by Xan Brooks
What began by the drawing room hearth has spread out to explore the adjoining chambers. Aware of the heat that is already banking against the library door, the Scarecrow takes up a chair and applies it to the widow. He orders the girl to climb up and out.
She clambers onto the sill and feels a shard of glass lance her knee. “Where’s Fred?” she says. “Where are Toto and Fred?”
“I’m going back to look. But you need to get out.”
She stares at him, ashen. “Don’t look for too long.” But he has already drawn back. Lucy drops to the verge and drags in great gusts of night air. The air makes her cough and there is fresh blood on her shin and one shoulder is aching from where Fortnum-Hyde knocked her down. But she remains on the grass, gazing up at the glow of the window, waiting to see who will crawl out of it next.
The fire is torrential. It rages unchecked and the whole house is in danger. Truman-Jones is lost amid the holocaust. He reaches for a door but the handle is molten so that it solders itself to the pad of his hand. The pain is terrific but there is no detaching himself. With dogged persistence, he keeps pulling the door open and closed in an effort to be free and this turns the door into a bellows, fanning the flames that lick about its edges. Each time it swings open it fans a fresh blast against him and now Truman-Jones is alight as well. He sinks to his knees and places his chin on his chest. But he is still welded to the handle. He shoves the door open and then pulls it shut.
Clarissa is safe, she has reached the loggia. She smoothes down her green dress, drags a chair to the table and sits for a spell until her nerves have resettled. From this vantage she can observe the exodus of the remaining survivors through the rear door of the house. Out comes the under-butler, Colvin, at the head of a caterpillar of housemaids. Sweetpea Long has emerged unscathed, while Mrs Cleaver hastens by her chair as though embarked on some important errand. Her features are set in a preoccupied frown. Her heavy-browed gaze is fixed on some unspecified point up ahead. Clarissa will later be told that Mrs Cleaver has died. The smoke and the exertion have put too great a strain on her heart. At the moment she hurries past the small table, the housekeeper is leaving the garden in search of a secluded spot to lie down. A lifetime of service has prepared her for this. She would baulk at the indignity of expiring in public, where her skirt might ride up and her mistress might see her.
Presently Clarissa feels that she can risk a cigarette. She summons one of the footmen, her eyes still scanning the garden. Several familiar faces remain conspicuous by their absence. “I don’t see Jules anywhere,” she complains.
York Conway leaves off his coughing to afford her a theatrical shrug.
“Oh dear,” sighs Clarissa. “Poor old Grantwood House.”
It is 1882. It is the Peloponnese. Whitewashed homes stand against the scarp and the mountain goats congregate by the wall. The cobbled lane slaloms through the village before the land drops away to show him the blue sky. The church bells begin clanging in discordant glee, as though they have somehow been party to this heavenly unveiling. The vista is so perfect that he is coaxed out of the shade and onto the terrace to peer out at Delphi. Lord Hertford is buried so deep in his dream that he responds joyfully when light streams into the room and the great golden figure closes to claim him. “Raine,” he exclaims. “You put me in mind of the sun god Apollo.”
The butler arrives at the foot of the bed and proceeds to mount the coverlet on all fours. His hair and collar are aflame; his forehead cracks and drips fluid. Raine crawls up the bed and embraces Lord Hertford through the blankets while the fire pours in to kiss and suck at his heels. It consumes the goose-feather mattress and the canopy overhead. It makes no distinction between the servant and his master. It takes ahold of each man and sends them both off together.
Lucy stays on the verge for ten minutes or more. She stares up at the window and shouts, “Scarecrow! Toto! Fred!” She stands there until the window turns bright and the panes separate from the frame and the heat becomes such that she is forced to back-pedal. And once she starts to retreat she is powerless to stop and now she has turned on her heels and is running on the lawn. The noise of destruction is deafening: it sounds like woodland being flattened. Looking up, she sees that the upper floors are alight, which means that it’s all over and that nothing can be saved. The inferno is determined to eat Grantwood House whole.
