When Abigail realised that she was being spied upon, her first horrified impulse was to get back into the room with Doll and bar the shutters. Her hand was on the pin when a voice said, very hushed, ‘Dunna be feared, lass – it’s me, Judah.’
She could see nothing but the shape of a head. She stood very still.
‘Aye, that’s bonny,’ said the voice. ‘That contraption ye’re standing on might go any moment. Now, d’ye hear me all right?’
‘Yes,’ she breathed.
‘I’ve some of the lads from the ship wi’ me. I’m droppin’ you a line with a loop in it. Put your foot in the loop and hold tight wi’ all your might.’
A rope tumbled down to her. She seized it, did as she had been told, and whispered, ‘I’m ready.’
As her chin rose above the roof slates, sturdy arms reached down and caught her under the armpits. In a few moments she was lying, limp and sweating, on the dewy slates.
There were several boys, two of them as small as Beatie, on the roof. They had bent the line around the stump of a chimney, and were now swiftly untying and coiling the rope. Barefooted and silent, they moved with the monkey-like nimbleness of apprentice seamen.
‘How did you know where I was?’ she asked.
‘It was Granny,’ said Judah, matter-of-factly. ‘Go ahead, lads, and take care, for the roof’s as rotten as them that own it.’
Keeping low, for fear anyone should see them outlined against the sky, Abigail and the boys crawled to the edge of the warehouse roof, and down the steep slippery gable of the terrace house next to it. If Abigail had not been so numbed with her recent experiences she would have been nervous of falling. But she had lost her shoes, and her stockinged toes, though not as deft as those of the boys, gripped fast in the mossy irregularities of the slates.
The boys pushed and pulled her across the roofs of six or seven little houses, sometimes disturbing rats playing in the guttering, or birds nesting in disused chimney-pots. She began to feel more and more unreal. Sometimes she thought she must have gone to sleep in the attic and was dreaming.
At last they came to a high rock lavishly curtained with convolvulus. A meagre lane squeezed between house and rock. Abigail cleared this space with ease.
‘Why, she’s as good as a lad!’ said one of the boys. ‘My sister Mabel would just ’a stood there squalling like a stood-on cat.’
Abigail, having slid down into the lane, was about to say that Mabel couldn’t have been blamed when a curious thing happened. A wave of heat rippled up from her feet, leaving her legs boneless behind them.
She said feebly, ‘I’m awfully sorry … my legs are gone somehow … and I think I might be sick …’
So she was, shivering and ashamed. But Judah merely said heartily, ‘Chuck it up, Abby. It’s a living wonder you’re not in a dead swoon, what you’ve been through this night.’
She dimly heard the apprentice with the sister say, ‘My sister Mabel would be flat on her back a’kicking and screeching in a fit of the flim-flams.’
‘Poor old Mabel,’ she tried to say, but nothing came out. Judah gathered her up, and she remembered no more until she realised she was being carried through the door of Mr Bow’s shop. The other apprentices had vanished. She did not open her eyes again; it was too safe and comfortable against Judah’s chest. If only, she felt drowsily, she could rest there for ever. But she had caught a glimpse of Dovey and Beatie, hovering about anxiously, and Gibbie in his long trailing night-shirt, flickering around like a small grey ghost, mad with curiosity.
Judah took her upstairs and laid her on her own bed. He said to Dovey, ‘Granny?’
Dovey shook her head. ‘Low.’
Abigail tried to speak, tried to ask, ‘Is Granny Tallisker ill?’ But although her mouth opened, her tongue moved, not a word came out. Terror filled her. What was the matter now? She caught Dovey’s eye, pointed to her mouth, struggled to speak.
Dovey said soothingly, ‘It’s the shock, without doubt. Come the morning your voice will be back, as good as gold. Now then, so I can tell Granny when she’s herself again: Did those villains do anything bad to you?’
Abigail longed to say, they kidnapped me and slapped me and a foul little beast with no legs bit me, and then they locked me up with a drunken consumptive who might be dead, as far as I know; but, no, they didn’t do what I know you mean. But she could say nothing. She looked helplessly from Dovey to Judah and shook her head.
Judah said, ‘I’ll go take a keek at my granny, then.’ He came over to the bed, smoothed the tangled hair back from her forehead as if she were a child, and said, ‘All’s over now, Abby. Fret no more. Go to sleep and dream grand dreams, as you deserve.’
