by Sarah Rayne
The children clung to the sides of the horrid bouncing cart, watching not the road ahead but the road behind, because surely they would see people coming after them at any minute. But there was only the long dusty road unwinding behind them like a dry, dark-brown ribbon, and there was no welcome sight of cars racing after them, or even of people running to catch them up. For what felt like miles upon miles they saw only thin starveling dogs and no people at all, except two or three pitiful little groups of beggars by the roadside, ragged and bony, their eyes looking as if they were filled with milk. Selina thought it was this kind of thing her father might be trying to write about, but Douglas said he had heard his father say you would never cure the poverty in India, not if you tried for a thousand years.
The cart took them towards the huge sweep of the mountains. India was bakingly hot almost everywhere, but as they got closer to the mountains it was starting to be dark, and it felt very nearly cold. Selina had on a cardigan, but most of the others had only been wearing cotton sundresses or thin shirts and shorts for playing in the garden.
And then they were being thrust into a horrid little stone hut-place on the side of the road; there were more men with guns waiting, and they were all grinning, displaying brown-stained teeth, and nodding at Selina and the other children, and looking as if something very clever indeed had been done.
Inside the hut there was an overpowering smell that made you think of lavatories that nobody had cleaned for years, and there was nowhere to sit except on the floor which was hard, dry, red earth, and when the door was slammed it was horridly dark. Selina felt sick again. She was more frightened than she could ever remember being in her whole life.
The smaller ones were still crying, and Douglas was saying loudly that his father would get them out, because he worked at the embassy in Delhi, and he would not stand for Douglas and his friends being dragged out of their homes and shut into a bad old hut like this. Selina felt a bit better then; she remembered that her own father worked for newspapers and that people did not like bad things written about them in newspapers. She added this to what Douglas had said, and the children began to look more hopeful.
But it was Christy who said, ‘Shush–we ought to try hearing what the men are saying. Then we’ll know what they’re going to do to us.’
So everybody was quiet, and Douglas crawled across to the door and pressed his ear against it to listen. The men talked in their own language, but Douglas and one of the other boys had been here since they were very small, and they knew some of the words the Indian people used. After a moment Douglas crawled back, looking white and a bit sick.
Hostages, that was the word being used by the men, he said. They had marked out six men who had influential jobs and positions, and they had made a plot to kidnap those six men’s children and hold them to ransom.
The plot had been thought up a long time ago; all the kidnappers had had to do was wait until the six children were together in one garden.
There was a garden at Teind House, of course: Selina had been pleased about that when she came to live with the aunts and Great-uncle Matthew. It was quite large and there were nice things in it.
‘It’s an English garden,’ said Aunt Rosa firmly. ‘So it will be very different from what you have been used to. There are lawns and herbaceous borders and an orchard and a rockery. You must learn the names of the flowers and the plants.’
Aunt Flora wanted to give Selina a corner of the garden for her own. ‘A distraction from her bereavement,’ she said in the kind of voice grown-ups used when they did not mean you to hear. Aunt Rosa had frowned and said in a loud, clear voice that of course Selina should have a little patch of the garden. She could plant snapdragons and sunflowers, and they must not forget the idea of a memorial for John and Poor Elspeth. In the normal way there would have been graves: bodies could be brought back to England in lead-lined caskets, and proper Christian burials arranged. But in this case…
And lavender, said Aunt Flora, a bit hastily. Selina should grow a little lavender bush so that muslin sachets could be made for wardrobes and dressing-table drawers. They would go outside now to choose where it should be. ‘Gumboots and a woollen scarf first, though,’ said Aunt Rosa. ‘For you aren’t in that heathen place now, Selina, and September can be quite chilly.’
The garden felt very chilly indeed. There was a faint scent of bonfires and of apples from the orchard which Selina quite liked, and there were crisp golden leaves on the ground between the trees: you could stomp on them and hear them crackle under your gumboots. It had not been possible to stomp on things in India like that.
It had been while they were plodding round the garden that Selina had looked between the laden apple trees, and the damson trees with their clusters of velvet-skinned fruit, and seen, just beyond Teind’s grounds, the towering structure like a huge brick chimney against the sky.
‘Aunt Rosa, what is that?’
‘Don’t point,’ said Aunt Rosa automatically. ‘It’s rude to point. Oh, you mean the Round Tower. That is one of Inchcape’s little pieces of history, Selina. Once there were monks here and a monastery, and the monks built the tower so that they could watch for enemies. Or perhaps so that they could hide valuable possessions that people wanted to steal.’ Her tone said that if you must needs be a monk, you must expect to encounter problems like that.
It was stupid to suddenly think that the apple-scented garden was dissolving in places, like when you held a candle to thin fabric and the fabric shrivelled, and that the hot, blood-smelling nightmare was showing through the shrivelled bits. Selina listened to what Aunt Rosa was saying, because it was very interesting: all about how people in Inchcape were quite proud of the Round Tower, especially since there were very few such structures left in Scotland, and those that were left were mostly so tumbledown as to be dangerous. But Inchcape’s tower was in very good condition, said Aunt Rosa; students of archaeology and early Christian customs frequently came here especially to see it.