Even out here, the smoke is intense and she staggers in and out of its drift. She is running on soft grass and then she is running on gravel, which means she must have reached the side drive that leads around to the yard. She presses on, thinking to return to the cottage, but then out of the mist gleams a pair of round headlamps and an instant later Coach’s old Maudslay appears on the track. The lorry has the gait of a wounded animal. It looks as though it is dying; it can barely manage the slope.
She scampers to one side and lets the lorry draw level. She cries out to Coach but it’s the Scarecrow at the wheel. “Lucy,” he says and is immediately overcome by a fit of choking.
She throws a glance at the back. “Where are Toto and Fred?”
The Scarecrow pulls open the door and staggers onto the drive. She thinks he is about to fall down and reaches out to steady him. He has spent too long in the house and inhaled too much smoke. And over his shoulder she sees that the night has turned brighter. The fire has found its way into the abandoned west wing.
When the coughing subsides he is able to speak. He gasps, “I hope she got out. Think she did. Don’t know about him. Couldn’t find either.”
She shakes her head, bites down on her lip.
“We need to go. But I can’t drive the lorry. Can’t work the gears, hold the wheel. Not at the same time. My arm,” he says. “Help me. Get us away.”
She wants to tell him no chance. She wants to ask him, “Go where?” She wants to point out that she can’t drive and only took the wheel a few times on those evenings in the woods. Instead she just nods. In that moment – with the ugly smoke swirling and the horrible house all ablaze – the Scarecrow’s request strikes her as the most sensible thing that has been uttered in months. Get out, get out, the entire world is collapsing. Afterwards they can look back and gauge the extent of the damage.
He removes himself to the passenger side. She draws in acrid air and throws the truck into gear and they lurch forward in spastic fits and starts, the masked one-armed man and his orphaned teenage chauffeur. Once on the main drive, she wrestles the stick and allows the vehicle to go faster. They plough past smoky figures who have fled through the main door and some of these step up, attempting to flag the truck down. She thinks that one of these figures is Rupert Fortnum-Hyde but he is there and gone in a flash; the Maudslay is gathering speed.
“He got out all right then. Fortnum-Hyde.”
The Scarecrow snorts and coughs. “Of course he got out. He was practically the first out the door.”
Beyond the truck’s tailgate, Grantwood House is aflame. Its windows have smelted. Smoke rises from its roof. Orange cinders blow out across the lawn and one of these has set light to a sheep. The animal stands amid its neighbours, its fleece a guttering torch, until its legs buckle and it rolls onto its side. The westerly cedar tree appears to have gone up as well. The other will follow; how can it resist? By this point the blaze is so bright that it can be seen from the village. The schoolmaster, up late, has alerted the fire station at Hertford. Farmhands are busy filling buckets from the spigot. Yet these rescuers will arrive a full half-hour too late. When the timbers combust, the upper stories collapse. Chimney breasts concertina; the roof pours into the cellar. And this is how one of the great seats of England passes into dust. In years to come the guests who once stayed there will remember it as a golden place and lament that nowhere else they’ve visited has ever quite measured up. And while this was not quite the legacy Lord Hertford intended, he may not have been altogether displeased.
Out of the inferno
bounces Coach’s old Maudslay; the fire at its back, the cold ground up ahead. Lucy intends to stop when she reaches the Palladian lodge but the engine is roaring and the thought of wresting it to a halt is somehow more unnerving than allowing the reins to go slack. So they run past the lodge and turn onto the macadam where the hedgerows are as high as one man standing on the shoulders of another. And yet even this far afield they have not quite propelled themselves clear of Grantwood House’s orbit, because a few hundred yards out they pass the Long Boys. As the truck bears down, the musicians turn and gawp in astonishment. They have been walking so long in this dark, empty land that they have begun to doubt they would ever see another living soul.
She sees George Washington stick out a hand. “Lulu! It’s Lulu!”
