Is

by Joan Aiken

  ‘What’s a hurrier?’

  ‘They bring the coal in trucks from the rockface to the loading area.’

  ‘Who takes the pockets for you?’

  ‘Well, my love, I think I had better not tell you his name. He is a simple fellow, slightly crazed, but it is a dangerous mission; and what the ear does not hear, the tongue cannot divulge. Even your grandfather does not know him – ’

  ‘It’s not Arn Twite – nor Davie?’ Is asked anxiously.

  Aunt Ishie shook her head and laid her finger on her lips.

  ‘I tell the truth, but never speak

  French or English, Latin or Greek

  My face never smiles, my hands never hold

  Though they may be made of silver or gold.’

  chanted Grandfather Twite, passing through the kitchen with a bale of paper.

  ‘Easy, Grandpa! A clock!’ Is shouted after him down the stairs to the cellar. The sound of her voice made him trip and drop the paper; she ran down after him and helped gather it together again.

  From her rides with the doctor, Is quite soon began to have a fair knowledge of the underground city of Holdernesse, not only its grander main squares and avenues, but also the smaller, darker streets near the sides of the great cave, close to the mine entrance. Here the less prosperous citizens lived, some of whom had already begun to wish they were back living out of doors again; they found that the benefit of never having wet or snowy weather outside the front door was quite outweighed by the stuffy atmosphere, and the lowering effect on their spirits of never being able to see sky through the windows, or feel the wind.

  ‘Even if ’tis grey and bitter and blowing marlin-spikes,’ one old man said, ‘at least ’tis there! I’d dearly like a sight of the old moon, or a star or two. I reckon ’Im Above sent us the weather to keep us ‘opping on our pins; ‘tain’t natural to live without, ’tis like vittles wi’ no salt.’

  There were a great many rats in Holdernesse, too. But they were not mentioned by polite people.

  At the end of the second week there was an explosion at the iron-foundry; one of the blast furnaces had blown out. Dr Lemman was sent for urgently.

  The ironworks lay close to the docks. As they approached, Is could see lines of rail wagons and great piles of iron ore – rusty purplish-brown powder, rough and dirty as it had been dug out of the ground – waiting to be cleaned of its impurities, melted down and made into pots and tools and machines. Like brown sugar, she thought, waiting to be melted into candy.

  Ahead of them lay the blast furnaces, rearing up like giant brick beehives.

  ‘What do they burn in them?’ asked Is, while the old mare picked her way among piles of scrap metal and files of trucks.

  ‘Coke; that’s coal with the gas baked out of it. They do that here first, in those kilns on the left.’

  ‘Why not use coal?’

  ‘Coke heats up hotter. Also, coal’s full of gas, likely to explode.’

  ‘Well they got an explosion now anyway, don’t they?’ said Is.

  ‘That’s because they never take enough care. There’s always a bit of gas left in the coke.’

  Dr Lemman, followed by Is, walked into a huge place like a frightful satanic cathedral, with a high roof supported by pillars of iron; a place which echoed all the time with the clang of machines and the roar of furnaces and other unidentifiable noises – wrenching, hissing, grinding – as well as human screams and shouts. The humans were there, but could only be seen dimly among jets of flame and clouds of smoke, among heaps of coal or slag, among pipes and machinery, and the sudden awful glow of red-hot metal.

  People were running about frantically. Lemman was wanted everywhere at once.

  ‘Doctor! Doctor! Here for God’s sake, come here!’

  At first Is helped him, handing remedies and bandages as fast as she could; then, since there were so many waiting for attention, she began dealing with the less serious cases herself. They were mostly terrible burns, which Lemman treated with wet cloths dipped in bicarbonate of soda, or with a mixture of olive oil and lime-water. And, over and over, with his quiet, soothing, potent suggestion that the sufferers were walking into a river of cool, buoyant water which would help to heal their hurts. Some of the cases, not so serious, were simply anointed with lard; Lemman had stopped at a butcher’s shop on the way and picked up several large tubs of it.

  One boy had lost his hand in an overflow of molten metal. He lay on a pile of sacks, moaning.

  ‘No sense treating him, he won’t be much use after,’ said one of the overseers, passing near.

  Is caught the boy’s eye. He was conscious; he had heard what the man said.

