Читать книгу Linnets and Valerians - Elizabeth Goudge - Страница 8

Emma Cobley’s Shop

“TODAY WE WILL BE BACK for tea,’ said Robert as he opened the front door. ‘Do you suppose there’ll be muffins every day?’

No one answered him, for the front door had opened on a new marvel, the porch with four stone steps leading down from it to the village street. It was a stone porch, deep and cool with seats on either side. They sat down instantly, two aside with Absolom between them, looked at each other happily and swung their legs. ‘Free to go where you like and do what you like.’ Such a thing had never been said to them before. If a slight chill had touched their hearts at the thought of being classically educated it had been dispersed by that superb sentence. Wonderful adventures shone ahead.

‘Not far today,’ said Timothy, ‘because of the muffins.’

‘A reconnaissance today,’ said Robert. ‘Exploration of the terrain.’ He was rather fond of using long words picked up from his soldier-father. He always hoped the younger children would ask him what he meant, but they never did. They were not interested in self-improvement and neither was Robert. It was just that he liked to feel grand. ‘Come on.’

They got up and climbed down the steps to the road. The door of the cottage opposite was open and just within it a very old man sat on a Windsor chair smoking a pipe. They smiled at him and he smiled at them and then they went on up the hill to the village green at the top. It was pocket-handkerchief size and had cottages grouped about it. One was an inn, the Bulldog, with a swinging sign of a fierce brindled creature, another had a pillar-box outside it and a window filled with bootlaces, bottles of boiled sweets, cakes of Windsor soap, birdseed, picture postcards, hairpins, onions, and a black cat asleep. Over the low green door beside the window was a board on which was painted, Emma Cobley, Post and General Stores. Also opening on to the village green was the lich-gate of the church and beyond it the churchyard.

From the green a lane led away uphill under arching trees and disappeared into a wood that looked as vast as a forest in a picture. Rising high into the sky, above the wood, was the great hill with the outcrop of rock on top, like a castle, with below it the rock like a lion keeping guard, that they had seen last night. The Bulldog was on one side of this lane and the angle of the other was formed by stone walls, with tall iron gates facing towards the green. Within the gates a moss-grown drive disappeared into a dark mass of evergreens. There were pillars on each side of the gates, with stone lions on top of the pillars and sitting on top of one of the lions was a monkey, who chattered at them angrily. Apart from the monkey there was no one about.

Robert summed it up. ‘There’s the shop, the Bulldog, that wood, the hill with the rocks on top and whatever is inside those gates. Where shall we go first?’

‘I want some sweets,’ said Betsy.

‘The shop, then,’ said Robert. ‘Has anyone any money? You have, Timothy. You have the threepenny bit Hector hicked out.’

‘And you have a sixpence,’ said Timothy. ‘The sixpence you were saving up to get a pony. You don’t want it now you’ve got Rob-Roy.’

‘I might want it for something else,’ said Robert, for he would be at times what country people call ‘very near’.

‘Don’t be horrid, Robert,’ said Nan. ‘You’re the eldest. You pay this time and Tim next time. We shall need all of sixpence, for we must get a stamp and a postcard as well as sweets. I think it would be nice to send a postcard to Grandmama. I think perhaps we behaved badly when we were with her. We didn’t see it at the time, but I think perhaps we did. I’d like to send her a postcard.’

Robert capitulated with good grace, for he didn’t want to be horrid. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The shop. But it won’t be much of an adventure.’

He was wrong. Little did they know as they approached Emma Cobley’s low green door what her acquaintance was eventually to lead to. They got inside the shop with difficulty, for when they knocked nothing happened, and when they turned the handle and pushed the door nothing happened either. Then suddenly it gave way and to the furious jangling of a little bell, that was fixed upon its inside, they fell into a warm stuffy darkness strongly scented with soap and onions, and a great many other smells that could not be identified in the confusion of the moment. Then came a most dreadful sound, a noise of snarling hate that froze their blood in horror, and something leapt at them out of the darkness. It was as big as a calf and Absolom barked madly and Betsy screamed.

‘I’ve got it,’ panted Robert, on the floor with his hands gripping a furry throat that seemed to sink in and in under his fingers.

‘So have I,’ gasped Timothy, gripping a long rope-like tail. And then he yelled, for the creature had suddenly got free and was on his chest, thrusting sharp talons right through his sailor suit into his skin and gazing down into his face out of terrible blazing yellow eyes.

‘It’s the cat,’ said Nan suddenly. ‘Don’t yell, Timothy, it’s only the cat.’ And bending over Timothy she picked the cat up in her arms, and suddenly he went all soft and purry, and everyone’s curdled blood began to run freely in their veins again. ‘He was asleep and we frightened him. Poor cat. Don’t growl, Absolom.’

