The Mystery of the Cupboard Page 9

“I can’t rightly describe it. A tinglin’… I nearly let go, only I thought, she’ll drop the saucepan and the hot lead’ll go all over. But holding her hand while she poured, well, I wouldn’t do that again for a mint o’ money, I can tell you. Not to mention what happened after.”

  “What?”

  “She took one peep into the water and in a second she’d covered up her eyes… Took a terrible turn, she did. I never saw if she took the piece o’ lead out and looked at it proper, like she done with ours, ’cause she just pointed with one hand, all trembling, to the door and ordered me to leave her to herself. But later we heard her cryin’ somethin’ awful.”

  “And afterwards? I mean, the parcel…”

  “I’m comin’ to that. After a couple o’ weeks of stripping, we started on the thatchin’, see, and she was gettin’ worse, with the doctor comin’ and goin’. Till near the last she’d be about, and gettin’ us our tea, and givin’ us money for cider or beer. And times we’d do her bits o’shoppin’ for her, till the gentleman come. Then he took over.”

  “The gentleman? You mean, her son?”

  “Arh… There was no more tea nor nothing else, after he come, not on the job anyhow. He just told us to get on with it and to keep our voices down. And she never come downstairs no more after that.”

  “And did he stay with her till she died?”

  “Oh, he were with her at the end, but for the last week he kind of come’d and go’d. He weren’t there all the time. That’s when she called me to come to her.”

  “Called you?”

  “Her bed were near the window and we had the ladders up and we’d look in on her, when he weren’t about, to see she was all right like, and when it was me going past her window with a load of thatch, she might beckon, weakly, like this” — Tom crooked his finger — “and when I could, I’d go to her room and she’d give me instructions.”

  “About the packages.”

  “Arh, them.”

  “Tell me about - the other one.”

  “I wasn’t to send it till after she’d gone. ‘Wait, Tom,’ she whispered. ‘Wait till I’m dead. Safe and sound — under the ground’ — and she give a little wheezy cough and tried to smile. Then she told me where the gentleman had put it away, hidden like. I was that afeared that he’d catch me takin’ it and think I was stealin’, but I had to do it - maybe it was the devil’s errand, like the lads said, ’cause I couldn’t resist her when she gave an order. Strange sort of a thing to be posting. A metal cupboard. And the key to it.” He paused. “And a letter.”

  “A letter!”

  “She told me what to put in it. I were never much on writin’, but I done my best.”

  “Who was it to?” asked Omri, though he knew.

  “A lady. My memory’s goin’. Whole gaps. Just goin’.”

  “Maria? Was it Maria Darren?”

  Tom’s face cleared. “Arh! That’s it!”

  “What was in the letter - do you remember?”

  “It were short enough… Let me see… Something about a mystery — arh, that’s it, the key to the mystery. I remember that because she took the key off of her neck when she said it, so I knew it were a real key she meant. She made me write something more about the key, about how it opened many locks — something like that. Then she told me to write three words. ‘They’re three hard words, Tom,’ she said, ‘so get them right. I took them.’ I wrote that down and then I couldn’t help it, I asked her what she’d took, and she give a look that shut me up. Then she said she didn’t ask forgiveness because she knew there couldn’t be none, and at the end, that sad part. ‘Is it any comfort to you to know, my life too was ruined?’ I remember that word for word, it gave me heartache, the way she said that, so sorry-like, and bitter at the same time. Then she was quiet for a while and I thought she’d dropped off, but she suddenly said, ‘Put “love”.’”

  “Then what happened?” asked Omri almost in a whisper.

  “Then I held the pen in her hand and she signed it with just her initials. She told me to put the key with the letter in the envelope, put that in the cupboard, pack it up careful, and after her funeral to send it to an address she gave me. A lawyer. She said he’d know where to send it on.”

  “And was that all?” Omri asked after a moment. “That’s the whole story?”

  The old man passed his hand over his bald head and looked down at the table. After a while, he said, “That’s all as I can tell without you thinkin’ what they all think.”

