Playing Beatie Bow (8 page)

‘Well, I don’t truly know,’ said Abigail, ‘but I think I can guess.’

‘Tell me!’ cried Beatie, bright-eyed.

‘We’ll trade,’ said Abigail.

‘I dinna know what you mean,’ said Beatie suspiciously.

‘You say you can’t get me back to where I came from. Maybe that’s true. But could you help me to Harrington Street? Because that’s where things started to change. And maybe if I got back there …’

‘I could. But it wunna be easy because Granny thinks you’re none other than …’ Beatie stopped short.

‘I know. The Stranger, whatever that is. But will you help me get to Harrington Street, when my ankle’s a little better?’

‘I dinna like going agin Granny,’ muttered Beatie. ‘She’s got the Gift. It’s not what it was when she was a lass, but she’s still got powers.’

‘Very well, then. Go away,’ said Abigail, and she lay down and turned her back on Beatie. She heard the child fidgeting around, going to the door once or twice, then coming back hesitantly to stand beside the bed.

‘Right, I’ll help you, and the dear God help me if Granny kens what I’m doing, for she’s dead set on your staying. There, I’ve given my word. Now for your part of the bargain.’

Abigail sat up again. ‘I think those children were using your name in their game because you got to be famous.’

Beatie’s face flushed. ‘Me? You’re daft. Famous? In Elfland?’

‘It isn’t Elfland,’ said Abigail, exasperated. ‘How many more times? If I tell you where … what … that place is, do you solemnly swear it will be our secret?’

‘I swear,’ said Beatie. ‘I swear by my mother’s grave, and there inna anything in the world more sacred than that.’

So Abigail told her. The little girl burst into wrathful indignation.

‘You ought to be ashamed, telling me such lees. You’ll go to hell for it, and be toasted on a pitchfork!’

‘You saw it for yourself,’ said Abigail, taken aback, ‘the Bridge and the Opera House, and all the tall buildings. Why, I live in one of them, right at the top!’

‘You’re a damned leear. Such things inna possible except in Elfland.’ But the girl’s voice quavered.

‘I wouldn’t have thought this place, time, or whatever it is, would be possible either,’ Abigail said angrily.

‘What’s the matter with here then?’ shouted Beatie in a whisper.

‘For one thing, it stinks like a pig-pen, and for another they won’t let a girl have a proper education, and for another people can die here of fever, and smallpox, and diphtheria.’

Beatie was silent. Then she said hoarsely, ‘Don’t folk die of those things in … that time?’ When Abigail shook her head, Beatie broke into a passion of sobbing. ‘Then Mamma would still be alive, and the babby, and Gibbie wouldn’t be so sickly.’

Abigail let her sob. Suddenly she felt towards this wounded tough little scrap as she had felt towards Natalie in that other life. But she did not touch her. She knew instinctively that Beatie would throw off any sympathetic hand.

At last Beatie was silent.

‘I thought I was over it,’ she said in a stifled voice.

‘You will be some day.’

‘It wunna lees you told me, then?’

‘No,’ said Abigail. ‘But I want to get back as soon as I can walk properly because my mother and father will be anxious to death about me.’

Beatie nodded. ‘I know how you feel about your mother. When I cried when Mamma was dying, Dovey said “Dunna let her go to her reward fretting about you, child” – that’s what she said. “For Granny and I are here to look after you and Gib. I’ll be your mother, hen,” she said. “Smile now and let your mamma be at ease.” So I did.’

She was quiet for a while, sniffling. Then she said grudgingly, ‘You’re no’ so bad, you.’

‘Neither are you,’ said Abigail, grinning. ‘Is it a bargain then?’

Beatie stuck out her hard, work-harsh little fist and they shook hands.

During the next two days Abigail learnt a great deal about these people amongst whom she had been thrown in such a strange way. She learnt that the Orkneys were a hard and ancient group of islands set amongst dangerous seas north of Scotland. All of the family had been born there except Mr Bow the Englishman, Gibbie, and the baby boy who had died with his mother.

Dorcas Tallisker was the cousin of the Bows. Her mother had died when she was born, and she was reared by her fisherman father Robert Tallisker, and his mother, Granny. Two years before, Dovey’s father was drowned in a squall in Hoy Sound, off Stromness, and Granny had decided to emigrate to New South Wales to live with her daughter, Amelia, who had married an English soldier, Samuel Bow. When Dovey and Granny arrived, they found Amelia, the children Beatie and Gilbert, and a six-months-old infant, deathly ill with the fever.

