Midwinter Nightingale

by Joan Aiken

  “If—if Simon likes the idea?”

  “Oh, he will. I really love him,” said the girl dreamily. “Really, really! Oh, it's good talking to you, Dido! It's so good to have a friend, somebody to come right into my world! The girls at school were stupid, and the people at Coldacre are all lower class and can't enter into my sentiments and aspirations. My grandfather is pro-Burgundian because they buy his sheep and he used to dance with the duchess long ago at Almacks's assembly rooms, but I think Aunt Minna is an old horror—don't you?—and I expect if the Burgundians don't find the sheep waiting for them at Marshport, they will just get into their ships and sail back to Burgundy. Don't you suppose that is what they'll do?”

  “What do they want the sheep for?”

  “To eat. I'm a vegetarian,” said the girl. “Are you? What's your favorite food?”

  “Cucumber sandwiches.”

  “Oh, famous! But now the problem is: First, where is the king? And, second, where's Alfred's crown? Do you know where they are?”

  “Nope,” said Dido. “Neither of them. Not the foggiest.”

  “Someone said the crown might be in Queen Adelaide's desk. But nobody seems to know where that is.”

  Dido kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Of course my mamma was not Queen Adelaide,” the girl went on chattily “My horrible father was married twice. Or at least he had two wives. My mamma was Zoe Coldacre …but she died when I was born. So Lot is only my half brother. And we don't know yet if either of us is going to take after Papa.”

  “Take after him?”

  “He was a werewolf, you know. That was why he was shut up in the Tower of London for fifteen years. He thought it was wholly unfair. Why should he be shut up for something he couldn't help?”

  “I heard about him,” said Dido cautiously “But hadn't he killed a lot of folk?”

  “Well, he couldn't help that! That's what werewolves do. That was done during the times when he was a wolf. At night, you know. So Lot and I don't yet know if that is going to happen to us. It sometimes happens when you are about twenty-one.”

  “How will you know?”

  “The first sign is, you can't see yourself in the mirror. Oh, wouldn't it be exciting!”

  “Did you know Lord Herodsfoot?” Dido asked.

  “Why?”

  “I jist wondered.”

  “I saw him once or twice,” the girl said casually. “He collected games for the king, didn't he? He had a game called Brooks on the Moon, or something like that; he thought it might cheer the king up, distract him, cure him of whatever is the matter with him. Of course Pa didn't want that. Herodsfoot wasn't a bad old stick. Pa shut him up in a box, Lot told me, because he wouldn't tell where the king was. Maybe he really didn't know. I didn't think he'd be dead for so long, not for ever. I was sorry when Lot told me that.”

  Dido did not ask whether Jorinda had known the Woodlouse. They were now approaching the end of the long tunnel, which had led them up a gradual incline for about half a mile. Ahead of them they could see a circle of pale sky; the night was coming to an end.

  Woodlouse and Herodsfoot, thought Dido, I'll not forget you. Not ever. Not ever. That's about all I can do for ye.

  An iron gate barred the entrance to the tunnel. But Jorinda had a key.

  “I nicked it off the park keeper,” she explained. “I used to come and stay for half-term sometimes.”

  She also had a dapple-gray pony which—luckily for the pony—she had tethered inside the gate. Luckily for they discovered that outside a severe blizzard was raging. Snow blew in long white streamers, sideways, across a vista of lake, clumps of tall trees and rolling parkland.

  “What a dismal nuisance,” said Jorinda. “It's going to take me forever to ride to Coldacre in this. Goodbye, Dido. I really enjoyed talking to you. Oh …you might as well have this. An Eccles cake. I brought it for my brother; Lot loves cake. But I never saw him, so you can have it.”

  She reached down from her pony's back and handed Dido a small solid circular cake wrapped in tissue paper.

  “Eat it for your breakfast! Goodbye!”

  She kicked her heels into the pony's flanks and rode off into the snowstorm at a smart canter.

  Dido gazed after her, long and thoughtfully, until she had disappeared in the driving snow. Then she looked down at the small clammy object in her hand.

