Crow Boy Read online

‘No need, Madam,’ The Doctor assured her. ‘You’ll be needing to put your hands on that ten shillings. And young Tom here has been expounding his fascinating views about . . . the efficacy of lavender. I’m sure he’ll take good care of me.’

  ‘I know it sounds weird to you,’ said Tom, ‘but you have to . . .’

  ‘Lead on, boy, before the poor girl dies of old age!’ snapped The Doctor impatiently, so Tom led him along the landing to the door of Alison’s room. When he pushed it open, he saw that The Doctor’s two helpers were already in there. The stocky man had opened the small casement window and had placed the glowing brazier in front of it. He was blowing on it to coax fresh heat from the slumbering coals. Joshua had unrolled a leather pouch and was arranging a row of fearsome-looking metal instruments on the floor beside the bed.

  As Tom watched, he selected what looked like a poker and thrust the head of it into the midst of the coals. He caught Tom’s eye and winked mischievously. Alison looked on, wide-eyed in terror, as well she might. Tom knew from what he had read that the preferred method of dealing with buboes at this time was to cut them open with a razor, drain the pus and insert a red-hot iron into the wound in order to cauterise it. It was not uncommon for patients to die of shock and those few who actually survived the plague would be scarred for life by its drastic treatment.

  The Doctor stood beside Tom, staring at the bed. In the small room, he smelled even worse than he had down on the street, like something that had died and been left to rot. He approached the bed and looked at the clumps of lavender hanging from the metal headboard on lengths of twine. He reached out and touched one of them.

  ‘Where did you first hear of this nonsense?’ he hissed.

  ‘It’s not nonsense!’ said Tom, without hesitation. ‘It’s . . . the latest thing.’ He studied Alison and thought she looked a little better than she had the night before. The swelling at her neck seemed to have gone down a bit and she was no longer gasping for breath. ‘Honestly, she’s looking loads better than she did. I think she’s already on the mend.’

  The Doctor didn’t seem so convinced. He moved closer to the bed. ‘Now, my pretty,’ he purred, as he leaned over Alison. ‘How are we feeling this morning?’ He lifted the stick and poked at the red swelling under her jaw, making her flinch. ‘Is that sore, my dear?’

  ‘A . . . a little,’ gasped Alison, staring up at the hideous beaked mask. ‘But nothing like as bad as it was last night. I think the Sassenach pills must be working!’ She pointed to the cardboard box of antibiotics on a rough wooden table beside the bed.

  ‘The . . . Sassenach pills?’ The Doctor reached out and picked up the box. He stared at it for a moment, puzzling over the printed design and the brightly coloured logo. Then his masked head turned to look at Tom again. ‘What are these things?’ he snarled.

  Tom swallowed. ‘It’s j . . . just some medicine I brought with me from . . . from Manchester.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like any medicine I’ve ever seen. What manner of apothecary despatched these?’

  ‘Oh, just my . . . regular GP! Those pills are made ‘specially for the plague.’

  ‘Plague pills?’ The Doctor shook his head in disbelief. ‘Are you making mock of me? There’s no such thing!’

  ‘Not here, but you can get them in England! E . . . everybody’s using them.’ As he watched, The Doctor was opening the box and pulling out one of the transparent blister packs. His head tilted to one side as his seventeenth century mindset tried to figure out just exactly what he was looking at.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Tom assured him, ‘she’s only had two, so far, but if she finishes the course, she’ll be right as rain and the plague will be gone. I guarantee it.’ He gestured at the metal implements beside the smoking brazier. ‘There’s no need for any of that, honestly.’

  ‘I’d say that’s for me to decide,’ said The Doctor. He slid the blister pack back into its box and threw it almost contemptuously onto the table-top. Then he walked back to the foot of the bed and gestured to his assistants. ‘We will continue with the treatment,’ he told them. He propped his cane against the end of the bed and held out one hand. Joshua stepped forward and placed an evil-looking scalpel into it. Alison gave a little gasp of terror.

  ‘Don’t fret, my dear,’ whispered The Doctor. ‘A simple cut to release the purulence and then a wee tap with the hot poker and we’ll be done . . .’

