They followed him to the edge of the clearing where a cage with metal bars on the sides stood. Three dark figures were huddled in one corner. As he approached the cage, the tall man made coaxing noises and called out, ‘Come out for a locust nut, come and get it, come on, come on…’ He held out his hand and two of the figures lifted their heads. Alice felt a chill of distaste at the sight of them, for their faces were pink-skinned and human-looking but their bodies were covered with coarse brown hair. She knew that their grotesque appearance was because they all had their faces and necks shaved in order to appear human when they were paraded before the credulous public dressed up as women and billed as the Pig-Faced Ladies. The bears had been trained to dance a lumbering quadrille which Alice hated to watch because the animals’ tragic eyes haunted her. She was sure that all of them – and particularly the biggest one called George – loathed the demeaning fate that was forced on him.
When they heard their keeper approaching their cage, two of them came ambling over towards the door snuffling eagerly and Long Tom, who with the aid of stilts and high-heeled shoes doubled as the Tallest Man in the World, said, ‘Here’s Jenny. She’s always the first. And Willy’s fine too but it’s big George that worries me. He’s so poorly that he can hardly rise.’
He opened the door of the cage and stepped in beside the animals, gesturing to Alice and Jem to follow. Gathering up her skirt to keep it clear of the stinking straw, she did so, swallowing down the nausea she felt at the rank smell of the animals. Two loomed over their keeper looking for titbits and he gave them what they wanted as he pushed past towards the third bear which lay in a pathetic huddle in a far corner. The animal’s yellow eyes were tragic and pleading in its grotesque face.
‘Take a look at him. Any idea what’s wrong with him, Alice?’ asked Tom, kneeling down beside the panting bear.
Alice gazed into the animal’s shaven face and noted the gathering glaze in his eyes. She sighed, ‘I think he’s dying, Tom.’
‘Can’t you do something? He’s my best bear. He’s the best dancer of the lot.’ Tom like everybody else in the show had great faith in Alice’s curative powers and her knowledge of herbal medicines.
‘Try giving him some brandy. That’s all I can think of,’ she said. She had little hope that anything would cure the poor animal’s broken heart but at least liquor would help it to die in peace.
Alice breathed a deep sigh when she stepped out of the stinking cage where the bear lay dying. In the open camp site, the smell of woodsmoke was sweet to her senses. Jem stood beside her at the cage door and she told him sadly, ‘That bear’ll not see the morning, poor thing.’
When she walked away, Jem shook his head and said quietly to Long Tom, ‘Get a couple of men to dig a grave for George and don’t let Alice see you burying him. You know how things like that upset her.’
Tom had travelled with Jem for many years, first in the boxing booth and then in the freak show, and he remembered how the big man had first met Alice, lost her again and spent years searching before he found her. He remembered travelling from town to town, asking everyone if they’d seen her and he knew how tenderly his old friend took care of his woman, how he considered her wishes in everything and how much he dreaded Alice disappearing again like a dream. For some unexplained reason Alice was prey to strange, engulfing melancholies and Jem did everything he could to avert them.
* * *
After he had given his orders, Jem ran to catch up with Alice whose dark outline could be seen heading towards the furthest caravan of the group. This vehicle was deliberately situated in the most remote part of the gulley and as she approached it, Alice heard the familiar thuds and strange animal grunting noises emanating from it. She knew the sounds showed that Billy was fretting, fretting, fretting. The noise was not worrying a tangle-haired girl, the daughter of Long Tom, who perched on the caravan steps with a piece of tatting in her hands. She was working very fast and concentrating totally on the work in progress. Jem caught up with Alice just as she reached the girl and asked, ‘How’s Billy now?’
The girl didn’t look up from her flying fingers and said with an expressive shrug, ‘Oh, just the same. I put his food in and left him to it. He’s finished. I heard him smashing the plate a little while ago.’
