The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  Would this night never end? Rose got up, turned on the light to make sure the cupboard door was still shut, and went to the window to look for the promise of dawn. The wind had risen. When she pulled back the curtain, silvery flashes of rain were blowing sideways across the light of the street lamp. The white flash of the dead man’s spirit, Miss Mumford had said, and for an instant, Rose thought she saw it, sweeping away with the rain.

  She dropped the curtain, and crept back to the bed like a mole and burrowed under the sheets.

  ‘You’ve talked half the night, I might have known it.’

  When her mother pulled the curtains back and woke her out of her first good sleep, Rose could not believe that it was light and the rain had stopped and the night was over. The yellow cupboard door was shut. Hazel was in the bathroom, running water. The room was its old bright self. She turned on her back and smiled up at Mollie, in a bright blue sweater and the first airing of her white summer skirt.

  ‘Rose, you look a wreck.’

  Rose put a finger under her eye. No tears there, but her head ached. ‘I cried in the night,’ she said.

  ‘Why, darling?’

  ‘I was sad.’

  ‘What about?’

  Rose shook her head on the pillow. ‘It was all so dreadfully sad.’

  ‘I know those dreams.’ Her mother bent to stroke her hair. ‘They seem to come out of some depths of our primeval past, don’t they, with the sadness of all the centuries.’

  As soon as possible after the breakfasts were done and Hazel had bicycled away into the beginnings of a sunny day, with the rain steaming up off the road, Rose went to look for R. V. Vingo.

  He was in the rocking chair on the triangular verandah under his room, which still held a sliver of the early morning sun. He was wearing an outfit Rose had not seen before, a tweed suit too heavy for the day, with a leather-buttoned waistcoat and a length of watch chain circumnavigating it.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ Rose stepped round the corner from the front verandah and shut the door.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Things are happening. Hazel and I slept in the annexe. They say I imagine things, and I know there’s nothing wrong with the house really, but there is.’

  His black eyebrows went up and he nodded and kept his chin down on his crooked bow tie, looking up at her under the eyebrows.

  ‘There’s a door there that wants to open all the time. There were weird dreams. I woke up feeling cold when it wasn’t cold. Once I woke up and someone was crying, and it was me. Why? Has this got anything to do with that tune, and the grey horse I saw? Mr Vingo, you seem to know something. You must tell me.’

  ‘Yes, I must tell you.’ He lifted his head and sighed. ‘I thought we had time. But we haven’t. It’s beginning to happen now for you.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  She sat opposite him on the wicker stool. Over her shoulder, she glimpsed someone behind the glass top of the door, who looked at them, but went away.

  ‘The music I am writing,’ he began, and his fingers played the piano on his knees.

  ‘You said it was about an old legend.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, it’s history. Legends aren’t necessarily true. This one is, but it’s been long forgotten, and it can’t be told properly in words. Only in music, to be understood by those who are worthy to know.’

  She wanted to ask, ‘Like me?’, because she had heard the tune, but did not want to sound conceited.

  ‘Hundreds of years ago – oh, almost four hundred years, let’s say, it doesn’t really matter – the people with money and position and power didn’t care much about all the others. In fact, they had no idea how the poorer people had to live. There were –’ He took a deep breath – ‘Well, there were nobles and dukes and things, and they gave money and soldiers to the king and got a lot of land and privileges in return. There were merchants, who made money off everybody, and there were the small farmers and insignificant peasants, who were totally dependent on the good will of the local high muck-a-muck to be able to survive. You’ve done history. You know all that.’

  ‘Sort of. What’s it got to do with –’

  ‘Peace.’ Mr Vingo held up a hand, plump pink palm outward. ‘Let’s get local. You know about the old castle on the moor?’

  ‘The old ruins? There’s only a few stones left.’

  ‘Fallen to ruin, as all evil edifices must do in the end. The man who lived there called himself the Lord of the Moor, though he had no right to the title. He was a cruel little weasel of a man, who kept a bloodthirsty weasel as a pet. He not only robbed the poor people of their common grazing land, but forced them to pay him for the doubtful privilege of living below his castle on the hill.’