Abigail thought he had the most beautiful smile she had ever seen. The ruddy wholesomeness of his face contrasted so vividly with the fearful half-beast countenances of the inhabitants of the thieves’ kitchen that she wanted to say, ‘Thank you, thank you, Judah, for everything, not just for saving me. Thank you for being here.’ But she could do nothing but press his hand.
He laughed, patted her cheek. ‘You’re a game lass, no doubt about that.’
Abigail still seemed to have no bones left in her body. Once again she was undressed by Dovey, given a posset, and put under the quilts. Dovey kissed her forehead, and hastened out.
Abigail thought, ‘Mabel has the right idea. Lying on my back kicking and having hysterics is just what I’d do if I had any strength left.’
She became aware that Beatie was squatting on the end of the bed, like a malignant gnome. Abigail, already muzzy from the posset, had never seen her look so ferocious.
‘What came over you, you blanky rattlebrain, to go down the Suez Canal? Could you not see it was the abode of cut-throats and mongrels? And what were you doing, fleein’ away like that, when I’d given my solemn word to help you back to your ain time? Aye, and I wunna go back on it, neither, even though my poor granny is half dead on your account.’
‘How, why?’ Abigail wanted to ask. She managed a pitiful squawk.
‘Never mind yer greeting, yer numbskull! Oh, couldn’t I punch yer yeller and green!’
Abigail was only able to give a faint yelp of protest. She buried her face in the chicken-coop smelling pillow, and went unexpectedly to sleep. She awakened early, feeling stiff and sore all over. A faint daylight crept through the windows, early market carts grumbled over the cobbles. Dovey knelt beside her bed, her face in her hands.
‘Oh, kind Lord in heaven, let my grandmother come to herself again, let poor Abby be as innocent as she was when she came to our care.’
Abigail managed a faint croak, and Dovey jumped up and came over to her. Abigail’s voice still seemed to belong to someone else, but she whispered, ‘Granny?’
‘She’s come back to herself, but she’s no’ well at all,’ said Dovey evasively.
Abigail could not help it. Tears trickled down her cheeks.
‘I’m just so tired of not understanding anything,’ she said plaintively. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I weren’t mixed up in it, but I am, and no one will tell me anything. It’s not fair at all.’
Dovey looked both dubious and conscience-stricken. Across her childish face flitted a variety of expressions.
‘Poor dear, poor child. ’Tis Granny herself who should tell you, as she meant to do. ’Twas a terrible effort for her, finding you last night. Aye, she was like a dead woman for two hours.’ She sighed. ‘’Tis sad, for there ne’er was such a spaewife as Granny in her young days; past and present were as clear as water to her eye. And Beatie, and myself – we dunna ha’ the power. Except Beatie a little, when she was wandersome with the fever.’
Abigail said, ‘I’m the Stranger, aren’t I?’
‘Aye,’ said Dovey. ‘Granny is certain of it. The signs are right.’
‘Tell me,’ begged Abigail. ‘It’s very frightening, Dovey. To be me, I mean. Not understanding anything at all.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Beatie creep in and sit on the rag rug beside Dovey’s bed. Her sallow face was both fascinated and repelled. Dovey looked at her warningly.
‘I’ll not have any jeering, Beatie,’ she said, severely for her. ‘We all know verra well, for you’ve told us a thousand times, that you dunna want the Gift and won’t have it; but nevertheless you and your children, should you have any, are in the way of it.’
‘Babbies!’ cried Beatie disgustedly. ‘Who’d want the puling, useless things?’
The Gift was not in the Bow family, but in the Tallisker clan. Mrs Tallisker as a girl had borne the same surname. She had married her cousin, for young men were scarce on Orkney where the sea took so many. It had been the ancestress of both these young people who had been whisked away to Elfland for several years, and then reappeared as mysteriously as she had vanished.
‘You see, Abby,’ explained Dovey, ‘Orkney is a queer old place, where dwarfies and painted men, Picts you might call them, lived long ago, and built great forts and rings of stone where a shepherd might wander and ne’er be seen again. And there are trolls, and spells to be said against them, and the children of the sea who dance on the sands on St John’s Eve … and it was Granny’s seventh grandmother, Osla, who was elf-taken while she was watching the sheep and came back from Elfland with a wean about to be born. And with that wean came the Gift.’
This precious legacy was the gift of seeing the future, of healing, of secret wisdom. The Gift could be handed down by the men of the family, but never possessed by them. With the Gift, Osla’s child, fathered in Elfland, had brought the Prophecy.
