Page 44 of The Peculiar Incident at Thistlewick House
Mallory did as she was bid and Harry muttered something about being glad to see the back of this sanctimonious backwater.
But poor Zella could barely get the words out between sobs when she found Samson to explain her mother’s instructions.
Mallory caught the conversation as she helped Hazibub to pack circus equipment back into the large tea chests they used for storage.
‘Why the hurry?’ her father asked, as he nailed a new piece of wood to one of the waggons where rainwater had rotted the boards.
‘Because she’s determined to ruin my life.
I’ve found someone who loves me and she can’t bear it.
She wants to tie me to this circus, but what if I want a different life?
Not to spend my days travelling from place to place.
I’m just a star turn to her. Something to perform, like the monkeys.
Train, train, train. “Do it again, Zella! Do it better!” She doesn’t treat me like a person with feelings, but she can’t keep me an old maid forever. ’
‘Don’t tell me one of those village lads has laid his dirty hands upon you?’ Samson’s quick temper reared its ugly head but Zella soothed him with her words.
‘Nothing has happened, Daddy. No one’s touched me. Quite the opposite. Master Felthorpe has behaved most gentlemanly towards me.’
‘The entitled so-and-so who’s been causing us all that trouble with his damn dog?’
Her expression answered for her and Samson laughed, so preposterous was the suggested love affair. He pulled his daughter close with his enormous bear-like arms.
‘Your mother is quite correct; that is not a romance that will have a happy ending. It’s them and us.
Surely these last few days in Thistlewick Tye have proved that.
She worries, that’s all. And we don’t want any more unexplained daughters popping up.
’ His attempt at humour fell flat as the young tightrope walker started sobbing again.
‘Certainly explains why he’s been a damn sight more pleasant to us but I can assure you, if your mother says we’re leaving Thistlewick Tye tomorrow, my girl, then we will be leaving.’
* * *
The afternoon rolled on but Katerina didn’t return from Felthorpe Hall.
Mallory wrote a note for Sarah and persuaded Harry to run it into the village.
The young girl would be terribly disappointed that the circus was moving on but she was determined to arrange a goodbye.
She asked to meet up in the churchyard around dusk, as she understood it wasn’t far from the Cleyfords’ cottage and she hoped Sarah could slip out the house for a few minutes.
Mallory hadn’t been into the village as such, but if there was one thing that stood out in a landscape, it was the parish church.
‘I can’t stay long and I had to lie to Mother – which I hate – but she’s being so unreasonable about this whole thing,’ Sarah said, as they sat together later that evening atop a generations-old burial vault.
‘She’s taken against you all and nothing I say will make her change her mind.
When we were in the butcher’s today, she told him that the vicious lies about the Reverend Marsham were the last straw.
The vicar helped to set up the Benevolent Committee, after all, and she said that to speak ill of such a man only proves that the Devil has surely sent you all to test us. ’
‘Then your mother will be pleased to know that we’re leaving,’ Mallory said. ‘But I couldn’t go without giving you this.’
Mallory had spent the last couple of days embroidering a square of cotton, using threads and scraps of fabric from the workbox that she kept for the costumes.
The young girl loved the sparkles and ribbons and so she had sewn the words, ‘True friends are never apart, maybe in distance but never in heart’, and surrounded them with a border of brightly coloured flowers.
Tiny glass beads, gold thread and sequins were all incorporated into the design and she knew that it was some of her finest work.
When the circus had moved on, which Katerina seemed to think would be imminently, Sarah would have this keepsake of their time together.
The young girl, whilst thrilled with the gift, was visibly upset. ‘I can’t believe the villagers are making you go. It’s so unfair.’
‘People always struggle with those who are different from them,’ Mallory explained.
‘It’s as much us as it is the villagers.
I’m not sure that, as travelling folk, we’re always as respectful as we should be, even though I’ve found, time and time again, we’re judged before we’ve done anything wrong.
’ She didn’t explain that the budding romance between Zella and Lord Felthorpe’s son had forced the issue.
Katerina clearly wanted to nip it in the bud before her star act could get herself into trouble again.
