His Name Was Walter Page 10

  ‘Good morning, Sparrow,’ Walter said softly. ‘I hoped to see you yesterday afternoon, but you were not here.’

  The sparrow cocked its head and chirped again. Its meaning was as clear to Walter as if it had spoken to him.

  ‘I was not free to come the day before,’ he said. ‘I was working in the town — in Lord Vane’s treasure house.’

  He could not keep a little pride out of his voice. He felt he had done well to find work so quickly — respectable work, too. He turned to look at the slowly moving river, and did not notice the sparrow ducking its head and fluffing up its feathers till it looked like a small, frightened brown ball.

  ‘I am nobody,’ Walter said, his eyes on the glassy water, ‘and that will never change. I will never be rich or powerful. My name will never be known in the world. I have been told that it is my destiny to die young, so it is almost certain that when war comes again, as everyone says it will, I will be rubbed from the pages of history as completely as my father was before me. So I am no prize …’

  He had forgotten that he was only speaking to a bird. Warmed by the strange joy that filled him, he had opened his heart without thinking, and was putting into words feelings he had hardly dared to admit even to himself.

  ‘But I loved Abby’s daughter the first moment I saw her,’ he went on in a low voice. ‘I will love her for as long as I live, and after. I have nothing to offer her except my heart, but that is hers completely. So whatever I must do to be near her, I will do, and however long I can stay, I will stay. All I want now is to find a way to free her so that she will never be lonely or afraid again.’

  The surface of the river wrinkled as a sudden gust of wind swept through the willow veil. Walter’s skin prickled as all around him trailing branches rustled and tossed. He had not felt anything like this since his earliest days in Magda’s clearing. He turned his head quickly.

  And there, one small hand still clutching the branch where the sparrow had perched an instant before, stood Abby’s daughter.

  Walter stared for an instant, stunned, then laughed in pure delight. ‘Sparrow!’ he burst out. ‘It was you all the time! Painting is not the only gift you inherited from your grandmother! Oh, what a fool I was not to have guessed!’

  He took an impulsive step forward but froze in mid-stride as the girl flung up a warning hand and shrank back. Clearly she did not want him to touch her.

  Walter blushed hotly as he remembered the unguarded way he had spoken to the sparrow just moments before. In deepest shame he told himself that he had assumed too much. He had thought that Lord Vane’s daughter had felt the same as he had, but he had been wrong. He had frightened her and perhaps insulted her, too, with his wild talk of love at first sight.

  ‘F-forgive me,’ he stammered. ‘I did not mean to be so bold—’

  The girl shook her head to stop him. Her lips were a little parted and she was breathing fast. The expression in her eyes was half beseeching, half defiant as she pushed back her hood and shook back her hair.

  And then Walter saw what the hood had been hiding — saw the sheen of smooth brown feathers on the girl’s cheekbones, beside her ears and making a V-shape high on her forehead. Gazing in fascination, he forgot all about being respectful, and said the first thing that came into his head.

  ‘Beautiful!’ he breathed.

  The girl put her head on one side and blinked at him, very startled. Then, quickly, almost violently, she stripped off her gloves to show that the backs of her hands, too, were clothed in feathers as brown and speckled as a sparrow’s wing. Her mouth hard and set, she thrust the feathered hands at Walter till they trembled almost under his nose.

  Then Walter understood. At last, he understood. Sparrow had expected him to be repulsed by the feathers. She had expected him to recoil from her in fear and disgust. Because … it could only be because everyone else in her life had done so. Because Abby had been horrified to find that her baby bore signs of her secret gift. Because Lord Vane had been appalled when his daughter had been born with features he saw as unnatural — even monstrous!

  Suddenly Walter had an agonising vision of what Sparrow’s life must have been, wrestling with the shame of being different, forced to keep her face and hands hidden because her mother was afraid for her and her father was ashamed of her. The beast-man was nothing to this. The ogress was nothing. No one knew better than Walter what it was to feel despised and alone.

