Cry of a Seagull Read online

  Monica Dickens

  Cry of a Seagull

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Something was going to happen. Rose felt restless, charged with an electric feeling of excitement.

  Needing to be out of doors, she ran out of the Wood Briar Hotel, crossed the road and climbed the soft sand of the dunes until she could see the sea.The wind was whipping white foam off the top of the waves as they surged towards the beach.What was there for her in the wind? Was Favour somewhere out there, the legendary grey horse of history, who came back to earth again and again as a power for good?

  When she became thirteen, Rose Wood had been chosen as one of the special messengers in his crusade against evil and cruelty. Although she led an ordinary life like anyone else, at any moment the mysterious horse might call her, challenging her to the next adventure.

  With her short straight hair blown back, she listened and stared so hard that her eyeballs hurt. Nothing. The wind and the sea and the hurrying clouds had no message for her yet. Soon, but not yet. The electric excitement died. She was ordinary Rose again.

  As she came through a gap in the dunes on to the road, she saw the ponderous bulk of Mr Vingo plodding along at the edge of the sand.

  Rose ran to meet him. ‘I’m glad you’re back.’ Mr Vingo lived at the Wood Briar Hotel, but when he returned after one of his mysterious disappearances, Rose knew enough not to ask, ‘Where have you been?’

  She took his bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  ‘What’s noo?’ Mr Vingo had picked that up from Rose’s American friend Abigail.

  ‘Nothing exactly. But something’s going to happen soon. I know it.’ She looked up at his broad, creased face to see if he knew anything.

  ‘Good.’ When he smiled, the features of his loose-skinned face rearranged themselves into a different landscape. ‘Are you ready, Rose of all Roses?’

  ‘I hope so.’ The excitement began to build in her again, a thrilling premonition that started at fingers and toes and surged into the pit of her stomach.

  Opposite the hotel, they waited for a few cars to pass them. A motorcycle was coming, but Mr Vingo stepped into the road without looking, and instead of avoiding him, the faceless rider in white helmet and studded black leather jacket swerved towards him and might have hit him if Rose hadn’t pulled him roughly back.

  Mr Vingo sat heavily down in the sand. Rose shrieked after the motorcycle. The man … boy … woman – you couldn’t tell – did not look around, but on the back of its white helmet a huge glaring yellow eye menaced her, and was gone in a cloud of sand blown off the dunes.

  She pulled Mr Vingo up and they crossed the road and went round to the side door that led up to his turret room over the corner verandah.

  ‘Look out!’

  Something large and bulky fell out of the sky, missing their heads by inches. A vinyl suitcase. Rose looked up to see where it had come from and saw her father on the roof, hurling a smaller suitcase savagely down on to the gravel path. He was doing his job as a quality tester of new products, to see if ‘Lifetime Luggage’ was really indestructible.

  ‘Obviously –’ Mr Vingo was out of breath – ‘a day for almost getting killed.’ He raised his hat to where Philip Wood stood on a flat part of the roof between two gables, a duffel bag in his arms, his thinning hair wild in the wind.

  ‘Good day to you, sir!’ Mr Vingo called up politely.

  ‘Good day to you!’ Rose’s father chucked down the duffel bag.

  Inside the hotel, the twin Miss Mumfords grabbed Rose in the hall.

  ‘Call the police!’ Miss Angela’s head shook more than ever. ‘There’s a madman on the roof.’

  ‘My sister saw him.’ Miss Audrey held on to Rose’s arm in a tight pinch. ‘Trying to kill us all.’

  ‘It’s only my father.’ Rose shook her arm free. She wanted to go through to the kitchen, but they blocked her way, side by side like Tweedledum and Tweedledee with short legs and square overcoats and green wollen berets at the same severe angle.

  ‘Not fit to run a hotel.’ Miss Audrey’s head shook too.

  ‘He doesn’t run it. My mother does.’

  ‘After a fashion,’ Miss Audrey said rudely. ‘We’re packing our bags and leaving.’

  ‘Let me know when you want me to carry them down.’ Rose dodged past them.

