The Little Gentleman

by Philippa Pearce

  Bet's silence did not mislead the mole into thinking that she did not feel for him. He said, ‘When they remembered, they gave me food and water. Sometimes they cleaned out the cage.’

  Bet managed to ask, ‘How long was it?’

  The mole asked, ‘How long did the book say that the Jacobites went on plotting and hoping to no purpose?’

  ‘Just over forty years.’

  ‘Forty years, then,’ said the mole.

  He could hear Bet catching her breath, trying not to cry. ‘Don't grieve now, child. It's over, done with. Long, long ago. And I have yet to tell you of my second painful encounter with witchcraft, and the outcome of that.’

  ‘No. Please,’ said Bet. ‘Not now. Not yet.’

  She had never before not wanted to hear him, to hang on his words.

  She could hardly speak for the anguish she felt.

  ‘Very well,’ said the mole. ‘Later.’

  That – for the time being – was that.

  Chapter Ten

  The Bag of Tricks

  Never before had Bet doubted what the mole had told her; but this time she did not want to believe. Over forty years in a cage, fed and watered ‘when they remembered’! She could not bear to believe it.

  In the time that followed, and for a long time after that, Bet used to look in books for anything to contradict – or confirm – the mole's story. Sometimes – but not often – she found something about the Hampton Court molehill and the Jacobite toast to ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’. She never found anything about a mole trapped and kept alive, a captive for over forty years, by witchcraft.

  Yet she always knew in her heart that the story must be true. The mole would never lie to her. So there was no escape for her: she must endure in her imagination the knowledge of what had happened long ago.

  That night, in her grandparents' house, Bet could not sleep for such imaginings. The room was stuffy with summer heat, so she got out of bed to open the window to its widest and to draw the curtains right back.

  In bed again, she hovered on the edges of sleep. If she closed her eyes, immediately she began to see what the mole had told her of: King William's horse stumbling on the molehill at Hampton Court, and the King's fall to his death; the headlong ride of the Jacobite spy from London into Scotland, with a dying mole caged up at his saddlebow; and, lastly, the midnight scene on the Scottish moor, with the bony-fingered witch and her bubbling cauldron.

  On that moor, what the mole had only heard and smelt and felt by touch, Bet saw. She was there; she saw it all. She saw the figures of people silhouetted black against the firelight. Among them was a man with a cage, and beside him a young boy, of about Bet's age. Between them they were forcing some little creature back into their cage, alive: the mole.

  Then something quite different began to happen. The same man pushed his son forward to the witch and her cauldron. The child had a tiny leather pouch with leather drawstring, just big enough to hold a single silver coin. The boy gave his coin to the witch, and in return she ladled into the pouch a thick black substance, now semi-solid, from the cauldron. The boy drew the pouch-string tight and went back to his father, who hung the little bag round the child's neck as a charm.

  Even in her dream, Bet knew that what she had just seen was more than the mole had ever told her. In dream-time she had been witness to a happening of 300 years ago. But that midnight scene – moorland and witch and cauldron – now vanished in a senseless whirling rush of time which blew her backwards – not centuries but millions of years – to the terrifying sound of monster footsteps: thump! thump! thump!

  Of course, a dinosaur! A dinosaur was coming to get her — and she could not run from it! She could not move!

  Thump! thump! thump!

  The thumping woke her from her nightmare. She was lying in bed in a sweat of fear, with the full moon shining on her face through the un-curtained, open window. Her grandmother had always said that moonlight brought bad dreams.

  Thump – thump – thump

  Her grandfather was thumping on the floor beside his bed with his walking stick, which he kept to hand for just such a purpose. He slept alone in the double bed in the room across the landing. Directly below his bedroom was the front room of the Allums' house, never used unless for entertaining visitors. Here Mrs Allum regularly slept on a makeshift bed, ever since her husband's complaints about her snoring. If he needed her, he thumped for her.

