The chanting grew gradually louder. I was frightened. I was being swung around, by my feet, by two big grim-faced girls who held onto my ankles with a grip far tighter and more cruel than necessary. Their faces, the only still points in a whirl of figures and furniture, broke into sadistic grins as I stared at them. I was already dizzy and was beginning to feel sick, my short filthy hair feeling the breeze as my head just missed the wall or the edge of a desk by a matter of inches. I kept my arms pulled in tight against my chest to stop them from smashing into something and, with clenched fists, I silently begged them to stop. Round and round I went, faster and faster; the girls couldn’t possibly keep control of my whirling body for much longer, and I knew if they didn’t stop I was going to hurt myself badly. A few times I tried to shout at them to stop, but they were making too much noise for my voice to be heard; and anyway, I knew from experience that crying out only made them whirl you more violently and gleefully.
As suddenly as the game had started, it was all over. The lookout’s warning — “Mrs. Muggerage!” — was taken up by the rest of the girls, until it was simply a general loud hissing sound throughout the room; the girls let go of me and dispersed to the four corners, leaving me spinning on my back, my hair grinding into the filth of the floor, my limbs sprawling.
A terrible silence descended. A huge figure was standing in the doorway. Only gradually did I realize who it was, though at the back of my head was the troubling sense that something was wrong; that this couldn’t really be happening. I struggled to sit up, the room continued to spin, and I felt the awful, inescapable sensation of my breakfast trying to escape. As the walls and floor whirled around my head, I brought up a great splattering stomachload of acidic, watery porridge.
A choir of angels couldn’t have been more innocent than that roomful of children pretended to be right then. Whether Mrs. Muggerage was fooled, I never knew — if she was, I couldn’t understand how — but there was only one child in the room who wasn’t sitting bolt upright, with her hands by her sides, looking wide-eyed and morally horrified at what she could see in the middle of the floor. And that was me. Just who else had been involved, it was impossible to tell; but plainly I had been at the center of things, because there I was on the tiles, propped up on one arm, retching.
“Mog Winter,” said Mrs. Muggerage, in a tone of grim pleasure at the prospect of being able to mete out some punishment. Her black boots echoing on the bare floor, she walked slowly over to me. There were a few seconds’ grace as I wiped my mouth and lifted my dizzy head to look up at her. She stood above me, a woman of awesome bulk and power, a grimy cloth in her hand. She was blocking out most of the light, but gazing up at her shadowy outline, I could tell her expression was without compassion, even slightly sneering with revulsion at my sickness. Then she grasped me by the collar and yanked me to my feet with a single, violent motion. I hung there from her fist like a marionette, weakened, close to tears.
“Mog Winter,” she said again. “I coulda guessed. Before I walked in, I coulda guessed.”
She turned around, slowly, holding me out to exhibit me to the rest of the children. There was complete silence as they stared at me. I registered the faces of my chief tormentors among the group, and they were looking at me with disdain, as though they were genuinely as disgusted with me as Mrs. Muggerage was.
“What have you got to say fer yourself?” she snarled at me.
“This ain’t right!” I said, struggling. “You’re not meant to be here.”
“No good,” Mrs. Muggerage was saying, “can ever come to those what misbehaves. Lord knows if we don’t try hard enough, girls and boys, to make it plain. Lord knows if I don’t teach the same lesson day after day. No good will ever come to those what can’t behave. And Lord knows if, day after day, some dreadful boy or girl don’t completely ignore the lesson, so’s I’m ‘bliged to teach it all over again. Well.”
That “well” was calculated to send a shiver of fear into every young heart in the room. Although only a single word, it was stretched so it lasted as long as a whole sentence, and it contained more misery in its elongated syllable than any complete sentence you could possibly think of.
She dropped me. Because she’d been holding me up with my feet off the ground, I had to put my hands out to break my fall, and as I tumbled to the floor again my palms went straight into the pool of vile porridge I’d left beneath me, smearing it further and sending it splashing up my arms and across my cheek. Without intending it, but unable to prevent myself, I swore — using a word I’d heard the other children use several times a day. The moment I heard myself say it, I knew my fate was sealed.
Their hearts in their mouths, the other children watched me crouching there, and waited to see what Mrs. Muggerage was going to do.
