by Anne Fine
Her brigand took his search to heart. He tumbled chairs, up-ended beds, and, though too tall, stormed up the attic stairs, poking his head in every room. Then Sophie pushed him up the last few steps that served no purpose since they came to a dead end.
I fretted as his stiff arms brushed the faded wallpaper. ‘No point in sending him up there.’
‘He’s headed for the roof.’
‘What, through the attic ceiling?’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Through the sliding panel.’
‘What sliding panel?’
But her quick, prying fingers were already showing me. There, where I’d always thought there was some tiny flaw in the design – steps leading up to nowhere – Sophie had found an explanation. ‘See? The square above him slides across.’
I was astonished. I could remember using my tiny fingers to prise at it so often from all sides when I was small. It never shifted. Sophie had come at the problem quite a different way and used a thumb to push it to the side.
Back it had slid. Already she had squeezed her brigand through to make him clamber out. He scaled the iron ladder to search among the chimney pots, then leaned over the highest parapet to search some more.
‘He’ll not find any will and testament tucked in the ivy,’ I scoffed. ‘The wind and weather would have shredded it.’
She was determined to follow her own story. ‘Not if it’s wrapped in oilcloth and tucked in some hollow.’
So on we went, until her story drew to its close, the brigand hunted down. I started gathering the dolls together.
‘No, no!’ she said, distraught. ‘We must arrange for his escape, or he’ll swing from the gallows.’
Knowing the gong would sound for lunch at any moment, I said, ‘Why don’t we simply make the judge transport him?’
‘Too harsh by far!’ cried my soft-hearted companion.
‘Then we must leave him kicking his heels in gaol – at least while we put the doll’s house to rights after his clumsy visit.’
I set the little chairs and tables on their feet while she picked up the tiny black and scarlet logs her villain had spilled from the grate.
‘Lucky he didn’t start a fire!’ I teased.
But he had caused some damage in the doll’s house. A pin had sprung up from the long thin padded seat under the drawing-room window.
Sophie put in her hand. ‘I’ll push that back.’
I tried to stop her, but I was too late. Her thumb had bent it.
‘Bother!’ she said. ‘Oh, well. I’ll pick out the pin. Then we can straighten it and try again.’
‘Leave it to me,’ I begged. But Sophie was too quick. Using her fingernails as pincers, she tugged. Again, she was too hasty. Out sprang another pin, and then another.
The long top of the padded window seat was lifting suddenly, like a lid.
‘What’s this?’
Reaching inside, Sophie pulled out a doll I’d never seen. Like Mrs Golightly, he’d been whittled from wood, almost a peg doll. He was a mischievous-looking lad with lank dark hair that fell over sharp eyes, and he was dressed in thick black clerical skirts far, far too long for him.
She handed him to me. ‘Is he a choirboy? And how is he supposed to walk, hobbled with skirts like these?’
I shrugged, as much at a loss as she was to explain his peculiar garb. And it felt strange to think that all those hours I had played alone, this doll had been so close, practically under my fingers, almost as though he had been hiding there, listening and waiting.
She snatched him back. ‘I’ll not leave him like that! I think it very cruel of someone’ – and here she looked at me suspiciously – ‘to dress him in such a way, and nail him in a window seat that might as well serve as a coffin.’
I laughed. ‘Come, Sophie. Perhaps, like me, he had to sit for ever in a wicker chair or in his bed. Perhaps these skirts were wrapped so thickly round his poor lame legs to keep them warm.’
She wasn’t amused. ‘You were not lame. And I expect that neither is he.’
I teased, ‘So you’re a doctor now!’
Just then the lunch gong rang and Mary appeared in the doorway. ‘Mother says both of you must come at once.’
Regretfully Sophie laid down the doll. ‘I shall say no to pudding,’ she announced, ‘so I can make him something more sensible to wear through our adventures.’
Of course her love of jellied fruit won out against compassion for a wooden doll. She sat as long, and ate as much as I did, and my appetite had been the wonder of the house; even Cook praised me. But Sophie did remember to beg some velvet scraps from Mary’s work box along with her small sharp scissors and, as soon as lunch was done, she fell to her task.
