The Midnight Omnibus

Everyone in the fen knows you can't catch the Midnight. It's gone before it comes. Sister Dorcas Lumb has been checking the times.

There was a timetable in a glass case at Wrayholme Cross, and everyone in the fen knew it was wrong.

The case was nailed to the post of the old shelter at the crossroads, where the drove road from Saltney met the lane up to the hospital. The shelter was three walls and a roof of black boards gone green, with a bench inside that nobody sat on. The case had a brass frame and a little brass lock that nobody had a key to, and behind the glass there was a printed card, yellow, in a typeface the jobbing printer in Holbeach said he hadn't owned since his father's day:

WRAYHOLME & FEN DISTRICT OMNIBUS MIDNIGHT SERVICE

and under that, in two columns, the halts: Wrayholme Cross, Saltney Drove, Hob's End, Thirl Bridge, Gedney Fen, and on down into the marsh, places that were only a name and a signpost. Beside each halt was a time. The times were different every night.

No one changed the card. People had watched. Lads from Saltney had sat in the hedge across the lane with a bottle and a lantern from dusk to dawn to see who came and changed it, and in the morning the card was different, and the lads would swear on their mothers that nobody had come near it. The Wrayholme & Fen District Omnibus Company had gone bankrupt in 1861. There had not been an omnibus on the drove road in thirty years.

But you could hear it. That was the thing. On a still night you could hear the bell.

People had tried to catch it. That was a thing lads did, the way they swam the Forty Foot Drain in March to show they could. You'd read the card at dusk, Wrayholme Cross 1.14, and you'd be at the shelter at ten past one with your lantern and your friend, and at a quarter past you'd hear the bell going away from you, off down the drove road in the fog. And there in the mud in front of the shelter would be the ruts. Two deep, fresh, iron-tired wheel ruts, sharp-edged, with the water still running into them, and the smell of hot horse on the air. You'd missed it. Everyone missed it. That was the saying in the fen, and they said it about everything, about the price of eels and the vicar's sermons and life: you'll not catch the Midnight. It's gone before it's come.

Sister Dorcas Lumb walked past the case twice a day for nine years before she read it properly.

She was night sister at the Wrayholme Cottage Hospital, which was twelve beds and a dispensary in a brick house at the top of the lane, built by a reed merchant's widow in memory of her husband and staffed, at night, by Dorcas alone. She came on at dusk and went off at seven, when Dr. Mallender rode over from Saltney to do his round. She was forty-six. She had a long plain face and big red hands and she counted everything. Pulses, with her lips moving. Breaths. The drops of laudanum into a glass. The steps from the ward door to the dispensary, which were twenty-two, and from the dispensary to the stove. She couldn't help it and had stopped trying. Her mother had said she'd count the hairs on the head of the Lord if He'd hold still.

And she had one rule, which she had never said aloud to anybody, which was that no one died alone on her ward.

It was not always easy to keep. The fen was a wet, killing country before the new pumps came, and a cottage hospital at the edge of it got the agues and the fevers and the drowned-and-dragged-out, the crushed legs from the drainage cuttings, the old ones who'd come in to finish. Some nights there were two going at once, at opposite ends of the ward, and she'd sit between them on a stool with a hand on each, counting both pulses at once under her breath, two different numbers, and her own heart going between them like a shuttle.

When they went, she looked at her watch. It was a good watch, steel, her father's. She set it every Sunday by the railway clock at Spalding. She would note the time to the minute, and then she would do what needed doing, and she would write the time in her own small black pocketbook, with the name.

She did not write it in the hospital book. Dr. Mallender wrote in the hospital book, at seven in the morning, when he came. He wrote the time he pronounced. Mr. Gotobed from Hob's End had died at twenty to three in the morning with Dorcas holding his hand and telling him about her sister's wedding, and the hospital book said Ezekiel Gotobed, aged 71, d. 7.10 a.m., in Dr. Mallender's handsome slanting hand, and that was the time that went to the registrar, and the parish, and the stone. Dorcas had said something about it once, early on. Dr. Mallender had explained, kindly, that a death was a medical fact, and a medical fact required a medical man, and until a medical man was present the fact did not, in law, exist.

So she kept her own book. Nine years of it. Names and true times.

It was Mr. Gotobed who made her read the card.

The morning after he went, she walked down the lane at a quarter past seven with her cloak pulled round her against the fog, and stopped at the shelter the way she sometimes did, to sit a minute on the bench before the long walk home to Saltney. She didn't sit. She looked at the case. She had looked at it a thousand times. The card for the night just gone was still behind the glass, the way it always was until dusk.

Wrayholme Cross 2.53.

She took out her pocketbook. E. Gotobed. 2.40.

Thirteen minutes. She stood there working it out with her lips moving. Thirteen minutes was what it took an old man with a bad hip to walk down the hill from the hospital door to the Cross. She knew that because she had walked Mr. Gotobed down the hill herself, a month before, the day he was first admitted and wanted to see the river.

