A Red Herring Without Mustard

“In spite of the broken star on my Mount of Luna?” I couldn’t resist asking.

Her creaking laugh caught me by surprise.

“Mumbo jumbo. Fortune-teller’s rubbish. You weren’t taken in by it, were you?”

Her laughter set off another round of coughing, and I had to wait until she regained her breath.

“But … the woman on the mountain … the woman who wants to come home from the cold …”

“Look,” the Gypsy woman said wearily—as if she were unaccustomed to speaking—“your sisters put me up to it. They tipped me off about you and Harriet. Slipped me a couple of bob to scare the daylights out of you. No more to it than that.”

I felt my blood freeze. It was as though the faucet that feeds my brain had suddenly switched from hot to cold. I stared at her.

“Sorry if I hurt you,” she went on. “I never meant to …”

“It makes no difference,” I said with a mechanical shrug. But it did. My mind was reeling. “I’m sure I shall find a way of repaying them.”

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “Revenge is my specialty.”

Was she pulling my leg? Hadn’t the woman just admitted that she was a fraud? I looked deeply into her black eyes, searching for a sign.

“Don’t stare at me like that. It makes my blood itch. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? And I meant it.”

“Did you?” I asked rather haughtily.

“Spare us the pout. There’s enough lip in the world without you adding to it.”

She was right. In spite of my turning them down, the corners of my mouth flickered, then began to rise. I laughed and the Gypsy laughed with me.

“You put me in mind of that creature that was in the tent just before you. Regular thundercloud. Told her there was something buried in her past; told her it wanted digging out—wanted setting right. She went white as the garden gate.”

“Why, what did you see?” I asked.

“Money!” she said with a laughing snort. “Same as I always see. Couple of quid if I played my cards right.”

“And did you?”

“Pfah! A bloomin’ shilling she left me—not a penny more. Like I said, she went all goosey when I told her that. Scampered out of my pitch as if she’d sat on a thistle.”

We rode along in silence for a while, and I realized that we had almost reached the Palings.

To me, the Palings was like some lost and forgotten corner of Paradise. At the southeast angle of the Buckshaw estate, beneath a spreading tent of green and leafy branches, the river, as though twirling in its skirts, swept round to the west in a gentle bend, creating a quiet glade that was almost an island. Here, the east bank was somewhat higher than the west; the west bank more marshy than the east. If you knew precisely where to look among the trees, you could still spot the pretty arches of the little stone bridge, which dated from the time of the original Buckshaw, an Elizabethan manor house that had been put to the torch in the 1600s by irate villagers who made the wrong assumptions about our family’s religious allegiances.

I turned to the Gypsy, eager to share my love of the place, but she seemed to have fallen asleep. I watched her eyelids carefully to see if she was shamming, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker. Slumped against the frame of the caravan, she gave off the occasional wheeze, so that I knew she was still breathing.

In rather an odd way I found that I resented her easy slumber. I was simply itching to reel off for her, like a tour guide, some of the more fascinating bits of Buckshaw’s history. But for now, I should have to keep them to myself.

The Palings, as we called it, had been one of the haunts, in his latter days, of Nicodemus Flitch, a former tailor who, in the seventeenth century, had founded the Hobblers, a religious sect named for the peculiar shackled gait they adopted as they paced out their prayers. The Hobblers’ beliefs seemed to be based largely on such novel ideas as that heaven was handily located six miles above the earth’s surface, and that Nicodemus Flitch had been appointed personally by God as His mouthpiece and, as such, was licensed to curse souls to eternity, whenever he felt like it.

Daffy had told me that once, when Flitch was preaching at the Palings, he had called down God’s wrath upon the head of a heckler, who fell dead on the spot—and that if I didn’t fork over the tin of licorice allsorts that Aunt Felicity had sent me for my birthday, she would bring the same curse crashing down upon my head.

“And don’t think I can’t,” she had added ominously, tapping a forefinger on the book that she’d been reading. “The instructions are right here on this page.”

The heckler’s death was a coincidence, I had told her, and most likely due to a stroke or a heart attack. He would likely have died anyway, even if he’d decided to stay home in bed on that particular day.

“Don’t bet on it,” Daffy had grumbled.