‘He may be a cat now,’ said Timothy morosely, for he had a lump coming up on the back of his head where it had hit the floor when the cat attacked him, ‘but he wasn’t when he jumped at me. He was as big as a tiger.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Tim,’ said Robert, and he said it all the more crossly because he was inclined to think that Timothy was right; he felt quite sure that his hands had not met round that great throat.

‘Well, he’s a cat now,’ said Nan, as she put him back in the window. ‘And this is a shop and we’ve come to buy sweets, a stamp and a postcard for Grandmama.’

‘There’s no one to buy them from,’ said Robert.

‘Yes there is,’ said Timothy suddenly. ‘Look.’

They all swung round and their hearts were beating almost as hard as when the cat had jumped at them. When they had first fallen into the shop, the darkness, after the sunlight outside, had seemed complete, but now that their eyes were growing accustomed to the dim light they could see that the small low-ceilinged room had a counter in it piled high with boxes and bags full of every conceivable thing, and shelves all round the walls crowded with rows of bottles, and more boxes. Bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling and in the far corner behind the counter, perched on a high stool, was a little old woman knitting a red woollen muffler. Absolom, who was thoroughly upset, growled at her, but she took no notice.

‘Good day, my maids, good day, young masters,’ she said in a bird-like chirping voice, nodding at them as pleasantly as though their entry into her shop had been a perfectly normal one. ‘And what would you be wanting?’

‘A picture postcard for our grandmother, please,’ said Nan. ‘And a stamp. And some sweets. We’ve sixpence. Where is it, Robert?’

There were a few anxious moments while they all stood in a row in front of the counter and Robert searched the pockets of his sailor suit and found nothing, and then the old lady pointed with a knitting-needle to a corner of the room. It had fallen out of his pocket during the scrimmage with the cat and rolled away behind a box of potatoes. Robert, as he retrieved it, wondered how she had known it was there. How, amidst all the noise and confusion, could she have seen such a small thing as a sixpence fall out of his pocket and roll away? He felt a bit uncomfortable, but he brought it to her and she took it from him, put it into a tin box beside her and smiled at him. She had a small brown wrinkled nutcracker face and beady black eyes like a robin’s. Their bright glance seemed to Robert to pierce right through his eyes and come out at the back of his head. Though she looked old, her voice was remarkably clear, and she seemed as full of vigour as Betsy. She wore an old-fashioned snow-white mob-cap, such as the children had seen in pictures, a voluminous black dress and a little red shawl crossed over her chest.

‘Sixpence is a lot of money, dearie,’ she said. ‘You must lay it out to the best advantage.’

She rolled up her knitting and got down from her stool and she was taller than she had looked sitting down, but small-boned, neat, and dainty. With quick darting movements she took a cardboard box from under the counter and laid out five postcards for the children’s inspection. They were of the church, the inn, the shop, the dark wood with the great hill behind it, and the gateway with the pillars. Then she took a sheet of green ha’penny stamps (it only cost a ha’penny to send a postcard in those long ago happy days) out of a teapot with roses on it and tore one off.

‘Can’t you make your minds up, my dears?’ she asked them as they argued over the postcards. ‘Send your granny the church.’

‘The one of the inn is nice,’ said Nan.

‘Look!’ said Robert. ‘It’s a different sign. Not the horrid bulldog. What is it?’

‘A bird,’ said Timothy. ‘A wonderful bird!’

He bent to look closer, but Emma Cobley quickly took the postcard away and put it back in the cardboard box. ‘That’s a very old postcard,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten I had it. Send your granny the church. That’ll please her, your Uncle Ambrose being Vicar.’ Then as she saw their astonished faces, she said, ‘Emma Cobley knows all about you. It was a boy from across the green who took the message to your granny last night to say you were safe. My door was open and I heard the vicar give the message. And old Tom Biddle who was a-setting in his doorway opposite the Vicarage dining-room window while you were having dinner tells me you’re to stop. Well, my dears, welcome to High Barton, but don’t you never climb to the top of Lion Tor.’

‘Why not?’ asked Robert.

‘It’s a dangerous place for children,’ said Emma, her bright glance piercing him again. ‘Something nasty might happen to you there. Now you’ve fourpence-ha’penny to lay out on sweets. There’s a lot of sweets can be bought for fourpence-ha’penny.’ And turning round she took from the shelves behind her one glass jar after another filled with sweets of every colour of the rainbow. They looked wonderful standing in a row on the counter, with the light from the window just touching them, far more magical than sweets usually look.

