LITMIR.BIZ

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Aunt Akky?’

      ‘Oh, go and do yer tattin’,’ said Dame Alice contemptuously, ‘you old maiden.’

      But Dulcie paid little attention to this insult. Her gaze had wandered to one of the many clocks in her aunt’s drawing-room.

      ‘Sword Wednesday tomorrow,’ she said romantically, ‘and in twenty-four hours they’ll be doing the Dance of the Five Sons. Fancy!’

      IV

      Their final practice over, the eight dancers contemplated each other with the steady complacency of men who have worked together in a strenuous job. Dr Otterly sat on an upturned box, laid his fiddle down and began to fill his pipe.

      ‘Fair enough,’ said Old William. ‘Might be better, mind.’ He turned on his youngest son. ‘You, Ernie,’ he said, ‘you’m Whiffler as us all knows to our cost. But that don’t say you’m toppermost item. Altogether too much biostrosity in your whiffling. No need to lay about like a madman. Show me your sword.’

      ‘No, I won’t, then,’ Ernie said. ‘Thik’s mine.’

      ‘Have you been sharpening up again? Come on. Have you?’

      ‘Thik’s a sword, bean’t ’er?’

      Ernie’s four brothers began to expostulate with him. They pointed out, angrily, that the function of the Whiffler was merely to go through a pantomime of making a clear space for the dance that was to follow. His activities were purest make-believe. Ralph and Dr Otterly joined in to point out that in other counties the whiffling was often done with a broom, and that Ernie, laying excitedly about him with a sword which, however innocuous at its point, had been made razor-sharp farther down, was a menace at once to his fellow-mummers and to his audience. All of them began shouting. Mrs Bünz at her lonely vigil outside the window, hugged herself in ecstasy. It was the ritual of purification that they shouted about. Immensely and thrillingly, their conversation was partly audible and entirely up her street. She died to proclaim her presence, to walk in, to join, blissfully, in the argument.

      Ernie made no answer to any of them. He stared loweringly at his father and devotedly at Simon Begg, who merely looked bored and slightly worried. At last, Ernie, under pressure, submitted his sword for examination and there were further ejaculations. Mrs Bünz could see it, a steel blade, pierced at the tip. A scarlet ribbon was knotted through the hole.

      ‘If one of us ’uns misses the strings and catches hold be the blade,’ old Andersen shouted, ‘as a chap well might in the heat of his exertions, he’d be cut to the bloody bone. Wouldn’t he, Doctor?’

      ‘And I’m the chap to do it,’ Chris roared out. ‘I come next, Ern. I might get me fingers sliced off.’

      ‘Not to mention my yed,’ his father added.

      ‘Here,’ Dr Otterly said quietly, ‘let’s have a squint at it.’

      He examined the sword and looked thoughtfully at its owner. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you make it so sharp, boy?’

      Ernie wouldn’t answer. He held out his hand for the sword. Dr Otterly hesitated and then gave it to him. Ernie folded his arms over it and backed away cuddling it. He glowered at his father and muttered and snuffled.

      ‘You damned dunderhead,’ old William burst out, ‘hand over thik rapper. Come on. Us’ll take the edge off of it afore you gets loose on it again. Hand it over.’

      ‘I won’t, then.’

      ‘You will!’

      ‘Keep off of me.’

      Simon Begg said: ‘Steady, Ern. Easy does it.’

      ‘Tell him not to touch me, then.’

      ‘Naow, naow, naow!’ chanted his brothers.

      ‘I think I’d leave it for the moment, Guiser,’ Dr Otterly said.

      ‘Leave it! Who’s boss hereabouts! I’ll not leave it, neither.’

      He advanced upon his son. Mrs Bünz, peering and wiping away her breath, wondered momentarily if what followed could be yet another piece of histrionic folklore. The Guiser and his son were in the middle of her peepshow, the other Andersens out of sight. In the background only partly visible, their faces alternately hidden and revealed by the leading players, were Dr Otterly, Ralph and Simon Begg. She heard Simon shout: ‘Don’t be a fool!’ and saw rather than heard Ralph admonishing the Guiser. Then, with a kind of darting movement, the old man launched himself at his son. The picture was masked out for some seconds by the great bulk of Dan Andersen. Then arms and hand appeared, inexplicably busy. For a moment or two, all was confusion. She heard a voice and recognized it, high-pitched though it was, for Ernie Andersen’s.

      ‘Never blame me if you’re bloody-handed. Bloody-handed by nature you are: what shows, same as what’s hid. Bloody murderer, both ways, heart and hand.’

      Then Mrs Bünz’s peepshow re-opened to reveal the Guiser, alone.

      His head was sunk between his shoulders, his chest heaved as if it had a tormented life of its own. His right arm was extended in exposition. Across the upturned palm there was a dark gash. Blood slid round the edge of the hand and, as she stared at it, began to drip.

      Mrs Bünz left her peepshow and returned faster than usual to her back stairs in the pub.

      V

      That night, Camilla slept uneasily. Her shallow dreams were beset with dead dogs that stood watchfully between herself and Ralph or horridly danced with bells strapped to their rigid legs. The Five Sons of the photograph behind the bar parlour door also appeared to her with Mrs Bünz mysteriously nodding and the hermaphrodite who slyly offered to pop his great skirt over Camilla and carry her off. Then ‘Crack’, the Hobby Horse, came hugely to the fore. His bird-like head enlarged itself and snapped at Camilla. He charged out of her dream, straight at her. She woke with a thumping heart.

      The Mardian church clock was striking twelve. A blob of light danced on the window curtain. Down in the yard somebody must be walking about with a lanthorn. She heard the squeak of trampled snow accompanied by a drag and a shuffle. Camilla, now wide awake, listened uneasily. They kept early hours at the Green Man. Squeak, squelch, drag, shuffle and still the light dodged on the curtain. Cold as it was, she sat up in the bed, pulled aside the curtain and looked down.

      The sound she made resembled the parched and noiseless scream of a sleeper. As well it might: for there below by the light of a hurricane lanthorn her dream repeated itself. ‘Crack’, the Hobby Horse, was abroad in the night.

       CHAPTER 4

       The Swords Are Out

      On Sword Wednesday, early in the morning, there was another heavy fall of snow. But it stopped before noon and the sun appeared, thickly observable, like a live coal in the western sky.

      There had been a row about the slasher. Nobody seemed to know quite what had happened. The gardener, McGlashan, had sent his boy down to the forge to demand it. The boy had returned with a message from Ernie Andersen to say the Guiser wasn’t working but the slasher would be ready in time and that, in any case, he and his brothers would come up and clear a place in the courtyard. The gardener, although he had objected bitterly and loudly to doing the job himself, instantly took offence at this announcement and retired to his noisomely stuffy cottage down in the village, where he began a long fetid sulk.

      In the morning Nat and Chris arrived at Mardian Castle to clear the snow. McGlashan had locked his tool-shed, but, encouraged by Dame Alice, who had come down heavily on their

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