With a grin Jem thudded his huge fist on the closed door and shouted, ‘Billy, hey Billy. It’s Jem, Billy!’ The sounds from inside ceased and after a few seconds, Jem turned the key on the outside of the door and slowly pushed it open. Inside was pitch dark. Still talking soothingly, Jem stepped into the blackness but his muscles were tense and his fists were half-up. He called out as he went, ‘Where are you, Billy? I’ll light your lamp – if you’ve not broken it that is.’
Alice and the girl watching by the door saw the glimmer of a scratch of flint on tinder and soon a faint gleam of light appeared inside. They leaned forward to see more clearly and could just make out Jem standing with a lamp held above his head. On the floor on the far side of the caravan, a thickset and muscular young man was squatting surrounded by broken bits of china. It had only been one plate but he’d fragmented it.
When the lamplight shone on Billy’s face he smiled and at first sight he looked almost normal, for he had a mop of curling dark hair and a boyish, fresh-coloured face. He was wearing buckskin breeches and a shirt that had once been white but was so no longer because he’d wiped his hands on it after his meal. When he smiled, he showed stubby ridged teeth and his eyes glinted merrily. If it was not for those eyes, he would have looked like a splendid specimen of young manhood but they gave him away because they were the eyes of a madman. Jem walked on into the caravan asking softly, ‘How’s Billy, then?’
The answer was a crooning murmur and Billy stood up holding his arms out. He liked Jem. When he was standing erect he revealed his impressive height and the staggering width of his shoulders. He came ambling over towards Jem and said, ‘Hello Jem. Take Billy for a walk. Billy wants to go out.’
Jem had a calming effect on Billy. He patted his arm and said, ‘That’s good. You must be feeling better. But it’s dark and we can’t go out walking now. I’ll take you tomorrow. Look, I’ve brought Alice with me to give you some medicine that’ll make you sleep like a babby. You’ll take it, won’t you Billy, a sleep’s what you need.’
When he saw that Billy was acquiescent, Jem turned his head back towards the door and whispered, ‘You can come in. It’s all right. He’s calm.’
She stepped through the door and stood close to her man. Billy lifted his head and sniffed because like an animal he could smell her fear but Jem took her hand and said, ‘It’s all right, give Billy his medicine and then I’ll sit with him for a bit. He gets lonely shut up here in his waggon, don’t you Billy? But when we get to the Fair you’ll get out. I promise.’
Alice was carrying a tin mug in her hand and she silently handed it over. It contained the potion she’d concocted and Billy obediently swilled all of it down without pausing for breath. Then he wiped his mouth with his hand and smiled at her. She smiled back but nervously, for she never knew when Billy was going to turn awkward. Tonight he was genial enough but when he was having one of his blacknesses she found him terrifying; fits swept over his poor brain like thunderstorms across a summer sky and when he was in the grip of them he was hideously violent, breaking everything within sight. Only Jem could cope with him then. Alice shifted closer and remembered what he had said earlier about the time when he could no longer master Billy by superior strength. What will happen when that day comes, she wondered? She knew that Jem was right. He was growing older and Billy was growing stronger. In a couple of months the young man would be twenty and in the full strength of his manhood. Already he well deserved the title of his billing in the freak show, for Billy was the Strongest Man in the World who bent iron bars and split planks of wood with one blow of his fist.
As Alice clung to Jem’s arm she wondered what would happen when Billy wanted a woman. So far he had been strangely i
nnocent sexually but that could not last much longer. What would happen when he had a need for sex? The potions she concocted for him contained ingredients that stifled desire and they worked well for the moment but she doubted if they would continue to be effective for much longer. Billy in search of a woman would be able to burst through any door and Alice made a mental note to tell Jem that Long Tom’s girl must stop acting as Billy’s watcher or something terrible could happen.
Jem sensed Alice’s nervousness and patted her hand when Billy handed back his mug. ‘Go back to our caravan, Alice, and I’ll sit here with Billy for a little while,’ he said and settled himself down on a wooden bench by the door. Billy came shambling over and sat beside him. ‘We’ll have a chat,’ said Jem companionably.
