Cora Ravenwing (13 page)

“Well, Mrs. Briggs told everyone we were done for and she saved us …”

“Tommy rot!”

“I know! I know very well she didn’t save us—but I suppose I took her word for the rest of it. I really thought we’d been at death’s door.”

“Well, I suppose people can die in the silliest of accidents if they lose their heads. But not us! I tell you one thing, though …”

“What?”

“I don’t know whether you saw this or not, but Mrs. Briggs seemed to be pushing me back down again. I was just getting to the top of the ladder when I felt this great pushing and shoving against the top of my head. And I looked up and there was this old hag leaning in trying to hold me down. That’s what I thought. Then suddenly she disappeared …”

“It’s true, Cora. It
is
true. I was there by the ladder and I saw her. I’ve tried to tell Mummy and Daddy but they won’t believe me.”

“Might as well save your breath as speak out against Mrs. Briggs.”

“But she didn’t disappear—I shoved her out of the way to give you a chance to get out.”

Cora looked at me for a long time. “Did you really, Becky? Then it was you who saved me. I think she was really going to do me in that time. I wasn’t sure, but if
you
think …”

“Well, I definitely thought so.”

In the silence that followed as Cora absorbed that
shocking
fact there was a sudden fluttering and scrabbling about on the other side of the loft. I thought someone was coming and leapt up guiltily, heart thumping.

Cora laughed. “Relax, you ass! It’s Whacky.”

“Who’s Whacky?”

She just pointed across the floor and there was a jackdaw strutting fussily towards the nest with a bright pink rag in its beak. Its claws rattled on the planking. Cora held out a hand and the jackdaw cocked its grey-capped head on one side and peered at her out of one cool,
pearl-grey
eye. I’d never been so near a wild bird before.

“Tchacka, tchacka, tchack,” it squawked loudly.

“She’s O.K., Whacky. A real friend,” said Cora and the bird came over and jumped on to her hand. She lifted him up to her face and talked away to him as if he understood every word. She looked like a bird herself, jabbing and
jutting
her sharp little nose at him while she spoke and staring into his bright grey eyes with her shiny black ones. When he’d had enough he jumped down and flapped up on top of the great pile of junk that was his nest. He was lost to view, but we could hear him scratching and poking away amongst the twigs. “He’ll be fixing that bit of pink rag in the nest.”

“Will his mate come along soon?”

“She might. I know her too. They’ve nested here for years. They just patch up the old nest and re-use it. There’s a rookery out in the churchyard—have you seen it?
Sometimes
they hang around with the rooks out there. And often they go off and forage in the fields with them.”

I was impressed by her knowledge. “Golly! You know a lot about them.”

“That’s what happens when you’ve no friends. You’ve got to fill up your time somehow—so I spend ages outside, watching animals and things.”

“You’re a funny girl, Cora. There’s lots more to you than anyone knows about.”

“Whose fault’s that?” She shrugged. “Never mind. It’s enough for me that you’re beginning to know me.” She caught my sleeve suddenly. “Tell you what!”

“What?”

“I could show you loads of animals and things you’ve never seen if you come out at night with me.”

“Night!”

“Yes. I often go out on the common at night.”

“But, Cora, it’s dangerous. There are men hanging around there at night. Nobody’s allowed there—I’m not even allowed to go during the day.”

“That’s all rubbish. I’ve never seen anybody. Well—a few couples kissing and things, but I just steer clear of them and they’re definitely not interested in me. They never see me anyway. One thing about watching animals—you learn to be ever so quiet.”

“I couldn’t come, Cora. I’d be scared stiff in the dark—and Mummy and Daddy’d be livid if they found out.”

“Just a thought … Actually I came for you once or twice soon after Christmas. I threw snow up at your
window
but you didn’t hear me. You must sleep like a log.”

“Good grief! You’ve got a nerve, Cora. We’re not
supposed
even to be speaking to each other and yet you come creeping around at dead of night! What if Daddy’d seen you?”

“I tell you, I’m never seen if I don’t want to be. You’d be safe with me, Becky. At least think about it. It’d be much more exciting than meeting up here once in a while.”

Something was vaguely falling into place in my mind. “Cora,” I said slowly. “Were those
your
footmarks outside our house—the ones that Daddy eventually got the police to look at?”

She laughed. “Must’ve been. I thought that when I heard you telling everyone at school about your burglar. Good thing you
did
make a great story out of it or I might have come again and been set on by police!”

“But what on earth had you got on your feet? They were massive great footprints.”

“Dad’s Wellingtons. Mine had got a hole in and I just came out in his. Just as well—it was enough to put you all off the scent.”

