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

my friend. All things must end. You, me, Canning. Even this fine house will be dust one day. For me, I prefer to leave my bones in a civilised country. English cruelty is like EngHsh games. I do not understand. I am going home. Goodbye, James. Get away from this place.'

James says: 'You said once you would show me the moon boy.'

Molina looks around, frowns incomprehension, then laughs as he remembers. 'You want to see?'

The boy nods.

'Bueno, vamos . . .'

Through the great salons, past the gilded mirrors, the tapestries, the looted idols; past enormous paintings, past elegant furniture . . . Now up the stairs, corridors, sudden windows, the disappearing back of a servant, the distant shutting of a door.

In here,' says Molina. 'In this room.'

James looks back along the corridor, momentarily lost. He thought they had come to his own door. Now he realises that they have. Molina opens the door.

'Come, James. Do not be shy.'

He takes the boy's hand, not too gently, and pulls him into the room, over to the mirror.

*You have met before?'

Molina backs to the door. 'Adios, my friend. This is a dangerous place. Peligroso. Even for you.'

James stares. The moon boy stares back. Outside, a fine blue rain is falling. A servant with a bucket is tramping to the house by the lake.

A boy, twelve-months taller, steps out of the woods carrying in his arms the luminous globe of a puffball as though it were the head of an ogre he has slain. Behind him lollops a dog, a grey, three-legged mongrel. They are companions of sorts; the dog indiscriminately fond, the boy content to let it be with him, his awkward shadow. Now and then he throws a stick for it, amusing himself with its comical gallop, its enthusiasm. It serves him in other ways too. The previous spring it came to the house, left ear hanging on, hanging off, by a strand of purple flesh. With needle and thread and Mr Collins to hold it down, James sewed the ear back on, neatly if not quite straight. It was his first patient, and when the dog failed to pick up more wounds, James administered them himself, with knife or stick, such that the dog that runs past him now towards the topiary in the Italian gardens bears a dozen scars, some livid, some pale, but each more cunningly tailored than the last.

He follows it towards the garden, loses sight of it among the clipped green walls, hears its nervous bark build to a crescendo, then abruptly cease. He calls to it; it does not come. He enters

the garden, sees the gardener's barrow half flill of prunings, but no gardener and no dog, though the animal's three-pronged track is visible in the grass. The hedges glisten. A family of birds is flung suddenly upward, wheeling off towards the woods. A voice is singing, faintly, huskily, a servant perhaps, illicitly to his sweetheart. Then the voice speaks to him, addresses him by name, out of the heart of an evergreen globe.

'James! Over here.'

By burrowing near its southern pole, the globe may be entered. James crawls in. Gummer is sitting, pleased as punch beside the body of the dog.

For the moment James says nothing. He is looking at Gummer as though he has come across him floating in a jar of preserving fluid. And he is preserved, though there are grey hairs in his nose, and his teeth are another shade of brown and the skin looser at his neck. James feels as if he has dreamt this meeting in the green dripping gloom of the garden, even its details, such as the wide-bore short-barrelled pistol Gummer casually aims at his belly.

'When do we go?'

'Well spoken, boy! Soon as ever you like. May I trust you to fetch your accoutrements from the house? I think I may. And should you happen to pack some of Mr Canning's silver, why, 'tis only recompense, a paying back without the trouble of forcing the rogue to law; for you were my property, boy, and the bastard stole you. Some cheese while you're at it, and meat, and a bottle of good wine. I shall take up my station over the way such that I may see you come and go. Any surprises and you shall join poor Cerebus here.' He pats the carcass kindly. 'Comprendy vous? Damn, but I'm glad to see you, boy.'

James goes into the house, toys momentarily with the idea of alarming the servants to Gummer's presence, then swiftly packs the better part of his wardrobe. He goes to the library and helps

himself to those of his favourites he can quickly lay hands on. From one of the galleries he takes four silver snuff-boxes, and from the kitchen where the cook snores in her seat toasting her feet by the fire, he helps himself to a pair of cold roast pigeons and a half-bottle of the cook's gin.

It is not hard to leave. He rides behind Gummer on Gummer's horse, rides south, his bag slung between them. Wherever possible they keep off the roads and out of villages. Now and then some rustic with a mattock over his shoulder, or a girl out berrying, gives them an enquiring look but mostly they are alone, observed only by the cattle, by sheep and by those creatures drawn to the light of their fire at night.

On their third day they ascend a winding lane between hedgerows blue with fruit. Sea-birds balance overhead, then a hundred yards beyond the crest of the hill, the world ends and a salt wind throws off Gummer's hat and flicks it idly down in swoops to the sea.

They cross Southampton Water by the ferry and come in sight of Portsmouth in the last hour of daylight, the first of night. The water stays light longer than the land. Not even at Bristol has James seen such a congregation of ships, ships in the Pool, and a great mass of