by Evie Wyld
‘Now then, take those off,’ she said, ‘and put these on.’ She pulled from her bag a long grey skirt and dark green flannel blouse.
‘Thank you, but surely you need those for yourself. I’m sure I can find something—’
‘No,’ she said rather crisply. ‘I brought these especially for you, it’s tradition, really. We all dress in the same way.’ She laid out the clothes and turned her back on Ruth, unbuttoning her own blouse as she did so.
There seemed little for Ruth to do other than undress. She had a horror of the woman coming and helping her. She opened the wardrobe door in order to have something to shield behind, and it made Janet whip round, a look on her face Ruth could not read, before she smiled encouragingly. Ruth tried not to hold an arm over her chest, but even with the woman’s back turned, she felt exposed. She stole glances at Janet’s body as she transitioned between outfits. A peculiar mixture of thin and plump, her arms like wire, her hips doughy. She took off her stockings and revealed thin white legs. When Janet was dressed she turned round and inspected Ruth.
‘You’ll need your stockings off,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’ll keep them on, thank you – I’ll freeze.’
‘As you wish,’ said Janet but her tone was such that Ruth found herself unclipping them while Janet sat at her dressing table. She tucked her hair into a thin black cowl, the kind of thing a nun wore under her habit, then she turned back to her bag and found one for Ruth.
‘This will keep you warm; most body heat is lost through the head, after all.’
Ruth pulled it on and tucked her hair under it. She felt like a frogman.
‘What are we supposed to be?’
Janet handed Ruth a black half mask that finished just under the nose.
‘We are supposed to all be the same.’
When they went downstairs, Peter was standing in the hallway, looking with some confusion into the ballroom, where Ruth could hear the other ladies talking.
‘Good morning, Mr Hamilton,’ said Janet, gliding by as though she were the grand lady of the house.
‘Yes,’ said Peter, ‘quite,’ and then he appeared to snap out of a dream. ‘Darling, what on earth are you wearing? You look like a medieval nun.’
‘It’s a costume. Apparently it’s part of the picnic.’
‘Right,’ he said. She had thought he might find it amusing, but there was something shadowy about him at that moment. He took her wrist and steered her into the dining room so the women couldn’t hear, though Ruth noticed their chatter soften, and then silence.
‘Did you know the boys were taken out of their beds last night?’
‘Yes, I—’
‘Do you think it might be possible to run that sort of lunacy by me before just sending them out in the freezing cold in the dark with a maniac?’
‘I didn’t know—’
‘It just bloody beggars belief – you do know what killed their mother, don’t you, you do know we moved here to protect their lungs, not to try and weaken them?’ The words momentarily drowned her.
‘I didn’t know they were going to be woken up to help. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was just before dawn, really –’ she heard herself defensive, even though it wasn’t how she felt – ‘and there are other boys down there too.’
‘I don’t care.’ The words were said with such finality, a blade coming down. He inhaled deeply and let it out, glanced at his watch. ‘Look, I have to go to the London office. Branning called and they can’t do without me, it’s the Howard file blowing up again. I’ll catch the twenty past, which means I have to leave here in fifteen minutes.’ He began to stride out of the room, folding his paper as he did.
‘Peter.’ She said his name and wasn’t sure what would follow. He stopped, looked at her over his glasses.
‘Mmm?’
‘The picnic. I . . .’
‘Well, you all go on without me. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of fun.’
‘But the boys – I mean, all of us – you’re expected.’
Peter took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘You have no concept of the workload I have to get through in order that you may frolic about on the beach in your fancy dress and picnic. Do as you’re told and get on with it.’
There was a feeling of the ground clawing up Ruth’s legs and tethering her to the spot, a dead weight.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, her voice calm but loud. ‘I am here because you brought me here, so that I can look after your children, while you carry on as if you haven’t a family to speak of.’
He moved slowly back towards her. She wondered for a moment if he would strike her, and she could see the thought race through him too; he moved his paper from one hand to the other. Suddenly it seemed like it might not be the worst thing.