‘What kind of fever?’ thought Abigail uneasily, remembering that though she had been immunised against most modern infectious diseases, a dockside area of the 1870s very likely had plenty of lethal bugs of its own.

‘The typhoid,’ said Beatie. ‘’Tis very common in these parts.’

Abigail decided she’d drink nothing but tea. At least she would know the water had been boiled.

‘And now tell me about the Gift,’ she said. Beatie gave her a scared look.

‘No, I wunna. Granny would ne’er forgive me. It’s the family Gift, you see.’

‘But I’m connected with it in some way. I’m the Stranger. Even your father said so. I ought to know what it is; it’s my right. Tell me or I’ll ask Granny.’

‘Dunna,’ pleaded the child. ‘I’m gey scared of it, Abby. I dunna want it. I just want to be a scholar. I dunna want to see things and know things a mortal body shouldna know.’

‘Why,’ Abigail thought, ‘it’s the second sight, ESP, or something. And Beatie’s afraid that she might have it too, poor brat.’

But she said nothing.

By the third day she was allowed to get dressed and be carried downstairs by Mr Bow. In fact she was dressed by Dovey: for when confronted with the garments the older girl lent her she had not the faintest idea how to put them on. There was a boned bodice of stiff calico fastened with rows of strong hooks and eyes at the back. Abigail eyed it with distaste.

‘Where’s my own underwear?’ she demanded.

‘But you had hardly a thing for underclothes,’ answered Dovey. ‘Just a few queer rags and drawers the size of a baby’s. Now, slip your arms through here, and I’ll hook you up, and you’ll be more comfortable.’

Scowling, Abigail did so. She also obediently drew on the cotton knickers and the long flannel ones that went over them, a waist petticoat that tied with a tape, and a woollen blouse that had long full sleeves and did up to the neck with an endless row of pearl buttons.

‘She’s such a skinny wee thing she won’t need the stays, Granny,’ said Dovey. Abigail thanked heaven.

‘I’m boiling,’ she said. ‘I don’t wear heavy clothes like this, ever!’

‘’Tis the kind of clothes worn at this season,’ said Granny with her quiet inflexibility, ‘and Dovey’s best, at that.’

‘I do thank you,’ said Abigail awkwardly, ‘but it’s not what I’m used to, you see.’

When she was completely dressed, in a long dark serge skirt over the blouse, a ribbon belt with a pewter buckle, knee-high stockings of hand-knitted wool in circles of brown and yellow, and one of Granny’s best buttoned boots (for Dovey had feet as tiny as her hands, and her boots would not fit Abigail by three sizes) on her good leg, she felt like a wooden image, stiff, clumsy, and half choked with the smell of mothballs and lavender that drifted from the fabric. On her other foot she had a knitted slipper with a fringed top. She hopped over to the mirror and recoiled.

‘I never saw such a scarecrow in my life!’

She looked so hideous she could have cried. But she had finished with crying; and, anyway, she couldn’t afford to lose her eyes as well.

‘You’ll look more yourself when your hair is brushed,’ said Dovey in her soothing way. She brushed Abigail’s hair flat off her forehead and plaited it tightly from the nape of her neck. The corners of Abigail’s eyes were pulled taut, so that she looked like a beaten-up Oriental. A huge greenish-blue bruise extended from her forehead to her cheek. Her nose had become pointy, and her teeth seemed to stick out.

‘Dracula teeth,’ she said mournfully, then hurriedly covered her slip by murmuring, ‘I look so awful!’

‘Beauty does not matter. It is all vanity, the Good Book says,’ reproved Dovey gently.

‘No wonder people in Victorian photographs look so monstrous,’ thought Abigail. ‘They didn’t have a chance, what with no make-up, ugly hair-dos and clothes that would make the skinniest woman look like a haystack.’

Mr Bow carried her downstairs. He seemed silent and absent-minded. There was a peculiar dull sheen in his eyes, and a red patch on each cheek.

Downstairs the odours of sweet-making were strong. Abigail could smell aniseed, treacle, hot butter, and boiling sugar.

She said, ‘I’d so like to see the shop, Mr Bow.’ But he did not seem to hear.

‘I bet he’s working up to another spell,’ she thought uneasily. Being so close to his head she could see the old wound in his skull, a scarred hole only half covered by the ashy grey hair. It was so big she could have laid the fingers of one hand in it. She shuddered and looked away.

‘What did they fight with in that Crimean War? Axes?’ she wondered. ‘How it must have hurt!’