  ‘No!’ said Tom. He stepped forward to bar The Doctor’s path. ‘No, please, give me another day or so and she’ll be as right as rain. I promise.’

  The Doctor stared down at him, his eyes glittering dangerously behind the black mask. He seemed to be considering his next course of action. For a moment, Tom feared that he would lift the scalpel and plunge it into his chest.

  ‘You impudent pup!’ he hissed. ‘You dare to challenge me, the leading expert in my field?’

  ‘O . . . only because I’ve worked with an expert too,’ Tom assured him. ‘In Manchester.’

  ‘Expert? What expert?’

  ‘It was er . . . Doctor . . . Wikepedia,’ stammered Tom. ‘Yes, he’s the talk of the city. Any question you ask him, he knows the answer. He’s brilliant. I’ve worked with him many times. He gave me the pills. He said to me, if I saw anybody with the plague up in Edinburgh, I was to use them.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of a coal cracking in the brazier. Tom looked and saw that deep in the heart of the coals, the head of the poker was glowing bright red. He tried not to think of it making contact with Alison’s neck.

  The Doctor took a deep breath and then he spoke. ‘You are a . . . headstrong boy,’ he said. ‘One might say, a foolish boy. If you’re wrong, this girl’s fate will be on your head. However . . . since time is tight and there are other cases waiting . . . ones who might accept the wisdom of an expert in this sickness . . . we shall give you the benefit of the doubt.’ He waved a hand at his assistants. ‘Out,’ he said. ‘We go on to the next case.’

  The two men looked disappointed but they hurried to obey him. Joshua pulled the poker from the fire and thrust it into a bucket of water. There was a loud hiss as the heat was abruptly quenched. The other man snatched up the smoking brazier and carried it out of the room. Finally, with visible reluctance, Joshua took the scalpel from The Doctor’s hand and returned it to its pouch. He followed his companion.

  ‘I’ll return tomorrow,’ said The Doctor. ‘You can be sure of that. And if there’s no marked improvement, the girl will be given the prescribed treatment. No arguments. Do you understand?’

  Tom nodded, and with that, The Doctor grabbed his cane from the end of the bed and swept out of the room. A moment later, the sound of his heavy boots went thudding down the stairs.

  Tom let out a sigh of relief and even Alison managed a pale and weary smile. ‘Thank you, Tom,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what would have happened if he’d touched me with that poker.’

  Tom turned back to face her, realising that the encounter had coaxed a sweat of fear out of him. He lifted an arm and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his blazer.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ he told her. ‘Just get better by tomorrow.’

  And he went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  Eleven

  There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Because of the white sheet in the window, no customers came to bring laundry and the tenants on the upper floors didn’t want to have anything to do with the people living below them – not until the all-clear was given.

  Missie Grierson spent much of her time in Alison’s room and the children, free from the everyday toil of their trade, moped around the first and second floors like three lost lambs. Tom found himself sitting with Morag in the kitchen. In fact, since his run-in with The Doctor, he couldn’t seem to go anywhere without her trailing along after him, looking up at him in some kind of bewildered awe. Clearly she had been very impressed by the way he’d handled himself. He’d sneaked off to the kitchen to t
ry to think about what was happening and what he might do to escape from here but Morag had still found her way to him. He hadn’t the heart to tell her to clear off. She was clearly worried and wanting reassurance.

  ‘Do you think Alison’s going to be all right?’ she asked him fearfully for perhaps the sixth time that day.

  He nodded. ‘Missie Grierson says she’s loads better. She reckons it’s her chicken broth that’s done the trick, but I know it’s the antibiotics . . .’ He glanced at her. ‘The, er . . . Sassenach pills,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘You saved her life,’ said Morag, almost as though she thought he might not have realised this. ‘She’ll always be in your debt.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘She doesn’t owe me anything,’ he said. ‘It was just lucky I had the pills with me. See, I had this ear infection a while ago but it went away by itself. I’d kind of forgotten I had them.’

  ‘Well it’s lucky you did. What’s an ear infection?’