  So he dared to take the hands thrust out at him so defiantly, and the last piece of shell around his heart cracked away as he felt the speckled brown feathers soft and warm beneath his fingers.

  ‘These signs are rare and beautiful, Sparrow,’ he said gently. ‘They are part of what you are, and only make me love you more. But I suppose they are why your father keeps you hidden. He finds them shameful.’

  Tears large and bright as melting stars welled up in the girl’s eyes.

  ‘Your grandmother was a witch and a shape-changer, and so was your mother,’ Walter said steadily. ‘Magic is in your blood. You do know that, don’t you, Sparrow? Abby did tell you what you were, before she died?’

  Staring, the girl slowly shook her head.

  Walter’s arms ached to hold her, but he did not move. He was remembering a dark city street, and a beggar woman telling him the truth that had set him free. Plain facts were what his love needed now.

  ‘Magda — your grandmother, who was my friend — could transform into a handsome grey cat when she chose,’ he said lightly, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. ‘She did not have fur on her hands and face, as you have feathers, but she had cat’s eyes — lovely, amber eyes.’

  As he spoke, he remembered Magda saying that it was dangerous for a witch to suppress the most basic of her gifts. Perhaps Sparrow’s feathered hands and face were the sign that Magda had been right. Perhaps the shape-changing magic suppressed and denied by Abby for so long had at last burst forth and found visible form in her child.

  He did not say anything about that, however. This was no time to talk about reasons, or blame.

  ‘Do the people in the palace know you are a shape-changer?’ he asked gently instead. ‘Your father? The housekeeper? That — that vile beast-man I saw last night?’

  Fear leaped into the girl’s eyes. She pulled her hands away from Walter’s and shrank back, shaking her head violently.

  ‘Do not be afraid!’ Walter exclaimed in distress. ‘If they do not know, they will not hear it from me, I swear it!’

  He saw the girl’s fear slowly fade, but its shadow remained in her drooping shoulders and trembling hands. Plainly he had given her a terrible shock by even suggesting that anyone in the palace knew of her secret life.

  With a chill Walter thought of the bars on the tower room, too close together for a girl to squeeze between them, but wide enough apart for a little brown bird to escape into the open air. Sparrow’s secret was her key to some sort of freedom. The thought of losing it was frightful to her.

  ‘If I know more about you I will not make mistakes like that again,’ he said gently. ‘Will you sit with me here and talk a while? Your father has gone from home and the ogress will surely not look for you till it is time for your midday meal, so we will be safe. There is so much I want you to tell me! Why, I do not even know your name!’

  The girl smiled faintly and Walter grew hot as he suddenly remembered that she could not speak. He had felt so comfortable talking to her, and her face and actions were so expressive, that he had quite forgotten!

  The girl’s lips opened. ‘You can know my birth name if you wish, Walter,’ she said in a light, soft voice that was as sweet as birdsong. ‘But I would like it very much if you went on calling me “Sparrow”.’

  CHAPTER

  14

  Colin had been more touched by the scene on the riverbank than he would have admitted to anyone, but it had made him feel self-conscious, too, because Tara was reading it with him. It was the same when he saw a love scene in a movie
or on TV in company. He stole a look at Tara to see if she was in tears. Love scenes always made his mother and sister and the girls at his old school cry. He was surprised and relieved to see that Tara was merely looking serious and deeply interested.

  ‘The palace in the book is a bit like this house, isn’t it?’ she murmured, without looking at him. ‘In a valley, beside a river, across a bridge, on top of a little hill … The palace even has a tower, like this place has a cupola.’

  Colin shrugged. ‘Writers often use things out of their real lives when they’re making up their stories, even when they’re writing fantasy,’ he said, remembering the few children’s authors who’d made the long trek to his little primary school in various Book Weeks. ‘And it’s most likely that whoever wrote and illustrated the book lived here, in this house, where we found it.’

  Tara bit her lip. ‘Ye-es,’ she agreed uncertainly. ‘That might be all it is. And it’s not as if the two places are exactly the same. There aren’t any willow trees by the river here like there are in the book.’

