by Gene Kemp
The story of the servant girl who died while reading in bed is true. The original story appeared in the Oxford Times more then a hundred years ago. She lived in St John Street.
The Shadow-Cage
PHILIPPA PEARCE
The little green stoppered bottle had been waiting in the earth a long time for someone to find it. Ned Challis found it. High on his tractor as he ploughed the field, he’d been keeping a look-out, as usual, for whatever might turn up. Several times there had been worked flints; once, one of an enormous size.
Now sunlight glimmering on glass caught his eye. He stopped the tractor, climbed down, picked the bottle from the earth. He could tell at once that it wasn’t all that old. Not as old as the flints that he’d taken to the museum in Castleford. Not as old as a coin he had once found, with the head of a Roman emperor on it. Not very old; but old.
Perhaps just useless old …
He held the bottle in the palm of his hand and thought of throwing it away. The lip of it was chipped badly, and the stopper of cork or wood had sunk into the neck. With his fingernail he tried to move it. The stopper had hardened into stone, and stuck there. Probably no one would ever get it out now without breaking the bottle. But then, why should anyone want to unstopper the bottle? It was empty, or as good as empty. The bottom of the inside of the bottle was dirtied with something blackish and scaly that also clung a little to the sides.
He wanted to throw the bottle away, but he didn’t. He held it in one hand while the fingers of the other cleaned the remaining earth from the outside. When he had cleaned it, he didn’t fancy the bottle any more than before; but he dropped it into his pocket. Then he climbed the tractor and started off again.
At that time the sun was high in the sky, and the tractor was working on Whistlers’ Hill, which is part of Belper’s Farm, fifty yards below Burnt House. As the tractor moved on again, the gulls followed again, rising and falling in their flights, wheeling over the disturbed earth, looking for live things, for food; for good things.
That evening, at tea, Ned Challis brought the bottle out and set it on the table by the loaf of bread. His wife looked at it suspiciously: ‘Another of your dirty old things for that museum?’
Ned said: ‘It’s not museum stuff. Lisa can have it to take to school. I don’t want it.’
Mrs Challis pursed her lips, moved the loaf further away from the bottle, and went to refill the teapot.
Lisa took the bottle in her hand. ‘Where’d you get it, Dad?’
‘Whistlers’ Hill. Just below Burnt House.’ He frowned suddenly as he spoke, as if he had remembered something.
‘What’s it got inside?’
‘Nothing. And if you try getting the stopper out, that’ll break.’
So Lisa didn’t try. Next morning she took it to school; but she didn’t show it to anyone. Only her cousin Kevin saw it, and that was before school and by accident. He always called for Lisa on his way to school – there was no other company on that country road – and he saw her pick up the bottle from the table, where her mother had left it the night before, and put it into her anorak pocket.
‘What was that?’ asked Kevin.
‘You saw. A little old bottle.’
‘Let’s see it again – properly.’ Kevin was younger than Lisa and she sometimes indulged him; so she took the bottle out and let him hold it.
At once he tried the stopper.
‘Don’t,’ said Lisa. ‘You’ll only break it.’
‘What’s inside?’
‘Nothing. Dad found it on Whistlers’.’
‘It’s not very nice, is it?’
‘What do you mean, “Not very nice”?’
‘I don’t know. But let me keep it for a bit. Please, Lisa.’
On principle Lisa now decided not to give in. ‘Certainly not. Give it back.’
He did, reluctantly. ‘Let me have it just for today, at school. Please.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll give you something if you’ll let me have it. I’ll not let anyone else touch it; I’ll not let them see it. I’ll keep it safe. Just for today.’
‘You’d only break it. No. What could you give me, anyway?’
‘My week’s pocket money.’
‘No. I’ve said no and I mean no, young Kev.’
‘I’d give you that little china dog you like.’
‘The one with the china kennel?’
‘Yes.’