  The trouble was that Mrs Allum was deaf in one ear: if she happened to turn in her sleep, so that her good ear was buried in the pillow, she could not hear the knocking.

  This must have happened now.

  As well as thumping, old Mr Allum was calling in what voice he could wheezily manage, ‘Girl, girl, fetch her! Fetch her!’

  Bet knew that she must run downstairs at once to wake her grandmother. Then, while Mrs Allum was puffing her way upstairs, Bet put a kettle on to boil in the kitchen. For his asthmatic condition, Mr Allum insisted on old-fashioned steam inhalations. By the time his wife had attended to his needs and he was feeling better, it would be almost morning. Often Mrs Allum would simply reboil the kettle for a cup of tea and then start her housework ahead of the usual routine.

  Bet herself was always sent promptly back to bed (‘School tomorrow, girl!’) after the trip to the front room and to the kitchen. This time she lay awake, still held by a fear she could not understand. There was no monster, after all; so what was this dread at her very heart?

  Then she remembered: her mother, whom – so soon – she was to meet for the first time. She dreaded that meeting. When she had told the mole of her fear, he had comforted her and given her sound, calming advice. She now made a deliberate effort to follow that advice. After a while she fell asleep.

  In the meadow after school, with Bet's consent, the mole resumed the distressing story of his long imprisonment in Scotland. The Encyclopedia had already told of the Jacobites' continued plotting for the restoration of the so-called King James III. In 1745 his son landed in Scotland, where he was welcomed as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and there he raised an army to march into England to claim the throne for his father. They never reached London, but turned back halfway. They fought their last battle in Scotland, on Culloden Moor, against the mainly English army, led by the Duke of Cumberland, a younger son of King George II. The Jacobites were utterly defeated. With that the entry in The Encyclopedia of Homeland Histories had ended.

  ‘Their defeat mattered nothing to me,’ said the mole; ‘but in the violence and terror that followed my cage was trampled over by horsemen, and broken, and I escaped. I escaped! My one intention then was to take to the earth and tunnel my way far from the battlefield and from Scotland altogether. But I was very weak from lack of food. I had the strength only to crawl out of the ruins of my cage. I was surrounded by the dead and the dying, one of whom had been my jailer for many years. He wore round his neck a charm in a tiny leather pouch with leather drawstring. Can you visualize such an object?’

  ‘I can,’ said Bet.

  ‘The soft leather of this little bag was the first thing I came across, and it was edible. I began to nibble and gnaw at the leather.’

  ‘Wasn't there anything inside the bag?’

  ‘There was, and in my haste to satisfy hunger I gave up nibbling and gnawing and swallowed the whole thing in one go, bag and contents, all.’

  ‘What did it taste like?’ Bet asked faintly.

  ‘Appalling. But I hardly cared; and whatever witchcraft was in that bag of tricks gave instant, overwhelming strength to my will to escape. I dived into the earth and began at once to tunnel. I tunnelled all that day and for many, many days afterwards. For days – months – years. On and on, skirting towns and villages as I came to them, swimming streams and lochs and even great rivers. On and on, always making southwards, out of that accursed land.

  ‘You're glad you're not Scottish,’ said Bet.

  ‘Not Scottish?’

  ‘You were born in Engla
nd, so you're English.’

  The mole said fiercely, ‘I am neither Scottish nor English. I am mole, Talpa europaea. My native land is the earth, the soil through which I go. I care nothing for monarchs and their quarrels. Thrones, countries, nationalities, patriotisms mean nothing to me. Nothing.’

  Then, for the sake of his listener, the mole calmed himself. ‘You are still very young,’ he said. ‘You have not experienced what I came to know. At the Battle of Culloden, the English forces were commanded, as I have told you, by the Duke of Cumberland. After that battle, he was known as “Butcher” Cumberland. This was only partly because of slaughter on the battlefield. The dead and the dying among whom I made my escape were not on the battlefield at all. Men, women, children, old and young, were killed and their homes burnt to the ground. The earth through which I tunnelled in the first days after the battle stank with human blood.’