It was true that in those days a great many sweets could be bought for fourpence-ha’penny. After a heated discussion, which lasted a full ten minutes, they chose a pennyworth of peppermint lumps that looked like striped brown bees, a pennyworth of boiled lemon sweets the colour of pale honey, a penny-ha’pennyworth of satin pralines in colours of pink and mauve, and a pennyworth of liquorice allsorts. And out of pure goodness of heart Emma Cobley added for nothing a packet of sherbet. They did not know what that was, and she had to show them how to put a pinch of the powder on their tongues and then stand with their tongues out enjoying the glorious refreshing fizz. If they had felt any fear of her it vanished with the fizz, and when they looked at the black cat peacefully asleep in the window, he looked so very ordinary that they no longer believed he had been as big as a tiger. They had just imagined it.

‘Frederick,’ said Emma, following the direction of their eyes. ‘A sweet cat. A dear, pretty, loving, gentle cat.’

Though the scratches on his chest were still smarting, Timothy kept silent during this eulogy, but something made him glance at Absolom and he was standing by the door with his tail between his legs, tucked down and in so very firmly it could scarcely be seen, and when Robert opened the door he vanished like a streak of lightning.

They said goodbye to Emma and went out into the sunshine sucking pralines. They were crisp and crackling on the outside and soft and squishy inside. The moment when the teeth crashed through from the outside was heaven.

‘Not too many,’ said Nan. ‘Remember the muffins and strawberry jam. We must leave room.’

‘The food’s good here,’ said Robert.

‘Everything’s good here,’ said Nan.

Timothy forbore to mention the cat Frederick. Instead he said, ‘Fancy Uncle Ambrose being Vicar. He’s not dressed right. Grandmama’s vicar had a stiff white piece of cardboard round his neck. Uncle Ambrose wears that white thing.’

‘Uncle Ambrose would never dress like all the other vicars,’ said Nan with a touch of pride. ‘Uncle Ambrose would always be different.’

‘He said he’d been a schoolmaster,’ said Timothy. ‘How can he be a parson too?’

‘Very clever men can be both,’ said Nan. ‘Uncle Ambrose is both. Look. There’s the carrier’s cart.’

From where they stood munching they could look down the hill towards the Vicarage, and drawn up outside the porch was a covered wagon drawn by a big grey horse. The carrier and Ezra were lifting out their trunks. Betsy’s doll Gertrude and Nan’s sewing basket, Timothy’s box of soldiers and Robert’s water-pistol, all they possessed was in those boxes. Now they knew they had really arrived. Now they knew without any doubt that they were here for good. They stuffed their sweets into their pockets, Robert took Betsy on his back and yelling hurrah they raced down the hill.

The rest of that day passed like a happy dream. Tea came up to their fullest expectations, with no scrimping of butter on the muffins and the strawberries in the jam large and juicy. It was great fun unpacking their belongings and putting them away in their rooms. For they had two rooms now. Ezra had put sheets on the four-poster in the spare room for Nan and Betsy, and the boys were to sleep in the dressing room opening out of it. At present they only had blankets and pillows on the floor, but they did not mind this because Uncle Ambrose said that presently they would borrow a couple of beds from Lady Alicia, and her name had such a soft silky sound that they were sure they would be comfortable.

After the unpacking Betsy suddenly said she felt sick, so she was given a cup of warm milk to settle her and put to bed and very soon she was settled and asleep. Her digestion was really very good for her age, but it had been a bit strained that day. The others did not feel sick, but they did feel disinclined for anything solid for supper, so they had milk and biscuits in the kitchen with Ezra, and Absolom had boiled cabbage, and some scraps left over from dinner.

‘Since you’ve come to stop,’ said Ezra when they had finished, ‘we must tell the bees.’

‘Tell the bees?’ ejaculated Robert. ‘But bees don’t understand when you talk to them.’

‘Never let me ’ear you say that again,’ said Ezra sternly. ‘Bees understand every word you say. They be the most wonderful creatures God ever made. If men were to ’ave one-quarter o’ the wisdom o’ the bees this wicked world would be a better place, an’ so I be tellin’ you.’

‘We did see the hives this morning,’ said Nan, ‘but we didn’t dare go near.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ezra. ‘They don’t like you near till they’ve been told about you. Now come along o’ me. Step quiet and keep civil tongues in your ’eads and be’ave yourselves seemly.’

He led the way up the garden and Robert, Nan, Timothy and Absolom followed him in single file. The sun had set and the sky was a deep blue, with one star shining above the tall dark church tower. The wallflowers by the beehives smelt wonderful, but in the dim light their deep red had turned to a mysterious velvety darkness. It was very quiet, for the birds and the lambs had gone to bed. The hives were quiet too, with only a few late bees coming home with the last load of honey. When they were all in Ezra brought the children quite close to the hives and touched his forehead in salutation, and Nan curtsied and Robert and Timothy bowed. Absolom lowered his tail and touched the ground with his nose. It came quite naturally to do this. It is what they would have done if they had found themselves suddenly in the presence of royalty.