‘The china dog with the china kennel – you’d give me both?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only for half the day, then,’ said Lisa. ‘I’ll let you have it after school dinner – look out for me in the playground. Give it back at the end of school. Without fail. And you be careful with it.’
So the bottle travelled to school in Lisa’s anorak pocket, where it bided its time all morning. After school dinner Lisa met Kevin in the playground and they withdrew together to a corner which was well away from the crowded climbing-frame and the infants’ sandpit and the rest. Lisa handed the bottle over. ‘At the end of school, mind, without fail. And if we miss each other then –’ for Lisa, being in a higher class, came out of school slightly later than Kevin – ‘then you must drop it in at ours as you pass. Promise.’
‘Promise.’
They parted. Kevin put the bottle into his pocket. He didn’t know why he’d wanted the bottle, but he had. Lots of things were like that. You needed them for a bit; and then you didn’t need them any longer.
He had needed this little bottle very much.
He left Lisa and went over to the climbing frame, where his friends already were. He had set his foot on a rung when he thought suddenly how easy it would be for the glass bottle in his trouser pocket to be smashed against the metal framework. He stepped down again and went over to the fence that separated the playground from the farmland beyond. Tall tussocks of grass grew along it, coming through from the open fields and fringing the very edge of the asphalt. He looked round: Lisa had already gone in, and no one else was watching. He put his hand into his pocket and took it out again with the bottle concealed in the fist. He stooped as if to examine an insect on a tussock, and slipped his hand into the middle of it and left the bottle there, well hidden.
He straightened up and glanced around. Since no one was looking in his direction, his action had been unobserved; the bottle would be safe. He ran back to the climbing frame and began to climb, jostling and shouting and laughing, as he and his friends always did. He forgot the bottle.
He forgot the bottle completely.
It was very odd, considering what a fuss he had made about the bottle, that he should have forgotten it; but he did. When the bell rang for the end of playtime, he ran straight in. He did not think of the bottle then, or later. At the end of afternoon school, he did not remember it; and he happened not to see Lisa, who would surely have reminded him.
Only when he was nearly home, and passing the Challises’ house, he remembered. He had faithfully promised – and had really meant to keep his promise. But he’d broken it, and left the bottle behind. If he turned and went back to school now, he would meet Lisa, and she would have to be told … By the time he got back to the school playground, all his friends would have gone home: the caretaker would be there, and perhaps a late teacher or two, and they’d all want to know what he was up to. And when he’d got the bottle and dropped it in at the Challises’, Lisa would scold him all over again. And when he got home at last, he would be very late for his tea, and his mother would be angry.
As he stood by the Challises’ gate, thinking, it seemed best, since he had messed things up anyway, to go straight home and leave the bottle to the next day. So he went home.
He worried about the bottle for the rest of the day, without having the time or the quiet to think about it very clearly. He knew that Lisa would assume he had just forgotten to leave it at her house on the way home. He half expected her to turn up after tea, to claim it; but she didn’t. She would have been angry enough a
bout his having forgotten to leave it; but what about her anger tomorrow on the way to school, when she found that he had forgotten it altogether – abandoned it in the open playground? He thought of hurrying straight past her house in the morning; but he would never manage it. She would be on the lookout.
He saw that he had made the wrong decision earlier. He ought, at all costs, to have gone back to the playground to get the bottle.
He went to bed, still worrying. He fell asleep, and his worry went on, making his dreaming unpleasant in a nagging way. He must be quick, his dreams seemed to nag. Be quick …
Suddenly he was wide awake. It was very late. The sound of the television being switched off must have woken him. Quietness. He listened to the rest of the family going to bed. They went to bed and to sleep. Silence. They were all asleep now, except for him. He couldn’t sleep.
