The Butterfly in Amber Read online

  Gasping, shivering, water gushing from their clothes, the two children crawled out of the river still clinging to the collar of the huge old bear.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Luka said hoarsely, coughing up river water, ‘I will never call you stupid again!’

  Boatmen on the river lifted their oars and waved, laughing, while workmen on the busy wharves leant down and shouted at them in high good humour. Emilia and Luka ignored them, too busy trying not to cut their feet on the barnacles that encrusted the rocks.

  ‘What a good bear you are,’ Emilia said, letting Sweetheart haul her up the steep steps. ‘You saved us, you good girl.’

  Luka patted her muzzle. ‘Just as soon as I can, I’ll get you a whole bucket of ale!’

  Sweetheart’s eyes brightened at the word, and she surged up on to the wharf, looking around her for an inn.

  ‘I’ll have to get us some money first. We’re broke!’

  They did their best to wring the water out of their clothes and hair. Rollo shook himself furiously, sending a shower of filthy water over them.

  ‘Rollo!’ Emilia cried. ‘Couldn’t you go and shake somewhere else?’

  ‘Criminy, but I’m cold!’ Luka exclaimed, rubbing his arms. ‘We’d better try and find some shelter, Milly. Night’s coming on.’

  Emilia suddenly remembered her charm bracelet. Checking quickly, she was greatly relieved to find it was still safe upon her wrist.

  ‘Imagine if it’d fallen off into the river!’ she said.

  ‘Lucky!’ he said. ‘Zizi darling, stop shivering! I know you’re cold. We’ll try and find a fire somewhere where we can get warm and dry again.’

  ‘Where?’ Emilia asked.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Luka snapped. ‘I got us to London, didn’t I? And got us away from Pig-face. Let’s try and find somewhere to eat and sleep, and we’ll go looking for the Graylings tomorrow.’

  They hurried along the wharf, damp and shivering. Everyone they passed turned to stare. Someone barged past Emilia, knocking her arm, and disappeared into the crowd. Emilia groped at her wrist in sudden suspicion.

  The charm bracelet was gone.

  Emilia gasped. Frantically she dragged back her sleeve and shook her arm. Her wrist was bare.

  Her chest so tight she could not breathe, Emilia spun on her heel, searching the cobblestones behind her, looking all around her in case it had simply slipped off to the ground. There was no sign of it.

  ‘Luka!’ she cried. ‘My charm bracelet! It’s gone!’

  ‘What? But you just had it …’

  ‘That boy who bumped me …’ Emilia started forward a few steps, her eyes searching the gloom, but there were people hurrying everywhere, all of them looking the same with their pinched faces and dark coats. Emilia’s knees would not hold her. She sat down on the cobblestones and bent her face into her hands. Luka put a clumsy hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I told you to be careful!’ he scolded. ‘You should’ve hidden it away. These pickpockets can take a ring off your finger without you even noticing.’

  Emilia could not speak. The shock was too overwhelming. Her brain could not begin to grapple with the consequences. Baba had trusted … all their kin had trusted … the charms were irreplaceable … how could they rescue their family now?

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ Luka said. ‘It’s gone now. No point blubbering about it. Come on, Milly, get up.’

  Emilia only shook her head.

  ‘Come on, Milly.’ Luka tried to speak gently, but he was tired and damp and cold, and his voice was sharper than he meant.

  Drying her face on her sleeve, Emilia got to her feet and trailed disconsolately after her cousin. She still could not believe her charm bracelet had been stolen. It had been so quick, so deft. Every few steps she put her hand up to check, just in case the bracelet had miraculously returned. But her wrist remained bare.

  They turned into a main thoroughfare and trudged along it, wondering what to do.

  Luka asked a few people if they knew of any gypsy folk but they shook their heads and hurried away. Miserably, Emilia thought it was no wonder. She and Luka were bruised and filthy and barefoot, and their animals looked thin and unhappy.

  In the countryside, they would have knocked on a cottage door and offered to cut firewood, or tell a fortune, or fix a fence in return for food. There was no wood to cut in the city, no fences to fix, no kind farmer’s wife willing to exchange a cup of tea for some harmless gossip and a bright view of the future.

  Luka and Emilia began to beg for help.