She told herself it was nothing. She was a sensible woman and a church woman and she knew what a coincidence was. But she was also a woman who counted, and for the next six weeks, at dusk on her way up and at dawn on her way down, she copied the card into the back of her pocketbook. All of it, every halt.

Six weeks. Eight deaths on her ward. Every one of them had a time at Wrayholme Cross, and every time came after the death by exactly as long as it took to walk down the hill. Mrs. Rusling, who had the dropsy and could barely shuffle, had thirty-one minutes. The Cobley boy, who was fourteen and had been crushed in a cutting and died with his legs still strapped, had five. Five minutes was how long it took a boy to run it.

Nights when no one on her ward was going, there was no time listed at Wrayholme Cross at all. Only a little printed dash.

She started reading the Fen Gazette. The deaths column. Saltney Drove times matched Saltney deaths, in so far as anyone in Saltney had noticed the hour. Gedney Fen matched Gedney Fen. Thirl Bridge, on a night in the third week, showed a time at a quarter past three, and on the Thursday the Gazette said that Amos Cudd, reed-cutter, had been found drowned in the Thirl Bridge dyke, believed to have gone in during the night, the hour unknown.

The hour was not unknown. Dorcas sat in her kitchen in Saltney with the Gazette open on the table in front of her and her pocketbook open beside it, and her tea gone cold. Three fifteen at Thirl Bridge. And beside it, in her own copying hand, a mark she had made without thinking that night because the time had looked odd to her. It was the only time on the card that night that hadn't been followed, in the days after, by a death in the paper. She hadn't known what to make of it.

Amos Cudd had gone into the dyke alone. There had been no one with him. No one to walk him down.

She thought about the lights.

Everyone in the fen knew about the lights. Hob lanterns, the old people called them. Little cold flames that went wandering over the wet ground on still nights, low down, sometimes alone and sometimes in twos and threes, going slow, as if they were looking for a road and couldn't find it. Marsh gas, said Dr. Mallender, and the new schoolmaster agreed with him, and nobody else did. You didn't follow a hob lantern. Everybody knew that too. The ones who followed them went into the dykes.

Dorcas had looked at them from the hospital windows on a thousand nights. She had never once counted them. That night she counted them. On the stretch of fen between the hospital and Thirl Bridge, on one clear still night in late October, there were forty-three.

She sat at the window until dawn with her hands in her lap. She did not count anything else.

The boy's name was Albie Thewlis. He was seven years old and he came to her from the Union workhouse at Holbeach in the second week of November, with a sore throat that the workhouse master had let go most of a week too long. By the time he came up the lane in the carrier's cart the gray membrane was already across the back of his throat like a wet cobweb, and he was breathing through it with a sound like someone sawing very slowly through damp wood.

He was small for seven. He had red hair, and freckles, and nobody. The workhouse said his mother had died there two winters back. No father in the book.

Dr. Mallender painted his throat with glycerine and carbolic and did what he could, which was little, and rode home. Dorcas sat with him.

He was afraid of the dark. He told her so the first night, in a whisper, because he couldn't manage anything louder. He was afraid of the fen. At the workhouse the big boys had told him that the hob lanterns were children who'd got lost, and that they came looking at night for other children to keep them company. Dorcas told him that was a wicked thing to say to anyone and that the big boys would answer for it. She turned the lamp up. She told him stories. She told him about her sister's wedding, the same as she'd told Mr. Gotobed, because it was a good story with a goose in it, and he laughed, which hurt him, and he laughed again anyway.

On the third night, when she walked up the lane at dusk, she stopped at the case.

Wrayholme Cross 4.06.

Nothing else at Wrayholme Cross. Nothing at all the night before. There were three patients on her ward that week: Albie; an old woman from Gedney with her heart, who was going home on Saturday; and a navvy from the drainage works with a broken leg, who was as strong as a bullock and was eating everything in the house.

She stood in front of the glass with the fog coming up off the fields around her and counted three patients twice.

Then she went up the hill and took off her cloak and hung it on its peg and went to sit with him.

He slept until after three. She held his wrist and counted. The pulse was fast and thready and it skittered under her fingers like a bird in a box. His breath sawed. The fog pressed up white against the windows and the lamp hissed and the navvy snored at the far end of the ward, and somewhere out on the fen a dog was barking, on and on, at nothing.

At a quarter to four Albie opened his eyes.

"Is that the muffin man?" he whispered.

She listened. Down the hill, at the bottom of the lane, a bell was ringing. Slowly. A deep, heavy, iron-tongued bell, the kind that hangs in a frame. It rang once, and waited, and rang again.

"It's early," Dorcas said. She hadn't meant to say it.

"Muffin man's always early," Albie said. "At the workhouse. He comes before it's light." He thought about it. "We never get any."

"I'll get you one," Dorcas said. "When you're better. A whole plate."

He smiled, and closed his eyes, and the bell rang at the bottom of the hill. She counted his pulse. She counted it all the way down, slower and slower and then very fast and then slow, and she counted it to the last beat, and after the last beat she kept her fingers there and counted the silence for as long as it took to be sure.

