A Red Herring Without Mustard

I couldn’t contain myself.

“Listen to this,” I said, bursting into my bedroom. Porcelain was sitting exactly as I had left her, staring at me as if I were a madwoman.

I read aloud to her the footnote on infant baptism, the words fairly tumbling from my mouth.

“So what?” she said, unimpressed.

“Mrs. Bull,” I blurted out. “She lied! Her baby drowned! It had nothing to do with Fenella!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Porcelain said.

Of course she didn’t! I hadn’t told her about the encounter with the enraged Mrs. Bull in the Gully. I could still hear those frightening, hateful words in my mind:

“Gypsy! Gypsy! Clear off!” she had screamed at Fenella. “ ’Twas you as stole my baby. Tom, get out here! That Gypsy’s at the gate!”

Thinking to spare Porcelain’s feelings, I skated quickly over the story of the Bull baby’s disappearance, and of the furious outburst its mother had directed at Fenella in the Gully.

Mrs. Mullet’s friend had told her the Hobblers dipped their babies by the heel, like Achilles in the River Styx. She didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s what she meant.

“So you see,” I finished triumphantly, “Fenella had nothing to do with it.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Porcelain scoffed. “She’s a harmless old woman, not a kidnapper. Don’t tell me you believe those old wives’ tales about Gypsies stealing babies?”

“Of course I don’t,” I said, but I was not being truthful. In my heart of hearts I had, until that very minute, believed what every child in England had been made to believe.

Porcelain was becoming huffy again, and I didn’t want to risk another outburst, either from her, or worse, from me.

“She’s that redhead, then?” she said suddenly, bringing the topic back to Mrs. Bull. “The one that lives in the lane?”

“That’s her!” I said. “How did you know?”

“I saw someone like that … hanging about,” Porcelain said evasively.

“Where?” I demanded.

“About,” she said, locking eyes with me, just daring me to stare her down.

The truth hit me like a slap in the face.

“Your dream!” I said. “It was her! In your dream you saw her standing over you in the caravan, didn’t you?”

It made perfect sense. If Fenella really could see into the past and the future, and her daughter, Lunita, could impress the Air Ministry with her powers, there was no reason Porcelain couldn’t summon up such an unpleasant woman in her sleep.

“It was like no dream I’ve ever had before,” Porcelain said. “Oh, but God … I wish I’d never had it!”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t seem like a dream. I’d fallen asleep on Fenella’s bed—didn’t even bother taking off my clothes. It must have been a noise that roused me—somewhere close—inside the caravan.”

“You dreamed you’d fallen asleep?”

Porcelain nodded. “That was what was so horrible about it. I didn’t move a muscle. Just kept taking deep quiet breaths, as if I was asleep, which I was, of course. Oh, damn! It’s so hard to explain.”

“Go on,” I said. “I know what you mean. You were in my bed, dreaming you were in Fenella’s bed.”

She gave me a look of gratitude. “There wasn’t a sound. I listened for a long time, until I thought they were gone, and then I opened my eyes—no more than a sliver, and …”

“And?”

“There was a face! A big face—right there—just inches away! Almost touching mine!”

“Good lord!”

“So close I couldn’t really focus,” Porcelain went on. “I managed to make a little moan, as if I was dreaming—let my mouth fall open a bit …”

I have to admit I was filled with admiration. I hoped that, even in a dream, I should have the presence of mind to do the same thing myself.

“The lamp was burning low,” she went on. “It shone through the hair. I could only see the hair.”

“Which was red,” I said.

“Which was red. Long and curly. Wild, it was. And then I opened my eyes—”

“Yes, yes! Go on!”

“And it should have been your face I was looking at, shouldn’t it? But it wasn’t! It was that face of the man with the red hair. That’s why I flew at you and nearly choked you to death!”

“Hold on!” I said. “The man with the red hair?”

“He was beastly … all covered with soot. He looked like someone who slept in a haystack.”

I shook my head. In a weird way it made sense, I suppose, that in a dream, Porcelain should transform Mrs. Bull, whom she had perhaps glimpsed in the Gully, into a redheaded wild man. Daffy had not long before been reading a book by Professor Jung, and had announced to us suddenly that dreams were symbols that lurked in the subconscious mind.

Ordinarily, I should have written off the contents of a dream as rubbish, but my recent life seemed so flooded with inexplicable instances to the contrary.

In the first place, there had been Fenella’s vision—in her crystal ball—of Harriet wanting me to help her come home from the cold, and even though Fenella had claimed that Feely and Daffy put her up to it, the whole thing had left me shaken; wondering, in fact, if her confession was not itself a lie.