She slammed the door shut as the brougham began to roll forward.
Ned and Birdie took off down the street, which was flanked by very wide pavements. For once, Birdie didn’t feel out of place among all the gentlefolk parading up and down – not in her expensive, brand-new clothes. But she was running with a badly dressed boy, and they made such an odd couple that they attracted quite a lot of attention.
Rounding a corner, she almost collided with a nurserymaid pushing a pram.
‘Beg pardon, miss!’ Birdie gasped. She saw that she was now on a quieter, narrower street where the terraced houses were all five storeys high, with white porticoes, black railings, and tall, stately, red-brick facades. At number six, a maid was sweeping the front steps. At number nine, a footman was helping a lady into a cab.
‘It’s over there,’ Ned suddenly announced, pointing. ‘Twelfth one along.’
Birdie stopped in her tracks. ‘Tell me where Mr Bunce is.’
‘In the parlour.’
‘Yes, but where’s that?’
Ned haltingly explained that the front door of Mr Fotherington’s house opened into a wide entrance hall with two large rooms off it. The parlour window looked out onto the street, and was divided from the dining room by a pair of wooden folding doors. When prodded by Birdie – who found it hard to get information out of him – Ned explained that the bogle was supposed to be hidden in the parlour fireplace.
‘So they’re all in the front room?’ asked Birdie, her face falling.
‘It ain’t as bad as it sounds,’ Ned assured her. ‘The window’s shuttered, and them rooms . . . they’re big.’ He racked his brain for a comparison. ‘Like a church.’
‘But they’ll hear us if we go through the front door. They’re bound to.’ As Ned shrugged, Birdie pondered. ‘And we can’t see through the window, on account o’ the shutters being closed.’
Ned gave a nod.
‘Where’s the kitchen?’ Birdie queried.
‘In the basement.’ After a moment’s thought, Ned continued, ‘There’s a mews out back, for the horses, but I ain’t bin there. It’s all locked up, I expect.’
‘We’ll try the kitchen first,’ Birdie decided.
She took the lead, marching along with her head held high because she was as well-dressed as any child in London, and saw no need to skulk. Ned, on the other hand, followed her with his head down, casting nervous glances from side to side.
‘You look like a princess,’ he mumbled, making Birdie flush.
‘If I were a princess,’ she replied in a low voice, ‘I’d be wearing a hat and gloves.’ Abruptly she halted again. ‘Is this the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’ They all looked the same to her. ‘How do you know?’
‘I told you. I counted.’
They were lucky. There wasn’t a soul near the place. What’s more, the parlour window was set quite high; even if it hadn’t been shuttered, anyone inside would have had to stand very close to the glass to see Ned and Birdie pass underneath it, into the area. A simple latch opened the area gate, which swung smoothly on well-oiled hinges. A short flight of stone steps led down to the basement door. No stray leaves or nuggets of coal crunched under Birdie’s feet as she padded across the area flagstones. No curious neighbours hailed her from the street, to ask why such a respectable-looking girl was ushering a common beggar (or worse) into Mr Fotherington’s house.
When Birdie tried the basement door, its knob turned cleanly in her hand. Someone had left the door unlocked. Doctor Morton, perhaps? After he let Jem in? As Birdie slowly pushed her way inside, she gritted her teeth in fearful anticipation. But the door was as well oiled as the gate, and hardly made a sound.
All at once she found herself in a generous scullery, complete with four stone sinks. The room was deserted save for a ginger cat, which was sunning itself on the windowsill. Silently it watched Ned follow Birdie over the threshold. The door clicked shut behind him, making him wince. Across the room, another door was standing ajar. It led to the kitchen, which was enormous but very dingy.
It, too, was uninhabited.
Mr Fotherington ain’t short of a quid, Birdie thought, noting the fine array of copper pots stacked on a dresser. She threaded her way between the table and the bread oven, her gaze lingering on bowls full of candied peel and great bunches of fresh parsley. The floor was damp. There were no windows. The larder was a dismal rat-hole, and the limewashed walls were grey with soot. Yet the shelves groaned with spices, a whole brace of partridges hung from the ceiling, and a fancy dumb waiter had been built into one wall, ready to transport food directly upstairs at the pull of a chain.
