Free The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson Page B

and start the training. You’d laugh if I told you – size of me – but it’s a good ’un. ’Sides,’ he said in a louder voice, ‘we’ve got to keep on till this little chavvy gets trained up, han’t we? Him and his sister.’ He lifted Tom right off his feet and shook him over his head, making the child squeal with delight.
    ‘And what’s he going to do?’ I said. ‘Train dogs?’
    ‘Acrobat,’ said Bill. ‘A tumbler, like his ma. My Lally is Topsy’s ma’s cousin’s girl and all Ilchenko on her pa’s side since way back.’ Bill put his son gently down on to the ground again. ‘He an’t no strongman, that’s for sure.’
    ‘Could be,’ said Tom, getting over his shyness of me at last, and flexing his thin arms ‘Might be.’ His father shook his head at him, chuckling, and then all of a sudden he looked hard at me.
    ‘And so Ma Cooke come and got you, did she? Not much gets past her.’
    ‘Do you know something, Mr … Bill?’ I said.
    He hesitated.
    ‘Too much,’ he said, at last. ‘I dunno what bee Ma’s got in her hat, mind, but I know more than she does about some things. More than I want to, truth be told.’
    ‘About Topsy?’ I asked. ‘About Ana?’ I was feeling my way in the dark, but I thought I should keep at it while he was in a mood to talk to me.
    ‘Ana!’ he said, her name seeming to catch his interest as soon as I spoke it. ‘She’s a mystery to me, that one. Someone needs to have a quiet word with the maid. Tell her she wants to be a bit more careful like, keep on the right side if she knows what’s good for her.’
    This certainly chimed with what Mrs Cooke had told me.
    ‘I intend to, Mr … Bill,’ I said. ‘And anything you can tell me will only help.’ But I had pushed too far now; I could see it in his face.
    ‘I’ve got my place here,’ he said. ‘And after what I’ve done to hang on to it I’ll keep my head down.’
    ‘After what you’ve done,’ I repeated, careful not to make it a question. Bill Wolf’s eyes showed just a dart of panic all the same.
    ‘Making a filler of myself,’ he said. ‘That’s what I mean. One step up from an odd-job man, that’s me. But I will tell you this: that old donah loves them chavs like babbies so it’s not the prads and spots that’s aching her, but His Gills is just flash mad he couldn’t stop them and coming down hard enough to break a king pole and if this show don’t hold together there’s more than me and Lall’ll end up nobbing the streets with a stick and a rag.’
    In other words, I thought (and getting it into other words felt more like unseen translation than anything I had tackled since my French governess had given up on me), Mrs Cooke was missing her grown-up sons as though they were children but it was Mr Cooke’s pride, not his heart, which was wounded by the boys heading for Coney Island or wherever they were without his say-so and taking trained horses with them, and now Mr Cooke was stamping his authority on the rest of the outfit with such vigour that he might flatten it completely except that some of the artistes would cling on to this job with their little fingernails, ignoring any amount of trouble, if it meant they could avoid … Madame Toulemonde herself would have forgiven me for leaving it untranslated because what could ever express abjectness better than ‘nobbing the streets with a stick and a rag’? Nothing that I could think of.
    I excused myself from the – unexpectedly delightful – Pa Wolf after that, mentally turning over the corner of his card to remind me to speak to him again, and wandered over to the tent.
    I was hoping for twelve liberty horses or Anastasia riding the haute école, and was disappointed and not a little surprised to see, in the ring, what looked like three clowns standing smoking, with a sausage dog rolling on its back in the sawdust at their feet. It seemed unlikely that they would have to practise their funny walks and pratfalls all