Then, as abruptly as if someone had lifted the top of his head like a lid and popped the idea in, he saw that this time – almost the middle of the night – was the perfect time for him to fetch the bottle. He knew by heart the roads between home and school; he would not be afraid. He would have plenty of time. When he reached the school, the gate to the playground would be shut, but it was not high: in the past, by daylight, he and his friends had often climbed it. He would go into the playground, find the correct tussock of grass, get the bottle, bring it back, and have it ready to give to Lisa on the way to school in the morning. She would be angry, but only moderately angry. She would never know the whole truth.
He got up and dressed quickly and quietly. He began to look for a pocket torch, but gave up when he realized that would mean opening and shutting drawers and cupboards. Anyway, there was a moon tonight, and he knew his way, and he knew the school playground. He couldn’t go wrong.
He let himself out of the house, leaving the door on the latch for his return. He looked at his watch: between a quarter and half past eleven – not as late as he had thought. All the same, he set off almost at a run, but had to settle down into a steady trot. His trotting footsteps on the road sounded clearly in the night quiet. But who was there to hear?
He neared the Challises’ house. He drew level with it.
Ned Challis heard. Usually nothing woke him before the alarm clock in the morning; but tonight footsteps woke him. Who, at this hour – he lifted the back of his wrist towards his face, so that the time glimmered at him – who, at nearly twenty-five to twelve, could be hurrying along that road on foot? When the footsteps had almost gone – when it was already perhaps too late – he sprang out of bed and over to the window.
His wife woke. ‘What’s up, then, Ned?’
‘Just somebody. I wondered who.’
‘Oh, come back to bed!’
Ned Challis went back to bed; but almost at once got out again.
‘Ned! What is it now?’
‘I just thought I’d have a look at Lisa.’
At once Mrs Challis was wide awake. ‘What’s wrong with Lisa?’
‘Nothing.’ He went to listen at Lisa’s door – listen to the regular, healthy breathing of her sleep. He came back. ‘Nothing. Lisa’s all right.’
‘For Heaven’s sake! Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘Well, who was it walking out there? Hurrying.’
‘Oh, go to sleep!’
‘Yes.’ He lay down again, drew the bedclothes round him, lay still. But his eyes remained open.
Out in the night, Kevin left the road on which the Challises lived and came into the more important one that would take him into the village. He heard the rumble of a lorry coming up behind him. For safety he drew right into a gateway and waited. The lorry came past at a steady pace, headlights on. For a few seconds he saw the driver and his mate sitting up in the cab, intent on the road ahead. He had not wanted to be noticed by them, but, when they had gone, he felt lonely.
He went on into the village, its houses lightless, its streets deserted. By the entrance to the school driveway, he stopped to make sure he was unobserved. Nobody. Nothing – not even a cat. There was no sound of any vehicle now; but in the distance he heard a dog barking, and then another answered it. A little owl cried and cried for company or for sport. Then that, too, stopped.
He turned into the driveway to the school, and there was the gate to the playground. He looked over it, into the playground. Moonlight showed him everything: the expanse of asphalt, the sandpit, the big climbing-frame, and – at the far end – the fence with the tussocks of grass growing blackly along it. It was all familiar, and yet strange because of the emptiness and the whitening of moonlight and the shadows cast like solid things. The climbing frame reared high into the air, and on the ground stretched the black criss-cross of its shadows like the bars of a cage.
But he had not come all this way to be halted by moonshine and insubstantial shadows. In a businesslike way he climbed the gate and crossed the playground to the fence. He wondered whether he would find the right tussock easily, but he did. His fingers closed on the bottle: it was waiting for him.
At that moment, in the Challises’ house, as they lay side by side in bed, Mrs Challis said to her husband: ‘You’re still awake, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
Mrs Challis sighed.
‘All right, then,’ said Ned Challis. ‘It’s this. That bottle I gave Lisa – that little old bottle that I gave Lisa yesterday –’
‘What about it?’
‘I found it by Burnt House.’
Mrs Challis drew in her breath sharply. Then she said, ‘That may mean nothing.’ Then, ‘How near was it?’
