FAIR NIGHT FOR FOUL FOLK (SERIAL) CHAPTERS SIX & SEVEN

Alice’s dream was like a fever that coasted between prolonged scenes of vivid detail versus fragmentary detachment accompanied by a vague awareness of an otherwhere – in which she was asleep but restless, moved about again like a bale of bacca.

In the main she was back in Rottingdean, though there was a vast stretch of grim wetland at the seaward side of the village, instead of the small shingle beach and immediate presence of the sea.

Women’s voice drifted over the strangely empty village. Neither of the two familiar from Rottingdean or Brighton.

“She’s twelve."

So am I.

“Zackly, and it didn’t always make sense, to be honest.”

Nothing makes sense – which made sense because Alice was aware it was a dream. Her eyes soared over the rooftops in the manner of a Wind Reader’s and watched two small figures solemnly walking up a narrow path that led out of the village onto a hill slope.

“In fact, somewhen she parleys like a regular little Owler chief, and I reckon she’s as stubborn as a chief, sureleye.”

“I bain’t stubborn.”

Nor am I. That is me down there, with Brax.

Brax had been a neighbour in Rottingdean and her best friend before he had been sent away to school on a scholarship.

The younger Alice below and Brax carried something between them – a small chest of sorts, but not with the exuberance they did when they played pirates and frolicked off to bury treasure.

I remember that. We were playing. Shortwhen after…

“The girl be a proper little wildcat. She was about to tackle McFeck and his great big Scottish Sword with her hatpin.”

“McFeck just now told me they were brave.”

That was nice of him. Brax had been nice too. We were playing funeral.

Brax had made the small waste wood coffin they carried after Alice had announced her intention to hold a funeral for Ebony.

A third woman’s voice joined the other two, shrill and plaintive.

“Why can’t Hastings and Rottingdean look after their own? We got enough trouble as it is taking care of our own.”

“Being the pious church-goer ye are, Breksid, I would have expected you to be more familiar with what the Good Book has to say about…”

Hastings? Brax is from Rottingdean, just like I am…was...

Ebony had been Alice’s fancy doll from France, which she had got from her father along-of being good on her sixth birthday. Three years later, the play-funeral in a copse of trees had been a solemn imitation of Alice’s father’s recent funeral at St Margaret’s.

“…like we’ve known each other forever and longer. Mayhap it won’t hurt me to forge friends along the coast.”

“Bettermost to trust naun at all.”

“Zackly. Jess so.”

They had buried Ebony just after Alice’s mum had broken the news that she was unable to pay their rent and they would have to move to Brighton. 

Alice had been horrified by the notion that they would have to leave her dad in Rottingdean, cold and lonely beneath his gravestone. She had reasoned that if she buried Ebony nearby he wouldn’t so alone. Besides, Alice hadn’t wanted Ebony to live through the shame of having to move to the slums, with the threat of the workhouse a continuous presence. Ebony was a lady and wouldn’t have liked the slums at all. It seemed silly now, but Alice vividly recalled the solemnity with which the two small figures below were laying Ebony’s coffin to rest. It had been real enough.

“Asides, weren’t ye busy enow forging friendship with Sam from the Old Bell?”

“Can’t trust them Bell-Ends from the Old Bell. They got their end of town, we got ours.”

Alice looked down at herself and Brax, standing hand-in-hand by the hole in the ground into which they had lowered the doll’s small coffin. She remembered the words they had spoken, remembered from her father’s funeral.

"Ashes to ashes. Dust to Dust."

Why can’t we be buried in the sky? Our coffins attached to a balloon to drift through the clouds, to disappear over the horizon – or ever upward, truly free of all land-bound worries.

“I won’t do that.”

“Mum, who are you talking to?”

“Nobody.”

Someone talking to a mother, but it wasn’t Alice’s mum’s voice. When they had been packing their meagre belongings for the move to Brighton, Alice’s mum had asked about the expensive doll. Struck by guilt, Alice had lied and told her mum the Rozzer soldiers had taken Ebony, just as they had taken all valuables they could find after the shooting was done.

I Lied to Mum. I Lied to Mum. I LIED to Mum.

