The Winter Ground (7 page)

‘No,’ said Alec. ‘I think you’re right about the enduring, but I got the distinct impression that she has an end in sight. She’s putting up with it all
until something
. Do you see?’

All of a sudden, I did. All of a sudden, Ina’s kindness to Albert Wilson the evening before seemed a little like the treat one gives to an old horse while, out of sight, a groom is loading the gun.

‘I suppose the obvious thing is widowhood,’ I said, reluctantly.

‘Not much chance of that – Wilson looks good for decades yet. I’d back him surviving her any day.’

‘And she doesn’t have the leisurely air one sees when good fortune is just about to fall into someone’s lap.’

‘The cushioned look of sure inheritance,’ said Alec. ‘The one that Robin Laurie wears like a mink cloak. It’s pretty sickening and, I agree, absent from young Mrs Wilson. So anyway, what did she say to you in the drawing room once you were alone?’

‘Not much of import, as you can imagine,’ I told him. ‘She was knocked flat by that debacle at the table.’

‘She must have said something,’ Alec insisted. ‘Tell me at least that you got to work on her and didn’t just let her sit there fluttering and fainting.’

‘Alec, darling,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t truffle on just for practice. We’re not on a case, if you recall.’ Even as I said it, though, I could hear the approaching footsteps which would render my words untrue.

Pallister had been pushed beyond his – considerable – capacity for cold disdain and looked simply stunned.

‘A visitor for you, madam,’ he said and he delivered it without any editorialising at all, not so much as a meaningful hesitation; but numbly, as though in shock. He did not hold the door open but turned and walked away.

Into the doorway, with a rustle of bombazine and a flash of gold, stepped Mrs Cooke, a small black monkey in a sequined waistcoat perched on one arm.

‘I’m ringing off now, Alec,’ I said into the telephone, ‘but I imagine we’ll be speaking again very soon.’

‘You’ll excuse me bringing the little one, my beauty,’ she said as she plumped down on to a sofa, ‘only he gets so bored in the winter there and then what mischief like you wouldn’t believe.’ The monkey, closely watched by a very puzzled Bunty, was looking around my sitting room with bright interest and twitching fingers and I followed its gaze, taking in the Dresden clock and candlesticks on which there were porcelain petals and cherubs’ wings so thin one could see the sunlight through them, and the Rockingham pottery Dalmatians, which were admittedly rather vulgar but had been presents from my sister and had terribly spindly legs. On the other hand, no one had ever called me her beauty, and as a sweetening tactic it was hard to beat.

‘Would you like some coffee, Mrs Cooke?’

‘Cup of tea would go down a treat there,’ she answered and I pulled the bell-rope.

Pallister had clearly recovered himself enough to spread the news because the parlour maid was in the room almost before the rope had stilled again, her eyes like soup plates.

‘I’ll have my coffee now, Becky,’ I said. ‘A pot of tea too.’ I glanced at the monkey. ‘And some cocoa? Milk?’

‘Bobbo would take a few raisins,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘But he’s not a lover of milk.’

I dismissed Becky with a nod and a smile and turned to business.

‘Now then, Mrs Cooke,’ I said, ‘what can I do for you?’

‘My father,’ she said, apparently in reply, ‘wurr a lion tamer. Now, you might not think that’s strange there.’ She stopped and regarded me for a minute.

‘It’s certainly less surprising than if my father had been a lion tamer,’ I said.

‘Well, my beauty,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘that’s where you’re wrong. For although there’s families of balancing slangers and tumbling slangers stretching right back, for wurn’t the first Tam Cooke a horse man just like Pa, the big cats is quite different, see. It’s like lightning, strikes anywhere, and dun’t come back.’ At this moment, she unclasped a little knitted bag she had hanging from her wrist and drew out a piece of card. ‘That’s me,’ she said, passing it to me. It was, I saw, a very old and rather yellowed photograph – a daguerreotype, probably – showing a fat baby dressed in the heavily beribboned style of the previous century, lolling amongst a set of cushions. I took a closer look and could feel my eyes widen. They were not cushions at all, but lion cubs, four of them, one of them with a big soft paw on the baby’s leg.

‘I loved the cats,’ Mrs Cooke said. ‘Watched them for hours, lions, tigers and leopards the same, watched my old pa in the cage every day, watched him break in the new stock, watched him clean their teeth and trim their claws. One time he tripped and fell over and got a bit of a biff for his trouble, because it dun’t do to show a cat your belly, and that day I just watched and din’t even leave off licking my lolly.

