Cold Shoulder Road

by Joan Aiken

  The voices in his head sounded louder and louder. “Where are you?” he called again.

  At this moment there came an urgent voice from outside.

  “Sir, Sir! The train is ready to start. We daren’t delay any longer.”

  “Oh, devil take it!” De la Twite moved restlessly forward. He made a half-gesture towards Fobbing with the pitchfork, then restrained himself.

  Coming to a sudden resolve, “We shall finish this talk in France!” he said with menace, and touched the brown jewels in his neckcloth as if to reassure himself. He called, “Niland! See that both prisoners are put on the train. In separate wagons. I will travel in the parlour coach. It is a deuced nuisance about those tusks. Fobbing, you may go in the tender with the fireman.”

  Fobbing nodded without speaking – he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about this permission – then picked up Arun under one arm and carried him with ease out of the station and down to the track. Arun was hoisted up and flung into a wagon which was otherwise empty. A few minutes later the sound of a thump near at hand suggested that Ruth had received the same treatment.

  The rain never let up all day. In one way that was useful, for it meant that fewer people were about and the misty drizzle cut visibility down to little more than a bowshot’s length. Pen, Is and Pye made their way by cautious stages from one patch of woodland to the next.

  Pye grumbled a great deal, and asked why they could not go through villages and buy food.

  “Because we’d be nabbed for sure,” Penny told her. “We can’t risk it, we don’t know who’d cry rope on us to the Gentry. You don’t want to go back to the Twites, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then!”

  Pye was silenced. She trudged along after them doggedly enough, but was plainly very miserable. Every now and then a tear slipped down her face. At dinner-time Penny produced a small supply of hard cheese and ship’s biscuit from her pack and said, “Here, little ’un. Have a bit o’ this.”

  But Pye could not be comforted by food.

  “Want Figgin,” she whispered dolefully.

  Privately, both Is and Penny feared that Figgin had probably returned to the Throstle after the human inhabitants had left it, and been blown to atoms in the explosion. They did not say so aloud, but Pye caught the picture that Is had in her mind, and shouted, “No, no! Figgin’s not dead! No, he isn’t! I won’t have him dead.”

  “Well, we certainly hope not, Pye,” Is said, trying to sound cheerful and encouraging. “We just have to wait and see.”

  Is noticed that Pye’s ability to catch other people’s thought patterns appeared to have been sharpened and strengthened to a surprising degree by all the sad and worrying things that had been happening. All night Pye had been restless, calling out, sometimes aloud, sometimes in her head, to unseen people. And Is had to be very careful not to think gloomy or anxious thoughts, especially about Ruth or Arun, for Pye picked them up with lightning speed. “When are we going to see them? Where are they?” she repeated, over and over, and all Is and Penny could answer was, “We’re looking for them. We’re trying our best to find them.”

  “I’ve thought of the name of a chap who might help us,” Penny said, as they sat shivering in Biggins Wood, near Folkestone, waiting for dusk to fall. “Ruth spoke of him, said he was the new Lord-Lieutenant of the county, was spoken of as a decent cove that wants to put an end to free trading and crime and rascality.”

  “He’ll be a clever one if he can do that! What’s his name?”

  “Sir David Greenaway.”

  “Hey!” said Is. “I’ve met him, when I lived in Wapping. I know his brother Sam. Sam’s all right. So maybe this David feller might be some use. Where’s he hang out?”

  “In Dover Castle, I reckon.”

  “What we need,” said Is, “is some proof of who’s doing what’s being done. No use just telling him what we think.” She thought of the burned cottage at Birketland and shivered.

  “Who all burned up?” said Pye at once.

  “Never mind it, Pye . . . why don’t you make up another piece of your song?”

  “Yes – I see what you mean,” Penny agreed with Is. “Maybe what we need to do is for one of us to creep into the old Admiral’s house after dark and do some snooping around there. Then we might find something that would fix him in the picture.”

  “Ah . . . that’s not a bad notion.” But Is quailed at the thought of Rosamund. “Ugh! Spiders! I hate ’em!”

  “Rosamund?” said Pye unexpectedly. “Is Rosamund a spider? Big spider? Pye don’t mind spiders. Pye likes spiders!”

  “Good heavens, Pye! – But this spider’s as big as a cockerel.”

