Deception

by Joan Aiken

  She took out her diary from under the pillow and wrote in the entry for the preceding day:

  “This Day was exelently well Spent in attending to our Estates. We worked hard all day long.” Her spelling was extremely idiosyncratic.

  Then she leaned across and poked her brother.

  “Wake up!”

  “I’m awake already,” he said at once, opening his eyes.

  “We must get up. Louisa’s coming today.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I was awake.”

  The two children shared a room at the end of the house, on the second floor. Conveniently for them, a servants’ stair, just round the corner from their bedroom door, led down to a side entrance on the ground floor, which had enabled them on countless occasions to slip out early or creep in late.

  They hurried on their clothes, Tot sometimes, with impatient kindness, helping his sister tie her petticoat strings at the back and fasten her tucker.

  “Don’t put on your shoes, they’ll make such a row; carry them downstairs in your hand. Make haste—I can hear Annie already.”

  Barefoot, carrying their shoes, the two children stole down the scrubbed wooden stairs, along a stone-flagged passage past pantries and still-rooms, and so into the big, warm kitchen. One of its walls was entirely taken up with ranges, and two of the fires had been banked so as to burn all night. Somebody had been at work already: a batch of thin oatcakes had been baked and laid out on racks to dry and harden off. Round loaves of bread dough were set in pans to rise before the hearth. A warm smell of yeast and dough filled the room.

  The children swallowed hungrily, but were too bent on escape to linger. They did, however, help themselves to a few crumbly corners of oatcake, which would not be missed.

  “Quick!” hissed Tot. “Somebody is coming along the passage!”

  They scurried across to a door which led to a back entry, and so into the stable-yard. In winter this would be a sea of mud; anybody who crossed it must wear knee-boots or pattens. Just now, a network of summer weeds, tansy and dock and plantains, made a platform over the slime. Poultry pecked about, and pigeons fluttered and cooed on the stable roof. The children enjoyed the feeling of the slime on their bare feet, and took no pains to avoid it, though it was ice-cold from the night rain.

  At the corner of the yard, where a gate and a track led into the pastures and down to the burn, they encountered red-headed Annie Herdman, their sister Katie’s wet-nurse.

  “Hssst! Quick into the harness room!” whispered Tot, but Nish said, “Annie’ll not tell on us,” and went on confidently. Indeed Annie displayed no surprise at all at the sight of them up so early, only said, “Have ye na seen wee Geordie, hinny? Aa left him here, play in’ in the horse-trough. Aa was only gyen but a minute, fetching a pan o’ milk—”

  “Na, we hivvn’t seen him, Annie,” said Tot, falling naturally into her language.

  “I’m feared he’ll be gyen doon to the watter,” said Annie worriedly. “He’s fair mad playin’ wi’ watter.”

  “If we see him we’ll send him back,” said Nish.

  “Ay, fetch him back for me hinny, he’s ooer young to be oot alane.”

  They nodded and ran on, dismissing Annie and her son from their minds as soon as they had rounded the corner of the track. It was a well-worn cart road, leading between orchard and pasture. The children turned aside into the orchard, climbing stone steps set sideways in the drystone wall, and filled their pockets with small apples. Then they hurried on, down to a ford crossing the small stream that ran into the Hungry Water. Tall fawn-coloured grasses and dark-green broom bushes lined the rocky banks. By now the children were out of sight of the house, screened from it by the farm buildings and a spinney of ash and sycamore.

  At the brook they found, as they had expected, that the stepping-stones alongside the cart-ford were almost submerged; just their tops showed above the swift-flowing clear dark-brown water. Nish crossed by the stones, on principle, skipping nimbly from one to the next on her bare feet; but Tot splashed straight into the water, which reached to his calves. He paused a moment to hoist up his nankeen breeches, and tighten the buckles.

  “Is it cold?” called Nish, hopping in the silvery, dewy grass on the far bank.

  “Not too bad—cold enough.”

