But Mrs Dyce wasn’t getting Roxy’s. Roxy knew that now. No one was.
Roxy’s baby.
How was it that now it filled her heart just thinking about that baby, growing inside her, with tiny feet and fingers? Curled up in the safest place in the world.
Inside Roxy.
Roxy could look after herself. She had proved that. And when she had some tiny little someone else depending on her, she would look after them both.
As soon as she told Anne Marie about her decision, she insisted that Roxy apologise to Mrs Dyce the very next day. ‘Sure you’ve hurt her feelings. And, fair play to her, Roxy, she did tell you the truth. She is having some of the babies adopted. What she’s doing here is illegal, she admits that. We’re the ones with the power. We could tell on her any time.’
That was what swayed Roxy in the end. Mrs Dyce had admitted everything. Surely, she thought, there couldn’t be anything else to tell.
Yet it seemed that just as one question was answered, another would surface.
Roxy watched for Mrs Dyce from the kitchen, saw her driving up in the old jeep and pulling to a halt. She had obviously been for provisions. (So somewhere nearby, Roxy thought, there had to be a village.) She waited until Mrs Dyce started unloading the boxes of fruit and vegetables from the jeep before she hurried outside to help her.
Mrs Dyce waved her aside. ‘No, no, Roxy. You can’t carry anything heavy.’
‘It’s only a couple of cauliflowers. They’re not going to do me much damage,’ Roxy said. Neither of them looked the other in the eye.
As they were putting the shopping away in the kitchen, Roxy said, ‘Can I speak to you?’
Mrs Dyce turned to look at her and seemed to suck in her cheeks. ‘What is it now, Roxy?’ Her husky voice sounded just on the edge of anger.
‘I want to apologise,’ Roxy said at once. She didn’t want the woman to be angry with her. Because what if they decided to put her out, expel her like Eve from the Garden of Eden. Where would she go? What would she do?
However, as soon as Roxy spoke the coldness in Mrs Dyce’s eyes melted away.
Roxy hurried on. ‘I know I ask too many questions. I won’t ask any more.’
Mrs Dyce shook her head and smiled. ‘Yes, you will, Roxy. I don’t think you’ll ever stop asking questions.’
‘I wanted you to know that I am grateful you took me in. I really am. I don’t know where I would be without you.’
Mrs Dyce pulled her close and hugged her. Now, that, Roxy didn’t like. It smacked too much of an American sitcom.
‘You’ve said enough, Roxy. Let’s just forget it, shall we?’
Roxy was so happy to be back in Mrs Dyce’s good books she almost felt like crying. It was so silly to feel like that, she told herself, yet she couldn’t help it. She only hoped her next request wasn’t going to spoil things again.
‘Can I send a letter to my mother?’
‘Do you want to go home?’ She couldn’t read Mrs Dyce’s face at that point. She had turned towards the cupboard and was stacking tins inside.
Home was the last place Roxy wanted to be at the moment. ‘I just want her to know I’m all right. I won’t tell her about the baby.’ It occurred then to Roxy that what Mrs Dyce would fear most would be Roxy telling her mother about the set-up here. She wanted to reassure her about that. ‘I’m not going to tell her where I am. You can read the letter when I’ve written it.’
Mrs Dyce’s shoulders visibly relaxed. ‘No need for that. Of course you must write your letter. I’ll see it’s posted. I think it’s an excellent idea.’
And if she really wanted Roxy to write to her mother, then why should Roxy ever be suspicious again? She promised herself she never would be. Like Anne Marie she would accept everything here, and be grateful.
Roxy started that letter a dozen times, then crumpled up the paper and hurled it in the bin. In the end what she wrote could have fitted on a postcard. ‘I’m safe and well. Don’t look for me. I’ll write again soon. Roxy.’
No ‘love’. Not even a ‘Dear Mum’. Terms of affection she couldn’t bring herself to use. Maybe her mother didn’t love her any more after what she’d done. Maybe none of them wanted to hear from her ever again.