  “Pye wouldn’t mind. Nice! Furry, like Figgin!”

  “Croopus . . . You tend to your song, Pye.”

  Instantly Pye recited:

  “Mums, kids, hold together

  fin to fin, feather to feather

  claw to claw, toe to toe,

  goose to gosling, fawn to doe.”

  “Well I’ll be hammered, Pye! You fairly take the cake!”

  Pye looked smug. Is softly sang her verse to Arun’s ‘Whales and Snails’ tune, which it fitted quite well.

  “I reckon you’ll be putting Arun out of business, Pye, at this rate.” Having said which words, Is felt a dreadful qualm, and heartily wished the words unsaid again. Pye, perhaps picking this up, remained silent for many minutes. Then, stumbling, faltering and hesitating, as if images were coming into her mind one by one, from a long way off, she slowly announced: “Arun’s in a train. He tells me to tell you that. (Tied up.) Arun’s going under the water. He says Ruth, too. In train. Can’t see Ruth. Arun got new teeth. Under water with new teeth. Arun going to France. Where is France?”

  “Pye! Is that really, really so?”

  Pye nodded solemnly, looking puzzled at her own vision. Is fairly hugged her. “Pye! If you’re right, that’s the cleverest thing you ever did. Is the train a whole row of wagons, going along clonky-clonk, in the tunnel?”

  Pye nodded again. “Arun sick with toothache. Lying down. Very thirsty and sick.”

  Suddenly she began to cry. Overstretched, from her poems and visions, she fairly howled. “Very sorry about poor Arun’s teeth,” she sobbed. “I won’t knock his teeth out, not ever any more.”

  “Shush! Shush! No, no, of course you won’t,” Penny said soothingly. “But do keep quiet now, like a good girl, or folk will grab us.”

  “Don’t want Arun and Ruth to be so far away,” wept Pye.

  “Is that you, Ma?” called Arun softly. “In the next wagon?”

  “Yes it is!” Ruth called back in the same tone. “What a pity we are not travelling in the same wagon. We could have enjoyed the trip so much more! And I wish it was daylight. I’ve never been to France, I should like to be able to look about.”

  “You forget,” pointed out Arun, “we are going through the Tunnel. It will be dark.”

  Indeed, in a moment, with no more than a gentle jerk, the train crept quietly out of the station and down the incline to the Tunnel entrance. The gate whined up – Arun well remembered the sound – then they were through, and gliding along in a tubular, dimly lit cavern. Every now and then there would be a blue disc overhead. (These were activated by electromagnetic currents, Arun learned later.) Once inside the tunnel the noise of the train grew too loud to permit conversation from one truck to the next.

  Arun concentrated on sending out thought patterns. Somebody might hear these, after all, he thought, if I keep calling for help loudly enough.

  If only he could make contact with Is! If only she were still there, somewhere! And Penny, and Pye. And Figgin. He could hardly endure the thought that the wicked old Admiral had, in one callous, wholesale act of destruction, demolished not only the Throstle – that happy home – but also Cold Harbour, welcome refuge of travellers since inconceivably long-ago times.

  Thud-thud, thud, went the train. Click-click-click.
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br />   Arun was thirsty – he could hardly seem to remember a time when he had not been thirsty – and his teeth ached and throbbed. But despite this, and the worry about Ruth, and the fear and uncertainty regarding Is and Penny and Pye – not to mention Figgin – he began to feel a faint, unreasonable hope. It was something to do with the man, Twite. He suddenly began to seem beleaguered, fidgety, unsure, much less powerful than he had been on that first nightmare carriage ride into the wood.

  Was it something to do, also, with those voices?

  “Is – are you there?” Arun called in thought patterns, over and over.

  Oddly enough, the Tunnel – despite being underground, undersea – helped to provide a good background for thought patterns. Presently Arun began to pick up more and more voices – voices from farther and farther off – transmitting messages of hope and goodwill. They arrived in all kinds of unfamiliar forms, new shapes, new keys; but he was sure they were friendly.

  And then, suddenly, much stronger, making his brain buzz and tingle with its unexpected force, came a thought-call from another direction, a childish, familiar, peremptory voice:

  “Arun! Is that you? Where are you? Have you got new teeth? Arun where are you?”

  “Pye! Is that you? Are you there?”

