His Name Was Walter Page 14
Colin’s eyes were burning and his throat was aching, but he fought the threatened tears back. Not that he thought it was unmanly to cry — he’d been told often enough that it wasn’t — but when Tara had prompted him to read on, she’d sounded fierce rather than sad. If Tara could read that last paragraph without crying, so could he.
He made himself think about other, more practical things. ‘So now we know how the desk got here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And we know what that narrow book in the back of the secret drawer is — Magda’s sketchbook. Abby’s letter is probably there too. And Walter’s notes on his last week in town, plus his farewell to Sparrow. And the gold thing in the corner must be Magda’s locket!’
‘Probably,’ said Tara, turning the page.
‘Let’s go and look!’ Colin whispered, his legs twitching with the urge to get up, get away from the sad spell of the story, go and do something.
‘Not yet,’ said Tara. ‘Not till we’ve finished the book.’
Colin felt suddenly furious. ‘But if the stuff in the drawer’s what we think it is, it’ll prove that the story’s based on something real, Tara!’ he argued. ‘It’ll prove to Lucas and the others that we aren’t just being stupid!’
Tara sighed. ‘It won’t make any difference to them if Walter was a real person or not. They’ll still think we’re stupid to go on reading the book. And I don’t care what they think anyway, Colin! I just want to finish Walter’s story. And it would be better — much better — if you did too. There should be two of us, at least.’
‘But we know how the story ends now!’ Colin clenched his fists in frustration.
‘We don’t,’ Tara said quietly. ‘Not quite. There’s more we have to find out.’
She looked up at Colin again, and this time her eyes were pleading. ‘Just … can’t you just take my word for it, Colin? We’ve got to read it all.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Sparrow wants us to, for Walter’s sake. She wants his story told. And she’s been waiting such a long time.’
And now her eyes were full of tears. The tears spilled over and ran down her pale cheeks. She made no effort to brush them away.
Sparrow wants us to, for Walter’s sake.
Colin’s skin was prickling as he looked down at the open book. He saw a terrifying picture of flames, of palm trees bending and broken, of dark figures running, some supporting others who had been injured, of a vivid red sky boiling not with clouds but with black smoke. He felt heat rising from the page. He could hear the groans of the wounded and dying.
Or were they the growls of the Beast he could hear?
He dragged his eyes from the painting, and unwillingly turned to the words.
So Walter was swallowed up by the world of war, and time in the valley went on without him, weeks lengthening into months and months into years. The boarding-house hen had told him to name her as his next of kin when he enlisted, if he wished, and he had accepted the offer gratefully. He knew that Sparrow would not receive letters sent to her directly, but he could rely on the hen to spread the word if she had any news of him.
Twice the good hen had letters from Walter. As he had expected, she carried the letters around in her handbag and insisted on reading them to everyone she met. It was curious how often a lone sparrow was nearby when she did this, its head cocked almost as if it were listening.
The first letter said that Walter was well and army food was not too bad, though not nearly as good as the red hen’s dinners. It said that a corporal in Walter’s brigade had turned out to be an old friend called Ginger, who long ago had taught Walter to whistle. The letter also said that it was very hot and sticky in the land where Walter was. It said that whenever Walter had a moment to himself, his mind flew back to the riverbank at home, and he pretended he was there, sitting in the cool shade of the willow trees.
The sparrow always became very still when those last words were read, but the hen was usually dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief by then, and never noticed.
The second letter was from a different place — an island to which Walter’s brigade had retreated after heavy losses. This letter said that Ginger had been injured. He had been buried under the flaming rubble of a building destroyed during an enemy attack. Walter had been able to dig his old friend out and drag him to safety, badly burned but alive, while fire raged all around them.
Someone once looked into my hand and told my fortune, the letter finished. One of the things she told me was that I would save a life. I suppose in a sense we are all saving one another’s lives here every day — or trying to — but I think Ginger’s was the life the prophecy meant. It is good to know that now he will be shipped home, to safety. There is still time, I think.
