The Winter Ground (13 page)

I need not have worried. When Ina and I went our separate ways the next day, Ma Cooke waved to both of us alike and Pa Cooke and his horse-whip were nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of Charlie. I took a deep breath, climbed the stairs to Anastasia’s wagon and knocked once again.

‘Enter,’ she called from inside and so, feeling a little like a parlour maid, I did.

‘This is insupportable,’ she said when she saw who it was. ‘I have nothing to say to you.’

She was still in bed, wrapped in a blanket and with a moth-eaten kind of tippet around her shoulders and drawn up over her neck. The wagon was chilly, with fogged windows and even a bloom of condensation on the paintwork here and there, and it made me begin to lose patience with her. She had at least three friends at Cooke’s that I knew of so far: Charlie, always ready to champion her; Ma desperate to help; and Tiny, like a self-appointed little jester at her elbow. Besides, ponies – like rabbits and white mice and Lord knows goldfish – simply
do
die. I could not see that there was any reason for her to be in such a monumental sulk with the world at large and certainly there was no call for her to be scowling so at me. On the other hand, might Charlie’s frequent leaps to her defence be designed to annoy his brother? And perhaps only professional stubbornness made Tiny Truman work so hard to make her smile at him. As for Mrs Cooke’s affectionate concern, Topsy had said she was a mother to all; there was no particular glory for Anastasia in it. With my spanking hand itching a little I forced myself to be gentle.

‘I hope you’re feeling better,’ I began, sinking my chin down into my fur collar and bunching handfuls of pocket lining into my fists to warm them. ‘What happened yesterday was a great shock to everyone.’

She nodded rather reluctantly.

‘A very nasty accident,’ I went on. ‘Very unsettling.’

‘It was not an accident,’ said Anastasia. ‘It was a warning.’ She was staring straight ahead, her face a blank.

‘A warning?’ I echoed. Was this a confession? She shrugged. ‘And what has Topsy done that she deserves such a warning?’

Now she turned to face me at last and frowned.

‘Good God,’ she said, ‘you don’t think it was
me
? Has someone said it was me?’ If her astonishment was an act, then it was a splendid one. Before I could think how to continue, two great fat tears surged up in her eyes and spilled on to the tippet. ‘Is that what they are saying? Haven’t I suffered enough? Exile, loneliness and grief. Being treated as though I am a nothing and having to sink lower than I can bear simply to keep a roof over my head and to have a name I do not fear to speak? And now to be accused of such cold-heartedness …’

‘Umm,’ I said. ‘No one has accused you of anything … dear. Only how do you
know
it was a warning?’ The tears were falling quite freely now. ‘And I certainly would not call you cold-hearted. Anyone could see how upset you were yesterday. But what do you know about it? If you can help me, tell me what you know.’

She caught her lip in her teeth and managed to stop crying with a shuddering sigh.

‘Of course I was upset,’ she said. ‘I think that it was done purely to upset me. It is I who is being warned.’

‘Well,’ I countered, ‘I should imagine Topsy was part of it.’

‘Poor Topsy was just the pawn,’ she replied, and she turned to look out of the window, although she could surely only see a patch of milky sky. ‘If they have found me. I think they have. They are everywhere. And so, once again, it begins.’

She sounded, I thought, not so much an
unhappy
girl as a girl who was absolutely (as my sons would have it) barking mad.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, carefully.

‘Before I answer,’ she said, ‘who are
you
? I must be careful. Trust is a luxury I cannot afford.’

Now, I try, always, to be professional when on a case, to set aside the norms of society and care only about the questions and answers, the suspects and clues, but at that moment I could feel something rearing up inside me and I was powerless to stop it. I was sitting in a damp, chilly hovel of a caravan – and Ana’s living quarters were squalid indeed compared with the Cookes’ – being spoken to by a girl not twenty-five years old who worked in a circus, as though
I
were a girl, a girl behind the glove counter who had lost madam’s order and offered madam cheek.

‘Now, look here, Miss … What shall I call you? What is your name?’

‘My name is Anastasia,’ she said.

‘And your surname?’

‘My name is simply Anastasia,’ she repeated. ‘That is best for now.’ I bristled. Even Mrs Cooke with her Russian blood admitted to ‘Polly’.

‘Well then, Anastasia,’ I said, ‘I am here to look into some matters which are troubling Mrs Cooke and you are one of them. She is worried about you.’