  Something occurred to Colin then — something that made him blink.

  ‘What?’ Tara asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Colin mumbled. That was a lie, but he’d made an instant decision to keep his thought to himself for now. He didn’t want to get into a long discussion with Tara about it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it himself. And he certainly wasn’t ready to think about what it meant in terms of the story.

  He turned a page to reveal a painting of a lonely figure walking away along a winding country road. By the look of the shadows, the time was late afternoon in summer. The figure had been painted from above, quite high above, as it would have been seen by someone watching, say, from a tower window, in a house on a hill …

  Colin blinked again. Then he forced his eyes away from the picture and turned to the text on the opposite page.

  Yes, Sparrow could speak, though Walter was the only person alive who knew it. As a tiny thing, babbling of wings and flying, chattering about things she could see that others could not, she had been warned so often by her frightened mother to hold her tongue that after a time it had seemed safest to have no voice at all.

  ‘I even learned not to make a sound when Mother plucked the feathers from my face and hands,’ she told Walter. ‘At first I would scream and cry because it hurt so much. Mother would cry, too — poor Mother! She was already weak and ill by then, and she hated giving me pain. But the feathers always grew back, so in the end Mother gave up and just made me wear gloves and a hood to hide them.’

  ‘Did Abby know you could transform?’ Walter asked, struggling to keep his voice free of the pity and anger he felt.

  ‘Of course!’ Sparrow shrugged. ‘It began when I was very young. I cannot remember a time when I could not become a bird. At first I thought it was the same for everyone, but Mother told me it was not. She told me that good, ordinary people stayed in one shape always. She said shape-changing was wicked. She said that if my father ever found out about it, he would send me away. She made me promise not to do it, but … but that was one promise I did not keep — could not keep!’

  Her voice broke a little, but then she lifted her chin. ‘I do not blame myself. It was too much to ask of me.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Walter agreed, ‘and Abby should not have asked it of herself, either.’

  He saw that Sparrow did not understand, and steeled himself to go on. He did not want to sadden the girl further, but she had to know the truth.

  ‘Abby was born a witch and a shape-changer like you, Sparrow,’ he said haltingly. ‘She tried to forget it, refused to use her powers. But shape-changing, at least, was part of her nature. She needed it, and giving it up weakened her sadly — just as if she had refused to eat or drink. She sickened, and at last she died. Magda was afraid that would happen. She told me so.’

  Sparrow’s immediate reaction was not what he had expected. Her face went perfectly blank.

  ‘But that would mean I did not cause Mother’s heart to break,’ she said in a low voice at last. ‘It would mean that her death was not my fault.’

  Then she put her hands over her face and wept. She wept for a long time. And Walter, sitting helplessly by, knew that she was crying not only for her mother but for herself, as the burden of heart-wrenching guilt slipped from her slender shoulders and was lost in the leaf-strewn dust beneath the willow tree.

  At noon, when Cactus the ogress stumped into the tower room with a tray, Lord Vane’s daughter was waiting, sitting innocently in her usual chair. As soon as the ogress had gone, however, a small brown bird flew swiftly back to the riverbank, and Walter.

  While Sparrow had been gone, Walter had resolved that as soon as she returned he would ask her directly about the beast-man. When he did so, however, Sparrow shook her head.

  ‘Why talk of evil that cannot be mended when we have so little time together, Walter? No! You must tell me your story now — every bit of it, right from the beginning! Where you came from and what you’ve done and how you met my grandmother and — oh, everything!’

  Walter wanted to protest that there was a world of time for them to talk of such things, but the girl’s eyes were so beseeching that he could not bring himself to refuse her.

  Soon he was glad he had not. Hands tightly clasped on her lap, Sparrow drank in his words as if they were sparkling water and she was parched with thirst. She listened so intently that it was as if she was trying to commit every detail of Walter’s tale to memory. And every time he tried to skip over events that seemed to him too boring or frightening or gruesome to repeat, she made him stop and go more slowly.

