Oy Yew (The Waifs of Duldred Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Also by Ana Salote

  Tree Talk (Speaking Tree 2007)

  ***

  Oy Yew is the first part of the

  WAIFS OF DULDRED

  trilogy

  ***

  Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mother’s Milk Books

  Copyright © Ana Salote 2013

  The right of Ana Salote to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders as listed on this page.

  Cover image & internal illustration copyright © Emma Howitt 2015

  Cover design copyright © Emma Howitt 2015

  Published in 2015 by Mother’s Milk Books

  www.mothersmilkbooks.com

  For Joseph and Grace

  Illustration copyright © Emma Howitt 2015

  Table of Contents

  By the same author

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Illustration

  1 Caught

  2 The Road to Duldred

  3 Steering

  4 True Colours

  5 Milk and Honey

  6 The Measuring

  7 Locks ’n’ Clocks

  8 The Bone Room

  9 Auction

  10 Rook’s Feast

  11 Unique

  12 All Thumbs

  13 A Spanner in the Works

  14 Master wants a Wife

  15 Forfeits

  16 The Rabidus

  17 Reading Between the Lines

  18 Bitter Sweets

  19 A New President

  20 Bad Apples

  21 Lost

  22 Crossing the Line

  23 Proposals

  24 A Day Off

  25 Court Report

  26 A New Arrival

  27 A Night Out

  28 Detective Spindle

  29 The Puzzle Room

  30 The Wedding

  31 Cake

  32 The Final Measuring

  33 They went to the Cupboard

  34 The Cart Before the Horse

  35 Escape from Duldred

  36 A Bumpy Ride

  Postface

  About Mother’s Milk Books

  1 Caught

  Oy was slight, weakly, overlooked. He had thought himself some sort of ghost till one day, when he was about seven (he guessed), someone saw him.

  ‘Oy, you,’ said the girl. Startled, he had slipped away, through a gap, into a yard, through a hole, into the innards of a half-collapsed shanty. There he survived on crumbs and smells until, some years later, he was seen again.

  He was in the alley behind the bakery when the waif-catchers netted him. He fed daily on the smell of bread, letting the vapours swirl around his brain and conjure of themselves a high-risen floury loaf. He would seize it with his two hands, break open the crust and inside it would be fluffy and white with a puff of steam, and he would scoop out the new bread and eat. That warm salt vapour would feed his mind for hours, but his body did not know bread.

  Only other children were fast enough to catch the waifs. It was a popular sport and paid well. The Affland girls who flanked Oy were tall and strong, and so explosively alive that Oy could hear their blood thundering. His feet pedalled air as they carried him to the office of Mrs Rutheday.

  ‘We got another one for you,’ they said, lifting him onto a block so that he could be seen through the hole in the wall.

  Mrs Rutheday turned showing her face. The wall had more feeling in it. She might have been scoured from stone, her mouth was a ruled line and her hair was like iron wire.

  ‘Family name?’ she asked. Oy was in shock like any wild thing when it is handled. He could only pluck at his rags and gape like a fish.

  ‘What is your surname?’ she asked again.

  One of the girls poked him.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he said with effort. He had picked up some stilted language but it was strange in his mouth.

  ‘Your second name, noodle. It comes after your first.’

  ‘You,’ said Oy.

  Yew, Mrs Rutheday wrote. ‘First name?’ she asked.

  ‘Oy,’ he said.

  The girls spluttered.

  ‘You’ve caught us a joker,’ said Mrs Rutheday. Then she looked at his pale, vacant eyes. ‘No, there’s not enough brains in there to joke with. Oy Yew it is then. What is that thing he’s wearing?’

  ‘Old flour sack, ma’am.’

  ‘Alright, take him up.’

  They pushed him into a room so long that its eight rows of benches disappeared to a point. Behind every work station sat a child, and each child was possessed of a pair of eyes, and each pair of eyes looked at him.

