Eppie (49 page)

‘She’s a bit frightful,’ Mrs O’Ruarc said, alluding to her
daughter’s shyness. ‘We’re a quiet family, used to keeping to ourselves.’

Gratefully, Eppie sipped the bland liquid from the grubby
bowl. 

Fur and Wakelin were seated on cut-down tea chests.

Fur pointed to a couple of rancid-smelling fish hung from
the rafters. ‘There’s a good pool beyond the woollen mill. You can fish with me
tomorrow, if you like.’

Wakelin chucked an indigestible cabbage stalk to the pigs. ‘Yur,
all right.’ 

‘No doubt you’ll be looking for work?’ Mrs O’Ruarc asked
Wakelin. ‘They’re always glad of folk at the mills.’

‘Nay, it’s the outdoor life for me. Good hard work with a
load o’ sweat.’

The meal over, Lottie wriggled fretfully on Martha’s lap,
desperate to pay a visit to the toilet.

‘There’s a bucket behind that screen,’ Mrs O’Ruarc told
Martha. ‘For the wet stuff, you know. We earn a few pennies selling it to the
fulling mill. They use it to bleach woven cloth. At the far end of the lane is
a necessary, though it’s for thirty houses and there’s always a queue. I keep a
separate bucket beside my bed for drinking and cooking water.’

Loud and steady came the digging of carthorse shoes along
the broken stone road. They stopped outside. 

‘That’s them,’ Mrs O’Ruarc said nervously.

The door was booted open and in marched a tinker, his arms filled
with unsold bric-a-brac. Another man soon joined him. Judging by the shared
facial characteristics, weasel-like eyes and seemingly non-existent chins
merging into necks, they were brothers. Striding back and forth to the furthest
corner of the cellar, carrying clothing and tools, including a barley-cocking
fork and a swan-neck hoe, they cast grim, inquisitive glances at the newcomers.
An elderly man, presumably their father, led in the small, shaggy horse. Upon
the man’s head was Gillow’s magpie feather hat. 

Martha gaped in surprise.

Wakelin swept towards the tinker. ‘It was you, you what
stole our stuff!’

Martha was more circumspect, not wishing to condemn the
tinker without evidence. ‘Please, could you tell me where you got that hat?’

Wakelin made a grab for it. ‘Give it back, swine!’

The brothers leapt on Wakelin and knocked him against a wall.

‘Leave it, Wakelin!’ Martha pleaded, seeing a dagger at her
son’s chest. ‘We can’t do anything.’

Glaring at the men, Wakelin dusted himself down. 

‘If you know what’s good for you, yu’ll do as yer owd woman
sez,’ the tinker advised. ‘Me and me lads know nowt about nowt.’

Martha followed the man to his part of the cellar, where he
kicked up sticks ready to fix a fire. ‘That hat. It belonged to my late
husband. I would like it back if it’s no bother.’

‘Keep yer filthy hands ta yersen. This hat’s mine, me own,
and always has been.’

Despite this being a time when most birds were at roost, a
white robin flitted into the cellar and caught up the hat by its brim.

Grunting in surprise, the tinker slapped a hand to his
sparse locks, his tankard of cold vinegar beef tea slopping down his trousers. 

Eppie tore along the lane in pursuit of the hat, which was
borne aloft like a dry leaf in a gale.

With a flick of its tail, the robin about-turned, released
the floppy hat into her outstretched hands, and vanished.

Fur dashed up. ‘How can a bird as tiny as that pick up a
hat?’

Eppie grinned, overjoyed that Talia
had followed her to this grimy town. ‘This little bird can do anything!’

That evening, Eppie and Martha hugged one another for warmth
and comfort.

Mrs O’Ruarc and Coline had been asleep for a while, as had
Lottie.

Evil-smelling mutton candles illuminated the tinkers, who were
singing and drinking with gusto.

The horse drank from a cut-down barrel, blustering nosily.

Eppie feared lying down, sure that she could feel beetles
crawling inside the mouldering sack and scurrying beneath the rags. Also, a
dread of the tinkers was growing in her mind.

Finding it difficult to settle, Wakelin had gone to the
market with Fur. Though foul and rotten, the meat on sale, from old, diseased
cattle or half-decayed animals, found its way onto the stalls of hucksters, who
bought up inferior meat and sold it cheaply by reason of its toughness or
badness. As nothing could be sold on the Sabbath, such things as would not keep
were bartered. The meat made up the O’Ruarc’s Sunday dinner.