  He poured himself through to her as clearly as he could and, in return, received a confused impression that she, Is and Penny were in a wood somewhere, hungry and wet.

  Then the connection faded and the new unfamiliar voices resumed their soothing murmur.

  As he lay back on the jolting wagon floor, tired, but hugely relieved, it suddenly occurred to Arun that these might be French voices.

  Chapter Ten

  THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING, LATER THAT night, as Penny, Is and Pye made their cautious approach along the beach to the eastern end of Cold Shoulder Road. Not a light showed in the little row of identical houses.

  “Looks like everybody took and cleared out from the neighbourhood,” whispered Is.

  The tide was low. The sea whispered to itself far away down across the flat sand. Nobody was stirring in the dark street, and piles of driftwood and seaweed left lying about suggested that the town authorities had given up bothering to clean the street any more.

  When they reached the end house – the one that had once been occupied by Dominic de la Twite and his sister – they saw that there was a burned-out gap next to it. Is was reminded of Arun’s missing teeth after Pye threw the grommet. And she fancied that Pye had a similar thought for she gave a little whimper and muttered, “Don’t like this place.”

  “We might use Twite’s house, I suppose,” Penny murmured doubtfully, but Pye whispered, “No! No! Horrible house!” and you could hardly blame the poor kid, Is thought, since she had been shut up in a box in it, every night.

  Mrs Boles’s house, beyond Ruth’s, had also suffered somewhat from the burning, and was plainly uninhabited, with open door and smashed windows. And serve the woman right, thought Is, I shouldn’t wonder but what she had a hand in the burning. I don’t think she liked Ruth and she was certainly scared of the paintings. I wonder where she has moved to? Just as well if she ain’t anywhere nearby, she was an untrustworthy piece of goods. If ever there was one.

  The house text to Mrs Boles was empty also, and seemed in reasonably good repair.

  “Shall we lodge ourselves in this one?” whispered Penny. “I remember it belonged to a weaver, Matthew Penge. He was a good friend to Ruth. But he died of the lung-rot. I bought some wool off him once.”

  They found that one of Matthew’s rooms was still almost entirely taken up by the enormous loom, which nobody had bothered to remove. And upstairs there still remained several piles of uncarded wool, which served handsomely for beds. They were all three dead tired and thought of nothing but flopping down on the soft mass and going to sleep.

  Next morning Penny said, “It’s best I’m the one to go out and buy the prog, for I haven’t been to Folkestone in some long while; folk won’t remember me. Is, you and Pye better stay close.”

  This made obvious sense, though it was tiresome. Is said, “Buy a bit of paper and writing things, Pen, while you’re out; we’ll send a letter to that Greenaway. And, while you’re gone, Pye can work on trying to pick up another message from Arun.”

  Pye would have liked to go out and run on the beach (a thing she had never been permitted to do while she lived with Twite and his sister) but even she could see that this was far too dangerous; people in Folkestone would remember her as the Handsel Child at whom they used to go and stare fearfully in the days when she hung in her cage over the railway.

  “But we might sneak along the back gardens and into some of the other houses,” Is said, to pacify her, and this they did, finding a good deal of rubbish and a few interesting relics in the little deserted dwellings: a whole roomful of wigs left behind by the master wig-maker Amos Furze; some cups, plates, and stools which they took back for their own use; an umbrella; a musical instrument made of clay and shaped like a fish; a book, Snake-Charming Without Tears; and, to the delight of Is, four paintings by Ruth, which she must have presented to neighbours and they had ungratefully left behind.

  Pye had never seen Ruth’s paintings and was completely spellbound; after they had been brought back to Matthew’s house she lay curled up on the wool, gazing at them in a trance of pleasure for a long time, while Is made a cautious survey of the overgrown little kitchen gardens, finding some leaves of spinach and a few old carrots and parsnips, which she made into soup.

  Penny arrived with news, as well as provisions.

  “What do you think! I came across Mrs Nefertiti at the market with one of her daughters. They’ve a stall, selling goats’ cheese. Oh, she was so angry about the Throstle! (Lucky they weren’t hurt by the explosion at the farm; only shook.) But I told her we’d seen the Admiral, with his kite. She knew it was his doing . . . Dunno how, she just knew. And she’s terrible angry about Cold Harbour, too. She said it won’t be long before the Admiral’s time is up. She’d not say how. She just feels it coming . . . No news of Ruth. I told her we’ve a notion Ruth’s in France. And she said yes, that made sense, for she could feel that a new kind of wave was going to roll across the Channel very soon.”