He carried her into the little front room. A small fire burnt in the basket grate. The furniture, covered with rose-patterned plush and stuffed as hard as bricks with horsehair, was plainly not for sitting on. Abigail was placed in a rocking-chair to one side of the fireplace. (‘As if I were one of a pair of china dogs,’ she thought later.) On the other side, in a smaller rocking-chair, swathed in shawls, was a small peaky-faced boy.

‘I’m Gilbert Samuel Bow,’ he announced in an important and yet tremulous voice, ‘and I’m in a decline. But if I live to my next birthday I’ll be ten.’

Abigail looked at him with distaste. She felt like saying, ‘Why bother?’ But Dovey was hovering around, so she didn’t.

Gibbie peered out of his huddle of shawls like a small wizened monk. His head had been shaved. It was not an agreeable head, being bony, bumpy, and bluish.

‘Mercy on us!’ piped this monkish person. ‘You’re as plain as a toad.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Abigail, nettled. ‘You’re not exactly a dazzler yourself.’

The little face assumed an expression of insufferable piety. ‘I expect you know I’m not long for this world. I’ve been given up by the doctors.’

Dovey limped in with two bowls of broth on a tray and a box of dominoes.

‘Just to pass the time away,’ she said coaxingly. Gibbie turned up his eyes and said, ‘I mun turn away from the things of this world.’

‘Oh, fiddlesticks!’ growled Abigail. ‘You’d get better faster if you moved yourself out in the sun and fresh air, instead of lying around like an old granny.’

Dovey reproved her. ‘Gibbie has been nigh to death, Abby,’ she said.

Gibbie put on a holy face. ‘And I still am. Maybe by my birthday I shall be with my mamma and the angels in heaven.’

Abigail looked disgusted. It seemed to her that a good spank on the backside would do wonders for this whiney, self-important little monster. She marvelled at Dovey’s patience with him. Typical Victorian morbidity about the sick and the dead, she thought, remembering what her mother had said about this mildewed aspect of the Victorian era. Certainly kilos of ‘mourning’ stuff came into Magpies – jet jewellery; brooches containing wreaths of the dear departed’s hair; once an onyx-framed miniature topped with two delightful tiny weeping angels. The miniature was of a white-eyed gentleman with side-whiskers and carnation cheeks. It had gone off, to the accompaniment of shrieks of laughter, as a conversation piece. At the time Abigail had thought the buyer’s mirth unbearably vulgar; because, after all, that man had once been real and someone had loved him and missed him when he died.

But now, in the middle of it all, and real as she was, all she could feel was exasperation and grumpiness. It was partly because she wasn’t as clean as she was used to being. She loathed this. Her hair was lank and greasy. That morning she had asked Dovey if she could wash it in the bathroom and the elder girl had gazed at her in innocent dismay.

‘But there’s no such place, Abby love, only in the grand houses!’

Abigail, who was accustomed to dashing under the shower whenever she felt like it, was aghast.

‘But however do you keep clean?’

Dovey explained that on Saturday nights Granny and the girls bathed in front of the bedroom fire. Uncle Samuel brought up the wooden tub and the hot water, and emptied it afterwards.

‘The menfolk wash in front of the kitchen fire, do you see? But it must be on Saturday, so as to be clean and proper for the Sabbath.’

‘But your clothes, how do you wash them?’ asked Abigail.

Dovey said, a little indignantly, ‘Our linen is boiled in the downstairs copper every Monday, rain or shine, and hung out to bleach in the yard. And our outer clothes are sponged regular every month with vinegar or ivy water, which is a fine cleanser, and better than the ammonia some use. Oh, we keep good and cleanly, have no fear of that!’

‘Oh, sugar!’ thought Abigail in despair. ‘No wonder everyone whiffs like an old dishcloth.’

It had never occurred to her that manufacturers would actually produce a fabric that couldn’t be washed or dry-cleaned (though she supposed the vinegar and ivy-water, whatever that was, was a kind of dry-or-damp cleaning). Probably Granny’s black linsey-wool dress had never had a wash in its life, though it smelt clean enough – if you liked the smell of camphor and lavender water, that is.

‘Well,’ she thought, ‘I’ve just got to get used to it – even beastly grubby hair. Just fancy what these people would think of drip-dry clothes!’

‘Ye hae’na noticed I haven’t touched a sip of ma broth,’ complained Gibbie.

Abigail, who had eaten hers enthusiastically, for she felt hungry this last day or two, said, ‘Too bad for you. It’s good.’

‘I been thinking on my funeral,’ Gibbie said pleasurably. ‘Six black horses I’ll have, with plumes, and four men in tall hats with black streamers and a dead cart covered in flowers. But my coffin will be white because I’m just an innocent child.’