Children of the Archbishop (17 page)

Nurse Stedge, dismayed by the thought of her negligée before so many men, had returned to her bedroom to dress properly in readiness for the kill. She was not a sadistic woman. But, even so, she gave a little shudder of joyous anticipation as she heard the key inserted into the padlock of the green spiked gate that led into the girls' playground.

Ginger heard it, too. As it happened, he was only just on the other side of the gate at the time. And, at that moment, the moon again disentangled herself from a skein of cloud. Immediately the wet asphalt became as shiny as a mirror: it was as though a gigantic polisher had been rubbed across it. And because the moon was riding high there weren't even any shadows. Just nowhere at all for a small boy to hide himself. Simply bare, unclimbable walls with broken bottles on the top and a great empty floor of black looking-glass.

Mr. Rushgrove saw Ginger as soon as he entered. And Ginger saw Mr. Rushgove. But only for an instant. As Mr. Rushgrove stepped into the playground the moon re-buried herself. It was blackness again. Already, however, Mr. Rushgrove was off the mark like a sprinter. And so was Ginger. Then the moon began playing tricks on them. Blazing forth at one moment like a beacon, she hid herself coyly at the next. It was like hunting by flashlights.
No sooner was Mr. Rushgrove hotly on the trail than he lost it again. But the shouts of Dr. Trump and the pounding feet of Sergeant Chiswick were enough to warn Ginger that they were closing in on him. He was flat up against the Junior Girls' block by now, alongside the Infants' Recreation Room and the darkness in front of him was full of charging figures. This was the end. There was no escaping this time. They'd get him in a moment.

Then he saw the zigzag fire-escape. He didn't know where it led to. Didn't know whether there would be any outlet that way. Didn't know whether they had seen him and would follow. It was simply that with the instinct of any hunted, anxious animal he began climbing; intended to go on climbing, in fact, until he could climb no farther. The steps were of iron-lattice. He mounted them two at a time. The night was now blacker and stickier than ever. He could see nothing. But he could feel. And by the time he reached the sixth landing the ladder gave a shudder. That meant that Mr. Rushgrove was bounding up after him.

Until that moment Ginger had intended to go right on up to the roof if he could get there. But just as he was rounding the next bend he saw an open window a couple of feet above him. And he jumped for it. Because he was desperate, his fingers were firm, like hooks. They grabbled on the wet woodwork. And, with a heave, he drew himself up and got one leg over the sill. He had just got the other leg over and was lowering himself on to the floor inside when he heard Mr. Rushgrove, breathing deeply, go thumping up past him in the darkness.

“Cor!” said Ginger devoutly.

But he could hardly stay where he was. It was a girls' dormitory. If they found him here they would probably send him to prison or something. And already the disturbance had roused the whole block. As he crouched there he saw the glass panel in the door suddenly spring into brightness and knew that the corridor light had been put on. Someone was coming. It was the night sister. He could see the shadow of her cap upon the panel. And there was nowhere to hide. Just iron bedsteads and little wooden lockers. There wasn't even another door at the other end.

Then, in that dim dormitory, with the long line of beds, all exactly like the one that he had left on the other side of the Hospital, he felt a hand come out from nowhere and touch him. He was so frightened that he was very nearly sick. But, when he turned, he saw that it was nothing to be afraid of really. The hand belonged to the little girl in the bed beside him. And, as he looked, she
removed her hand and put her finger up against her lips warningly. Then as he looked closely he saw a fringe of dark hair across her forehead and a pair of eyes that looked enormous over the edge of the bed.

“Are they after you?” she said in a low whisper. “Better get in by me. Then you can hide.”

And, as she said it, she lifted up the corner of the bedclothes in readiness.

That was Ginger's first meeting with Sweetie.

The whole incident remained unexplained and inexplicable.

By the time the police arrived, Ginger had quit Sweetie's bed and gone back down the fire-escape. Because he was a bit rushed, there was no time to say good-bye properly. And, in the circumstances, Sweetie did not attempt to detain him.

“I'm going,” Ginger announced suddenly; and all that Sweetie replied was: “I won't tell.”

