Gideon the Cutpurse Read online

  Peter listened to the buzz of conversation punctuated by occasional gales of laughter. One voice, in particular, swept up from the table and echoed off the walls of the house into the night.

  ‘Damn your eyes, sir!’ exclaimed a stout, hearty gentleman whilst removing his wig and wiping his bald head with a lace handkerchief. ‘I’ll wager you ten, no twenty! bottles of my best port that the bay mare is in foal before her sister.’

  ‘I accept your wager, Parson Ledbury, as the whole table can bear witness,’ declared the man sitting opposite to him. ‘And as you boast you keep the best cellar in these parts, I shall look forward all the more to consuming my winnings.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Mrs Byng reproachfully, ‘I hope your passion for gambling does not lead you down the same path as my husband’s friend, Lord Arlington. He lost a king’s ransom last month betting that one raindrop would reach the bottom of the windowpane before another.’

  Parson Ledbury roared appreciatively.

  ‘What is a life without risk? A sorry one, I should say, madam. How much did the young feller lose?’

  ‘Three thousand guineas.’

  Wow! Peter said to himself. They sure are fond of betting.

  The Parson slapped his thigh. ‘Sidney,’ he exclaimed, gripping the boy’s arm in his meaty fist, ‘by the look of disapproval on your dear mother’s face, I believe she is beginning to doubt the wisdom of entrusting her jewellery to me. My dear Charlotte, do you think me capable of betting your diamond necklace on a raindrop?’

  Mrs Byng laughed. ‘All I ask is that you have the clasp properly repaired and the necklace returned safe to me in time for the Harvest Ball. In any case, if I could not trust you with my precious necklace, I should scarcely be entrusting you with my two precious sons.’

  The Parson’s fleshy face folded into a roguish smile. ‘I see your reasoning, cousin, although it occurs to me that Sidney, here, is a strapping, young fellow. Now that it is the custom in London to wager one’s relatives when one’s purse is empty, what is to stop me losing your son and heir in a bet?’

  Sidney shot to his feet, affronted, and the whole table burst into laughter.

  ‘The Parson is teasing you, Sidney,’ said his mother gently. ‘You know he cannot stand to be serious for more than five minutes at a stretch.’

  Peter chuckled into his sleeve. This was a different Sidney to the one he had seen lord it over his sisters at breakfast. Parson Ledbury gave Sidney a friendly punch to the shoulder, causing him to spill his glass of wine, which Peter suspected was the Parson’s intention. A footman appeared out of the shadows to mop up the mess although Peter noticed that nobody bothered to say thank you.

  Peter watched the Parson turn serious all of a sudden as he leaned towards Mrs Byng. He lowered his booming voice although it was still perfectly audible to everyone.

  ‘You will not, I hope, mention the necklace to Mr Seymour, given his history.’

  Peter’s ears pricked up. What’s the Parson got against Gideon? he wondered.

  ‘My brother says we are lucky indeed to have him,’ said Mrs Byng. ‘He ran a great house in London as well as an estate in Surrey with a thousand acres. Richard insists that he is a good man who has been ill used by Lord Luxon.’

  ‘A leopard does not change his spots, madam. I don’t trust him and I don’t like him. I shall be on my guard, of that you can be certain.’

  ‘You are too harsh,’ replied Mrs Byng. ‘I believe Mr Seymour to be sound.’

  ‘What has Mr Seymour done, Mother?’ asked Sidney.

  ‘Nothing, my dear, nothing at all. It is of no consequence.’

  The Parson grunted. Peter was so keen to hear what they were saying about Gideon that he lost his footing momentarily and his chin came crashing down onto the woodensill, causing him to bite his tongue. He gasped in pain and inhaled all the dust that had collected in the corner of the window. The dust irritated Peter’s nose and he let out not one but four explosive sneezes one after the other that rang out across the garden. When Peter opened his eyes, every face at the table was turned up towards him. He thought he had better wave and say something.

  ‘Goodnight!’ Peter shouted down. ‘Looks like you’re having a smashing dinner.’