Alice wanted to cry. In her dream she squirmed with guilt and rushed to the copse of trees to claw at the earth. Hauling the small coffin Brax had made out of the ground, she opened the lid, gushing with relief at the notion that she’d see Ebony’s porcelain face appear. She then take the doll home to show her mum…but it wasn’t Ebony’s face that greeted her eager eyes…

…it was Bill’s, mouth comically open in astonishment as he watched the gruesome mess of his shredded stomach. Alice was back on The Martlet, chased by the four killers. Once more she saw Hattie Tucknott and Brock as they were peppered by the Gatling. Then the Chopback on The Joseph Swaine’s deck, trying to stumble away from the flames that engulfed him, his mouth gaping in an agonised scream. Only this time…this time they were all looking at Alice with accusation in their eyes. Bill, Hattie Tucknott, Brock, the burning man. She could read no pain in those eyes, no disbelief or incomprehension. Just recrimination.

…you did this…you did this…you did this…

“NO!” Alice shot upright. “Yarr, I did. Oh no, no…”

She was trembling again. Not because she was being shot at, nor the cold. Just that horrible dream and overwhelming sense of guilty failure. She looked around her in a daze of confusion, disorientated because she had no idea where she was.

Folding her arms around her chest, she tried to take stock. It was night still, but the room she found herself in was dimly lit by the stump of a flickering candle on a dresser, next to her battered top hat. The room was timbered and lacked straight angles, age having warped floor, walls, and ceiling to create a lopsided whole.

There were distant sounds coming from a lower floor. Voices, loud or laughing. Other voices united in a song, accompanied by musical instruments.

Oh for the love it

Oh for the hate of it

Oh for the “Damn nearly getting away with it”

Oh for the sighing and the rueing the day of it

Oh for those Belles.

Were they above a tavern?

Ain't that always the way of it

Oh My! Oh I was taken in!

(Oh, all my eye and that Betty Martin!)

A man must acknowledge the wages of sin

And not blame those Belles for the mess that he's in!

Discovery followed discovery.

Alice was wearing a clean shift that felt smooth to the touch. She found herself in a warm bed with goose down mattress, crisp sheets, and a soft, thick wool blanket. She was clean. Her hands had been bandaged. Alice relished the touch of a cool ointment that soothed her palms. There were more bandages and plasters for the worst of the cuts elsewhere on her body.

Looking around, she could see another bed opposite hers, a mop of dark tousled hair on the pillow.

Alice was relieved Pip was here. Where ever here was, it was certain to be a long stride from everything that was familiar and known. Even though she’d only just met him, Pip’s presence suggested a connection to the world Alice knew, not the flat wetlands where they had come crashing down.

Just then Pip started to twitch, moaning.

“Pip!”

“NO! Harold!”

“Pip, wake up, you’re dreaming.”

He began to trash about wildly. “HAROLD! NO!”

Alice lifted her covers, stepped onto the floor, and crossed over to Pip’s bed.

“Harold.”

“Hush, Pip.” Alice sat down on the bed and stroked the boy’s hair. Shuddering with guilt again, she wondered if Harold had been the man on fire – had Pip watched his brother burn alive?

It’s all my fault.

“Pip, I’m so sorry.”

“Huh? Quiddy? Whazmatter?” Pip seemed to waken in the same disorientation that still left Alice unsettled. He struggled to a seating position, the covers falling away to reveal his upper body, bandages bright against his bare skin.

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Liss?”

“I’m so sorry.” Alice choked back a sob.

“What for? Where are we?” Pip was puzzled as he looked around the room.

“Sinneport, I reckon. I don’t remember naun after getting on Neeva’s horse. I just woke up now. But that’s where they said they’d take us.”

“Take us to Scylla the Mairemaid.” Pip shivered and Alice could feel a chill crawling along her spine. “That man said she were going stake us out at Camber Sands!”

Alice considered this. “I don’t reckon so, Pip.”

“Why not? Scylla is half-Pook, bain’t she? She’s got a cruel streak – drowns chavvies in mud be what folk say back home.”

Alice found it hard to explain. There had been promises of cruelty, but she suspected much of it in an exaggerated fashion. In her experience it was how some men talked.

Back in Brighton, she sometimes visited the police station below Town Hall to talk to Chief Willoughby about the Toffs from the fancy areas of town that she shadowed on his behalf. The constables at the station always talked in loud boasts. First Rate Constable Harding usually threatened to arrest her – even though Alice suspected he liked her just as much as she was fond of him. At any rate, when Harding had actually had an opportunity to put cuffs around her wrists for violating the Vagrancy Act, he’d cunningly made the evidence against Alice disappear – with a wink, grin, and friendly insult.