From what Mallory had witnessed, time was certainly of the essence.
‘Will I ever see you again?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’ It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine Samson bringing the circus back up to this part of the world, but more that she wasn’t sure she’d still be alive when he did. ‘But thank you for your friendship. I’ll never forget how kind you’ve been to me.’
They sat chatting for a while before their final tearful embrace, and then Mallory threaded her way through the gravestones and back out onto the common.
As she approached the camp, however, she was confused at the lack of noise. Usually by now, someone would be singing – often a drunken Cupid – and there’d be chatter from the big tent. The silence was unsettling in the extreme.
She came up behind the waggons where the horses were tethered. Beauty nickered softly to her as she passed. The two zebras were standing behind, their white striped bodies visible, even in the dim light. The monkeys were chattering away inside their cages but no human voices could be heard.
As she neared the big tent she stumbled over something on the ground.
It was a pair of booted feet across the pathway – one of the hands drunk again, she assumed, and continued onwards.
Much of the preparation had been done for their leaving, as the benches and trestles had been stacked on one of the waggons, but they’d need to sleep in the tent tonight, so dismantling would begin at first light.
She pulled back a corner of the canvas but there was no one inside.
In the flickering lamplight, she could see that most of their possessions had been packed away, apart from the bedrolls and some of the cooking equipment.
Of course, she realised, the troupe would be sitting around the fire.
She unhooked a lantern and carried it out the other side of the tent, but it took her brain a few moments to catch up with the sight that met her eyes.
The fire was burning embers. No one had been tending it, but it gave off enough light for her to make out the slumped bodies of the troupe sprawled across the benches and lying on the ground.
But this was not a drunken rabble, passed out from too much intoxicating liquor.
As she held the swaying lantern aloft, she could see the tortured corpses and rictus grins of people who had seemingly been poisoned.
‘No, no, no, no…’ she repeated under her breath, as she ran from body to body in the vain hope someone was still alive.
Cupid was face down on a bench, Harry and Po Po nearby, and the Caley sisters were the other side of the smouldering fire, curled together on a rug…
but the most heartbreaking sight of all was Zella clutching a dead Esfir to her chest.
Two thoughts hit her with equal force. The first was that Hazibub had been right.
He’d known something bad was on the horizon but, despite his circle of salt and strange ritual, the evil had come for them regardless.
The second was whoever was responsible must surely still be out there. Would they now be looking for her?
Trying to suppress her sobs for fear of someone hearing, she stepped back into the twisting shadows and away from the devastating scene, trying to work out what could have possibly happened in the hour or so that she’d been gone.
There was a clatter as her foot caught a couple of bottles standing on the ground and she used the lantern to illuminate a crate of wine bottles and a half-empty basket of foodstuffs that she didn’t recognise.
As someone responsible for the meals, she knew the current state of their larder, and it hadn’t included these items. Was this what had killed them?
In the ensuing stillness, she heard approaching footsteps and low, mumbling male voices.
Panic flooded her body and she gently placed the lantern on the ground and extinguished it, knowing that to carry it would give away her location immediately.
This wasn’t any of her troupe returning – she’d now accounted for everyone, save Katerina, whose body she hadn’t yet come across.
She slipped back into the big tent, grabbed her small box of personal possessions and a blanket for warmth, and quietly headed for the woods.
Too bewildered to make sense of the scene she’d stumbled across, and too emotional to think clearly, she knew she had to hide herself away and not do anything rash.
* * *
Mallory spent the night in the copse. She found a hollow to curl up in, but her sleep was fitful and she heard voices in the distance, weaving into her dreams. When she awoke, the air held the bitter pungency of smoke. What would daylight reveal when she returned to the camp?
But as she stepped from the trees, it was as if the horrors of the night before had never taken place. Hardly anything of the camp remained. The waggons and horses had gone, as had the boxes ready for loading, and the tent was a smouldering heap in a now almost empty patch of land.
We’ve been completely erased, she realised, staring at the flattened grass and muddy tracks – the only evidence that the circus had been camped there just a few hours before. But why?