  And with that he slammed down the window, leaped into bed and covered his face with a sheet, the sound of Parson Ledbury’s laughter ringing in his ears.

  The farewell dinner had ended some time ago and now Baslow Hall was silent except for the occasional hooting of an owl. Gideon Seymour alone was not asleep in his bed. On his bed lay the crumpled letter. He stood motionless at an open window high above the gardens, fragrant with lavender and roses. Above his head, silhouetted against a hunter’s moon, bats flitted in and out from under the eaves.

  ‘To think I escaped his clutches only to learn of this!’ Gideon’s eyes burned with such intensity and hatred that an observer would have thought he was talking to a living being. Yet it was into the empty night air that Gideon directed his words and whatever he saw in his mind’s eye was clearly causing him great distress.

  ‘He lies, Joshua! He lies! He does not hold you in high regard, he does this to lure me back, he has no other aim!’ Gideon cried. ‘Will Luxon not rest until he has taken everything from me? Why can he not let me go in peace?’

  Peter was dreaming about his mother and father. He was trying to tell them something but they could not hear him, no matter how loudly he spoke.

  ‘Peter! Peter! Wake up!’

  Someone was shaking his shoulder. He blinked his eyes open and the bare, whitewashed room came into focus.

  ‘Oh. It’s you,’ he said and slumped back on the pillow.

  ‘Peter, I can make myself blur!’ said Kate. Her hair was loose and she was still dressed in a long white nightgown. Her face was lit up with excitement. ‘Just watch.’

  She closed her eyes and shook out her body until her limbs were floppy. Peter lay on the bed watching Kate. She looked so comical standing there that when nothing happened after a couple of minutes, he started to chuckle.

  ‘Oh, you’ve put me off now,’ said Kate crossly. ‘It’s a knack. I know I can get better at it. I’ve been practising since daybreak. It’s like those 3-D pictures – at first everything’s flat but if you relax and just keep on looking, after a while the picture pops out at you and you can’t imagine how you couldn’t have seen it before.’

  Kate walked towards the window and stood in the sunshine, her red hair gleaming.

  ‘Don’t put me off this time,’ she ordered and relaxed her body again. She closed her eyes and let her head fall forwards a little. She put Peter in mind of a meditating angel.

  A moment later, Kate seemed to melt into the morning air. The sun shone directly onto Peter’s face. He lifted up his hand to shade his eyes. The next moment Kate had vanished altogether. A buzzing bluebottle zigzagged in the bright space where she had stood.

  ‘Oh no! Kate!’ Peter called out. ‘No!’

  Peter’s heart started to beat frantically and that sixth sense which tells you if you’re in someone’s presence told Peter, even before he looked around him to check, that the room was empty. Kate had gone. The thought of being stranded in 1763 all alone was terrifying. She might have her faults but he and Kate were in this together and she couldn’t just abandon him like this, could she? Peter flung himself on the bed, feeling wretched beyond words, and punched his pillow, again and again, shouting ‘No!’ with each thump.

  ‘Temper, temper,’ said Kate from his bedroom door.

  Peter froze in mid-punch and looked over at her open-mouthed.

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I walked,’ she replied and burst into fits of giggles.

  ‘Stop laughing and tell me what happened,’ said Peter in exasperation.

  But Kate could not stop laughing and collapsed on the bed, holding her stomach, tears running down her cheeks.

  ‘Your face,’ she gasped. ‘Those girls’ faces!’ She buried her head
in the sheets but her body still vibrated with laughter.

  ‘What girls? Oh Kate, do get a grip!’

  Kate slowly sat up and tried very hard not to laugh. ‘I walked the length of the classroom …’ she started, but it was no good, she was having an attack of the giggles and the crosser Peter looked, the more she laughed.

  Why does she have to be so annoying? Peter thought, already forgetting how pleased to see her he had felt. Finally she stopped.