  ‘Who wants this one?’ shouted the eldest of the two girls.

  There was no answer.

  ‘Name of Oy Yew,’ said the other girl to breaking laughter.

  A faint, croaky voice came from somewhere far down the hall: ‘Here, he can sit here.’

  The girls craned to where a shy hand waved and shoved Oy towards it. Oy fixed his eyes on the fuzzy, white head of Linnet Pale and stumbled down the aisle.

  So Oy went to bench 54, to sit by Linnet, and to be trained by her in assembly. They had no idea what it was they assembled, only that they strained their eyes over sixteen tiny screws, and that the part thus assembled was passed on to the next bench, and from there to the next, till the thing was much increased in size, whereupon it was loaded onto trolleys and taken through the arches where there were flashing lights and sparks and a smell of burning rubber.

  Linnet had no pigments in her skin or hair except for a stain on her temple. The other waifs said it was the hole where all her colour leaked out. Oy thought she was perfect. At first he was alarmed to have someone evidently seeing him, constantly speaking to him and even caring to know what was in his head. Once he got used to it though, it was exciting. It unsettled and warmed his insides, this business of having a friend.

  To start with the conversation was all one way. What language Oy had was buried deep. He had always thought in pictures, pictures as vivid as life, but with Linnet’s help he began to speak. Neither had known there was so much to say. Oy especially, as he learned more and more words, had seven or eight or nine years (who knew) of thoughts all stored up for telling.

  The talk fell naturally into the great rhythm of the factory.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ asked Oy, his voice climbing above the tapping of a hundred little hammers in the rows behind them.

  ‘To begin with? I came from Poria on a raft, of course.’ Linnet shouted over the strikes and clattering.

  ‘What a raft?’ Oy shouted back.

  Linnet looked puzzled. ‘You know, a flat boat. Sometimes it’s just a few logs tied together. We’re all raft-children aren’t we? Can’t you remember? You were too little I expect. On fair days the beaches were all dotted with seeing-off parties. All the way down the coast you could see them, loading the rafts with spares like us. It’s not something you forget easy, sitting on that bit of wood, and all that mass and slap of water and the sea smell, and your family getting smaller and smaller as you’re sucked away and away, all the way down here to Affland – that’s if you don’t drown first.’

  Oy stared at her with wide, empty eyes.

  Linnet leaned towards him. ‘Are you listening?’ She looked into his eyes then pulled back fearfully. ‘You was more than liste
ning. You was right inside my head.’

  ‘Is it wrong?’

  ‘Not really. I just ain’t been listened to quite like that before.’ She shot him little sideways glances, then smiled. ‘Go on, tell about what you ’member.’

  ‘I can’t remember no sea trip,’ Oy replied. ‘I can’t ’member nothing before the bakery. I just sprout there, like weed I think – live off crumbs and sour dough slung out back. I watch and hear through windows and in the alley but no one sees me. So I wonder what I am. Am I a ghost p’raps?’

  ‘That’s silly,’ Linnet giggled.

  Oy had always wanted to try laughing, so he copied her. This tickled Linnet even more. Then the noise from the steam room swelled and swallowed all.

  At night in the waif sheds, while others slept, they talked on, as though they knew their time was short.

  ‘Tell me about your home in Poria. Why did you have to leave?’ Oy asked.

  ‘Us Porians, we generally don’t talk too much about that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You weren’t to know. Oh, I’ll tell you anyway. My family…’

  ‘What a family?’

  The boy in the next floor space twitched and pulled his blanket over his head.

  She lowered her voice to a croaky whisper. ‘My family kept me for as long as they could, but I was always expecting to be sent away. I knew it was my time when the harvest failed second year running and then my mother’s belly started to swell…’ Oy looked confused. ‘With a baby – that’s a sign a woman’s going to have a baby. That’s when my father started to build a raft.’

  ‘Did it make you very sad?’

