The Means of Escape (10 page)

‘And the señora will buy the Holy Child,’ Rosario asked with calm confidence. ‘Certainly you will want the Jesucristo.’

‘But it’s so big, Rosario,’ cried Mrs Sheridan, for the infant Jesus had clearly been salvaged from another ‘set’ and was over a foot long. Made of rough earthenware, he towered over the delicate miniatures.

‘What does it matter if He is big,’ said Rosario, wrapping up the figure swiftly in a piece of greyish-white paper. ‘After all, He is the King of the whole world.’

Mrs Sheridan looked round at the mercado, at the ruined black stumps of wood, which seemed bewildered, and the silent black stumps of old men and women.

‘Oh, Rosario, I’m so sorry! – so very sorry about everything!’

‘You mustn’t worry so much,’ said Rosario. ‘That is a fault …
venimos prestados
– our lives are only lent to us.’

J
ack Digby’s mother never gave him anything. Perhaps, as a poor woman, she had nothing to give, or perhaps she was not sure how to divide anything between the nine children. His godmother, Mrs Piercy, the poulterer’s wife, did give him something, a keepsake, in the form of a gilt medal. The date on it was September the 12th, 1663, which happened to be Jack’s birthday, although by the time she gave it him he was eleven years old. On the back there was the figure of an angel and a motto,
Desideratus
, which, perhaps didn’t fit the case too well, since Mrs Digby could have done with fewer, rather than more, children. However, it had taken the godmother’s fancy.

Jack thanked her, and she advised him to stow it away safely, out of reach of the other children. Jack was amazed that she should think anywhere was out of the reach of his little sisters. ‘You should have had it earlier, when you were born,’ said Mrs Piercy, ‘but those were hard times.’ Jack told her that he was very glad to have something of which he could say, This is my own, and
she answered, though not with much conviction, that he mustn’t set too much importance on earthly possessions.

He kept the medal with him always, only transferring it, as the year went by, from his summer to his winter breeches. But anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later. Jack had an errand to do in Hending, but there was nothing on the road that day, neither horse nor cart, no hope of cadging a lift, so after waiting for an hour or so he began to walk over by the hill path.

After about a mile the hill slopes away sharply towards Watching, which is not a village and never was, only a single great house standing among its outbuildings almost at the bottom of the valley. Jack stopped there for a while to look down at the smoke from the chimneys and to calculate, as anyone might have done, the number of dinners that were being cooked there that day.

If he dropped or lost his keepsake he did not know it at the time, for as is commonly the case he didn’t miss it until he got home again. Then he went through his pockets, but the shining medal was gone and he could only repeat, ‘I had it when I started out.’ His brothers and sisters were of no help at all. They had seen nothing. What brother or sister likes being asked such questions?

The winter frosts began and at Michaelmas Jack had the day off school and thought, I had better try going that way again. He halted, as before, at the highest point, to look down at the great house and its chimneys, and then at the ice under his feet, for all the brooks, ponds,
and runnels were frozen on every side of him, all hard as bone. In a little hole or depression just to the left hand of the path, something no bigger than a small puddle, but deep, and by now set thick with greenish ice as clear as glass, he saw, through the transparency of the ice, at the depth of perhaps twelve inches, the keepsake that Mrs Piercy had given him.

He had nothing in his hand to break the ice. Well then, Jack Digby, jump on it, but that got him nowhere, seeing that his wretched pair of boots was soaked right through. ‘I’ll wait until the ice has gone,’ he thought. ‘The season is turning, we’ll get a thaw in a day or two.’

On the next Sunday, by which time the thaw had set in, he was up there again, and made straight for the little hole or declivity, and found nothing. It was empty, after that short time, of ice and even of water. And because the idea of recovering the keepsake had occupied his whole mind that day, the disappointment made him feel lost, like a stranger to the country. Then he noticed that there was an earthenware pipe laid straight down the side of the hill, by way of a drain, and that this must very likely have carried off the water from his hole, and everything in it. No mystery as to where it led, it joined another pipe with a wider bore, and so down, I suppose, to the stable-yards, thought Jack. His Desideratus had been washed down there, he was as sure of that now as if he’d seen it go.

Jack had never been anywhere near the house before, and did not care to knock at the great kitchen doors for
fear of being taken for a beggar. The yards were empty. Either the horses had been taken out to work now that the ground was softer or else – which was hard to believe – there were no horses at Watching. He went back to the kitchen wing and tried knocking at a smallish side entrance. A man came out dressed in a black gown, and stood there peering and trembling.

‘Why don’t you take off your cap to me?’ he asked.

Jack took it off, and held it behind his back, as though it belonged to someone else.

‘That is better. Who do you think I am?’

‘No offence, sir,’ Jack replied, ‘but you look like an old schoolmaster.’

‘I am a schoolmaster, that is, I am tutor to this great house. If you have a question to ask, you may ask it of me.’

With one foot still on the step, Jack related the story of his godmother’s keepsake.

‘Very good,’ said the tutor, ‘you have told me enough. Now I am going to test your memory. You will agree that this is not only necessary, but just.’

‘I can’t see that it has anything to do with my matter,’ said Jack.

‘Oh, but you tell me that you dropped this-or-that in such-and-such a place, and in that way lost what had been given to you. How can I tell that you have truthfully remembered all this? You know that when I came to the door you did not remember to take your cap off.’

‘But that—’

‘You mean that was only lack of decent manners, and shows that you come from a family without self-respect. Now, let us test your memory. Do you know the Scriptures?’

Jack said that he did, and the tutor asked him what happened, in the fourth chapter of the Book of Job, to Eliphaz the Temanite, when a vision came to him in the depth of the night.