‘She need not be,’ said Anastasia and she smiled to herself. ‘I have no choice. I have only one card left in my hand. I cannot believe that I must play it but … my life has been unbelievable to me for some time now. Mrs Cooke need not worry. She will triumph.’

‘I am not entirely sure that I follow you,’ I said. ‘Mrs Cooke’s concern was for your happiness not her own. She thinks you are a talented girl – she called you a star – and she does not want to lose you.’

Anastasia smiled again. ‘As you say: she does not want to lose me. So it is lucky that her needs and mine march along together. She will help me.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘She will always be there to help you, but you must help yourself too. You could try to be a little more … Well, I noticed that you didn’t seem very pleased with the new act yesterday. You could have been more …’

‘You do not know how hard I try,’ said Anastasia. The tears were flowing again.

‘I
do
understand,’ I told her. ‘I know nothing about circus acts and even I could see that Reflection by Moonlight is a waste of your talents. It is a hard lesson to have to learn and rather heavy-handed of Mr Cooke to force you into it, but
he’s
only trying to help you too.’

Ana, at that, gave a short, dry laugh.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘everyone is only trying to help me. Everyone has wonderful ideas about how to help me. You do not know what help I must take. Just to be safe. Just to survive. But how did it help me when that man took my horse? He told me Bisou was ill and had to be shot, but I know he sold him.’

‘I see,’ I said, grasping on to this one little pip of possible sense in the midst of it all. ‘He was your horse? The haute école pony who died? He didn’t belong to the Cookes?’

‘He was mine,’ she said. ‘I trained him as a child and no one but me ever rode him. Now he is gone, as so much that was mine is gone. But not everything. I am not without value, even brought as low as I am. I will purchase my protection, though the cost is to rip my heart out of my breast and lay it upon the altar.’

I stared at her, thinking hard. I was half convinced there was a name for what I was hearing, something which had been bandied around in the newspapers of late. Hugh had probably tutted and read out passages about it in withering tones. And stealing Pa’s whip to pay him back for the death of her pony fitted all too neatly into it. No wonder Mrs Cooke was anxious about her, and one could hardly blame Mr Cooke if he did feel his circus would be in calmer waters without her, talent or no. Even her denial of guilt in the matter of the rope began to lose a little of its weight when set against the fact that she sounded just as sincere talking absolute fantastical rot about nothing at all.

There was only one person I could think of who might have a different view of the unfortunate girl. After leaving her – still in bed, still under the blankets (and I felt the spirit of Nanny Palmer move within me; it was after eleven on a sunny morning) and with the temperature in her wagon dropping all the time as the stove grew cold – I sought another audience with Tiny, who certainly knew something. Ma Cooke had said so and I agreed with her. I had no more than that one look of his to go on, but it had been quite a look.

He was sitting peeling onions on the steps of his wagon, with the door shut behind him, and he gave a cheery wave of his knife as I approached him and winked one of his streaming eyes.

‘You must be frozen,’ I said, remembering what he had said about the merits of nice warm mud and the hard frost which had now descended.

‘Two ticks, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, ‘and we’ll get away inside, only I’ve just got me stove going strong and didn’t want to let the heat out, only I can’t stand t’smell of onions hanging round all day either, so here I am. Poor Cinders!’ He pulled a tragic face at me and, although I had never peeled an onion in my life, I was tempted to take the knife from him and pitch in to help.

‘I’ve just been to see Ana,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ said Tiny, cocking an interested look at me. ‘And how is she this morning?’

‘Still in bed,’ I said. ‘Rather rattled after yesterday. She’s a funny one, isn’t she?’

‘She’s not alone round here, missus,’ he said, bundling up his peelings in newspaper and hefting the pot of onions into his arms. ‘Come on in. I’ll make coffee.’

‘Coffee?’ I echoed, surprised and delighted.

‘Andrew Merryman and his swanky ways rubbing off on me,’ said Tiny. Inside, he set the pot on the floor, opened the stove door and pushed it inside. The stove was the same size as all the others and so Tiny did not have to bend to look into it, but the rest of the furnishings did have something of the doll’s house about them – a miniature chair and table, a shaving stand not two feet tall, a ladder up to the box-bed at the end.

