Bleak Expectations (15 page)

‘Fine, I shall carry it.’

‘Thanks!’ Harry handed the anvil over and, with an elastic
sproing
, his arms sprang back to their normal length – though initially they twanged back a bit further so that for a brief moment his arms were ridiculously short and he looked like a small, plump dinosaur.

I immediately wished I had broken the law and said no: the anvil felt heavier than an elephant fed on lead-filled suet pudding. I plodded slowly forward, my feet squelching on the wet ground, for it was raining hard now, great splattery drops smacking into us, soaking and slowing, and the wind was picking up also, driving the liquid weather into us at speed.

As I write these words, towards the end of the glorious nineteenth century, we have tamed the climate with liberal burnings of coal, gas and liberals. But back then the weather was far more severe and eccentric. Everyone remembers the Thames used to freeze over in winter, but we forget that in summer the river Severn used regularly to boil. The people of Shrewsbury would stand on bridges and hurl tea, milk and sugar into the steamy, rushing waters, then hurry downstream to enjoy a cuppa straight from the river.

And the winds! Few people now know that Norfolk used to be right next to Somerset before a hurri-twister-phoon blew it all the way to East Anglia, explaining why Norfolk and Somerset accents sound so similar – it is not just actors being lazy.
³

Then there were the rains, such as the great storm which, thank God, flooded the valley between England and France, aquatically separating them for ever. And it seemed as if we were in the teeth of another such downpour, one so rain-filled that it was what we used to call an air-bath.

Rain lashed at us, like an angry sadist in an underwater lash factory. As I trudged on, my vision shrank to a few blurry feet, then several unfocused inches and ultimately a water-dimmed nothing.

‘Is everyone all right?’ I asked, into the rainy turmoil, and during the brief seconds my mouth was open so much rain entered that I felt briefly as if I was drowning. It caused me a momentary panic; but much worse was the panic I felt when I realized that there had been no response from my companions. I risked drowning again by yelling, ‘Pippa? Poppy? Aunt Lily? Harry?’

Nothing.

I yelled again, but still nothing.

There was no sign of them. We had clearly become separated, and I was now alone – though what choice did I have other than to proceed?

Actually, I could easily have stopped, sought shelter, maybe given up entirely, abandoned my family and used the anvil to eke out a living as an itinerant blacksmith.

I chose not this last, however, instead trudging onwards, onwards and, where there was higher ground, upwards. The anvil was so heavy I was tempted to leave it, but dreaded Pippa and Poppy’s wrath if I did so. I tried briefly to use it as a heavy iron hat to protect me against the rain, but that really didn’t work so I simply carried it and got wet.

And I was wet indeed, so, so wet. The rain soaked me not just to the skin but to the bones and organs beneath, my gall-bladder getting so wet it got cross and became a galled-bladder, and I was just beginning to think that I could not possibly get any wetter when I realized that it was in fact not raining any more and that I had walked into a lake.

Fortunately it was not a deep lake, the water reaching only to my chest, and what was more, it offered sustenance to my now hungry self, for it teemed with fish, eels and, that most delicious of aquatic creatures, the underwater squirrel, an animal so tasty that in the past fifty years it has been eaten to extinction.
⁴
Alas for them, but hurrah for me, they were friendly little rodents, who quickly came to investigate my presence and, exploiting them mercilessly, I caught and ate three.

Yum.

My strength replenished, I waded onwards until I reached the far shore. I was now in an area of marshy grassland, flat, muddy and forlorn, but ahead of me I saw something that brought great cheer to my heart: a church spire. Was it St Reluctant’s? Could I yet save my mother? Had Providence and an unanticipated shortcut across a lake brought me to the right place?

The spire was but a hundred yards off and I made haste towards it, albeit anvil-handicapped haste. A stone wall separated the churchyard from the marshes, but it was dilapidated and tumbly-downy, and I quickly scrambled up and over. And there amid the gravestones, wedding-rocks and baptism-boulders
⁵
was a sign indicating the name of the church: St Reluctant’s.

I had made it!

And, better yet, there was no sign of a carriage or of any other human presence. I appeared to have beaten Mr Benevolent.

Victory might yet be mine!

I decided to check vocally the absence of presence before advancing to the church itself, and cried out, ‘Hello! Is there anyone here?’