‘A spirit passed before his face, sir, and the hair of his flesh stood up.’

‘The hair of his flesh stood up,’ the tutor repeated. ‘And now, have they taught you any Latin?’ Jack said that he knew the word that had been on his medal, and that it was
Desideratus
, meaning long wished-for.

‘That is not an exact translation,’ said the tutor. Jack thought, he talks for talking’s sake.

‘Have you many to teach, sir, in this house?’ he asked, but the tutor half closed his eyes and said, ‘None, none at all. God has not blessed Mr Jonas or either of his late wives with children. Mr Jonas has not multiplied.’

If that is so, Jack thought, this schoolmaster can’t have much work to do. But now at last here was somebody with more sense, a house-keeperish-looking woman, come to see why the side-door was open and letting cold air into the passages. ‘What does the boy want?’ she asked.

‘He says he is in search of something that belongs to him.’

‘You might have told him to come in, then, and given him a glass of wine in the kitchen,’ she said, less out of
kindness than to put the tutor in his place. ‘He would have been glad of that, I daresay.’

Jack told her at once that at home they never touched wine. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Children who are too strictly prohibited generally turn out drunkards.’ There’s no pleasing these people, Jack thought.

His whole story had to be gone through again, and then again when they got among the servants in one of the pantries. Yet really there was almost nothing to tell, the only remarkable point being that he should have seen the keepsake clearly through almost a foot of ice. Still nothing was said as to its being found in any of the yards or ponds.

Among all the to-ing and fro-ing another servant came in, the man who attended on the master, Mr Jonas, himself. His arrival caused a kind of disquiet, as though he were a foreigner. The master, he said, had got word that there was a farm-boy, or a schoolboy, in the kitchens, come for something that he thought was his property.

‘But all this is not for Mr Jonas’s notice,’ cried the tutor. ‘It’s a story of child’s stuff, a child’s mischance, not at all fitting for him to look into.’

The man repeated that the master wanted to see the boy.

The other part of the house, the greater part, where Mr Jonas lived, was much quieter, the abode of gentry. In the main hall Mr Jonas himself stood with his back to the fire. Jack had never before been alone or dreamed of being alone with such a person. What a pickle, he thought, my godmother, Mrs Piercy, has brought me into.

‘I daresay you would rather have a sum of money,’ said Mr Jonas, not loudly, ‘than whatever it is that you have lost.’

Jack was seized by a painful doubt. To be honest, if it was to be a large sum of money, he would rather have that than anything. But Mr Jonas went on, ‘However, you had better understand me more precisely. Come with me.’ And he led the way, without even looking round to see that he was followed.

At the foot of the wide staircase Jack called out from behind, ‘I think, sir, I won’t go any further. What I lost can’t be here.’

‘It’s poor-spirited to say “I won’t go any further”,’ said Mr Jonas.

Was it possible that on these dark upper floors no one else was living, no one was sleeping? They were like a sepulchre, or a barn at the end of winter. Through the tall passages, over uneven floors, Mr Jonas, walking ahead, carried a candle in its candlestick in each hand, the flames pointing straight upwards. I am very far from home, thought Jack. Then, padding along behind the master of the house, and still twisting his cap in one hand, he saw in dismay that the candle flames were blown over to the left, and a door was open to the right.

‘Am I to go in there with you, sir?’

‘Are you afraid to go into a room?’

Inside it was dark and in fact the room probably never got much light, the window was so high up. There was a glazed jug and basin, which reflected the candles, and
a large bed which had no curtains, or perhaps, in spite of the cold, they had been drawn back. There seemed to be neither quilts nor bedding, but a boy was lying there in a linen gown, with his back towards Jack, who saw that he had red or reddish hair, much the same colour as his own.

‘You may go near him, and see him more clearly,’ Mr Jonas said. ‘His arm is hanging down, what do you make of that?’

‘I think it hangs oddly, sir.’

He remembered what the tutor had told him, that Mr Jonas had not multiplied his kind, and asked, ‘What is his name, sir?’ To this he got no answer.

Mr Jonas gestured to him to move nearer, and said, ‘You may take his hand.’

‘No, sir, I can’t do that.’

‘Why not? You must touch other children very often. Wherever you live, you must sleep the Lord knows how many in a bed.’

‘Only three in a bed at ours,’ Jack muttered.

‘Then touch, touch.’

‘No, sir, no, I can’t touch the skin of him!’

Mr Jonas set down his candles, went to the bed, took the boy’s wrist and turned it, so that the fingers opened. From the open fingers he took Jack’s medal, and gave it back to him.

‘Was it warm or cold?’ they asked him later. Jack told them that it was cold. Cold as ice? Perhaps not quite as cold as that.

‘You have what you came for,’ said Mr Jonas. ‘You have taken back what was yours. Note that I don’t deny it was yours.’

He did not move again, but stood looking down at the whiteish heap on the bed. Jack was more afraid of staying than going, although he had no idea how to find his way through the house, and was lucky to come upon a back staircase which ended not where he had come in but among the sculleries, where he managed to draw back the double bolts and get out into the fresh air.

‘Did the boy move,’ they asked him, ‘when the medal was taken away from him?’ But by this time Jack was making up the answers as he went along. He preferred, on the whole, not to think much about Watching. It struck him, though, that he had been through a good deal to get back his godmother’s present, and he quite often wondered how much money Mr Jonas would in fact have offered him, if he had had the sense to accept it. Anyone who has ever been poor – even if not as poor as Jack Digby – will sympathize with him in this matter.