The Beggar's Curse Read online

  Just before eight the Blakemans had been summoned to Ranswick Hospital. They had been in the hotel since six o’clock, trying to eat a meal and sitting like zombies in front of the television screen. Their ears were sore with listening for the telephone bell, and they were hoping against hope that it wouldn’t ring. Then it did. When he heard it Colin’s heart lurched horribly, and he saw his father feeling round for the car keys as he spoke to the hospital.

  “They want us to go,” he said in a grey voice, putting down the receiver. “Just me and Mum.”

  “Can’t I—”

  “Stay here, Colin. It’s no use. You’d be better not coming.”

  “Is this it, Dad?” Colin said in a dry whisper, grabbing his father’s sleeve as he hustled Mrs Blakeman towards the lift. Everyone had used words like “going” and “sinking” about what might happen to Prill. Their grandmother talked about people “passing away”. “Death” was like a rude word.

  “Is she going to die, Dad?” he asked in a loud unnatural voice. There, he’d said it at last. The very sound of it gave him cold shivers. And his father turned back in the hotel corridor and said, “Yes,” just like that.

  But as they sat yet again by the silent hospital bed, something was happening to Prill behind the lifeless mask. It was as if she was coming back along a little black road, all on her own after some great journey. At first it was very quiet, then a bird started cheeping up in a tree, and she heard a soft beating noise which gradually became louder and more distinct, and which she finally recognized as a church clock.

  The country she passed through was desolate. Nothing was very clear, because her eyes were tired, but there were signs of great struggle under the earth; heaps of broken rocks, and rivers that had burst their banks, and trees all twisted and broken by rushing winds. But she knew for certain that the land had survived its great battle, that she too had survived, and now she was being drawn on, and upwards, to what looked like a single point of intense white light.

  As she got nearer, the light expanded. It was no longer round and complete but had opened out like the petals of a flower and was bathing the whole earth. This light had the strength of steel and the power of the sea. It was so great it seemed to be pushing her on to her knees with the force of a great hand. Prill knelt down, but that was not enough, so she stretched out on the hard, black road and lay with her face hidden from it, in case she went blind, but knowing that she was still alive, feeling frightened and mystified and glad.

  Her eyelids flickered. The light in the ward was hard and bright and she felt sick. Suddenly a clock chimed somewhere in the town, and a man’s voice was saying, “Everything’s happened in medicine, Mr Blakeman. I admit that we were worried half an hour ago, but I. . . Well, what can I say? What can anyone say? Sorry to have alarmed you like that, but in a case like this it could have gone either way. Everything will be analysed of course, and we’ll make a full report. No doubt you’ll be interested. Thank God it’s turned out like this, anyway.”

  “Mum?” the girl in the bed was saying. “Mum?” It didn’t sound like her voice though. This girl’s voice was all woolly and peculiar, as if she had pebbles in her mouth.

  “What? Prill? Are you feeling better now, love?” It didn’t sound like her mother either, and it didn’t look like her at all. This face was all red and ugly, from crying.

  “I’m so hungry, Mum,” the girl in the bed said, in a clearer voice this time, and she sounded rather cross about it.

  On Easter Tuesday, Prill Blakeman and Sid Edge were brought back to Stang in the same ambulance, which was embarrassing to say the least. Slasher hadn’t responded at all to Uncle Harold’s magic potion, or to Winnie’s furious prompting from the front row. Old Dr Eliot had been in the audience. When Sid didn’t move he’d pushed to the front to have a look at him, and pronounced that he’d knocked himself out. He came round eventually, but they packed him off to Ranswick Hospital for observation. Oliver had done his job better than he knew.

  Prill hadn’t wanted to be separated from her parents, or from Alison, not for a minute. The Camerons had brought the little girl down from Scotland the day before, and now Prill kept getting glimpses of her through the back window, in the little red hired car, waving and yelling and burying her sticky hands in her mother’s hair. “You’ll be more comfortable in the ambulance, dear,” the ward sister had advised Prill, “you’ll be able to stretch your legs out. The other children can travel with you if they like, and you’ll have Sid to talk to.”

  Colin and his cousin sat side by side, opposite the two invalids, but never exchanged a word. Oliver was in disgrace. In the relief of Prill’s recovery Dad had said very little about his sudden disappearance, and Mum seemed extremely vague about it – she had quite enough to think about anyway. But Rose Salt had gossiped. Winnie was very cross with him for playing that extraordinary trick on Tony Edge, and she’d argued with Molly, who seemed to think it was all rather hilarious, a kid’s prank of some originality. The Edges weren’t speaking to anyone, of course, and were threatening to go to the police.

  Oliver didn’t care. He sat with his hands thrust in his pockets and thought about the play. How glorious it had been, in those last few minutes. Sitting on top of Sid Edge had made everything worthwhile. From the string and bus tickets in his left pocket he pulled out something crackly. It was his photo of the hedge with the rare bird in it. He glanced down at it slyly. It was a rotten photograph, all blurred with a little brown splodge in the middle that might have been anything. How could he have taken it for a dunnet?

  He would burn it when he got back, and he’d burn his copy of the play too. That was all over now. The one thing he wanted to keep was Rose’s little gold horse which his fingers had closed on in the other pocket. It was so pretty, joyfully prancing across his palm, he’d like to keep it really. Still, it belonged to Rose and he ought to give it back. There was nothing in its face to frighten her now, or in Sid’s either. He just looked tired and a bit bewildered.