The red hen and her cronies always wondered aloud what that last sentence meant, then abandoned the question and agreed that Walter was a hero who should get a medal. The listening sparrow knew that the words about Magda’s prophecy had been intended for her, and her head drooped.
Then there were no more letters, except the official one saying that Walter, together with all his surviving comrades on the island, had been taken prisoner by the enemy.
Lord Vane put on a grave face when he heard the news, but once he was back in his chamber and the tall polished door was shut behind him, he nodded with satisfaction. The enemy army that had taken Walter was known to have no respect for the lives of prisoners of war.
The coast was attacked. The fear of invasion became real. In the long, grim years that followed, it was as if Walter had vanished off the face of the earth. Possibly he was still imprisoned. More likely, he was buried in an unmarked grave. By the time the war ended in exhausted victory, and the valley’s husbands, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters began coming home, many people had almost forgotten the quiet, courteous young man who had once worked in the treasure house.
And who could blame them? For years the world had been split in half, and the opposing sides had fought like two raging, many-headed dragons. Countless people had suffered and died. Countless more were injured or grieving. Homes had been lost forever. Great cities had been laid to waste. Monstrous evil had been done. What was one man’s fate compared to all this?
But Widow Bonnet sometimes spoke of Walter to her returned soldier son, as with Dorothy the farm hand, who had stayed on to help, they laboured to keep their struggling vineyard from being sold to pay their debt to the treasure house. The red hen still sighed when she swept and dusted Walter’s empty attic room. And as for Sparrow, dreaming on the riverbank — well, the scribbled note she had found in the secret drawer of the little desk read, I will never really leave you, Sparrow. I will love you for as long as I live and after, and she believed this with all her heart. Her memories of Walter remained so strong and clear that it almost seemed as if he were sitting there with her in the green shade of the willow.
‘That’s the only thing that doesn’t fit,’ Tara murmured as Colin finished reading. ‘The willow trees. They’re so important in the story, but there are no willows on the river here. I can’t understand it.’
She looked so puzzled — almost hurt — that Colin knew he had to tell her. ‘I think there were willows here once,’ he said. ‘I saw some stumps. They were probably cut down.’
‘Cut down?’ Tara echoed in shock. ‘But — why would anyone do that? They must have been so beautiful!’
‘It’s being done all over the place,’ Colin told her. ‘It’s to conserve water. Willows suck a lot of water out of rivers. So they take them out and grow native plants on the riverbanks instead. Not everyone agrees with it, but it’s happening. It happened on the river up where I used to live, and they’ve done it here. Didn’t you see all the seedlings with little plastic sleeves pegged around them, down by the bridge?’
Tara shook her head, speechless.
‘Natives grow fast,’ said Colin. ‘In a year or two, the banks will be covered again. They won’t be so beautiful, but they’ll be green. That’s what happened at home
.’
Home, he thought, realising what he’d said. He felt Tara looking at him, and flushed.
‘You really miss it,’ she said softly. ‘The place where you used to live.’
He couldn’t speak — couldn’t do anything but nod.
She didn’t say anything about getting used to things, or tell him he’d feel better in time. That was a relief, because he knew all that, and it didn’t help. She didn’t even say she was sorry. That was the greatest relief of all, because he didn’t want anyone’s pity.
‘We couldn’t afford to keep the farm,’ he muttered, ‘so we had to let it go.’
‘Like the willow trees,’ Tara said.
Colin couldn’t see what she meant at first, and then he got it. Tara was saying that sometimes you have to give up things you love because they’re stopping you from moving on. Like favourite shoes you’ve grown out of so they hurt you to walk in, Colin thought, and then smiled ruefully because his example was so unromantic compared to Tara’s.
‘Did you ever lose something you really cared about?’ he asked.
