Cold Shoulder Road

by Joan Aiken

  “No,” said Ruth.

  De la Twite began to grow angry. He remained quiet, but seemed to swell and become larger inside his clothes.

  “No? And why not, pray?”

  “Firstly,” said Ruth, “because I have no idea in the world where the treasure is buried. Oh, somewhere in this neighbourhood, perhaps; or perhaps not. It could equally well be in France. My son did not tell me where he found the treasure, nor did I ask him. I am not interested in the treasure, Mr Twite. Secondly, you have no right to use the child as a bargaining counter. She is not a piece of property, she is a human being, though you have not used her as such . . . So you may just as well stop the carriage and put me out in the road, for I am no use to you whatsoever.”

  De la Twite exploded with fury.

  Ruth was reminded of Pye, as his face darkened and his breath came in surges.

  “No use to me, madam! But I’ll see that you are of use to me. If you won’t help me yourself, you shall be made the means of putting pressure on your son, who is back in Seagate with my sister at this time.”

  Ruth turned a little pale.

  “And as for the child,” Twite went on furiously, “since it seems that you have so little value for her, I may as well tell you that your charming establishment – your cosy home in the tree – is not in existence any more, but has been blown to Jericho! My colleague – ah, my colleagues – have contrived to drop a packet of highly explosive hop-manure – which is made from wool refuse, you may know! – on to the Throstle, and that, combined with the gunpowder stored in the ship’s hold, was quite sufficient to send the vessel sky-high!”

  Ruth stared at him. Then she said slowly, “So you lied, when you offered to let me keep the child. Since she was already dead.” After a pause she added, “How do I know that you are not lying now?”

  A few lights began to show on either side of the road.

  They were entering Folkestone.

  Arun lay tossing and twisting on the dusty floor of the loft. It is hard to sleep with your hands tied behind you; harder still if your teeth ache, and you are still painfully thirsty, and worried to death, besides, about what is happening to your mother, and have been told that you yourself are to be sent off on a slave ship to the plantations in the Tornado Islands.

  Down below there was complete silence. He wondered if Miss Merlwyn Twite had gone to bed. Or was she sitting, bolt upright, with her big-knuckled hands in her lap, waiting for her brother to come home?

  And where was her brother? In Folkestone, trying to extract directions from Ruth as to the whereabouts of King Charles’s treasure? Although he felt so miserable and frightened, Arun could not help a faint grin at the thought. First of all, she doesn’t know where it is, he told himself, and second of all, even if she did know, she wouldn’t tell Twite, not if the Queen of England was his aunt.

  Arun was obliged to admit to himself that, aggravating and difficult though she might be in some respects, Ruth had plenty of grit in her; it was impossible to imagine that she would ever knuckle under to a tyrant.

  Well, look at the way she took and pinched the Handsel kid, just because she thought it was right. And a plaguey lot of trouble that led to. But still, he might do the same himself. Or at least he hoped he would.

  When he considered his own danger, and the unpleasant prospects that lay ahead, Arun shrank, and ached, and wished he could think himself back into being a cat instead of a boy, as he had been used to do. But now, when he thought about Ruth subject to similar dangers and despairs, he had not the heart to retreat into cathood. Besides, cats can’t sing. Cats don’t fight battles, either, he thought. (Well, perhaps Figgin might, but then, Figgin’s no common cat.)

  What had been the meaning of that confused message from Is about the ship being smashed? Had Twite done that? Was Figgin all right? Were Is, Penny and Pye all right? Where were they?

  Why was he lying here immersed in rambling miserable thoughts, when he ought to be sitting up and singing his head off – if that was what Dominic de la Twite particularly disliked?

  He sat up and began to sing:

  “Dance the Barnaby Prance

  dance the Paddington Frisk

  gambol as you advance

  take no thought of the risk . . .

  Boys and girls, come out to dance

  Dance your way to the coast of France

  Along with your playfellows, all night through

  Dance your way to a parlez-vous . . .”

  Pretty fair nonsense, but it kept up his heart.

