Ash (7 page)

“Do you recognize something?” Lady Isobel inquired as Ash sat down in a stiff-backed chair next to the desk.

“They look like my father’s seals,” Ash replied.

“This one is.” Lady Isobel picked up a letter and held it up to the light. “It is from your father’s steward in Seatown.” She picked up the second letter and said, “This one is from the King’s treasurer in the City.” Her face wore a look of grim decision. “Do you know what this means?”

Ash shook her head.

“Your father’s business was not doing wel when he died,”

Lady Isobel said bitterly, “and he spent my inheritance on it. I 55

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did not know this until now. This letter says that your father has debts that I must pay for him now that he has died.” Her voice took on a steely quality as she said, “I do not have the money to pay for your father’s mistakes. My first husband left me with only this property to support me; that is why I married your father, because I thought he was a good man who would provide for me and my daughters. But he was a liar.”

Ash objected, “He was not. You—”

“Be quiet,” her stepmother said. “I am telling you these things because you need to know what sort of family you come from. You are not my daughter; you are your father’s daughter, and you are going to pay his debts.”

“What what do you mean?” Ash asked in a thin voice.

“Because of these taxes, I must sell your father’s house in Rook Hill,” her stepmother said. “It is of no use to me. That wil solve some of these problems, but not al of them. I could send you out to service in the City, but I can make better use of you here. Therefore you wil start by helping Beatrice in the kitchen every morning. In the afternoon you wil review Ana and Clara’s lessons on your own, and then you wil assist Beatrice in preparing and serving supper.” Lady Isobel paused, and then looked directly at Ash before saying, “If your father had known how to manage his finances better, you would not be put in the position of paying for his mistakes. As it is, I wil expect you to work off his debts without complaint, because you are his daughter and it is your responsibility. Do not shirk your duties.”

Ash was silent. She felt numb.

Lady Isobel folded the letters and put them in the desk 56

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drawer. “Now go and find Beatrice. I’ve already told her about this; she’l need you to help her tonight because Sara won’t be coming here again. I can’t afford to pay Sara when you can do the work instead.”

Ash stood up and left the cold parlor, and went slowly to the kitchen. Beatrice was pul ing the stew pot off the stove, and when she saw Ash hovering in the doorway she said,

“Come over here, girl, and give me a hand. Lady Isobel told me you’re to work with me now.”

Ash went toward the broad wooden table where Beatrice had set the pot down.

“Get the plates and bowls from the cupboard,” Beatrice ordered. “Don’t just stand there.”

Ash went to the cupboard and took out the plates she was accustomed to eating on. The stew smelled like thyme and roast mutton that night, and when Beatrice lifted the lid, the fragrant steam wafted up in a hot cloud. Beatrice dished out the stew into three bowls and began to slice the bread. “Take that out to the dining room and light the candles,” Beatrice said, gesturing to the bowls.

The dining room was dark and Ash lit the candles with shaking hands. As the room came into light, it was as if the world had shifted: three place settings, three chairs, three plates.

There had never real y been a place for her, after al . She went to tel Ana and Clara to come for supper.

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Chapter VI

s the winter passed, Ash learned
the feel of firewood in the morning, the cold bark digging into her fingers as she A carried the rough logs upstairs, depositing them one by one into each bedroom. She learned how to set the tinder in place so that the wood caught fire as quickly as possible; she learned how to breathe gently on the first sparks to coax them into flame. Her fingers became cal oused from scrubbing the hal floor, and she learned how to carry the heavy bucket of soapy water up the stairs without spil ing a drop. When she flung the dirty water out the kitchen door, she watched the brown liquid soak into the ground where it left a stain on what remained of the snow. And she came to know the corners of the drafty stone house wel . On the first floor landing there was a chip in the plaster where a dark hole opened up in the wall just above the floor, and sometimes she would lie flat on her bel y and peer into the darkness. In the parlor, the window 58

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seat lifted up to reveal a locked chest carved with vines and roses; the keyhole was wedged shut with a wad of tissue, and she could never quite pry it out.

When she had first begun to work, she had been clumsy and slow. She knocked her knees against the bucket, bruising them.

She cut her hands on the firewood and nearly singed off her eyelashes while fanning the morning flames. Her stepmother berated her for her mistakes, and initial y Ash would reply sharply, but each time she felt the sting of her stepmother’s ringed hand on her cheek, she sank further into silence. Once, as Beatrice was sponging off a cut on the corner of Ash’s mouth that had been delivered by her stepmother’s hand, she said gruffly, “You’re making things harder on yourself. It does no good to anger her.” Ash looked at the housekeeper, whose mouth was set in a frown. Sometimes Ash felt as though her own heart were frozen. She did not dare to let herself feel a thing except anger, because that warmed her. But in that moment she saw the hint of tenderness on the older woman’s face, and the grief inside her reared up again, coming out of her in a broken sob.

Beatrice looked startled, and Ash covered her face with her hands, pressing the emotion back down. “It hurts, does it?”

Beatrice said, not unkindly. “It’l heal up sooner than you think.”

