Spirit (51 page)

She stumbled back to the house. She was exhausted by the time she struggled up the steps to the front door, and she was gasping for breath. She went inside, sniffing with cold, and slammed the door behind her. There wasn't any time to lose. She hadn't wanted to do this – not this way – but now she knew that she had no choice. She brushed the snow off her coat, and put on her great-grandma's bonnet again. Then she went into the sitting-room. She held Laura's hand, and kissed her frigid cheek.

‘Please be all right, Laura,' she whispered. ‘Please don't leave me, not now. I need you so much.'

She sat in the big armchair on the other side of the room. She wound her scarf around her neck and tied it in a slipknot. She tied the other end to the arm of the chair.

Pray God this works. Pray God this works. Pray God I don't strangle myself, and die
.

She closed her eyes. She tried to think of Esther Summerson, the way that Dickens had described her, when she and Ada first met. ‘I saw in the young lady, with the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With such rich, golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent, trusting face!'

She leaned sideways in the armchair, so that the slipknot tightened around her neck. The scarf began to squeeze her larynx, and made her gag. But she kept on leaning over, further and further, until her breath was coming in short, harsh whines, and she felt as if she were throttling. Her vision darkened, and she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She started to panic, and claw at the knot with her fingernails, but somehow she managed to tell herself to stop, to stay calm, to think of Laura, to think about Lenny.

‘Esther Summerson,' she whispered. ‘Esther Summerson.'

Her vision darkened and darkened, until she could see nothing at all. She heard herself breathing in high-pitched squeals of constricted air; but then even that sound seemed to fade away, and she was sure that she was walking, not sitting, and that somebody was walking beside her. She heard shouting, and jeering, and the sound of horses' hoofs and iron-rimmed carriage wheels.

‘It's here,' said a woman's voice, very close to her ear.

She opened her eyes. She was standing outside, in the slush, on a foggy winter's morning. A woman in a brown Victorian cape and shawl was standing next to her. She looked around her, and saw that they had reached a narrow back street, part of a ramshackle collection of courts and lanes. The wind had dropped, but the air was extremely raw, and there was an acrid stench of coal-smoke and horses in the fog.

‘It's here,' the woman repeated. ‘You were asking for Krook's, wasn't you? It's here, right in front of your nose.'

Esther found herself in front of a shop, over which was written, in spindly letters
KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE,
and
KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES
. In one window a sign announced Bones Bought. In another, Kitchen Stuff Bought. In another, Old Iron Bought, and Waste Paper Bought, and Ladies' and Gentlemen's Wardrobes Bought. In all parts of the window there were quantities of dirty bottles – blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles. There was a tottering bench heaped with shabby old books, labelled Law Books, 9d Each. Inside the shop's entrance, Esther could see heaps of old scrolls and law papers, and heaps of tags, and second-hand bags of blue and red, all hanging up like hams.

It was so gloomy inside the shop that Esther couldn't have seen very much, except for a lighted lantern carried by an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap. As soon as he saw her, he turned, and came towards the entrance, and confronted her. He was short and withered, his head sunk sideways between his shoulders as if he were slowly collapsing from within. His breath fumed in the fog. His throat, chin and eyebrows were frosted with white hairs, and his skin was so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked like an old root that had been left out in the snow.

He addressed her, stepping out of the shop. ‘Have you anything to sell?'

‘Mr Krook? My name is Esther Summerson. I badly need your help.'

The old man stepped back, and eyed her up and down. He smelled of dust and ink and candle-grease and yesterday's luncheon, whatever that had been.

‘Help, what manner of help?' He peeked under her bonnet. ‘Hi, hi! Here's lovely hair! I've got three sacks of ladies' hair below, but none so beautiful or fine as this!'

‘I didn't come to sell my hair. I need you to come with me. I'll pay you well.'

‘I don't care for pay,' said Mr Krook. ‘It's things, that's
what I want to lay hold of. I have so many parchmentses and papers in my stock. I have a liking for rust and must and cobwebs. All's fish that comes to my net. Besides . . . I can't spare the time. I have rags and robes to weigh, bones to sort.'