  To his amazement, his song was answered by a number of voices outside on the beach.

  First in thought-speech;

  “So that’s where you are! Jen told us that you had gone to the dentist’s house, but we never saw you come out . . .”

  Then they all burst into song:

  “Sing, sing, everybody sing

  Speech is the queen, and music is the king!”

  One of the voices out there, a girl’s, high and ringing, he recognised as that of Jen Braeburn, the girl in the red dress.

  “Hello, boy! What are you doing up there?” she called.

  “I’m shut in!” he called back. “My hands are tied and the trap is bolted.”

  “Hold on, mate, we’ll just fetch a beam and break down the door. Keep your pecker up! They burned up some of us, but they haven’t got us all! Not by a long chalk! And there’s more on the way – they’ll never get us all!”

  He heard the sound of many scampering feet.

  But now, also, Arun heard the voice of Merlwyn Twite, and her rapid, angry footsteps on the stair below his trapdoor. The bolt slammed back, the trap shot open, her furious face came into view.

  “What do you think you are up to, boy? You will please stop that disgusting noise immediately!”

  Much worse, he heard horses’ hoofs and carriage-wheels on the landward side of the building. A shout went up:

  “Miss Twite! We’ve come to fetch the boy! The Leader wants him in a hurry.”

  “He’s here,” she called. “Come and get him.”

  Three men – from the sound – tramped up to the first floor, two came on to the second. Arun was grabbed, unceremoniously dropped through the trap, caught down below, then the same speedy process was repeated on the lower flight of stairs; he was half-hauled, half-carried across the empty ground floor and bundled into a waiting carriage.

  “The Leader wants you, too,” one of the men called to Miss Twite.

  “Well, you can tell him it’s not convenient,” she grated. “I’ve had my rest disturbed quite enough for one night. I’ll come tomorrow, in my own good time, tell him. And I’ll thank you to leave me in peace now.”

  She banged the outer door and bolted it just as Jen and her friends came running back with a tree-trunk they had taken from a builder’s shipyard farther along the beach.

  “I’m in the coach. They are taking me to Folkestone!” Arun called in thought language as the carriage sped past the hurrying group; but he could not tell if they heard him. His head had been tied inside a sack and he was thrown roughly on to the floor as the horses accelerated into a gallop.

  Above his head the men in the carriage were talking casually.

  “What’s to become of the Gentian, now? If more and more goods are to be carried by train?”

  “She ain’t the Nob’s ship. She belongs to His Fish. And he don’t want to part with her, I’ve heard.”

  “A ship’s allus handy, in case of trouble.”

  “A fly card he is, that owd Admiral, with his contraptions and his kites; dang me if I’d ever a beleft he could shift that frigate out of that tree where she was perched so snug!”

  “A right shame, I call it,” pronounced another voice. “The owd Throstle made a rare handy nest for any cove as wanted to lay low for a while.”

  “Still, ’twas clever. That you can’t deny. His Fish has got more brains than the Nob.”

  “Ah. But what about smashing up Pook’s Pantr
y? Knocked to blazes, so they do say, a place what had been a refuge for poor folks for dunnamany thousand year. That ain’t pound dealing.”

  “Ah! That’s so,” they all agreed thoughtfully. One voice asked:

  “Were there folks a-refuging in Cold Harbour when it was strook? Is that known?”

  “If there were,” somebody said, “their own dearest wouldn’t know them now. You get a ten-ton hunk of rock atop of you, and a little owd majesty’s frigate on top of that, you ain’t going to be so handsome.”

  Arun shivered, listening, curled on the coach floor among the feet. Oddly enough, he had no wish to turn into a cat.

  Chapter Nine

  PENNY SUDDENLY EXCLAIMED, “I REMEMBERED about the tortoise!”

  “What do you mean, Pen?” Is asked, rather crossly.

  They had passed a most miserable night, under the great yew tree at Cold Harbour, having piled themselves damp, lumpy beds from all the debris that lay scattered thickly about.

