“Lucky we’re under cover,” Is remarked. “It’s raining stair-rods out there. Hark!”
They could hear the rain lashing on the roof.
Arun said nothing. There were two doors at the stairtop, each side of a tiny landing-place. He opened the right-hand one and walked into the room beyond, Is still keeping very close behind.
As they entered the room a mighty, scalding-yellow canopy of lightning swept over the whole sky. Next moment a tremendous crash of thunder, just overhead, it seemed, made the whole house rattle.
“Croopus!” gasped Is. “That was a close one!”
But she spoke with huge relief. The flood of yellow light had revealed a neat bedroom, with bedcovers tightly tucked, clothes hanging on a hook, candle and matches on a chair by the bed. Nobody was here. No ill or dead person – which was what Is had feared – lay stretched on the bed.
“I just can’t understand it,” Arun was saying in a puzzled voice. “Where
can
she be?”
“Maybe she went on a visit? You got aunts – uncles – she got family of her own?”
Is knew nothing about her aunt Ruth, Arun’s mother, save that she had married Arun’s father, Hosiah Twite, brother to Desmond Twite, Is’s own father. And that the pair had belonged to this Silent Sect.
“Her parents were dead,” said Arun. “We’ve only got family on Dad’s side, and who’d want Uncle Desmond?”
He was trying to light the candle. Slowly the flame grew, and soft shadows flickered across the small room.
“The Twites ain’t all bad,” said Is. “There’s Dido. She’s a real one-er! And my sis Penny’s not so bad, so long’s you take her the right way—”
Arun was carefully carrying the candle across the room. “I’ll have a look in Dad’s room—”
His voice came from the top of the stairs.
“Where did you sleep, then?” asked Is, following behind.
“There’s a little clothes-closet off Dad’s room. I slept in there on a cot-bed.
Blister
it! What, in the name of—?”
There was a loud thump and a crash.
“What’s up?” called Is.
“There’s
things
piled all over the floor – bits of board – I gashed my shin – oh, curse!” He tripped again, and only just managed to save himself without dropping the candle. “Watch how you go!”
“Rum stink in here,” said Is. “Paint, you reckon?”
Another terrific flash of lightning suddenly lit up the room in bold black and yellow. Arun and Is let out simultaneous gasps. For what dazzled their eyes was not only the lightning, but also the contents of the room: all around the walls, and on the bed, and stacked three-deep over the floor, and on the single chair, and on the clothes-chest, were piled squares of wood about the size of chair-seats, and these were all dashed and splashed with wild, brilliant colour.
“What in creation’s name
are
those things?” gasped Is, as they were plunged back into dark, lit only by the candle’s shadowy gleam. She picked up one board and held it near the flame.
“It’s a picture. Of flowers. But
what
flowers! Glorious me! I never saw anything
like
it! Not in my whole life. And there’s hundreds of ’em.”
“In the closet too,” said Arun, investigating.
Several more lightning flashes gave them a chance to decide that all the paintings had been done by the same person. They were nearly all pictures of flowers.
“There’s jars of paint here, in the corner,” said Is. “And brushes. D’you reckon your Mum did these, Arun? Was she fond of flowers?”
“Well . . . she was,” he said doubtfully. “If she were out in the lane, and she’d see a dandelion on the bank, most often she’d stop and look at it. Just for a minute. But my Dad was the real one – he knew a lot about plants. He’d walk all over the county, times when business was poor, or even if it wasn’t, and he made a map showing where all the rare ones grew, Jacob’s Ladder and Green Man and the Monkey Orchid. But he never told people where they grew. And Ma never went with him.”
“Could your Dad have painted these?”
“Never!” declared Arun. “He used to say pictures were the Devil’s likenesses. He’d never do
anything
like this. And he’d never allow Ma . . . Not when he was alive. No, this couldn’t be Dad’s work.”
Is felt inclined to agree with Arun. She had, by chance, been present as her Uncle Hosiah Twite lay dying of cold and wolf-bites. He had seemed a sad, defeated man, certainly not capable of producing pictures like these, which blazed with colour, which twisted and writhed and swarmed with strong, bright, wild interlocked shapes.
“Then it must have been your Mum what painted them. But where can she be now?”
“If only I knew! – We can’t sleep in here,” said Arun. “There’s no room for a mouse. We’d best drag out the mattress from underneath and lay it on the floor in the other room. I’ll have that, and you can have Mum’s bed.”