That winter seemed to stretch on interminably, but spring fi-59

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nal y crept back to West Riding to suffuse the meadow in a glow of pale green. Ash’s thirteenth birthday was shortly after the Spring Festival, when flower peddlers flooded the market square with buckets of daffodils and crocuses. In Rook Hil , her mother would have woken her up with gifts wrapped in silk, but this year Ash woke up alone just as dawn broke and dressed quickly in the dim light of her bedroom. She went outside to the pump and paused in the kitchen garden, smelling the spring air: the sharp tang of the herb garden, the slight sweetness of new meadow grass, the trace of damp that lingered from the morning dew. She had dreamed the night before that she was walking down the hard-packed dirt path that led from the Wood to the hawthorn tree where her mother was buried. She could see the headstone, but though she kept walking, she could never reach the end of the path.

She had dreamed that same dream many times over the course of the winter, but in recent days, it had become more insistent. Now she stood in the garden looking out across the meadow at the budding trees of the King’s Forest, and she felt something inside of her turning toward those trees. Perhaps, she thought, she could just leave.

The idea sent a jolt through her, and she glanced back at the house as if someone might have overheard her thoughts. But al she saw was the kitchen door hanging partway open. Taking a deep breath, Ash picked up the wooden bucket and went to the pump, where she lifted the cold iron handle, creaking, to release a flood of icy water. Her hands trembled.

The opportunity came a week after her birthday. Lady Isobel had taken her daughters to luncheon with the vil age philoso-60

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pher, and Beatrice had gone into the City on an errand. Ash stood at the front door and watched the carriage roll away with her stepmother and stepsisters inside, and then she shut the door after them. The house was silent. She took her cloak and went out the kitchen door and did not look back.

It was a pleasant, warm day, and the sun was nearly overhead. The herbs brushed against her skirt as she went down the path and out the low iron gate to the meadow. She thought that if she walked along the border of the Wood she would eventual y come to another vil age where she could hire a carriage with the promise of payment upon arrival in Rook Hil .

But when she reached the treeline she felt a compulsion to continue into the forest instead of turning west. The sound of birds was clear in the air; the sun dappled the ground in patches of yel ow and light green; the new leaves whispered gently when the breeze rustled through. The trail was carpeted in a slightly damp layer of fallen leaves from last autumn, and the ground was spongy beneath her feet. As she walked into the rich smel of sunlight and growing things, a path opened wide before her like an old carriage road just rediscovered.

Her original plan, tentative though it was, had been forgotten. Her feet moved as if of their own wil , and she felt a dim sense of surprise that she was so sure of her destination: straight forward along the path, where the distance lay shadowed in green and yel ow and brown, magnetic in its mystery.

Al around her she felt the Wood breathing, her senses alive. It was as if she could see the leaves unfurling gracefully from their jewel-like buds, the young beetles creeping purposeful y forward on the earth. She did not think of her stepmother 61

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anymore.

She walked this way for a long time, but the light did not change; it seemed to always be morning. The sun continued its bright blinking overhead, and when shafts of golden light came through the leafy canopy, dust motes hung in the air, glittering as bright as diamonds. It was an enchantment, she was sure.

This Wood was so gentle in comparison to the dark, thick forests near Rook Hil . There, the evergreens were so tal and so old she could not see the tops of them; here, oak and birch branches broke the sky into lacy filigrees of light green, exposing the tender blue above.

But at some point in her passage, the trees began to change.

They stretched tal er, and the soft, pale bark darkened, rough-ened. She put her hand to a tree and touched the lichen growing dark green upon brown, and it felt like old cork, dry and crumbling. Here the sun mellowed, took on the cast of late afternoon, and the shadows seemed to fal a bit longer; the forest had sunk into a deeper silence, magnifying what sounds did arise. The sudden, quick crash of a fox bounding through the brush was as loud as the slam of a great wooden door.

She came upon a bubbling stream, and she knelt down and dipped up a handful of icy water to drink. She gasped at the shocking cold of it. Wide, flat stones showed her the way across the streambed, and she stepped across careful y to avoid fal ing into the water. On the other side of the stream the Wood transformed into the dark forest she had known as a child: peeling, soft brown bark on the trees, and leaves like drooping feathers. The sky seemed to retreat far above, and she had the strange sensation that she was shrinking, that soon 62

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she might be no larger than an ant crawling over the ground.

Here the Wood was a secret place, and she knew she was tres-passing. But she went on, because she could not go back.

The path had narrowed; it was no longer the wide highway used by hunting parties. Instead, tree roots crossed the path, half-hidden by the mossy undergrowth. She passed young saplings clustering around the bases of the tal est trees like children surrounding their mother. She felt an old peace there, and something in the air that smelled like magic. When the path shrank to an uneven track that she could barely see in the deepening dusk, she felt a part of her heart sink into place: This was where she should go. It felt like home. The gathering darkness, the rise and fal of the ground, the giant, silent trees around her like columns supporting the vanishing sky al of it was familiar. And soon the path became clear again: It was narrow but hard-trodden, and the trees parted from it wil ingly.

In the distance she could see the edge of the Wood, some kind of building outlined in dim light, and perhaps a hil . She felt a faint prickling on the back of her neck, as if she had been to that place before. The ground descended in a slope toward the edge of the Wood, and when she approached the downhil portion, she knew where she was.

She stepped out of the Wood into the shadow of the hawthorn tree, and looked up the hil at the house where she had grown up. The windows were dark and empty.

She went to the tombstone that marked where her mother lay buried and knelt down on the new grass before it. She felt tears well up in her eyes and let them fal down her cheeks. She touched the stone marker, feeling the imprint of her mother’s 63