‘I suppose we ought to look on the bright side,’ Martha
said. 

Eppie was sick with anxiety. ‘What’s bright about this?’

‘We might’ve been sleeping in sheets drenched with blood.’ 

In spite of her sadness, Eppie smiled at the appalling
vision.

Without knowing it, she slept.

Eppie awoke, with a start, to the
harsh call of a cockerel beating its grimy wings.
      

In daylight the cellar looked worse. Sour-smelling dampness
oozed from walls glistening with water. Chalk whitewash flaked around mildewed
cracks. The only natural light filtered meanly through a rusty grate set into
the outside wall.

With a backward glance at the sleepers, she tiptoed out. 

It was a grey morning, perfectly still with a melting mist.
She recalled mornings such as these back home when she would happily gaze upon the
hills, veiled in a purple haze. Here all she surveyed was a river used as a
depository for excrement and household waste and row upon row of cottages,
wholly or half ruined, though with evidence of occupation.

A man was propped against an open doorway, smoking. Women
emptied foul liquids before their doors, or traipsed to the river to drain
buckets. In the distance, the elegant spires of a church, the only feature of
beauty in this otherwise dreary environment, floated on a cushion of fog.

She wandered up the lane. A stench arose from dismembered
corpses of farm animals and horses that littered a knacker’s yard. All along
the riverbank, fetid pools containing rotting offal were greedily alighted upon
by carrion crows. Next to the knacker’s yard was a brick building with
Blincoe
Brother’s Finest Ground Bones
painted beneath the second storey windows.

Fur sidled up.  ‘Not much to look at is it?’

‘Everywhere is so filthy.’

‘When it rains, hard like, the river overflows. All this
muck runs into our cellar. It was during the last flood that my father and brother
died.’

Wakelin appeared at the end of the alley.  ‘Quit dawdlin’,
Fur.’

‘We’re off hunting,’ Fur told
Eppie. ‘Your mother was wondering where you’d gone. It’s not a good thing to
get lost. There are some queer folk around here, far worse than the tinkers.’

‘Opposite the mill, when we were walking into Malstowe, we
saw a chapel,’ Martha said, over a breakfast of flour and a little butter mixed
with hot water from the tea-kettle. ‘Do you fancy we’d find a welcome there,
Mrs O’Ruarc?’

‘I’m sure, and do call me Eibhlin. That’s the mill chapel, though
I doubt you’ll find many in the congregation. Workers prefer to be idle of a
Sunday or, like me, they feel too ill to attend. I know it sounds heathen, but
if you ask any of the women I work with they’d tell you they’ve nothing to
thank the Good Lord for. We labour like the devil is after us, what with the
heat and the toil.’ 

Eppie’s spirits rose as they reached the upper town. Gone
was the filth that so attacked her senses. Here was a sweet, earthy scent. By
the light from the rising sun, withered leaves in the woodland flashed golden
with tinges of red. 

It was as Eibhlin had said, hardly more than a handful of
worshippers attended the service. Of those most were poor, elderly women. The
man reading the prayers was a kindly-looking, portly gentleman who, though smartly
dressed in a beige tailcoat and well-pressed trousers, did not exhibit about
his character any considerable display of wealth. Accompanying him, as he left
the chapel, was a handsome tawny-haired girl of about Eppie’s age, whom she
presumed to be his granddaughter. 

Upon returning to the cellar, they were relieved to find
that the tinkers had left in search of things to trade. Eppie’s only other
solace was the amiable company of the Irish family.

‘My, what a lovely you are,’ Eibhlin cooed in her singsong
voice, taking Lottie onto her lap.

As sweet as the warbling of a songbird, the Irish woman sang
about a girl longing for a lost love, her listeners absorbed by the song’s
lyrical cadence.   

Creeping to the tinkers’ corner, Eppie rummaged about, thrusting
aside a worn pair of fire bellows, a wooden flour barrel and a folding
bootjack. Her eyes grew wide in amazement. ‘Mam, look!’ 

‘What is it you’ve found?’ Coline asked timidly.

‘Dawkin’s knickknack basket!  Dawkin was a friend of mine.’
She reached for the remains of the basket.  An oak apple crumbled to dust
between her fingertips.

Coming to Eppie’s side, Martha stroked the binding of
Gillow’s bible and replaced torn pages that hung loose.

Stamping in, Wakelin tossed the catch of fish upon his
bedding and came over to join the others.  ‘I could kill ‘em, Ma.’