Granny was the greatest spaewife and healer of them all, explained Dovey. But as she grew older the Gift left her, coming only in erratic, puzzling flashes that she could not always understand. She could not, for instance, correctly interpret the Prophecy, although she was sure that Abigail herself was the Stranger.
‘It’s this way,’ explained Beatie gruffly. ‘Whenever the Gift looks like breeding right out, a Stranger comes. You can tell the Stranger because he or she always has something belonging to the Talliskers.’
‘Well, I haven’t,’ thought Abigail. ‘Granny’s barking up the wrong tree this time. It can’t be my dress, because Mum said that was an Edwardian curtain I made it from and she’s never wrong about fabrics.’
‘And the Stranger makes the Gift strong again,’ said Beatie. Her turbulent, troubled little face was solemn. ‘The blanky thing!’
‘Beatie,’ reproved Dovey, ‘how can you speak that way?’
‘Because,’ Beatie said crossly, ‘even though I dunna want the Gift myself, I know it’s true. Oh, aye, I’m dead afeared of it; but I know it’s true.’
For an instant Abby thought Beatie was going to confess that several times she had gone unvolitionally into the next century, but instead she muttered, ‘You mind when I was sick, Dovey, and I had the dream of Mother’s funeral and the yellow fever rag on the door …’ Here Abigail started, for she, too, had dreamed of a door with a yellow rag tied to the knocker. ‘And my three sisters that died of the smallpox came to me, looking as bonny as angels’
‘Well I remember that dream,’ said Dovey. ‘I feared they had come for you.’
‘Those were only dreams,’ said Beatie. ‘But that night I had a flash, clear as day, and I knew I was no’ to die. I didna like to tell you, in case you thought I had the Gift.’
‘Whatever did you see, Beatie?’ interposed Abigail.
‘My own hands,’ said Beatie, ‘and they were a woman’s hands, and there was no ring on them, and they were holding a book, very heavy, with a leather cover. A scholarly book. And I thought then, maybe I winna be an ignorant lass all my life, but get some education like Judah, or even better. I have kept it from you, Dovey; but all must come out now with Granny so low.’
Both Dovey and Beatie seemed to have forgotten Abigail, and she herself was thinking furiously. ‘And why shouldn’t she? She’s brainy, and as determined as a little red devil. This Mr Taylor, who runs the class for promising boys, he must have a feeling for education … Perhaps if Beatie went to see him, let him know how much she has learnt, how much she longs to be properly educated …’
There was a piercing wail from above.
‘I want the chamber-pot, Dovey. Come quick!’
Beatie sprang to her feet. ‘I’ll go, Dovey, and won’t I shove his head in it if he’s doing no more than pester us!’
‘I’d like to see Granny,’ said Abby. ‘Please, Dovey.’
The old woman who lay in the small iron four-poster bed was scarcely recognisable. She had a look of ancient and unbearable fatigue, as though all strength had drained out of her. Abigail saw her eyes flickering under the silken brown eyelids.
‘Granny,’ said Dovey softly, ‘’tis Abby, come to show you she is safe.’
The eyes opened. Light had drained out of them also. The glistening vitality and intelligence, so like that in Judah’s eyes, had gone. The dark blue had faded to a bleached slate-grey. Abigail was shocked and distressed.
‘Oh, Granny,’ she cried, ‘do you feel very bad? Oh, Granny, I’m so sorry, but I just had to try to go home.’
The knobbly old hand wavered out. Abigail took it. The old woman’s grip was feeble, and yet firm. She held Abigail’s hand lightly but Abigail felt that even if she wanted to take her hand back she would not be able to.
‘She hanna the Power, Dovey,’ said the dim, rustling voice. ‘She isna one of us. But there’s something there, something … I can feel it strengthening me. Now, Abigail, isna the time for truth come? For you and for us, too, forbye. You dinna come from another country, but from another time?’
Abigail heard Dovey gasp. She told Mrs Tallisker the year of her birth, and Dovey breathed, ‘Dear God, is it possible?’
‘Hush, Dovey. Tell me true, Abigail, in that far-off time which is yours and not ours, did ye ever hear the name Tallisker, or Bow?’
‘No, never,’ said Abigail truthfully.
‘Your father’s name is Kirk? A Scottish name.’
‘Yes, but he’s half Norwegian. He was born in Narvik, and brought to Aust … to New South Wales as a baby.’
‘His mother’s name?’
‘Emma Rasmussen.’
Granny Tallisker asked the same questions about Abigail’s mother. But Kathy was fourth generation Australian, and Abigail knew of no blood strain other than English and German amongst her mother’s ancestors.