She said nothing for a long time, while my unguarded oath resonated in our terrified souls. She said nothing, just stared down at me, for what seemed an eternity. The walls towered around us, cold, dirty and cracked, with barred windows in them so high above our heads that all we could ever see through them was the sun, the clouds, or the night sky. They were that high up on purpose, of course, to prevent us from seeing what was outside and dreaming or devising plans for escape; but quite often, when we were unsupervised, we used to form acrobatic towers by climbing on top of one another. Four children standing on one another’s shoulders meant that the person on top could grasp the bars and peer out over the wide sill, and we used to take turns being the one on top. Looking down, we could see the flagstones of the dank little orphanage yard far below, and part of the high brick gateway that led to the outside world; but of much more interest to us was the rooftop view, at eye level: the vista of chimneys and church spires receding into the distance and, beyond the city’s rooftops, a glimpse of hills to the north. We didn’t know any names for the places we were looking at: it was just “Out.” When we scrabbled our way up to look through the grimy window, we could see Out; we dreamed constantly of being Out, and staying Out, and never coming back.
And, although I thought about it almost every minute of every day, I had never longed more to be Out than I did at that moment.
Her teeth bared, Mrs. Muggerage leaned slowly down and pressed her incensed face into mine.
“Do my ears deceive me?” she hissed. Some other child in the room echoed her hiss with a sharp, frightened little intake of breath. The huge, terrible woman clenched the foul wet rag she’d been holding in her left hand, which, I now saw, was smeared and dripping with the contents of whatever disgusting corner of the orphanage she’d just been cleaning. It only seemed to occur to her at this moment that the rag was just the object she needed to make her point, and humiliate me at the same time.
“A mouth as filthy as that,” she snarled, “wants a good clean.”
“Don’t,” I moaned, “don’t… please don’t…” But there was no escaping it, and the next thing I knew she had grabbed me by the back of the neck with a clawlike hand to stop me from moving my head, and the vile-smelling thing was thrust into my face, and squeezed hard until it oozed its slime between my lips and into my nostrils and made me choke and gag.
“Don’t!” I repeated, “Please don’t… please don’t…”
“Mog,” said a familiar voice, “Mog, it’s me. Mog! Wake up!”
There still seemed to be something tremendously wet in my face, but, as I came to, I realized it was the eager tongue of my dog, Lash; and the voice was that of Nick, my twin brother, sitting on my bed looking down at me with an expression of urgency in the yellow light of a flickering lamp.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I reached up my hands in relief, and grabbed my dog’s furry head on both sides, both to greet him and to pull him away. His long snout continued to sniff excitedly at my face and I had to strain with all my strength to hold him back from licking me. “Stop it,” I said, “you ridiculous dog.”
Lash was as ridiculous and lovable a dog as a child ever owned, a gangling golden-haired mongrel with a huge smile and a long tail which was never still, and curly blond eyelashes so prominent they had given me no choice as to what to call him. I ruffled his head as I blinked in the lamplight and exhaled with relief at the discovery that I wasn’t in the terrible orphanage after all.
“I was dreaming again,” I said to Nick. “Sorry.”
“Must have been a bad one,” Nick rejoined, “to make you squeal like that. It sounded like you were being murdered. I came in as fast as I could, but you were about to wake up the whole house.”
I was still coming to. “I was in the orphanage,” I said, the full horror of the dream coming back to me. “I was being whirled around and around … and Nick, guess who was there? Mrs. Muggerage!”
“Well, that was a nightmare then,” said Nick with sympathy.
We may have been twins, Nick and I, but we hadn’t known each other all our lives by any means. We had been born at sea, on a voyage back from India, to the most beautiful and virtuous mother who had ever lived. I had always thought of her this way; and, although she had died when we were just two weeks old, I had pictures of her in my head and some small mementos of her which had always been the most precious things I owned. I was named after her: Imogen was my full name, and I had only acquired the abbreviated name of Mog in the loathsome orphanage to which I was taken as a baby. I lived there until I was six or seven, when I had the good fortune to be taken away. The streets of London were no place for a little girl, on her own with no one to support her; but there was no shortage of work for boys, and because I’d always looked like a boy, I got a job as a printer’s devil for Mr. Cramplock, in Clerkenwell. It was a happy life and it contained lots of adventures, which is another story altogether. But ever since I left the orphanage, I’d had dreams like the one from which I’d just awoken, and for several years I’d lived in constant terror of being discovered and dragged back there.
Nick, meanwhile, had somehow become separated from me in our tiniest infancy, and had grown up completely separately. For as long as he could remember, he’d lived among the criminals and sailors of London, looked after by a violent ship’s bosun who passed himself off as his father, and by Mrs. Muggerage, the dreadful woman in my nightmare. Together they treated him even worse, if possible, than I was treated in the orphanage. We had only met for the first time, completely by accident, last year, when we were both twelve. It turned out we’d been living less than a mile apart, both of us making our way in the crowded streets of London without knowing one another. Neither of us had any inkling we had a brother or sister at all, let alone that we were twins, living so close together all this time.