‘Madam queens an’ noble bees,’ said Ezra, ‘there be four children come to bide in this ’ouse, nephews an’ nieces o’ the Master. Their names be Robert, Nan, Timothy an’ Betsy. The three eldest, they are ’ere with old Ezra an’ they’ve made their reverence to ’ee. The little one, she be poorly, but come the mornin’ I’ll bring to make ’er curtsy. There be a dog, Absolom, a good dog. They be good children. ’Ave a care of ’em and let no ’arm come to ’em. ’Ave a care of ’em in the wood and on the ’ill. Good night to you, madam queens an’ noble bees, good night to you from the Master, from ’Ector and Andromache an’ ’er four kittens, from Jason now called Rob-Roy, from Nan, Robert, Timothy an’ the little un that’s poorly. From Absolom an’ from Ezra. Good night all that lives an’ breathes in ’ouse an’ garden, the mice in the wainscot an’ the spiders round about an’ all that wears fur or feather in your dominion. Good night all your subjects, madam queens an’ noble bees.’

He touched his forehead again and the children bowed and curtsied and said good night and then they went solemnly back to the house again in single file.

‘Can bees take care of you?’ asked Timothy wonderingly, when they were back in the kitchen and Ezra had lit the oil lamp that hung from the central beam and they were sitting round the fire.

‘The Vicarage bees, I reckon they saved my life,’ said Ezra. ‘There’s always been bees at the Vicarage an’ from a boy I’ve loved ’em, an’ so they saved my life. I were a shepherd once an’ one spring I was up on the moor with my sheep an’ a lamb strayed. It was evenin’ when I found it, caught in a thorn tree an’ bleatin’ somethin’ pitiful. I ran towards it an’ sudden I felt the ground give way beneath I an’ I fell. It was one o’ the workin’s of an old tin mine, all overgrown with brambles, so that runnin’ quick I didn’t see it. I fell a long ways down and I knew when I got to the bottom as I’d ’urt meself real bad, for I couldn’t get up, not nohow. I was scared as I’d never be found, an’ I never would ’ave been but for the Vicarage bees. They swarmed that mornin’ an’ your uncle ’e ran after with a spare skep in ’is ’and, and they led ’im on till they brought ’im where the lamb an’ I was, and then they settled theirselves ’angin’ from the bough of a tree just on the near side o’ the pit, bringin’ the Vicar up sharp. I was near a goner, but I ’ollered an’ ’e ’eard me. ’E fetched ’elp from the village and I was took to ’orspital. They took me leg off, but they saved me life, an’ when I come back to the village again the Vicar took me to be ’is man, for I be too lame now to be a shepherd. I was that grateful to the bees that I carved a bee on me wooden leg and painted it ever so pretty. Do you say now, young uns, as bees don’t take care o’ you? If you’re good to the bees the bees they’ll be good to you. But you must mind your manners with ’em. They like a bit o’ courtesy.’

‘Is it dangerous in the wood and on the hill that you asked the bees to take care of us there?’ asked Nan.

‘There’s dangers if you don’t keep your wits about you,’ said Ezra. ‘But if you want to go there you won’t come to no real ’arm now I’ve told the bees to look after you.’

Timothy’s head was already nodding, and the others were feeling sleepy too, but Robert had enough wits left to put his hand in his pocket and bring out one of the bags of sweets that they had bought from Emma Cobley. He peeped inside. It was what was left of the pennyworth of bee-striped round peppermints, and feeling them to be appropriate to the occasion he offered them to Ezra. He did not want to, for he liked them himself, but courtesy had been stressed and he felt he ought. The effect on Ezra was alarming. He shot up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box and roared out, ‘Where did you get them sweets?’

‘From the shop on the green,’ said Robert.

‘Emma Cobley’s.’

‘Yes,’ said Robert.

Then don’t you never go there no more,’ thundered Ezra. ‘I don’t buy nothin’ at Emma Cobley’s. The Vicar, ’e buys ’is stamps from Emma, that bein’ ’is duty bein’ Vicar, but I wouldn’t get so much as a bootlace there not to save me life. I gets our groceries in the town. When you want sweets you tell me and I’ll buy ’em in town for ee. But don’t ee get ’em from Emma.’

He was so angry that for a few moments no one dared speak and then Nan said gently, ‘But she seems a very nice old lady.’

‘’Andsome is as ’andsome does,’ said Ezra.

‘But what does she do?’ asked Timothy.

‘Never you mind,’ said Ezra. ‘An’ as for that cat of ’ers, that Frederick, you can ask ’Ector an’ Andromache about Frederick. They’ll tell ee.’

His mouth set like a trap and it was obvious that he was not going to tell them any more, and since they did not know how to converse intelligibly with Hector or Andromache, there seemed no way of acquiring further information. Discouraged, they went to bed. But they did not stay discouraged, for when they slept they dreamed of bees, thousands of bees rustling all about them in a murmurous, musical, protecting cloud.