One of the doors beyond the larder was a pitch-black rectangle. Birdie could only guess that it led to a root cellar. Though she caught barely a glimpse of it in passing, even that quick glimpse filled her with dread. Was there someone inside? Someone she couldn’t see? Telling herself that this was a foolish notion – that Miss Eames had given all the servants the day off – Birdie rushed up the kitchen stairs as if pursued by a man with a meat cleaver. She didn’t know why she was so unnerved. The danger lay ahead of her, not behind. Yet the more distance she put between herself and that dark hole, the better she felt.
She stopped only when she reached the top of the staircase, which didn’t creak as much as she had expected it to – perhaps because it was built to muffle the footsteps of servants at dawn. Ned caught up with her as she was yanking off her boots. From the ground-floor stairwell they stepped straight into a kind of butler’s pantry full of crockery and linen. This pantry, in turn, opened onto the main entrance hall, which was separated from the servants’ quarters by a cloth-covered door.
Birdie placed one hand on the green baize padding and gave it a gentle push. Then she peered into the hallway. Like the kitchen, it was empty. The front door was shut. There were only two other access points: the parlour door, which was also closed, and the dining-room door, which stood slightly ajar.
Somewhere out of sight, a voice was squeaking wordlessly in fear or anger. Or was it desperation?
‘That’s Jem,’ Ned breathed into Birdie’s ear. ‘Sounds like he’s bin gagged.’
She nodded. Thanks to Ned, she knew that she would see something of the front parlour if she stuck her head into the dining room – because the folding doors between the two rooms had been pushed apart. So she crept forward on stockinged feet, passing lightly from oilcloth to polished parquet. But then the floor creaked behind her, and she glanced around.
Ned was standing frozen, with one foot raised. He looked both guilty and apologetic. When she motioned for him to stay put, he gnawed at his lip and pulled an anxious face. He didn’t, however, try to follow her across the hall, which was wider than Birdie’s whole house and crowded with all kinds of strange things: a carved grandfather clock, a hatstand made of horns and antlers, a barometer inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a painting of a tiger eating a wolf. The dining-room door was squeezed between the grandfather clock and a lacquered cabinet full of strange wooden masks. When Birdie peered around the doorjamb, the first thing she saw, in the middle of the room, was a long table draped in green cloth. Behind it was a fireplace. To the left was a sideboard, with the dumb-waiter hatch inserted into the wall just above it. To the right, one of the folding doors projected slightly, forming a strange little stub of a wall that partially blocked Birdie’s view of the parlour.
But though she couldn’t see much of the room to her right, she could see Alfred. He had stationed himself beside the parlour fireplace, which shared the same wall as the one in the dining room. Visible in front of him was a triangular wedge of parquet floor, together with a small portion of the salt circle he’d laid out. Birdie could also see half a painting, half a side table, and a very large book-cupboard.
She couldn’t, however, see Doctor Morton. If he actually was in the parlour, he had to be tucked away out of sight, near the front window. Jem was also hidden from Birdie, though she
could hear him well enough. The sound of his muffled squawks made her blood run cold. She guessed that he was in the middle of the magic circle – most of which she couldn’t see.
She was craning her neck to get a better look when Alfred suddenly spotted her. His eyes widened. His face stiffened. Birdie quickly put a finger to her lips, before encircling her wrists with her fingers, to signify handcuffs. Then she jerked her head towards the street. She was trying to tell Alfred that the police were coming.
In response, he blinked. Birdie instantly understood that Doctor Morton must be in the room with him – somewhere in a corner, out of sight – and that she would have to be very, very careful. So she went on to explain, in sign language, that Alfred shouldn’t drink anything. First she pointed in his direction. Then she mimed a bottle. Then she shook her finger at him, after which she clutched her throat with both hands, as if she were choking.
Again Alfred blinked. Twice. He had been darting little glances at her; now he fixed his gaze on the parlour fireplace, as if trying to allay any suspicions that the doctor might have. Birdie was satisfied. She knew that Alfred had understood. And since she was becoming more and more overwhelmed by a kind of creeping dread (which she blamed on Doctor Morton’s close proximity), she decided it was time to retreat.