‘Near enough.’ After a pause: ‘I ought never to have given it to Lisa. I never thought. But Lisa’s all right, anyway.’
‘But, Ned, don’t you know what Lisa did with that bottle?’
‘What?’
‘Lent it to Kevin to have at school. And, according to her, he didn’t return it when he should have done, on the way home. Didn’t you hear her going on and on about it?’
‘Kevin …’ For the third time that night Ned Challis was getting out of bed, this time putting on his trousers, fumbling for his shoes. ‘Somebody went up the road in a hurry. You know – I looked out. I couldn’t see properly, but it was somebody small. It could have been a child. It could have been Lisa, but it wasn’t. It could well have been Kevin …’
‘Shouldn’t you go to their house first, Ned – find out whether Kevin is there or not? Make sure. You’re not sure.’
‘I’m not sure. But, if I wait to make sure, I may be too late.’
Mrs Challis did not say, ‘Too late for what?’ She did not argue.
Ned Challis dressed and went down. As he let himself out of the house to get his bicycle from the shed, the church clock began to strike the hour, the sound reaching him distantly across the intervening fields. He checked with his watch: midnight.
In the village, in the school playground, the striking of midnight sounded clangorously close. Kevin stood with the bottle held in the palm of his hand, waiting for the clock to stop striking – waiting as if for something to follow.
After the last stroke of midnight, there was silence, but Kevin stood still waiting and listening. A car or lorry passed the entrance of the school drive: he heard it distinctly; yet it was oddly faint, too. He couldn’t place the oddness of it. It had sounded much further away than it should have done – less really there.
He gripped the bottle and went on listening, as if for some particular sound. The minutes passed. The same dog barked at the same dog, bark and reply – far, unreally far away. The little owl called; from another world, it might have been.
He was gripping the bottle so tightly now that his hand was sweating. He felt his skin begin to prickle with sweat at the back of his neck and under his arms.
Then there was a whistle from across the fields, distantly. It should have been an unexpected sound, just after midnight; but it did not startle him. It did
set him off across the playground, however. Too late he wanted to get away. He had to go past the climbing frame, whose cagework of shadows now stretched more largely than the frame itself. He saw the bars of shadow as he approached; he actually hesitated; and then, like a fool, he stepped inside the cage of shadows.
Ned Challis, on his bicycle, had reached the junction of the byroad with the road that – in one direction – led to the village. In the other it led deeper into the country. Which way? He dismounted. He had to choose the right way – to follow Kevin.
Thinking of Whistlers’ Hill, he turned the front wheel of his bicycle away from the village and set off again. But now, with his back to the village, going away from the village, he felt a kind of weariness and despair. A memory of childhood came into his mind: a game he had played in childhood: something hidden for him to find, and if he turned in the wrong direction to search, all the voices whispered to him, ‘Cold – cold!’ Now, with the village receding behind him, he recognized what he felt: cold … cold …
Without getting off his bicycle, he wheeled round and began to pedal hard in the direction of the village.
In the playground, there was no pressing hurry for Kevin any more. He did not press against the bars of his cage to get out. Even when clouds cut off the moonlight and the shadows melted into general darkness – even when the shadow-cage was no longer visible to the eye, he stood there; then crouched there, in a corner of the cage, as befitted a prisoner.
The church clock struck the quarter.
The whistlers were in no hurry. The first whistle had come from right across the fields. Then there was a long pause. Then the sound was repeated, equally distantly, from the direction of the river bridges. Later still, another whistle from the direction of the railway line, or somewhere near it.
He lay in his cage, cramped by the bars, listening. He did not know he was thinking, but suddenly it came to him: Whistlers’ Hill. He and Lisa and the others had always supposed that the hill had belonged to a family called Whistler, as Challises’ house belonged to the Challis family. But that was not how the hill had got its name – he saw that now. No, indeed not.