‘Forty feet high,’ added Aunt Flora. ‘And with a staircase inside going all the way up to the top.’
Aunt Rosa pointed out to Selina the tiny slit-like windows set high up in the circular brick structure–twenty or thirty feet from the ground at least, could Selina see them clearly?–and Aunt Flora described how the monks would have used the windows to look out for foes creeping towards them.
Selina said, How interesting, and, Thank you for telling me, and tried not to look at the parts of the garden that had dissolved. By this time if you looked directly at them–only Selina was trying not to–you could see through them quite clearly. You could see into the trampled jasmine of mother’s garden, and you could see Christy and the others scratching and kicking to escape from the men who had snatched them up…
‘Once there would have been a conical roof on the tower’s very top,’ Aunt Rosa was saying. ‘It would have looked like a little pointy hat, but it crumbled away years ago, so now there is just a layer of lead to keep the inside weatherproof.’
The hut in Alwar had not been weatherproof; the thick choking dust had blown in from outside, making their throats raw and dry. Selina’s eyes had stung and watered a lot.
‘You must never go inside the tower, Selina.’ This was Aunt Flora. ‘You might fall over and hurt yourself, and in any case the stairs aren’t likely to be very safe.’
Selina was staring up at the top of the tower. She said, in a strained little voice, ‘There’re birds on the top, aren’t there? Large birds,’ and Aunt Rosa said briskly that certainly there were large birds; they would be from the bird sanctuary at Stornforth where all kinds of different birds were kept. A very interesting place, the bird sanctuary: they would go along there one day soon, would Selina like that?
Selina said politely, ‘Oh yes, thank you very much,’ but as she watched the birds soaring up to the tip of the sinister tower the nightmare, which had gradually been receding since she left India and came to Inchcape, was trickling back through th
e shrivelled fabric of Teind House’s garden.
They had been kept in the bad-smelling hut for nearly two days. Christy and Selina had marked the hours off carefully, not because it made a lot of difference to the situation, but because it was something to do. Douglas said that when this was all over they would have a good tale to tell, and so it was important that they knew how long they were kept prisoners.
The men brought them some food: cornmeal mush and dry bread, and a pitcher of water. It was not very nice, but Christy said they should eat it because of keeping up their strength. It was what you had to do in an adventure, Christy said, her eyes glowing. You had to keep up your strength, so that when you saw a way of outwitting your captors you were strong enough to take the chance.
Most of the children found the cornmeal mush horrid. Selina managed to choke down a few mouthfuls, but it made Douglas sick. He did it in the corner, but it splashed onto his shoes, and the smell of it in the hot enclosed space made two of the smallest girls sick as well. Christy and Selina cleaned them up with the water from the jug as well as they could, but it was not very good really.
There was no lavatory in the hut, and after a while they had to use the corner farthest from the door. Normally Selina would have found this embarrassing beyond belief, but that kind of thing had stopped mattering by then.
It was not money that the men wanted from the children’s parents; it was free pardons for some of their number who were in gaol. The children understood this after a while–Douglas had tried to overhear as much as he could, but in the end the man who was in charge of the plot told them about it. His English was not very good, and they had not understood very much of what he said about Hindus fighting Muslims–they had not actually been very sure which their captors were–but they had understood enough.
It did not matter whether these men were Hindus or Muslims, because the outcome was going to be the same as far as the children were concerned. If the free pardons were not given by sunset that day the children were going to be taken out of the hut and shot.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunset came gradually into the room Mary had been given at Moy, and she hated it, because it was not the gentle beautiful thing that people painted or wrote poems about: it was a slow, inexorable clotting of daylight, the dying sun smearing the sky with blood, and the blood oozing down onto the world and dripping into this cell…
‘It’s a nice room,’ the stupid young warder had said when he brought her here. He was baby-faced and earnest. He looked about sixteen, although he must be older, and his name badge said he was called Robert Glennon. Robbie. Mary had thought, Well, Master Robert or Robbie Glennon, if you like it so much, you live in it, but she had not said it because it was better to seem submissive and quiet until she had these people’s measure.
In the house where she had lived until she was fourteen, sunset had been gentle and warm, creeping softly over the garden, turning the windows to melted gold. It ought to have been lovely, but in that house sunset was not something to admire or enjoy.
‘I hate sunset,’ Mary’s mother always said, not once, but over and over again.
‘Sunset is the hour your sister was taken from us,’ Mary’s father always added, regarding his wife anxiously.
‘Sunset on the twelfth of September 1948,’ said Mary’s mother, her face taking on the remote pinched look. Stupid, thought Mary. She looks so stupid. ‘Seven years old and three months, she was on that day, your lovely sister.’
There was always a memorial service at the local church on 12 September, and then there was another one on 8 June. ‘Her birthday,’ said Mary’s mother reverently, counting off the years. In 1957, when Mary was six, and old enough to understand, her sister would have been coming up to her sixteenth birthday.
‘Sixteen,’ said Mary’s mother wistfully. ‘Just starting to go to dances.’
‘The belle of the ball she would have been as well.’