  Dido was not fond of cake. And, although hungry, she did not at all fancy this one. Unwrapped, it was both sticky and greasy, a shell of bright yellow pastry wrapped around a mass of little black wrinkled things. Were they currants? Perhaps. They looked thoroughly unappetizing. Dido broke off a quarter of the cake and dropped it on the snowy grass. Two small wild birds had been sheltering inside the tunnel entrance. They pounced on the pastry, pecked at it eagerly—and both fell dead among the crumbs.

  “Humph,” said Dido. “Sorry about that, birdies! I wondered why she should take the trouble to bring a cake to her brother, for she didn't seem so all-fired fond of him. I reckon the rest of this can go down among the fishes.”

  She walked to the border of the lake, which was close at hand, dropped the cake into the water, noticing that a film of ice was beginning to form along the edge, and knelt to rinse her hands in the freezing water.

  “Now, which way do we go? Too bad Miss Jorinda didn't wait to give me any directions. But I reckon if she had, they'd only lead me into trouble.”

  Since Dido had no idea where in England Fogrum Hall was situated, nor where the nearest town lay, her simplest course was to walk away from the house, which also had the advantage of keeping the wind at her back.

  And no one's likely to see me in this weather, she thought. Also, they've other things to worry about.

  Peering behind her through ribbons of snow, she could see a dense black plume of smoke blowing her way over a tree-covered hillock out of which the tunnel emerged. Maybe they'll blame me for the fire, Dido thought. I'd best get away as fast as I can manage.

  This was not very fast. Besides hunger and exhaustion, she now had worry. Was it possible that that awful girl was really going to marry Simon? Or was it just something she hoped for? Dido had not seen Simon for a good many months while she had been away in America; all sorts of things could happen in a short time. Here was the poor king apparently about to die, and David the prince of Wales dead in some catastrophe in the north, but did that really mean Simon was next in line to the throne? Could that be possible?

  Struggling on through the storm, Dido hoped devoutly that Simon had too much good sense to marry a girl who was capable of poisoning her own brother. Did he know how ruthless she was? Could he be aware that her father was a werewolf and her brother a drunkard?

  Dido was making her way across a huge park with rough grass, scattered trees and patches of woodland. As she trudged on she began to see that the park boundary ahead of her was a wall, a twenty-foot-high barrier that seemed to run on and on without a break. But there had been a gateway. Dido remembered the arrival of the carriage and the two stone gateposts with crumbling griffins on them. What a long time ago that arrival now seemed. What a lot had happened at Fogrum Hall.

  This park, she thought, is as big as Ameriky. I hope I don't have another hundred miles to walk before I find a gate.

  With relief, after a while, she saw a gap ahead, and a small lodge building beside it, set about with tall trees. The gap contained a gate, but the gate was shut. What's the odds that it's locked, thought Dido, and I'll have to tell some tale to make them let me out? That is, if there's anybody at home in the lodge.

  However, as she neared the lodge, its door opened and a man came out. He wore a black robe and hood, which made Dido's heart sink. Croopus, is he one of the baron's strong-arm boys?

  As the man walked toward the gate, while Dido was still about twenty yards away, an unexpected thing happened. A massive branch broke from one of the big trees by the lodge, and it blew straight down toward the man.

  “Hey, mister!” yel
led Dido. “Watch out!”

  He did not hear. He had not seen her. Her voice was drowned by the gale. She raced toward him and just managed to tug him backward as the branch smashed down onto the spot where he had been. Dido and the man both fell to the ground in a tangle of twigs and leaves, but otherwise unhurt.

  The lodge door shot open and an aproned woman scudded out.

  “Oh, Your Reverence! Are you killt? Are you hurt bad? Oh my lordy-lord, what a thing to happen …just when you've been so good, visiting my poor Tim!”

  “No, Mrs. Dale, I am quite unharmed, thank you, due to the speedy action of this excellent young person.”

  The elderly man struggled to his feet and Dido saw with immense relief that he was a clergyman, not one of the baron's henchmen. “Your Tim will have his work cut out, sawing up that bough for firewood, when he is back on his feet, which I trust will be in a day or two. No, truly, I am perfectly unhurt, Mrs. Dale, and must be on my way without delay. Ah, thank you, thank you,” he said as the woman ran to open the gate for him and Dido, then shut and bolted it behind them.