  Linnet shrugged. ‘Ain’t no point being sad about what can’t be helped.’

  Like a duckling that takes for its mother the first object it sees, Oy took for his friend the first person to really see him. The endless assembling, all the endless hours of endless days, did not bother him. Hunger and hardship were only what he’d been used to, but now everything was shared, and that put a shine on it. Linnet was just as pleased. She had only ever been looked down on, never looked up to.

  One day, some weeks later, Oy paused in his work.

  Linnet nudged him. ‘Ma’s watching. Get on.’

  Oy dropped the screws in place and paused again. ‘Linnet,’ he said, ‘if I am a person do you think I had a mother?’

  ‘Yes, you must have had a mother, just like I had, even if it wasn’t for long.’

  ‘Do you think she forgot about me then, put me down somewhere and never bothered to pick me up again?’

  ‘No, there’ll be more to it than that.’

  Linnet patted Oy’s arm. Oy hadn’t been patted before. He looked at his arm curiously, then started. He felt three sharp knocks on his backbone and cold metal pressed to the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Poker faces, poker backs.’ Mrs Rutheday looked down at him.

  She had no expression. She could not read expressions, so she hated to see them, especially smiles. In fact she did not like curves of any sort.

  ‘Are you making your quotas with all this chatter?’ Her voice was grittier than the sanders.

  Oy tried to answer but found that he had forgotten how.

  ‘Yes’m,’ Linnet butted in, ‘we’ve never missed.’

  ‘Mr Gurney had better raise them then, if you’ve got leisure to talk.’ All the time she appraised Oy, making him want to hide. ‘Stand,’ she ordered. Oy stood. She tipped her head. ‘You’ll do. He likes them small for the house. Be ready at six tomorrow for the cart to Duldred.’ Linnet began rising from her seat in protest, but Mrs Rutheday’s frozen face weighed her down again. ‘What, you want to go too? Attached to this one are you? None of you lot are pretty but the Master wouldn’t want anything as plain freakish as you at the house.’ She turned to Oy. ‘Mind what I say. Front gates, hour of six.’ Mrs Rutheday moved away, knocking kinks out of spines with her poker as she passed between the benches.

  Linnet sat back staring at her hands.

  ‘What did she mean?’ asked Oy.

  ‘You’re being sent to the big house, to be a house servant for Master Jeopardine.’

  ‘Is it near?’

  The noise from the steam room grew loud again. Linnet shouted. ‘Fifteen miles or more. But not allowed out. Like here. Work, sleep, work, sleep.’

  For the rest of the day they chose their words carefully, knowing that there were few left to them. That night, as they found their spaces under the high windows of the waif shed, their faces were passive but their eyes were busy storing friendship.

  2 The Road to Duldred

  There was company on the cart to Duldred, two girls, bright and breathless with excitement at leaving the factory. They sat on Oy before they noticed him.

  ‘Ooh, beg pardon,’ one said, ‘you’re a little ’un. Gritty Garnet, and this is my sister Gert.’ Two hands were offered.

  ‘Oy Yew,’ he answered, touching their hands nervously in turn.

  ‘Oh yes, we’ve heard about you, Yew,’ they said, laughing.

  ‘Look at all the green,’ said Gritty. ‘I’d clean forgot about that colour.’

  ‘Ah, see there,’ Gertie elbowed Oy in the eye as she swung around to look at some goslings.

  I suppose I’m fading again, thought Oy. Linnet had given him substance only for Mrs Rutheday to pick him out. Perhaps it was better to be a poor ghostly thing. Perhaps by the time he reached Duldred he would be invisible, then he could slip away back to his friend.

  ‘I wonder, will we be fine ladies’ maids in smart caps and starched aprons?’ Gritty mused.

  ‘Enough prattling,’ said the carter, looking darkly under his straw hat, ‘I don’t want to pick the cherries out of your cake, but there’ll be no caps and no starch for you, and if there’s any fine folks around, you’ll be lucky to see more than their chamber pots.’