She was slowly edging backwards when her eyes strayed towards the dumb waiter. For an instant her heart seemed to stop. The little hatch was open. It had been closed before, and now it was a gaping hole.
But it wasn’t the hole that frightened Birdie. What gave her the shock of her life – what made her freeze, then gasp, then jump back into the entrance hall – was the thing bubbling out of the hole.
It moved silently, like a cloud. It was large and dark and oily, like a surge of coal-black soapsuds. And it was growing bigger by the second as it slurped down onto the floor . . .
30
A TERRIBLE SHOCK
Birdie didn’t know how long she stood there, paralysed, with her hand over her mouth. Time slowed to a crawl. She could see Ned trying to attract her attention, his face a mask of anxiety. He wanted to know what was going on.
Then she heard a muffled shriek – and snapped out of her daze. There was a bogle in the next room! A real one! And here she was, a bogler’s girl, cowering like a mouse in a bread-bin!
It’s only a bogle, she told herself, before taking a deep breath and charging back through the dining-room door.
She was confronted by a scene of pure chaos. The bogle was now heading for the parlour. It was a huge mass of warts – or were they boils? Or bubbles? Birdie couldn’t tell; while the lumps did pop like bubbles, they also oozed like boils. And because of all these eruptions, it was hard to make out the bogle’s exact shape, though it did have a couple of gnarled, twisted, leprous-looking horns, and some kind of dragging tail that left a sticky black residue in its wake.
It also had two very long arms, with claws at the end of them. And just as Birdie crossed the threshold, one of these arms shot towards Alfred – who couldn’t quite dodge it in time. Perhaps he’d been deliberately looking away from the dining room, so that Doctor Morton wouldn’t be tempted to glance in that direction. Perhaps he wasn’t as alert as usual because he hadn’t been expecting a real bogle to descend on them.
Whatever the reason, he was taken by surprise. Before he could even aim his spear, the bogle seized a clump of his shirt-front and jerked him into the air like someone lifting a pint-pot. The spear was knocked from Alfred’s hand. Birdie saw it hit the floor. She darted forward to grab it, but the bogle was in her way.
Behind her, Ned cried, ‘Birdie!’ Jem was squealing; from where she now stood she had a clear view of the salt circle and the brass box, which was quite big, though not big enough for Jem. His feet and head were sticking out of the box, which could have been a coal box except that it was embossed with strange symbols instead of miners or knights or jolly drinking scenes. There was a strip of cloth tied across his mouth. His legs were bound with thick, hairy twine.
Beyond Jem, near the parlour window, stood Doctor Morton. He was reading aloud from a leather-bound book, his voice raised in a monotonous chant that was barely audible over all the shouts and screams. Since he seemed to be fully absorbed in his task, and wasn’t threatening anyone, Birdie made a snap decision to ignore him.
She was busy enough already.
Suddenly the bogle ploughed forward, into the magic circle. Alfred still had his bag of salt, but couldn’t reach down to close the circle because he was being jerked around like bait on a hook. The bogle grabbed Doctor Morton’s brass box, upending it so that Jem tumbled out. Jem groaned. His dark eyes were bulging with fear. Doctor Morton gave a shout of protest when he saw that his trap had been sprung.
The bogle didn’t pay him any mind, though. It grabbed Jem around the ankles. And as Birdie watched, horrified, it plucked him from the floor so that he was dangling upside-down. Then the bogle turned again, spinning around on a kind of oil slick. It held Jem and Alfred suspended, one in each hand, like the dead pheasants downstairs.
Birdie was now standing between the bogle and the dumb waiter. But help was on its way in the shape of Ned Roach, who had entered the dining room and was sidling in her direction. ‘The spear!’ she told him hoarsely. ‘Get the spear!’ As soon as he nodded, she gulped down a lungful of air and began to sing.
Hold up thy hand, most righteous judge! Hold up thy hand awhile.
For here I see me father dear come tumbling o’er the stile.