  Sparrow pored eagerly over Magda’s sketchbook. She sighed over the old letter, and kissed the image of her mother in the locket. Then she gave all three items back to Walter.

  ‘I cannot take them,’ she said. ‘I have no safe place to hide them, and the ogress is a spy and a thief.’

  ‘I will buy you something to keep them in,’ Walter promised, but Sparrow only smiled sadly and shook her head.

  By the time Walter’s story was done, and Sparrow’s questions had all been answered, the shadows on the river were lengthening. Reluctantly Walter stood up to go. As it was, he would have to walk fast to be back in town by sunset. He did not want to attract attention to himself by arriving late at the boarding house again.

  ‘Stay for just a few minutes more!’ Sparrow begged. ‘Cactus will not bring my supper for a long time yet.’

  ‘But your father will be back soon, I am sure,’ Walter said uneasily, for despite everything he still felt guilty about deceiving Lord Vane. ‘It would not do for him to come looking for you and find you gone.’

  Sparrow put her head on one side. Her eyes hardened. ‘My father does not seek me out, Walter,’ she said. ‘He prefers to forget I exist, and that suits me perfectly.’

  The contempt in her voice unsettled Walter. He would have understood anger or sadness, but contempt seemed wrong.

  ‘There is no excuse for the way Lord Vane treats you,’ he said cautiously, ‘but in a way he is to be pitied, Sparrow. He has a lot to bear. I realised that last night. You know what I saw.’

  Sparrow simply looked at him. Her face had become as pale as milk. The brown feathers stood out like brands on her cheekbones and brow.

  ‘What hold does that beast-man have over your father, Sparrow?’ Walter asked urgently. ‘How long has he lived in the palace?’

  ‘Always,’ the girl said, and turned her head away.

  She would say no more. To Walter’s every question she just pressed her lips together and shook her head, till at last he gave up.

  ‘I am sorry to have upset you,’ he said miserably. ‘I just want to help you, if I can.’

  ‘You have helped me, Walter,’ the girl said in a voice so faint that Walter could hardly hear it. ‘You have given me the truth about myself. You have freed me from a sense of guilt that has tortured me for most of my life. You have made me feel loved. And
now that I have met you, I will never feel alone in the world again. What more could anyone ask?’

  Very moved, Walter closed Magda’s locket, put it safely away in his pocket with Abby’s letter, and crouched to slide the sketchbook into his knapsack. ‘I wish I could leave your grandmother’s things with you, Sparrow,’ he said.

  ‘It will comfort me to think you have them,’ the girl replied, still with her head turned away. ‘They will make a link between us, whatever you do, wherever you are and however far you go.’

  She sounded so sad! Walter could not quite understand it. A week was not so long.

  ‘Well, I am not going far just now, am I?’ he teased gently, straightening up with the knapsack in his hands. ‘Or at least, no farther than the town. And next Sunday, I will be back.’

  To his astonishment, Sparrow spun round, her eyes wide with fright. ‘No, Walter!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought — I thought you understood! You have to go away!’

  ‘Away?’ Walter stared at her in confusion.

  ‘Far away!’ the girl cried. ‘We must not see each other again.’

  She saw his stricken face, and tears gathered in her eyes but did not fall. ‘We cannot be together, Walter! That — all that was just a fairytale! It was a lovely dream that could never come true! Do you not see?’

  ‘No, I do not see,’ Walter said steadily. ‘If you really care for me—’

  ‘Of course I care!’ Sparrow broke in, wringing her hands. ‘That is why I tell you to go! I will always love you, Walter! I will remember today till the end of my life. But if you stay here, if you tie your fate to mine, you will die. I feel it! I know it!’

  ‘This is to do with the Beast in the palace,’ Walter said grimly, and saw by the look of terror on the girl’s face that he was right.

  ‘No one can be close to me,’ Sparrow whispered. ‘I can never leave the palace. I can never marry. He will not permit it.’

  ‘I will be here next Sunday,’ said Walter.