  Bet could see that, at the recall of what he had witnessed, the mole's body was shaken with fear and with pity.

  Presently he continued: ‘You will easily credit that it took me many, many years to tunnel my way out of Scotland and into England. I believe, nearly a hundred. Then one morning in early summer, somewhere in the north of England, I was tunnelling away – perhaps rather nearer the surface than usual – when I was attracted by the sound of a human voice. It was speaking rhythmically, in a way that made me shiver with pleasure. Then the voice stopped. Then it resumed in a different, particular way of speaking which one uses (I later knew) when one talks to oneself. The speaker was alone.

  ‘Cautiously I surfaced, and the voice stopped. I realized that whoever it was had observed me. It would have been natural then for a mole to retreat underground at speed; but whatever had been in that bag of tricks still worked in me as strongly as on Culloden Moor. I dared to stay where I was.

  ‘Very quietly the voice said, “Good afternoon, sir.”

  ‘I did not understand the words, but I understood the tone, gentle and friendly. I wanted to respond to the speaker, whom I judged to be a young woman or a girl. I struggled to respond, but had no words at all. I had never, in all my life as a mole, been able to understand or to use the words of human beings – or wanted to until now.

  ‘As I struggled in vain to communicate something, I felt her fingers touch me. She did not try to take hold of me, or even to stroke me. Only the tips of her fingers touched my shoulder, but her touch and my will to speak – the two together – gave me power. At first I could only repeat her words – exactly.

  ‘At that exact repetition she laughed a little. “You must not call me ‘sir’,” she said. “I am my father's only daughter, so you had better address me as Miss –” and then she added an English surname too difficult for me to attempt. Was it Featherstonehaugh, or perhaps Woolstenholmes? Some such. She saw my difficulty, and with the greatest delicacy suggested that at least for the time being I should call her Miss X. I have done so ever since.’

  The mole sighed, but contentedly. ‘That meeting changed my life, enriching it over the many years of our friendship. All that first summer we talked, and she read aloud to me, usually poetry, and sometimes she sang. This all happened in a corner of the vicarage lawn secluded from inquisitive eyes. I still remember the smell of the lilac, the sound of bees. When winter came, we could rarely meet; but Miss X had her piano moved into a room overlooking the garden. Whenever she could, she played and sang with the window open, even in the coldest weather, so that I could hear her across the lawn. Winter or summer, year after year, we enjoyed each other's company, and I learnt the art of human conversation.’

  There was a long pause; the mole seemed lost in recollection. But Bet, looking at him closely, saw that in the shade of his own doorway and in the safety of her presence, he had fallen happily asleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  Things Happen

  The Saturday came for Bet and her grandmother to make their day trip to the East Anglian town of Disham to meet Bet's mother. This was the expedition that Bet had dreaded.

  Old Mr Allum disapproved of what they were doing – but, then, in the past, he had been too angry with his own daughter to allow her even to enter the house. Mrs Allum, however, had become bold. She said that they were going, anyway, and that Mr Allum could perfectly well manage without her for one Saturday: ‘With his dinner all laid ready for him, and his tea!’

  Mrs Allum was flustered by train travel and a strange town, but she had her daughter's address in her hand and – as she said – a tongue in her head. Eventually they reached the right block of council flats. They rang the bell at the front door, and Bet heard light, quick footsteps coming and the door began to open – and opened. There stood her mother, at last.

  Bet described the meeting later to the mole, when she was back in the meadow. She and her mother had not at first embraced, but only stared at each other as if they could hardly believe their eyes. Then suddenly, awkwardly, they were hugging and kissing; and Mrs Allum, to everyone's surprise, including her own, had wept.

  ‘And then,’ Bet told the mole, ‘I met Jack, he's my mum's husband, he's a carpenter and joiner and he works for a firm that does units and fitments in wood.’

