Free Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

the men, and slender, like shoots growing up towards the light. The children looked strong, and some of them were playing with the dogs, or riding round the edges of the chamber on the smallest ponies Silver had ever seen.
    ‘Bog ponies,’ said a voice by her ear. ‘The dogs be Jack Russells, the ponies be bog ponies, and my name be Micah, and I be the Leader of the Clan.’
    Silver opened both her eyes and looked at the man who had come out of the shadows. The others were all dark haired, but Micah was blond. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a torn waistcoat embroidered with flowers, and a pair of blue seaman’s trousers. He had a long clay pipe in his hand, and on his fingers he wore gold rings three deep.
    Silver sat up. She was feeling stronger but she was starving.
    ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Gabriel rescued me. Can I have some food, please?’
    ‘Eden! Bring you food for the child?’
    A woman came forward with a wooden dish. There was a piece of pizza in it, and some thick yellow soup. ‘
Eccola bambina bella!
’ said Eden. Silver didn’t care what it was, she ate and ate, and all the time Micah watched her.
    Then Silver started to tell the whole story of her parents, and Mrs Rokabye, and Abel Darkwater, and the opium in the tomato sauce.
    ‘And what be the reason of all this doing?’ asked Micah.
    ‘It’s a clock called the Timekeeper, and a house called Tanglewreck.’
    Micah’s face changed, but he did not say what it was that had caused his pale face to redden, and then turn paler than before. He knocked out his pipe and stared into the low fire.
    Then he said, ‘We will help you, we will. We know the man Abel Darkwater.’
    ‘You know him?’
    ‘We did know him, we did, once upon a time, yea, and we know of his business.’
    Micah clapped his hands and everyone stopped their work or their drinking, and the dogs stopped jumping over each other, and the ponies stood quietly at the back.
    ‘We have no traffic with Updwellers,’ said Micah, ‘but you be a child and a Stranger, and it be in our beliefs to help Strangers. All of us that you see here before you were Strangers once, so we were.’
    And Micah, in his high singsong voice, began to tell of how it began that the Throwbacks had come to be.
    ‘There be a hospital called Bedlam – though not what you would call a hospital now in your own time, but a terrible tall torture of a place where a man or a woman might be tied to a chair for days at a time and fed no food but dead mice.
    ‘It was a Mad House. It was a place for the Insane, though many of us who went there had no insanity, no, none at all, but we were an offence to our masters. Many ways there be to get into Bedlam but only one way to get out. And that was the narrow way that all must take. Yea, Death.
    ‘I be in Bedlam myself in the year 1768 and that year the Warden minted the name of the Throwbacks for us, and hung the names round our necks in these medallions – yea, these medallions, look you here.’
    Micah reached round his neck and took out a circular metal disc on a chain. On one side was his name, MICAH, and on the other side the word BEDLAM.
    ‘Throwbacks we be, and by his cruelty he called us after angels too, for our Christian names, to make the visitors laugh, for in those times visitors come to Bedlam and other Houses of the Mad, to laugh at us like wild beasts.
    ‘Strong I be, and clever too in my way, yea, and I see one day that there be a rusty door in a rusty cell, and I contrived to get time in there and I found it led out and away, if only we digged enough, and for three years long we digged enough, and we found a way to be free, and many of us escaped underground, and hid here.
    ‘When we were free we discovered a strange thing, yea, that underground we be not living and dying as Updwellers do, but that for us, Time moves more slow, creeps like darkness. We live long lives, not like to Updwellers, and we know not Time as you know Time.’
    ‘But