  People pushed past them impatiently, muttering, ‘No, sorry.’ A beggar in a tattered Roundhead uniform yelled at them, and shook his walking stick at them. ‘Get out of here, this is my corner,’ he shouted. ‘Go beg somewhere else.’

  A few streets later, they passed an inn. The smell of hot food wafted out the window, where a woman stirred a big pot on the fire. The smell made their stomachs growl.

  ‘Do you think they’d give us some food if Sweetheart danced for them?’ Luka said.

  ‘It’s worth asking,’ Emilia said hopefully.

  Suddenly they were soaked with a deluge of filthy, stinking water. They gasped and cried out, then looked up. A red-faced chambermaid in a frilly white cap was shaking a chamber-pot at them from the window of the upper storey. ‘Get out of here, you filthy thieving gypsies!’ she cried. ‘We don’t want your kind round here.’

  ‘We weren’t doing any harm!’ Luka yelled back. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Get out of here,’ she bellowed back. ‘Go on!’

  Luka glowered at her, holding his arms out stiffly so the muck could drip down on to the cobblestones. The chambermaid snorted with laughter, and banged the casement shut. Luka looked round. Emilia knew he was looking for a rock to throw at the window. His eyes fell on the shelf just inside the kitchen window. There lay a tray of loaves cooling, and a small row of bottles. She waited for him to snatch something and run, feeling a weight of sadness like a stone in her chest. Her uncle Ruben had always said, ‘You can’t walk straight when the road is bent,’ but it seemed to her that the road of the Rom was always being twisted awry under their feet.

  Luka heaved a deep sigh and turned away, scraping away the worst of the muck and throwing it on the ground. ‘Come on,’ he said. Quietly she followed him.

  Silently they plodded on down the street, Zizi a shivering ball of damp fur on Luka’s shoulder, Sweetheart lumbering behind. Luka never normally walked in a straight and steady line. He always had to find the most dangerous and difficult route anywhere – over stiles and along walls, up a tree and down a vine, on the narrow edge of a gutter, or along a ridgepole. If he had to walk on flat ground, he would skip and run, turn cartwheels or walk on his hands. Luka was always in motion, always laughing and talking and whistling and singing at the top of his voice.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight he dragged his feet along like a donkey plodding round and round in a treadmill. Emilia followed, so worn out and weary she could have wept. Even Rollo slunk along, his tail between his legs and his ears drooping.

  It grew darker. The streets began to empty. The wind nipped at their ankles and insinuated a cold finger down their necks. Something rustled behind them, and they edged closer together. Emilia kept her hand on Rollo’s back, her fingers deep in his fur, occasionally sniffing and wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  Then she saw fire shadows, leaping against a towering stone wall at the very top of a steep alley. She caught Luka’s arm and jerked her head towards it.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘It looks like a campfire.’

  They stood, hesitating, staring at the orange reflections.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Luka said at last, starting forward.

  ‘But what if –’

  ‘At least we might be able to get warm and dry,’ Luka said, and led the way up the hill.

  The Cathedral

  The campfires were built in the grounds of a ruin of a ca
thedral, surrounded by booths and barrows and makeshift huts where people sold beer and books and baskets of bread, and brown eggs and muddy potatoes, and green bunches of watercress, and broken tiles, and many other things beside. Chickens and goats and pigs rooted around in the mud, and half-naked children ran, laughing and screeching, through the maze of tumbledown stone and rickety timber.

  There were too many fires to count, dotting the church grounds like scarlet will-o’-the-wisps. People crouched by the flames, roasting chestnuts or cobs of corn on sticks, or stirring an iron pot swung on a tripod.

  Looming high above the seething, fire-lit crowd was the broken hulk of the cathedral, like a massive toppled giant, arms spread wide, its chest weighed down with a ramshackle tower, crosshatched all round with tatters of wooden scaffolding. The roof had fallen in at many places, and all the windows were smashed. The gaping holes flickered with more fire shadows, showing that people were living and working inside the building as well as all around its massive circumference.