I was amused and relieved to think that, after all, it had been little Cora and not some grim maniac hanging around the house. And I began to think again about the common—perhaps it wasn’t peopled after dark by madmen after all. I wanted to tell Cora I’d go with her on one of her
night-time
jaunts but I wasn’t sure I dared. Instead, almost for pratice, I inveigled Hermione into playing truant with me. This was when we made off together to commune with nature instead of going to school. It was a marvellous day but all the time I was disloyally aware of the shortcomings of my companion. Not only was she as ignorant of the ways of the countryside as I was but she didn’t really seem interested in nature itself, only in so far as she could use it to influence her mood and thoughts and thereby work up some poem or other. She didn’t really examine it for its own sake—she just went on examining herself through it; her reactions to it were what concerned her. I’d found her so fascinating at first. Now I began to be actually bored by her self-absorption. It was now, too, that my special trio of friends pushed me into betraying Cora
by participating with them in their “curse”. I never told Cora how I’d stuck thorns into her effigy, much as she’d once declared she’d like to ram them into Mrs. Briggs, and I never took the curse seriously. Bit by bit, my loyalties changed.

Meanwhile, schooldays rolled on happily enough with friendships continuing as established at the beginning of the year. It would have been far too inconvenient and
disruptive
if people had started questioning whether they really, in fact,
liked
their “friends”. Everybody knew who was whose friend and that was that.

I loved the summer term. The weather was warm again and we all wore short socks and sandals and gingham dresses. Some teachers let us sit out of doors for lessons, and there were treats like rounders and practising for sports day and Miss Tidmarsh, who took us for nature-study, lining us up in a crocodile for rambles. Once she took all seventeen of us on the common and we were late back for lunch, and we heard she got quite a row from Miss Todd. Actually, that walk on the common was just about what did it—that, plus the taste for adventure that I got when I went that day with Hermione. By mid-May I was thoroughly determined to go with Cora on a night-time expedition. We made our arrangements in the bell-tower during one of our infrequent, clandestine meetings there. She would come for me the first fine night and take me off to experience, at first hand, sights and sounds of nature that I’d only
hitherto
read about.

T
HE ONLY DIFFICULTY WE FORESAW WAS WAKING ME UP IN
the first place. I was indeed a heavy sleeper. We hit on the bizarre solution that I should tie one end of a reel of cotton round my little finger and then drop the whole reel out of the window. My bed ran alongside the window and I could easily leave the sash slightly open all night. If Cora came she would look for the reel on the flower-bed under my window and pull on it to wake me. If she didn’t I could snap the thread in the morning, drop the loose end out, and retrieve the whole lot and rewind it later in the day. I was sure that if Mother found it before me she would only conclude that one of the boys had been messing around with it—she’d never dream it was part of an
elaborate
conspiracy between Cora and me. In fact, it wasn’t all that marvellous an idea. Several times I snapped the cotton by mistake as I rolled over in my sleep and I wouldn’t have felt a thing if Cora had come on one of those nights. But, as it happened, it was still intact the first night she actually did come.

I awoke to the oddest little twitching sensation in my finger. It seemed to be jerking all by itself. Then I realized it was being tugged. It reminded me of the tiny, bobbing, nibbling pulls I’d felt when fishing for flounders from a rowing boat one summer. I lay in a semi-dream,
remembering
the thrill of getting a bite, when suddenly a slightly sharper jerk brought me right round with a jump. Cora! I leapt up in bed and peered out into the dark. There she was, remarkably clear in the moonlight, cupping her hands round her mouth and whispering, “Hurry up, for heaven’s sake!” I snapped the cotton and dropped it out, then I pulled the curtain across again and switched on my bedside lamp. I threw on the first clothes that came to hand and tiptoed downstairs, holding my breath. As I grabbed my mac in the hall the belt buckle swung out and banged loudly against the wall. I thought the game was up and stood transfixed, waiting for lights to go on and Father to appear at the top of the stairs. But nothing happened. I sneaked through to the kitchen—it was one-thirty by the clock there—and let myself out of the back door. At the front of the house Cora and I confronted one another with glee. “Come on!” she whispered and snatched my hand. “Let’s clear off!” We ran lightly across the lawn, out through the gate, and off up the road in the direction of the common.

Cora had everything planned, it seemed. Once beyond our garden hedge we stopped running and walked quietly up through the village. Our sandals made no sound; we seemed to glide over the pavement. Everywhere was still and dark; house and street lights were all out; Copcutt’s on the corner was black as pitch. We held hands tightly and spoke in whispers, though at first I was too excited for words at all. The air was mild and warm and, now and
then, heavily scented—we would walk through a sudden wave of perfume, then turn to see where it came from and discover thick apple-blossom or a border of wall-flowers in someone’s garden. As we made our way up the road towards Cora’s house and the church, the hedges closed in on either side of us and made it darker than before. My heart began to pound as I realized that we’d have to pass the field with the air-raid shelters and the graveyard. But Cora babbled in my ear and hardly gave my imagination a chance to sweep me off into fearful fantasies.