Esther could dimly see her reflection in the shop's grimy windows. A very pretty, fair-complexioned girl, with gentle eyes, and slightly-pouting lips. She wondered why she seemed so unfamiliar, so unlike
her
.

Mr Krook turned, and hobbled back into his shop. It was then, however, that Esther saw another room, almost an invisible room, superimposed on the rags and the junk and the law books. A sitting-room, with a fireplace, and a long-case clock. She felt a tight constricting feeling around her throat, and she realized who she was, and why she was here.

‘Mr Krook!' she called. ‘I have a whole house for clearance, a whole house crammed to the ceiling with books and papers and kitchen stuff and furniture! You may have it all, all of it, if you assist me now!'

The old man stopped, and came back. ‘Is this true?' he wanted to know.

‘All you have to do is to put on your coat and come walk with me.'

‘Walk with you? Where?'

‘I won't detain you for long. Mr Krook. Why, if we fall to pleasant conversation, you might even persuade me to sell you my hair.'

The old man stopped, looked hard at her, looked down into the lantern, blew the light out. Esther waited in the street while Mr Krook donned his overcoat, a worn arrangement of greasy black, with a black astrakhan collar. Then together they walked along the slushy street.

‘May I know our destination?' Mr Krook inquired. Esther wished that he wouldn't draw quite so close to her, and that he didn't smell quite so rank.

‘Somewhere else,' said Esther. ‘You should stop at this corner, as I do, and close your eyes, and think of somewhere else . . . Lapland, where it always snows, all the year round.'

‘Lapland? Why should I wish to go to Lapland?'

‘You wish to have the contents of my house, don't you?'

‘Mmyes,' said Mr Krook, grumpily.

‘Then close your eyes and think of Lapland.'

They had reached the corner of the street. A hansom cab rattled past, followed by a horse-drawn dray, from the back of which half-a-dozen ragged children were hanging. A man in a bowler hat was standing on the opposite side of the street with a mournful expression and a placard that said, simply, Fish.

Esther stood close to the wall so that she wouldn't be jostled by passers-by, and closed her eyes. ‘Are your eyes closed, Mr Krook?'

‘My eyes is closed, Miss Summerson, though the Lord knows why.'

‘Are you thinking of Lapland, Mr Krook?'

‘I am, Miss Summerson, though the Lord knows why.'

They seemed to be standing on the noisy street-corner in Dickensian London for an age, without anything happening. Then, quite suddenly, Esther became aware of a chilly wind blowing against her face, a fresh cold wind that carried no odours of horse manure or coal smoke – a wind that smelled only of fir trees and frozen distances. She opened her eyes and she and Mr Krook were standing on an endless plain of pure unmarked snow, under a sky that was seamlessly black. It was bitingly cold, but it wasn't snowing, and the air was so pure that she could almost hear it ring. This was the imaginary world in which Peggy had been dancing when she fell through the ice into the swimming-pool. Esther had arrived here at last.

‘Mr Krook!' she said. ‘You may open your eyes now!'

Mr Krook opened first one eye and then the other. He
looked around him with his mouth hanging open, revealing rotten yellow stumps of his teeth.

‘Where are we? What the devil happened to Lincoln's Inn? Where's my shop? You've spirited my shop away, haven't you? That's what you've done! You've stolen my bottles, and my rags, and my law papers! That's it, ain't it?'

‘No, Mr Krook, I've done nothing of the kind. I've taken you to Lapland, to meet my sister. She lives here, amidst the ice and snow.'

Mr Krook closed his eyes tight shut. ‘Take me back again!' he demanded. ‘Take me back to Lincoln's Inn, or by all-that's holy – '

‘
No
, Mr Krook,' Esther insisted, and firmly took hold of his mittened hand, and began to pull him across the snow. Reluctantly, grumbling, he opened his eyes and started to walk with her.

‘Who would live in such a place? Where's the houses? Where's the people? Where's the rags and bones and bottles?'

They hadn't walked for more than a mile before Esther saw a small white shape in the distance. She knew instinctively what it was. She was more than a character in a book, as Mr Krook was. She was Elizabeth as well as Esther. She had influence over her own imagination, so that she could change where she was, and what time it was, and who she should fancy to meet.

