The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  Monica Dickens

  The Messenger

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Rose had always thought of herself as a rather humdrum, matter-of-fact kind of girl, to whom nothing extraordinary had ever happened, and perhaps never would. So what did happen that afternoon in the kitchen when the newspaper caught fire was totally odd and unexpected.

  Rose’s parents, Philip and Mollie Wood, owned a small hotel near the sea, three miles away from Newcome, a busy coastal town. Rose was working in the kitchen that Saturday afternoon, chopping vegetables for soup, while Hilda, one of the helpers who came and went, read a folded newspaper while she stirred custard.

  Hilda always read her favourite newspaper while she was cooking or washing up or mopping the floor, holding up close to her one good eye its dreadful news of murder and car crashes and scandal among film stars.

  ‘Custard’s burning!’ When Rose yelled at her, Hilda lowered the newspaper to swivel her eye into the saucepan, and the edge of the paper caught and flared – a conflagration on the stove.

  Hilda shrieked and dropped the custard spoon on the floor and stepped backwards into the cat dish. Rose pounced forward, turned off the gas and, without thinking, brought her hand down on the burning newspaper. The flames dwindled immediately, and went out.

  Shaking and terrified at what she had done, Rose took her hand off the charred paper, expecting to see all the skin gone from her palm.

  ‘What happened?’ Her mother was there, fresh pink cheeks gone white with fright. ‘Oh, your hand! Oh …’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Rose stared at the palm of her hand, smooth, not even red, the head line, the heart line, the deeper line curving round the base of her thumb, which Mrs Ardis the chambermaid said was the line of your death, perfectly whole and unscarred. There was no pain. The fire was out.

  Her mother put the burned saucepan into the sink. Hilda set off to Newcome Hollow village to buy another newspaper. Rose’s father came in to tell them, ‘Something’s burning.’

  ‘The whole kitchen would have burned, Phil, but this brave girl saved us.’

  Rose beamed and hung her head. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘It was a miracle. I saw it as I came through the door. The whole stove was in flames.’ Rose’s mother’s round blue eyes were huge with exaggeration. ‘She put her hand on it and it went out – without even burning her.’

  ‘She’s in shock, Mollie. That’s why there’s no pain.’

  ‘No, look.’ Rose showed him her miraculous hand.

  ‘Hrhm.’ Philip Wood cleared his throat, a sign that he was going to explain. ‘Something in the way she cupped her hand made a vacuum that instantly eliminated all the carbonizing oxygen.’ He had a logical, scientific mind, and could explain anything away, even fairy tales and true ghost stories.

  Rose went back to chopping vegetables in an ordinary way. But that evening when she was sitting close in front of the television set in the upstairs lounge, nodding over a boring talk show, she sat up with a shock when one of the talkers turned and smiled right out of the screen at her and said, ‘Wake up, Rose, this is important.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ one of the twin Miss Mumfords snapped. ‘We can’t hear.’

  ‘Did you hear what that man said to me – the one with the beard?’ Rose turned round to where the elderly twin sisters sat on the sofa, with their skirts pulled down over their neat knees, like dolls.

  ‘I can’t hear anything when you keep chattering.’

  ‘This is only meant for you Rose, anyway,’ she thought the man said, but when she turned back to him his shaggy head was fading into a commercial, the smile fading last, teeth very white and lips very pink in the hole in his beard.

  At the end of the commercials there was a different person talking on the screen.

  ‘Where’s the man with the beard?’ she asked the text book salesman, a one-nighter who was also in the hotel lounge.

  ‘What man?’

  Had Rose imagined him? What was going on? What was it that was only meant for her? Two weird things in one day. What was happening to her?

  Rose was almost thirteen. She had lived here for four years, since her mother had plunged into the hotel business to try to add some money to Philip Wood’s salary as a tester for a consumer magazine, which told its readers things like what make of washing machine worked best.