“Don’t stop,” the Scarecrow tells her.
“Should I?”
“No,” he says, and with some relief she reapplies her foot to the pedal and they mingle for a moment with the men on the road – two on one side, two on the other – before the towering hedgerows carry them round, up and out. The ground is ascending. The antique engine takes on a faint note of strain.
Near the crest of the hill the bushes drop back and the land opens out. They have emerged from the valley. She can feel the wind slap the truck and see thin clouds in motion across the expanse of night sky. In a corner of the windscreen, the horizon glows a dull, damp orange. The sight makes her heart jump; she thinks it’s the first light of dawn.
“No,” says the Scarecrow. “That’s still Grantwood House.”
But eventually even this sullen smudge is lost beneath the horizon and they ride on through the darkness, past primitive tithe cottages and waterlogged fallow fields. The road up here is mercifully straight and they meet no oncoming vehicles. Lucy discovers that, so long as she keeps the wheel aligned and maintains a steady pressure with her toes, the act of driving is really no more upsetting than anything else. She supposes the concentration it requires counts as a blessing as well. It helps set her mind apart from the events of the night.
The Scarecrow leans forward, peering at the signs for unfamiliar towns. He coughs for a spell and then composes himself.
“When we reach a main road there should be directions to London. This little lane can’t go on forever.”
She shakes her head. “If we see directions to London I’m turning the other way.”
“Lucy,” he says. “It’s time you were home.”
“What home? I don’t have a home.” The realisation hits her like a splash of cold water. She accepts that it was the Maudslay that first took her away from the Griffin and therefore it’s only right and proper that it should one day take her back. But she has travelled too far and is a different person these days. She is not about to steer Coach’s truck through the morning traffic on Ermine Street. She recoils at the thought of walking into the pub in Clarissa’s party dress, with dried blood on her shins and smoke in her hair, to tell them she’s sorry she’s been gone and then pick up where she left off. In a day or two she might feel differently. For now she is determined to point the truck away from the city and headlong into England. She plans to bear down on the pedal until the fuel tank runs dry.
The Scarecrow coughs and clears his throat, clearly in the grip of some dilemma of his own. Presently he says, “I have a home. Or rather I did have a home.”
“Ha,” she says. “You told me you didn’t.”
He nods. “It might still be there, but it’s more than a hundred miles away. It’s right across country, far out to the west.” He says, “Lucy, a favour. Can you drive me back home?”
Hertford market officially opens at eight, but Harry Sullivan has learned that if he is not there by seven, Pete Lang will have sloped in and set up at his stall. Lang always insists that he assumed it was spare, which is pure hogwash and adds insult to injury. If a man wants to steal another man’s stall, he should at least be upfront about it. He ought to brazen it out and say, “I like this stall better and now I got first dibs.” Don’t make out it’s the other fellow’s fault for showing up at the correct hour. Don’t make him say sorry for his lateness when he wasn’t late at all.
Any road, he‘s been through this palaver before and accepts that the best course of action is to be there by seven, before some of the traders have even dragged themselves out of bed, and that way he can sit on his fold-out chair and give Pete Lang a wave when he scurries in. Anyone seeing that wave would put it down as a jovial salute; a merry greeting from one mate to another. Only Pete Lang knows what it really means. It means, “Hello, you old thief, look who’s late today.” It says, “Here I am on my stall. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it, you bastard.”
The upshot is that he is out of the house before the birds have begun chirping, his fruit and veg stacked in the back of his van. The cabbages, he judges, are turning soft at the crowns; it’s been a rough year for cabbage, but these things can’t be helped. If a customer wants cabbage, his are no worse than the rest.
Halfway to market he passes a girl on the road. She is sat on the wall, a picture frame of all things propped against her bare knees. When the girl spots the van, she waves for it to stop. Sullivan is not in the habit of giving lifts, but a chap would need a hard heart to ignore a child in distress. There is something amiss with a world that sends a little girl out on her tod in the middle of nowhere before the sun has come up, where she might get knocked over or catch her death of cold.
