I still felt responsible for what had happened, I realised.
I wondered what the policeman would make of the dream and decided I would tell it to him when he came next. Somehow I did not doubt that he would continue to call, for the mystery of Mama’s death and Rose’s disappearance had taken hold of his mind. I thought of his earlier suggestion that Rose might have gone into the park first, and wondered what had made him think so. It struck me that he might all along have had some theory he had never voiced. Certainly Rose had never feared the park and sometimes she had spoken as if she was only putting off the pleasure of entering it, like someone leaving the icing on a cake till last. I had imagined she was teasing me, but once she ventured to take a few steps under the trees when Mama had not accompanied us, and I had been forced to show her my fear before she would come out to me. Was it possible that Mama had become distracted by something, allowing Rose to slip away? I did not think so, but nor could I believe that Mama and Rose had accidentally strayed into the winter park.
If only I had gone with them to the pantomime. If I had been there, holding Rose’s other hand, I could have kept her from the park, or if not that, then at least we would have been lost together.
I heard a strain of music that reminded me of the velvet song walkers, and I glanced out of the window to see that dawn had come. I looked this way and that along the street, trying to see one of the rare velvet men who passed through the town, but instead I saw a flash of colour, red as blood, vivid and unmistakeable at the edge of all that black and grey and white that was the winter park. I watched until the flash of red resolved into a woman in a scarlet cloak and hood. Then I realised it was not a hooded cloak but a wild mass of red hair. I could not see her face, for she looked down at a great shaggy beast that walked beside her. A dog it must be, yet my first impression had been that it was a bear. She went along the other side of the line of ghost trees and then passed out of view. I wrapped my shawl tighter and flew along to Rose’s old room, which offered a view from one of its windows of the road and the nether end of the park, but there was no sign of the woman.
Deciding I had probably dreamed her, I returned to my room to bathe and dress and went down to breakfast. I had told cook not to come in early, for my stepfather ate almost nothing and I liked to break my fast very lightly and only when I was hungry. But being awake so long had given me an appetite, and I decided to make pancakes the way they had been made in the country of my birth. Once the batter was resting, I melted butter and opened a bottle of preserved cherries. The smell of them was sweet and rich and red and made me think of Mama who had supervised the cooks as they boiled them in sugar syrup, sweat shining on her forehead and making little golden curls riot about her pink cheeks. She had sung as she worked, and I had sat listening to her, rocking Rose in her cradle and waiting for her to spoon a taste into my mouth.
The door bell rang and I heard my stepfather’s voice. A few moments later he entered, accompanied by the policeman I had been thinking of earlier. He guided my stepfather gently, and nodded to me in his characteristic grave, courteous way. I dropped an awkward curtsey, conscious that I was red-faced with the heat and had a splodge of cherry juice on the bib of my apron.
‘Inspector Grey has a question,’ my stepfather said, then he sniffed the air and sorrow washed the slight colour from his face. His dark eyes clouded and he stooped, as if he were under an intolerable burden, and ran a long-fingered hand over his face and left it smudged with a bruise-like weariness.
‘I have made pancakes for breakfast,’ I stammered.
My stepfather flinched, as if I had tried to strike him a blow from behind, then he turned and made his way to the door, hands outstretched, saying not a word as he closed the door behind him.
‘They smell very good,’ said the policeman kindly.
‘Would you like some? I am afraid I have made too much for one and I find that I have no appetite.’ I gulped out the words, striving to control myself. Then I sank gracelessly into the chair my stepfather had grasped, my face streaming with tears.
‘You must eat,’ said the policeman. ‘You must keep up your strength, for hope is the hardest work.’
‘Hope?’ I wondered incredulously if he mocked me. ‘Hope will not save Rose.’ Then I told him my dream, adding, ‘So you see, it is a prince who is needed.’
‘There is truth of a sort in dreams, and in tales as well, but when it comes to life, if there are no princes, well, we must make do,’ said the policeman.
I looked at him, half marvelling. ‘It is surprising to hear a policeman speak in such a poetic way,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it is not as uncommon as you think. We are men as well as policemen, and once we were children. A good policeman must keep his mind open.’
He began dishing out the pancakes efficiently, adding melted butter and warmed cherries, then pouring the coffee I had made into fine china mugs and fetching cream and sugar from the cool closet and pantry. Finally he brought us knives and forks. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for the whereabouts of things and he smiled a little when he caught the expression on my face. ‘I do not have a wife and so I am accustomed to cook for myself. Contrary to popular belief, I am a man who likes to cook and all good cooks have similar habits. So as well as being a policeman and a man who was once a boy, I am also a cook.’
I said nothing, distracted by imagining him going to his solitary bachelor apartment or maybe to a small brown cottage where he would do his own laundry and cook for himself with only a servant to come in and clean for him, not because he lacked wealth, though that might also be true, but because he liked his solitude. He would read poetry, I decided, while he waited for his eggs to cook. But how did such a man fit into the philosophies of Bernice, Magda and Friday? Or mine, come to that?