  The elderly Miss Mumfords were always threatening to leave, but they never did. They stayed all winter, complaining, left in May and were back at the end of September as faithfully as the sea fog, and as boring.

  Professor Henry Watson, retired from the University, had been here all winter too. He had come for a week’s rest after pneumonia and stayed on because he liked the friendliness of this small hotel, and Rose’s mother Mollie played backgammon with him and understood his special diet. A retired couple had been staying for the last three weeks while their house was being decorated. Couples and single people and travelling foreigners came for a few days, and various salesmen stayed for a night or two while they were doing business in the nearby town of Newcome. Rose’s friend Ben Kelly and his family might come for Easter, but there had been no word. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  When she fed her hamster in his cage in her room, she told him, ‘Ben’s coming,’ as a good luck prophecy, and before she went to bed she washed her hair and cut her straggly fringe.

  Next day she woke in the same restless mood, and went to her window to look towards the moor. The back lawn was hazed with wet cobwebs. The wood was in a mist. Beyond it, somewhere … She made her mind and eyes go blank to try to project herself into that other fantastic half of the double life she led now: from an ordinary thirteen-year-old who wasn’t special at doing anything, to the trusted messenger of Favour, the Great Grey Horse.

  Who was it on the motorcycle, and why had they nearly killed Mr Vingo? What was the message of the glaring yellow eye? Was this the start of the next adventure?

  No sign yet, so after she had served breakfast and helped Mrs Ardis, the chambermaid, to make beds, Rose went on her bike to the Moorside stables where she rode every week, for a jumping class with her friend Abigail.

  Abigail rode her own smart dun pony Crackers over from the farm where her family lived when her father was working in England. Rose rode the clumsy old cream horse Moonlight, whom she dearly loved, because she loved all horses for being horses, not because of what they looked like or what they could do. Everyone else at Moorside stables thought Moonlight a bit of a joke, and the owner, Joyce, called him Mule and reviled him.

  ‘You can have a go on Marigold if you like,’ she said when Rose came into the tackroom to get Moonlight’s saddle and bridle.

  ‘That’s O.K.’ Rose was afraid of the bright bay Marigold, who jumped like a cat, straight up and down and twice as high as necessary. At least old Moon was safe, even though he muddled over the jumps and knocked down bars, so that Rose had to get off into the mud to put them back.

  ‘Put it higher!’ Joyce called from the middle of the field. ‘He’ll never pick up those plates of feet till he has to make an effort.’

  Rose pretended she had raised the bar, but Joyce had a zoom lens eye. She came across the field and raised the top bar to two foot nine, and with flourishes of her long whip and cries of ‘Har – get up there!’ chased Rose and Moonlight over it, both equally unwilling.

  ‘All rig
ht!’

  Rose and Moonlight were clear on the other side, both surprised.

  ‘On Sunday, you can have a bash at the in-and-out,’ was Joyce’s promise, interpreted by Rose as a threat.

  ‘Don’t reckon you’ll be here on Sunday,’ Abigail said as they rode together out of the field.

  ‘Why not?’ Rose never let on, even to Abigail, that she was scared.

  ‘I know you when Ben’s around,’ Abigail said casually, looking straight ahead, her thick chestnut pigtail pulling her neat little head back, as she sat gracefully still while Crackers bounced and fussed to be off home.

  ‘Ben – the Kellys are coming? How do you know?’ Why should Abigail know before Rose? Jealousy could make you almost hate someone you loved.

  ‘Mr Kelly called my father, to see if he knew whether the boatyard was open. He and Ben want to get their boat in the water.’

  ‘Oh well.’ Rose made her voice casual too. ‘I knew that. Just didn’t know when.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  Moonlight turned greedily towards the stable, and Abigail turned Crackers away to go home. ‘See ya!’

  Rose rode her bike home fast to make certain there was a room ready for Ben and his father. Turning off the road and along the edge of the wood, she bumped over a thick root and shouted, ‘Har – get up there!’ to the bicycle. She would tell Ben she and Moonlight had jumped three feet.

  On her left, the slope of rough grass and bushes rose towards the beginning of the moor. As always, Rose stopped and raised her head to listen.