  ‘Do you know you’re sleeping in a Year 11 Common Room? It was full of bossy prefects in overalls holding scrubbing brushes. Someone had scrawled really rude comments about the teachers all over the walls and they were having to clean it off. Miss Gunn, the Deputy Headmistress, was there – she’s really strict – sitting reading a newspaper. Every so often she’d look over her glasses and say: ‘Come on, girls, a bit more elbow grease. This is my holiday too, you know.’ The sports captain was there, right next to me. She winded me with a netball the other week just because I was daydreaming. When she looked round I stuck my tongue out at her. It was so cool. She screamed and screamed. She looked like she’d seen a ghost, they all did.’

  ‘Well they had, sort of,’ said Peter.

  ‘But I’m not dead,’ Kate replied cheerfully.

  ‘How are they supposed to know? We must be missing presumed dead by now. And look at what you’re wearing – a perfect ghost costume.’

  Kate’s face dropped. ‘They’ll tell Mum and Dad and they’ll think that I’m dead. Oh, no, what have I done?’

  ‘We’ll just have to get back and show them we’re alive, won’t we?’ said Peter, getting in quickly in case Kate got emotional. ‘You know,’ he continued, ‘it was difficult to see properly because of the light, but I think you just about disappeared this time. Did you look solid in the classroom?’

  ‘I’m not sure – I couldn’t see myself. But I could see stuff through my arm. I guess I must have looked kind of filmy, not fully formed somehow. But they all looked so terrified I must have looked like a ghost. The funny thing was, all the time I was there, I was still aware of you in this room. It was like having one foot in the past and one foot in the future.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’ asked Peter. ‘Could you have stayed there if you had wanted to?’

  ‘It felt like it was taking all my strength to stay there as long as I did. I don’t know how to describe it … It’s as if I have a giant elastic band tied round my waist which is attached to a hook here. I can go quite a way straining against the band – and I suspect that I could go further and stay longer – but sooner or later I am going to ping right back.’

  Peter kicked the bottom of the bed absent-mindedly.

  ‘Don’t do that. You’ll scratch it,’ said Kate.

  Peter gave her a look and kept on kicking. ‘I wonder if you’ve always been able to blur, I mean even though you didn’t know you could. Or perhaps whatever happened to us has changed you in some way.’

  Kate shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘I’ll write “I’m not dead” on a piece of paper and take it with me when I blur. Then they’d know I was all right.’

  Peter thought for a moment and screwed up his face. ‘A ghost saying “‘I’m not dead”? I don’t think so somehow.’

  Kate sighed. ‘Yeah, well … I’m going to keep practising blurring anyway. If I do it enough times maybe I can figure out how to unhook the elastic band and then bye-bye 1763.’

  ‘Do you think I could blur?’

  ‘Gideon said you did.’

  ‘Well, I can’t remember.’

  ‘Try! Lie on the bed and relax and think of home. Imagine your Mum’s face and try to let go.’

  ‘All right,’ said Peter, unconvinced, ‘I’ll give it a try.’

  He stretched out and made an effort to let his muscles go slack. He tried to picture his mother bringing him up a glass of milk at bedtime, sitting on the edge of his bed and talking to him while he drank it. He clenched his fists as he forced himself to conjure up her image but no picture would come into his head. His throat constricted and he grew tense and anxious. Why couldn’t he see her?

  ‘I can’t even remember what she looks like now!’ Peter burst out.

  Kate looked at him, concerned; he seemed upset. ‘Okay, okay … think about your bedroom, then,’ she suggested. ‘I think it’s really important not to feel stressed.’

  Peter took in a deep breath and released it slowly. He thought of lying on a beach as Margrit had once taught him. He imagined the roar of the surf as his shoulders and neck, then his arms and legs, started to feel heavy and sank into the firm sand. Now he was calm. It was the memory of his stripy duvet that popped into his head first. He held the picture as steady as he could and before long his mind was full of stripes, dark blue on white. They were curiously soothing and soon, ever so gently, the stripes started to ripple and vibrate, as though some great engine was being started up a long way away. After a while the stripes turned into spirals and gradually they became more luminous. Peter had the sensation that they were passing right through his body and that he was leaving this world behind. Then, unbidden, his mother’s pretty face appeared in front of him, smiling and sweet; she was brushing the hair out of his eyes. He felt a surge of happiness when he saw her face. How much he had missed her and how long it had been since he had allowed himself to give in to that feeling. All the sadness of wanting his mother to come home burst out of him in one big sob of pain. He sat up with a start.