  Crossing the triangle of land between the brook and the larger stream they emerged into the sun, which had previously been cut off by a steep shoulder of heather-covered hillside above the Hall. At once the world seemed more cheerful; the soaked grass and bushes sparkled, one or two birds began to twitter soft autumn songs, they could hear the long, bubbling upward cry of a curlew.

  “Wee Geordie can’t have been down here,” said Nish, looking at the black, noticeable tracks they left in the grass. “We’d have seen his trail.”

  “He’s likely gone round to the Lion’s pool,” said her brother. “I’ve seen him there before.”

  “Oh—Mithras!” Nish stopped in dismay.

  “What’s to do?”

  “It’s the first of the month—October. I meant to go round by the Lion’s pool and get me a wish. I’d my bent pin all ready too, stuck in my collar.”

  “Well you canna go back now,” said her brother. “Mrs Slaley or Surtees or Parthie would come out and catch us.”

  “But I meant to wish that Louisa would never come home!”

  “Much good that would have done. I doubt they’re in the coach already; I heard Papa tell Archie to start early yesterday evening—”

  “Oh, I wish I hadn’t forgotten! It was seeing Annie put it out of my head—bother Annie!”

  “‘Twouldn’t have helped,” said Tot. “I reckon praying to Mithras is no more use than the other kind of praying.”

  “He does help! He helped when I lost my flowered ribbon. I prayed and prayed and put two bent pins in the Lion pool and I found the ribbon the very next day in the harness room.”

  “Well, pray to him now, then,” suggested her brother. “Pray at the wellspring and leave your bent pin there—I don’t suppose Mithras minds where you put it.”

  “I suppose I may as well.” But Nish sounded doubtful. “I suppose it’s better than doing nothing at all.”

  She had been skipping at a rapid pace along the path, a narrow sheep track here between alder bushes and tufts of reedy grass, skirting the bank of the larger stream, the Hungry Water. But now she slowed, and began to look from side to side as she went, picking a few late flowers that had lingered in the Indian Summer—a harebell or two, a purple head of scabious, yellow toadflax, a twig of scarlet rosehips and a spray of glossy haws, a red pimpernel and a tiny blue wild pansy. Having bound these into a posy with a reedy stem, she followed Tot over a narrow wooden footbridge that spanned the burn, which ran deep and chuckling among dark grey tumbled rocks and small grassy islets. Both children bore right on the farther side, and soon came to a spring, which cascaded down out of a rocky cranny in the river-bank, and trickled, from a small natural basin below, into the main stream.

  The children paused and drank from cupped hands here, ceremonially, as from long established usage, standing to do so on a flat slab of rock evidently set there for the purpose. After drinking, Nish dropped her posy into the pool, as well as the bent pin which she took from her collar, meanwhile reciting in loud but reverent tones: “Oh, Lord Mithras, if it be thy will, accept these gifts from thy servant and grant that this day my brother and I may run into no danger, nor do anything to earn thy wrath. Also please prevent our sister Louisa from returning home. We ask this most earnestly. Also help Annie Herdman find wee Geordie and stop her father from being so nasty to him. With kind regards. Nish Winship.”

  “Amen,” added her brother, but without her confidence; he spoke in a quick undertone, as if this were a needful, but embarrassing, social formality. Then he added, “I don’t think you ought to bother Mithras abou
t Annie and wee Geordie. Let Annie pray to Mithras for herself.”

  “She doesn’t know about Mithras.”

  “Oh, come along,” said Tot, suddenly tired of this. “We’ve a long way to go, to get to our last place. We’d best stay on the bank, as the burn’s so deep; it’d take all day wading in the water.” He pronounced this word watter, as Annie had done.

  Nish looked disappointed, but submitted to his dictum.

  “Only, what about our islands that have been spoiled by the spate? I can see three from here—Madagascar and Krakatoa and Great Isle. We need to mend them.”

  “No use mending till the spate’s gone down. Then we’ll have a great deal of new material, besides.”

