A Cornish Orphan, page 4
Matt had hated Lottie on sight. It had been bad enough when Tom was born. Now this weird shipwrecked girl had invaded his home. Matt had never seen a girl like Lottie with such pale skin and pale hair, so much hair swirling around her, hiding her face. He didn’t like the dismissive stare she’d given him, and the way her eyes had warmed to Tom’s irritating friendliness. Intense jealousy had boiled in his mind when Arnie explained how Lottie had slept in their bed, in between HIS parents, when Matt had tried to creep in there on lonely nights and been pushed away. ‘Get back to bed, YOU.’ Not even honouring him with his name. YOU was such an insult. Like a slap.
So Matt made up his mind to hurt Lottie. He’d make her life hell. He’d tried to do it to Tom, pushing him over whenever he could get away with it, hiding his things, jumping on his sandcastles. A few times it had been satisfying, hearing his little brother’s howl of pain, but as Tom grew older Matt found him infuriatingly placid, slow to anger and disarmingly kind. Lottie would be a much better target for Matt’s grudge against the world. He knew, from playing with the local tribe of children, that little girls could be furiously indignant. Pure entertainment to Matt, a chance to stand there grinning and smirking. Their enraged crying painted a picture of his own inner pain, helping somehow to unlock it, release a bit of pressure. The recriminations didn’t bother Matt. Bad was strong. Bullying was strong. And addictive. He felt no guilt.
‘You stay here, Matt, and you, Tom.’ Jenny had wagged her finger at the boys on the morning after the storm. ‘I want that sand swept off the stairs. Put it in those two fire buckets in the yard.’
‘But I want to see the wreck,’ Matt protested, ‘and help Dad with the looting.’ He sidled along the wall to the door.
‘Oh no you don’t.’ Jenny grabbed his thin arm, her fingers angry, her eyes fixing him like nails into wood. ‘Someone’s got to be here in case Lottie finds her way back. She’s lost, Matt. She’s in a strange place, she’s lost her mum and dad, and her home, wherever it was. We’ve got to help her.’
‘I haven’t got to.’
‘Yes, you HAVE.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I say so.’ She looked in despair at her son’s hardening stare. ‘You stay here, Matt, or Daddy will deal with you. And you won’t get NOTHING from the looting. Daddy and I, and Tom – and Lottie – will all be eating tinned peaches and you won’t get any. So stay here and sweep the stairs.’
Matt shrugged. Jenny’s words made him feel desolate, as if he couldn’t go much lower. He sat down on the stairs, twiddling the hand brush Jenny had given him. All he wanted was to be out on the bright water, on his dad’s boat, just the two of them. Arnie’s boat was called The Jenny Wren, and Arnie had rescued her from a scrapyard in Hayle. Matt had proudly helped him to restore her, and together they had made her seaworthy again. Now The Jenny Wren was the brightest boat in the harbour with her coat of fresh paint in blue, white and yellow. She was a motorboat with a cabin and a big deck with room for Arnie’s lobster pots and fish baskets. ‘One day she’ll be yours,’ Arnie had promised.
Jenny’s angry voice carved into his dream.
‘And don’t just sit there . . . SWEEP.’ Jenny frowned at his insolent gaze. Tom was already eagerly sweeping sand, not getting much of it in the dustpan, but he beamed up at her. Jenny ruffled his hair fondly, and went out into the street, shutting the door behind her.
Matt remained sitting on the stairs, annoying Tom by beating out rhythms with the handle of his brush and with his bare feet. About an hour later, someone knocked at the door. ‘I’ll answer it, not you,’ Matt said to Tom. ‘I’m the oldest.’
He opened the door, and stood there, shocked to see Nan’s storm-coloured eyes glinting down at him. Matt knew who she was, and he knew she didn’t like him. It was mutual.
The silence simmered between them.
‘Where’s your father, boy?’
‘Down ’Gwidden.’
‘He’s getting cargo from the wreck.’ Tom’s eyes gleamed with pride.
‘And where’s your mother?’
‘Out, looking for Lottie,’ Tom explained, while Matt hung his head and scuffed sand around the flagstone floor.
‘Then you two boys go and get her,’ Nan said. ‘Tell her I’ve brought Lottie home and she’s proper poorly. Have you got that?’