“It was easy, wasn’t it, Becky? See, you can do anything you want now. We can go out ever so many nights, see each other for hours. What do you think of night? Have you ever been out so late before? It seems still, doesn’t it? But just you wait—the common’s more alive at night than during the day!”

At that point there was a fantastic, ear-splitting shriek right over our heads and something swept by, giving us about an inch of clearance. I felt the draught as it swooped past. “Cora!” I screamed, and clutched her in panic.

“Screech owl—there’re loads round here.”

I recovered almost at once, unburied my face from her shoulder, and looked about for it—much too late, of course. “I’ve never seen one. Blast! I’ve missed it.”

“We may see it again up at the church.”

When we got there Cora made to go through the gate. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hanging back.

“Come
on
!” she said firmly, pulling me by the arm. “You’ve got to come up and see Whacky and mate. They’ve hatched out five chicks, you know.”

“Won’t it put them out if we go clattering up?”

“That’s a feeble excuse,” she said and her grinning teeth caught the moonlight. She looked like a skull!

I leaned feebly against the gate. “I can’t, Cora. I’m petrified!”

But somehow she yanked me in round the gate and we crunched up the path round the back of the church and shoved open the bell-tower door. It was pitch black in there but, before I could protest, Cora switched on a little torch to light us up the steps. There was a lot of flapping and tchack-tchacking as we approached the top, but Cora called up to the jackdaws that it was only us and by the time we arrived all was peaceful. “Let me show Becky your chicks, Whacky‚” whispered Cora. “They’re so beautiful.”

Whacky flapped down from the heap of sticks and strutted proudly back and forth. I could see another
jackdaw’
s head sticking out at the top. “That’s the female,” said Cora. “She’ll shift in a minute if I give her some food and then you’ll be able to see the chicks. Here, you hold the torch and stand on tiptoe.” She pulled a screw of paper from her pocket and emptied it into her hand. “Here, girl, corn,” she said, and the greedy female struggled up off her chicks at once and climbed down on to Cora’s wrist. I stretched my arm up as far as I could, stood on tiptoe and directed the slender beam of torch-light into the nest. Sure enough, five ugly, bristly, little heads popped up on long wobbly necks. As I craned forward I nearly overbalanced on to the pile of twigs. “Watch out!” hissed Cora. I felt abashed and shone the torch on her. She was sitting on the floor with the jackdaws beside her, eating from her hand. “Greedy pair, aren’t they?” she said smiling up at me. The sharpness in her voice had been only a warning-note.

I was to hear it often during our night outings, as she jerked me back from a rabbit-hole I was about to stick my foot in, or stopped me from blundering straight into a concealed pool. Her eyes were as sharp as a cat’s, her sense
of smell like a fox’s. I stumbled blindly after her and would have scarcely seen anything if she hadn’t shown me.

Later, that first night, we went on the common. By this time I was finding it quite a strain trying to see. I felt as if my eyes were reaching right out of their sockets in an effort to make the most of the moonlight.

“Are we going to see anything special? Or are we just here on the off-chance?” I whispered.

“You can speak normally, you know. There’s nobody around.”

But I couldn’t speak normally. I jumped and trembled at every crackle underfoot or puff of wind and hung on to Cora’s arm as if my life depended upon it. What I thought she could possibly do in the event of any of my worst horrors actually materialising I’ve no idea. But at least I was determined not to lose her. We ended up in a little wood on one side of the common. I’d never been here
before
. It was very dark; the leaves rustled and hushed, rustled and hushed, as the breeze came and went. I wasn’t sorry when Cora sat down with her back to a big tree-trunk and pulled me down beside her.

“Let’s sit here for a bit and see what happens,” she said and pulled out a bag of toffees. “Try not to make a row chewing and rattling papers.”

“What might happen?”

“You’ll see. Don’t talk.”

We sat for a long time, hunched together, silent. At one stage my eyes stopped bulging and popping out of my head and nearly closed instead. Sleep was amazingly near. Then Cora nudged me and I could hear a grunting, snuffling, snorting very close by. It seemed to be right beside us and I snatched my feet up under me. “Shh!” hissed Cora in my ear. Suddenly she switched on a little red light and in its
glow I made out a black-and-white striped badger-head some yards off—further away than I’d thought. It was poking up out of a hole, nose in the air, sniffing and peering. Then out it came, about three feet of it in all, like a hunched-up, hairy, grey dog, and began grubbing about along a little pathway outside its hole. I knew of the existence of badgers, of course, but the sight of it there, right under my nose, shook me.

I brought my lips right up to Cora’s ear. “Will it attack us?”

She didn’t speak but I saw her shaking her head and smiling.