There was a short pause, and then came a reply: ‘No!’

That was reassuring.

Although . . .

Hang on a minute . . .

Though the word ‘no’ indicated no one else was there, the mere fact of its utterance contradicted its own meaning. But before I could process the implications, a dread figure loomed up from between two gravestones, scarred and muddied, grim-faced and terrifying, and seized me in its terrible arms.

Oh, blimey.

¹
The word ‘camouflage’ wasn’t invented until 1922 by the Russian Professor Hidin Maskirovska.

²
When Edward VI inherited the throne after Henry VIII’s death in 1547, his two older sisters (the future queens Mary and Elizabeth I) were so cross at being literally overruled that they passed the
Frater Faciendum
Act just to annoy him.

³
Yes, it is.

⁴
There were many more underwater versions of common land mammals before the twentieth century. Sadly for their continued existence, they were all absolutely delicious.

⁵
There was a proliferation of churchyard ornaments during the ever-commemorating nineteenth century. As well as those mentioned in the text, there were midnight-mass monoliths, harvest-festival pebbles and regular scatterings of Sunday-morning-service gravel. Eventually in 1903 Archbishop of Canterbury Erasmus Joyfree banned memorials for anything other than graves, hoping to teach people a miserable ecclesiastical lesson.

Aaarrggh, was my first thought; my second and third thoughts were of a similar ilk, as were my fourth, fifth and sixth. It was not until my seventh thought that I concocted a more rational mental response, and even that was ‘I’m terrified.’

‘Hold your noise,’ hissed the dread figure, from its twisted, broken-toothed mouth, ‘or I’ll cut you from gizzard to guzzard.’
¹

This prospect did not seem a pleasant one so I held my noise, cupping one hand over my mouth to do so quite literally, whimpering scared sounds into it like the frightened child I was.

Satisfied by my silence, the figure now released me and stepped back, and I got my first unstartled look at him – for I now saw that it was a him. His face was fierce and covered with the nicks and scratches of a man who has fought nettles and briars and brambles, or is just not very good at shaving; he was shoeless, and limped awkwardly on hurty feet that were bruised and stone-bashed and flint-cut; his ankles were shackled by a leg-iron-anchored chain; and he was wearing a pristine white wedding dress.

This last, it must be said, surprised me.

‘Release your noise and tell me your name, boy.’

I removed my hand from my mouth and whispered nervously, ‘Pip, sir.’

‘Whassat? Speak up, young cully.’

‘Pip, sir,’ I repeated, more strongly this time. ‘Pip Bin.’

‘How do, Pip Bin?’ he now said, in a considerably friendlier tone than that in which all the gizzard-cutting threats had been delivered.

Emboldened by this tonal turn, I asked, ‘Do you have a name, sir?’

‘Aye. It’s Havertwitch, Bakewell Havertwitch.’

At this I could not help my instinctive response: ‘And do you, as your name might suggest, have a twitch?’

‘No,’ he said, a brief spasm running down the left-hand side of his face and giving the lie to his answer. ‘But I do bake well. Eccles cake?’

From a muddy sack beside him he proffered a curranty treat. Not wanting to risk a gizzard cutting, I accepted it and took a great bite.

It was disgusting, thereby also giving the lie to the other half of his name claim. Not that I mentioned that because I was still pretty scared, though I did make a mental note that his name actually should have been Bakesbadly Really-Does-Have-A-Twitch.

‘Mmm, delicious,’ I lied. Hoping to distract him and so be able to dispose of the repellent cake, I asked, ‘Are you an escaped criminal, sir?’ For surely a man in such a place and state could only be that.

‘Escaped criminal? No! By heaven, no!’ He seemed most offended. ‘I’m an absconded wrongdoer, a fleeing malefactor, a running-away dodgy geezer or a broken-out incarcerated person of somewhat lax moral probity.’ I looked at the synonymizing wastrel, and he seemed to give in. ‘Yes, I am basically an escaped prisoner.’

‘From the hulks, sir?’ One of these vile prison ships was moored on the nearby estuary, indeed the largest one yet commissioned, a former navy frigate called HMS
Banner
, now painted bright green and known popularly as the Incredible Hulk.