That was the whole of the leave-taking. It was simple, brief, sufficient. And, in comparison with the outward journey, the way back was quite absurdly easy. When Sergeant Chiswick had unpadlocked the spiked gate, marked “Girls Private,” he had left it open after the posse had passed. Ginger just slipped through as quietly as an errand boy. Less than five minutes after leaving Sweetie's bed Ginger was back in his own bed and Spud's gym shoes were in the locker where they belonged.

It was only Spud himself who was the trouble.

“D'yer get it?” he asked hoarsely.

But this time Ginger's reply was so astonishing that Spud did not ask anything further.

“You shut up,” Ginger answered. “There's been a murder.”

It was getting on for 1 a.m. when the hunt was finally called off. But even with the departure of the policeman, the incident was not over. It was too momentous for that. When the whole year came to be reviewed in perspective, it remained the central incident of nineteen-twenty-seven.

Not that the twelve months had been entirely uneventful in other respects. A strange fungoid growth like subterranean mushrooms
began pushing up the asphalt of the infants' playground and an area nearly the size of a tennis court had to be re-laid at a cost of eleven pounds six shillings. That was in February. Then towards the end of April, measles swept through the junior girls like cholera, leaving only Sweetie spotless and untouched. Sweetie herself mysteriously developed the ailment three days after the incubation period was over when, of course, the isolation business had to begin all over again. July was the next month for trouble: Mr. Rushgrove, demonstrating how a cricket ball should be hit, contrived to put it clean through the net and laid out a senior boy who had been hoping to make Mr. Rushgrove miss simply by staring at him: two front teeth was the price of such behaviour, and Mr. Rushgrove had to be warned by Dr. Trump not to hit so hard. The late summer and early autumn passed quietly. But October was a trial. The boiler on the girls' side went wrong again. And one of the laundresses, the big over-developed one who carried messages for Mrs. Gurnett, absent-mindedly put down a practically red-hot smoothing iron on top of a pile of nurses' uniforms and burnt a neat heart-shaped hole through all six of them. Then in November came the snow, and Dr. Trump was forced to prohibit snowballing.

And finally, right at the turn of the year, actually on New Year's Eve itself, there was one of those unhappy, unavoidable affairs, that strike a cold note and leave everyone edgy and miserable. They lost one of the girls through meningitis. Sweetie was in the Infirmary at the time and saw it happen. Knew all the details in fact as plainly as if she had died herself.

She was six at the time.

It is always strange in the Infirmary. Not just shadowy. Mysterious. Interesting. Full of puzzles. It is another world. Different faces. Different uniforms—everyone in the Infirmary wore white and looked like seagulls with big stiff butterflies resting on top of them. Different sounds. The beds in the Infirmary were mounted on rubber wheels and squeaked when anybody
moved them. A different smell. Particularly a different smell. A smell like petrol, only it isn't petrol. Petrol, with soap and carbolic mixed up with it. It was the cleanest smell that Sweetie had ever known, as though the air itself had been sponged down and rinsed through with the stuff. Also, it was horrid.

Sweetie wasn't very ill. Just a temperature that kept running up and down, and a bit of a sore throat. But Mrs. Gurnett had decided that she would be better in the Infirmary: then they could tell if it was going to be anything.

Even though she wasn't very ill, she was very bored. Bored because there weren't any toys in the Infirmary. Dr. Trump had decided on that point. He wasn't going to have a lot of dolls and teddy bears and golliwogs, he said, going in and out of the Infirmary, spreading germs over the whole Hospital. The point had been explained to Sweetie and because everyone was very serious about it, she accepted it. But it was sad having to leave the pink plush rabbit behind her. And she supposed that Dr. Trump
was
right about the germs. She had been in the Infirmary for two days now and she had only seen one germ the whole time. That was when they were making her bed and she had watched the germ, soft and white as thistledown, detach itself from the edge of the new blanket and go whisking off into space. Only one germ, and two nurses to catch it if they had been quick enough.

