The cook’s wife, Mrs Groom, licking her lips, showed for an instant a long shining thing that must’ve been a knife.

‘I mean to skin you,’ she said. ‘I’ll bake you, boil you, poach you, pluck you! Gut you!’

‘Odith!’ snapped Piggott. ‘Not yet!’

‘My ears!’

I was on the floor, ducked down between the other leather ones who were now twisting and turning with their anchors and helmets all in a struggle to pull theirs off first. I’m not taking mine off, I thought, not if I can help it, even with the glass broken. Protection of some sort, that’s what it is. I saw my anchor beside me, the kitchen boy, staring at me, frowning. I shook my head, please, please don’t tell. He didn’t. He didn’t call out.

‘Mrs Groom!’ he whispered. ‘She will cook you! If she’s a mind to do it, she’ll do it!’

‘Help me.’

‘She’s a fishwife, she is. She’d gut her own baby.’

‘Help me.’

He didn’t help, but he didn’t tell. He might have perhaps, I can’t say, because he didn’t really have a chance, because then one of those heavy helmets put down on the ground didn’t stay on the ground, it started, all on its own, to skid along the floor, faster and faster, to rush down the corridor into something in one of the kitchen halls, onto a wall of the kitchen hall. All eyes followed it, all eyes saw it connect to something that was moving on the back wall. No, it wasn’t just something, it was the whole wall that was moving. Was it the storm? Could it be the storm breaking through? No, no, that wasn’t it because now I saw the little man with the whistle shriek because his whistle was trying to pull away from him and if he hadn’t had it on a string around his neck it would have been lost by now. Then another freed helmet rushed away and then a whole big heap Iremonger fell down and started slipping towards that back kitchen wall. That did it. That did it for all of them because then Idwid screamed, ‘A Gathering, a Gathering, quieter than the storm!’

And then they were all screaming, ‘A Gathering! A Gathering!’

And then I ran.

19

A MARBLE MANTELPIECE

Clod Iremonger’s narrative continued

Grey Flannel

I sat in the Infirmary with James Henry in my lap, apologising to him, asking him who he was, promising to find his family, tapping him a little and then begging its, his I must say, begging his pardon.