They talked like this, even though the era of Rock Around the Clock and Blue Suede Shoes had started, and people of sixteen were jiving and rocking and rolling, wearing flirtily wide skirts, or tight jeans with ballet-pump shoes for bopping.
‘Show Mary the photographs, William. You see, Mary, what a very beautiful sister you had.’
‘Beautiful,’ said Mary obediently, although the black-and-white photograph really showed a bunchy-faced child with her hair tied up in silly spanielly ringlets on each side of her head.
When Mary was six she was allowed to accompany her parents to the memorial service, and afterwards they walked around the garden, hand-in-hand, talking quietly just as they always did. Mary had thought she would walk with them this year: she thought she could walk in the middle holding her father’s hand on the left and her mother’s on the right. She thought that even though she had not been born until two years after this wonderful sister died, she could join in the If-she-had-lived game, because she had listened to her parents and she knew all the things that had to be said. Things like, If she had lived, she would have been learning to play the piano now. If she had lived, she would have been a wonderful musician.
‘She loved music,’ said Leila Maskelyne.
‘I like music as well.’ Surely mother knew this from school concerts, when Mary sang in the junior school choir?
‘Yes, dear.’
And English. If Mary’s sister had lived she would have been studying at the grammar school by now. She might even have been clever enough to go on to university.
‘I’m clever,’ said Mary. ‘Miss Finch thinks I’m very good at sums and writing. I could go to grammar school if I pass the eleven plus.’
‘That will be very nice, dear.’
A year later, 8 June fell on a Sunday, and Mary’s mother started to say ‘Seventeen come Sunday’ months ahead, and arranged for that year’s memorial service to include the Vaughan Williams arrangement of the old English folk song.
‘A very nice sentiment, Mrs Maskelyne,’ said the vicar. ‘Yes, the organist can certainly play that for the service. My word, you do keep your girl’s memory green, don’t you?’
Mother said, ‘She is never out of my thoughts for a moment. Not for one moment.’ After supper that evening she said, ‘Seventeen, William, only think of it. If she had lived she’d have been seventeen. We’d have had a party. There’d have been young men taking her out, by now.’
Mary was almost eight and it was half-term so she was allowed to stay up a little later. She listened to the conversation, wondering what year her parents thought they were living in, because life seemed to have stopped for them in 1948.
‘That child who escaped,’ said Leila Maskelyne, and Mary heard with a shock that her mother’s voice was different as well. It was harder, colder. ‘She is so much in my thoughts lately. I hate that child, William.’
Mary’s father said, ‘Hush now, my dear, no good ever came of hating anyone.’
‘I can’t help it. I hate her so much.’ Mary had always thought of her mother as very pretty, but now, for the first time, she saw how the prettiness could change, and become thin and cruel and spiteful. ‘She is enjoying the life that our dear girl should have enjoyed,’ said Leila. ‘Seventeen this year. I know how old she is, that girl, I marked her age at the time, William. She is our dear one’s age almost exactly, and so today, this summer, all these lovely sunny afternoons, she will be doing all the things that girls of seventeen do. Out there in the world. Alive! Living! Walking and breathing and laughing and buying new clothes and listening to music…’ The pretty hands that sometimes played the piano in the front sitting room–hands that must have taught that other child how to pick out some of the notes–and were always protected from gardening and cooking by household gloves, curled into claws–there was no other word for it. Mary watched. ‘If there was to be one who escaped,’ said Leila, ‘why couldn’t it have been our dear, lovely girl?’
Mary had wanted to say, But you’ve got me now, but mother was already starting the harsh dry sobb
ing that made her feel so uncomfortable, and father was kneeling in front of her chair, giving her his handkerchief, saying, There, there, my poor dear, you always feel like this after the birthday memorial, and putting his arms round her and saying she would soon pluck up.
Plucking up meant that father would lead mother up to bed and bring her a cup of tea and her supper on a tray. Mary and father would have their supper together, and later on when mother had stopped crying into the pillow, after Mary was in bed herself, mother would say the thing she almost always said, and Mary almost always heard through the wall: ‘Come into the bed with me, William.’
Mother and father slept in two beds, side by side in the same room, with a little cabinet between them, but when mother said, Come into the bed with me, there was the creak of bedsprings, and the sound of father getting into mother’s bed with her. Then the bedsprings bounced for quite a long time in a kind of rhythm, and father panted as if he had been running very fast. Then he groaned, and said, ‘Better stop for a moment–better let me get something–I’m very near to—’
‘No, don’t use those horrid things, William! I want another child! Tonight we could make one!’
There was the sound of father going h’rm, h’rm, in the way he sometimes did when he felt embarrassed.
‘Yes, please, William. Because supposing she’s waiting to be re-born to us. Only think of it! Our lovely girl!’
The bedsprings bounced more violently, and then father gave another long groan, and the sounds stopped. There was the creak of a floorboard as father got out of the bed, and then a chink as he poured himself a glass of water from the washstand. He said, in a sad, rather defeated kind of voice, ‘You believed she would come back when Mary was born.’
‘Mary could never replace Christabel. Oh, William, I miss her so much…’