He put a fork into my hand and began to eat his own pancakes, lifting his brows at the taste of the cherries. I told him that the recipe for preserving them had been Mama’s and a secret she had guarded jealously, supervising the cook and undertaking the final part of the process herself.
‘Your mother had many secrets,’ he said.
I looked up into his grey eyes and thought that in a certain light they had the sheen of moonlit water. ‘I can find out nothing about her before she married your father. I wrote to the country where you were born but the authorities can find no records of her birth. She must have come from somewhere else.’
I thought of the occasional foreign words and sentences she had uttered, usually under stress, and of her saying that among her people a girl became a woman at twenty. ‘She never spoke of her past,’ I said.
The policeman said nothing, but his eyes were searching.
‘Mama loved Rose,’ I said, and heard the defiance in my voice.
He put down his fork, looking genuinely surprised. ‘How did you know I was wondering about that?’
I shrugged. ‘Mama used to say I could see things no one else saw. When I was small she called me The Girl Who Could See the Wind.’ I laughed sadly. ‘It was Rose, really, who saw things about people, but she didn’t see that Mama was afraid of the winter park . . .’ I stopped.
‘Did Rose see what you saw, in the park?’ he asked carefully, treading the tightrope between accusing me of delusion and wanting to understand.
I did not answer.
‘If your sister went into the park after something no one else could see, then it follows that a girl who can see the wind might be able to find clues hidden from the rest of us,’ he said. ‘Might even see what her sister saw.’
‘I promised Mama I would never go into the park. She made me prick my finger with a needle and draw blood to make the swear.’ I stopped, hearing how peculiar that sounded. But the policeman only carried his plate to the sink to rinse it.
‘It was just a thought,’ he said, and he bowed and thanked me for the pancakes before turning to the door.
‘Inspector Grey,’ I called. ‘My stepfather said you had a question.’
‘Ah,’ the policeman said. ‘As to that, you told me a while ago that your mother had sometimes seemed to fear for your safety, yet she did not exhibit the same fear for your sister. I merely wondered if you had any thoughts about what she feared.’
I shook my head and he nodded politely and let himself out.
After he had gone, I sat looking into my cherry-stained pancakes for a long time. Then I wept a few tears of confusion before pushing away my uneaten food and going back upstairs. Sitting in my window seat, I looked out at the park, now striped with sunlight. There was no sign of the woman in red.
Once I had heard the servants speak of the disappearance of Rose. One of the maids whispered that a gang of criminals had captured her, having struck Mama dead, but neither they nor the newspapers that later printed a similar story mentioned that there had been only two sets of footprints, both ending at my mother’s body, which made it impossible for Rose to have been taken by kidnappers. Inspector Grey told me it had been decided to keep the footprints secret as a means of disqualifying the few madmen and women ready to confess to any crime, for while the coroner found Mama had died by misadventure, Rose’s disappearance had given rise to a slew of lurid blackmail and kidnap theories that resulted in several confessional calls. I had asked if it would not be better to reveal the two sets of footprints ending at Mama’s body, making it clear Rose could not have been kidnapped, but the inspector had explained that the callers would then advance occult theories instead. He had given me an odd look then, as if he expected me to offer my own theory, but I had none.
I looked out at the park and summoned up a picture in my mind of Rose holding Mama’s hand as they walked home from the pantomime. She would have been chattering about the performance, no doubt asking questions that would have called from Mama the irritated little cough she always developed when she was asked too many questions. Eventually, she would have snapped at Rose, but then what? In some way that I could not conceive, Rose and Mama had gone into the park together or one after the other. It seemed most likely that Rose would have gone first, Mama following unwillingly. But what happened then to make Mama lie down, and what of Rose? Tests had shown that no footprints had been obscured, deliberately or by chance, nor had Rose’s prints leading to the body been false. The evidence of the footprints showed quite clearly that mother and daughter had entered the park, whether alone or together, and that Mama had lain down of her own volition and died, though no one could determine the cause of death, since it had been a mild night and there was not a mark upon her.
Of cold, I thought, but what had become of Rose?
Nothing, my mind told me. She entered the winter park and she is still there.
Two days later, Inspector Grey called again and asked the servant who answered the door if I would come out to the yard to speak with him. It was odd that he did not come inside, but I took my parasol, for the sun blazed down, and went out. To my considerable surprise, the policeman was standing under the jacaranda tree with one of the velvet nomads.
‘This is Nullah,’ said Inspector Grey. ‘He is a native tracker who works for us sometimes. I brought him to look at the place where your sister disappeared. I thought you would like to hear what he has to say.’ He nodded at the velvet man, who was watching me closely.
‘I am Willow,’ I told him and I held out my hand.
Nullah took my hand in his own enormous warm grasp, and seemed to weigh it more than shake it. Then he smiled at me with the very same familiarity as the song walker in Dusty Town had done long ago. He released my hand, and said something to the inspector.
‘He wants me to tell you he greets you as an equal and invites you to walk about the land with him,’ said the policeman. ‘It is an unusual compliment because Nullah is considered a leader among his people, a spirit guide.’
‘Please ask him whether he saw anything that will help us find Rose.’