As Alice stood in the doorway she heard him saying, ‘That’s right. Sit near me, Billy and I’ll tell you about the place we’re going to on Monday. It’s called St James’ Fair. There’ll be lots of people and hundreds of horses. You like horses, don’t you? If you’re good you can go out and have a look at them…’
Billy was excited and bounced on his seat, the muscles of his upper arms and thighs rippling beneath his clothes when he moved.
‘Billy likes horses,’ he said in a childish voice.
‘Course you do and you like Jem too, don’t you? Sit down quiet again and I’ll tell you about the Fair.’ With one hand Jem pulled Billy back down on to the bench where he sat staring all the while at Jem who was talking in a soft, reassuring voice. ‘The Fair’s held in a big field facing a castle. It’s been there every year for a long, long time and people come from all over the place. We’ll make a lot of money and Billy’ll have two whole roast chickens to himself for supper and as much ale as he wants to drink. So you’ll behave well, won’t you Billy, when all the people come to see you?’
Billy nodded. ‘Billy’ll be good,’ he promised.
‘You’ll bend the bars and bite the nails in half but you won’t try to run away. Last time you did that you frightened all the ladies and a man wanted to shoot you. I had the devil of a job stopping him, Billy.’
Billy threw back his head and laughed as if the memory of the occasion was funny, though Jem remembered it very differently. ‘Billy won’t run away,’ he said gleefully.
‘That’s right,’ advised Jem. ‘You’ll have to wear your leg-chains for the show but the new ones are extra strong. It’d take two elephants to break them. Just do your tricks Billy and everybody’ll clap and cheer you and pay lots of money to see you.’
Billy threw back his head again and gave a huge guffaw, exposing his strong throat with muscles like hawsers up each side of his neck. When he was in a good temper, as he was at that moment, he looked like a big strong farm boy, a simple-minded plough laddie who could be relied on to carry out any heavy task that defeated the other men.
Jem stayed with him for an hour. Before he left, Alice’s potion was beginning to work and Billy was yawning, lying down fully-clothed on the floor ready for a sleep. Jem draped a blanket over his body and stood looking down at him with pity in his eyes. ‘Poor Billy,’ he thought. ‘I’m fond of you. I wouldn’t like to see you with someone who’d beat you or keep you under with cruelty. You’re not a bad lad. You don’t mean to hurt – you just don’t know your own strength.’
When he got back to his caravan, Alice was sitting alone in the circle of lamplight. She looked up when he entered and said, ‘You’re good to Billy. You like looking after people, don’t you Jem?’
He laughed. ‘I suppose I do.’
‘Was it because you wanted to look after me that you searched for me for so long?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think it was that. You haunted me and I looked for you for six years before I found you in London.’
‘I’m glad you did. I was nearly at the end. But why did you want to find me? We’d hardly spoken,’ she asked.
Jem’s face was solemn. ‘I just knew I had to find you. There was something about you – something lost – and I knew you thought I’d been responsible for McKay dying and I couldn’t stomach that because I’d nothing to do with it. I wanted to tell you that.’
‘I didn’t know who to blame, I was so angry,’ said Alice, shuddering as she remembered the first time she’d seen Jem. ‘I’d been cheated and deceived by so many people by that time, I didn’t know who to trust. Poor McKay trusted people and he died because of it.’
Jem sighed. ‘That toff who was running McKay killed him right enough because he matched him against a man twice his size and then bet against him. He wanted him to lose and he couldn’t care less if McKay took a beating. When he was knocked out like that I was mad because I knew what was going on. McKay was only a youngster. He shouldn’t have died.’
Alice’s face was grim as she remembered the inn near Northampton where they’d all foregathered eight years ago for a boxing match. She was with a young man called John McKay who’d been her man since she left Scotland. She’d let him pick her up on the road because a woman couldn’t travel without money or a man to protect her and she had neither so she was grateful when she met him. McKay was like Billy in a way, strong and simple-minded but he was also gentle and kind. He’d felt sorry for Alice and taken care of her.
