Page 5 of The Midnight Carousel

Maisie doesn’t care that they’re laughing at her inability to pick out the words. She’s leaving them– and soon, with any luck.

‘You’re a rum one, Maisie. We’ll miss your quiet ways,’ Mrs Sixpence claims, though it’s obvious she’ll miss the sixpence each month most of all.

Maisie turns to nudge Tommy, a silent message to ask Did you hear that woman’s nonsense?

, but he’s shuffled to face the wall, the baby left on the floor.

He’s rocking back and forth, his dirty fingernails picking at a patch of bare scalp.

Putting the letter aside, she wraps her arms around him.

With all her heart, Maisie is desperate to leave this place.

At the same time, the thought of being separated from Tommy brings a lump to her throat.

Maisie’s aunt arrives on a day that smells of smoking pilchards and wet rope. Tommy is at the shoreline, scraping lard from the cauldron when he spots a tall lady picking a careful passage over the mud, one hand clutched to her straw hat as if the sky will fall in if it blows off.

He bounds across the scrub to tell Maisie.

Since she got the letter, he hasn’t let her out of his sight, as though he worries that she might be whisked away at any moment without a proper goodbye.

Maisie feels the same way. For the past week, she’s made the most of every second with Tommy, teaching him how to light the fire and pluck cockles and forage for berries on his own, hugging him more than usual when he gets it right.

Though he’s only a few months younger than her, Tommy has always relied on Maisie.

Together, they watch as the lady almost slips on damp pebbles before righting herself.

Maisie knows this can only be her aunt, because no one ventures this far up the estuary path, with the exception of the dock boys in search of iron rivets lost from ships or the wild dogs chased off by Mr Marley, the local farmer.

There is a tightness in her chest. Heat flooding from her head to her limbs makes everything spin. After all those years of hoping, she’s minutes away from freedom.

Mrs Sixpence lumbers to join them in the doorway. Her face is a picture, her expression twisting like everything she’s ever known is turned upside down.

‘Now then,’ she says, removing her stained apron. ‘If someone had bothered to tell me you had the distinction of being born from a white mother, I would have been a little kinder, given you more food.’

Mrs Sixpence shakes her head, tutting, as though Maisie is to blame for having been ill-treated.

But Maisie has lived on Canvey Island for a decade, a lifetime for a twelve-year-old, brought from the mainland on the back of the greengrocer’s vegetable cart ‘like a lumpy potato’, Mr Sixpence enjoys telling everyone– and she possesses not one single memory before then.

It means that she’s as surprised as anyone by the appearance of the woman now navigating the path alongside the rocks: a creamy-skinned, golden-haired princess– so unlike Maisie, with her beige complexion and brown hair, that the two don’t appear to be related.

Her nerves tingle. All the children at the Sixpences’, including Maisie, create imaginary stories about their parents– they are kings and queens of faraway lands, explorers, ballerinas, brave soldiers– but this is her chance to know who her mother and father really are, and why they have left her in this place all these years.

‘Your pa must be one of them dark spice traders from the East,’ Mrs Sixpence tosses out, bustling to the washstand to prepare herself for refined company.

A desire for justice overcomes Maisie like a storm erupting in her mind.

She knows that Mrs Sixpence would like nothing better than to entertain her aunt, offering her stewed prunes on chipped china, so that she can tell Mrs Dalrymple, her sister-in-law from Leigh-on-Sea, of her important, new acquaintance.

To deny her foster mother this pleasure, Maisie hugs Tommy and whispers that he can keep all the treasure to himself if he doesn’t cry.

As she bolts out of the door, she hears the crash of the copper water jug and swearing.

She skips over the stones near the riverbank and along the row of dark green poplars. Her aunt is as elegant as a silver birch, willowy, with delicate features and a wide smile. Now that she’s in front of her, Maisie finds herself holding back, suddenly shy.

‘You must be Maisie,’ her aunt says, stooping to shake hands. ‘I’m your Aunty Mabel and I’m very pleased to meet you.’

The magic of this moment makes everything sparkle. The sun glints. The river gleams. Her aunt’s eyes are filled with shining tears as though there’s no person more wondrous than Maisie. It’s a look she’s never seen before.

Shouting in the distance breaks the spell, and they both turn around.

Mrs Sixpence has appeared at the mound of fish guts piled near the washing line, shaking her fist. With surprising speed, she lopes across the patch of tall grass and is soon close enough for Maisie to see the grimace on her face.

‘Shall we go?’ Aunty Mabel asks.

Maisie hears Tommy crying in the distance.

She imagines him wanting to run after her, but too frightened of the Sixpences to stray from the shack.

There’s a wrench in her heart, an urge to race back and rescue him.

But Aunty Mabel tugs her hand, and, before she knows it, they are scarpering across the stepping stones that lead to the mainland at low tide, both silent, not stopping even when they’re out of breath.

In their haste, Aunty Mabel loses her hat to a gust that takes them by surprise at the turn of Mr Marley’s farm gate, and she doesn’t even try to follow it back down the path.

‘There are plenty more hats in this world,’ she puffs.

Past the fork in the road, Aunty Mabel helps Maisie into a waiting carriage. As the driver cracks his whip to encourage the four white horses to set off, the knot in Maisie’s stomach uncoils. She is safe. No one can take her back now.

Aunty Mabel’s smile returns, and she wears the same expression as before, like Maisie is the most interesting person in the world. It helps Maisie to lose her shyness.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks.

‘To Jesserton.’

Maisie opens her mouth to ask what Jesserton means, and whether her parents will be there. But an uncomfortable prickle that the answer might not be what she wants to hear encourages her to hold her tongue.

Pressing her nose to the window, she soaks in the patchwork landscape of corn fields streaming past, tiny villages with smoke curling from chimneys, dark green forests merging into the distance. With each circle of the carriage wheels, everything she’s ever known is left further and further behind.

Dusk is descending like mist by the time the carriage pulls on to a long gravel driveway, at the end of which the tallest, widest residence she’s ever seen rises like a giant sandcastle on rolling countryside.

A cosy cottage is what Maisie was expecting, not a building a hundred times larger than the tavern on Canvey Island.

‘This is Jesserton. I’ve a new position as head housekeeper,’ Aunty Mabel says, as though that explains everything. ‘Welcome to your new home, Maisie.’