  “I think you saved my life,” the man then said politely to Dido. “Shall we exchange names? I am Father Sam, of Saint Arling's Chapel. Who are you and where are you bound?”

  Dido liked the look of Father Sam and replied without hesitation, “I'm Dido Twite, mister, and I'm not just sure where I'm going, because I haven't the foggiest notion where I am …but I'm looking for a chap called Simon Bakerloo.”

  The man's face lit up. “Bless my soul! What a piece of good fortune! I am on my way this very minute to meet that very Simon! He asked if I knew your whereabouts. I saw him only a few hours ago and told him how to find his way to Otherland Priory, where I hope he may be now. He had hoped to take refuge in my hermitage, but that was not possible, for it was in imminent danger of flooding …and I had to go on a charitable errand.”

  “Oh, mister! Oh, Father Sam! What a lucky thing! Is Simon a-going to see the king? I just been in Fogrum Hall, where there's a batch of jammy-fingered coves ud give their ears and whiskers for a buzz about where His Nibs has got to—”

  “Hush, my child! Walls have ears!” Father Sam exclaimed, glancing at the high park wall. “Let us get away from this neighborhood.”

  “I'm right with you there, Reverence,” Dido agreed.

  Dense forest skirted the park wall on its outer side, beyond a narrow coach road. Father Sam glanced this way and that, evidently searching for a landmark, then found a notched yew tree and plunged unhesitatingly into the woods. Dido, following him, discovered that a narrow path, out of sight of the carriageway, ran steeply downhill between the trees.

  “The road goes round,” Father Sam explained to Dido, “but the path goes across. It is a shortcut. But the floods will prevent our following it all the way. We shall have to leave it after a few miles and skirt round the flooded area. Still, it will save us an hour's walking. And if—but how in the world did you come to be in Fogrum Hall, child?”

  “I was scrobbled, Father.” Dido explained how she had been kidnapped after her interview with the archbishop and what had happened after that.

  “I see…. So you will not be aware that His Grace the archbishop was found murdered a couple of days ago?”

  “No! Is that so? Poor old boy! Now, who would do in a decent old cove like that?”

  “Oh, unquestionably it was done by order of Baron Magnus. Some guards at the Tower—and a doctor— were also found with their throats slit. Doubtless Baron Magnus had a grudge against them.”

  “I reckon he had a grudge against almost everybody …except maybe that fat old duchess. Too bad she's still around. And Lot—his son—we don't know if he was done for in the fire or if he's still live and kicking.”

  “Hark!” Father Sam held up a finger. Through the trees above them on the hillside came the rattle of a carriage being driven at a gallop. And, a moment later, the sound of a single horse, ridden at the same headlong pace.

  “D'you reckon that might be someone after me?” asked Dido uneasily.

  “It is possible. You might have been seen crossing the park. Or they might have asked at the lodge. But if so,” said Father Sam comfortably, “you have now given them the slip. A carriage can't follow you down this path. And the snow is covering our footprints.”

  “Father,” said Dido after a while, “what d'you reckon those things are, on ahead?”

  They had come to a scantily wooded stretch of forest, where the ground was covered with fern and bracken now beaten down by the snow into sodden lumps. Among these tussocks were half a hundred human figures, seated, silent and motionless. They wore green-and-gray jackets. The snow had crowned them with white caps. They were apparently alive but seemed to be unconscious. The oddest thing about them was that they were all seated six to twelve inches above the ground.

  “Holy custard!” said Dido. “How d'you reckon they do that, Father?”

  Father Sam was worried.

