Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

constable beat at the door with his iron-tipped pole and had to be shown from room to room before he would believe there was no murder, no witchcraft.

From quotidian miseries they progressed to the mimicking of more spectacular disasters; the contortions induced by poisons, and all possible woundings from daggers, pistols, toledoes. At the end of the week Gummer tested the boy, having him fall down on the street and clutch his knee, or howl in dismay upon receiving a slap, or run about hopping and bellowing from a scald. The first experiments were too fulsome or too feeble. Onlookers were confused, suspicious. But James was no sluggard. What he did not learn from Cato Leigh he took from others, following a man being whipped through the streets, squatting down to observe the torment of a street crier, her leg shattered by a cartwheel. One bright afternoon he sat on Gummer's shoulders to observe, over the heads of the crowd, the hanging of a felon outside the gates of Bristol gaol. It was everywhere, this thing called suffering. And such an infinite variety! People skulked in horror of it, prayed to their god to be spared it, and yet it seemed that nobody was; no one, that is, apart from himself. Even Gummer was not immune, living like the others at the mercy of a rotten tooth, a loose slate, a tainted oyster.

They set out in July through the green gut of a country road. The city ended suddenly; there was a house, a brick stack, smoke, ugly children. Then only fields and the scrolled canopies of the trees,

and farmhouses where old dogs, eyes ajar, stunned themselves in the sun, and a woman in iron pattens paused outside an open door, shading her eyes with her hand to watch them pass. Marley Gummer, Adam Later, James Dyer and Molly Wright - first of the 'mothers' -jolting, shoulder to shoulder in a high-sided wagon, piled high with boxes and poles and rolls of canvas.

The first fair was a market town in Gloucester. The show was an unqualified success, almost too smooth, so that Gummer fretted that they would be unable to repeat such a marvel. Three days later, in Somerset, they did so, and again, a week later, across the border in Wales. They rode east then, through the harvest to Oxford, then east again through a flat land, travelling from spire to spire, to Norwich, the great roll of its cathedral bells heard on the breeze while the city was still invisible.

'Mothers' came and went. The potion itself was rarely the same, the ingredients bought from local apothecaries who were well paid to keep their curiosity in bounds. Only the crowd was always the same, the crowd and the act, though on occasion Gummer would extemporise, convolute his tale of secret recipes, bearded magi, magical ingredients.

By his own lights Gummer treated the boy well; new clothes and shoes, sugar plums, a neckerchief as green and dark as the sea they had walked by at Cromer. He taught James secrets of the underworld: how to cut out a purse, how to cheat at cards, how to conceal a blade so that it drops neatly into the hand when needed. And stray, unprovoked advice on women, what they care for and how. In the country outside Lincoln, after a lunch of rabbit cooked on the spit, Gummer showed James a length of lamb's gut he called a London Overcoat. Protection, he said, from Signor Gonorrhoea, and he winked and wiggled the thing in the air, laughing. Only once did he feel it necessary to chastise the boy. It was nothing he had done, nothing he had said. It was a look, a quite shocking look, such as Gummer had seen once before, in the eyes of a

hanging judge at the end of a long quarter session at Dorchester. For this insubordination he strapped James tight to the wheel of the cart and left him there all night. Grace Boylan, now James's 'mother', swore that she could find a way to hurt him, her with her background, her talents, and for a minute or two Gummer let her try. Then he pushed her away, freed the boy and tenderly walked the life back into his legs. James,' he sighed, where would we be without each other, eh?' And as they walked back to the cart through the shadows of the trees he sang:

In summer when the shaws be sheen And leaves be large and long, Full merry it is in fair forest To hear the fowles song . . .'

Grace wakes him with the toe of her boot. It is time to go. James moves easily into wakefulness, shrugs off his dreams, inhales the pre-dawn air. He takes up his bundle, pulls on the coat he has been sleeping under and waits by the flap. Grace comes, shivering, rubbing at her face with the heels of her hands. She is at her worst at this time, fiall of speechless fury at the darkness, the chill air, the long walk ahead of them. Also at fate, the too-many years on her back, and this strange untouchable boy walking the road beside her. An old soul he has, or no soul at all. You'd think he might whistle or ask how far it will be or when they will eat. Not this one.

Black; black and gold. Night disperses. Light hangs in rags from the trees. Clouds the size of villages drift westwards. For

five minutes the tips of the corn-stalks catch the sun and scintillate. Already there are gleaners at work, women gathering the left-behind, the second crop. They gather a clutch, bind it and pass it to one of the children who run to the gate where a boy stands guard.

Grace and James breakfast in the corner of a meadow. When they have eaten, Grace lies back in the grass, belches, sinks the lids of her eyes. The breath whistles in her nose;