  ‘Oh it’s just . . . you know, when you get earache.’

  ‘Like when you’ve been listening to Cameron?’ said Morag brightly and Tom grinned.

  ‘Yeah, that would do it,’ he agreed.

  Morag studied him intently. ‘Cameron says you’re a bampot,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I know he does.’

  ‘He says that you keep going on about being from the future.’

  ‘Only because it’s true,’ insisted Tom.

  ‘But . . . how could you be?’

  ‘I don’t really understand it myself.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Remember when I first met you on the Royal Mile? And I said I’d had a fall?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, that’s what happened to me – only when I began to fall I was in 2012 . . . and when I landed I was here, in 1645. It’s like I just . . . fell through time.’ He frowned. ‘I told Cameron all this but he didn’t believe me.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Morag, solemnly.

  Tom smiled at her. He reached into his pocket and took out his mobile phone. ‘See, I showed him this,’ he said, ‘I thought it might convince him if I could make it work, but of course I couldn’t get a . . .’ He broke off in surprise as he saw that the phone’s icon was now illuminated. It was only weak: a couple of bars, but it was a signal.

  He didn’t waste any time wondering how such a thing could be possible. He pressed his contacts button and hit his dad’s mobile number, noting as he did so that the battery level was already dangerously low. He lifted the device to his ear and listened intently. There was the longest pause and then a ringing tone. It sounded very far away and, Tom thought, it ought to. It was travelling hundreds of miles across hundreds of years. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Morag, mystified.

  ‘I’m phoning my dad.’

  ‘But what . . .?’

  He waved her to silence. The phone rang again and again and he began to think he was wasting his time. Then–

  ‘Hello?’ His dad’s voice: faint, distant, but unmistakeably his.

  ‘Dad, it’s me! It’s Tom!’

  ‘Tom?’ A pause. ‘Look, mate, you shouldn’t really be calling me at work. I’m kind of busy this morning.’

  ‘No, Dad, listen, this is important. Really important. I’m in Edinburgh, right, only not in modern-day Edinburgh. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s 1645 and I’m at this orphanage . . .’

  Dad laughed. ‘That’s very funny, Tom, but really, I’ve got way too much on this morning. You can tell me all about it when I get home, OK?’

  ‘When you . . . get home?’ That stopped Tom in his tracks. ‘But, Dad, I don’t . . . I don’t understand.’

  Dad answered, talking slowly as if to an idiot. ‘When I get home from work, we’ll speak then. OK? I’m sure whatever it is can wait a few hours, can’t it?’

  ‘But . . . don’t you know? About Mum, I mean?’

  ‘What about her?’ Dad sounded baffled, a little bit cross.

  ‘She . . . I’m sorry, there’s no easy way to say this, but she’s . . . well, left you, Dad. She’s moved up to Edinburgh with this other guy she met, Hamish. She left you a note and . . .’

  ‘Son, if that’s meant to be a joke, it’s in very poor taste.’

  Tom sat there, open-mouthed, his mind racing. ‘But, I . . .’

  ‘And what’s all this nonsense about Edinburgh?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s where Mum went,’ whispered Tom. ‘Isn’t it?’

  There was a long sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘Look, I know it hasn’t been easy for you,’ said Dad, speaking with great care. ‘With Mum going so suddenly, it was a great shock for both of us . . . and then all the stress of the funeral and everything, of course it got to us both. But I thought we were over that. I mean, it’s been a year now and we both have to go on with our lives . . .’

  Dad’s voice seemed to fade away to a background murmur. Tom sat there in a state of shock, only vaguely aware of two trickles of moisture running down from the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t sure why he was crying. He was pretty sure she wasn’t dead, not really, but it was the idea of it that had got to him. Morag was looking at him intently, her mouth open.

  ‘Tom?’ Dad’s voice: more urgent now. ‘Tom, are you still there?’

  ‘Uh . . . yes. Yes, I’m here.’ Wherever ‘here’ is, added a voice in his head.

  ‘Look, do you want me to come to school and get you?’

  ‘That er . . . that could be tricky,’ croaked Tom. He took a deep breath. ‘Tell me . . . tell me about Mum.’