Her own voice astonished her; it was clear and pure and strong, cutting cleanly through all the commotion. It mesmerised the bogle, which became so still that Birdie finally got a good look at it. She realised that its dragging tail was actually a pair of long, wet, leathery wings. Its legs were rotting stumps. It had the crinkled muzzle of a bulldog, topped by a cluster of lidless eyes. When it suddenly bared its teeth – which sprang up in double rows like blood-drenched spikes emerging from a black, muddy bog – Birdie’s breath caught in her throat. But after a moment’s pause, she kept on singing.
Oh hast thou brought me silver or gold or jewels to set me free,
Or hast thou come to see me hang? For hanged I shall be.
Ned was edging towards the fallen spear, using the table and chairs as cover. Jem’s gag had fallen off. He was twisting and writhing and yelling for help at the top of his voice. Birdie wished that he would stop. It was hard enough trying to be heard over Doctor Morton’s strange, monotonous chanting. The doctor had picked up his brass box; he was standing behind the bogle as if he expected it to climb inside. But the creature didn’t seem to notice him at all.
Alfred, for his part, was trying to empty his bag of salt onto the bogle. He missed because its arm kept flailing around, knocking him against the wall, the ceiling, the book-cupboard, the mantelpiece. His face was turning purple, thanks to the bogle’s tight grip on his collar. He couldn’t speak. He’d lost his hat. As the bogle surged forward, his knee bounced off the folding door.
Birdie retreated a step. Then another. Then another. But she didn’t for one moment stop singing.
If I could get out o’ this prickly bush that prickles me heart so sore,
If I could get out o’ this prickly bush, I’d never get in it no more.
By now Ned was squatting behind the folding door to Birdie’s left. She could tell that he was biding his time, waiting for the moment when he could throw himself at Alfred’s spear without getting too close to the bogle. So she began to move in the opposite direction, edging closer and closer to the dining-room door.
Her plan was to lure the bogle away from Ned, then make her escape into the entrance hall while Ned grabbed Alfred’s spear. Even as she sang to the bogle, she was looking at Ned and miming a stabbing motion. But would he understand what she was trying to say? He was as white as Alfred’s salt beneath the smears of soot and mud that adorned his face.
Oh I have brought no silver or gold, nor jewels to set thee free.
Suddenly the bogle dropped Alfred. Birdie saw him bang to the floor and reach for his spear. Then a giant claw snapped at her, missing her by inches. She screamed and threw herself backwards, just in time. When the claw lunged again, she dodged it by falling over. Rolling onto her stomach, she heard Ned shout.
Next thing she knew, she was sailing into the air, screeching like a parrot. The bogle! It had her! It was going to eat her!
And then, all at once, it popped.
She didn’t realise what had happened, at first. She heard a strange noise and felt a warm shower of goo as she hit the floor with a thump that shook every bone in her body. Despite the pain in her arm, however, she immediately jumped up and hurled herself into the entrance hall.
‘Birdie! Wait!’ It was Ned’s voice, coming from behind her. She was about to respond when she spied Doctor Morton, who was also in the hall. He yanked open the front door, then shut it again in a panic – though not before Birdie spotted a policeman on the doorstep.
Doctor Morton slammed the bolt home, turned on his heel, and charged towards Birdie. He was probably making for the kitchen stairs, and the look on his face was so frightening that, just for an instant, it drove every other thought from Birdie’s head. She froze in terror. And by the time she found her courage again, Doctor Morton was almost on top of her.
Someone else reached her first, though. As the policeman hammered on the front door, and Jem let loose a torrent of oaths, and Ned burst out of the parlour, Alfred suddenly appeared beside Birdie, carrying his spear. He scooped her up with one hand; with the other, he shoved his spear at Doctor Morton’s throat.
‘Take one more step,’ he said in a harsh, icy voice, ‘and I’ll slice you in two.’
The doctor had skidded to a halt. He thrust an open palm at Alfred, as if ordering him to back off, and began to recite something in a foreign tongue. But Ned had already unbolted the front door, which banged open to admit a very tall, burly police constable.
A Very Unusual Pursuit Page 19