“They can’t see this red light,” she whispered later. “It used to belong to Mum, you know.” Then she pointed and I looked back at the hole to see another badger-head popping out—a baby one—followed by two more. These were much less cautious than the adult as they burst out of the
confines
of the sett, and rolled and romped around on the sandy path and in and out of the bracken on either side. The air was full of their grunts and whimpers and squeals and snorts. The adult largely ignored them and busied itself rolling up bundles of bracken and shuffling backwards into its tunnel with the whole lot under its chin. I was thoroughly engrossed in watching all the antics and totally relaxed for the first time since I’d crept out of the house. Then suddenly a blood-curdling scream from somewhere deeper in the wood came ripping through the air. It sounded as if someone was being slaughtered. I gaped at Cora but, before I could speak, two more screams tore through the darkness. The badgers stood stock-still, noses in the air.

“Switch the torch off—we’ll be seen!” I tried to grab the torch from Cora.

“Shut up, you idiot!” she snapped. “It’s another badger.”

“
That!
It
ca
n’
t
be!
Please
put the light out.”

“We won’t see it if I do.”

“That was a
human
scream. There
is
someone there. Something awful’s happening. Let’s run for it.” My temples were throbbing with terror. I stood up.

Then: “Look! Look!” said Cora and pointed. Another big badger came nosing along the path towards the sett. He sniffed at the others and pushed his way past them into the hole. With one accord they all followed and, in no time, there we were again, just Cora and me, alone, with our backs against a tree-trunk, in the middle of a wood, in the middle of the night.

“Sorry,” I said.

“That’s O.K.,” she said. “Have another toffee. Then we should go, I think.”

All the way home she told me details about badgers and their ways, and I wasn’t frightened at all. I crept in our back door at half-past four, locked it behind me and sneaked upstairs to bed. Nobody heard me.

In the morning I didn’t know whether to feel very clever or very guilty as Mother bustled round making breakfast and the usual good-humoured conversation. Her
cheerfulness
made me irritable but at school, as I day-dreamed sleepily through the lessons and gazed at the back of Cora’s black head, the thrills of our night excursion rushed back to me. I couldn’t wait to go again.

And we did go. Lots of times. They were nights I have never forgotten—usually warm, and still, and starlit, but sometimes Cora would come on a night that was windy and wild, and we’d watch the branches bowing and clouds tossing across the face of the moon. Cora usually had
something
specific in mind for us to watch or hear, but not
always
. We heard nightingales and nightjars and owls. We
watched the badgers on numerous occasions and saw bats and once a fox. One night we went to the big pond on the common and listened to the croak-croaking of vast
numbers
of frogs. If it rained we went into the bell-tower and sheltered with Whacky. Once we sat up there in a
thunderstorm
and heard the huge black bell overhead reverberating echoes of the thunder peals and saw each other’s faces as clear as day in the flashes of lightning which shot in through invisible cracks in the stonework. Sometimes we sat in Cora’s garden-shed and talked, and played with her pet hedgehog, Thatch. At first I used to feel a bit sick watching him guzzle down the worms and slugs we took him, but in the end I fell for him, prickles, ticks and all. We very seldom saw anybody at all during our escapades; odd rustles and thumps would turn out to be birds and rabbits we’d disturbed. Occasionally we’d almost stumble over a courting couple but, as Cora had predicted, they didn’t have eyes for us. Only on one occasion did anything unusual or spine-chilling happen.

It was a gusty, blustery, black sort of night. At times the wind would clear the moon for a few seconds and an eerie, silver light would shimmer on ruffled puddles and our wet faces. Then it would be black as pitch again for half an hour or so. We were bumping against each other as we stumbled across the common and laughing a bit hysterically and thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s galloping
horseman
. Cora was teasing me, I remember, and I was giggling nervously. “Whenever the trees are crying aloud,” she was intoning in the complete blackness … When, suddenly, the moon shone out again—and there was a bulky,
black-cloaked
figure right in our path. We all saw each other at once as the moon shone full on our startled, grey-white, night faces. The figure straightened up and pushed back its
dripping hair—its lips were black and gaping, its nose hooked, its eyes wild. It was Mrs. Briggs.

I couldn’t move.

Cora seized my hand. She screamed once: “Run!” The moon went out and we turned in the dark and dashed for it. Cora was fleet and sure-footed. Without her I would have fallen flat on my face in seconds. For a while we could hear the cursing Mrs. Briggs plunging after us. But at last we were sure we had left her far behind and that the panting and puffing we fancied we heard when we stopped dead to listen was only the wind which we’d been enjoying so much earlier.

“D’you think she knew it was us?” I gasped.

Cora looked at me closely in the torchlight as we squatted in the shed beside a rummaging Thatch. We both had macs on with hoods pulled up and tied tightly under our chins. “Not for sure. You don’t look like you with your hair all pushed back under your hood. And she only caught a glimpse of us.”