  It looked less like a hotel than a large, odd-shaped and rather ugly house, which is what it used to be. It was built about 1900 when they favoured gables and pinnacles and cowled chimneys and odd little balconies, and a stained glass window half way up the staircase that threw blue and yellow sun diamonds on to the dark red carpet.

  It was not like a hotel, with rooms opening off straight corridors. Some of the bedroom doors were in unexpected places, opening awkwardly the wrong way, so that they hit a bannister post or the big double doors of the linen cupboard on the landing. None of the rooms was quite square, and some of them were reached by two or three stairs up or down. The bathrooms had been fitted in wherever the plumbers could put pipes, not where you would expect them. New guests were sometimes found in dressing-gowns, wandering, lost, far off the trail.

  The dining-room led on to a wide front verandah, with a view across the road of the billowing sand dunes that lay between the hotel and the beach. Round the corner at the side, there was another little odd-shaped verandah, dark and draughty, with a sagging roof over which was balanced a narrow round turret room. Rose had always liked this room, because it had curved walls and windows and a floor that sloped towards the middle so that furniture legs had to be propped. But guests found it too small and dark and uncomfortable, and it was only used when the hotel was full.

  Fifteen guests was the limit, with a few more if they were toddlers who could sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, or babies who slept in car cots, or sometimes in a bottom drawer.

  ‘Don’t shut the drawer!’ Rose, coming back from getting a snack while she was babysitting for guests who had gone shopping, had once found Mrs Ardis the chambermaid just about to shut in and suffocate the Robinson’s baby with a push of her grey gym shoe.

  When Rose’s mother Mollie took over the small hotel, it was called ‘The Cavendish’, which was pointless and much too grand. Mollie, who was a romantic, called it ‘Wood Briar Hotel’, because the girl who lived there was Rose Wood. Philip Wood called it a glorified boarding house.

  Rose worked for her mother at weekends and in the holidays, cooking, cleaning, making beds, and being a waitress in a short blue and white check apron that tied in a bow at the back and looked odd in the summer over shorts.

  Most of the money she made was spent at a stable a few miles from the hotel, where she was learning to ride.

  She was not learning very much. The classes were not exciting – walk, trot and sometimes canter, if you could make your horse canter – and Rose seemed to be the worst in the class. Some days, she just bumped about, or fell off even at a trot. The horse they gave her, a pale, bony animal called Moonlight, which her father called The Mule, would almost never canter, except once when she was allowed to go out with a group on the moor, and Moonlight had suddenly turned and lumbered off for home, going right into the stable, where he would have brained Rose against the top of the door if she had not been lying on his neck,
clutching his thin mane and praying.

  Rose loved going to the stable, because of the horses. Even though she was a clumsy, hopeless rider who could fall off at a standstill if necessary, she was fascinated by all the horse smells, and by the sounds of a creaking saddle, the clink of a bit, the reverberating rumble of a long snort blown into the wind, the lid of the wooden oat bin, the stamp of a shod foot, the thrilling dull pounding of hoofs when they were out on the turf of the moor, the slosh of mud at a gateway, the crisp greed of Moonlight, stoking himself with hay.

  After riding, when she had cleaned out his pungent stable and brushed as much of his bony frame as she could reach, she would lean over his stable door to breathe in the strong-flavoured scents that called her to some emotion she could not name, before she dragged herself away back to the hotel to wash the horse smell off her hands with regret, and serve teas.

  This Sunday, after the miracle of the fire, and the bearded man on television, Rose went to the stable with greater hope. When she got her bicycle out of the shed behind the hotel and pushed it through the long grass beyond the lawn, interwoven with tall spring flowers that her mother never wanted to have mown down, there was this new hope that now that something rather extraordinary had happened to her at last, she might suddenly be able to ride well. Moonlight might transform himself into the horse of her dreams, who she had always imagined came from the stars, pawing and arching his neck outside her window at night, if only she could see him.