  Yes! There it was. Her heart beat faster to the unmistakable beat of hoofs, and she leaned the bike into a bush and scrambled up the slope and on to the top of the stone wall of the sheep pasture. The breeze off the moor brought her the heady scents of thyme and gorse, and with them a hint of the eerie thrilling music that she knew as Favour’s tune. It curled upwards and then fell to the rhythmic low vibrations that were the snorts of a galloping horse, blowing off steam with every reach of his powerful forelegs. Away to the right among the tossing trees whose young leaves were silver underneath, Rose saw the flaunting end of a thick grey tail as the hoofbeats faded and were gone.

  Favour! Since the beginning of time, this mystical horse had been coming and going on the earth to rescue the victims of evil and injustice, and wipe out the haunting legacies of past wrongs done through human violence and stupidity. Being still only a horse, although a spirit free in eternity, he used living people as messengers to carry out his work. People like Rose, at this special age when anything is possible. With the horse, she could transcend time and space to travel to other scenes in the past, present and future that were as real as her everyday life.

  ‘I saw him.’ She ran up the corkscrew turret stair to tell Mr Vingo, who was playing the little upright marmalade piano that he kept in his room. He stopped and raised his pudgy hands and brought them down with a crashing triumphal chord that shook the floor.

  ‘I knew it.’ He swivelled round on the stool that was too small for his broad bottom. ‘That’s why I came home’ Mr Vingo was the only person who knew that Rose was one of Favour’s messengers. Long ago, when he was thirteen, Mr Vingo had been a messenger, too.

  ‘You’re going to help me?’

  ‘I’ll back you up. But it’s your adventure, Rose. You must face it on your own.’

  ‘Do you think the motorbike was part of it? That monster was out to kill.’

  ‘Who knows? You probably saved my life, O Rose whose noble heart is lit by brilliance of the purest dew.’ He loved to weave poetry around her name. ‘Now there are others to be saved.’

  Rose went along the upper corridor to change out of her riding clothes. There was some activity in the hall below, and a voice called up to her, that well-rememberd, strong and eager voice. Damn. She had planned to be in her new jeans and sloppy sweater when Ben arrived, but he bounded up the stairs and caught her in her muddy jodhpurs and shrunken green sweatshirt with ‘Moorland Riding Stables’ on it, and some slobbers from Moonlight.

  ‘Still horse mad?’ Against his bright outdoor skin and light brown hair, his eyes were very blue. He was two years older, and she never knew if he was laughing at her about horses.

  ‘I jumped three feet today,’ she said, but was obliterated by an affable bellow from Ben’s father in the hall. She had to go down and let him hug her and tell her she had grown six inches which she hadn’t, but he was an unimaginative, well-meaning man who didn’t know when to stop saying the things that grown-ups said to children.

  ‘How was your winter?’ he asked Mollie.

  ‘Not bad. It’s summer now that you and Ben have come. We’re hoping for a good season.’

  Rose’s mother had fair, softly curling hair and a bright smiling face. When she was being sunny, Rose’s father was often gloomy. ‘Hoping,’ Philip said dourly, ‘isn’t the same as expecting.’

  ‘I am expecting it.’ Mollie was always optimistic, even when faced with the myriad crises of running your own hotel.

  ‘The experts aren’t,’ Philip told Mr Kelly. ‘They’re forecasting a rotten tourist season. All the hotels are gloomy.’

  ‘Except this one,’ Ben said. ‘Come on, Rosie. Let’s see if your table tennis has improved with age.’

  Chapter Two

  Very early next morning, before she helped with the teas and breakfasts, Rose went running on the beach with Ben. He was a famous runner at his school, in training now for the spring marathon. Rose’s job was to pace him, keeping level and steady, until he put on a spurt and left her behind.

  Soundlessly on the clean hard sand where the tide had gone out, their feet made herringbone patterns all down Sandy Neck beach. They were out of sight of the hotel and almost to the stone breakwater before the harbour at Newcome Hollow, when Ben pulled ahead, and at the same time Rose saw the grey horse rise out of the ocean like a great thrashing sea animal. He stood with the water round his knees, and tossed his head: Come with me!