  Luka and Emilia sidled near the closest fire, tended by a woman as thin as a stick, in a long dress with a hem all bedraggled with mud, and a big grey apron that had a wooden spoon sticking out of its pocket. She was chasing after a snotty-nosed baby with a big cleaver in her hand, but to the children’s relief, only caught him by the back of his grimy petticoats and lifted him into a pen she had made out of a broken barrel, before going back to chopping up onions.

  She snorted with grim laughter when she caught their expression. ‘Did you think I was having baby stew for dinner tonight, did you?’ she jeered in a high, shrill voice. ‘No, it’s cabbage soup again, worst luck.’

  Her bright, shrewd glance flickered over them, the boy and his monkey, the girl in her ragged, grimy skirts, the shaggy dog and the great bulk of the bear.

  ‘Travelling performers, are you? Hard way to earn a penny these days. Guess that explains why you’re both so thin.’

  ‘We’re very hungry,’ Emilia said hopefully.

  ‘You and me both, dearie,’ she answered shortly and turned back to her chopping.

  ‘We’re cold too,’ Emilia said, hugging her arms about her. ‘Can we just warm ourselves by your fire for a bit?’

  ‘Suppose so,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t think you can go pinching anything off me, though. I haven’t got nothing to pinch.’

  ‘We wouldn’t steal from you,’ Emilia said indignantly. ‘We’ve just been robbed ourselves, and it’s a real mean thing to do to someone.’

  ‘Robbed, were you? Not surprising, a couple of country bumpkins like you.’

  Emilia drew close to the fire. ‘We’re all wet too. We fell in the river.’

  ‘Lucky it’s August,’ the woman said, deftly sweeping the onion into a big pot. ‘Else you’d have caught your death. Go on. Draw up a pew.’ She nodded her head to a bit of broken seating that, when Luka dragged it closer to the light of the fire, showed itself to be indeed a piece of broken pew from the church. She drew back hastily as the two children came near, and said, ‘Just don’t come too close! Whoo-ee, you smell!’

  ‘Someone dumped a chamber-pot on us,’ Luka said.

  She gave a snort of amusement. ‘Country bumpkins.’

  Emilia sat down wearily and stretched her hands to the blaze. Her bare feet were bruised from the hard stones of the city streets. She glanced down at her legs. They looked as if she was wearing grey stockings that reached up to her knees.

  ‘How come the church is all wrecked?’ Luka asked, swinging Zizi down from his shoulder. He showed her to the baby who gabbled away, reaching for the little monkey with two very small, very dirty hands.

  ‘The Roundheads nicked the funds, to pay their troops.’ The woman threw a lump of lard into the pot and swung the pot over the fire. ‘It was hit with lightning, you know, close on a hundred years ago. The king was going to pay for it out of his own pocket, but then the war came.’

  She threw a handful of roughly sliced cabbage into the pot, and then poured in a jug of rather brackish-looking water. ‘More than a thousand years it’s been here, they say, and look at it! Those Roundheads. No respect! You know they baptised a foal in the font? And chopped up the pews for firewood. It’s a crying shame, I say. Though at least it gives us somewhere to set up shop.’

  Emilia let the woman’s voice wash over her. Although she was so tired her bones seemed to ache inside her skin, needle-sharp anxiety twisted inside her. I’ve lost the chain of charms, I’ve lost the chain of charms. Tears stung her eyes, and she blotted them away with her sleeve.

  Rollo thumped his tail and nudged her with his nose, and Emilia patted his rough head. He laid it against her knee.

  Luka gazed longingly at the pot, which was beginning to smell, if not exactly appetising, at least a little like food. Zizi gazed too, making a little mewling noise like a hungry baby.

  The thin woman scowled and hunched her shoulders. ‘Warm enough yet?’ she said.

  ‘We need to earn some money,’ Luka said. ‘Do you think the people round here would pay us if our bear danced for them?’

  The woman looked them over. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘She’s very funny,’ Emilia said. ‘Especially when she dances with the monkey.’

  ‘We could all do with something to laugh about,’ the thin woman said. ‘Heaven knows life has given us enough to weep over.’

  Luka looked about him, making sure there were no soldiers about. ‘I wish I had my fiddle,’ he said unhappily. His eye fell on the barrel that the woman had been cutting onions on. He rapped it with his knuckles. It boomed in a deep, satisfying way. ‘Can I borrow your barrel? And some wooden spoons?’