The Rottingdean Owlers were even worse. Hattie Tucknott had rarely issued a command without adding dire threats as to cruel and unusual punishments that would follow failure to comply in perfection.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” whoever was crewing The Martlet would respond cheerfully with a wide grin, and that would be the end of it. If warnings or sanctions were in order, the skipper’s sharp tongue was all she’d needed. Alice had seen big strong men like Bill cringe and shrink under a verbal lashing by the skipper. Alice had been at the receiving end of a few herself, when her mind had drifted off – away from whatever task Alice should have been focusing on.

She fought off a wave of renewed guilt. Apart from her dad, it was near impossible to image a better teacher than Hattie Tucknott. There had been a heart of gold beneath the skipper’s gruff manners and raw determination to get jobs done well. But it was probably better not to talk to Pip about Hattie Tucknott. Alice was sure she would cry. There was another explanation though, one that made sense.

“Look.” She showed Pip her bandaged hands and then pointed at a bandage on his chest. “They cleaned us and dressed our wounds. Why do that if they planned to hurt us? This shift they put on me is a fancy one. Ever so soft.”

Pip looked down at himself, frowning. He peered beneath the covers and then threw them off in horror.

“WHY AM I WEARING-” – his voice broke and he finished shrilly – “-girl’s bloomers?!”

Alice couldn’t help but giggle at his squeak. The bloomers seemed to match her shift as far as she could see in the dim candlelight, with frilly lace ends. “Mayhap they didn’t have boy’s stuff to hand.”

Pip frowned. “Who undressed – and cleaned me?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure it was someone…,” Alice paused, then mimicked Goody Tumtops’s ancient voice, “…who raised four strapping sons, lad, and who doubts ye got anything atwixt—”

“—Yarr, yarr. Very funny.” Pip scowled, instinctively folding his hands over that part of his body. “I’m naun enjoying Romney Marsh much yetner, there be far too much undressing for my liking.”

Alice disagreed. She thought that part of the night at the Tumtops farm had been rather interesting, but of course she wasn’t going to admit as much. “I reckon we’re as safe as can be, Pip. They bluv we’re Free Traders, you heard Neeva. This Mairemaid will help us get home, sureleye.”

“I miss home,” Pip confessed, lips trembling.

Alice was relieved she wasn’t alone in that. She could well understand his strong yearning to be back where there was a sense of belonging and safety. Maybe she wasn’t as cut out for the Free Trade business as she had reckoned herself to be. “Oh, Pip! So do I.”

“I don’t know how to tell my folks…about Harold.”

Alice bit her lip. She had no idea how to bring such tidings herself.

“I know it’s silly,” Pip said morosely. “But I just want him back. I want Harold to be alive.” He broke down in sobs, which grew into cries of anguish.

Alice didn’t know what to say, so folded her arms around him instead. He crawled into her embrace, crying uncontrollably now. Feeling his shoulders quivering as the boy was racked with sobs, Alice could no longer keep her own eyes dry and started to cry as well. The tears flowed for Hattie Tucknott, Bill, Brock, the Hastings crew, the Frenchmen aboard the channel-runner, two fine sky-skiffs, a cargo-brig, a crop of lace, and poor Pip coming to terms with his brother’s death.

It was all so unfair.

At long last the sobs stopped coming and their tears dried up. Alice felt much better for it, although it appeared Pip was embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have cried. Men don’t cry.”

“Nonsense. You lost your brother, anybody who’d naun cry over that be a monster, not a man.”

“Do you really reckon so?”

“I know so,” Alice said with all the determination she could muster. She gently untangled herself from their embrace and yawned. “I don’t ken what time tis, Pip. But mayhap we should try to get some more sleep, if we’re to meet this Scylla later.”

“Mayhap,” Pip said softly. “Liss, will you stay with me? Please.”

It wasn’t proper but after all they had been through Alice reckoned that didn’t matter. They were hurt, grieving, scared, and lonely. She answered him by lifting the bed covers and crawling beneath them. They snuggled up and, drawing comfort from each other’s presence, were soon asleep again – much more peacefully this time.

Alice only woke the once before morning, or rather might have, because she wasn’t sure. Perhaps she was dreaming when she perceived someone sitting on the side of the bed, and then a hand softly stroking Alice’s forehead.

“Mum?” Alice asked sleepily.

It wasn’t her mother’s voice that answered though but another woman’s, one of the voices she had heard earlier, 

“No, my dear, but I could have been.”

The words were so nonsensical that Alice dimly reckoned she must have been dreaming. She snuggled tighter against Pip and drifted off again.