  Beyond the gate at the end of the back garden, she rode the bicycle along the path through the small wood, bumping over roots, swerving for a low branch, splashing through a puddle, wearing her riding hat, making the old small bicycle into a horse. This summer, she had planned to save part of her wages for a new bicycle, but if she turned into someone who could really ride, and they let her ride other horses, like Mr Pepper and Red Admiral who went to horse shows, she would spend it all on horses.

  Where the narrow woodland path opened out to the light and clouds and blowing grass of the beginning of the moor, Rose pulled the left rein and yanked the bicycle on to the wider gravel track and out on the road that led to the stables.

  Would they see her as different? At the hotel, she was something of a heroine for having marvellously put out the fire, which would have sent the whole gabled and turreted edifice up in flames. (The story improved each time it was told.) Would they be impressed? If she showed Mrs Benson or Joyce her unharmed hand and told them about the fire, would they say, ‘Admiral for you today!’ and give her a leg-up?

  No, they would not. They saw her as plain old Rose, who had not washed her jodhpurs or cleaned her boots and, because two people had come in late for the hotel lunch, was not in time to go out on the ride, and would have to slog round the muddy ring with the duffers.

  ‘And clean Moonlight off before you tack him up. He’s laid down again.’

  Brown horses, on whom it doesn’t show, always lie down in clean straw. Moonlight, being a pallid cream colour with pink eyelids and nose, always lay down in manure.

  But today, Moonlight cantered one and a half times round the ring, and Joyce shouted, ‘All right!’ in her encouraging riding teacher voice; not the bad mood one that roared, ‘Oh my God!’ or, ‘Hold him up, dammit, he’s going as if he had five legs!’

  Rose spun home along the road from the stables, feeling like a jockey, because her knees came up high on the small bicycle. The dark little wood was ahead of her, and before it, off to the left, the first shoulder of the moor, dark blue in the afternoon shadow, and farther off the higher ground, greening in the spring, where the sheep were.

  Lambing time was just over. The little ones would be in the pasture, trying out the bounce of their legs, while their mothers steadily tore at the grass, to manufacture milk.

  Rose looked at the watch her father had given her, ‘Hrhm – in the hope that you may be on time for anything except your meals.’ Just time to turn up towards the moor and see if the ewes and lambs were still near the farm. In the wood, instead of taking the path home, she turned left and rode to the edge of the trees, then flung down her bike and ran uphill through the bushes to where she could climb on the wall and look into the broad sheep pasture and over the farther wall to the wider, wilder part of the moor.

  She was singing. She usually sang in her head while she rode, to keep the rhythm of Moonlight’s slovenly walk and unwilling trot, and she always sang to him under her breath when she brushed him down. She was still singing now, not out loud with words, but a tune in her head that she did not recognize. Where had she heard it? The air of the moor seemed to pick it up, and there was a drift of words that were not quite words, and the tune rose up joyfully in her head and then dropped into a sort of quick rumbling on the same note, like a – like a what? Like the snort of a horse? Was someone riding on the other side of the hill?

  As she listened, she heard the drum beat of galloping hoofs, far away at first, but coming closer so fast that she knew the horse must be flying over the moor at a tremendous rate of speed. And then she saw him. A big grey riderless horse with a long mane and tail, streaking beyond a line of trees – sun, shadow, sun – the most beautiful horse she had ever seen.

  At the end of the trees, he suddenly stopped, forelegs stiff, head up. He posed for a moment, then shook his handsome head, bucked, and was gone.

  Down below in the pasture there were sheep and lambs, but Rose was not looking at them. The sight of the splendid horse had moved her to a pitch of excitement. She wanted to follow him, to run crazily over the moor, looking for his hoof tracks. Yet the thrill was mixed with fear, a dread of something unknown that made her shiver, although she was not cold.