  Blazing with fury, she determined to save him if it could be done.

  ‘Doc. Doc! Could you come and see to this feller? I’ll do the gal with the burned back, I can manage that. – Please, Doc!’ as he hesitated.

  He gave a sudden grin and a nod, changing places with her; she heard him say to the boy, ‘We’ll fix you up, dearie, don’t fret.’

  Kneeling on the muddy, puddly, coaly ground, Is carefully poured oil over the girl’s back.

  The girl, who had been whimpering faintly, caught her breath and said, ‘That helps. Thanks, love!’

  ‘You been here long?’ Is asked, carefully laying on court plaster (which was silk treated with isinglass and balsam of Peru; she had helped Lemman prepare a quantity of it earlier in the week).

  ‘Nope – only a coupla weeks – came on the perishing train – wish to blazes now I’d stayed at the lacemaker’s in Shoreditch – ’ gasped the girl.

  No use asking her about the boys, then, thought Is.

  She moved on to the next patient, and the next . . .

  Meanwhile the rest of the workers in the foundry went about their business; furnaces roared, white-hot dazzling metal was poured like liquid sunshine into great sluices, cooled to a dull red glow; was beaten, puddled, sliced, hammered, re-heated and slung into water, where it hissed and gave out clouds of scalding steam. The hurt workers were forgotten, the work went on.

  After four hours of nonstop labour, all the possible cases had been treated. Since there was room in the Infirmary for only about half of them, the rest were taken to a shed near the river, where they lay on canvas cots or piles of sacking.

  ‘There’s a boy over here wants a word with you,’ said Lemman as – filthy, grimed, greasy and bloodstained – he and Is were preparing to leave.

  Is went where he pointed: it was the boy who had lost his hand.

  ‘Reckon I owe you,’ he said hoarsely. He could only just speak.

  ‘No odds, cully,’ said Is. ‘You’d do as much for me. When you mend, you could get work doing folks’s gardens.’

  ‘No gardens in this place,’ he muttered. ‘But I’ll find summat – ’

  ‘You ever come across a boy called Arn Twite?’ Is asked him in a low tone. ‘Or David Stuart?’

  ‘Never met no Arn. Davie I knew well enough – he was with me on Number Four furnace . . .’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘When? How long ago?’

  ‘I – I – ’ His eyes closed.

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ Is muttered quickly.

  But when they came back next day the boy was no longer there. The overseer in charge of the accident cases told them he had died in the night and already been buried.

  ‘And it’s as well,’ he said shortly. ‘What use would he ’a been? Nowt but wasted time, treating ones like that.’

  Is found one or two other people among the injured who had at one time or another worked on Number Four furnace, but none could remember David Stuart.

  Grandfather Twite had decided to print some of Penny’s stories, and asked Is to recall as many of them as she could.

  ‘Ishie can write them down for us – she writes a neat hand – and then I will print them and make a little booklet, and perhaps she will find some means of distributing it to the workers. Such as can read, or have any chance of reading.�
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  ‘Shouldn’t think as how many can,’ said Is doubtfully. ‘If they start work at five, how’d they ever have time?’

  But still, she liked the idea. And at least the workers in the foundries, breweries or potteries worked in daylight, and lived together in lodgings above ground perhaps they might be able to snatch a chance to read occasionally. Penny would be pleased, too, Is thought. So at pocket-making time, while she stitched, she told Aunt Ishie the stories about the harp of fishbones, and the crocodile who swallowed the dark, and the glass dragon, and the girl who talked to the dead king, and Aunt Ishie wrote them down in her neat, clear handwriting.

  ‘Aunt Ishie?’ said Is one evening, when they were putting away their work.

  ‘Well, my love?’

  ‘When you foretell the weather that’s coming – how do you do it?’

  ‘I begin to have a kind of prickle, or a tingle, and then I can feel the cold – or the heat, or the wind, whatever is coming. Sometimes I can see sky or snow, or clouds – ’

  ‘See them? How?’

  ‘In my mind’s eye,’ said Ishie, and Is nodded. She was beginning to see faces in her mind’s eye. But the Touch had not visited her for some time.