  “What?”

  “That I’m funny in the ’ead.”

  “I won’t think that,” said Omri.

  “Well, then. The last time ever I saw Missus Driscoll — who wasn’t a missus, but a miss, so they said, but that’s nought to do with me - she give me a trifle for doin’ her errand, and she give me somethin’ else as well. She give me a present as no man ever had a better, except I had to keep it secret all these years, but for sure that’s why I never, ever forgot that lady, and says a prayer for her of a Sunday to this day.”

  Omri found his mouth had gone dry. “What — what was it? What did she give you?”

  The old man looked at him for a long time. His eyes had lost their piercing, steady look and become dreamy and unfocused. When he spoke again it was in a singsong voice as if Omri wasn’t there.

  “She gave me her confidence. She told me about them, and said they’d all gone safely back,” he said. “All but one, and she wouldn’t go, because she said her life wasn’t worth living where she come from, she wanted to stop here, with Missus Driscoll. But she couldn’t keep her, like, bein’ not long for this world. So she give her to me - she give her into my hand, into my keepin’. And I kept her. I kept her safe, and she was the best friend, the sweetest companion any man could have.”

  “Can - can I see her?” whispered Omri.

  Tom’s eyes focused on him again.

  “I don’t know how or why, but you’re the first as I could’ve shown her to,” he said. “But I can’t because… because I ent got her no more. She lived with me in secret for thirty year, and then one day two months ago she—”

  He stopped. Omri saw he had stopped because he was going to cry. Omri wanted to turn his eyes away but he couldn’t.

  “She was a little person, wasn’t she?” he asked in a whisper. “A tiny person as big as your finger.”

  “Arh,” Tom Towsler said hoarsely, wiping his eyes. “My Jenny.”

  12

  Jenny

  Once started, the old man couldn’t stop. It poured out, and Omri sat there in the garden and listened.

  Jenny had been a maid in a large Victorian household sometime in the 1870s. (“Around when Boone was a boy,” Omri thought. It was hard to compare them, their lives had been so different.)

  She’d been put into service when she was only twelve and had been a servant for eight years with an awful snobbish family in Dorchester with lots of children and a houseful of servants. They made her sleep in a tiny attic without any heating, gave her half a day off a month, allowed her no ‘followers’ (boyfriends, Tom explained), and worked her like a slave from morning till night, doing the hardest, lowest household chores for practically no money.

  Her own large family lived in poverty in the country — quite near where they were now, as it happened — so there was no way they could help her. In fact, most of the little she earned went straight to them. She couldn’t save anything. There was no escape — this was to be her whole life.

  And then one night when she was asleep, curled up against the bitter cold in her little room under the roof, she was transported into a different world — a different time. She found herself in a country farmhouse much like the one she’d been born in, only that it wasn’t so poor. And she was tiny, or, as she thought, everything around her was huge.

  Terrified at first, she soon found that this was not, as she’d thought, a nightmare. On the contrary, she seemed to be living a dream of happiness in the home of this giantess, whom she lea
rnt to call Miss Jessie, and who, instead of expecting Jenny to work for her, did everything in her power to please her and make her happy.

  She gave her delicious things to eat, as much as she wanted (the first time in her life she had had enough), and spoilt and cossetted her. She even taught her to read, using tiny cutout pages printed clearly in big, brown-ink letters. But the best thing she did was to talk to her and treat her as an equal, as a person with rights and dignity. As a friend.

  In the beginning, Jenny was shuttled between her two worlds, and it was like shuttling between hell and heaven. But hell by day wasn’t so bad when you knew that heaven was waiting. She began to spirit away things that she needed in that heavenly other place — such as sewing things so that she could make her own clothes, not out of coarse cloth but from the silks and muslins Miss Jessie supplied.

  She brought her own little eating utensils, hidden in her pockets, and then she grew bolder. With her pitiful wages she bought some cookpots, shoes, books, and other carriables.