It was almost a week before she gave the letter to Mrs Dyce, one night after dinner. Mrs Dyce took it and slipped it in her pocket. ‘I’ll have it posted tomorrow, Roxy.’ She said it brightly, as if they were friends again.
‘You won’t be posting it from anywhere near here, will you?’ Roxy couldn’t help notice the hesitation in Mrs Dyce’s eyes. ‘You can tell me the truth, I understand. If the letter is posted from here, my mother might just come to this area looking for me … I wouldn’t want that. Neither would you. Of course you have to post it from somewhere else.’
Mrs Dyce stared at her. ‘You really are something else, Roxy. You should be a detective. You’re quite right. I’ll have someone post it from London. It wouldn’t just be you who would be in danger if the postmark was local. It would be all these girls here.’
Roxy looked around her. All these girls here were now mostly dark-skinned, frightened and alone. Illegal immigrants, dumped when they were pregnant. No English. There was only herself and Anne Marie left of the original crowd. No more nights piled into each other’s rooms, like boarding school. No more midnight feasts. Everyone kept to themselves. Everything was changing here, Roxy thought.
She felt better after she had given Mrs Dyce that letter. At least she had let them know she was safe. That she wasn’t dead, that she hadn’t been murdered or kidnapped. That she was alive and well.
That night as they lay in bed she asked Anne Marie if she had ever thought of writing home.
‘Me? You’ve got to be joking. I wouldn’t risk them finding out where I was and coming after me. Not to look after me, mind, just to thump the living daylights out of me. Do you know something, Roxy? Mr and Mrs Dyce, they’re my family now. And you too. You’re like my little sister.’
Suddenly, a wonderfully bright idea hit Roxy like a thunderbolt. She jumped up in bed. ‘Anne Marie, why don’t we live together after the babies are born? We could help each other, and we do get on really well.’
But Anne Marie didn’t sound too certain. ‘Sure, that would be a great idea, but you’re under age Roxy, it isn’t going to be so easy for you.’
Roxy knew that was going to be a big problem, one she wasn’t ready to face right now. But the thought of sharing the future with Anne Marie suddenly seemed so right.
She sat on Anne Marie’s bed. ‘I’m sure the Dyces would sort things out for us. Find somewhere for us to live, maybe. They would keep in touch. You could still see them.’
Anne Marie smiled. ‘Do you know, Roxy, this might be the perfect answer. You and me, and our babies, all together.’
They lay back in their beds giggling and talking about the future. The bedroom window was wide open to let in some air, and the sky was clear with bright stars. It seemed to both of them that night that nothing could go wrong.
Anne Marie’s face, with her apple-red cheeks, beamed happily in the moonlight. ‘Roxy, do you know, I think our story’s going to have a happy ending.’
Chapter Sixteen
Mrs Dyce liked the girls to rest in the afternoon, insisting they pull down the shades to darken the rooms, and keep out the hot sun.
Anne Marie loved her afternoon rest, especially now, so near her time. But not Roxy. She could never sleep and she hated lying on her bed, listening to the gentle snores of the other girls drifting in through the open doors. But the house was never so quiet as on those afternoons, and Roxy used the time exploring. She was determined to find a way into those attics, into those other rooms, blocked off from the rest of the house.
She had already found stairs that led nowhere, that seemed to disappear into walls, and doors that were locked, or even boarded up, but on one of her hot afternoon explorations she found exactly what she had been looking for.
She
had often walked past the back stairs. Underneath was stacked with old carpets and bags of clothes and boxes and chairs. Up against the back wall there was an upended table. Just a load of old rubbish, she had always thought as she walked past it. But that day, something made her stop and look more closely. It occurred to her that the back wall had to lead on to the back of the house. She moved closer into the gloom, lifting boxes, moving carpets as silently as she could, trying to clear a way to the back, to the upended table that blocked the back wall. But close up she realised the table would be far too heavy for her to move on her own. Still, she refused to give up. Could she get behind it? she wondered. It wasn’t flush against the wall, but stood at an angle, and as she crept closer she could see behind that gap. She could see that there was a door behind the table.