  Not long after the foundry explosion, Is and the doctor had just returned from a long round of mixed patients when Lemman was called out again. A ship had been sunk by a southern gunboat, and hurt survivors were coming ashore on the beaches beyond Holdernesse Hill.

  ‘I’ll come too!’ said Is at once, but he told her, ‘No, dearie, you’ve done plenty for today.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Honest!’

  ‘No,’ he said again firmly, ‘I’ve another errand I want you to do for me, dearie, and that’s to take some pills to Mrs Gower.’

  ‘Mrs Gower!’ Her voice showed her scorn.

  ‘She has her troubles too. Run along, like a kind creature.’

  ‘Oh, very well!’ snapped Is.

  It was no more than a twenty-minute walk down through the ruined streets to the arched entrance into Holdernesse town and the tunnel leading to Twite Square; but it was just as well that Dr Lemman had obtained an official pass, countersigned and sealed by the District Supervisor, for Is was stopped three times by wardens or constables, demanding to know what an unaccompanied child of her age was doing out in the street.

  It’d be like prison living in this town, she thought, as she rapped the knocker, and the handsome door of the Gower mansion was opened by a parlourmaid in cap and apron.

  ‘Who is it? Is that the doctor?’ came an anxious call from upstairs.

  ‘No ma’am – ’tis only the young lass, his ’prentice,’ the maid called back.

  ‘Oh dear – I had so hoped for Dr Lemman himself!’

  ‘He had to go to a shipwreck!’ Is shouted crossly up the stairs.

  Mrs Gower came out and leaned over the banister. Her face was pale and disappointed.

  ‘Will you come up, please,’ she said, glancing warily at the maid. ‘That will do, Maria. – I wished to ask Dr Lemman so many questions – about taking the tablets – ’

  ‘Every two hours, he said, till the pain gets better,’ said Is, dying to get back to pocket-making and storytelling.

  ‘But I also wanted to ask him about little Coppy.’

  Reluctantly, Is climbed the stairs. She felt certain that all Mrs Gower’s alarms would turn out to be needless fuss about nothing. Dr Lemman seemed to have unlimited patience with such people; Is found this hard to comprehend.

  She followed Mrs Gower into a large handsome first-floor parlour. Its bow windows looked out across the brightly-lit square. The waxed floor shone like a frozen lake; spindly pieces of furniture stood elegantly about with wide spaces in between; there were china ornaments in glass-fronted cabinets and silk curtains and crystal lustres. It was very different from Grandpa Twite’s kitchen.

  In the middle of the floor, on a Persian rug, a small curly-headed boy was playing with a wooden train.

  ‘Chuff, chuff,’ he murmured busily. ‘Chuff-chuff-chuff.’

  Another woman sat on a slender settee watching him intently. She, like Mrs Gower, was thin, pale, dark-haired, and wore an exquisitely frilled and embroidered gown. There was a look of infinite sadness on her face.

  ‘My sister, Mrs Macclesfield,’ said Mrs Gower vaguely, ’er – Dr Lemman’s assistant – ’ She made no attempt to discover Dr Lemman’s assistant’s name.

  Now they could study Is close to, both ladies gazed at her in evident dismay. And she could easily read their thoughts. What possible help would she be able to give them?

  ‘Look – Doc Lemman tells me everything he can about the folk he sees, and what he does to cure ’em,’ Is explained to the sisters. ‘I’m beginning to be able to guess what he’ll do, as often as not. So, what’s fretting you? If I can’t be any use I’ll tell you straight enough; I wouldn’t fool you. Honest! Is it summat ails the kid?’

  She glanced at Coppy. He looked well enough – pale, as everybody was in the town of Holdernesse, but quite stocky and robust in his little blue velvet sailor suit and frilled collar.

  Mrs Gower burst into racking sobs.

  ‘No – no – no – he is well enough,’ she wept. ‘That’s the trouble! He is very well-grown, he looks already like a boy of five. But he is only four! I’m afraid – I am so afraid. We ought to send him away, I know it. My husband says so. Mr. Gower says Coppy ought to be sent off to boarding-school in Scotland – there is an accredited school at Grantown for the children of government officials – but oh, but oh, he is so young to be sent so far away from his home!’

  ‘You’re feared he’ll get nabbled if he stays here?’