‘I’m not their fucking nanny,’ she said, her jaw clenched. The bad language echoed between them. She wondered if the ladies were listening and decided she didn’t care.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is patently obvious.’ He looked calmly at his watch again, then walked to the door, taking his briefcase, hat and coat in one movement.
The floor did not release Ruth for a long time. She wished she hadn’t been wearing such a ridiculous outfit for the fight. She tore the cowl off her head and stayed there, listening to the sound of his footsteps becoming fainter and fainter, heard rain drum against the window in a sudden gust of wind. His going to London felt so badly wrong. She went back into the kitchen and stood a moment, before picking up a heavy brown mixing bowl and smashing it on the floor.
‘Fucking hell,’ she bellowed at it.
‘Shit!’ came a small voice, and she saw that Michael was standing in the pantry holding a sticky bun and looking at her. Neither of them knew what to do with their faces. Christopher appeared behind him.
‘Yes,’ said Ruth. ‘Yes, shit, as well. Shit!’ and they all smiled together in what may have been the first incidence of that kind.
III
‘Good God, Jesus, hell,’ a man wails, and a scream sweeps down the runnels. We fly out of the house wrapped in our bedclothes, the Widow Clements included, though she has no business being in our home. You can smell it. The pig shed burns – the scream just an alchemy of pigs and fire.
A man staggers out, then another, both with their arms outstretched, appealing to the sky. Someone throws a bucket of water upon one, rolls him on the ground in the mud, but has no bucket for the second man. The second man drops to his knees and falls, flaming face down into stillness. He keeps burning, dead on the ground while the first man screams and screams and then is quiet and dead too. Smoke rises from them both. All of us stand, holding our bedclothes around us, unable to turn our attention to the blaze, because despite the abomination and the evil of what we have just seen, our stomachs turn with the smell of roasted flesh, and our mouths water. I say a prayer that pigs have also died in the blaze and this is what we are smelling.
‘They will come for her, and they will come for us,’ says my father, turning his back on the fire and speaking in a low voice in case anyone should overhear. ‘Take only what you can carry,’ he says, ‘see the girl has boots to wear.’
Sarah hasn’t left her room, I know because I’ve been sitting outside it the whole of the night.
We enter the woods without speaking, Father in front, then the Widow Clements, Sarah, Cook and me at the end. We do not run, but we are on the very edge of it, we do not have a candle and we fall, often, planting our blind, outstretched hands into mud and leaves and bark. I take to moving in a hunched fashion, like I’m part animal. Cook’s white calves glow in the dark, and I can see blood on them from a bramble scratch.
All of us carry what we can hold, which for Cook is a large pan and half a dozen cups and bowls. Their clanking and her coughing is the only sound above the crack and stir of bracken and the snort and rasp of our breath. I find that I have brought with me only a blunt knife wrapped in a short bit of sacking that Mother was teaching need
lework to Agnes on before. I have slept with the sacking under my pillow since Mother died, because in the badly sewed lines of my sister and the straight economical stitches of my mother I see them by the fire and they are still mine.
Wolves have been reported on the edge of these woods. Agnes was found just beyond the boundary of the silver birches, where the light is snuffed out even at midday. You feel the wolves, or the ghosts of them, nearby, watching.
We fumble for what feels like hours on the forest floor, crawling over fallen logs, getting further and further from the village; there is not even the slightest glow any more from the fire, and the Widow Clements is trying to calm my father. ‘They will see we have gone and they will be glad of it. They won’t come looking, surely. The girl is gone, the threat is no longer there. They will be putting out that fire until morning.’
Our pace slows and within the hour we come upon a clearing. ‘No fire,’ Father says to Cook who has begun brushing a space to set one. It is cold and wet, and a fire would be welcome.
