TWO
WE LUMBERED THROUGH THE high street, the sound of the horse’s hooves echoing loudly on the cobbles.
“What’s his name?” I asked, pointing at the ancient animal.
“Gry.”
“Gray?”
“Gry. ‘Horse’ in the Romany tongue.”
I tucked that odd bit of knowledge away for future use, looking forward to the time when I would be able to trot it out in front of my know-it-all sister, Daffy. Of course she would pretend that she knew it all along.
It must have been the loud clatter of our passage that brought Miss Cool, the village postmistress, scurrying to the front of her confectionery shop. When she spotted me seated beside the Gypsy, her eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth. In spite of the heavy plate-glass windows of the shop and the street between us, I could almost hear her gasp. The sight of Colonel Haviland de Luce’s youngest daughter being carried off in a Gypsy caravan, no matter how gaily it was painted, must have been a terrible shock.
I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop, fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say “What jolly fun!” What I wanted to do, actually, was to leap to my feet, strike a pose, and burst into one of those “Yo-ho for the open road!” songs they always play in the cinema musicals, but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.
News of my abduction would soon be flying everywhere, like a bird loose in a cathedral. Villages were like that, and Bishop’s Lacey was no exception.
“We all lives in the same shoe,” Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying, “just like Old Mother ’Ubbard.”
A harsh cough brought me back to reality. The Gypsy woman was now bent over double, hugging her ribs. I took the reins from her hands.
“Did you take the medicine the doctor gave you?” I asked.
She shook her head from side to side, and her eyes were like two red coals. The sooner I could get this wagon to the Palings, and the woman tucked into her own bed, the better it would be.
Now we were passing the Thirteen Drakes and Cow Lane. A little farther east, the road turned south towards Doddingsley. We were still a long way from Buckshaw and the Palings.
Just beyond the last row of cottages, a narrow lane known to locals as the Gully angled off to the right, a sunken stony cutting that skirted the west slope of Goodger Hill and cut more or less directly cross country to the southeast corner of Buckshaw and the Palings. Almost without thinking, I hauled on the reins and turned Gry’s head towards the narrow lane.
After a relatively smooth first quarter mile, the caravan was now lurching alarmingly. As we went on, bumping over sharp stones, the track became more narrow and rutted. High banks pressed in on either side, so steeply mounded with tangled outcroppings of ancient tree roots that the caravan, no matter how much it teetered, could not possibly have overturned.
Just ahead, like the neck of a great green swan, the mossy branch of an ancient beech tree bent down in a huge arc across the road. There was scarcely enough space to pass beneath it.
“Robber’s Roost,” I volunteered. “It’s where the highwaymen used to hold up the mail coaches.”
There was no response from the Gypsy: She seemed uninterested. To me, Robber’s Roost was a fascinating bit of local lore.
In the eighteenth century, the Gully had been the only road between Doddingsley and Bishop’s Lacey. Choked with snow in the winter, flooded by icy runoffs in spring and fall, it had gained the reputation, which it still maintained after two hundred years, of being rather an unsavory, if not downright dangerous, place to hang about.
“Haunted by history,” Daffy had once told me as she was inking it onto a map she was drawing of “Buckshaw & Environs.”
With that sort of recommendation, the Gully should have been one of my favorite spots in all of Bishop’s Lacey, but it was not. Only once had I ventured nearly its whole length on Gladys, my trusty bicycle, before a peculiar and unsettling feeling at the nape of my neck had made me turn back. It had been a dark day of high, gusty winds, cold showers, and low scudding clouds, the kind of day …
The Gypsy snatched the reins from my hands, gave them a sharp tug. “Hatch!” she said gruffly, and pulled the horse up short.
High on the mossy branch a child was perched, its thumb jammed firmly into its mouth.
I could tell by its red hair it was one of the Bulls.
The Gypsy woman made the sign of the cross and muttered something that sounded like “Hilda Muir.”
“Ja!” she added, flicking the reins, “Ja!” and Gry jerked the caravan back into motion. As we moved slowly under the branch, the child let down its legs and began pounding with its heels on the caravan’s roof, creating a horrid hollow drumming noise behind us.
If I’d obeyed my instincts, I’d have climbed up and at the very least given the brat a jolly good tongue-lashing. But one look at the Gypsy taught me that there were times to say nothing.
Rough brambles snatched at the caravan as it jolted and lurched from side to side in the lane, but the Gypsy seemed not to notice.
She was hunched over the reins, her watery eyes fixed firmly on some far-off horizon, as if only her shell were in this century, the rest of her escaped to a place far away in some dim and misty land.
The track broadened a little and a moment later we were moving slowly past a decrepit picket fence. Behind the fence were a tumbledown house that seemed to be hammered together from cast-off doors and battered shutters, and a sandy garden littered with trash which included a derelict cooker, a deep old-fashioned pram with two of its wheels missing, a number of fossilized motorcars, and, strewn everywhere, hordes of empty tins. Clustered here and there around the property stood sagging outbuildings—little more than makeshift lean-tos thrown together with rotten, mossy boards and a handful of nails.
Over it all, arising from a number of smoking rubbish heaps, hung a pall of gray acrid smoke which made the place seem like some hellish inferno from the plates of a Victorian illustrated Bible. Sitting in a washtub in the middle of the muddy yard was a small child, which jerked its thumb from its mouth the instant it saw us and broke into a loud and prolonged wailing.
Everything seemed to be coated with rust. Even the child’s red hair added to the impression that we had strayed into a strange, decaying land where oxidation was king.
Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks. It was nibbling away at my own skin at this very moment and at the skin of the Gypsy seated beside me, although it was easy to see that she was much further gone than I was.
From my own early chemical experiments in the laboratory at Buckshaw, I had verified that in some cases, such as when iron is combusted in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, oxidation is a wolf that tears hungrily at its food: so hungrily, in fact, that the iron bursts into flames. What we call fire is really no more than our old friend oxidation working at fever pitch.
But when oxidation nibbles more slowly—more delicately, like a tortoise—at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations. I have sometimes thought that if we could stop oxidation we could stop time, and perhaps be able to—
My pleasant thoughts were interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek.
“Gypsy! Gypsy!”