  ‘He looks like a five-year-old!’ wept Mrs Gower. ‘And they are growing less and less scrupulous – my husband says there is an acute shortage of pit-hands.’

  Her sister put a protective arm round her shoulders; she turned and hugged the other woman convulsively. ‘Oh, Susan! What ever shall I do?’

  ‘But – croopus! If your husband – if Mr Gower is a government official – can’t he see that don’t happen? To his own son?’

  ‘Even he would not dare. People have vanished away – nobody knows what becomes of them. My own sister’s husband – ’

  ‘Can’t you jist leave, both of you, with the kid? Go to live somewhere else, where they don’t swipe the kids off the streets?’

  ‘Leave our beautiful house? And Mr Gower is a very important man – Deputy Moderator – he does not enter into my feelings about this – he says it is best that we send Coppy to Scotland. I cannot argue with him. But I had hoped that Dr Lemman – ’

  ‘Indeed, my dear, I believe you must send the boy,’ said Mrs Macclesfield earnestly. ‘Better that, than what – ’ She stopped and bit her lip.

  ‘My sister’s Helen was taken,’ Mrs Gower gulped out. ‘She was eight – they thought they had managed to keep her presence in the house a total secret – she was never, never allowed out. But somebody – one of the servants – must have laid information. The wardens came at night and seized her – the parents had to pay a heavy fine – Helen has never been seen since. And my brother-in-law – when he protested – he, too – ’

  Is took a long, slow breath. She looked at the two unhappy ladies. Then she squatted down on the floor beside Coppy, still busily pushing his train between two lines of the pattern on the rug.

  ‘Hey, Coppy! Would you like to go to school in Scotland? And learn lessons out of books? And play with other kids?’

  ‘Iss!’ he said cheerfully.

  She experienced a warm, jolting shock in her mind, as if some ray of communication had shot between them on a level that he, surely, was far too young to understand. But – understanding or not – he was aware of it, all right. He grinned up at Is, patted her cheek and said, ‘Go to Scotland with you!’

  ‘Heavens above!’ breathed Mrs Gower in astonishment. ‘He never did so before. Usually he is shy with strangers – afraid of them.’

&n
bsp; Is rose to her feet. ‘I reckon you’d do best to send him to Scotland, ma’am,’ she said. ‘He’s got plenty of grit in him. He’ll make his way. Not but it ain’t right hard on you, having to let him go; but I reckon Doc Lemman’d say the same.’

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Mrs Gower. ‘I – I dare say you are right. Since Coppy – has taken such a liking to you – ’ Her throat closed, she could say no more, but turned and hid her face on her sister’s shoulder.

  Is, embarrassed, nodded awkwardly at the other woman, then turned and took her way down the stairs. The unsmiling maid was ready at the foot to let her out, and she started on the walk home.

  Poor devils, she thought, stirred and saddened by what she had seen and heard. Nothing about this hateful place is any good. Nobody is happy. Not even the rich ones.

  And while she walked, in her mind again she felt the Touch, as she had done just now when kneeling by Coppy – but this time it was immeasurably magnified: a chorus, a host of voices all calling to her at once. Help us, help us, we are so lost and lonely and separated, talk to us, tell us there is hope somewhere, help us, help us, help us.

  I will, I will try to help you, she promised; only tell me where you are, who you are, tell me how to find you, where you are, tell me?

  But, as before, the connection faded and failed, and she was left to finish her walk home in dark and solitude. I sure miss Blackheath Woods and the smell of leaves, she thought, and my old Figgin-cat. But at least there’s plenty to do here, and plenty to think about.

  When she reached Wasteland Cottages she was surprised to find that Number Two still had lights showing downstairs. Normally by this time the elderly inmates would have retired to bed. But perhaps Dr Lemman had come back unexpectedly soon from his errand to the shipwrecked sailors and was sharing Mr Twite’s nightly mug of saloop.

  Is pushed open the door and walked along the passage to the kitchen. A candle guttered low, but no one was in the room. Even Montrose was missing from the box where he normally slept at night. A note on the table in Aunt Ishie’s small neat writing said: ‘Called out to deathbed in Warren. Cannot say when will return. Soup in brown bowl. Remind your great-g to take his warm drink. I.T.’