  ‘How could they, if they were so poor?’

  ‘Cows, sheep, grain. The favourite daughters to slave in the castle as servants and marry his crude, rotten soldiers.’

  For the first time, Mr Vingo was talking fast and easily, not wheezing and stammering as he usually did.

  ‘One beautiful daughter had a son, who … Enough of that, we haven’t got much time. This you must know, Rose. When that boy was about your age–’ he nodded at her solemnly – ‘the Lord over-reached himself in beastliness and all the people would have been killed, but they were saved by the bravery of the boy and of the grey horse who was the favourite charger of the Lord of the Moor.’

  ‘The Great Grey Horse,’ Rose said. ‘I heard you say that at the concert before I fell asleep.’

  ‘And the people idolized him as the noblest of all living creatures: courage and beauty and peaceable strength.’

  ‘A thirteen-year-old boy?’

  Mr Vingo shook his head.

  ‘The horse?’

  ‘What else?’ He leaned forward over his tweed paunch, with his large prominent eyes fixed on Rose, crouched on the low stool at his feet.

  ‘His mission is to protect innocent people from evil and misery and violence.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Can’t tell you now.’ Mr Vingo’s eyes were watering. He was running out of breath. ‘You’ll know later. Just know about …’ he paused. ‘The Great Grey Horse.’

  ‘I saw him,’ Rose whispered.

  Mr Vingo nodded and began to breathe heavily.

  ‘You played the tune, and I had to go there. You knew. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Timing, timing, Rose. Timing is everything. I had to wait till you were ready. So did he. Now – now, when your life is travelling through that – that special age –’ He was losing breath – ‘When your mind and spirit are aroused to a state of tempestuous movement …’

  ‘You mean, being thirteen?’

  ‘Understand that you are one of the chosen, who can reach him, and respond and – and – and obey.’

  Mr Vingo began to cough. Water streamed from his eyes. He pulled out a handkerchief and put it over his face, rocking backwards in the wicker chair, and plummeting down with his feet flat on the floor boards.

  The spell was broken. Rose shook herself. ‘You made it up. People don’t obey horses. Horses obey people.’

  Mr Vingo came up out of the handkerchief. ‘Not this one.’

  ‘You’re trying to frighten me. I wish I hadn’t told you about the annexe. You’re trying to make me more scared.’ Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of someone’s shadow beyond the glass door, watching them again. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rose.’ Mr Vingo’s great chest went up and down, and he smiled sadly at her. ‘You have no choice.’

  She left him abruptly.

  Later that day, he was gone. He had disappeared completely, leaving behind the piano and most of his clothes.

  ‘Did he pay his bill?’ Philip asked Mollie.

  ‘Not yet, but he will when he comes back.’

  ‘He’d better,’ Philip said grimly. ‘What were you talking to him about this afternoon, Rose?’

/>   ‘I don’t know … Things.’

  ‘I’m not sure I trust that character. For two pins, I’d get a van down and have the damn piano and all his stuff carted away.’

  ‘Oh, Phil,’ Mollie said soothingly.

  ‘I mean it. I don’t want you getting too friendly with him, Rose.’

  ‘I like him.’ She was not going to say, ‘He frightened me.’

  ‘I don’t like either of you being too chummy with any of the customers. I’ve told you that.’

  ‘But that’s part of the charm of Wood Briar,’ Mollie said.

  ‘It’s not professional.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Mollie said, and Rose said, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ They had heard this before.

  Chapter Six

  Nothing changed. That was the deceptive thing. One day Rose’s life was in a turmoil, and the next, everything was back to normal.

  Her mother and father were the same as always. Her mother working like a demon, with damp tendrils of hair on her flushed cheeks, hurtling in and out of crisis when the fishmonger didn’t deliver or the plumbing got stopped up, but always smiling for the guests. Her father returning from work sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes cheerful and wanting to swim or take the little boat out, sometimes bitter about his job and his boss at the laboratory who was stupider than he.