Of course, we’d been together ever since, Nick, myself, and Lash. I’d never known anything you might call a family, in my entire life; dreams and contemplations of my mother had been the most comfort I could hope for. Now, for the first time, I was getting used to the idea that I wasn’t alone. It meant more to me than anything else in the world; and, to be honest, I still lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding it had all been an impossible dream.
I held Lash’s soft head firmly between my hands and gazed into his face, pretending to be stern with him.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t think it would matter how far away Lash’s face was; he could still stick out his tongue and lick my nose. How long do you think it is?”
“It probably never ends,” said Nick. “He could sort of launch it out of his mouth and lick absolutely anything at all, on the other side of the room, or on the other side of the street. It probably curls up inside his mouth and down his throat and goes on forever, like a kind of snake.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s the middle of the night,” said Nick, and his voice was suddenly low and quiet as though he’d just remembered how late it was, and how dark.
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yes …” He hesitated. “I was dreaming too,” he admitted. “I was glad to be woken up, actually.” We had both been having especially vivid dreams in the past few weeks, and when we described our dreams to one another it seemed we were both dreaming very similar things, again and again: dreams of being pursued, dreams in which people we knew were in danger and we were powerless to help them.
“Can you hear something?” I asked suddenly.
“I can hear the wind,” said Nick.
“No, there’s something else,” I said, straining to listen.
I stopped making a fuss of Lash, and got out of bed, and went over to the window. There was no curtain or blind, and the window didn’t quite fit the frame properly, which meant if it was windy it often used to rattle and keep me awake. Nick had tried to fold some paper to the right thickness to make a wedge to hold the window shut, but it had never really worked, and the wind still used to whistle through the gap in an eerie way.
“Can’t you hear it?” I asked him. “A sort of—crying sound.”
“It’s just the wind,” said Nick, yawning.
“It’s not,” I said. The wind certainly was hissing violently through the trees tonight; and this house had turrets, and gables, and roofs which sloped at crazy angles to one another, all of which hooked and snagged the wind and could make it sound like thunder. But what I could hear was distinct from all that, like a sporadic distant sobbing. “There!” I said. “It’s someone crying, Nick. A girl, or a woman.” We both listened hard, and every now and then I was sure it was there — somewhere amid the wind, beyond the windowpane, or perhaps in another part of the house. But I could see from Nick’s face that he didn’t believe me.
I climbed onto the window seat to look outside, but the only thing I could see in the darkness was my own reflection.
“Put the lamp out,” I said to Nick.
Now, the scene outside emerged. There was a bright three-quarter moon tonight, which only occasionally appeared between scudding clouds. From where we slept we could see the central tower of the castle, with seven tall chimneys in a row jutting out behind it like a lower jaw against the sky. Rooks’ nests poked out from between and inside them, and at dusk the rooks would circle and screech for an hour or more in great excitable flocks. This late at night, they were all roosting, oblivious to the wind which stirred their stiff feathers as they huddled among the chimney stacks. At the foot of the tower, if I craned my neck to peer over the sill, I could see the pale gravel of the courtyard. Behind that were the low stable buildings and the coach-house on the far side, and beyond them the darkness of the forest. Everything was disappointingly calm and normal. I couldn’t even hear the sobbing anymore.
“There’s no sign of—“ I began. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark outside, I could see the faint glow of lamplight in one of the windows in the tower, immediately opposite.
“Nick, there’s a light!” I whispered.
It was Sir Septimus’s study. From this bedroom there was a perfect view across the courtyard into the side of his big oriel window, and Nick and I could often see him sitting there at his desk, in profile, sometimes working, sometimes talking, often just appearing to stare into space ahead of him; and, coming and going, the loyal dark figures of his servants, Bonefinger and Melibee. Like a pair of old black ravens, they attended quietly to his wishes, kept the affairs of the house in order, and were rarely far from his side. As I peered out into the night, there was no sign of Sir Septimus in his customary chair, but tall shadows seemed to be moving in the lamp-lit tower room.
“I can’t see him,” I said, “but there’s someone in there.”
“He’s not normally up as late as this,” said Nick. He was kneeling on my bed watching me, still yawning. “Maybe he heard you crying out, and he’s gotten up to investigate.”
“Come and look,” I said, impatiently. “It might be a robber.” And I pressed my face back to the cold pane.