McKay was a barefist boxer who was matched one day in a big bout organised by a group of gambling gentlemen against a lumbering and villainous-looking man who was said to be failing in his powers. When Alice saw him, however, she was afraid because he looked as if he had been drugged and when it came to the fight, he literally pounded her lover to pieces before her eyes. The blood flowed and McKay slumped on to the ground unconscious before a shrieking crowd who were too busy exchanging money to bother about him. Only the big man in charge of the ring seemed concerned. He held back McKay’s opponent and picked up the unconscious body as if it had been that of a doll. The big man who acted as the referee was Jem.
Now when she looked at him sitting beside her she remembered running behind him as he carried McKay slung over his shoulder up the inn stairs to a bedroom on the first floor. When a doctor arrived he pronounced McKay dead and told Alice that he would probably have died of his injuries anyway but the journey upstairs with his head hanging down caused the final trauma that killed him. She went raving down into the bar parlour and attacked Jem, pounding his chest with her fists and shrieking, ‘You killed him, you bastard! You did it deliberately!’ Someone quietened her down in the end and the innkeeper’s wife gave her a bed for the night. Early next morning she headed for London and a life on the streets. What followed was a period in her life that she preferred to forget.
Six years later, when she was being kept by a vicious and loose-living young buck in Chelsea, she met Jem again on the street in Covent Garden. He’d recognised her from the other side of the carriageway and hailed her, running across beneath the hooves of cantering horses to grab her arm. To her surprise he said that he’d been looking for her ever since that night in Northampton. They joined forces and she’d been with him ever since but she knew he was unsure of her. Nothing she said would reassure him. He did not know if she stayed with him because it suited her or because she loved him. As she watched him sitting in the lamplight beside her, she realised that the answer was love.
‘Do you realise we’ve been together for more than two years?’ she asked in a gentle voice.
‘I know. I was thinking about that this morning. It’s time we got ourselves properly spliced, Alice.’
Her face went sad in the candlelight. ‘Not yet, Jem. I don’t know if I can but if it’s possible there’s nothing I’d want more.’
‘What’s to stop us? I’m a widower and if you were married when you were young your man’s either dead or he’s found another wife by now,’ said Jem, but she shook her head and told him, ‘I’ll make enquiries in Lauriston. I promise you I will.’
He sighed. ‘You’re a mystery, Alice. You always hold something back. Maybe one day you’ll tell me the lot.’
‘I prom
ise I will – one day,’ she said solemnly and leaned across to kiss him.
Chapter 6
Sunday, 2 August
At half an hour after midnight a light glittered in the window of Rachel Faa’s cottage in Kirk Yetholm. In the bare room inside, Thomassin knelt beside the old woman watching a small clay crucible which steamed slowly by the side of the fire. Rachel was staring into the flames with dilated pupils and muttering strange incantations, a long stream of incomprehensible words and Thomassin knew better than to interrupt or distract her but after a bit she paused and turned to the girl with some instructions. ‘Draw a six-pointed star on that paper over there. Use the goose quill to do it,’ she ordered.
Thomassin went over to the table where a thick yellow tallow candle was burning in the church candlestick that she had stolen from Linton Kirk. Its flame flickered feebly in the draught that came beneath the ill-fitting door making weird shadows dance in the corners of the room. Her heart was thudding as she lifted the quill which she was about to dip into a pot of dark liquid that stood beside it when Rachel stopped her in time. ‘No, no, that’s toad’s bile! Use the bairn’s ratti I told you to bring,’ she instructed.
The girl brought the phial of baby’s blood out of her pocket and used that to make the star. Then she held the paper up to contemplate her handiwork in the dim light. She was disappointed when Rachel did not even glance at what she had so laboriously done – for Thomassin could not write – but only reached out for the paper and with more strange words, ceremoniously floated it on top of the logs of the fire where it slowly shrivelled and burnt up before their eyes.
‘Are you sure this’ll work?’ Thomassin asked doubtfully. She was surprised at how harsh her voice sounded. Her throat felt dry and tight when she spoke.
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