The girl nodded. ‘When my grandmother died, I did,’ she said. ‘Granny was … like me.’ Faint colour stole into her pale cheeks. ‘We didn’t talk about it much — my mother didn’t like it — but we both knew. I mean, Granny felt things, and heard and saw things, like I did. Things other people mostly didn’t feel or see.’
‘Ghosts,’ Colin mumbled, still very uncomfortable with the word.
Tara gave a little shrug. ‘Things,’ she said vaguely. ‘Feelings and shadows. Nothing like this.’ She glanced towards the short corridor and shivered. ‘This is so strong that it seems to affect everyone whether they admit it or not — well, except for Lucas, but he’s different.’
She said it quite casually. It didn’t seem to occur to her that Lucas’s difference from other people might make life just as hard for him as her difference made life for her. Colin didn’t say anything, though. Tara was too wrapped up in her own problems just now to care much about anyone else’s. She’d probably been like that for a long time. Maybe ever since …
‘When did your grandmother die?’ he asked awkwardly.
‘Three years ago.’ Tara swallowed. Her eyes darkened. ‘I miss her terribly — well, of course I do — but it’s more than that. I’d always felt okay about myself while she was here, but after she was gone I … I don’t know … got scared or something. Scared of other people, normal people. Scared they’d find out about me and …’
Again she shivered. Her shadowed face looked lost, and she bent her head. Colin thought about Abby, desperately hiding and denying her gift, and about Sparrow, ashamed of her feathered hands and face. He remembered Tara frowning and clenching her fists as she read about the witch-hunting villagers burning Magda’s house. He understood.
‘I saw a nature program once, about birds,’ he said slowly. ‘It said that some sorts of birds — parrots, for example — have eyes that are sensitive to ultraviolet light, so they can see colours that people and other birds can’t see.’
Tara didn’t raise her head, but she was very still and Colin knew she was listening.
‘Sulphur-crested cockatoos look plain white to us, because our eyes aren’t tuned to ultraviolet light,’ he went on. ‘We can’t see it without special equipment, but cockatoos can. The program showed what they look like to each other — not white, but a sort of weird, bright blue, with patterns all over. Well, in a way, you’re like that.’
‘You’re saying I see like a cockatoo?’ Tara asked, with a tiny smile.
‘I’m just saying that might be a good way of thinking about it,’ Colin said doggedly. ‘You were born with an extra talent that most other people don’t have — like being born with an amazing ear for music, or a feeling for numbers, or — or a huge talent for swimming, or whatever. That’s a lot less scary than imagining yourself with special antennae waving round on your head as if you’re some sort of alien.’
Tara actually laughed, and at last she looked up. Colin felt a rush of satisfaction as he saw that the lost, lonely expression had faded.
‘Thanks, Colin,’ she said simply.
They sat in silence for a moment. The darkness felt peaceful, and Colin yawned, becoming aware of how very sleepy he was. His eyelids were drooping when the soft, whistled melody he thought he’d heard before drifted into his mind. The sound was sweet but it wasn’t soothing. It came and went, advanced and retreated, keeping him awake, dancing around in his head like a warning of something he’d forgotten.
He was jolted out of his daze as beside him Tara made a small, shocked sound and abruptly leaned forward. He opened his eyes to see her frantically groping around on the floor at her feet. With a shock of his own, Colin realised that the book was no longer on her lap. Somehow it had slipped off and vanished into the tangled folds of his sleeping bag.
Tara fished it out of hiding. It had fallen closed.
‘We let ourselves get distracted!’ she hissed, rapidly flipping over pages to find the place where they’d stopped reading. ‘And then we nearly went to sleep! We mustn’t do that, Colin! It’s what he wants!’
As she found the fiery battle painting and turned quickly to the next page, the growling began again, low and threatening, drowning out the plaintive whistling. Colin tried to screen out the growling, but he couldn’t. His mind seemed to throb with it. Beside him, Tara was trembling.