She looked at her father's watch. Three fifty-one.

She wrote it in her pocketbook. A. Thewlis. aged 7. 3.51. Her hand was perfectly steady. She had done it two hundred times.

She closed his eyes and laid his hands together on the sheet. She sat back on her stool.

And something small and cold slipped into her right hand and held on.

She did not look down. She knew there was nothing there to see. She could feel it, though, as clearly as she had ever felt anything: a child's hand, the fingers thin, the palm cold and a little damp, the grip much tighter than a child that size should have. Holding on the way he'd held on to her sleeve the first night when she went to turn the lamp down.

Down the hill, the bell rang.

Dorcas stood up. She took her cloak from the peg with her left hand and got it round her shoulders, awkwardly, without letting go. She took the lamp. She went out through the ward door, twenty-two steps to the dispensary, eleven to the outer door, and out into the fog.

The lane down to the Cross was a quarter of a mile and steep and she had walked it twice a day for nine years. She could not see farther than a cart's length. The fog took the lamplight and made a small yellow room of it around her and she walked in the middle of the room down the hill, with the hand in her hand. Out on the fen to her left the hob lanterns were moving, more than she'd ever seen, low and slow and cold, and every one of them, she understood, was turned toward her. Toward the bell.

"Don't look at them," she said aloud. "Look at the lamp."

The hand gripped harder.

She came down to the crossroads at four minutes past four by her father's watch, and the Midnight Omnibus was standing at the halt.

It was bigger than she'd thought, and older. A long, high, closed coach on great iron-bound wheels, with a brass lantern lit on each side of the door and a curved roof, and on the roof, in an iron frame, the bell, still swaying. The woodwork of it was black and twisted, and she couldn't tell whether it had been carved to look like branches or whether branches had grown over it. The windows were lit from inside a deep warm red. There was a driver's box, and no driver. There was a conductor's step at the back, worn hollow in the middle by boots, and no conductor.

Four black horses stood in the traces with their heads up. Their eyes caught her lamplight and held it the wrong way, the way a lamp's wick holds a flame when it is turned down almost to nothing: a small steady orange glow, deep in, that had nothing to do with her lamp at all. They didn't stamp. They didn't blow. They stood.

The door of the omnibus opened from the inside, and nobody opened it.

Inside, the benches were red plush, worn shiny, and they were full. Dorcas saw Mr. Gotobed with his bad hip, sitting near the door with his hands folded on his stick, and he nodded to her, the way he used to nod when she brought him his cocoa. She saw Mrs. Rusling. She saw the Cobley boy, sitting very upright, his legs whole. She saw faces from the first year and from the fifth year and from last month. Every one of them she had sat with. Every one of them she had written down.

They moved along on the bench. They made room for a small one, by the window, where he'd be able to see out.

The hand in hers loosened. It didn't let go all at once. It went finger by finger. And then there was nothing in her palm but the cold where it had been.

The door closed.

Dorcas looked at her father's watch. Five minutes past four. She looked up, and the bell on the roof swung, and rang once, deep and slow, and the four black horses leaned into their collars all together without a word from anyone, and at six minutes past four by a steel watch set every Sunday by the railway clock at Spalding, the Midnight Omnibus pulled away from Wrayholme Cross exactly on time, for the first time in thirty years, because someone had been early.

She stood in the road and watched the red windows go off down the drove road into the fog. She counted eleven strokes of the bell going away down the drove road before the fog closed over the sound.

Out on the fen, one by one, the hob lanterns turned to follow it.

At seven o'clock Dr. Mallender rode up the lane, and came in shaking the wet off his hat, and went to the bed by the window and did what he had to do, and wrote in the hospital book in his handsome slanting hand: Albert Thewlis, aged 7, d. 7.15 a.m.

Dorcas took the pen out of his hand. She drew one clean line through 7.15 and wrote 3.51 above it, and her initials, and the date.

"Sister," said Dr. Mallender, astonished.

"That's when he went," Dorcas said. "I was with him."

He opened his mouth to explain about medical facts and looked at her face and closed it again. He took his hat and his bag and went down the lane. She heard him whistling all the way down, not well.

She walked down at a quarter past seven as she always did. She stopped at the glass case at Wrayholme Cross. The card for the night was still behind the glass, Wrayholme Cross 4.06, the way it always was until dusk.

But at the foot of the card, below the last halt, below the printer's rule, there was a line she had never seen there in nine years of passing it twice a day. It was in the same old type, a little smaller, the ink a little fresher, as if it had been added that night:

Wanted. Conductor. Wrayholme Cross. Apply within.

Dorcas Lumb stood in front of it in the cold with her cloak round her and her pocketbook in her hand. She counted the words. Then she counted the halts on the card, down into the marsh, every one of them, and she counted the hob lanterns still left out on the fen in the gray morning light, the ones that hadn't followed, sitting low and still in the reeds where no one had come for them.

There were a great many. She was a woman who could count to a great many.

She went home to Saltney and slept, and at dusk she walked back up the lane, and she was early.