She knew she had to get through to that door. Nothing was going to stop her now. If she had to pick the lock, if she had to break the door down, she was determined to do it. That door had to lead into the rest of the house.
It would be tight, she knew that. But she was carrying this bump of hers neatly, everyone said that. ‘You’d hardly know you were pregnant,’ Anne Marie would tell her. Roxy stretched out her hand between the gap to grasp the door handle, half expecting it to refuse to turn, to be locked. But it wasn’t. She gasped as the door opened, and with a quick look back to make sure she hadn’t been seen, Roxy squeezed behind the table and stepped through the door.
She found herself in a dark, musty corridor. At the far end a narrow window was shuttered closed, but through the gaps in the shutters streams of light shone through. The bottom half of the walls was panelled with dark wood, the top half had ancient paper peeling from it. She stepped gingerly along the hallway, hardly daring to breathe. There was a smell in here, the smell of long-dead rooms. At the end of the corridor was a door leading to narrow winding staircase and she began to climb. These would have been the servants’ quarters long ago. She was sure of that. No lady would ever have been allowed to use a tiny cramped staircase like this. There would have been no room for their ornate dresses, for a start.
There was a door at the top of the stairs too, and this one creaked open so noisily that it made Roxy catch her breath, afraid someone might hear. She stood for a moment listening, waiting for a call, or footsteps, but there was nothing. She realised she must be in the main part of the house. She was standing in a hallway that must have once been quite grand. Dusty curtains half hung on high windows. Chairs lay upended on the floor, and thick brocade tapestries rotted against the walls.
She began to walk, warily, stepping as quietly as she could. She opened a door into one of the rooms, but once again there were only shuttered windows and rotting draperies. No one had been inside this part of the house for years. Yet the part the girls lived in was bright and newly painted. It reminded her of something. She had to think for a moment of what that something was. Then it hit her. It was as if the front of the house, where the girls lived, was the stage in a theatre. Brightly lit, furnished, with actors playing their parts. Here was the back of the theatre, dull, unused and dusty. And it was cold. Though the sun scorched the earth outside it was as if Nature had turned off her heating in these rooms.
There was a mystery here, there had to be. ‘Aren’t you the one with the imagination,’ Anne Marie would say. But there was a mystery here. Why was one part of the house so bright, taken care of, and another, this part, just left to fall apart? She could hear Anne Marie’s glib answer to that. ‘It’s expensive enough for them to heat and run this part, you can’t expect them to open the whole house up just for us.’
But this was their house – the Dyces had said so. And this part wasn’t just closed up, with white sheets covering furniture, as if it was waiting for someone to claim it again. This part of the house had been long forgotten. It looked as if it should be condemned.
Condemned. She didn’t like the sound of that.
Here too, carved into doors, on fireplaces, even on the ancient wallpaper, dragons were everywhere. This was indeed Dragon House.
Roxy climbed another flight of stairs and found herself on the attic floor. Here she found a warren of small rooms, musty and empty, except for rubbish stacked against walls or on the floor. There were more broken chairs, moth-eaten carpets, old curtains. One room had obviously once been a nursery. She found a library too. One room still stacked high with books. Roxy lifted one from a shelf and opened it. Dust exploded from it, the pages almost fell apart. She dropped it to the floor and sent dust leaping all around the dark room. Roxy began to sneeze, tried to stop herself and couldn’t. She held her shirt against her nose and looked around. In the middle of the library there was a spiral staircase leading to a landing above. Once, long ago, this must have been a favourite spot for relaxing. A place to come with a book, climb the staircase, sit by the top window and look out at the view.
The view. She saw that through the one small window on that landing a strip of light was shining through the shutters. What might she see from there?
The spiral staircase was rickety and shook with every step she took, but it was worth the journey. From the landing window she could see below her a pathway that led from the Dyces’ apartments, from that room marked PRIVATE; a pathway which led to the delivery room, a square, brick building separate from the main house. She could see the exit door from here too. The door Mrs Dyce had told her about. The door through which everyone must leave, here, at the back of the house, secluded and sealed off. No wonder no one was ever seen leaving. Roxy sat there for a long time. Now she knew how the girls and their babies left Dragon House. They went through the Dyces’ apartments, down the path and into the delivery room, and then one by one, they all left, silently, secretly, from here.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, thinking and watching. But when she finally checked her watch she knew she had to hurry. She didn’t want anyone to know she had found this secret place. She would tell Anne Marie, but only her, and swear her to secrecy.