“Maybe she’ll come home yet – yes! Hark!”
Rat-tat
! on the front door.
“Maybe she lost her key,” said Arun with a huge gulp of relief. He ran down the stair. There was no key in the locked front door. He opened the window beside it, with a struggle, and called hopefully, “Is that you, Ma? Go round to the back, we’ve no key for this one.”
When he returned to the kitchen, his candle flame revealed the sorry state it was in, mud and slime all over the brick floor, mould and mildew on the surfaces of chairs, table, and sink-board. But on the dresser he found two more candles, and lit one of them before opening the back door.
Surely this can’t be Arun’s Mum? thought Is, gazing with some dismay at the woman who came pushing into the kitchen. She looked like a weasel, with a thin pale face, wispy grey hair escaping from under a shawl, and a lot of teeth which looked as if they were made of china.
“Mrs Boles!” said Arun.
“There! I made sure it must be robbers when I saw your light!” cried Mrs Boles aggrievedly. “That or yer Ma come back. I never thought as how it would be
you
, Arun Twite! Given up for lost,
you
were! And your Dad walking to London-town seventeen times, a-searching for you, and yer Ma crying her pore eyes out – when
he
wasn’t there. Caused a peck of trouble,
you
did.”
She stared at him accusingly, out of eyes which were red-rimmed with gin, not tears.
“But where
is
Ma?” demanded Arun.
“Ah! There’s plenty as ‘ud like to know that! Vanished clean away, she done – clean as a whistle. Not but what they all of ’em went, those mumchance beggars as calls ’emselves the Silent Sect –
I’d
give ’em silent! I daresay their thoughts is as nasty as anybody else’s,
if
not nastier; special that one as calls hisself the Elder – Dominic de la Twite, fiddle-faddle! Plain Twite’s his monacker, ask me!”
“The Silent Sect have gone from Folkestone?” exclaimed Arun. “Did they go to America, then?”
“Nah, nah! Only just up the road to Seagate town. Made the neighbourhood too hot to hold them here, I reckon, and there was plenty empty houses going free up there. Seagate’s welcome to ’em, says I. (Not but what your Ma was a decent body, when you got her alone; nursed me through a nasty case of gordelpus, she done, once.) But as to where she’d got to – well, a nod’s as good as a wink to a dead donkey.”
She crossed her arms and stared at Is and Arun. “’Oo’s the gel?” she demanded. “She’ve a look of you, Arun – but you never ‘ad no sister, did you?” Her eyes gleamed with curiosity.
“She’s my cousin, Is Twite. My Uncle Desmond’s youngest. But when did my mother go, Mrs Boles? You say she
didn’t
go with the Sect, to Seagate?”
“Nah. Like I say, she went afore they did. Days before. And there’s some as say she abducticated little Abandella Twite, time she went. And was a-going to use the kinchin for wicked magicking, some do say. There’s plenty, Arun Twite, as said your Mum is a witch, that she got rid of you, first, and then done in your pore Dad. In fact, if it weren’t for me, keeping a neighbourly eye on the place, this house woulda been burned down, weeks back.”
“What?” Arun gaped at the woman, quite stunned. “For a start, who in the wide world is Abandella Twite? I never heard of such a name. And why should my Mum abduct anybody? She’s the very
last
person . . . And, as for her being a witch, that’s just clung-headed. Why, Mum wouldn’t hurt a fly! I’ve seen her pick up an ant, crossing the kitchen floor, and carry it safe outside.”
“All I knows is,” said Mrs Boles, “there’s folks around this town as don’t scruple to call your Mum a wizard. Acos she used to go and nurse sick folk, and mostly they got better. That ain’t natural. And you’d best look out yourself, Arun Twite – anyone as is connected to the Silent Folk, hereabouts, they can be in for a peck of trouble.”
She leaned close to Arun and hissed, “With the
you-know-who
!”
“I don’t know who,” said Arun, puzzled, stepping back. Mrs Boles’s breath stank of gin, old potato-peelings, and fish-bones.
“The Emjee!” she whispered, and nipped through the back door, pulling it to behind her with a spiteful slam.
“The Emjee?” said Arun to Is. “What in the world can she mean?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll find out in the morning. Let’s eat the pie and go to bed.”