‘Sit down,’ said Tiny, nodding to a second chair. Beside his it seemed enormous, and actually when I looked closely at it, it really was enormous. ‘Andrew’s chair,’ said Tiny, laughing at my slowness. ‘I tell you when we get a good bottle down us and sit in t’wrong seats it’s an uncomfortable night for both.’ He closed the oven door on the pot and gave the stove a little polish before tucking the pad tidily away.

‘Won’t the onions make the wagon smell now anyway?’ I asked him. I could remember the smell of boiled onions in milk on the nursery fire when I was tiny, never quite worth the fug no matter that they were delicious.

‘No, it’ll all go up the pipe now,’ said Tiny. ‘Oh, the winter the winter the winter ground,’ he moaned. ‘In season, there’s a big dinner twice a day. Dinnertime and again after t’show, but winters it’s dinner together and shift for yourself at night, see? I’d starve if it weren’t for Topsy. She feeds Andrew up and I get his leftovers.’

‘She doesn’t feed you?’ I said.

‘She’s her own boss,’ said Tiny. ‘She does as she likes.’

‘And how is she today?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen her?’

He nodded. ‘Her hands is bad,’ he said. ‘Be a week before they’re straight again. Lucky in a way it’s winter and the start of it too. Pa Cooke would have her dropped off in t’next town and someone new in, family or no, if it were season.’

‘Things are that desperate?’ I said. ‘Ana said something which I took to be a story, but if things are as tight as all that …’

‘Pa Cooke stole her horse and sold it?’ said Tiny. ‘Who can say, who can say? Pa said the beast took a bad colic and the glue man come and shot him, but half of us was away to t’next stand and it’s not like Pa to hang back at pull-down. So who can say?’

‘Why on earth would he do such a thing?’ I said.

‘I’m not saying he did,’ said Tiny, which was far from a straight answer. ‘That’s just Ana’s story.’

‘It wasn’t by any means the only story she was telling,’ I said.

‘Oh, she’s the star o’ t’show and we all hate her for it?’

‘She didn’t touch on that particular point,’ I said. ‘But for some reason, she seems to think – and this in the teeth of all the evidence – that she is the target of these tricks, or whatever you want to call them.’

‘Wouldn’t call them “tricks” now, would you?’ said Tiny, his face settling in deep lines as he frowned. ‘Not if this last’s another one, because a missing swing’s one thing, but that long rope could have killed Topsy. No, it had to be an accident. Had to be.’ His voice cracked and he rubbed his hand roughly across his mouth.

‘Ana called it a warning,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said Tiny. ‘She would do. It’s a little foible of Ana’s, see.’ He was scooping coffee into a battered tin pot, in generous quantities.

‘I don’t see, not really,’ I said. ‘When the two things that were done were specifically aimed at Topsy, I don’t see at all.’

‘Well, here’s where I have to do my duty as a fine upstanding member of Cooke’s Circus what doesn’t want to get his marchers when it’s so cold outside.’

‘I knew you knew something,’ I said.

‘I knew you knew I knew,’ said Tiny, then he grew serious again. ‘There was more than them two things done. And the rest were nowt to do with Topsy at all. Here,’ he said, ‘know what just struck me? How come you’re talking to me like I’m on your side, missus? How come you think whoever it were, it weren’t me, when it were my rope what got used for t’swap?’

‘
Because
of the swap,’ I said.

‘Ain’t you ever heard of a double-bluff?’

I hesitated. He joked incessantly but who knew what sensitivities the jokes might hide.

‘Because your rope was tied to the beam,’ I said at last. ‘Sorry to be so blunt.’

‘You think I couldn’t climb up that pole and walk along that beam with a coiled rope on me?’ said Tiny. He was pouring out two cups of coffee with a flourish, raising the pot as high as he could to make the tops froth. He got out of his chair and climbed on to it, pouring all the time, holding the pot high above his head and still hitting the cup with the thin stream of liquid. ‘Why would that be then?’ he asked me, looking straight across, at eye-level now.

‘I simply assumed …’ I began, clumsily. Tiny climbed down again and handed me one of the cups.

‘Yesssss, you’re right there,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have done it to save me life.’ He paused. ‘No head for heights.’ I nodded. ‘Never needed one. Boom-boom.’ And he laughed so heartily at my discomfort that in the end I had to laugh too.

‘So,’ I said sternly, at last. ‘The rest? That was nothing to do with Topsy?’