Whispers in the Dark (7 page)

I made my escape the following Saturday. Annie fixed it all for me. The Lincotts suffered nothing more than the temporary inconvenience of losing a scullery-maid, someone whom they never even paid for her labors and who could be replaced from the endless stock of the impoverished and desperate.

Annie’s father had left her a little money, and out of this she gave me three shillings and sixpence, more money than I had ever had in my life. That’s worth seventeen and a half pence nowadays, and it will scarcely buy you a newspaper.

“When can I pay you back?” I asked.

“When you’re a fine lady in that big house.” She laughed. “You can take me on as a maid.”

“No, you’ll come and live with us. You’ll be my friends, you and your brother.”

“You’ll forget us when you’re rich. Wait and see.”

“I’ll never forget you, Annie.”

And I never have. I remember Annie every day. I’ve tried to find her so many times, always without success. She slipped away from me without trace, like a boat without a mooring. A long time after that I went to the Lincotts and inquired about her, but they barely remembered her name and could not tell me where she had gone. I did not make myself known to them, nor do I think they would have thanked me if I had.

“I’ll write to you,” I said. “As soon as I’ve settled in.”

I didn’t tell her how unlikely I thought it that any of our dreams would ever materialize. The Ayrtons would turn me back at the door, and that would be the end of the story. My greatest worry was how, after that, I would ever find Arthur.

Annie told me where to go and how to make my way through Gateshead and Newcastle. In addition to money, she gave me something of even greater value: a pair of old but sturdy shoes that fit me properly. As a result, I was able to walk all the way, anxious to save the little money I had. In Gateshead, I found Clark’s foundry, a horrid place filled with fumes and noise, where they told me Arthur had stayed a month and then vanished. That was all they knew.

I crossed the river into Newcastle on the High Level Bridge, taking the Ha’penny Lop, the old horse-drawn brake that was still used then and for many years afterward. We all got down at the far end in sight of the castle, and I set off with my three shillings in my pocket, aware of how little I mattered in anybody’s course of things. I kept imagining footsteps behind me: Mrs. Moss, coming to reclaim me and the priceless belongings I had stolen from her; Mrs. Venables, indignant, resourceful in her search for revenge; Mrs. Lincott, cold, disdainful, aloofly calling me back to her scullery. At every corner,

I expected to see them waiting. If I saw a policeman, I would shrink aside, as though I were the most sought after of criminals.

I recalled—already a distant memory—trips to town with my mother, when we would go shopping in Fenwick’s or Bainbridge’s. Afterward she would always take Arthur and me to Tilley’s Cafe in Blackett Street. Everywhere we went, shopkeepers and waitresses would treat us with enormous respect. I thought then that that was just how people were, that they would always treat me so if I smiled and said “please” and “thank you” as I had been taught.

Now, making my way through the city without fine clothes or a carriage waiting to take me home, I saw how things really stood. No one made way for me, no one lifted his hat as I passed by. Once, a stall holder clipped me round the ear as I stood looking at the pies he had for sale, telling me to “get on out of it.” I passed the door of Tilley’s Cafe and knew they would not even let me inside.

I spent that first night in a cheap rooming house in Black Boy Yard, off the Groat Market. The room was crowded and dirty, and the thin blanket they gave me was barely adequate against the cold, but I lay there with a growing sense inside me of something I could scarcely name, something I now know must have been freedom, an awareness that I had, in the spacc of a few hours, taken control of my own destiny.

The next day I devoted to getting free of the city. I followed the instructions Annie had given me, asking directions a piece at a time until I got myself onto Claremont Road. From there I took the long road north through Kenton toward Ponteland. I was tired and hungry, and my feet ached terribly, but I was on my way. The smoke and clamor of Newcastle were behind me now. Before long, I was in open countryside, still heading north—walking, I hoped, along the very road Arthur had taken all those months earlier.

I spent my second night at Woolsington, in a cold shed full of turnips. In return for sixpence, a farmer’s wife prepared a meal for me, the first hot food I had eaten since leaving the workhouse.