‘Yet you are the Stranger,’ murmured the old lady. ‘’Tis very puzzling, Dovey.’
‘I’m not, you know,’ said Abigail emphatically. ‘You’ve made a mistake. I got here quite accidentally. It was because …’ she stopped. She had promised Beatie solemnly that she would not ever tell that the younger girl had visited the twentieth century.
‘No, no,’ said the old woman almost impatiently. ‘You are the Stranger; there is nae possibility of mistake.’
Her voice had grown stronger. The hyacinth colour almost perceptibly flowed back into her eyes. Abigail wondered uneasily if she were withdrawing vitality from her own hand, and she tried to take it away, but could not without a sharp, rude jerk.
Suddenly Dovey spoke rapidly in the broad Orkney dialect. Abigail could scarcely catch a word except ‘aye’ and ‘Beatie’ and ‘unwed’. Mrs Tallisker was excited.
‘Then she’s not to die, my clever wee hen! God be praised for that, anyway.’
‘I have just told Granny what Beatie saw,’ Dovey explained; ‘the woman’s hands without a ring, and a book in them. And she says that is the first part of the Prophecy proved.’
Abigail was bewildered. She was not interested in the Prophecy. What she wanted to know was how Granny had known where she was held captive. But it didn’t seem the time to ask.
‘The Prophecy,’ explained Mrs Tallisker, ‘is for each fifth generation, when it is so ordered that the Gift is at risk. This is the fifth generation from my grandfather’s time, when there wunna a Tallisker left but himself, after the Stuart wars in Scotland. Tell Abby the words, Dovey, the while I catch my breath.’
Dovey said in a low reluctant voice, ‘It is in our Orkney speech, but it means, “One to be barren and one to die.” ’
‘Well, goodness,’ said Abigail, ‘I can’t see that that’s so bad.’
‘See, Abigail,’ explained Dovey, ‘I am the sole child of Granny’s son Robert Tallisker who drowned, God rest his soul. And of the bairns of my Aunt Amelia, four died young. Of those who can hand on the Gift to the future, there are now no more than four.’
‘You, Judah, Beatie and Gibbie,’ said Abigail thoughtfully.
‘And of those Beatie is to be barren and will not hand on the Gift,’ said Mrs Tallisker.
‘But you don’t know that!’ protested Abigail.
‘The ringless hand,’ reminded Dovey. ‘She saw it herself. She will not wed, and will be childless.’
‘I think it’s absolutely repulsive,’ cried Abigail, ‘talking about people as if they were part of some superstitious pattern. It’s all right for Beatie not to marry if she doesn’t want to, don’t you see? But that means one of the rest of you will die.’
‘And die young,’ said Dovey.
‘Don’t you care?’ cried Abigail. ‘Why, it might be you! It might be Judah!’ Then realisation struck her. ‘Gibbie! You believe Gibbie’s going to die, don’t you?’
‘It might well be the poor little one,’ said Dovey gently. ‘He hasna made headway since the fever, and it is now seven months since he sickened. His little bones are like sticks, and he hasna put on an ounce, feed him up as we may. But on the other hand, Abigail, it may be myself, as you say. It is your coming that will decide.’
‘I’ve nothing to do with it!’ cried Abigail. ‘I came here without wanting to and I want to go home. I’ve a life of my own, and I want to live it. My mother, I miss her, don’t you understand?’ she said chokily. She thought fiercely, ‘I won’t cry, I won’t.’ She waited for a moment, and then said quietly, ‘I’m not your mysterious Stranger. I’m just someone who came into your life here in some way that’s a riddle to me. But I have to go home, I don’t belong here. You must see that.’
‘We canna let you go,’ said Mrs Tallisker. She had relinquished Abigail’s hand and was sitting up against her pillows. Except for her sunken eyes she looked almost like her own dignified strong self again.
Abigail glowered. ‘I’ll run away again and again till I find the place where I came into this horrible century; and I’ll go, I swear I will.’
‘But we canna let you go until you have done whatever it is the Stranger must do to preserve the Gift.’ Dovey was distressed. ‘Oh, dear Abby, it may only be for a little while and then we will help you go to your own place. We do understand what you feel, that you long for your ain folk, but we canna let you go … you are our only hope, you see.’
Abigail said unbelievingly, ‘This thing … is it so precious to you that you’d do this to me? It … isn’t Christian.’
‘The Gift is not Christian,’ said Mrs Tallisker. ‘But aye, you have it right, girl. It is so precious to us that we would keep you here for ever if this were ordained to be so.’