I watched her spread the velvet scraps beside the doll. ‘Shall his new breeches be blue or green?’
She took some time to choose, pushing at the doll’s skirts so she could better measure the length of his legs. I heard her gasp. Then, snatching him from the floor, she quickly turned away. Only a moment passed before, as if she’d suddenly become possessed of sleight of hand, she thrust a different doll towards me.
Yes. Another doll entirely!
But not that, either. No, not quite. For here were the same face, the same eyes and the same lock of hair that fell across the forehead. This was the same boy grown into a man, but the green eyes gazed out with a more piercing look and the thin smile had curdled into something sourer – closer, I thought uneasily, to satisfied spite than simple mischief.
As I watched, Sophie flipped the doll over. The boy was back. She flipped the doll again. The skirts swept down and there, once more, was the grown man.
‘Two dolls for one! Daniel, have you seen anything so clever?’
I didn’t answer. I was miles away, back in a book of fairy tales I’d had to beg my mother to take out of my room each night because it gave me such bad dreams. There was an illustration at the front. If I looked at the picture one way up, then it was Snow White with her tumbling ebony locks smiling at me. Twist the book upside down and the same picture showed a different face entirely. Lace frills around Snow White’s neck had now become her wicked stepmother’s greying hair. The ebony curls had turned themselves into dark scallops around the old queen’s neck. Through the strange alchemy of the artist’s skill, only the eyes, viewed upside down, stayed eyes. Everything else – eyebrows, age lines around the neck, lips and the shadows of the chin – became some other. How many hours had I sat in bed, haunted, twisting the book this way and that, just as now Sophie flipped this most unusual doll first one way, then the other?
‘Don’t keep on doing that, Sophie! Leave it be!’
I had surprised myself, and she had never heard me be so sharp with her. Her small face crumpled and her lower lip shook. Then, as if suddenly resentful of my tone, she flipped the boy to show the man again and thrust him in my face.
I’ll swear her voice became a snarl. ‘I’ll do exactly as I choose!’
Even more startled than I, poor Sophie threw the doll down on the rug as if it scorched her. Her eyes stared and she suddenly looked scared to death.
‘Sophie?’ I put a hand out. She was trembling. ‘Sophie?’
‘I’m sorry, Daniel! I didn’t mean to speak like that!’
I had to comfort her. ‘I didn’t for a moment think those were your own words.’
It was as if she actually believed me. ‘Really?’
She looked so anxious that I thought it best to keep up the pretence. ‘No, not for a moment.’ I forced myself to laugh. ‘I took it you’d forgotten that our game was over, and had become your fierce brigand once again.’
She was still pale. ‘Come on,’ I tempted her. ‘Let’s start again. Begin another story.’
‘Another story, yes.’
She reached for safe little Rubiana with her pink cheeks and bright blue eyes. I chose from the rest of the dolls. I look back now and I no longer think it curious that, offered a doll with two fresh faces, I still turned my back
and picked up poor balding Topper, who could do nothing more than scratch and bark.
We set off with as much invention as we could muster, but within minutes all enthusiasm melted away. Sophie threw Rubiana aside. ‘Daniel, let’s leave the doll’s house for another day.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed at once. ‘Another day.’
It was a long time before that day came.
No doubt Mrs Marlow spoke to her husband about my storm of weeping, because early one morning, shortly after the fever had left town, he rapped on the door to my room.
‘Awake, Daniel? I’ve a couple of calls to make down by the quarry; but then I’ll keep my promise and come back to take you with me to the hospital to see your mother.’
I rushed to dress myself, all the time wondering what she would think to see me look so different. Now, there was colour in my cheeks. My legs were stronger and I stood up straight. In the new jacket that had been made for me I looked quite the young man of health and sense.
