Birchwood

‘I am Silas,’ he said. ‘Come along with me now.’

I followed him down the line of caravans to the largest of them, painted black, and there, with another smile, in silence, he led me up the steps. They were all in there, perched on stools, reclining on the narrow bunks, standing idly about, the youth with the hot eyes, the fat woman, golden children, all. There was a great silence, and a smell of boiled tea. At my back the pale girl entered quietly. She went and stood by her twin, who was her double except for Ker ravenblack hair. No one said a word, but they all smiled, a symphony of strange smiles around me. Silas rubbed his hands.

‘Well here we are,’ he said. ‘Allow me to present-this is Angel, and Mario there, young Justin and Juliette.’ The painted children bowed and tittered. ‘And the baba under the table, little Sophie. Come out and say howdedoo, baba. Shy, are you? This is Magnus, and Sybil here, and last, but ah! the very best, my darling girls, Ada, Ida.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder and took a deep breath. ‘Children, this is Gabriel Godkin.’

I was confused. The names all slipped away from the faces, into a jumble. The tall slender woman with flame- red hair and agate eyes, Sybil it was, turned her face from the window and looked at me briefly, coldly. Still no one spoke, but some smiled. I felt excitement and unease. It seemed to me that I was being made to undergo a test, or play in a game the rules of which I did not know. Silas put his hands in his pockets and chuckled again, and all at once I recognised the nature of the bond between them. Laughter! O wicked, mind you, and vicious perhaps, but laughter for all that. And now I laughed too, but, like theirs, my laughter made no sound, no sound at all.

23

SILAS TOOK ME next on a tour of his collapsible kingdom. Now strictly speaking it was not a circus at all, but a kind of travelling theatre. Here was no big top strung with a filigree of tightropes and gleaming trapeze bars, but a long rectangular tent with benches and a stage, the latter an awkward hinged affair which took a workparty of four an hour to dismantle. The canvas roof above us, cooking slowly in the sun, gave off a smell of sweat and glue. I felt obscurely betrayed. There were worse disappointments in store. Out behind the tent we found the wild beasts promised by the poster, a melancholy tubercular grey monkey in a birdcage, and a motheaten tiger lying motionless behind bamboo bars on a trailer. The monkey bared his yellow teeth and turned contemptuously away from us, displaying his skinned purplish backside. I peered into the tiger's glassy yellow eye and ventured to enquire if it was alive. Silas laughed.

‘Stuffed!’ he cried, greatly tickled. ‘Yet very lifelike, would you not say? Fearsome. Ha!’ He clasped his hands on the shelf of his big belly and beamed at me, not without fondness, amused by my chagrin. ‘It is real, you know, Gabriel. They find it quite convincing.’

They were the folk who paid to look upon these wonders. There was both mockery and reverence in the way he spoke the word. People believed the shoddy dreams he sold them! The fact filled him with awe.

‘You see, my boy, they pay to gape at our stuffed friend here, to make faces at Albert the monkey, to watch us capering about the stage, they pay, mark you, and their pennies work like magic wands, transforming all they buy.’

We sat down side by side on the shaft of the trailer. He took from his waistcoat pocket a short black pipe and stuck it between his teeth, folded his arms and gazed at the blue hills away behind the town. I watched him suspiciously, with the uneasy feeling that he was making fun of me. He was an odd old man. I liked him. The sun, still low, was in our faces, and now I saw a figure approach out of a mist of light, skimming down the path by the caravans, a tiny figure on a threewheeled cycle. At first I thought it must be Prospero, and I stared at Silas. He said nothing. The little man pulled up before us and put one sharp shoe to the ground. He had a big square head and enormous hands. His black eyebrows and his hair were as smooth as fur. He wore a neat grey suit tightly buttoned. A red scarf was knotted at his throat. He was less than four feet tall.

‘Well well,’ said Silas, by way of greeting. ‘There you are.’

The little man stepped down from his cycle, tugged the wrinkles out of his jacket deftly with finger and thumb, and gravely bowed.

‘Silas, my friend, how are you? And…?’

‘This is Gabriel.’

He shook my hand.

‘The name is Rainbird,’ he said loftily, as though presenting to me something of inestimable value. We made room for him on the shaft and he settled himself daintily between us, clasping his mighty hands in his lap. Silas looked at him over his pipe and asked,

‘Well, any news?’

Rainbird squirmed, feigning a delicious horror.

‘What a day, O! what a day. Would you believe it, I was knocked off my bike. Just look at my things.’ There were a few faint mudstains on his jacket and his shoes were damp. ‘A child it was, a little girl, no higher than that. I could have slapped her face, I really could. And what's so funny, may I ask?’ Silas was chuckling. He turned his laughter into a cough and waved his hands apologetically. Rainbird sniffed. ‘I see nothing funny, I'm sure.’

He turned his attention to me and looked me up and down with a calm appraising gaze, and, still with his odd eye upon me, said to Silas,

‘Not much doing in these parts. Tenant farms, mostly. A village or two. They say the gentry are trigger-happy. Go north is our best bet.’

Silas nodded, paying scant attention to this information. He said to me,

‘Rainbird is our scout.’

The little man glared at him.

‘O that's all,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Our scout. Nothing more.’

Silas grinned, still gazing away toward the hills.

‘Does a couple of tricks too, for the show.’

‘Tricks! Well!’ cried Rainbird. He ruminated darkly for a while, then shrugged and turned to me again. ‘Well Gabriel? Another hopeful, I suppose?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Running away from home, are you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Aha, I thought so.’

‘Sir, the girl, the one who knocked you off your bike…?’

Although Silas did not stir, or look at me, I fancied that his delicate almost pointed ears quivered. I was sorry at once that I had spoken, and cursed myself inwardly for my incontinence. Had I not vowed that I would proceed upon my quest in silence cunningly? Now here I was, blurting out my heart's secrets, with no going back. Rainbird was examining me with a new interest, waiting for me to finish my question. When he saw that I would not, he said,

‘She was some child, I don't know. Why?’

Silas took the pipe out of his mouth and peered into the bowl, poked at the dottle with the nail of his little finger, clamped the pipe between his teeth again, gave it a couple of experimental puffs and put a match to it. He was waiting for me to proceed, and a perfect blue smoke ring, hovering above his head, seemed somehow to betray, unsuspected by himself, the very shape of his interest. Rainbird glanced inquiringly from one of us to the other. I found to my surprise that I had begun to enjoy my position at the centre of attention.

‘Well, I'm searching for someone, you see,’ I said, and added, faintly, ‘a girl.’

Rainbird's mouth formed a little circle, and he said,

‘Oo, are you now, indeed?’

‘Yes. My sister.’ They looked at each other and nodded slowly, apparently much impressed. ‘My twin,’ I said, quite reckless now. ‘She was stolen-’

‘By fairies?’ Rainbird asked innocently.

‘No no. I never knew her, you see, I mean I don't remember her, but I'm sure…that is I…’

I stopped, and looked at them suspiciously. They were altogether too solemn. Silas put a florid red handkerchief