As they reached the kitchen yard, a happy shriek came from somewhere overhead, and Henry sailed down from a chimney stack and landed with a thump on Hortense’s head. He clucked at her affectionately.
They stopped to pull off their muddy boots, and Strideforth said, ‘We must sneak past Mrs Burdock, if we can. Otherwise, there will be trouble.’
They looked cautiously in through the door and tiptoed inside, through the empty kitchen, along the passageway and up the stairs.
Strideforth peered around the corner of the corridor. ‘Good. She’s not —’ Then he gave a gasp and said, ‘Oh no!’ as a small, elderly woman wearing an apron and an old-fashioned lace cap bustled out of Hortense and Stella’s room with a basket of washing.
She gave a squawk. ‘My heart alive. Look at you. Pingling about like that, out in the mizzle. Wet through. All over with muck. Cold as cabbages.’ She twitched a towel off a pile of neatly folded washing and gave Strideforth’s wet hair a vigorous rub. ‘Without your hats. You’ll catch your deaths, and serve you right, altogether.’
Strideforth emerged from the towel, gasping for breath, his hair sticking up like the crest of a cockatoo. He said, ‘This is our cousin Stella. Stella, this is Mrs Burdock.’
Mrs Burdock gave Stella an odd look, almost as if she were frightened. But then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Nasty and wet, and still in your nightgown too!’ She saw the stone goldfish in Stella’s arms. ‘And what’s that mucky thing you’ve got there? Are there not enough useless mingle mangles in this house already?’ She wrapped the rough towel around Stella’s head and rubbed hard.
‘But —’ Stella choked, her mouth full of towel.
Mrs Burdock said, ‘And you keep right away from that lake, you hear me? You’ll get yourself drowned, and then where will you be?’ She flapped the towel at Henry, on Hortense’s head. ‘Get away with you, you great grackle.’ Henry screamed and snapped his beak at her. ‘None of that,’ she said, shooing him away. She dried Hortense’s hair briskly, ignoring Anya’s angry squeaking, and said, ‘I’ve unpacked your trunk, Miss Stella, but mind you keep your things tidy. I’m not picking up after you.’
‘Has the postman come today?’ asked Strideforth.
‘If he comes, I’ll tell you, Master Strideforth,’ said Mrs Burdock. She gave him a push towards his bedroom and bustled Stella and Hortense into theirs, clucking angrily. ‘Come on with you now. Out of those nasty wet clothes.’
As Stella pulled her nightgown off over her head, she remembered what Strideforth had said about the photograph. She took a breath and said, ‘Please, Mrs Burdock. Do you remember a lady who stayed here about ten years ago? She had two babies.’ She took the photograph from the pocket of her coat. ‘This lady.’
Mrs Burdock stared at the little picture. She put her hand to her mouth. After a moment, she said, ‘My heart alive. Why would you be asking me a thing like that?’
‘She was my mother. I think I was one of the babies,’ said Stella.
Mrs Burdock opened her mouth, then shut it again. She gave Stella another odd look. Then she frowned and said, ‘No. No. I don’t know nothing about that. Nothing at all.’
‘But —’ said Stella.
‘Ask no questions, hear no lies,’ snapped Mrs Burdock. ‘Get on with you. Get yourselves washed and dry and respectable, altogether. As much use as tadpoles in a trifle, you are.’ She bundled up their wet clothes and went away, muttering to herself.
The remains of A Garden of Lilies lay on the dressing table. Stella looked at the photograph again. I will find out what happened, she told the three pale faces. She tucked the little picture safely back between the torn pages and put the heavy stone goldfish on top of the book. It sat there, fins outstretched, still and cold. Could it really have been swimming in the lake only a short time before? It seemed very unlikely. It looked exactly like a garden ornament.
Strideforth was right. It was impossible.
Hortense touched the fish with her finger. Anya hissed at it, her fur bristling.
Stella washed her hands and face. Shivering, she found clean drawers, a vest, a pair of woollen stockings, two petticoats and a dress in the wardrobe, and pulled them on. She twisted around, but could not reach all the long row of tiny buttons down the back of the dress. ‘Could you help me, please?’ she asked Hortense.
The little girl was putting on dry stockings. She scowled, but came over and fastened the buttons neatly.