But when I said as much to Mrs Marlow, she drew me aside. ‘Daniel, you mustn’t be too disappointed with this meeting. Your mother is not well. If she were half herself she wouldn’t still be in the hospital. And Doctor Marlow says the nurses can’t persuade her to eat more than a few scraps. Her face is very drawn, he says. You will be shocked.’
I kept a sober look, and nodded to show that I’d been listening. But, deep inside, my heart was singing because I knew the moment my mother saw me standing there, she would be well again. She’d take me in her arms, her spirits soaring, and make an effort to return to her old self. Soon she’d be bringing out her lace-making tools and earning our living again. Perhaps the Marlows would allow her to take my bedroom for a week or two, while I slept on the couch in the doctor’s study. And then, when they were both assured she was quite well, we would go off together and find another place to live, as good as Hawthorn Cottage. Better.
‘Daniel!’
The doctor was at the door. I flung my arms round Mrs Marlow, and ran from the house. Together, Dr Marlow and I walked through the town and out the other side, further than I had ever ventured with Mrs Marlow or the girls before the fever had corralled us all. Mostly we walked in silence, and more than once I had the feeling that Dr Marlow had drawn breath to speak and then thought better of it, while I was busy trying to control my rising excitement.
At the town’s edge we reached the sign that pointed to Langley Hospital, but the doctor kept on.
I stopped. ‘Why are we going further?’
‘Further?’
I pointed to the sign he’d just walked past. ‘Are there more visits to make before I see my mother?’
He understood at last. ‘No, Daniel. She’s not there.’
‘You said that she was in the hospital.’
‘And so she is. But there’s more than one sort of hospital, and she’s in another.’
‘Where?’
‘Further along. A little out of town.’
We walked for what seemed half an hour or more. Suddenly, we were off the road and into what he told me was a beech wood. Maybe it was the fact that this was the first true wildness I had ever seen that made it such a gloomy place. We’d only gone a little way between the trees before I had the feeling that I was in a strange world out of fairy tales. Birds screeched and fluttered. I could hear the rasp of leaves, and scuttling in the undergrowth.
‘It feels like stepping into one of those stories on the shelf.’
‘I only wish it were!’ he answered before, instantly regretting his words, he stopped in his tracks to grip me by the shoulders. ‘Did my wife warn you?’
A chill ran over me. ‘She said my mother was much changed.’
‘A good deal changed. You might not recognize her. She has been very ill.’
I flared up. ‘Maybe she would have been a whole lot better if your kindness had stretched to letting me visit her!’
Taking my arm, he led me to a tree stump and made me sit at his side. ‘You’re wrong. Naturally you think of your mother as the gentle soul who sat beside your bed, and brought your meals, and helped you out into the garden, and back again. But, Daniel, that was your mother while she was managing to keep your life the way she wanted it: shut down, shut in – yes, shut away from everything.’
It seemed a harsh way to describe a woman caring for her son. But since I now knew there was nothing wrong with me, how could I argue with him? I sat sullen and silent.
He kept on. ‘At first we took her to the hospital that you and I just passed. I thought – so did the nurses – that once we’d explained to her that you were safe, she would calm down. She heard every word I said – that you’d come back to her as soon as she’d accepted that you weren’t ill and needn’t waste another minute of your precious life locked away from the world.’
He let out a sad sigh. ‘But still she raved.’
I felt as if I couldn’t properly know the word. ‘Raved, did you say?’
He was insistent. ‘Yes, she screeched and spat. Tore at her clothes. Spun like a dervish – even flew at our faces with her fingernails and cursed us.’
‘Cursed you? My mother?’
‘Believe what I’m telling you, Daniel. We are not dealing with the mother you know. She acted like a woman unhinged. It reached the stage where bolts were put on her door, and none of the nurses dared go in without two sturdy janitors to keep them safe. We tried for weeks. The trays of food we left were hurled around the room. The crockery was broken. The other patients were kept awake all night because of her howls—’
‘My mother howled?’
‘The nurses said it was like listening to a wolf bay at the moon.’
I covered my ears. ‘No, I can’t bear this. Don’t say any more!’