  It is dreadful to see a place that has been your comfortable home utterly smashed up and reduced to pieces no bigger than shoes. The arrival of daylight only made this scene more depressing, as a thin cold rain had begun to fall. Penny found some bits of her dolls strewn about, Is found the blue headscarf that Window Swannett had given her, wet and torn. Pye actually came across the remains of the loaf she had baked, and was furious that Is and Pen would not allow her to eat it.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s all full of broken glass, Pye, that’d cut your stomach to ribbons.”

  Worse still was the unspoken question – which neither Is nor Pen dared put into words – as to whether there might have been any wayfarers taking refuge in Cold Harbour when the ship fell on it like a meteor and knocked over the great sarsen stones. If there had been anybody inside, no human hand could help them now.

  “Reckon Mrs Nefertiti didn’t give us very good advice that time,” Is was remarking glumly, when Penny made her unexpected statement about the tortoise.

  Is, who had found a few squashed turnips in a muddy sack, had been trying to persuade Pye that they would do for breakfast.

  “I know you ain’t partial to turnips, Pye. But, honest, there ain’t anything else.”

  “Mrs Nefertiti didn’t mean for us to come here,” Penny went on excitedly. “Now I remember what it was about Diggory. The tortoise. He used to eat woodlice. They were a big treat for him. Like strawberries ‘ud be for us.”

  “Well,” snapped Is, “Pye and I ain’t a-going to eat woodlice for our breakfast. Nohow! And there aren’t any strawberries.”

  “What made me think of him,” Pen went on, without paying heed to this, “one time Diggory was just going to munch up a woodlouse when it nipped right up to him and hid in his armpit, where he couldn’t find it.”

  “What are you getting at, Pen?”

  “Mrs Nefertiti meant for us to go back to Cold Shoulder Road. In Folkestone. That’s her cold pillow. Folkestone’s where the Merry Gentry have their main centre, you may lay; that’s where the Channel Tunnel comes out. And where the Admiral lives . . . And that’s just where they won’t be looking for us.”

  “You ain’t so clung-headed, Pen,” said Is, after a moment’s pondering. “I reckon you may be on to something there. But how are we going to get back to Folkestone? It ain’t far, I reckon – not as the rook flies – but it’s all open country close around the town. We’re likely to be spotted.”

  “We’ll have to wait till after dark.”

  Accordingly, they spent a dismal day.

  Arun was flung out of the coach and landed on rough ground. The sky was still dark, but there were lanterns round about, and a number of men busily at work. He had no trouble in recognising the place. It was the valley, the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, and members of the Gentry, all hooded, were bustling about with crates and bales and barrels, taking them from the goods wagons and piling them into the carrying-panniers of a line of ponies.

  Just up above, in the thickety hillside, Arun realised, was the gully from which he and Is had looked down last time they watched this scene. And in behind, deep in that hill . . . Arun almost choked at the sudden realisation that the treasure which Dominic Twite was so urgently seeking lay less than half a mile from here, under a pile of rubble and sand.

  “We brought the boy,” said a voice over his head.

  “Good, Fobbing. Take him into the station.”

  Arun was dragged over to the neat little rail station with its tarred platform and flint buildings. He was thrust through a doorway, under a sign that said LADIES’ WAITING ROOM and left on the floor, half-propped against a wall.

  Facing him, to his horror and dismay, he discovered his mother, sitting on a wooden bench. Her hands and feet were tied, and she looked dusty, pale and tired. But she smiled at him and remarked in a matter-of-fact tone, “There you are, my dear! I hope you have your new teeth?”

  Arun smiled back, in order to display them.

  “All I need,” he said, “is something to bite with them. I haven’t tried that yet. Folk aren’t too free with their wittles around here.”

  Dominic de la Twite strode into the small room, making it seem smaller. Arun noticed at once that he was wearing the chain of brown diamonds, twined amongst the folds of his high white neckcloth. He seemed angry and somewhat distracted.

  “Now!” he snapped. “I’ve no time to waste. In a few moments I must travel to France on urgent business. Let us have no nonsense, pray!”

  A voice called, “Sir? Only one-third of the tusks have come.”