At least he no longer felt sleepy. In fact, he’d never felt less like sleep in his life. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus on the text in its pool of torchlight. It was hard to concentrate at first, but as the story drew him in again the growling sound faded until he could hardly hear it at all.
CHAPTER
20
One evening towards the end of autumn, when the valley was silent and the river lay smooth as a grey satin ribbon beneath the rising moon, a farmer’s cart came trundling along the bumpy road that led to Long Rest. Two men sat in the front of the cart, talking in low voices as the old horse clopped along. The cart pottered slowly past dreaming farms where fields lay fallow and ‘For Sale’ signs sprouted like weeds, till it came to the river. It crossed the rickety bridge, and stopped. A thin young man with a stiff leg and a scarred face climbed awkwardly down onto the road. The cart’s driver passed a walking stick and a kit bag down to him, thanks and farewells were exchanged, and the cart set off again.
Then Walter (for of course the thin young man was he) looked up at the palace on the hill, at the light burning in the tower room and the small, pale shape of a face looking down. Leaning on his stick, he limped to the tall iron gates. Then, paying no attention to the griffins snarling on either side of him — he had seen far worse things than griffins since he last stood in that place — he began to whistle a strange little tune.
Sweet and clear, the melody floated up the hill and drifted through the bars of the tower window. And so it came to the ears of the young woman watching there, as she had watched every night since Walter went away, and her heart swelled and opened like a flower that bursts into bloom at the first kiss of the sun. Gripping the bars of her cage in her feathered hands, she pressed her face against the cold iron, straining to draw a fraction closer to the beloved figure at the gates.
‘Walter didn’t die in the war,’ Colin whispered. ‘He came back! But what about the prophecy?’
Tara looked up at him but didn’t answer. Her eyes spoke for her.
There’s more we have to find out … We’ve got to read it all.
Colin felt sweat break out on his forehead as menacing growls again swelled around him. His whole body was thrilling with fear. The urge to get up, turn his back, refuse to read any more, was almost overwhelming. The snarling, bloated face of the Beast flashed before his eyes.
He’s making me feel like this, Colin told himself. He’s desperate to stop me reading. He tried to distract me, he tried to send me to sleep, and when neither of those things worked he started trying to scare me
off. He doesn’t want me to know what happened.
The thought stiffened his back and cleared his mind. He took a breath and went back to the book.
Perhaps Walter had whistled the little tune to give Sparrow the chance to turn away from the window if she so wished. That would be very like him. After all, he had been away for a long time, he had returned damaged in body if not in spirit, and Sparrow had seen more of the world since their last day on the riverbank. It could be that she had changed her mind about him.
But as he saw her press against the window bars, he must have felt her unwavering love beaming from the tower. He must have known then that time had altered nothing, and that scars and a crippled leg would not make a jot of difference, either, for he stopped whistling, and Sparrow thought she saw him smile. Then, shouldering his kit bag, he pushed one of the tall gates open and limped through it, into the grounds of the palace.
It was night. Only owls and bats flew at night. But somehow, before the gate had clanged shut behind Walter, before he had taken two steps up the driveway, a little brown bird was hopping through the tower window bars and fluttering in terror to the ground. Then Sparrow was outside beneath the moon for the first time in her life, her feet were on the gravel of the drive she had seen every day but never felt, and she was running, hair streaming behind her, into Walter’s arms.
‘Oh, Walter, go back!’ she panted, even as she clung to him. ‘This is too dangerous! Tomorrow — on the riverbank—’
Walter took her face gently between his hands and tilted it up so their eyes met, and instantly she saw that she might as well have been talking to the shadows on the grass. Walter’s inner being had not changed, but a sort of innocence had left him, and would never return. A sterner gleam now mingled with the warmth in his honest eyes. He did not try to explain this, just softly caressed the feathers on Sparrow’s cheekbones with his thumbs as he kissed her, but she understood him as surely as if he had spoken.