  “A tidal wave?” said Is anxiously. “Like the one that hit Blastburn?”

  “No I don’t think so . . . A wave of people, it seemed to be.”

  Pye came downstairs, playing a breathy tune on her clay pipe.

  “That’s an ocarina,” said Penny. “I’ve seen Italian pedlars with ’em at fairs. I will say, Pye, you soon got the hang of it.”

  Pye was playing the tune of ‘Whales and Snails Make Merry in Gales’.

  “Maybe Arun can hear music,” she said hopefully. “Some people can. I can hear them – times – they pick it up and sing. Like Ruth’s pictures! I tell people about those. I tell them lots of things.”

  Penny had bought apples and mutton pies and a pinch of tea, for which she had a passion, done up in a paper twist; she set water to boil, over a drift-wood fire, in an old iron pot Is had found outside.

  Pye took a mutton pie and an apple and retired upstairs again. The others were soon glad that she was out of sight for, just as Penny as about to raise the longed-for cup of tea to her lips, there came a tap at the front door, and the unpleasing head of Mrs Boles poked round it, lumpy with curl papers.

  “Well, I never!” she said, stepping inside and closing the door behind her. “I fancied it might be you that I saw in the High Street’ (with a nod at Penny). “‘Well,’ I says to myself, ‘if that ain’t the young lady as used to come and stop once in a way with Ruth Twite! Well,’ thinks I to myself, ‘what a shock it will be for her if she goes along to Cold Shoulder Road and finds the house all burned up.’ So, I thinks, I’ll just step along and see. And what do I find? Made yourselves real snug in here, haven’t you? Very sensible, too, for poor old Matthew long ago handed in his cards, and poor Ruth’s house, as you can see, suffere
d a futality. Oh, shocking, it was! And my poor little home suffered, too . . . I was obliged to move in with my sister, in Eccleston Road. It’s a disgrace, I tell the Council, over and over, but not a bit of notice do they take.”

  All the while she was talking, Mrs Boles’s little redrimmed eyes were running round the room like cockroaches, taking note of everything that was there, or was not there.

  “And how is Mrs Ruth?” she asked chattily. “Do you have good news of her? And that poor little Handsel Child – what they used to hang over the track with her head in a bag, – what Mrs Ruth made off with? Are they well, the both of them?”

  “We reckon Aunt Ruth is in France,” said Is stolidly. “That’s all the news we have of her. And that ain’t definite, no way.”

  “In France? Well, now, fancy that! Who’d ha’ thought it? That’s a long step for her to have taken the kinchin. Though, mind you, France ain’t so far as it was, not now they’ve got this Chunnel Tannel! And will you be stopping here long?”

  She wiped her hands on her apron – which was just as damp and grimy as the last time Is had seen her – and looked hopefully at the pot of boiling water and the paper of tea.

  “That depends,” said Penny. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Thank you dear, I wouldn’t say no. Most acceptable, that would be. Now, I remember when you were here before, with the young lad—” nodding at Is, “you carried all Mrs Ruth’s pictures up to the Admiral’s place. How is the young lad?” Her eyes wandered to the stair.

  “He’s well, thank you,” Penny said, passing her the tea. in a broken mug. “(Is, I reckon there’s a cat upstairs, you better go and chase it out.)”

  Is took the hint and vanished upstairs.

  “And will you be seeing the Admiral, like?” enquired Mrs Boles, blowing the steam off her tea. “To take a look at Mrs Ruth’s pictures, like?”

  “Well . . .” began Penny.

  “Why I ask,” went on Mrs Boles, “round here it’s getting to be a known thing that the Admiral’s the gaffer of those—” she whipped her eyes round the room and sank her voice to a murmur, “—those Gentry. And it’s a known thing that, quite soon, he and that other feller, that feller Twite, and that sister of his, are all a-going to scarper off to the Ayzores, to live on toasted larks and sherry wine for ever after. While the rest of us shiver and starve and all the poor devils they done away with are gone and forgotten.”