  ‘You started to fade for a moment there,’ said Kate. ‘I think you can do it, Peter. You can blur, too.’

  The morning of departure had arrived and the whole Byng family and most of their servants had been milling about on the gravel forecourt since breakfast. The July sun was already beating down mercilessly. Kate and Peter longed to set off and all this waiting seemed interminable. Sweat trickled down Peter’s back but he did not dare remove his jacket. Kate, too, was suffering under the weight of her complicated attire and was fanning herself madly with the painted fan Mrs Byng had given to her. Mrs Byng had explained about the language of fans – if you held it in this way it meant ‘I like you’ and in another it meant ‘go away’. Whatever else Kate’s frantic fanning signified, it principally said: ‘I am suffocating, please let me undo these awful stays.’

  Four, sturdy chestnut horses were harnessed to a gleaming black carriage. The horses stood patiently, chewing on the iron bits in their mouths while footmen clambered onto the roof of the carriage fastening down trunks. One of them lost his grip on a heavy crate and nearly sent it crashing to the ground. There was the sound of clinking glass as he dived down and grabbed it just in time.

  ‘Well caught, Andrew,’ called out Mrs Byng. ‘That would have been unfortunate, indeed,’ she observed to the older children. ‘That chest contains Parson Ledbury’s supply of port. He is convinced that every tavern keeper between here and London will water down his wine.’

  Peter watched a stable boy arrive with two horses. Gideon, who had been helping organise the trunks, now came forward. He walked slowly around the horses, stroking their heads and talking quietly to them. He examined their eyes and their hooves and pulled up their gums so he could see their teeth. Then he got the stable lad to run around the forecourt with them on a long lead so he could watch them canter.

  ‘I will take the black stallion,’ Gideon said to the stable boy. ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Midnight, sir. He’s fast and strong, sure enough,’ replied the boy, ‘but there’s not one of us stable lads he hasn’t kicked.’

  ‘Good!’ said Gideon. ‘I like an animal with some fight in him.’

  Poor Jack Byng was clearly not keen on the idea of travelling to London. Despite all his sisters’ efforts to cheer him up, he was clinging to his mother’s skirts like a sailor to a mast in rough seas.

  ‘Uncle Richard writes he will take you in a row-boat to Eel Pie Island and that you will ride on a donkey at Vauxhall Gardens where you wil
l see all the fine ladies and gentlemen,’ said one sister. ‘We girls are all jealous because we simply long to go.’

  ‘And King George will touch you and cure you of the scrofula,’ said another.

  ‘I am better already,’ protested little Jack through several layers of fabric.

  He steadfastly refused to leave his mother and Mrs Byng was forced to drag him around like a third wooden leg. Only when Peter offered to have a game of footie with him did he peep out from the folds of her dress. Mesmerised by his fancy footwork, Jack followed Peter as he dribbled the ball onto the lawn. Mrs Byng mouthed her thank you to Peter and suggested to Sidney that he join in. Sidney merely looked on in a very condescending fashion, striking a pose with one foot forward, a hand on one hip and his chin thrust into the air. What a plonker, thought Peter, booting the ball right at him so that he had to catch it.

  ‘Gadzooks, sir!’ he exclaimed. ‘You might have dirtied my waistcoat!’

  Jack immediately struck the same imperious pose as his elder brother and repeated in his own high voice: ‘Gadzooks, sir, you might have dirtied my waistcoat!’

  All his sisters laughed so hard and for so long, the servants had to bite their lips in order not to join in and Sidney, furious, stomped off into the house.

  Peter suddenly felt Kate’s hand on his arm.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she whispered into his ear.

  ‘Why? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to leave a clue for my friend Megan,’ Kate replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Peter.