost tame. Her ears twitched curiously as she looked back at Cassie.
“You’re a pretty little thing.” Cassie crouched down, wondering if the fox would snap if she tried to stroke her. “Are you hungry?” she wondered. “Stay there.”
She pushed the door almost closed and hurried back to the kitchen, picking up a scrap of cold bacon from the larder and some stale bread. As an afterthought, she took the candle lantern that was hanging on a nail by the door to the yard, lighting it with a taper from the fire. At the door, she pulled on her cloak, putting the hood up around her face. It was so cold outside that she needed to wrap up, even if she was only going out for a few minutes.
The fox gulped down the scraps hungrily as Cassie tore the bread and bacon into tiny pieces to feed her, but she was careful not to nip Cassie’s fingers. When all the food was gone, she sniffed at Cassie and then licked her hand as if she was grateful.
“You should go home,” Cassie told the fox again. “Go home, girl.” But the fox just laid her muzzle on Cassie’s knee and looked up at her, eyes still hopeful.
“I can’t get any more food,” Cassie told her, cautiously stroking the top of her head. “Not without it being noticed. Mother might think Margery or Benjamin took it – they’ll get into trouble. And if I stay out here much longer, someone will see.”
The fox heaved a sigh and turned away, trotting out to the middle of the street. Then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at Cassie standing in the doorway. She seemed surprised, as though she had expected Cassie to follow her.
“I can’t come with you,” Cassie said, but deep inside she felt that same strange longing. Out on the icy river, she had seen the fox and known that she had to go with her. It was important, somehow. The little fox needed her – and she needed the fox.
Cassie swallowed and looked back into the house. Her mother was still in the parlour, asleep. No one would know she had gone. And she’d be back soon, wouldn’t she?
Cassie picked up the lantern and drew the door closed behind her with a quiet click of the latch. Then she followed the fox cub out into the snow.
The fox set off quickly, padding along the snowy street with her paws lifted high and her ears flattened against the cold wind. Cassie thought that it was probably going to snow again soon. The night seemed to have turned even colder and heavy clouds were starting to cover the sky. They were blocking the moonlight and Cassie was very glad she had brought the lantern.
“Where are we going?” she called to the little fox, a few minutes later as they passed the great church of St Dunstan’s. Cassie stopped for a moment to catch her breath and to look up at the two painted wooden giants who struck their bells to tell the quarter hours on the church clock, as she always did. It was late – nine o’clock already. How much longer would the crowds stay at the Frost Fair, with the weather worsening? The streets seemed almost empty now but she suspected that soon they would be full of chilled merrymakers on their way home from the fair.
Cassie called again. “Are you going home?”
The fox looked back at her, her pink tongue showing as she panted a little, but she didn’t answer. Cassie hadn’t really expected her to, of course, but there was something about her, something that seemed strange and special. It didn’t seem impossible that she would talk.
Cassie wondered how far they were going – where the fox’s home was. If her mother and father were right – that foxes didn’t live in the city – the fox’s den must be quite a long way away. What if her mother woke and found her gone? She glanced over her shoulder anxiously. They’d already come a good distance from her home.
Cassie stood wavering in the snow, uncertain what to do. The fox looked back and saw her standing there, and made a worried little yipping noise. She came padding through the snow to Cassie and stared up at her pleadingly, her eyes shining just a little in the light of the lantern. Help me, she seemed to say, and Cassie nodded.
She pushed all thoughts of home and her mother and the trouble she would be in firmly away, and began to walk again. It was an effort, though. She wasn’t used to walking in the soft snow, it seemed to make her legs work differently. They hadn’t even started to climb Ludgate Hill and her legs were aching already. But she went a little faster as they came in sight of the cathedral. It seemed to change every time she saw it, the walls a little higher each day.
Her father loved to take her and Will to look at it. He had made Cassie shiver, describing the way the fire had taken hold of the old church of St Paul’s and the rats had come streaking away in a great tide of dirty fur, shrieking and scrambling in panic past the watching crowd. Then after them had crept a slow tide of shining metal, the lead from the cathedral roof, melted by the heat.
Her father had been an apprentice himself then, seventeen years before. His master’s printworks had been swallowed up by the Great Fire. They had carried away the cases of type, he told Cassie and Will, and as much of the presses as they could, but the fire had been too fast, too hungry. There had been hard years afterwards, camped out in the ruins of the building, trying to raise the money to repair and rebuild the house and the workshop, and keep their livelihood going.
It was difficult to tell now where the fire had raced through the city, except for the neat, sturdy brick houses that had been built in the ruined streets. But it would be a long time before the new cathedral was finished. Years and years, Cassie reckoned. It was so big and so grand, it was bound to take forever.