‘I can’t see what we can do,’ she answered. ‘The tinkers
seem to have rid themselves of the rest of our bits n’ bobs. Besides, if we
make trouble, things might get worse.  What if they hurt the girls? There’s no
knowing.’

Cartwheels rumbled.

Fur dived to the door. ‘Look out, they’re back!’

Eppie thrust the basket beneath her blanket just as the
tinkers tumbled in, bragging loudly amongst themselves about items pilfered.

With not much else to do, Eppie set about helping Coline
prepare a stew, chopping blackened, bendy carrots to go with the rank-smelling meat.
As she did, she cast furtive, jealous glances at the tinkers who were relishing
their lavish repast.

Tipsy bounded in, a chewed mouse between her teeth. Dropping
it at Martha’s feet, as in offering, the cat sprang towards the elderly tinker.
The man ripped into a goose leg, grease dripping from his mouth. In the playful
way that she often did when Wakelin ate, she clawed at his trousers, hopeful of
titbits. ‘Get outta it, ya fur bag.’ With a belt from the back of his hand, he
sent Tipsy flying.

‘Eppie, come back!’ Martha cried as she watched Eppie dash
into the street after the cat.

Tipsy bounded along a tangle of narrow, crooked streets,
past children kicking a ball made from a blown-up pig’s bladder.

‘Tipsy, stop!’ As she ran, Eppie was shocked to see how extensive
the grubby desolation was. With little opportunity to keep clean, people looked
as mucky as the swarms of pigs. Landlords having blocked in windows to avoid
paying the window tax, the rooms, seen through the occasional open door, appeared
damp and gloomy. 

Leaving the labyrinth of lanes and blind alleys behind,
Tipsy sprang through the railed gates of Saint Peter’s church, nestling on the southern
fringe of the town. When Eppie reached the gateway, Tipsy was nowhere to be
seen.

Peaceful in its isolation, the church looked as old and
forgotten as the headstones that spread like a grey mantle over the cold earth.
Gargoyles jutted upon the rooftop. Twisted around spires, they scowled
stony-eyed in the superstitious expectation that malevolent spirits would be
deterred from settling upon the church.

Crows swooped across the sky, their harsh calls cutting
through the chilly air. 

Fur sprinted up. ‘You can’t half gallop. Has your cat gone
in there?’

‘I’m scared in case she gets lost.’

‘Maybe she’ll find her way back.’

Tramping through a less-frequented, unkempt part of the
graveyard they chanced upon a ghastly sight. Bundled in sacks, prisoners’
corpses were being tipped from a cart into the mouth of a gaping pit.

 Fur spoke as though seeing the bodies were an everyday
experience that merited no show of emotion. ‘It must be jail sickness again. Usually,
except when they’ve died from some disease, the bodies of hung prisoners are
sent to London to be hacked by surgeons.’

Eppie could hardly believe she was hearing about such
atrocities. Dank Cottage seemed a world away.

A wicket gate was set into a cobblestoned wall. ‘This way’s
the short cut back to the cellar,’ Fur said. ‘That’s the jail over there, one
place I wouldn’t care to see the inside of. Crispin Cornell, the Thief-Taker
General, gets rich on the hangings. Watch how you go, it’s muddy in parts.’

The sluggish river gurgled on its stodgy course.

Unidentified things bobbed in the water. Amongst them, Eppie
recognised the bloated bodies of dead animals. Slick, rainbow-hued oily patches
covered its surface. ‘Why is the river so dirty?’

‘Bone-boilers, dyers, guano-makers, bleachers, you name it,
they all spew out what they don’t want into the water. It’s so full of
poisonous stuff that I’ve seen pockets of fire blaze in the river on hot summer
days. The water moves so slowly that it freezes in winter.’

On the opposite bank was the burnt-out shell of a warehouse.
‘That used to be a place where they stored rubber. It caught fire. It went on
for days and spread to the tea warehouse next door.’ They ascended a flight of
steps. Before them was a tavern. Wrapped around it, like a thick sheep fleece, was
a pungent smell of beer.

‘This is The Leaking Barrel. The best gin palace around. Open
all hours.’

‘It won’t be long before Wakelin finds his way here.’ 

‘He already has. It would’ve been busy last night. A lot of
men who work at the mill blow most of their wages on drink and spend Sunday
suffering for it.’

Tipsy did not return to the cellar.

The night drawing in, Eppie huddled beneath the covers with
Martha and Lottie, comforted by the warmth of their bodies and steady
breathing.