‘Thank you.’ Stella dragged the brush through her wet, tangled hair and plaited it again. As she tied a ribbon at the end of the plait, she saw in the mirror that Hortense was watching her.
‘Would you like me to brush your hair?’ Stella asked.
Hortense frowned and shook her head.
Miss Araminter looked up from her book as they came into the kitchen, and said, ‘There you are, my dears. Good morning.’
Mrs Burdock bustled in, carrying their wet clothes in a washing basket. She said, ‘Out in the rain, they were. Climbing trees and jumping in the lake, or some foolishness. Trailing muck and weeds into the house. Making work for people. It ain’t respectable. More trouble than grasshoppers in the gravy. If they were mine, Ma’am, I’d give them what for.’
Miss Araminter smiled vaguely and picked a twig out of Hortense’s tangled hair, which made Anya spit and hiss. ‘The giant spruce,’ she said. ‘Picea giganteum. A magnificent specimen, as I am sure you will agree, Mrs Burdock. From the Americas, and at least eighty years old, I should think. The leaves are useful for scurvy and blackwater fever.’
Mrs Burdock looked annoyed. ‘That’s all very fine, I’m sure, Ma’am. All that reading of yours. But sense is sense. They say the old gent spent days locked up in that library of his, all them years ago, reading. Or down in that summerhouse. Up to no good, no doubt. When he wasn’t bringing useless piles of piffle back from foreign parts for other folk to dust. What’s the point of it? That’s what I’d like to know.’ She gave an angry snort and added, ‘And that dratted boy of mine’s late back from the village again. Firtling about, no doubt. I’ll give him the back of my hand, I will.’ She picked up the laundry basket and went away.
After breakfast (bread and jam and cocoa), Miss Araminter smiled and rubbed her hands together. ‘Lessons,’ she said, and cleared a space at the end of the kitchen table. She presented Stella with a smart blue notebook and two sharp pencils, a piece of India rubber, a pen and six shiny nibs in a little tin.
The first lesson was botany, and Miss Araminter told them many interesting facts about the giant sundews of Malacca. Stella carefully copied a picture of a giant sundew into her new notebook with one of her new pencils and labelled all the different parts of it, in English and also in Latin.
After the botany lesson came mathematics. Stella had learned only simple arithmetic from the Aunts, and she worked carefully through the sums that Miss Araminter set her, counting on her fingers. Anya made inky footprints between the numbers in Hortense’s notebook while Strideforth busily filled several pages with figures and calculations.
Then came more botany. They learned about buttercups (the roots were useful for raising blisters), the enormous St Thomas bean (which grew so large that the individual beans could be used as snuff boxes) and some of the carnivorous lilies of the Congo. Stella made a drawing in her notebook of a Congolese lily swallowing a mouse.
Next came Latin. Henry had been sleeping on the mantelpiece, but when the Latin lesson began, he woke up with a happy shriek. He flapped to the table and landed with a thump that knocked a bottle of ink onto the floor.
Strideforth hurled his Latin primer at him. It missed, but Henry shrieked and nearly toppled off the table. He grabbed the book in his beak and tried to tear it apart.
‘No,’ said Miss Araminter.
Henry screamed, ‘Stulte!’
Miss Araminter snatched the book back. ‘Behave yourself,’ she said.
Stella caught Hortense’s eye and giggled. Hortense gave her a tiny smile.
After Latin came botany, a short break for cocoa and some caraway biscuits from a tin, Greek, still more botany, and then drawing. Hortense drew a lovely picture of Teasel the hedgehog crunching up a beetle, and Miss Araminter pinned it up on the wall.
They had dinner (bread and cheese and apples and walnuts), and then Miss Araminter gave Strideforth a list of the members of the nightshade family to learn and a Latin lesson to study. She gave Hortense a page of sums to complete and an enormous prickly thistle to draw. She gave Stella a piece of paper, an envelope and a penny stamp, to write a letter to the Aunts. Then she smiled and wished them a pleasant afternoon, picked up a pair of clippers and a basket, put on her coat and hat, clasped her umbrella and strode outside into the rain.
Eight
Stella dipped her pen into the ink and paused. In A Garden of Lilies, Lucretia made a blot on a letter she was writing to her godmother and was squashed unexpectedly by a falling bust of Prince Albert.
Be attentive when you write,
Or you might not make it through the night.