“Are you stopping to look too?” Cassie murmured to the little fox as they hesitated at Ludgate itself. Cassie never liked the gate. It always seemed to her that the poor men in the prison up above were watching her as she passed through and the fox cub seemed to have the same eerie feeling. They slunk under the stone gate together and hurried on to get a better view of the cathedral.
But outside the churchyard, the fox stopped altogether, pacing around in a small circle and sniffing anxiously at the snow. She seemed to be dithering, looking first one way and then the other.
“Towards the river?” Cassie suggested, but the fox only looked up at her uncertainly, and paced a little way towards Watling Street and then back again.
“Are you lost?” Cassie asked, crouching down and shivering as the hem of her cloak trailed in the snow. “I can’t help! I don’t even know
where you’re trying to go. Where you’re taking me…” She looked around worriedly. It had seemed to make sense, following the fox when the little creature knew where she was going. A lost fox was a different matter entirely.
Cassie frowned. “Unless I’m meant to help you get to wherever it is you’re trying to go,” she muttered. “Maybe that’s why it felt so important that I came.” She stood up again, gazing around. “I don’t think we should stay here too long. There are guards around the cathedral, protecting the building site. I should think they’ll chase us away. Besides, it’s so dark now. People will see our lantern and that might not be good.”
Her mother was always warning her to stay close to home when she went to meet the other children from the street and she was hardly ever allowed to go out in the dark. To hear Cassie’s mother tell it, London was a den of thieves. But then she had come from the country and still found the city a strange and daunting place sometimes.
A shadow flitted across the street in front of them and Cassie swallowed and tucked the lantern underneath her cloak. “It isn’t as if I’ve got anything to steal,” she whispered to herself. “I don’t think a thief would bother robbing a child…”
She huddled the hood of her cloak closer around her face, feeling the comfort of the warm wool. It would hide the pale smudge of her face too, she thought, her heart beating a little faster. She didn’t like her brown cloak much, but it was dark. All the better to melt away into the shadows. “Over here,” she whispered to the fox, pressing closer to the wall. “We need to stay out of sight.”
But the little fox wasn’t listening to her. She was standing out in the middle of the street, ears pricked and one paw lifted. She looked alert, worried.
“What is it? Have you worked out where we’re going?”
Then the fox’s ears flattened back and she shrieked in panic as the strange shadow they had seen before came surging back towards her. Not a pickpocket, as Cassie had feared, but a dog. A skinny, sharp-toothed stray, looking for a fight.
The little fox darted about, trying to dodge the bigger creature’s jaws. She was whining with fright and Cassie gasped as the dog snapped horribly close to the fox cub’s shoulder. “Leave her alone!” she cried out, entirely forgetting to be quiet and stealthy. “Get away! Get away!”
The dog glanced sideways at her and growled but it didn’t seem scared of Cassie at all. The fox was panting now, tiring as the great beast chased her here and there in the snow.
“I need a stick,” Cassie said to herself, but everything was covered in snow. She couldn’t even see a stone to throw.
The fox cub let out a heartbreaking whimper, slipping on to the snow as the dog loomed over her, and Cassie screamed again. She couldn’t let this happen. She set down the lantern and dragged off a heavy wooden-soled shoe. Then she flung it at the dog’s head. She stood there, with her stockinged foot in the snow, pressing her hands against her mouth. What if the dog turned on her now?
But it didn’t. It stood up, shaking its head as though it felt dazed, and growled at Cassie and the fox. Then it sloped away into the darkness.
Cassie picked up her lantern and crouched down by the trembling cub, stroking the red-brown fur and checking for wounds. There was a scratch on the little fox’s muzzle but otherwise she seemed unhurt. She crept closer to Cassie, huddling against her skirts and whimpering.
“This isn’t the place for you to be,” Cassie murmured as the cub shivered next to her. “We have to find where you belong – it isn’t safe here. I wish I knew where you came from.” She looked at the fox doubtfully. “I suppose the closest bit of wooded country to here is across the river. Did you come that way? Over London Bridge? I don’t see why you’d want to come into the city, though I suppose you are quite a curious little thing. It seems a long way to travel, just following your nose.”
At this the fox poked her pointed muzzle out of the folds of Cassie’s cloak and sniffed the air loudly. Then she let out a whine, a soft, hopeless noise that caught at Cassie’s heart. “Don’t say that!” she whispered. “We’ll find it. Do you really not know the way?”
It seemed clear that the fox didn’t. She stared at her paws, her ears drooping.
“No, you don’t. Well…” Cassie looked around. “You were on the river, on the ice…” Which meant that the fox hadn’t actually needed to cross London Bridge at all, Cassie realized, even if she had come from the south side of the river. She could just have walked down on to the ice, if she found a flattish bit of bank, or one of the flights of steps that led down to the landing stages.