  ‘Hrhm.’ Her father’s remembered voice brought her back to earth. ‘In the hope that you may be on time …’ She looked at her watch and hurled herself off the wall and back down through the bushes. She bumped her bicycle along the path, bawling loudly, ‘Onward, Christian so-ho-ho-holdyahs!’, threw the bike in the grass, kicked off her muddy boots, crashed through the back door, tied a kitchen apron over her riding clothes and began to cut crusts off the big rectangular loaf to make toast.

  Chapter Two

  The elderly twin Miss Mumfords had been at the hotel all winter, because their own house in town was too cold. ‘Not that Wood Briar is an oven,’ they said, shaking their heads, one of them in a negative way, the other, because her head always shook slightly, negative or positive.

  There were always a few winter regulars, as well as the salesmen passing through, and odd people visiting the hospital or the university in Newcome. Sometimes pale people would come to convalesce after an illness, although the winters here were harsh, and the winds that blew over the sand dunes from the long open beach and Sandy Neck smacked the hotel full in the face and moaned in the drain pipes, and had once broken one of the glass dining-room doors all over a man eating bacon and scrambled eggs.

  Now the Miss Mumfords were moving out, unregretted, because they were boring and critical and found mean little ways to try to reduce their bill, and the summer people would soon be coming in. Dozens of them. Some stayed a week or two, and some came back every year, like Ben’s family. What would Ben be like this summer? At fifteen, he would probably notice Rose even less than last year. Travelling people came for a night or two, attracted by the beach, foreigners on tours, Americans, who are less foreign because you can usually understand what they say.

  In July and August, Rose’s short strong back ached from carrying baskets of laundry and making up clean beds, day after day.

  This year, there would be even more, because Mollie Wood had bought the smaller house next door after the old gentleman died there, and it was to be Wood Briar Annexe, with three extra bedrooms.

  ‘And all those towels and sheets to carry across the garden, gracias muchas.’ Rosita’s ‘Thank you very much’ meant ‘No, thank you’, with a toss of the hair and a roll of the fiery eyes that threatened one Spanish chambermaid walking out befor
e the summer even began.

  ‘The painters will be finished tomorrow,’ Mollie told everyone after supper. Rose and her parents usually stayed in their own rooms at the back of the hotel, but this was the Mumfords’ last night, and the sick man and his nurse would be leaving soon, so there was wine and gingerbread in the lounge. ‘Shall we start getting the annexe ready, Rose? The curtains and bedspreads came – scarlet and gold chrysanthemums, the pattern you wanted. It’s going to be beautiful.’

  ‘Take more than a few red and yellow mums to beautify that old place,’ one Miss Mumford said, looking suspiciously into her wine glass for flies before sipping at it, and making a face. ‘It’s a misfit. Always was.’

  ‘Only because it was so dark before we redecorated, with those heavy curtains and the panelling.’

  ‘My sister and I,’ Miss Mumford continued sombrely, ‘went to a birthday party there when we were children.’

  ‘Dressed alike?’ Rose asked.

  She was genuinely interested in the idea of two identical little Mumfords in white dresses with blue sashes and hair ribbons, pretending to be each other, to fool the grown-ups; but Miss Mumford said, ‘That’s not for you to ask, nor me to tell you.’

  ‘I only asked!’ Rose felt a hot surge of fury at the silly, secretive old woman who had never done anything in her life worth being secretive about, and her father said, ‘Rose!’ in rebuke and her mother cried, ‘Rose!’ in amazement. Rose was known for being amiable and patient. It wasn’t like her to fire up and scowl and hang her hair forward and hiss under it something that sounded like, ‘Gee!’, or even ‘Jeeze!’

  The sick man yawned and closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten that party,’ said the other Miss Mumford with the shaky head, who had once been married, but had changed her name back to Mumford when her husband died of drink. ‘My sister was frightened by some kind of animal in the garden. A mad bull, she said, though no one believed her. And then they played hide and seek.’ Her slipped face with the moles and faded, anxious eyes pouted childishly. ‘I cried and cried and our mother had to take us home.’