‘Until this one day.’ Mrs Cooke had a new note in her voice. ‘It wurr a tigress. Princess Zanzi was her name and Pa had bought her from the Rosaires to make three for his second spot. Well, as soon as I saw my daddy step into that cage with Zanzi I started to scream and holler and drum my heels, just like a little flatty rakly instead of a circus girl. I got tooken out, leathered hard by my ma and put in the wagon with no dinner, tea nor supper that day. And what do you think happened, there?’

The door opened and Becky entered with the coffee tray, followed by Annie with a tray of tea and one of the housemaids carrying a plate of buns which could easily have been brought by one of the others, but I could hardly blame them.

Mrs Cooke poured herself a cup and gave Bobbo one of the buns from which he did, sure enough, begin to pick out raisins. I was mesmerised for a minute or two, watching him crouched on the arm of my sofa with his long toes curled over it, daintily transferring the little morsels to his mouth.

‘Well, my beauty, what happened was this: when he’d got Princess Zanzi trained up and in the ring with the other two tigresses – and it took no time at all, for my pa worked a charm on every cat he met and she wurr a quick one to catch on – the very first show, first whip crack, she leapt off her tub and went for his throat.’

‘Did he survive?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘he turned away in time and she got him in the shoulder there, but he lost his arm and near half his blood and spent the rest of the season in the hospital with doctors coming from all over to look at him, and then how many acts din’t up and leave us, with the boss laid out and my mother struggling. We had a hard winter that year.’ She took a swig of tea. ‘Well, there’s what comes of not sticking to your family way, but he’d learned his lesson. When he came home at last the first thing he did wurr get a lion tamer in and himself went back to his horses.’

‘And what happened to Zanzi?’ I asked. ‘Was she shot?’

‘No, none of that,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘Beast couldn’t help her nature, could she? She wurr put in the menagerie and drew a fair crowd there. My ma painted up the sides of her wagon with scenes of the fight, called her Zanzi the Mankiller. Flatties couldn’t get enough of her after that. And do you know, Pa ended up with a set of liberty horses as good as Tam’s is now even with his one arm, so all was well and ended well there.’

I had the feeling familiar from the day before that Mrs Cooke’s story had gone awry somewhere. Certainly, I could not see the moral of it.

‘So,’ I began, ‘are you saying that lightning did strike twice in this case? That you have the gift for big cats like your father?’

‘Me?’ said Mrs Cooke, astonished. ‘Not me. I love the beasts but I’m a Cooke through and through, horses all the way. Not but what my ma wurr pure Ilchenko and like as she had no bones the tumbles she could do. No, I’ve no way with the big cats much as I love them. Never even thought myself to try.’ She now looked at me with as piercing a stare as two such round brown eyes could muster. ‘No, it’s the sight I have,’ she said. ‘Even from a babby. I knew trouble was coming from that Zanzi. And’ – she leaned forward – ‘I know trouble’s coming now. I’m not a maid any more and I don’t scream and shout, I play clever. But I knew it, I know it and I’m not wrong.’

‘What kind of trouble?’ I breathed. One could take or leave the second sight and one could not help thinking that the history of Zanzi and her old pa was a bit of a shunt up a narrative siding, but if Mrs Cooke had hard facts with her as well as memories, I wanted to hear them.

‘Topsy,’ she said and then bit her lip. ‘It goes against my nap to be telling a … someone who’s from the outside, begging your pardon. But I need help there and no other way round it. Topsy has lost her swing. Topsy Turvy, our little tumbler, my niece, more or less. Her swing what she has for the trapeze is gone.’

I had been sitting forward with my breath held, waiting, and at that I must admit I let it go and slumped back a bit again.

‘And you need help to search for it?’ I said. Mrs Cooke gave a short laugh, which made me blush and made Bobbo the monkey look up at us both for a moment. ‘Or you need help to find out who took it?’ I said; a slightly more sensible suggestion.

‘I think I know who took it,’ said Ma. ‘I only wish I din’t.’

‘So,’ I said slowly, but not slowly enough for what I should say next to spring to my mind. ‘So … I’m sorry, Mrs Cooke, but how exactly
can
I help?’