“Do foxes walk down steps? I don’t know… Did you follow something? Were you hunting, maybe?” Cassie blinked. “Oh! That boy! The puppeteer’s boy… He went off hunting, didn’t he? At The Dog and Duck, and his master was so angry with him for wasting all of yesterday afternoon… That’s where they were, in St George’s Fields, where it’s all marshy and there are ducks.”
She gazed down at the fox. “That sounds very much the sort of place where a fox would live too. And I first saw you by the puppet-show wagon.” Cassie pressed her hand over her mouth, laughing. “Did you eat their bread and cheese, little fox? Was that why they both said they hadn’t had any?”
The fox looked back at Cassie with her head on one side and then a pinkish tongue shot out and ran around her muzzle, as if she were remembering those cheese crumbs.
“I bet you did…” Cassie held out her hand to the fox cub, then patted her leg. “Come on. This way. I don’t know which way you came in the wagon, but I think we can go back across the ice. I’m not sure the guards would let a fox go across London Bridge, or me either. And besides,” Cassie shuddered, “I don’t like seeing the heads.”
The heads of traitors were impaled on spikes at the southern gatehouse of the bridge and they made Cassie feel sick. She always shut her eyes and hung on to her mother’s cloak when they went that way to visit her aunt, who lived over the other side of the river on St Margaret’s Hill, not far from the bridge. But there was no one for her to hold on to now, so she would have to look.
“We’ll go down the steps and on to the ice instead,” she explained to the fox as they trotted towards the river. “But we’ll have to be careful, in case we meet Father or Will.”
That evening, her family had gone down the Temple Stairs to get on to the ice just where the Frost Fair began. But now she and the fox had already walked further on, past the fair towards the bridge.
It should be quieter here, Cassie hoped. There was less chance of someone stopping her and asking where she was off to on her own. She could hear the sounds of the Frost Fair further up the river – music, shouting and the noise of a lot of people having a good time.
She led the fox down towards the river, past a grand new church with a tower and tall glass windows. Newly built since the fire again, Cassie guessed, looking around to see where they could get down to the river. A dank, rather fishy smell of boats and boathouses led her down another smaller alley, and they saw a set of stone steps leading directly into the ice.
There were two open rowing boats moored there still, sitting sadly in the ice with little ripples frozen around them. It was odd to step down and walk past them – it made Cassie feel as if she was walking out on to the water. She hesitated a little before she put her foot down, as if the ice would melt away and she’d fall into the dark water of the Thames instead.
The fox cub flinched as she stepped out on to the snow-covered river. “It isn’t far,” Cassie told the fox. “Only as far as it was from St Paul’s to here. We’ll hurry. And then you’ll almost be back home. I don’t know exactly where The Dog and Duck is, but you’ll know where you are, won’t you? Once you’re back on your side of the river?”
The fox plodded forwards, shivering a little now. It was starting to snow again, those clouds that Cassie had noticed building up even more thickly. Cassie wrapped her cloak tighter around her, trying to ward off the biting wind that seemed to swirl straight down t
he frozen river. Then the two of them set off across the ice.
Cassie struggled up the snow-piled stairs, with the little fox waiting for her a few steps above. She seemed much happier now she was back on the south side of the river. Her ears were brightly pricked again and she had a new energy, despite the freezing cold. Cassie smiled as the fox bounded eagerly up the steps, sure that this meant they were going in the right direction.
It seemed even colder on this bank of the river, though. She was regretting that she had not brought an extra muffler or her mother’s mittens to wear on top of her own. She didn’t think she had ever been so cold and the snow was thickening now, blowing sideways into her face as she reached the top of the stairs. The light of the lantern spread around Cassie in a tiny circle, so that the world seemed only to be a thousand falling snowflakes and no more.
She lifted the lantern up higher, trying to see where they were. She only came to the south bank of the river rarely, when they visited her aunt. But she lived a good way further along from here and Cassie wasn’t at all sure where they were. The south bank of the river was well known for its theatres and skittle alleys and the bear pits, but looking around in the snow-filled darkness, Cassie thought it was the loneliest place she had ever seen.
The fox was busily sniffing about in the hedge and Cassie hoped that she was finding the scent of her home. She paced away up the path and then looked back, waiting for Cassie to follow her.
“I hope it isn’t far…” Cassie sighed. “My feet have turned to lumps of ice, I can’t feel them any more.” And once you’ve found your home again, I’ll have to go all the way back to mine, she said to herself. On my own. That thought made her feel even colder.
She followed the fox down the lane, watching its white tail tip in the faint glow of the lantern. There seemed to be small houses on either side, but there were hardly any lights showing. It was so hard to see anything that Cassie almost screamed when a huge building loomed up ahead of them out of the snow.