He asks where she needs dropping and she asks where he’s going. When he tells her Hertford, she replies that that’ll do just as well. He has the feeling that she’s not from these parts. But instead of increasing his concern for her safety, the notion makes him uneasy. All at once he’s not convinced that he likes the mysterious creature he has let into his cab. Her dress is torn and her face is smudged and she stinks of smoke; it comes off her in waves. She brings a wildness with her, some tremor of mischief that strikes him as distasteful. It’s a wicked world that sends children out alone in the night. But sometimes it is the children that are wicked and this is why they’re abroad.
Their breath fogs. The picture frame grinds distractingly against his knee as he drives. She asks, “Is Hartwood full of rich people then?”
“Hertford,” he corrects. “Have you been living in a box all your life?”
“Is it full of rich people?”
“There’s rich and there’s poor. Same as any town, innit?”
Brightly, the girl goes on to inform him that she is out on a mission. She wants to find some rich people who might buy a painting. She says it’s an extremely nice painting and she would rather not have to sell it. But her poor mother is sick and the money-lender needs paying. She gnaws her lip and says, “Falconio.”
“What’s Falconio?”
“The money-lender. No, Falconio. Please, Falconio.” And for some unaccountable reason this sends her off into cackles.
Yes, Harry Sullivan thinks, the girl is not right. Where on earth has she sprung from – this raggedy sprite with the sailor’s laugh and the threadbare tale about an invalid mum? He would like to wind down the window and disperse the smell, but the nights have turned cold and the fields frosted over. Most of all he would like to push open the door and invite the girl to hop down.
“How old are you anyway?”
“Thirty-two,” she says promptly. “How old are you?”
“Now then, miss. I don’t hold with cheek.”
They continue in silence until they reach the outskirts of town. Street lights sweep the cab but when the girl angles the frame to show him the painting, he can’t make out head nor tail of the thing. He flicks a harried glance and sees a chaotic pattern on the oblong canvas. It is enough to tell him that the girl and her painting appear to be well matched. Each is as off-puttingly bestial as the other.
“Very good, I’m sure. And did you paint it yourself?”
“Course I didn’t paint it. It’s a very famous picture. It’s worth at least fifty pounds.”
“Right you are, miss.”
“It’s painted by a man called Pick-Arsehole.”
He says, “Now what did I say? I don’t hold with cheek and I draw the line at blue language.”
“Honestly, no joke, that’s his name. Pick-Arsehole.”
“Don’t keep saying it,” Sullivan splutters.
“Pick-Arsehole,” she says – and this time he can’t help but giggle too. The whole thing is too ridiculous. He could never have predicted his morning would end up like this.
He crosses the Lea; he can see the malting house now. He explains that he is going to market and he can drop her off there. If she wants to hang about for a bit, then that’s her look out. Who knows? She might even offload her picture on some short-sighted fool with more money than sense. Good luck to the girl. She can bag herself a free stall.
He says, “Tell you what, I know just the one. You can set yourself up at Peter Lang’s stall.” And she joins in with his merriment and lets fly with her loud, filthy cackle. She cries, “Oh, oh, Falconio!” and the van turns onto the cobblestone square and dips behind the rows of covered stands and it carries Winifred out of this story and off into another. The October morning is cold. She will find a way to keep warm.
THE SEA
29
They ride into the west and it takes them all day. For the first leg of the journey they stick to the back roads, crawling behind farm carts and sliding in and out of quiet hamlets where the residents glance grudgingly up from their business. The going is hard; they keep losing their way. Faded, mud-spattered signs only point the direction to the next village and then the one beyond that, because nobody who uses these roads appears to travel more than five miles at a time. This makes Lucy feel as though they are crossing invisible borders, through a system of small, self-contained kingdoms that may very well extend all the way to the sea.