  “Oh, dear me! They will very soon freeze to death if we leave them like that. I am afraid it is certainly my duty to help them. If you will just give me a hand, my dear, I think we can soon rouse them.”

  what had once been a dark strip of barren land on the edge of the coast but separated from the mainland by the Middle Mere, a long, narrow freshwater pool, reputed to be bottomless. Over centuries the monks of the Priory had cultivated the strip of land, creating vineyards, orchards, gardens and fields of corn where there had been nothing but a rock-crowned hummock of sand. In flood time or at spring tides, it was cut off, and at all times it was inaccessible except to those who knew their way through the mazy swamplands, the clumps of willow and alder whose roots were exposed at low tide, the beds of reeds and rushes, the slow-moving streams that changed their courses from week to week. Mist often lay among the islets for weeks on end; flocks of wading birds, swans, pelicans, herons and storks, inhabited the channels. There were quicksands into which unwary travelers had sunk and never been seen again.

  On the seaward side of Otherland a shingle bank, twenty miles long and forty feet high, ran from the Priory down to Wan Hope Point. Ships were often wrecked on this bank, as the currents that swept down it were fierce and treacherous. Local shipping knew better than to come anywhere near the coast thereabouts, but generations of wreckers had lit bonfires on the shingle bank—which was known as Querck Bank—to entice strange ships to their doom.

  King Richard's grandfather, Angus the Silent, had decreed that the railway be extended from Marshport to the Priory land so that the cargoes and wreckage from foundered ships could be transported inland. “Otherwise,” he said, “yon canny monks get it all!” This was true, and the railway was begun. But, due to one reason and another, it was never finished during the lifetime of King Angus, and since then, funds to finish it were not forthcoming. A grand viaduct had originally been built, connecting the highest point on the mainland with the rocky crag that formed the pinnacle of Otherland Mount, but the rail track had never been laid across the viaduct and the rubble bedding of the track had been much worn away by the passage of time. Few chose to approach Otherland on foot by that route; the dizzy height of the viaduct, two hundred and fifty feet, was enough to deter most people, and then there was a dauntingly steep climb down at the seaward end.

  On Father Sam's advice, Simon had chosen this approach to Otherland because floodwater had greatly increased the width of the marshy channel down below; in any case there did not seem to be any ferryboat, and if there had been, he did not see how the sedan chair was to be loaded into a boat.

  But now, within a stone's throw of the entrance to the viaduct, he was starting to have grave doubts as to the 'wisdom of this choice. In fact he was beginning to think he had made a terrible mistake. Old Harry was not encouraging.

  “We'll niver get told gentleman across yon footway!” he lamented. “Niver! I've come as far as my old pins'll bear me, Mester Simon; they on't take me across yon devil's causeway, I'm telling you! Nor the
sheep don't like it, neether, Mester Simon. Look at them!”

  It was true. The sheep did look very dispirited. Many of them were lying down on the snowy rail bed; others were dismally nibbling at bits of bramble and brushwood that sprouted along the gritty side of the permanent way. And Simon's latest protgs, a pair of Russian bears, were hunkered down with their heads sunk between their shoulders, and forepaws dangling, the very picture of dejection.

  “I do wish Father Sam had caught up with us,” Simon said.

  Father Sam had given Simon excellent directions for skirting as quickly as possible round the flooded forest.

  “But when ye get to the Middle Mere, there's a problem,” he had said. “Ye'd never find your own way through the waterways; ye'd have to find a boatman. And the boatmen may be paddling any otherwhere in the floods, the way things are just now. So you'd best take the high way. I'll come up with ye as fast as I can but I've a couple of sick folk to visit—ye can't disappoint sick folk—and I'm afeered those boys in the URSA may be needing medical advice. But I'll haste after ye as fast as I'm able; we'd best meet at the end of the viaduct, where the permanent way runs out of Wanmeeting Wood.”

  So that was where Simon was now waiting with his companions.

  And that was where Jorinda found him. She was riding a hired horse, a bay hack, which started and shied at sight of the bears, so she reined in at the edge of the wood, dismounted and tied her horse to a tree.

  “So this is where you've got to!” she said. “Aunt Minna thought as much. Do you know that you can be seen on the skyline? Clearly! Not very sensible, was it? Aunt Titania said that was what you would do. Now that my father is dead, they will probably support your claim to the throne. What on earth are you doing to that bear?”

  Simon was massaging its ears.

  “The damp air gives them a headache,” he said. “They are used to a dry winter cold.”