‘Judah wouldn’t let you!’ burst out Abigail. ‘He’s got some gumption, he’s a seaman, a grown man …’ But she could see from their pitying faces that Judah believed in the Gift as strongly as they did.
‘Either they’re all dotty, or I’m dreaming,’ thought Abigail. Her knees wobbled. ‘But I’m not dreaming. I’m here, in a little Victorian cottage full of oil lamps and iron pots and funny clothes and paintings of people who lived before Queen Victoria was born. It’s real, more real than Magpies, or anything.’
At the thought that she was trapped as efficiently as she had been in that gloomy cavern of the Suez Canal, she sniffed dolorously.
‘I can’t go my whole life without seeing my mother and father again,’ she whispered. ‘And truly you are mistaken. I’m not this Stranger of whom you talk. I didn’t have anything belonging to the family. I wasn’t even wearing anything unusual: just my green dress.’
‘Aye,’ said Mrs Tallisker, and her voice was so tender, so loving, that chills ran up and down Abby’s spine.
‘My dress? That had something to do with … ?’
All at once she remembered the dream-like conversation she had heard that first terrible, confused, and painful night. Dovey and Granny. Whispers. No mistake. Pattern. Not a needle set to it yet.
She cried, ‘Not the dress, the crochet! The crochet!’
She saw by glancing from one to the other that she was right.
‘The pattern … the grass of Parnassus …’
‘It is a common bog plant in Orkney,’ said Dovey.
‘The initials,’ breathed Abigail. ‘A.T. Not Anastasia Tassiopolis but Alice Tallisker … I don’t know what to say. That crochet – you designed it, you made it … but not yet.’
Mrs Tallisker nodded. She had wearied again. The small vitality she had absorbed from Abigail seemed to have leaked away now that Abigail herself was trembling and shocked.
‘The crochet brought me here in some way; it was a sort of link between me and Beatie … and you’ve burnt the dress, so now I can never get back, never.’
She felt very much older than fourteen. She felt like an old woman.
It was like the terrible lostness and helplessness she had felt when her father went away. The empty place inside her had swallowed her up. She got up to leave the room. Dovey tried to stop her, but Abigail’s stony, hating face made her recoil. She went downstairs, with Dovey limping after her.
Mr Bow looked up with surprise from the marble slab where he was moulding liquorice babies.
‘What in the name of fortune are you doing, girl? You’re still in your night-rail!’
Abigail looked down without interest at her stiff calico nightdress. It struck her then that this was the kind of clothing she would always wear until she was an old woman and graduated to a flannel gown and a baby’s bonnet nightcap like Mrs Tallisker. That was if she survived scarlet fever, cholera, plague, and all the things she had not had shots for.
‘Fortunately I have had my polio injections and my smallpox inoculations,’ she remarked politely to Mr Bow. The man looked flabbergasted. He wiped his hands on his apron and led her gently away from the door. He put his sticky hand on her forehead, and said anxiously to Dovey, ‘Would she be sickening for something, walking about this way in her shift?’
Dovey tried to put her arms around Abigail, but she pushed them away. ‘You pretend to be kind, but you’re cruel. Your father died and your mother died, and you know how hard it is. But you will keep me away from my home and my friends and my mother and I’ll never see her again.’
She felt that somewhere inside her she was sobbing broken-heartedly, but outwardly she was calm.
‘I can’t trust any of you, except Judah.’
She thought then of Judah as a rock in the wilderness. His strength, his frankness and plainness of speech, his understanding of Beatie’s longing for education – why else should he be teaching her Latin, and geometry, too, for all Abigail knew?
‘Abby, Granny wants to see you. Please come.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘It’s about your dress.’ Dovey faltered. ‘I told you an untruth, Abby, and verra ashamed I was. But Granny thought it best. Your dress was not burnt, ’tis hid away, safe as houses.’
Abigail leapt up the stairs two at a time. She burst into Granny’s room. Beatie was helping the old woman into a clean wrapper. Abigail’s rage was beyond bounds. She opened her mouth to yell at Mrs Tallisker, but the old woman looked at her steadfastly. It was if she were being engulfed by those blue eyes. Her anger melted, and she said, gently and politely, ‘Is it true that my dress was not destroyed?’
‘True indeed,’ replied the old woman tranquilly. ‘And when you’ve done what you were sent here to do I shall give it back to you, and you can return home.’
‘But I don’t know what I have to do,’ said Abigail desperately.
‘It will show itself in time,’ said Granny.
Abigail begged and pleaded, but Mrs Tallisker was adamant.