  As they made their way along the uneven bank they looked assessingly at the rocky islands, most about the size of small card-tables, some much smaller, which it was their continual self-imposed task to keep decorated with moss, flowers, twigs, shining lumps of quartz, and minute rock plants. About a mile of the burn’s course had already been beautified in this way, and they were now obliged to travel farther and farther afield to colonize new territory. The spate overnight had washed a great deal of their work away.

  “We shall have to do them all over,” said Nish mournfully. But there was a certain satisfaction in her tone also, at the demands of the task that lay ahead. “It will take us days and days.”

  “We must finish Corsica and Sardinia first. We ought to get those done before we begin mending.”

  Tot preferred conquest and acquisition to the duties of maintenance.

  He went on, “Besides, the nearer we are to the house, the more risk that we’ll be spotted and sent back to be there when Louisa comes.”

  “How horrible was she?” asked Nish anxiously.

  “Very horrible. You don’t remember, you were only four. But I was five, and I remember a deal of things about her. She used to make a special face when I wouldn’t do what she wanted—a furious, hateful face, showing all her teeth; it always made me cry. It wouldn’t now, but I still remember it in dreams. And she used to pinch my arm in a special way when she was left in charge of me—and she told Mamma, if she saw you doing something forbidden—”

  “What things did she want you to do?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Perhaps Mithras will arrange for the carriage to overturn and her to be thrown out and killed,” suggested Nish, who had looked despondent at these recollections.

  “But then Meg and Isa would be killed too; that wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Mithras may not trouble about fairness.”

  They argued this point as they pursued their way along the river-bank, Tot maintaining that gods had to be fair, Nish contending that their notion of fairness might differ from that of humans.

  Meanwhile the autumn sun rose higher and gilded them with warmth. A breeze, strong but not cold, tossed the osier branches and chased clouds across the sky. The stream at first zigzagged along a flat valley bottom, with level alluvial haughs on either side, and wide gravel beds on the inner side of each bend. Nish would have liked to stop and search these for new treasures the flood might have brought down or uncovered: worn pieces of wood, uprooted plants or sparkling quartz stones, white, pink and purple; but Tot impatiently urged her on. He was eager to arrive at the less explored reaches of upper water, where the valley closed in, the banks were steeper, and the rocks bigger.

  “I’ll tell you a story if you like,” he suggested. “I’ll tell you about Captain Cook.” Tot was in the middle of reading A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, which he had discovered in his father’s library.

  “Very well.” Nish agreed without enthusiasm. She found her brother’s recitals intensely boring; he was a slow and laborious narrator, frequently forgetting points and being obliged to hark back—“Oh, I should have said that before this they unloaded all their stores from the boats.” He told his story in a loud monotonous voice which made it hard not to listen. Nish continually annoyed him by asking awkward questions: “How big was the boat? How many men were there? You never said there had been a storm.” “Don’t interrupt, you make me forget things,” he would exclaim impatiently. Nish much preferred invented stories, but these were not within her brother’s capacity, though he, too enjoyed them. Very occasionally Granny Winship could be persuaded to tell stories of the Black Douglas, who grabbed the woman’s shoulder and startled her to death; or the Cauld Lad of Hylton, who wailed, “Wae’s me, wae’s me, the acorn is not yet, Fallen from the tree, that’s to grow the wood, that’s to make the cradle, that’s to rock the bairn, that’s to make the man, that’ll lay me,” or the bloodcurdling tale of Abigail Featherstonehaugh, who rode out as a bride “all gay with her ladies and the bridegroom and all his lords” but they never came back, only their ghosts, streaming with gore, at the cock-crow time. “Do, do tell that story again, Granny,” Nish would beg, but the old lady was unreliable; on some days she would tell stories, on others not. Mrs Slaley the cook, if the spirit moved her and she was not too busy, might tell tales of gypsies or Scottish reivers, or the broomiehuts where people were left to die in the Great Sickness. Her tales were gloomy, but interesting.

  “Let’s eat our apples,” suddenly proposed Nish in the middle of a long and particularly dull passage about Captain Cook’s division of rations. “It must be dinner time by now.”