Only too glad to escape, Matt and his brother tore out of the house. Matt saw Lottie lying down in the back of the donkey cart, her eyes button black and still. It gave him goosebumps. Was she dead, he wondered? And was it his fault? Had his anger reached out and somehow cursed this pale child from the sea?
Nan took a metal bucket from its peg on the back of the cart and filled it with water from the street tap. She gave it to the donkey who drank noisily, sucking and shaking drops from his velvet lips. Then she tethered him to a ring in the wall and hung his canvas nosebag of meadow hay around his neck.
‘Now then, young lady, let’s get you sorted out.’ Nan lifted Lottie from the back of the cart and carried her inside. ‘Is this the right house?’ she asked. ‘Jenny’s house?’
Lottie’s eyes looked relieved. She nodded, recognising the black stove with its ornate brass and the reassuring curl of steam from Jenny’s big oval cooking pot.
Nan put her in the wicker chair by the fire and the child just lay there like a rag doll, her eyes hungry for reassurance. Nan filled a cup with hot water from the kettle and took a small muslin bag from one of the capacious pockets of her apron. She sniffed it. Dried fennel and chamomile. She dunked it in the steaming water and added a spoonful of honey from the jar in Jenny’s kitchen. ‘Nan’s healing tea,’ she told Lottie, ‘made from the herbs in my garden. You drink it.’
She watched, satisfied, as Lottie tasted it, then gulped it down, draining the cup, and snuggling deeper into the chair as if she wanted to sleep.
‘You ain’t very well,’ Nan said. She pulled up a chair and sat close to Lottie, studying the expression in the child’s eyes. Grief, Nan thought. Deep, inexplicable grief. Her heart went out to the little girl, so alone in the world, and so shocked. ‘You’ll get better, dear, when you’ve had a rest.’
But Lottie shook her head. She sighed deeply.
‘You can tell Nan. Anything, anything at all.’
She waited while Lottie’s haunted eyes searched hers, seeking answers to a queue of questions. ‘Tell Nan,’ she prompted, half-listening to the street outside, hoping Jenny wasn’t going to come barging in. Nan felt she needed to bond with this intriguing child who looked so young and yet so old. Nan felt it was her, and not Jenny, who had the skills to find an answer to a question that was burning the child’s soul. She leaned closer to hear the words.
‘I don’t want to be in S’nives,’ Lottie whispered. ‘I thought the ship was going to America.’
‘America is far away – across the Atlantic Ocean,’ Nan said. ‘And who told you this was S’nives?’
‘The stationmaster, and he laughed at me.’
‘Well, he’s wrong,’ Nan declared. ‘Now you listen to me, Lottie. This isn’t S’nives. It’s Saint Ives, and it’s a special, magic place.’ She lowered her voice, and Lottie’s eyes fixed on her, listening. ‘Its name comes from the sea, like you – only she arrived by magic. She floated on a giant leaf, all the way from the Emerald Isle where the fairies live. Before she came, this place was an ordinary fishing cove, but St Ia made it a magic place, full of light and flowers. She even found a well of crystal water. She taught people to find silver and gold.’
Lottie’s eyes rounded. Her tight little mouth relaxed into wonder, and Nan observed that she was fingering the black velvet pouch as if the contents might be a meaningful piece of jewellery. Nan lowered her voice to an enchanted whisper. ‘Silver and gold,’ she continued. ‘At twilight when the sun and moon shine opposite each other across the water, you have to imagine you can float, like St Ia did, on leaves of silver and gold, and gather the jewels of the ocean. When you have them in your hand, you can go anywhere, even to America or China, or the land of ice and snow at the top of the world.’
Nan was enjoying herself. She’d often longed for a granddaughter to share her stories with. She sensed Lottie’s need for deep, peaceful sleep to heal the trauma of the shipwreck and the grief of losing whoever it was she had lost. The fennel and chamomile tea was beginning to work and Lottie’s eyelids were getting heavier. Hopefully she would drift into sleep and dream of St Ia and the silver and gold pathways of light on the water.
But, predictably, Jenny burst through the door, bringing in with her the wind and the soft eternal roar of the sea.
‘Oh there you are!’ She brushed past Nan in a swirl of skirt smelling of wet seaweed. Lottie’s eyes flew open. ‘Half the town’s been out looking for you, Lottie.’
Lottie looked mutinous and sleepy. She turned her head away from Jenny and curled up in a ball.