When I set off the next morning, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Clouds lay motionless all across the sky. In every direction, the countryside had turned dark, there were shadows behind every hedge and in every thicket. A cold wind moved in from the north, hampering my progress. The wings of blackbirds tangled through the sky. I saw men and women in the fields—old men, old women—tout very far away, beyond the reach of my voice, stooped over strange instruments, intent on some dark labor that I could not comprehend.

The farther I walked, the more desolate the landscape grew. Nowadays people make that journey with their children, in large cars, cocooned against the cold and the dark. They drive on smooth, black roads, each one as long as all the roads of my childhood strung together. They carry National Trust cards in their wallets and copies of road maps in the glove compartments of their Volvos. Their worst fear is that they will run out of petrol on the long stretch from Otterburn to Belsay. And what is it they fear? That they may be forced to wait for an hour or two until one of the road clubs sends a man in uniform to their ignominious rescue.

I neither despise nor envy them. They work hard, they are entitled to their weekend outings, their souvenir mugs, their potato crisps. And if the price they have to pay for that is some sort of inner desolation of which they may not even be aware, some loss of self, some unawareness of place and the passion for place, perhaps it is not too high a price for the comfort they feel.

The price I paid for walking in those fields was higher, and I never felt comfort or peace or oneness with nature. That is all a game. Do not believe everything my generation says. I knew only fear there, a sense of disquiet. Every coppice I passed seemed alive with mingling shadows. But it was not just shadows. It was presences. It was the knowledge that here, where green fields gave way to moor, I was more vulnerable than ever. Something was waiting for me, something I could neither name nor envision. But I knew, as I turned each corner of that road, that it was hiding, biding its time.

I reached the village of Kirkwhelpington early on the third day. “Barras Lodge, near Kirkwhelpington” was the address I still remembered my mother writing on the envelope when she asked my father’s cousins for help. It was a small bleak hamlet on the edge of nowhere, with an ancient parish church, a school, and very little else. The world seemed to end here, in scrub and moor and forest.

I found a little public house where they sold me bread and cheese and small ale to wash it down. It was a rough place, with no more than a couple of unpolished tables and a few wooden stools. When I had finished, the publican’s daughter came to clear my table. She was a girl not much above my own age, red-faced and well built, but not at all pretty.

“Can you tell me where to find Barras Hall?” I asked.

“Barras Hall? Whatever do you want to go there for?”

“My brother’s there,” I said. “I have to Find him.”

“What business has your brother with the likes of them?”

“You mean the Ayrtons?”

“Who else would I mean? They’ll give him no work, if that’s what he’s looking for. Nobody goes to Barras Hall in search of work.”

“Why’s that?”

“They just don’t.”

“Nevertheless I believe he’s there. Can you tell me how to find it?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Keep on the main road as you leave here, that’s the Cambo Road. Stay on it through Cambo to Scots’ Gap. There’s a turning past there on your left, before you come to Hartburn. That’ll take you up to Barras Hall. You can’t miss it. There are walls all around and but the one way in.”

I thanked her and left. Outside, there was a threat of snow in the air. On the grass verges, the morning’s frost had not lifted. I passed dark woods in which the frosted branches of leafless trees stood out against the conifers like plumes of smoke. No one passed me on the road.

At Cambo, I asked the way again. My shoes were almost worn through by now, and I wondered how much longer I could walk in them. The road was badly surfaced, and I had started to limp by the time I got to Scots’ Gap. Not far past, another road, little more than a lane, turned northward between tall, winter-struck hedges.

The wall started soon after that. It was high and thick, intended to keep people out. Grass grew right up against it and moss covered its top. Beyond it, a screen of trees prevented me from seeing any further. There was no sign of a house. On my left, tall crags cast sharp shadows against the flatness of the sky.

I must have walked two miles or more before I came to a break in that long line of stone. Tall posts flanked a high rusted gate. Behind them. I could make out a sort of lodge, its door boarded up, its windows broken.

I pushed open the gate and stepped inside.