  School was the same, limping towards the end of term as if it would never get there. Rose was the same. She rode in the late afternoon now that it was lighter, out on to the moor with a string of riders, and Moonlight put his foot in a rabbit hole that everyone else avoided. The moor was the same.

  They rode past the flat-topped hill on the other side of the lake, and Rose asked Joyce if she knew any legends about the old ruins up there.

  ‘Did hear something once. Shorten your reins, Rose, and don’t let that beggar snatch at trees. Bunch of rubbish though.’

  ‘What did you hear?’ Rose kicked Moonlight to catch up with Joyce’s long-legged, striding horse.

  ‘Can’t remember. Fairies and goblins or some such rot. All right, everybody! Stop loafing about and let’s see if we can get these nags into a ter-rot!’

  The moor was the same. With Mr Vingo gone, it was easier to try to put off thinking about what he had told her. Everything was the same.

  Some of the same people were turning up at the hotel. Spring visitors who liked to come before the summer tourists. Fishermen who went out in Jim Fisher’s brother’s boat, and got Mollie to fry their fish for them. Rose was as glad to see people come back as Mollie was. It tied your life to the safe cycle of the year, like knowing that the birds would come and go, and that even as the leaves fell off the trees in autumn, they were being pushed by the embryo growth of next year’s buds.

  One of the welcome events was Martin and Leonora turning up in their van for lunch, as they did every spring when he had to go to the hospital for a check-up. Rose helped Leonora and Jim to tug the wheelchair up the shallow front steps. Martin was strong and healthy from the waist up, but his legs had been paralysed after a crushing steeplechase fall two years ago. Rose was fascinated by him, because he seemed as relaxed and happy as if nothing were wrong, and was more interested in other people than in himself. She wanted to talk to him about horses, but perhaps this was a forbidden subject now.

  Leonora, who had given up a ballet career to look after him, was the kind of woman Rose would love to grow up to be: slender and graceful, with long straight black hair and gentle, shining eyes in a lovely pale face. Some hope. Several new people were arriving too. A family of four and a half (one was a baby) were staying for a month until their new house was ready. The car people began to turn up every evening demanding rooms without reservations and taking off next morning without even seeing the sea, leaving beds, beds, beds to change for Gloria and Mrs Ardis and a flighty young girl called Cindy from the drug treatment centre, who told Rose that going to gaol couldn’t have been worse than cleaning bathrooms.

  They were using the annexe now, and everyone loved it. When Jake and Julie came the next weekend, Mollie offered them the best front bedroom as a favour.

  Rose did not see much of them. They did not seek her out. After lunch, Jake went off somewhere in the car, and she saw Julie crossing the road towards the dunes alone, with the dog. She could not find them after dinner when she looked for them to play Scrabble, so she took care of the baby while the family of four – husband and wife, grandmother and divorced daughter – went to the cinema. That night, from the baby’s room at the back of the hotel, a full moon night, a night for dogs to howl for no reason, Rose heard Jake and Julie’s dog whining and barking from the kennel.

  Julie did not come to the dining-room for the big Sunday breakfast – choice of kippers or sausage and bacon and egg, or both. Jake usually had both. This morning, he just wanted toast. Gloria was waiting on him, but he stopped Rose as she went by his table.

  ‘I know you don’t do room service,’ he said, ‘but could you possibly take something over to Julie when you’ve got a moment – coffee and toast?’

  ‘You can make that for her in the annexe kitchen,’ Rose said.

  ‘I offered.’ Jake’s long thin face was mournful. ‘She wouldn’t let me get her anything. But if you just take a tray over …’

  Rose knocked at the bedroom door and went in. Julie was in bed in a dim light, so she put down the tray and pulled back the curtains.

  ‘Look – it’s a lovely day. Don’t you feel well?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Julie said, not looking up. She pushed herself up against the pillows and tried to smile. ‘Thanks, Rose, but I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You must have breakfast.’ Rose put the tray on her lap. She had picked a rose from the garden as she came through and put it in a glass, but Julie didn’t notice.