‘Let her be.’ Nan put a restraining hand on Jenny’s shoulder.
‘What d’you think you’re doing here?’ Jenny gave her a look of pure hatred.
Nan’s hand jumped back. She noticed Jenny was twitching with frustration. A time bomb, programmed to explode with relief at finding her lost child, relief which manifested as fury. Telling her to calm down would only ignite a second burst of rage. So Nan pursed her thin lips and stood there, looking down at Lottie.
Jenny interpreted the silence as judgemental. ‘Get out of my home,’ she hissed, pushing her face towards Nan. ‘Go on. GO.’
Nan turned to granite. She turned away from Jenny, her head held high, her craggy jaw lifted to the light that streamed in through the open door. The curtain billowed into her face as if it wanted to give her a slap. She shoved it aside. She’d go home now and her cats would run to her with their tails up. She’d lead Mufty, the donkey, up the hill, and on the steepest part she’d walk behind the cart, pushing it for him, helping him as best she could.
Outside in the street, Nan was incensed to see Matt sitting on Mufty’s back, bouncing up and down, with Tom watching gleefully. ‘HOW DARE YOU,’ she bellowed, and the women brushing the street froze like a game of statues. The boys’ grins vanished and Matt got down, a ghost of an insolent smile in his eyes as he looked at Nan. ‘That donkey is resting and having a meal,’ she thundered as the boys scurried past her. ‘How DARE you abuse an animal like that.’
Tom paused and looked up at her with clear, bright eyes searching into her soul. ‘Sorry,’ he lisped.
Nan gave him a frosty nod, and unhitched Mufty from the ring in the wall. ‘You tell your mother Lottie’s got a fever.’ She fished in the pocket of her apron and handed Tom another muslin bag of chamomile and fennel. ‘Give her this. It’s herb tea.’
She set off on the exhausting walk home, past St Ia’s Well and up the hill. I ought to go back, she thought, a memory of Lottie etched into her tired old heart. I ought to call the doctor to that child.
Lottie heard the voices as if from a distance. She heard the crackle of the fire and the sigh of the waves, the cry of seagulls, and the crooning of the wind. She sensed the flurry of movement around her. Heavy skirts and boots. A smell of fish.
She opened her eyes, and found herself lying on a sofa in the window. The window had square panes and flaking paint, and in the top panes a slice of blue sky with racing clouds, a flicker of sunlight over the blanket Jenny had put over her. Now Jenny was looking down at her with anxious eyes, and beside her was a strange man smartly dressed in a waistcoat with brass buttons. He was holding Lottie’s wrist and frowning at a gold watch attached to his pocket.
‘Don’t worry, Lottie – it’s Doctor Tregullow,’ Jenny said, and her face looked blurred. Lottie tried, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She was aware of Matt and Tom nearby, trying to be quiet, whispering to each other. Then she slipped back into the dream. Or was it real? The violence of the shipwreck. The cries for help. The pain in her hands as she clung to the broken door. Then Nan, telling her about St Ia. Nan, giving her the sweet herb tea.
She cried out with pain when Jenny turned her over. ‘You should see her back, Doctor. I put iodine on it, I didn’t know what else to do.’
Lottie whimpered in protest. She didn’t want anyone looking at the marks on her back. To be beaten was shameful. To remember those hard, cold eyes, the flared nostrils, the savage injustice of seeing avaricious glee in the smile of a person who was supposed to be caring for her. Hot stripes of pain had clung to her back as she ran alone through the night, a glimmer of hope in her heart as she saw the ship with its gangway still down on the quayside. The effort of standing up very straight and lying to the sailor who was guarding it. ‘Excuse me,’ Lottie had smiled her sweetest smile, ‘I have to take an important message to my father. I know where he is. I’ll be very quick.’
Without waiting for a reply, Lottie had marched confidently up the gangplank and onto the ship. ‘She’s sailing in ten minutes,’ the sailor called after her, ‘so get a move on.’ It didn’t occur to Lottie to ask where the ship was going. She assumed that all ships went to America when they sailed out west. She quickly found a hiding place, inside a coil of rope under a tarpaulin, a perfect shelter from the weather.
Excitement pulsed through her. She felt the ship dipping and rolling over the swell beyond the harbour, and she clapped her hands in joy. She’d done it! She snuggled down into her nest of salt-drenched rope, hearing rain pattering on the tarpaulin, and then wild splats of spray as the ship headed out into the gathering storm.