Cook and the widow lie down next to each other. Sarah sits against a tree, her arms wrapped around her knees. She shivers, and before I can offer my coat, Father has laid his over her shoulders. She looks up and smiles at him. Father I suppose cannot help but see Agnes in Sarah. Her small body that he took from the man who found her, and laid on the floor and covered with his coat so that Mother didn’t see. I tuck myself underneath a fallen tree. It is no comfort, and yet I fall asleep almost instantly. I wake at a sound, a lowing, but it happens only once, and I tell myself it is just someone crying out in their sleep. I have to trust that everyone is still there, because the dark is full and thick. I try to stay awake, because I hope she will come and speak with me. For hours I think every noise in the night is her. The crying does not come again, just the sound of Cook’s snore, which lulls me back to sleep.
II
The ladies had left by the time Ruth went back to the drawing room, and she heaved a sigh of relief while dreading the explanation she should offer. Let them wonder. She would not say a word on it. She would act as though nothing was out of the ordinary. This was what happened when you arrived at a person’s house early and made them dress up like a goose.
The boys told her they had come back from the beach because they were hungry and so she returned to the kitchen to clear up the bowl and made both of them a cheese sandwich, blackening the bread on the boiling plate of the Aga.
‘Why did you throw that bowl on the floor?’ asked Michael once he had a mouthful of sandwich.
‘It was a funny sort of accident,’ she said, wanting to move the conversation on as fast as possible. ‘Did you know that Reverend Jon Brown was going to come and wake you up this morning?’
‘He said he might,’ said Christopher, ‘but that we weren’t to tell anyone. He said it would spoil the surprise.’ Perhaps she would talk to Betty about locking the doors at night. For a moment she felt rather sick, but she breathed deeply through her nose. It was just a bad argument, they would settle things when he was back home.
‘We had torches of our own to hold,’ said Michael, pleased.
Ruth studied their faces for signs of hurt. She regretted calling them your children. She found she didn’t know what to look for, how a child’s hurt presented. Perhaps it was completely fine. An overreaction. Perhaps next year they would look forward to the event. Still. She ate Michael’s crusts. ‘Do you suppose we’re ruining ourselves for the picnic?’
‘I don’t like picnics,’ said Christopher. ‘You have to eat in front of people and it’s always pies.’
‘Will there be a cake?’ asked Michael.
‘There’s a treacle tart that Betty made.’
‘Imagine the sand in it,’ said Christopher.
Ruth found some tablet in the pantry and shared it between them.
‘Is Father not coming then?’ said Christopher. She hadn’t heard him call Peter ‘Father’ before. It felt Victorian.
‘He had to go to London.’
‘Is that why you broke the bowl?’ asked Michael. ‘Because you wanted him to play the hide-and-seek game with you?’
Ruth smiled. ‘Between the three of us, I’m not particularly excited about hide-and-seek. I broke the bowl because I was being overdramatic, and I had a bothersome morning. And it looked like it would break in a satisfactory way.’
‘And did it?’ asked Michael.
‘Very much so. But we must tell Betty that it was an accident.’
The boys nodded seriously.
On the way down, cowl in place, and carrying extra blankets and scarves from the laundry, they passed Betty and Bernadette walking back up to the house. Betty stopped when she recognised Ruth.
‘Yes,’ said Ruth. ‘They made me dress up.’
‘So they did, madam.’ Betty looked very unhappy.
‘Betty, won’t you both be joining us?’
‘Oh no, too much to do – I’ll get behind.’
‘Well, let Bernadette come? We can get to know each other! I thought the whole point was so that the children can have a good time.’ The girl had been with them a month or so, and Betty had kept her so out of the way Ruth wasn’t sure she’d be able to recognise her in a line-up.
‘That’s very kind, madam, but really, I couldn’t impose.’
‘Nonsense, it’s no trouble at all. I’m sure the boys would welcome the company.’
Betty looked at Bernadette, who shifted from foot to foot.
Betty moved closer to Ruth, in an attempt to stop the children from hearing. The children were looking at each other shyly. It was clear Bernadette wanted to come.