I am wide awak now, wide awake but dreaming of my past. A long path or drive lay in front of me, though from where I stood only a little portion of it was visible. On either side, dense evergreen shrubbery grew close to the edge, hemming in the path and blocking the view. The sky was obscured by tall, leafless trees that rose out of the bushes. They grew thicker and more tangled as they receded into the distance, until at last they became mere shadows through which I could see nothing.

It was as though, stepping through that gate, I had severed myself from all contact with the world outside, as though my universe had abruptly shrunk to the narrow dimensions of this solitary gravel path thick with weeds. I glanced behind me. The heavy gate had closed of its own accord, unheard by me, as though acting in harmony with the trees and shrubs, working in silence to enclose and contain whatever came within their reach. To enclose within, but also, I sensed, to shut out.

Strangely that thought comforted me, for was not the world from which I had come indeed something to be repelled? The walls and gate which had at first seemed so forbidding to me now took on a quite different aspect, as the outriders of a fortress within which—should all go well and against my expectations—I might at last find once more the security that my father’s death had snatched away. Behind those high walls I could forget the shabbiness and poverty of that other existence. If only it could be so. I shut my eyes tight and offered up a prayer. If only it could be so.

The path was evidently seldom attended to. Moss and weeds choked it, and I began to fear that Barras Hall might, after all, be deserted or in a state of decay. Was this why there had been no reply to my mother’s letter? The trees, a mixture of oaks, beeches, and sycamores, had been left to grow without proper care. I remembered the splendid old trees in our garden at home, and all the pruning and lopping Tom our gardener had said was essential to their health. Here, clumps of dull green moss and splotches of unsightly fungi clung dispiritedly to the trunks, pitting and ruining the bark. I noticed several that had died and one, struck by lightning, that leaned heavily on its nearest neighbor, weighing it down.

I must have walked for almost half an hour. The gravel gave way in places to patches of half-frozen mud, across which I made my way with difficulty.

Turning a sharp corner, I found myself suddenly in full view of the house. Beneath a shrunken sky, from which it could have been cut out and deposited on the ground, it stood facing me like a wall of gray stone. I felt my knees go weak as I looked at it, wondering why I had ever been so stupid as to come here, so naive as to imagine I might ever be received with cousinly pity or concern.

You have seen houses like it on your travels. The drivers with their National Trust cards and their flasks of milky coffee visit them on weekends, to walk, silentfooted, in a daze of admiration, about their stiff, furnished rooms. I have never shared their fascination, but I suppose they look within themselves for memories of a past they never knew.

I had arrived at the end of my road. I knew that if I were forced to turn back down that path and seek the open road again, I would have nowhere to go, that I would in all certainty die in a ditch somewhere.

The facade was a long granite slab with high windows set on the ground floor and smaller, squarer ones on the first. In its center stood a rectangular portico of thick, evenly spaced pillars, topped by a pediment. Other than that, the house was devoid of ornament. Not even the clumps of ivy that rambled in patches over the stone could offset the impression of severity conveyed by its every angle. This was not the severity to which I was accustomed, the grim utilitarianism of the workhouse or the factory, but something of quite a different order.

There was grandeur in it—for the house dwarfed everything around it—and a certain aloofness. Yet the severity of its lines suggested something else. Hauteur mixed with . . . what? Savagery? Not quite, something tamer than that, tamer and yet more ancient, if that were possible.

Hesitantly I climbed the steps to the door. I stood there for a long time, suspended between conflicting fears. Several times I reached out for the handle that pulled the bell, and each time I drew away again. All the time, light was draining from the afternoon sky. I could feel the imminence of night. The cold had grown even more bitter. It was that which hurried my hand to the bell at last. I pulled it hard, a single, determined tug, followed by a long, scarcely bearable silence.

And then, barely perceptible at first, I could hear footsteps coming nearer. The door opened soundlessly and I saw, framed in the doorway by shimmering candlelight, a tall woman dressed in black. Her waist was tightly clasped by a wide leather belt from which hung a huge ring filled with keys. In one hand she held a tall glass lamp in which a candle burned.