‘The Gift is more precious than you, or any of us here. It munna be more than a couple of days before we know what you must do.’
‘Tell me what it is and I’ll do it!’ pleaded Abigail.
But Granny shook her head. ‘That we dinna know, child. But it will reveal itself.’
‘Why don’t you know, if you have the Gift?’ cried Abigail.
‘Because I’m old and the Gift is leaving me –’ replied Granny with dignity, ‘as is the power of my sight and the strength of my hands. If I could still heal would I not make poor Gibbie as strong as his brother?’
‘All very well,’ thought Abigail contemptuously, ‘but how did you know I was in that warehouse, tied up and helpless?’
‘Because you called me, child,’ answered the old woman readily, ‘and I sent out my mind to search for you.’
Distantly the voice of Gibbie could be heard, cheeping wretchedly.
‘I’ll see to him,’ said Abigail to Beatie. She was half-way up to the attic before she realised that Mrs Tallisker had answered a question she had not asked aloud. She shuddered. Did Judah believe all this stuff? Did Mr Bow?
Gibbie was lying back on his little bed, looking holy. Abigail looked at him critically. No doubt of it, he was a miserable whitebait of a kid, as flimsy within as without, she had no doubt. He opened one eye a slit and peered at her through his eyelashes, and began to wheeze dramatically.
‘Don’t waste your theatrics on me,’ said Abigail.
‘Going to the theatre is the devil’s work,’ said Gibbie in his parson’s tone. ‘You fall straight into hell fire ten miles down.’
‘Sounds fun,’ said Abigail. Gibbie blanched.
It was no wonder, thought the girl, that Granny and Dovey thought he would be the one to die. And this conclusion, she knew, would not lie easy on their minds. She recalled Dovey’s devotion to the child, her sleepless nights and endless patience with a youngster Abigail felt was as unlovable and obnoxious as a child could get.
The attic had a sloping roof covered with flowered wallpaper. There were framed texts on the walls. In the sharp angle of the ceiling and floor was a small casement window.
‘Dunna you open it,’ said Gibbie in a fright. ‘’Twould mean my death of cold, immediate!’
‘I’m just looking,’ said Abigail. The attic window looked over the back of the house, over midget back yards; ‘wee hoosies’; and incredible masses of rubbish: old iron bedsteads, broken hen-coops, rusty corrugated iron. The skillion roof of the Bows’ kitchen ran below the window, to extend half over the next yard, where someone had strung a line of deep-grey tattered washing. A small pig was tethered on the roof, rooting listlessly at a heap of rotting cabbage leaves. In the next yard two Chinese with pigtails worked industriously over a steaming copper. Their laundry was dazzling white. Baffled by this, Abigail returned to the bed, where Gibbie was watching her with big eyes.
‘Why do you look so different from us?’
‘You’ve got me there,’ said Abby. ‘Haven’t you anything to do besides pick your nose? Haven’t you anything to read?’
‘I dinna read very well, but sometimes Granny tells me stories of the fishermen, and the big storms and such things; and when Judah is home from a voyage he tells me of shipwrecks and rafts, and the forest where the cedar is cut, and how he’s going to be master of his own ship, and sail to the Solomons and see the savages.’
‘That must be interesting,’ said Abigail. The little boy’s face had momentarily lost its pinched, old-monkish look, and become vivacious and excited. Then he said in his dreariest tone, ‘But I’m going to heaven instead to be with Mamma and the angels, and I daresay that is twice as worthwhile as the Solomon Islands.’
‘Poor little rat,’ thought Abigail. Then she caught herself: ‘I’m going on as if I believe he’s going to die, just like the rest of them.’ Aloud she said, ‘Do you know the story of Treasure Island?’
Gibbie’s eyes glistened. ‘I do not. Can you tell it to me?’
Abby began: ‘Once upon a time there was a pirate called Long John Silver …’
‘But if he doesn’t die,’ she thought, ‘there’s only Dovey and Judah.’ The room seemed to fill with Judah’s warmth and liveliness, his boy’s joviality and his man’s sense of responsibility towards his family. She could almost hear him telling this sick child of tropical forests and coral reefs, never mentioning all the hardships and perils of an apprentice seaman on a coastal brig.
‘Won’t ye be goin’ on?’ pleaded Gibbie. ‘For I’m fair mad to hear about this pirate.’
‘He had a wooden leg,’ said Abby absently.
‘Oh,’ she thought, ‘don’t let it be Judah; it mustn’t be Judah!’