The Peggy-girl came nearer and nearer across the vast and flawless plain of snow. The air was so clear and lens-like that she seemed to become larger by optical magnification, rather than perspective. Not far behind her, a huge black shape loomed, its cloak billowing in the Arctic wind. Esther could hear its thundering tread when it was still more than a mile away, like the thundering of a distant iron foundry.

‘Hi! What's this?' said Mr Krook.

‘My sister's coming,' Esther told him.

‘Your sister? And what else? I shan't take another step. I detest this place. I detest this tedious walking, too.'

‘Then stand still,' said Esther, in the clearest of voices.

The Peggy-girl reached them and stood in the wind, staring at them with a cold and disapproving expression on her face.

‘Lizzie,' she said. ‘Why did you come here? This is my place, not yours.'

‘I came for Lenny. I want him back, and I won't be leaving without him.'

‘Who's this?' asked the Peggy-girl, turning to Mr Krook.

Mr Krook dragged off his fur cap and gave her the deepest and most sarcastic of bows. ‘They call me the Lord Chancellor, my dear, although I'm not the salaried Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned brother who sits in the Inn. They call me that because both he and I grub on in a muddle, never cleaning, nor repairing, nor sweeping, nor scouring; and because he and I can never bear to part with anything, once we've laid our hands on it.'

‘Why did you bring him here?' the Peggy-girl wanted to know. Behind her, in the middle-distance, the black shape of the Snow Queen was bearing down on them like a huge transcontinental locomotive. The ice began to tremble under their feet, and the air began to twang and crack.

‘I want Lenny,' Esther insisted. ‘You didn't have any right to take him. More than that, I want you to leave me alone. Stop protecting me. Live here, if you want to, with your Snow Queen and your fairy stories, but leave me alone!'

‘God's teeth,' breathed Mr Krook. The black shape was almost on top of them now, taller than two men, with a hideously hunched back. Mr Krook looked at Esther in alarm, his rheumy eyes bulging out of his head, and took two staggering steps backward. ‘What is this thing?' he asked, his voice thick with panic. ‘Does it mean us harm?'

The Peggy-girl circled around Esther, one blackened toe
pointed downward, ballet-like, so that she left a perfect circle in the snow. The air was so cold now that Esther's coat was stiff with ice, and her bonnet glittered. The black shape rumbled and thundered only a few feet away, towering over them, black against a blacker sky. Still the temperature fell, until the air itself began to crackle like cellophane, and every breath formed diamonds around their mouths and nostrils.

‘You should know where Lenny is,' said the Peggy-girl, and her eyes were impenetrable. ‘Where do all our loved ones go? Where did little Clothes-Peg go?'

‘Let him free!' Esther shouted at her. ‘Peggy, for the love of God, let him free and leave me alone!'

‘Don't you want me?' asked Peggy, plaintively.

‘No, I don't want you! Go away!'

‘Don't you
love
me?'

‘No, I don't love you! I hate you! Go away!'

The Peggy-girl stayed silent for a moment. Then her hair rose up in the air, as stiff as icicles, and she screamed and screamed until Esther thought that the ice would crack beneath their feet.

At the same time, she heard a clashing metallic snarl, and a rumble of heavy material, and the so-called Snow Queen threw back her cape and bared her head.

‘Save me!' screamed Mr Krook, dropping to his knees. ‘Saints and angels, save me!'

The head that emerged from the Snow Queen's cape was monstrous and bony, and white as death. It was a grotesque parody of a woman's face, long and skull-like, with blind white tentacles writhing around its neck. Its eyes were dark and unreadable, like the Peggy-girl's, but the jumbled rows of jagged teeth that encrusted its jaw were drawn back in a hideous and obvious grin of triumph. Out of the cloak reached a claw-like hand, fleshless and shrunken, and Esther thought that she could glimpse naked flesh, white with cold, and
dangling and swinging with extraneous growths and tags of skin.

‘Hel, the daughter of Loki,' she breathed, and even her breath hurried away in terror.

The Peggy-girl stood close to her. ‘That's right. How did you know? The Snow Queen was always Hel. “Hel into darkness thou trew'st. And gav'st her nine unlighted worlds to rule. A queen and empire over all the dead.” '