  At night she would bundle these necessaries up in a pillow slip and cuddle it to her in bed, so that when Miss Jessie ‘summoned’ her (as she called it, as when her hated real-life mistress pealed one of the household bells), the things she needed would go with her.

  In the Dorchester household they began to complain about her. She was constantly tired. There were times when she couldn’t be wakened. A doctor was called but could find nothing wrong with her.

  Eventually, after a prolonged visit that, at her beseeching, lasted several blissful days, she had awakened in the poor ward at a big hospital. The nurses were bewildered. As she lay there apparently unconscious, eating nothing, hardly breathing, she had put on weight, and when she awoke she was in better health than when she had ‘fallen ill’.

  They sent her home to the family she worked for, but they were growing tired of her ‘turns’. The mistress of the house summoned her for the last time.

  “You’ll have to go,” she said carelessly. “You’re not earning your keep. I’ll give you your wages to the end of this week. But you can’t expect a character after the trouble you’ve caused.”

  To be turned out without a character was the worst thing that could happen to a servant in those days. It meant she had no reference, and without one, no one would employ her. Jenny left the house in which she had worked herself to the bone, with nothing but her few possessions in a little cardboard suitcase.

  Sleeping rough that night in a field, cold, friendless, and frightened, she was ‘summoned’ and that was when she told Miss Jessie very firmly through her tears of relief that she wanted to stay with her for ever and not go back, ever, to the cruelty of her life in nineteenth century Dorchester.

  “And she were happy,” said Tom in the end. He still wiped his eyes from time to time, but it was obvious to Omri that talking about Jenny had done him good. “She were happy with the lady, and she were happy with me. It was hard to keep her safe and secret. Any number of times we were nearly caught out. But I worked out ways.”

  “Didn’t your wife—?”

  “Left me. Early on. Took Peggy and left me for another man. Dead now these twenty years… Peggy come to take care of me after — well. After Jen went, I had a bit of a breakdown. Can’t manage like I used to — forget things. So she come. Good girl is Peggy.”

  “So you lived alone, all those years.”

  “Like Missus Driscoll predicted. Alone yet not alone! I had Jen. I fixed her up a little place of her own and all manner o’ things for her to use, and she lived her little life alongside my big un and we was happy. She loved to read… She used to read to me from them little books she’d brought… the Brontës, and Walter Scott, and the poets, Wordsworth and them… She loved poetry. Voice like silver bells, she had.” He blew his nose for the tenth time. “She was a wonder all right. I been lucky.”

  “But how did she - you know - die?” asked Omri.

  A dark look came over Tom’s face.

  “She didn’t die. She were killed,” he said.

  “Killed!”

  “That’s my belief. Or let to die. Same thing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Listen. She were sittin’ on my hand, the way she always did when we was havin’ a chat. Just sittin’ in her long dress, doin’ her embroidery. Talkin’ to me of an evenin’ as usual. And on a sudden she just - lifted her head — looked at me, surprised-like, and — stopped.”

  “Stopped? You mean—”

  “I mean she stopped. She stopped bein’ Jenny. She stopped bein’ human.”

  Omri looked at him incredulously. “Stopped being human?”

  He nodded fiercely. “I still can’t believe it, not properly, but it happened. One second it was her, the next second it — she — went light.”

  “What?”

  “Light. In my hand. She didn’t weigh hardly anything. And then she - it - it fell over sideways. No proper colour. Nothing. I touched it. You won’t laugh? It was just a — a brown — a woman shape — only it was—” He buried his face abruptly in his hands.

  “Plastic,” breathed Omri.

  Tom lifted his face. “You know,” he said. “You know all about it.”

  “Yes,” said Omri. “I know.”

  They sat for a while. Tom recovered a little and lit another cigarette.

  “What did you mean — killed?” Omri asked at last.