They went to bed as the storm rumbled away inland. Is wondered if the rain was falling on Arun’s Mum. And on those two queer figures – the stumpy little character with pale eyes like silver pennies – and the person riding on two wheels and drawn across the hillside by a kite.
I must have just
thought
I saw him. But how could I invent such a thing?
Finding no answer to any of her questions. Is fell asleep.
Chapter Two
“W
E HAD BETTER GET HOLD OF MRS BOLES
and ask some more questions,” said Is next morning. She and Arun had breakfasted scantily off a loaf, which Is went out and bought in Wear Street, and they were now making a rather hopeless attempt to clean the filthy kitchen with brooms and rags and pails full of sea water, scooped from the high tide which chomped and frothed beyond the shingle bank on the south side of Cold Shoulder Road.
“Mrs Boles is a horrible woman,” said Arun. “There’s lots of things missing from the house: Ma’s work-basket, and the pink mug my Granny Twite gave me when I was born, and all Dad’s fish-hooks and lines – and the clock. I bet she took them—”
“Hush! Here she comes now,” warned Is, as the garden gate clicked.
Mrs Boles, seen in daylight, was no great improvement on last night’s version: she had pale-grey skin, scanty grey hair done up in curl papers, and a well-used apron tied over layers and layers of grimy clothes. She was holding the pink mug.
“Took it for safe keeping,” she explained. “Ah hah! Getting the place a bit straightened up, are ye?” with an indulgent glance at their efforts. “Well, it does look a mossel better, I give ye that. You been trying your best. Not but what my best advice to you is leave here right soon – there’ll be nowt but trouble for you in this town. Like I was telling ye last night—”
“Mrs Boles, what is the Emjee?”
“
Hush
, will ye!” Mrs Boles’s eyes – still very red-rimmed – shot nervously hither and thither. She laid a
skinny finger
on her lips. Then, dipping the same finger in Arun’s pail of sea water, she drew ten letters in the thin layer of sand on the brick floor.
MERYJENTRY
“Merry Gentry? But what have
they
got to do with my Mum?”
“
Quiet
, boy, will you? You want them to come and poke you head first in a bog-hole on Romney Marsh? And me as well?”
“No; of course not; but why—”
“She took and went off with the Handsel Child!”
“She did what?”
“Y’Mum. Stole the Handsel Child.”
Arun was beginning to look frantic.
Is said quietly, “We don’t know what the Handsel Child is, Mrs Boles. We never heard of it. We have only just come from a long way off – Blastburn, way up in the north country. You’ll have to tell us about the Handsel Child.”
But this Mrs Boles seemed quite unable, or unwilling, to do. She clapped a hand over her china teeth, stared haggardly at each of them in turn, gulped, and muttered, “Well,
I
don’t know, I’m sure. Don’t know – How’m
I
supposed to tell ye? I wish now I’d gone off with my Meena – that I do. And then – and then there’s all y’Mum’s pictures . . . I’m sure I—”
“Did Aunt Ruth paint all those pictures?” Is asked with lively curiosity. She thought how very much she would like to meet a person who painted flowers in such a way. She had been up before breakfast to take another look at them by daylight.
“‘Oo else woulda done so, gel?”
“Did you watch her painting them?”
“Mercyme! Not on your Oliphant!
I
don’t want to turn dropsical – or come down with hot pulpitations.” Mrs Boles made the nervous gesture with her fingers of someone warding off bad magic. “‘Oo else woulda painted them if not Mrs T? Pictures don’t paint theirselves. Nobody else ’as bin in the ’ouse – only the skinny lady and she didn’t stop; she come axing questions after y’Mum took and scarpered—”
“The skinny lady? What skinny lady?”
“Come axing for y’Mum. She’d come here times afore – I remember her around Michaelmas a-colloguing with y’Mum. Tallish and sharpish-looking and bony as a hostrich; I showed her where the key is kep’ – ‘case she might want to take the pictures; dunno if I done right – but she never stopped—”
Mrs Boles’s voice dribbled away. She peered warily at her two listeners. Is wondered what other people she might have let into the house, and what they might have taken from it.
“You goin’ to get rid o’ them pictures? Take them outa here?” Mrs Boles asked hopefully.
It was plain that she feared and disliked the pictures; seemed to believe they had magical properties, might do her harm.