  She frowned. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  ‘The pleasure of knowing you’re helping two poor little orphans,’ Emilia said.

  The woman guffawed with laughter.

  ‘I’ll give you some of whatever we earn,’ Luka said. ‘But only if you give us some stew first, we’re starving.’

  ‘And what if all you get is stones and curses?’ she demanded.

  ‘Then you’ll get a fair cut of those,’ he answered at once, and she laughed again.

  ‘Fair enough, I suppose.’ The woman, whose name was Annie, gave them each a bowlful of the thin, tasteless stew, and they ate ravenously, then put the half-empty bowls down for the animals to share. It was not nearly enough, but it was better than nothing, and at least it was hot.

  Then Luka dragged out a few of the barrels into the light, and sat, experimenting with Annie’s wooden spoons, enjoying making music again, no matter how primitive. Annie lifted the baby onto her knee, and sat and listened, nodding her head and tapping her toe. A few people nearby stopped and listened.

  Sweetheart’s eyes brightened. She knew that music meant dancing, and dancing meant praise and tidbits, and plenty of ale. She rose ponderously on her hind legs and began to sway to the music. Then Zizi swung down and scampered over to meet her, holding up one tiny paw. Sweetheart bent down and took it, and the bear and the monkey danced clumsily together.

  Round and round they went, one so great and heavy, the other so small and nimble; Zizi spinning and pirouetting and turning deft cartwheels, and Sweetheart trying to copy her. The watchers roared with laughter and applauded vigorously. Soon a large crowd had gathered, and coins were clinking into Luka’s hat.

  Emilia stared into the fire, hearing the drumming as if from a great distance. She felt very light, almost as if she was not her own self, but merely the thin, crooked shadow she cast on the ground. Flames roared in her ears, filled her eyes.

  She saw the cathedral burning, flames as tall as the sky devouring the vast edifice of stone as if it were a pile of dry leaves. She saw the whole city burning, churches and palaces and shops and the narrow, huddled hovels of the poor, all consumed in a great conflagration that destroyed everything in its path. The stench of ash and brimstone was in her nostrils; she heard the sharp crackle and snap of the flames, and the shrill cries and screams of the dying.
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  Emilia shut her eyes. The boom-boom-boom of the drums filled her ears. She wanted to wrench her mind away from this dreadful vision of disaster, she wanted to bury her head in her arms and thrust her fingers in her ears.

  Instead she thought of her family. Show me . . . she begged.

  She saw Beatrice, her head locked in a metal cage. She saw her grandmother hunched over, the whites of her eyes quivering in the slit of her halfshut eyelids. She saw Noah coughing, coughing, coughing, a bloody rag held to his lips. She saw her uncles, holding him up so he could breathe. She saw her aunt, wan and filthy, trying to drive off a pack of rats so her starving daughters could eat. Then she saw the door of the cell open, and the shadow of the pastor fall upon the floor like an accusing finger. She saw Beatrice cringe back against the wall. As the scold’s bridle hit the stone, it clanged like a funeral bell. The shadow advanced on Beatrice, step by slow step, blotting out her legs, her body, her shoulders, her head within its dreadful cage. Again Emilia heard a clang, as if of a bell . . .

  ‘Wake up, Milly!’ Luka cried. ‘Look, we got quite a few coins, and I’ve bought us some bread and cheese, and a bottle of elderflower wine. Annie says we can doss down here for the night, and maybe earn some more in the morning …’

  Emilia blinked and looked about her. The crowd had drifted away, and Sweetheart had her muzzle thrust in a large jug of ale, slurping it down with pleasure. Zizi was perched on Luka’s shoulder, cracking a chestnut with her sharp teeth, and Rollo was asleep at her feet. The only light came from the fire which had fallen into coals.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Luka asked.

  ‘We’ve got to go on,’ Emilia said. ‘We haven’t got time to be sleeping. We’ve got to find the last charm.’

  ‘But it’s late. It’s black as the devil’s waistcoat out there.’

  ‘I’m just afraid that if we stop and sleep, we’ll lose our chance,’ Emilia said. ‘We really only have tomorrow to find the butterfly in amber, else we’ll never get back to Kingston in time. We still have no idea where to find the Graylings.’