‘How can she help, she asks!’ Mrs Cooke twinkled at me. ‘Don’t you come over shy with me, my beauty. I saw your hand, remember there? And I looked at your leaves once you’d gone, just to make sure. I know what you are.’ I stared at her and I could feel a prickle as the hairs stood up along the back of my neck. ‘Besides, it in’t just Topsy. There’s more going on than Pa could crack his whip at and the swing’s just the tip what’s broke the surface like. But, one way or three, you can stop it. You know you can. You’ve done it before, han’t you?’

‘Apart from anything else,’ I said, regaining some of my composure, ‘it was my left hand you looked at.’

‘Left hand’s where some things show,’ said Mrs Cooke.

I decided that a brisk air of business was the best response to such bewitchments (and I thought, not for the first time, that for a rational woman such as me, brought up to believe that miracles and wonders were the province of the vicar and he was welcome to them, I certainly seemed to be a magnet for mystic fancy).

‘So who took it then?’ I said.

‘Ana,’ answered Mrs Cooke. ‘I din’t see her or nothing but I’d put my toenails on it. There’s no love lost ’tween her and Topsy and less every time you look there, and it’s not the first time neither, although thanks be that I stopped it a-coming out or she’d have been off that ground there with a flea in her ear.’

‘But if she’s a thief,’ I said, ‘then why not?’

‘Not a thief!’ said Mrs Cooke, shifting and resettling herself with a great rustling of her petticoats. ‘Not so bad as that. It wurr just a prank.’

‘What did she do?’ I asked.

‘She took Tam’s whip.’ Mrs Cooke’s voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘If Tam had found out … it just in’t circus to go meddling with props what in’t yours, and the rum coll’s whip in’t just any old prop.’

‘The who?’ I asked.

‘The boss man,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘What you’d call the ringmaster.’

‘You must be very fond of this Ana,’ I said. ‘If she’s being as naughty as all that and you’re still on her side … and against your own husband too.’

‘Tin’t that,’ said Mrs Cooke. She looked at me for a long moment before she spoke again. ‘You know our boys are away across the sea? Kushty boys, they are, both of them. Lads still, not forty, and I miss them more than I can tell you without my heart breaking in my mouth. Do you have babbies of your own?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Two sons, like you. Fifteen and thirteen.’ I forbore to mention that I had waved them gladly off to prep school at eight and we smiled at one another fondly.

‘So there’s how bad it is then,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘My Tom and Joe are two of the finest horsemen I ever did see, and that’s not just me what’s their ma saying it. They have a voltige act for now – The Brothers Ilchenko – using their granny’s name for the sound of it – a Cossack act and it’s a sight to see, madam, dancing on them two ponies of theirs, fast as a blur and all the galleries clapping and stamping their feet. It wurr the top of the show.’ She was getting quite misty as she recounted this, but soon gathered herself again with a sniff. ‘But young Tom would have gave way in the end,’ she said. ‘Give over the act to young Joe and his wife – when he got one, like – and taken the whip from his pa. Tam Cooke’s Circus it would be, same as ever. That’s what we’ve thought, Pa and me, since the day he wurr born.’

‘But they’ve gone,’ I put in, hoping to keep Mrs Cooke from recounting Tom Jr’s entire childhood to me.

‘And I thought we’d fold for sure without them,’ she said. ‘Till our Ana came along. Her and her golden pony.’

‘She’s the star of the show?’ I said, guessing.

‘But don’t you go saying so, mind,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘I mean to say, the Prebrezhenskys are a grand spot and Topsy’s a pretty girl and always draws a crowd. And them two clowns was made for each other. But a circus needs animals, see? If she ups and leaves us, we won’t hardly be a circus at all no more.’

‘But she’s trouble?’

‘I wun’t say that,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘The poor maid’s troubled in herself and who could blame her? For she’s had a hard life there and come to the circus to make it better but not a scrap of luck since, none at all. Her golden pony died and Tam – I shouldn’t speak ill of my own man – but Tam’s that down on her and just looking for a reason to give her the ghost. Or she might just up and off by her own self, afore we have a chance to get her bound to us for keeps like. And she could have a grand life at Cooke’s, if she’d just bed in. If she’d just … If she wurr one o’ my own, I’d talk to her myself, find out what’s ailing her and talk her round like. But …’

‘She’s not a relation then?’

‘Josser,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘Gently born like yourself there, madam. And so I thought you could mebbes talk to her in her own tongue, get close to her and get her told. Only … don’t go talk talk talking until you know what to say there, eh? I’d talk to the rest of ’em first, find out what’s what and who knows it. Them clowns is up to something for starters. And not just them neither. Bill Wolf knows more than he’ll tell me.’