Rather discouraged by this depressing story, Stella wrote very carefully:
Dear Aunts,
She stopped and gazed around the warm kitchen. The fire hissed in the grate and the heating pipes clanked overhead. Strideforth was kicking the leg of his chair and filling the margin of his Latin primer with diagrams of cogs and wheels and steam pipes. Hortense was drawing the thistle, the tip of her tongue poking out in concentration. Anya was pouncing on a piece of India rubber. Henry was snoring loudly on the mantelpiece, his head tucked under his wing. Stella chewed the end of her pen for a bit, and then wrote:
I hope this letter finds you in tolerable health.
What to put next? The Aunts were very particular about letters. She imagined Aunt Deliverance opening the envelope in the breakfast room of the Hotel Majestic and glaring at the letter with her beady black eyes. Stella thought for a few minutes, and then dipped the pen into the ink again and wrote:
I had an agreeable journey and arrived at Wormwood Mire last evening.
What next? She couldn’t tell the Aunts about what Henry had done to A Garden of Lilies, or about climbing the tree, or about the dark shape swimming in the lake, or about the stone goldfish.
My cousins’ governess is a very educated lady, and we are studying Latin and mathematics and drawing and botany.
Surely the Aunts would approve of all these lessons. Stella looked at her inky fingers and thought about the creature in the lake. She had only glimpsed it for a moment. Was it a pike or an eel, as Strideforth thought? Or some kind of foreign fish? She remembered the huge, dark head and the gaping mouth full of pointed teeth. Perhaps Miss Araminter knew about fish. Or maybe there was a book about them in the library. A book about foreign fish would be an agreeable replacement for A Garden of Lilies.
Before she could think of anything else to write, Anya suddenly jumped sideways, twisting like a snake, and made a loud, chittering noise. Cheerful, piercing whistling and clattering footsteps came from outside. Henry woke up, shrieked and flapped his wings.
‘It’s Jem,’ said Strideforth with a grin.
A small, skinny boy poked his head around the door. He was about the same age as Hortense, with a freckled face and carrot-coloured hair. ‘Granny ain’t here?’ he asked in a whisper.
Strideforth shook his head.
The boy sidled in. He wore a large, shabby oilskin coat, dripping with water, and carried a basket and a can of milk. He set it down with a thump and stretched his arms. Anya dashed towards him, chittering, her fur spiky.
‘She’s right fierce, ain’t she?’ he said admiringly. ‘I got her something.’ He fished a little piece of cheese out of his pocket and held it out. Anya edged forward, snatched up the cheese and darted up to Hortense’s shoulder. She perched there and ate the cheese, holding it in both hands like a squirrel. Jem watched her, grinning.
Strideforth said, ‘This is our cousin, Stella. Stella, this is Jem Burdock.’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Stella.
‘G’afternoon, Miss,’ he said. He took a large loaf of bread from the basket and put it on the table. ‘I’m that late back again. Granny’ll skin me alive if she sees me. She’s got a toothache, and she’s been cross as a bear for weeks. She says I wouldn’t be late if I din’t hang around, listening to gossip. Keep your nose out and your mouth shut, that’s what she always says.’ He looked over his shoulder, then leaned forward, lowered his voice and added, ‘Tom Pintucket, in the village, reckons he seen the monster again, last night. Clear as day. Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘A monster!’ said Stella.
‘Tom says it were right there,’ Jem jerked a thumb over his shoulder, ‘in North Field, right near Boggart Wood. Like a shadow, he says. And glinting. That’s the second time he seen it. He says it’s back.’
‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ said Strideforth, frowning.
‘Well, it ain’t been around for years and years. Since afore I was born. When I were little, Granny used to tell me, Finish your porridge or the monster’ll gobble you up.’ Jem laughed. ‘But Tom had three sheep gone, night before last. Nothing left, not even a scrap of wool. Tom reckons the monster crunched them up, bones and all. He reckons it’s back, for sure. And Mrs Thorn’s little ginger cat’s gone too. Although that might’ve just wandered off.’ Jem gave a sudden bloodthirsty grin. ‘It must be a cobbin’ great thing to eat up three sheep. I’d like to see that, I would.’
Strideforth said, ‘Probably those sheep were taken by thieves. There were many bandits in the Argentine. They steal cattle and shoot people. They would steal sheep too, that is certain.’