But the policeman shook his head. ‘You misunderstand. I brought Nullah here to look at the footprints, but as soon as he set eyes on the park he stopped and said there was no point because the land there will not sing to him. He would have to learn to hear it and that would take many years.’ The velvet man said something, and the policeman nodded and said, ‘He asks now why I summoned him when I have you to guide me.’
‘Tell him that he is mistaken about me. I am not a guide.’
The velvet man seemed to understand and shook his head. He spoke at length to the policeman, who asked several questions and was answered before turning back to me.
‘He says the park is not part of his land. It is a place where another land is pushing through. He says he cannot walk there because he has no link to that place, but that you do. He says he can feel it.’ The inspector shook his head, looking suddenly younger in his puzzlement. ‘Maybe I am misinterpreting. Maybe he is just trying to tell me that he thinks you will be able to discover what happened to your sister.’
The velvet nomad spoke again, a few words, looking at me.
‘He asks if you love your sister,’ the policeman said, then he answered without waiting for me to speak. The nomad nodded, pointed to me and then pointed towards the park.
‘I swore I would not go there,’ I said, and heard fear in my voice. The velvet man spoke again, his eyes holding mine. The policeman exchanged a few words with him and then said, ‘He asked why your mother demanded such a promise. I told him that she feared for you, and he said that the mastering of fear is the first step a child must take away from its mother and father. He said if you are able to master your fear, he could teach you to hear the song of this land.’
‘What do you want of me?’ I asked the policeman.
He sighed. ‘I did not know that Nullah would react as he did. I’ve never heard him talk this way before. To be honest, I wanted to see what you would make of his words, because he seems to see something in that park that I don’t, just as you do.’
‘You want me to go there,’ I said dully. ‘Perhaps I will disappear too. Then instead of solving one mystery, you will have another.’
‘I will come too,’ said the policeman. ‘I will let no harm come to you.’
‘How can you go there?’
‘I will go with you. I need to understand what it is that this park meant to your family – at least to you and your mother and sister. Maybe then I can work out what happened to Rose.’
4.
I went to the kitchen and bade the cook prepare food for a journey, while the policeman took Nullah to the train station. I ordered a maid to find the trunk of winter clothes we had brought with us. Mine were too small, but I took out a heavy gown and a cloak of Mama’s, as well as boots, muff and hat, weeping a little when I saw how well they fitted me. Upon his return, the inspector accepted one of the heavy coats that had belonged to my father, for Mama had kept these as well. How strange it was to see them inhabited again. I sat down to write a letter to my stepfather, explaining what I meant to do.
‘Love will lead me to Rose or to death,’ I wrote baldly, then I sent my love to my stepfather and signed my name, sealing the silky sheet of writing paper into an envelope upon which I wrote his name. I propped it alongside my stepfather’s pipe stand so that he would find it when he reached for the pipe before supper that evening. He would have to summon a maid to read it to him.
I felt numb with fear of what I meant to do, but I was resolved. Suddenly it seemed to me that my whole life had been shaped in order that I might enter the winter park. The policeman was not forcing me; he was merely an instrument of fate. I felt the heat of the day beating on my back as we crossed from the apartment to the line of ghost trees, but the cold from the winter park raked my bare cheeks.
‘Do you believe what Nullah said?’ I asked the inspector when we stood at the edge of the park. ‘Do you believe the park is not part of this land?’
‘I believe this will bring us to the place where your mother’s body was found,’ he said.
I followed him through
the ghost trees and the moment we were on the other side of them, the heat and noise of the town was cut off and a thick, soft silence fell about me. I looked at the policeman, but his expression had not changed so I knew he did not feel the cold as I felt it. Indeed, his forehead shone with perspiration, for he had no need of the coat he wore.
I looked down and saw two sets of footprints in the snow, one belonging to an adult and the other to a child. They were as fresh as if Mama and Rose had just walked there, and yet the policeman did not look at them. He was clearly finding his way by memory. I turned my attention back to the footprints that progressed side by side into the winter park, and knew that Rose had not come in first after all, nor Mama. They had walked side by side, almost keeping pace, save for the additional skip Rose had made every few steps to keep up. My heart ached at the memory of the jerk she had given my hand whenever she had executed that little skip. And then we were entering a clearing. I stopped, seeing the unmistakeable imprint of Mama’s form.
I was not aware of having cried out, but the policeman looked at me sharply. ‘What do you see?’ he asked.
I pointed to the outline and for a fleeting moment I saw the red earth and the leaf litter among twisting tree roots that the policeman was seeing. I said, ‘I can see the outline of where Mama lay, in the snow. I see Rose’s footprints leading away!’
‘In the snow,’ he repeated. ‘Can you see the two sets of footprints leading to where the body lay?’
I nodded. ‘And I see Rose’s footprints going away there.’ I pointed deeper into the park.
‘You can see her footprints in the snow?’ he asked and I nodded. ‘My people saw scuff marks and footprints in the dust when the body was first found, but those have long since faded.’ He gave me a considering look and then pointed some way to the left of the prints. ‘You see where the body lay there?’