  ‘Tell you about her?’

  ‘About what happened.’

  ‘You know what happened!’

  ‘I just . . . need to hear it. One more time. Please.’

  Another long pause. Tom was horribly aware that the battery on his phone was almost drained.

  ‘Well, she . . . Tom, she was driving down to the shops, wasn’t she? You know that much.’

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t remember why.’

  ‘Why? Well . . . she needed to look for a present for Veronica’s leaving do, didn’t she? And the lorry came out of a side street and I suppose maybe she wasn’t concentrating . . .’ Dad’s voice was ragged, just on the edge of breaking up. ‘Look, this is crazy. I don’t know why I’m going over it again.’

  ‘Because I need to know!’ It came out sounding angrier than Tom had intended, but his parents had never been good at keeping him in the loop. It had come as a complete surprise to him when they’d split up.

  Dad sighed. ‘They said it was very quick . . . the police

  . . . they said she wouldn’t have known what . . . what hit her . . .’ His voice trailed off for a moment and there was the sound of his laboured breathing as he tried to pull himself together. ‘Tom, do we have to talk about this now? Can’t we do it tonight, when I get home from work?’

  ‘Sure. Sure, Dad, I . . . I’m sorry; I just needed to hear the details.’

  ‘But we must have been through it a dozen times.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘And you’re all right?’

  ‘I’m fine now. I’ll . . . I’ll see you later. When you . . . when you get home. When I get home.’

  ‘OK. Bye, son.’

  Dad hung up. Tom sat there, trying to tell himself that this was just another alternative reality; it didn’t really mean that his mother was dead. But he couldn’t help wondering if – when he got back – if he ever got back – would this be the world that was waiting for him? What if one of the crazy things he’d been shown could actually come true? What then?

  Twelve

  He realised that Morag was still looking up at him intently.

  ‘Are you all right, Tom?’ she whispered. ‘I heard a wee voice coming from that thing. Like an imp in a bottle.’

  Tom nodded. He sniffed, wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Then a thought occurred to him and he hit the button on the phone that would display the few photographs he had
stored on there. He found the only one he had of Mum. She was standing in the kitchen at home, looking awkward because she never liked having her picture taken, but Tom thought it was a good one of her; she looked young and pretty, her dark hair brushed and shining. He held out the phone to show the image to Morag.

  ‘Oh, what a lovely miniature,’ she said.

  ‘That’s my mum,’ said Tom. ‘And it’s not a painting, it’s a photograph.’

  ‘She looks very grand,’ said Morag. ‘What are those things behind her?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Tom looked. ‘Oh, that’s just a kettle and a toaster. You make tea or coffee with this thing and you toast bread in that. You just press a button and when it’s ready, it pops up.’

  ‘I see,’ said Morag. ‘But where are the flames?’

  ‘There aren’t any. It just . . . gets hot. You heat the bread till it’s brown and you put butter on it and maybe some Nutella or something . . .’ He looked at her blank expression. She clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to show you my mum.’

  ‘It’s very lifelike,’ said Morag. ‘You can’t even see the brushstrokes.’

  ‘No, that’s because there aren’t any. I took this myself. Here, look. I’ll take one of you.’ He lifted the camera and framed Morag in the shot. ‘Smile,’ he said, but she just opened her mouth to ask something. He snapped the picture anyway. Then he turned the camera back to show her. There she was, sitting in her chair, her mouth open, a puzzled expression on her face.

  When she saw the photograph, Morag let out a gasp of surprise. ‘How did you do that?’ she cried.

  ‘It’s no big deal; everybody can do it where I come from. You just need a mobile phone.’

  ‘But that’s incredible!’ she cried. ‘Tom, I think you really are from the future!’

  Just at that moment the door opened and Cameron shambled into the room, looking bored.

  ‘Cameron!’ cried Morag. ‘You must come and look at this.’

  He glanced at the device in Tom’s hand. ‘I’ve already seen it,’ he said, his voice toneless. ‘That’s the machine that Tom uses to talk to people all over the world. Only it doesn’t work.’