Jem shrugged. ‘I reckon it lives in Boggart Wood, most likely, and comes out at night. Maybe it’s a panther, escaped from a fair. Maybe it’s a huge big badger. A huge big sheep-eating badger!’
‘Where’s Boggart Wood?’ asked Stella.
‘It’s close by here, Miss.’ Jem pointed. ‘You can see it from the road, down in the valley. It’s right creepy. Granny says keep to the road, don’t go near the wood, but I’ve been right down there, I have. There’s an old cart track goes down, near the bridge. I ain’t frit of nothing. I’ve been close, but I ain’t been in. You have to be careful, Miss. Because if you go in the wood, you might get lost and never come out again. There are caves under there. The stream drops right down into a hole and goes underground. And there’s a ghost in there too. And some people say there’s a ruined castle in there, that giants built in the old days.’
‘There’s no such thing as giants,’ said Strideforth, ‘or ghosts either.’
‘There is a ghost,’ said Jem. ‘It’s a ghost of a girl. A singing girl. People say you can hear it singing to itself in the night, right in the middle of the wood, near the crossroads. If you hear it, it means something bad will happen to you.’ He leaned on the table. ‘There’s ghosts all over. There’s this one ghost on the highway, over near Brockley. It’s a black dog, big as a calf. People say if you’re walking there just at dusk, you feel its breath on the back of your neck, warm like. But you mustn’t turn around. You just keep walking. Because if you turn around and look in its eyes, you die of fright. Mrs Gromwell’s granny felt its breath one time, and she was right peculiar after that, so they say.’ He grinned again. ‘And there’s a coach and four that comes over the bridge at Cobden Wake, at midnight. That’s a ghost too. And them ghost horses ain’t got no heads. And them ghost coachmen ain’t got none either. No heads at all.’ He laughed. ‘I’d like to see that, I would.’
Strideforth said, ‘Those are just stories to frighten little children. There aren’t any ghosts. And there aren’t any giants or monsters either. You should not believe foolish things like that.’
Jem laughed again. ‘Lots of folk say that. And Granny says, what with Tom drinking in The Leopard every night, ain’t no wonder he’s seein’ things in the wood. That’s what Granny says. But she makes Granda lock the hens away
and puts the shutters up at nightfall all the same. I seen him. Everyone’s frit. They’re locking up tight and staying in after dark, whatever they say.’
Stella asked, ‘Aren’t you scared?’
Jem said, ‘I ain’t frit of the monster. I ain’t frit of nothing. I’m going to be a sailor when I grow up, like my da. And sailors are right brave. And I know how to keep safe. I whistle if I go near the wood. Whistling keeps you safe from ghosts, and maybe from monsters too, I reckon. And I wear this red hanky round my neck, that’s lucky. And my shirt outside in, like this, so I can’t be tricked off the path by nothing. And look, I got a tallybag.’ He pulled out a bootlace from around his neck. A little bag hung from it, bound tightly with red thread. ‘It’s got a hazel twig in it, and a bit of bread, and an iron nail from a horseshoe, and a scrip of proper black writing from the Bible.’
‘That’s just superstition,’ said Strideforth. ‘A little bag can’t protect you from anything. That is certain.’
‘So you say, Master Strideforth. But I know it works, because I’ve been right close to Boggart Wood, close enough to spit, and I’m safe, ain’t I? And you can’t argue with that. I got it off Mrs Spindleweed, at the sweetshop. And it cost me a bob, so it’s a good ’un.’ Jem tucked the little bag back under his shirt and gave it a pat. ‘Mrs Spindleweed’s right clever. She fixed my granda’s arm up when he burned it, better’n new, he says. But she gives me the shivers. Everyone’s frit of her.’
Stella remembered Mrs Spindleweed’s strange yellow eyes. She said, ‘I was in the sweetshop yesterday. It was a bit —’ She hesitated. ‘I heard an owl, I think.’
Jem nodded. ‘She’s got a huge big owl. I’ve seen it flying in her window. Mrs Spindleweed can put a shadow after you in your dreams, so you can’t never sleep the night through. She put a chill on George Oakapple one time. He were in bed for a week, shaking with cold. And she can make you hurt yourself, without even coming near.’ He lowered his voice again and said, ‘And they say she’s got a familiar.’
Wormwood Mire Page 5