  “No it isn’t. Nothing like. Look at the sun,” said Tot, who had a much more accurate sense of time.

  “But the apples are heavy and I’ve got the most. And I have to carry them in my skirt.”

  “Oh; very well. We can sit on that rock.”

  They had reached a point where the burn narrowed to a miniature torrent between high, clifflike banks, and the water divided in a roar of white and gold around a large central flat rock about the size of a grand piano. A gap of three or four feet separated the rock from the bank.

  Tot leaped carelessly across the gap. Nish, burdened with a skirtful of apples, misjudged the jump, slipped, and gashed her leg. Worse, she dropped all her apples into the race of water. Tot grabbed her arm and hauled her to safety, then shook her crossly.

  “Look what you’ve done! All right—don’t cry so—I daresay I can get them back.”

  But she sat crying miserably on the rock, with her eyes tight shut, while he hopped nimbly down into the watercourse and pursued the bobbing apples among smaller rocks and inlets. When he came back, with most of them retrieved, she was still crouched, wailing, in the same position.

  “All right, all right, you can open your eyes. I’ve got the apples.”

  “My leg! Is it very bad?” she asked fearfully, and extended it, still with her eyes shut. Tot inspected the wound with care.

  “I’ll wash it and tie my handkerchief round. Then you’ll not notice it.”

  When the soaked linen was bound tightly round her leg, Nish at last consented to open her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said on a last sob, then forgot the matter instantly. The sunshine was hot in the sheltered gully as they lolled on the flat-topped rock and ate their fruit.

  “Louisa would never in the world come as far as this, would she?” Nish suggested, and Tot shook his head.

  Up above the miniature ravine, heather-coloured hillsides blazed bright magenta colour in the noon sun, or darkened to slate when a cloud crossed the sky.

  After they had eaten, the children resumed their journey, until they reached a point where a good-sized waterfall discharged itself into a deep pool of dark-brown water. This was Pike Force. At the pool’s lower edge were two islands which had been christened Corsica and Sardinia. In the decoration of these, Nish and Tot proposed to spend their afternoon.

  But, after they had been working for an hour or so, Tot abruptly abandoned his task of carrying white quartz pebbles to pave the central square of Sardinia. He said, in a hoarse, deep voice, quite different from
his usual tone: “Eh, Nish. I’m gyen to have one o’ my turns.”

  “Oh, Tot!”

  His sister instantly dropped the plants she held, and forged her way splashily across to him through water which, for her, was rather more than knee deep. She grabbed his arm with both hands, and glanced about her, assessing their position.

  “Over there’s best. On the little beach. Come along.”

  On one side of the pool lay a narrow gravel-bed from which they had been quarrying their building materials.

  “I have you quite safe,” Nish said with authority. “Come along. Fast as you can.”

  Her brother followed without speaking as she pulled him along. His mouth had opened, his eyes looked blankly ahead, he had begun to tremble.

  “It’s all right; I’ve got you,” Nish said again.

  Reaching the little strand she made him sit, then lie down and turn his head on one side. In a businesslike manner she poked a finger into his mouth to make sure that his tongue was free and would not choke him. His eyes were already closed. Now there was nothing more that Nish could do for him except to unfasten his shirt collar and see that, in his deep sleep, he did not roll over into the river. Matter-of-factly she settled down cross-legged beside him, with her skirt dipping in the water. He often slept after these turns for two, three, even four hours. Nish glanced at the sun and hoped he would wake before it set.

  It was worrying his head about Louisa brought that on, she thought. Drat Louisa! Do, Mithras, do please help us. I gave you the pin and the posy, and you had some of our apples too. And a bit of my blood . . .

  She dabbed a finger on her gory shin (the handkerchief had been washed away as she helped Tot across the pool) and marked a small circle of blood on a flat stone.

  I do think, Mithras, that you might arrange for Louisa to be tossed by Coxon’s bull?

  She listened, but there was no sound to be heard above the roar of the waterfall. Mithras kept his own counsel.