  “Them where she come from. At — at the other end, as she called it. Where she’d left — the rest of her. The way I figured it, all them years, she was in that paupers’ hospital ward. Just layin’ there like asleep, while the real Jenny were here with me. And then one day, after about thirty years of it, well, if you work it out, it was around 1899, time o’ the second Boer War, and they must’ve been desperate for beds and didn’t have enough staff, and maybe they just decided — it weren’t worth keepin’ her alive because like, she was never going to wake up. And that was true. They wasn’t to know she was alive and kickin’ and makin’ me happy three-quarters of a century in the future.”

  Omri said, “Have you still got her? The plastic figure of her?”

  Tom shook his head. “You ent laughed so far, so I’ll tell you what I done. I give her Christian burial in the churchyard. Made her a little coffin, read the burial service over her, put her a cross with her name on it, this big.” He held up his finger and thumb. “Course, it’ll all get overgrown in time, when I’m gone, but I done what I thought was right.”

  Omri, remembering other funerals, nodded.

  “Course,” said Tom after a while, “I worried about her. When she were with me. Worried she’d be lonely an’ that, for people her own size. But she said not to. She were content with me. She said them others weren’t much company. Not her sort, she said.”

  “What others?” asked Omri sharply.

  “The others the lady ’ad.”

  Of course! Jessica Charlotte had brought a number of little people to life — she’d hinted as much in the Account! All gone back safely, Tom had said, before she died.

  “Do you know anything about — the others?”

  He shook his head.

  “Jenny said they weren’t her sort so I didn’t bother my head about ’em. The cupboard and the key that brought ’em, they was gone, I’d posted ’em off like Missus Driscoll told me to. But there was a number of ’em, I know that — three or four.”

  “They must be in the cashbox,” Omri suddenly said. “Their plastic figures!”

  “Oh, arh,” said Tom. “That’s where they are, I reckon.”

  Peggy appeared at the back door.

  “Run along now, young man,” she said. “Dad’s tired now. It’s time he was comin’ in for his tea.”

  “It’s time I got to work mendin’ that roof tile,” said Tom, levering himself to his feet.

  “You ent mendin’ no roofs at your age, Dad. Don’t you be so foolish. Come along in now, it’s gettin’ chilly.”

  Omri gave Tom a secret smil
e, and left them still arguing.

  When he got back to the Red Lion it was closed, and the garden was empty. He wasn’t surprised. It was well after four o’clock. No wonder they hadn’t waited.

  He walked home between the hedges. His mind was full to bursting.

  Nobody was annoyed with him for going off by himself, except Tony’s dad. He seemed quite annoyed, for some reason.

  “Patrick told us you found this old thatcher,” he said aggrievedly. “Said you were having a long talk with him.”

  “Yes,” said Omri.

  “What did you find to talk to him about for so long?” he asked, in a tone that implied that nobody but himself had any rights to Tom at all.

  “He was interesting,” said Omri vaguely.

  “I’ll bet! You might have taken me along. You knew I wanted to interview him, and now we’ve got to get home.”

  “Sorry,” said Omri. But he wasn’t, not specially.

  Tom wasn’t crazy, but you never knew. If a real journalist got to work on him, he might have let something slip.

  That night, when they were in bed, Omri told Patrick everything — including his great decision.

  Apart altogether from the earrings, if they ever wanted to hear the end of the story - to know who the rest of Jessica Charlotte’s companions had been, the very first little people ever to travel through time in the magic cupboard - they were going to have to recover the key from the bank.

  To open the cashbox.

  13

  The Fall

  “Dad, can we go to the bank today?”

  His father continued painting for a moment or two. Omri was standing in the doorway of his dad’s big new studio. It was the next day, Monday.

  He and Patrick had stayed awake talking for hours last night, and Patrick in fact was still sound asleep. But Omri’s brain was seething and he couldn’t wait, now he’d decided, and had pursued his father out to his studio first thing after breakfast.

  His dad turned slightly, his eyes and his mind still on his painting, which was of a large, colourful, impressionistic rooster. Omri thought his paintings had changed a lot from the sombre roofscapes and still lifes of gardening tools he had usually painted before they’d moved out of London.