  You never asked, ‘Where to?’ When the horse appeared, you went with him, wherever he chose to take you. Rose ran out along the breakwater and climbed easily on to his wet back, burying her hands and face in his salty mane as he rose like a gull and headed out to sea. Looking back, she could see the toy-sized village and the boats in the harbour, and a tiny speck that was Ben, moving like a fly across a windowpane.

  ‘Roof! Roofie!’ A small child’s voice cut piercingly through the roaring rush of the horse’s galloping flight, and Rose emerged from clouds on to a beach in bright sunlight. She was sitting on sand with her legs stuck out, wearing wide blue shorts that reached to the knee. The legs below them were tanned, and rather thick and hairy.

  ‘Roofie.’ A demanding little girl in a romper suit tugged at her shirt. ‘Georgie wants a choc ice … wants you to … wants go home … wants go wee wee’ – a garbled babble of wants to which nobody paid any attention; so Ruth, whose mind and body Rose inhabited now, didn’t see why she should either, although she was supposed to be the mother’s helper.

  It was a large, happy-go-lucky family, having a picnic on the beach. The mother was a relaxed, smiling lady, reclining on a deck chair with a book, while several children of all ages raided the picnic basket and spilled lemonade and scrapped over melting chocolate biscuits. From time to time she flapped a hand at them and murmured, ‘Steady on, duckies.’

  Ruth was hungry for lunch. Good. Rose was always glad when people whose bodies she was visiting put food into their stomachs. It was a peculiar situation. She was Ruth, feeling what she felt, thinking her thoughts, and yet she was still Rose, who could observe as an outsider.

  Ruth opened another hamper and took out untidy packets of sandwiches. The children fell on them with rude cries.

  ‘Banana and honey – ugh, I’ll puke,’ said Brian, the oldest. Simon said, ‘Where’s the sausages?’

  ‘Peanut butter – that’s for babies.’ Marion made a terrible face. ‘Here, Georgie baby, this is your lucky day.’
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  Georgie took the messy bread with sandy fingers and then wouldn’t eat it because it had sand in it. She made a grab at Simon’s ham and cheese, and he slapped her, and she fell over with her face in the sand and came up bawling. Ruth took her down to the sea to wash her off. The water was too cold for swimming, but it was nice to paddle in.

  ‘Isn’t this fun, Georgie?’ But Georgie was having what her mother cheerfully called ‘a bad day’.

  ‘Not want go in water, Roof. Want go wee-wee.’

  ‘Do it in the sea. Your rompers are wet already.’

  Georgie lost her balance, staggered outward instead of inshore, fell, and was submerged for a moment or two before slow, casual Ruth finally moved to pull her out.

  Rose had been having fits trying to make her move more quickly, but although she shared Ruth’s body and mind, she couldn’t influence her.

  ‘Bit cold for bathing.’ Ruth laughed and brought back the soaked child, who was spluttering and coughing too much to cry. Rose braced herself for a telling-off from an anguished mother, but Mrs Thomas merely took the baby on her lap, wrapped her in a towel and told her, ‘The sooner you learn to swim the better.’

  The three older children wandered off. Mrs Thomas didn’t tell Ruth to go and keep an eye on them, so she sat with her arms hugging her hairy legs and looked around contentedly, which gave Rose the chance to try to see where she was, as a clue to what she might be doing here. The horse, being only a horse, could not solve the problem for her of who needed rescuing from what. It was her task as a messenger to fit together the clues she learned on each of these journeys.

  This beach was less crowded than any popular beach of Rose’s experience, and the people were dressed in clothes that suggested about twenty-five years ago. Baggy shorts like Ruth’s, narrow sunglasses, skirted floral swimsuits and few bikinis, and Mrs Thomas’s dress and hairstyle looked like an old picture of Mollie, girlish on her honeymoon with Rose’s father.

  The beach looked familiar though. Rose recognized the upper part of some of the houses beyond the sea wall, but the pier looked small and strange. Of course, this was Newcome beach, but still with the old dilapidated pier that had been pulled down and rebuilt before Rose was born. The snack bar shed was a different colour, but the same pungent smell of scorched hamburgers and hot dogs drifted from it.