He used his strength to pull my hands away and told me, almost angrily, ‘Now can you see why I’ve been waiting so long to take you to see her? I must be the only doctor in these parts who blessed the coming of fever to his own town, because it gave me one more small excuse to keep a boy from his mother.’
Seeing my tears splash on my knees, he slid a comforting arm around my shoulders. ‘And now I’ve told you the truth, perhaps we should sit quietly while you decide if you’d prefer to take my advice – heartfelt advice, Daniel! – to turn for home. It will not do you any good to see your mother.’
He broke off. It was as if he had to force himself to finish what he had to say.
‘And I no longer think that it will do your mother any good to see you.’
And so we sat there on that mossy stump, while I thought stubbornly he must be wrong. Try as I might, it was impossible to imagine my mother tearing her gown and slapping at her nurses, or hurling so much as a reel of thread onto the floor. Do I sound mad if I say that it suddenly occurred to me that Dr Marlow might be making up this terrible story so he could keep me in his family? He had no son of his own. I was an amiable and sensible lad. Perhaps, between them, he and his wife had hatched a plot to steal me from my mother and keep her locked up in her turn. Or perhaps Mrs Marlow didn’t realize what her husband planned. Perhaps—
My head spun. I stood up. ‘I know you think I’m foolish to persist. But I won’t rest until I’ve seen her.’
He rose in turn. ‘No, Daniel. I admire your courage. But I must warn you, this will be a dreadful day for you.’
‘It is already,’ I said ruefully. And on we walked through the beech wood until we came across a cart track, which we turned to follow. Soon, through the thinning trees, I caught sight of a dark, forbidding building.
‘Is that the place?’
He nodded. We walked on, past a leaning sign that said Haldstone Asylum, past outhouses and stables, through a stone arch and then across a cobbled courtyard sprung with thin weeds.
We reached a massive studded door. While I stood waiting, Dr Marlow tugged the bell. Far off inside we heard a jangling. It seemed an age till we heard footsteps. The door opened and a woman as round as a ball, wearing a dark blue unifor
m, greeted the doctor cheerfully enough. ‘Ah! Come again to see your patient?’ She looked at me and her expression changed. ‘Is this …?’
‘Yes, this is Mrs Cunningham’s son.’
The information sounded like a warning. The matron looked me up and down, then turned away saying, ‘Perhaps the two of you would give us just a few moments?’
I wondered if she meant to scuttle off to warn the other nurses: ‘Quick! Rip Mrs Cunningham’s skirts, strew broken crockery around her room, and poke her with her needles till she howls.’ Or perhaps I’d been told nothing but the honest truth, and as a kindness to me the matron meant to rush ahead and force my maddened mother into decent clothing, and sweep up the messes around her – even wipe her tear-stained cheeks – to save me from a little of the shock.
‘We’ll wait in here till Matron comes for us,’ said Dr Marlow. Clearly he knew the building well, because he ushered me into a waiting room. Cold ashes lay in the grate, and over the mantelpiece there was a painting of a cloudy sky over blue hills. ‘Take a chair, Daniel.’
We waited without speaking until a nurse put her head round the door. ‘Ready?’
We followed her. I’d never in my life opened my eyes under water in any river; but there was a dismal greenness to the corridor down which we walked that made me think of drowning. On either side were doors. To the left, some were ajar. I turned to see a nurse empty a chamber pot into a sluice, and passed another room in which there was a cluttered desk.
But on the other side, all of the doors were rimmed with iron and were shut. Their bolts were shot across, and from inside I could hear dismal noises – mutterings and groans, or sounds of weeping.
I felt my anger rising. ‘My mother – is she locked away like this?’
‘Hush, Daniel.’
I bit my lip and kept walking. We turned a corner and I almost stepped in what I took to be a trail of oil leaking beneath a door.
Dr Marlow stopped short. ‘Curses!’
He took my arm and tried to push me through a door on the other side. ‘Daniel, you must stay out from underfoot till this grim matter’s sorted.’