  It felt much warmer down in the valley, and when the man stopped outside Elphins and opened the ambulance doors, a sweet smell came in, a smell of flowers and grass and blossoming trees. It was beginning to feel like spring at last.

  “Gorgeous house, Molly,” Dad said, getting out of the car and looking up at the moth-eaten thatch. “Gorgeous village altogether, actually. I’d like a look round later, when we’ve got Prill organized. Now cheer up, Colin,” he called across to his son. The boy was so irritable and gloomy, you’d have thought his sister was still at death’s door.

  Nobody could understand why he was being so foul to his poor cousin; he’d completely ignored him in the last twenty-four hours – it was quite embarrassing. Oliver couldn’t be expected to feel quite the same about Prill as her own family did, and he’d been amazingly helpful and considerate to everyone since she’d come out of hospital, a real paragon of good behaviour.

  They went home two days later. Molly felt lonely afterwards, it was so quiet. She’d enjoyed having the old house full of children. When the car had disappeared from sight she stood by the gate, still waving sadly into the dusty silence. They had all waved and smiled, even Prill, but Oliver had waved longest, flapping his small white handkerchief through the back window.

  And it was Oliver she remembered. He wasn’t like the other two, she’d known that from the beginning. Life in the village had been plodding and ordinary before he’d come to Elphins, but things had started to go wrong on his very first day. The two Blakemans hadn’t had very much to do with what had happened, she was sure of that. Oliver was the one, there was something about him.

  The Edges were responsible for a great deal of course; they were weak vessels, easily led and easily tempted, always ripe for new evils to work upon. But something must have activated them this time, something must have entered the quiet valley and unconsciously triggered off that appalling train of events. All was peace, before Oliver came.

  She stared across the road and
saw Sid Edge fiddling with his bike outside the Stores, and her mind went back to the night of the Mumming. She saw Slasher draped in purple and gold, and the little white King with a cross on his breast. All the villagers said it was the best play they had ever seen. Only Oliver had understood that the fight in the shabby schoolroom was a fight to the death.

  But none of this would ever mean very much to the bewildered Colin. They were squashed in the back of the car together, all the way home, but he never said a word to him, and it was a very long time before Oliver was in his good books again. Colin found it hard to like him after what he’d done, and he never really understood why he’d deserted them when everything was at its worse, and why he’d sneaked off, just to be in that awful play. And Oliver never explained.

  AFTERWORD

  Although you will not be able to find Stang on any map, its Mumming play is real enough, and part of a very old tradition. These plays are still performed occasionally, in English towns and villages, but you would be quite lucky to find one nowadays, for they are part of a rural way of life that has almost passed away.

  In the 1950s, I used to go “Soul Caking” in a Cheshire village. To me this simply meant watching, with other children, as a Mumming play was acted out in a country schoolroom. It wasn’t until years afterwards that I understood that “Soul Caking” referred to the little cakes of corn which were eaten at harvest time, a ritual act symbolizing the taking in of life and strength from the “corn spirit”, and from the souls of the dead. “Our” play, I remember, was always performed round Hallowe’en, All Souls’ Night.

  I don’t remember eating corn cakes, but I do remember the play, with its all-male cast, and the air of secrecy and excitement which hovered over all the preparations. I remember the warring knights, and Beelzebub, and the comical Quack Doctor with his bag of outsize instruments and his magic potion, which always brought the dead men back to life again. Above all, I remember the hobby horse, and that awful, thrilling moment which we waited for every year, when the lights were switched off, the schoolroom was plunged in darkness, and the jaws were snapped at us again and again, while we all squealed with delight.

  “Old Hob” is a special feature of Cheshire Mumming and takes the plays far back in time, beyond the dawn of Christianity, to the rituals of ancient horse worship. An authentic hobby horse would be made from a real skull. Here is a description of the whole process, from somebody who clearly knew all about it!

  “The horse’s head never belonged to Lymm. It belonged to Warburton and was always kept at the Saracen’s Head, and Garnett Bauff hired the costumes for the young men of Warburton. The first horse’s head was stolen, so two of the men went to Toole’s of Warrington and got another head and they boiled it in a boiler at the Saracen’s Head and got all the flesh off it. They had to put it together again and glued the teeth in, painted it and decorated it and put it on a wooden leg and put a handle at the back to open its mouth and the man underneath the cloth worked it.”*

  The plays were traditionally performed at set seasons of the year: Hallowe’en, Christmas, and Easter. But although Christian elements have crept in over the centuries, they remain essentially pagan. There are dozens of variations, both in character and staging, but one great theme underlies them all. It is the symbol of death and rebirth, the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new, the harvesting of the ripe crop, and the hope of fresh life and growth to come.

  A.P.

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  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

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  Amber’s Secret

  The Empty Frame

  Black Harvest

  The Witch of Lagg

  The Pit

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  First published in Armada by Collins 1984

  This edition 2000

  Text copyright © Ann Cheetham 1984

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  Source ISBN: 9780007102709

  Ebook Edition © November 2013 ISBN: 9780007560448

  Version: 2014-02-27

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  * Extract of a letter from E. M. Leather to Mrs Yarwood, 8th November 1950, published in The English Mummers and Their Plays (Alan Brody, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).