  ‘Units and fitments in wood,’ repeated the mole, trying to grasp all that he was being told.

  ‘And they have a baby. A little boy. He's my brother – well, my half-brother. I've never had a brother before.’

  Bet had liked all that she had seen of her new family, and they had wanted Bet to come to live with them. She wasn't quite sure.

  ‘I cannot advise,’ said the mole. ‘As I have told you, moles have no experience of family life after their earliest infancy.’

  ‘My gran thought,’ said Bet, ‘that I might go and stay for a few days when the holidays begin. To see how we get on.’

  ‘A very reasonable step,’ said the mole.

  ‘And then go again and stay longer.’

  ‘Well thought,’ said the mole.

  ‘And then perhaps stay for good. They're getting a bedroom ready for me: it's going to be papered with roses on a trellis; and lovely shelves for books and things. Oh, and there's girl called Madeleine – Maddy for short – who's my age and she lives in the flat above, and her mum is friends with my mum.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said the mole. ‘Friends and family.’

  ‘But,’ said Bet emphatically, and paused.

  ‘But?’ said the mole.

  ‘I'll come back often on visits to my gran, of course. And to see you.’

  ‘To see me…’ the mole repeated thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bet. She was too full of her news to pay attention to what the mole might be thinking. ‘And just supposing it doesn't work out with my mum, then my gran says I can come home to her and live just as before. If I really want to.’

  ‘Your grandmother is a woman of sound sense and a warm heart,’ said the mole.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bet. ‘I suppose she is.’

  *

  The long summer holidays were not so far away now. A date was fixed for Bet's second, longer visit.

  As the time drew near, the mole became strangely disturbed at the prospect of Bet's absence. She tried to reassure him: ‘Only a few days. Then I'm back.’

  The mole said, ‘I may not be here.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  In a moment the mole had become secretive; also short-tempered and sullen; hard. He said, ‘Things happen.’

  ‘But – what things?’

  ‘Things.’ Then suddenly, ‘You seem not to realize that I have more important things to do than to loll here all day, chatting. I travel to a destination. I have to get to Hampton Court. I can't put that off forever. I must make a start on this last lap. Years of hard tunnelling, no doubt, but still – the last lap.’

  Bet felt desperate. ‘But you wouldn't set off before I got back from my mum's? You wouldn't do that, would you?’

  The mole would promise nothing. He was in a strange, contrary mood, very gloomy.
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br />   In despair Bet went to Mr Franklin. Only after much hesitation had she resolved to consult him. Since the mention of witchcraft, they had never spoken together of the mole. Indeed, they had hardly spoken together at all. It was as if they were back in the time before Mr Franklin's broken leg and his testing her ability to read aloud about earthworms.

  Bet found Mr Franklin sitting among his aunt's books, reading and making notes, with Moon for company. He tipped Moon off his usual chair, so that Bet could sit down. He saw that she had something important on her mind. He listened; and Bet found that he had not forgotten about the mole. On the contrary, Mr Franklin had even come to accept the fact of the mole's great age.

  ‘And you say he's thinking of going to Hampton Court?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bet was taken aback. She said that perhaps – well, after all, the mole had been born there.

  Mr Franklin snorted. ‘What a reason!’

  With satisfaction Mr Franklin went on to point out the impracticality of the idea: ‘To reach Hampton Court, he's got to get to the other side of London, does he realize that? He certainly can't take a direct route, straight across London, or he may well find himself trying to cast up a molehill under one of the great lions in Trafalgar Square. No, he'll have to go right round London, and that will mean years and years of extra tunnelling. Years and years and years. And then, when he gets to Hampton Court, does he realize that in the twenty-first century the whole place will be swarming with tourists? Oh, and I believe there's a golf course there nowadays, too. The golfers won't like molehills one little bit!’

  Bet was dismayed. ‘What do you think, then? I mean, what should I say to him?’

  ‘Ask him what I've asked you: Why?’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Bet. ‘I don't think he'll like me asking that.’