‘Aye. But I shouldn’t have been there! I didn’t do nothing wrong!’

This last phrase seemed to indicate he had done something wrong, though allowance for bad grammar could lend a more favourable meaning to his denial.

‘What didn’t you do wrong, sir?’

‘They said I stole a loaf of bread. But I never!’ He looked wistfully away, and I took the chance to flip the gruesome Eccles cake into a nearby patch of nettles. It struck one of the rabbits hopping there and killed it stone dead. ‘I actually stole some flour, water, salt and yeast. But then the Bow Street Runners got after me so I stuffed everything down my trousers and ran. Well, it wor a long chase and a hot day, and when they caught me, all that running and heat had mixed the stuff together and cooked it up into a trouser loaf . . .’

He trailed off sadly, and I thought perhaps he was not such a bad man as he had first appeared. Though he was still as bad a baker as he had first appeared, for the nasty taste of burned currants and over-larded pastry persisted in my mouth.

‘And why do you wear a wedding dress, sir?’ This incongruity had begged an answer since I had first seen it, and now it got one.

‘I found it in the vestry of this ’ere church and I put it on because, first, it really suits me and, second, it’s a good disguise. Who’s going to stop a happy bride and haul her off to prison, eh? Now, if only I had some way of breaking these shackles.’ He indicated the leg-irons round his ankles.

‘I have an anvil, sir.’ For I did. I pointed to where it had lain nearby since I had dropped it on first being surprised by him.

‘That is mighty convenient.’

It was. With two mighty strikes of one of his rock-hard Eccles cakes, the chain and shackles were shattered and he was free.

‘Thank ’ee, young cully.’

With that he was away, leaping over the crumbling churchyard wall and running off through the marshy surroundings, the train of his wedding dress trailing behind him. ‘I’ll not forget you!’ he yelled back, as he ran. ‘One day I shall repay your help and kindness, Mick Grin!’

‘That’s Pip Bin,’ I corrected.

‘Of course. Slip Tin, I shall remember that name!’

‘No, Pip Bin,’ I once more corrected.

‘Got it, Drip Flim.’

‘No, it’s—’ But it was too late: he was out of earshot and word-range, now just a speck of white on the horizon.

Then, behind me, I heard the snorts of panting horses and the crunch of carriage wheels approaching and, turning, I saw that Mr Benevolent had arrived, which meant that so had my mother-rescuing time of destiny.

¹
‘Guzzard’ was an alternative spelling of ‘gizzard’ so the threat is tautological. Unless it is a misprint for ‘gazzard’, a now disused word for the loose bit of skin on the elbow, though this would have required a level of skill with a blade more akin to that of a surgeon than an escaped criminal. Oh, hang on, just realized: the revelation that this is an escaped criminal hasn’t happened yet. Oops, sorry, slight story-ruining, something I promised I wouldn’t do. Don’t worry, I’m certainly not going to ruin it any more by saying that this character goes on to— Ah, no, caught myself in time.

The carriage came to a halt and, peering out from behind a wedding-rock, I watched as the door opened and Mr Benevolent emerged and raged, ‘Damnable storm! It must have taken us an hour to replace those drowned horses.’

The storm must also have turned the local roads to quagmires, for the carriage was clotted with mud even up to the sill of the door, and how glad I was of that meteorological event and its cunctatory effects!

Now my mother descended from the carriage, singing to herself:

‘I’m a little tablecloth clean and neat,
Aren’t I pretty, aren’t I sweet?
I’m not a bath towel or a sheet,
I go on the table and get covered with meat.’

Alas, poor Mother, still doolally and bonkers-chops! ‘Come on, you mentalist, let’s get you inside and into your wedding dress.’ Mr Benevolent dragged her towards the church door and then in, the driver stomping behind them, a mute slab of grumpy-looking man-muscle – not just a coachman but evidently henchman also.

I stepped out from behind the wedding-rock ready to follow them, but a shout stopped me.

‘Pip Bin!’

Why, it was Harry, come to aid me! As he entered the churchyard I clasped him in a strong, male embrace with no hint of forbidden love or anything other than strong, non-beastly companionship. ‘Are the others with you?’

‘We are!’ came a chorus of presence-stating from Pippa, Poppy and Aunt Lily, who now also arrived in the churchyard.