  “I know that!” he called back impatiently. “This time I am going to look into it myself. Now: you boy! I want you to tell me where these came from.” He tapped the chain of stones round his neck.

  Arun stared at him without replying. De la Twite called, “Fobbing! Come in here! Bring a pitchfork!”

  At this command, Ruth looked up sharply. One of the men came in; like the rest, he wore a black hood with slits for eyeholes. He carried a long-handled farm fork with three steel tines, tapered and shining and sharp.

  “Push them against the boy’s throat and chest – yes, so.”

  Fobbing stood stolidly as directed, holding the fork-handle level, so that all three points of the prongs pressed against Arun. The point against his throat felt as if it had pierced his skin. The cold bite of it made him cough.

  “Now then, boy. Let’s have no foolishness. If you don’t tell me at once where these stones came from, Fobbing is going to spit you through.”

  Arun’s eyes met those of Ruth. I wish I could talk to her in thought language. Just to pass the time of day. Just to say, hullo, Ma. That would have been nice.

  He tried. He poured out a series of messages. He could tell they did not reach Ruth. But, strangely enough, Dominic de la Twite shook his head angrily, rubbed it, and looked discomposed, as if loud noises were distracting him, noises that he disliked, but could not understand.

  Anyway, thought Arun, I don’t really need to talk to Ma in thought language. I know well enough what’s in her mind.

  Don’t give in to them. Never mind what happens. Never give in to them.

  As the steel tine sank a little deeper into his neck he said politely to Dominic de la Twite, “I think the stones come from High Brazil.”

  “Not that, idiot! Where did you find them?”

  “I didn’t find them.”

  “Stop quibbling and paltering. I’m in a hurry. My patience is wearing very thin. Where did the necklace come from?”

  “My cousin found them,” said Arun in a tone of mild surprise, as if, only now, did he grasp what Twite was getting at. “My cousin Is, she found the necklace. She never told me exactly where . . . But, when we were on the ship coming from France, I remember she did say something about diamonds . . .”

  He tried to look vague and willing, as if he were being asked a question in a school test.

  “Ship coming from France?” Dominic de la Twite looked ut
terly taken aback.

  Now, in the background, not too far away, but not too close either, Arun began to hear a number of thought-voices. Were they speaking to him? Or to each other? Was it because of the spike sticking into his neck that he heard them?

  “Who are you?” he called urgently. “Where are you?”

  And again, he noticed Dominic de la Twite wince and shake his head, then scrub at his forehead with impatient fingers as if trying to rub away a cloud of midges.

  “Why yes,” Arun slowly answered Dominic’s question with an innocent air. “My cousin and I came here on a ship, the Dark Diamond – she often puts in at Calais before crossing to Folkestone—”

  Ruth now entered the game. “In Calais,” she remarked thoughtfully, “there are many stories of King Charles’s treasure. Le Tresor du Roi Charlot, they call it. Queen Henrietta was bringing it on the HMS Victory, but some say it sank off Cap Gris Nez – the treasure may just as easily be on that side of the Channel . . .”

  Dominic stared furiously from mother to son and back again.

  “Where were you and your cousin in France?” he asked Arun.

  “I don’t know the names of French places,” Arun replied simply. “I don’t speak French.”

  “Aha!” cried a lot of voices inside his head. “Thought language needs no translation!”

  “Did you do any digging? Go into any caves? Did your cousin?”

  If it were not for the steel prongs jammed against his neck and ribcage, Arun could have burst out laughing; and also if it were not for the frightening and sinister memory of the men’s talk in the carriage coming to Folkestone. For, so far as he could make out, the frigate Throstle had been blown up into the sky by some diabolical contrivance of the Admiral’s, had smashed the Cold Harbour refuge when it fell to earth again, and, for all he knew, his cousins and Pye were in one or the other place when this happened.

  In which case, as Twite must very well know, any knowledge that Is might have as to the whereabouts of the treasure had been blown to smithereens along with her.

  He’s going to get nothing more from me, resolved Arun, and received an approving glance from Ruth.