Roxy was covered in dust and cobwebs when she came down towards the bottom corridor again. She stopped to dust herself down before going back through the door under the stairs, when she heard voices coming through the wall. She realised she was listening to the Dyces in their private office. There was no way she wasn’t going to listen to this. She had to strain her ears to hear them, only catching snatches of what they were saying.
‘More girls,’ Mr Dyce was saying. ‘Is that wise?’
And his wife’s answer. ‘More girls,’ and her voice was so husky Roxy only just caught her last words, ‘economically viable’.
‘Economically viable’? What did that mean?
Two new girls arrived next day. (The ‘more girls’ Mr Dyce had been referring to, Roxy wondered?) Both of them foreign. One was Asian and rejected any attempt at friendliness. But the other was a wary, silent black girl, Aneeka. She was an illegal immigrant. They all knew that without asking. She trusted no one and ate in a corner by herself.
Anne Marie was the one who tried to be friendly, squeezing up beside her, miming conversation because Aneeka spoke no English. It was no use. She turned away, her dark eyes wide with fear, afraid to trust anyone.
‘I don’t understand how they found her,’ Roxy said to Anne Marie. ‘She can’t speak any English, so she couldn’t have told anyone she needed help.’ Yet she had found her way to the Dyces.
Anne Marie had a ready answer. ‘They have contacts everywhere. Word of mouth.’ She stared at Roxy long and hard. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still suspicious?’
She knew that Roxy was. Roxy had told the older girl about her expedition, making her promise to keep the secret. Anne Marie had warned her that it could have been dangerous, she could have been trapped there and no one would have known where she was. Sensible stuff. Even when Roxy had told her about the Dyces’ conversation she had another ready answer. ‘“Economically viable.” Well, if they brought more girls they might feel they would have to open more of the
house, and it would take too much money to decorate it and make it liveable in. They probably mean that using the whole house wouldn’t be economically viable. It would be too expensive to run. You didn’t hear all they were saying, Roxy.’
So Roxy shrugged her shoulders and decided not to make too much of it. But new girls, foreign girls, how could they be more ‘economically viable’? Unless, the more babies they sell, the more money they made. Because they were selling the babies, no matter what Mrs Dyce said, no matter what Anne Marie believed. That was the answer for Roxy and she didn’t like it.
Aneeka wasn’t with them for long.
One hot night, two days after Aneeka had arrived, Roxy was awakened by her sobbing. It was hard to sleep it was so hot, and the windows and doors were all opened wide to let in some air, and when she got up out of bed there was Aneeka, crouched in the corridor, her arms wrapped round her legs, her face buried in her knees.
‘Aneeka OK?’ Roxy knelt beside her with difficulty. She held up her thumb in an international gesture. Aneeka only looked at her and her eyes flashed with fear.
‘It’s me … Roxy’ she said softly, smiling. Aneeka’s face was streaked with tears. She didn’t smile back, she just stared. Roxy kept smiling, not knowing what else to do. Feeling like an idiot.
Suddenly, Aneeka bared her teeth like a wild animal and she started shouting. She gave Roxy such a fright she fell backwards. At that, Aneeka leaned over her, grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her. Now, Roxy was terrified.
‘Anne Marie!’ she shouted.
By now, Aneeka was almost hysterical. She wouldn’t let Roxy go. She was crying and yelling and all at once the corridor was filled with girls waddling from their rooms, pulling on dressing gowns. They all started shouting.
‘Doesn’t anyone speak her language?’ Roxy yelled. ‘What’s she saying?’
Anne Marie tried to put her arm around Aneeka, but she threw it off angrily. And then she said the only English words Roxy had ever heard her speak, and they frightened the life out of her.
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