‘Lottie!’ Jenny was shaking her gently. ‘Will you try to wake up, please? Doctor Tregullow wants to ask you some questions.’
Jolted out of her dream, Lottie felt bewildered and shivery. She looked at the two faces gazing down at her. The doctor’s neat and serious face, and Jenny’s rosy cheeks. Where was Nan? ‘I want Nan,’ she said. ‘Nan looked after me.’
‘Nan’s gone home,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll look after you now.’
‘Will you open your mouth, Lottie, please? I need to look at your throat.’ The doctor peered into her mouth. He touched the sides of her neck, gently feeling her glands. ‘Hmmm,’ he frowned, then looked into her eyes. ‘Who did that to your back, Lottie? Who beat you so badly?’
Lottie sank back into sleep. Her eyelids closed again to heavy darkness.
‘Why would anyone beat a child like that?’ Jenny asked, and the rest of her words blurred into a jumble. ‘Lottie?’
‘I was in the orphanage,’ Lottie mumbled, ‘and I let the birds out. I opened all the cages, and the birds were happy. They flew away, out of the window . . . but . . .’ She sank deeper, into another nightmare. The voices of Jenny and Doctor Tregullow drifted away to the far edges of her consciousness.
‘So she IS an orphan,’ she heard Jenny say.
‘She has got a fever,’ Doctor Tregullow said, and Lottie heard the snap of his medical bag being closed, and the creak of his shoes. ‘Keep her quiet, lots of drinks, and I’ll come again in the morning to see her. I’ll bring something for you to put on her back.’
‘But, Doctor . . .’ The cool of the sea wind brushed her hot cheeks as Jenny opened the door to let him out. ‘We can’t possibly pay you.’
‘Don’t worry, my dear. It was Nan Lanroska who sent me, and she’s already paid me.’
The door closed and the footsteps walked away.
‘Interfering old woman,’ Jenny ranted, and Lottie sank deeper into a restless sleep, a sleep where storms raged and people argued.
‘Nan was kind to Lottie.’ Tom’s bright voice was full of indignation.
‘You hold your tongue. It’s nothing to do with you what I think of Nan.’
‘But why can’t we go to Nan’s house and see the donkey?’ Tom asked, pouting. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Dead right it’s not fair. Life isn’t fair. So stop complaining. Lottie’s proper poorly and we’ve got to look after her. She’s a very sick little girl.’
Lottie lay there, listening, half awake and half asleep. Is that me? she thought. A very sick little girl. ‘Am I going to die?’ she asked.
Jenny came over to her immediately. ‘Course you’re not. We won’t let you. You’ll soon be better and running around again, and you’re going to be our little girl.’
Comforted, Lottie gave in to the drowsy fever and closed her eyes again. She wished it was quiet. But moments later there was a new voice, new footsteps and skirts rustling. Someone new coming to stand by the sofa and look down at her.
‘That’s kind of you, Millie,’ Jenny was saying, ‘and it’s beautiful. She’ll love it.’
‘Well . . . poor little child. I knew you’d got her here and I didn’t know what else to do, so I got me wool basket out and knitted it up. It only took me a few hours. Here you are, darling.’
Lottie felt something woolly and soft being pushed into her hand. She opened her eyes and saw a beautifully knitted doll, in a red dress like hers. The doll had long hair made from yellow wool. She had a pink face with a stitched-on smile and royal blue eyes with arched eyebrows giving the doll an expression of amiable surprise. She wasn’t anything like the dolls Lottie had been used to. Hard, porcelain dolls with eyes of glass and hard little porcelain hands. This simple knitted doll felt squashy and friendly, like Nan’s donkey.
‘I made her for you,’ Millie said. ‘She’s a cuddly friend for you to have in bed with you.’
‘Thank you,’ Lottie whispered, tucking the doll against her cheek.
The woman smiled down at her with happy, beaming eyes. ‘I’m Millie,’ she said firmly, ‘Millie next door. And when you’re better you can come in with me and I’ll show you how to knit, and you can have toasted saffron buns for tea. How about that?’
Lottie didn’t know what a saffron bun was, or if she wanted to learn to knit. But she noticed the way Millie’s smile made lines radiate from the corners of her eyes, like sunrays. It made her want to smile back, and she did, before the fever swept her back into a dark, deep place.