  ‘Jake’s worried about you.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Julie set her mouth.

  ‘Julie!’ If this marriage went wrong, nothing was secure.

  ‘This has been a horrid weekend, for some reason. Jake’s moody. I’m in a bad temper. Yesterday, he took that – that girl – the one with the baby – off to the art museum because she’d never been before.’

  ‘But you’ve been there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Julie said, meaning, ‘You don’t understand.’ She picked up the cup and began to weep into the coffee, trying to sob and drink coffee at the same time.

  Later that day. Rose went over to the annexe to collect towels, and heard Julie weeping again. But their red car was not in the hotel car park, and her mother told her that they had left.

  It was only a matter of time. Mr Vingo did not return, but the haunting little tune drifted through her head at odd times, and she knew she could not avoid the horse for ever.

  Once, she heard the ascending flute notes of the tune through the roar and rush of the dishwasher in the scullery. Once, the low, reverberating notes, like a horse snorting into the wind, were revolving in the engine of her father’s noisy old car. When she and Hazel went to an afternoon pop concert on Newcome Pier, Rose heard the melody again, weaving its way through the jagged rock music of a local group in pirate hats and pink running shorts.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she shouted urgently at Hazel, through the noise. Hazel picked up Rose’s wrist to peer at her watch. ‘It’s not half over.’ Her words were blotted out in a crash of electronic sound, but her lips were obviously protesting, ‘We’ve paid.’

  ‘You stay. I’m off.’

  Hazel shrugged, and continued to move her large knee solemnly up and down, slightly off beat. Rose clambered over her, pushed her way past several elderly holiday-makers who were being deafened by the music if they weren’t deaf already, and ran back down the pier to get her bicycle. She rode through back streets, and full tilt out towards the moor.

  She came on to it up the road that led to the stables, turning along the edge of the wood and hurling the bicycle in the bushes, to run up to the wall and across the pasture, not thinking, not afraid, drawn f
orward by some force far stronger than herself.

  This time, as she rounded the rock with her heart pounding, and groped her way down through the mist, she became aware that somewhere around her in the valley, shadowy, undefined figures were moving. The blood that drummed in her head had become the murmur of rough voices. She heard an oath, a sound like the rattle of chains, in front of her a man’s laugh, so close that she stopped and turned to go back, but there was someone else behind her. She couldn’t see him, but there was an acrid smell of sweat, and she could hear his breathing.

  The horse … She had got to keep going, and break out into the sunlight to reach the horse. She took one or two timid steps down, with her hands out to feel her way, when a patch of mist drifted away, and for a clear moment before the vapour closed in, she saw a huge figure in a cloak right in front of her. His face was masked from nose to chin, and his eyes were slits of steel.

  Rose stumbled sideways, and as she plunged on down beyond him, a hand brushed her shirt, and she heard the laugh again. Suddenly she was out of the mist and running down the last slope to the river, and the horse plunged out on to the rock with a great surge and clatter, his pearly coat a blaze of silver light.

  ‘I’m coming!’ she called. He tossed his beautiful head, and she thought, ‘If I go to him, I’ll never get back. I can’t go back through that dreadful mist.’

  On the bridge, she stopped and turned with a hand on the rickety rail, to risk a look behind her. There was no mist. No cloaked shapes, no threatening murmur of voices, no clink of steel or creak of leather. Only the slope of the valley, studded with rocks and bushes, a lark singing high in the sky at the top.

  She crossed the bridge and climbed up the other side, her eyes fixed ardently on the shining horse who stood waiting on the rock above her.

  She climbed round over the jumbled stones and stepped out on to a rock just above him on the other side, with a steep drop on one side, a rock wall at her back, and the great horse confronting her. As he turned his head, she saw herself, small and afraid, a tiny creature in the deep, wise grey eyes, and before she knew it, she was on his back. His bright, glowing skin did not burn. It was at the same time warm and cool, his back unbelievably soft, yet firm and safe. He rose, and with his long grey mane blowing like a pennant in her face, they were away – galloping, flying – she could ride!