But to-night something important was going on. So important that Sweetie felt out of it. There were six other children in the ward. And one of them, quite a small girl, was very ill, too: Sweetie could hear her scratching. Scratching and scratching all night long. That wasn't the one, however, that they were worrying about. It was a big girl, a girl of nine or ten with thick red hair, who was the centre of everything. She had been in the next bed to hers when Sweetie had first been brought in. But they had moved her now right up to the end of the ward away from everyone. Sweetie knew why, too. It was Sweetie's own fault. It was because she would keep talking to her. Even when the red-haired girl didn't answer, Sweetie went on telling her little things just so that she wouldn't feel miserable. And now she must be terribly lonely, completely cut off from everything with three empty beds between her and anyone she knew.

Then, as though that weren't bad enough, they put a screen round her. That was cruel, Sweetie thought, and it made her angry. It was wrong to punish any child so severely simply because she had been caught talking—and sometimes only just listening—after
they had told her to be quiet. And Sweetie could tell that the red-haired girl minded. She could tell that from the sound her breathing made. It was very noisy breathing, as though she had been crying and had got herself all stopped up inside.

The breathing was the loudest sound in the Infirmary, except for the scratch, scratch, scratch two beds away. And it seemed louder still because everything else was so quiet. It was night outside. Everyone else in all London was asleep. Everyone except engine-drivers, that is. Sweetie could hear them all the time, banging into things and blowing whistles and letting off steam. Engine-drivers were different. They went to bed all day and then started shovelling coal into their engines as soon as it began to get dark. She had never actually seen an engine. But she knew all about them from books. And she had never heard an engine in the daytime. Not even one.

The night nurse had shifted the screen a little, and Sweetie could see through the gap where the hinge was fixed. There was a light on the other side and she could see the big girl's red hair quite plainly. And her face. But something had happened to her face. It was red, too, like her hair, and one of the nurses kept sponging her forehead. While Sweetie watched she saw the nurse pour something into the girl's mouth straight from a teapot.

“I suppose they're sorry now that they've been so nasty to her,” Sweetie thought. “They're trying to make up for it.”

Then the doctor came. This was very interesting, because she had never seen the doctor come at night-time before. He was dressed in his ordinary clothes, dark thick sort of clothes, and he carried his bag, the one that he always took whenever he came. And as Sweetie looked at him she realised that doctors were even more extraordinary than engine-drivers. They never went to bed at all. Just had their tea and went out to see people like the red-haired girl, who had been asleep when they had called during the daytime.

She couldn't see what the doctor was doing. And that was because his back was in the way—if he had been over on the other side she could have seen perfectly. But he was there for a long time and she thought, though she couldn't be sure, that he was sticking something into her. The shadow on the wall looked as though he was. Not that shadows are anything to be relied on. Just now when he had come in, the doctor's shadow itself had looked like a giraffe that reached right up the side of the ward and
bent over, when it came to the ceiling. And this was silly because the doctor was only quite a short man, shorter than Mrs. Gurnett, shorter than the night sister; one of the shortest doctors in the whole world. But she was still sure that he had stuck something into the red-haired girl. Because when the shadow had made the prod the red-haired girl had given a little cry, a sort of whimper as though someone was hurting her. And shadows never hurt anybody.

But something else was going on. The doctor came into sight again from the screen and walked back down the ward towards Sweetie. He looked cross, Sweetie thought. Or worried. Or else he had lost something—it's difficult to tell what grown-ups are: thinking when they're frowning. And she didn't want to look too closely because she was supposed to be asleep.

She very nearly was asleep when the doctor came back. But this time it was more interesting than ever because the doctor had got Sergeant Chiswick with him, and this surprised Sweetie a lot because she had never guessed that Sergeant Chiswick was another person who didn't ever go to bed. Sergeant Chiswick was carrying something she had never seen before. It was round and long and heavy and it was metal. Then she recognised it. There was one of them in the room where the dentist came to see if your teeth were all right, and it was something to do with having a tooth out so that it didn't hurt. So that explained everything: the red-haired girl had got toothache and the doctor had borrowed something so that he could pull it out. Perhaps Sergeant Chiswick was going to help. Perhaps he always helped because he was so strong from carrying buckets and things.