  Gritty looked downcast. Oy wanted to pat her arm but he was too shy.

  It wasn’t long before the carter tipped them out by a massive set of gates. ‘This is it,’ he said, ‘Duldred Hall, your new home. Now follow that wall like you’ve been told.’

  Fifty yards from the gate, Gritty found a crawl-sized hole partly hidden by a thorn bush. One by one the children disappeared into it. The grating scraped open and a shout of, ‘Three in!’ came from the other side.

  ‘Three in,’ the carter repeated under his breath. ‘I’m not much good with figures but I’ve seen more go in than I ever see come out again. Still it’s no business of mine.’ He clicked to his nag and clopped away.

  Sly Rutheday slid the grating back into place, barred and chained it. He gave the children a brief, disgusted look. Over by the main gate a mass of hounds hurled themselves against a fence and began a frenzy of barking. ‘Just in case you should ever have thoughts of going that way instead o’ this,’ he crossed his hands pointing in opposite directions, ‘them beasts patrol night and day. They’d crunch you up like a chicken. Follow,’ he said, and went back to musing on his next meal.

  The children fell into single file, skipping every few steps to match the thoughtless strides of their guide. All of their eyes were fixed on the big house still far distant. It was long and high and dark, with a black diamond glitter to its leaded windows. The house grew ever bigger as they tramped across the lawns till they could see its awful details.

  ‘Would you look at them windows,’ said Gertie, ‘you could ride a horse on stilts through there and still have room for a top hat.’

  ‘That can’t be home to just one person can it?’ said Gritty.

  ‘Our village would fit in the porch,’ said Gertie.

  ‘Twice,’ said Gritty.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ said Sly. ‘Nobody asked you to speckle – specultate on your betters, so shut it.’

  Oy could barely think let alone talk. He felt smaller as the house got bigger and the dark of it filled his eyes. So he did what he was used to doing when he needed comfort: he thought of food, of sucking slowly on a sug
ar candy cane, striped like a rainbow.

  They came off the wet grass onto a flint carriageway. On their right was a spread of dim water hemmed with blue-grey reeds. Hard eyes and metallic beaks showed between the stems.

  ‘Iron-beaks,’ said Sly. ‘Bred to attack if they scent fear. With waifs they like to go bang, straight between the eyes.’ He thumped his head. ‘If you’re out this way, you’d better learn to stay calm. I’ve taken a few bruises myself till I snapped the neck of one.’

  The scent of unknown, nervous waifs unsettled the birds. A low hissing ran around the lake; threatening cackles rose above the reeds and carried across the park.

  Gertie nudged Gritty and pointed to the still centre of the lake where chained swans glided listlessly round an island.

  At last they came into the shadow of Duldred, skirting its courtyard, smelling its cold stone. The upper floors hung over them like frowning brows. Sly led them between low hedges, round the side of the house and down a flight of steps to the kitchen door.

  ‘He’s cut the waif ration again,’ Molly cook was saying. ‘I don’t know how they survive as it is.’

  ‘It’s all to do with this election what’s coming up. It’s been Master’s dream since childhood to be President of the Ossiquarians – that’s what these bone collectors call themselves. He used to sit at this table when he could barely see over it, and practise writing P of O after his name.’ Mrs Midden scribed with her finger in the air.

  Molly shook her head. ‘Why make the waifs suffer?’

  ‘Down to money. He needs some rare bones to impress the members, very costly they are.’

  ‘Perhaps he should cut back on his fresh flowers and tailoring.’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t want that. His mother once put him in a plainstuff shirt. You’ve never seen a child squirm and whine like it. It was rubbing his hairs the wrong way, it was making him hot, then cold, then itchy. Waifs is made for hardship, masters for finery. Way of the world.’

  ‘Well it strikes me as folly.’

  ‘It’s not your business to be struck by anything; it’s your business to cook.’