I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop, fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say “What jolly fun!” What I wanted to do, actually, was to leap to my feet, strike a pose, and burst into one of those “Yo-ho for the open road!” songs they always play in the cinema musicals, but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.
News of my abduction would soon be flying everywhere, like a bird loose in a cathedral. Villages were like that, and Bishop’s Lacey was no exception.
“We all lives in the same shoe,” Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying, “just like Old Mother ’Ubbard.”
A harsh cough brought me back to reality. The Gypsy woman was now bent over double, hugging her ribs. I took the reins from her hands.
“Did you take the medicine the doctor gave you?” I asked.
She shook her head from side to side, and her eyes were like two red coals. The sooner I could get this wagon to the Palings, and the woman tucked into her own bed, the better it would be.
Now we were passing the Thirteen Drakes and Cow Lane. A little farther east, the road turned south towards Doddingsley. We were still a long way from Buckshaw and the Palings.
Just beyond the last row of cottages, a narrow lane known to locals as the Gully angled off to the right, a sunken stony cutting that skirted the west slope of Goodger Hill and cut more or less directly cross country to the southeast corner of Buckshaw and the Palings. Almost without thinking, I hauled on the reins and turned Gry’s head towards the narrow lane.
After a relatively smooth first quarter mile, the caravan was now lurching alarmingly. As we went on, bumping over sharp stones, the track became more narrow and rutted. High banks pressed in on either side, so steeply mounded with tangled outcroppings of ancient tree roots that the caravan, no matter how much it teetered, could not possibly have overturned.
Just ahead, like the neck of a great green swan, the mossy branch of an ancient beech tree bent down in a huge arc across the road. There was scarcely enough space to pass beneath it.
“Robber’s Roost,” I volunteered. “It’s where the highwaymen used to hold up the mail coaches.”
There was no response from the Gypsy: She seemed uninterested. To me, Robber’s Roost was a fascinating bit of local lore.
In the eighteenth century, the Gully had been the only road between Doddingsley and Bishop’s Lacey. Choked with snow in the winter, flooded by icy runoffs in spring and fall, it had gained the reputation, which it still maintained after two hundred years, of being rather an unsavory, if not downright dangerous, place to hang about.
“Haunted by history,” Daffy had once told me as she was inking it onto a map she was drawing of “Buckshaw & Environs.”
With that sort of recommendation, the Gully should have been one of my favorite spots in all of Bishop’s Lacey, but it was not. Only once had I ventured nearly its whole length on Gladys, my trusty bicycle, before a peculiar and unsettling feeling at the nape of my neck had made me turn back. It had been a dark day of high, gusty winds, cold showers, and low scudding clouds, the kind of day …
The Gypsy snatched the reins from my hands, gave them a sharp tug. “Hatch!” she said gruffly, and pulled the horse up short.
High on the mossy branch a child was perched, its thumb jammed firmly into its mouth.
I could tell by its red hair it was one of the Bulls.
The Gypsy woman made the sign of the cross and muttered something that sounded like “Hilda Muir.”
“Ja!” she added, flicking the reins, “Ja!” and Gry jerked the caravan back into motion. As we moved slowly under the branch, the child let down its legs and began pounding with its heels on the caravan’s roof, creating a horrid hollow drumming noise behind us.
If I’d obeyed my instincts, I’d have climbed up and at the very least given the brat a jolly good tongue-lashing. But one look at the Gypsy taught me that there were times to say nothing.
Rough brambles snatched at the caravan as it jolted and lurched from side to side in the lane, but the Gypsy seemed not to notice.
She was hunched over the reins, her watery eyes fixed firmly on some far-off horizon, as if only her shell were in this century, the rest of her escaped to a place far away in some dim and misty land.
The track broadened a little and a moment later we were moving slowly past a decrepit picket fence. Behind the fence were a tumbledown house that seemed to be hammered together from cast-off doors and battered shutters, and a sandy garden littered with trash which included a derelict cooker, a deep old-fashioned pram with two of its wheels missing, a number of fossilized motorcars, and, strewn everywhere, hordes of empty tins. Clustered here and there around the property stood sagging outbuildings—little more than makeshift lean-tos thrown together with rotten, mossy boards and a handful of nails.
Over it all, arising from a number of smoking rubbish heaps, hung a pall of gray acrid smoke which made the place seem like some hellish inferno from the plates of a Victorian illustrated Bible. Sitting in a washtub in the middle of the muddy yard was a small child, which jerked its thumb from its mouth the instant it saw us and broke into a loud and prolonged wailing.
Everything seemed to be coated with rust. Even the child’s red hair added to the impression that we had strayed into a strange, decaying land where oxidation was king.
Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks. It was nibbling away at my own skin at this very moment and at the skin of the Gypsy seated beside me, although it was easy to see that she was much further gone than I was.
From my own early chemical experiments in the laboratory at Buckshaw, I had verified that in some cases, such as when iron is combusted in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, oxidation is a wolf that tears hungrily at its food: so hungrily, in fact, that the iron bursts into flames. What we call fire is really no more than our old friend oxidation working at fever pitch.
But when oxidation nibbles more slowly—more delicately, like a tortoise—at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations. I have sometimes thought that if we could stop oxidation we could stop time, and perhaps be able to—
My pleasant thoughts were interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek.
“Gypsy! Gypsy!”
A large, redheaded woman in a sweat-stained cotton housedress came windmilling out of the house and across the yard towards us. The sleeves of her cardigan were rolled up above her rawboned elbows as if for battle.
“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she shouted, her face as red as her hair. “Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”
Everyone in Bishop’s Lacey knew perfectly well that Tom Bull had cleared off ages ago and that he would not likely be back. The woman was bluffing.
“ ’Twas you as stole my baby, and don’t tell me you didn’t. I seen you hangin’ round here that day and I’ll stand up in any court o’ law and say so!”
The disappearance of the Bulls’ baby girl several years earlier had been a seven-day wonder, but the unsolved case had gradually crept to the back pages of the newspapers, then faded from memory.
I glanced at the Gypsy to see how she was bearing up under the ravings of her howling accuser. She sat motionless on the driving ledge, staring straight ahead, numb to the world. It was a response that seemed to spur the other woman to an even greater frenzy.
“Tom, get yourself out here … and bring the ax!” the woman screeched.
Until then, she had seemed hardly to notice me, but now my gaze had become suddenly entangled with hers, and the effect was dramatic.