‘Madam, I just worry for the girl. She can’t swim, and sometimes Reverend Jon Brown gets carried away.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on her, and don’t worry, I’m quite aware of how Reverend Jon Brown conducts himself.’ She smiled to reassure her. ‘I’ll make sure she eats something, drinks something, plays cricket and is returned to you safe and well.’
Betty turned to Bernadette who had laced her fingers together in front of her as though trying to tame them. Betty leaned down and said something firmly to the girl and the girl nodded and looked at the ground.
‘I’m afraid she says she’s not feeling too well,’ said Betty. All three children studied their shoes in the sand. ‘Another time. Maybe tomorrow she’ll be feeling better.’
‘If you’re sure.’ Perhaps it was some awful leftover Victorian feeling that staff shouldn’t mix with their employers. Bernadette gave the boys a small wave and the boys waved back, and she started to move towards the house. Looking behind her at the house, Ruth noticed the shape of someone standing at her study window, and she wondered with annoyance if one of the women had gone around inspecting her home, but there was something not quite right about the shape of the person. Betty touched her arm and she jumped, and the figure was gone.
‘And, madam,’ said Betty, ‘you watch out for yourself and the boys too.’
Six large tartan rugs had been laid out at the base of a dune, where there might be a little shelter from the wind, which was, as ever, up. Two large trestle tables held the picnic, the food covered over with serving platters and dishcloths weighted down with cutlery and flasks.
Twenty or so people had already assembled by the time Ruth and the boys arrived. More than half were women dressed exactly as she was, while the men wore paper crowns with cut-outs of animal ears – hares and foxes, she thought.
‘Your mask!’ one of them shouted, and it made her start, the seriousness of the tone. She took her mask from her pocket and put it on. It wasn’t comfortable, but at least she didn’t have to try to look happy to be there. Someone handed her a glass of champagne and clinked glasses. Reverend Jon Brown appeared wearing a captain’s hat and a neckerchief and put his arms around the boys’ shoulders.
‘Aha!’ he said. ‘My prize helpers – come and we’ll set up the cricket with the other boys and girls, there’s some ginger ale in it for you.’ He
steered them away to where a small band of children stood around a rowing boat pulled up onto the sand. A little way out to sea a beautiful schooner was moored. Reverend Jon Brown pulled a cricket bat from the rowing boat and began orchestrating a game. Without the boys, Ruth felt lost.
‘Pleasure to see you,’ said a man, offering his hand. ‘My name’s Aidan White, I’m the head of Carlekemp Priory.’
Ruth opened her mouth to give her name, but was surprised by Aidan White putting a finger to her lips. She took a step back.
‘Just to remind you not to tell us your name – we don’t want to give the game away too quickly!’ He was smiling, and another man behind him laughed and came forward, presented his hand.
‘Richard Duggan,’ he said, ‘governor of Fort Augustus. Don’t mind us, this must all seem very strange—’
Ruth could tell it was Janet that came up to intercept the group, she had a very particular walk, one arm always at a right angle and flush to her body, as though holding a phantom handbag.
‘Are these men boring you, dearie?’ Janet asked, brandishing a bottle of champagne. Both men laughed heartily.
Ruth smiled, it seemed the most peaceable thing to do. ‘I’m not sure I quite understand,’ she said. Janet topped up Ruth’s already-empty glass. The discomfort was making her drink quickly.
‘All it is, frankly, is a ridiculous tradition that certain people –’ here she made out that at least two of those people stood before her – ‘have got rather carried away with. We all eat and drink, and then the women hide, and the men have to find us. It’s completely stupid, but rather good fun.’
‘Why do we have to dress up to do that?’
‘Once we catch you,’ said Duggan, ‘we have to guess who you are.’ He smiled broadly as he said it. Behind him came the sound of a ball being struck, and Ruth watched as Christopher started to run. Other children’s voices carried on the wind. She’d never seen him run fast before.
