The Bride's Farewell (11 page)

They entered town, curling down a steep hill and crossing over the Avon on a narrow wooden bridge. At the baker’s in Pevesy she bought yesterday’s stale loaf, hard halfway through, though this didn’t deter Dicken, who grinned happily and carried his crust off out of sight before swallowing it down. The meal did little for the emptiness at the core of her. At home there was bacon only rarely, but they’d an orchard and a cow, and she dreamed of stewed winter apples with cream.

Past the checkerboard flint shops and houses, past a tall white mill already buzzing with activity, she smelled and heard the blacksmith’s shop—the rusty tang of hot iron, the exhaling whoosh of the fire, the dark clang of hammers and hissing bellows—before she reached it. Pell slipped into the grimy interior, standing out of sight in a dark corner while her chilled limbs unfurled in the heat of the forge and she inhaled the familiar smoky combination of charcoal and iron and sweat with something like bliss. A broad-shouldered young man with a thick leather apron and a blackened face peered at her from behind the left hind foot of a heavy cart horse. She’d seen his features before, only softer, less defined.

“Hello?” he said, wondering at her presence in this place.

“You wouldn’t be Robert Ames?” And at his nod she said, “Your brother told me where to find you.” She felt suddenly shy.

The young man frowned. “Which brother? I’ve dozens.”

If she’d only asked the boy’s name! “The gardener’s lad at the big house just along—” She pointed, flustered.

He winked at her. “I haven’t really got dozens. What help did he offer?”

She told him of her search, straining to be heard above the roar of the forge and hammer, as he finished fixing a high-ridged plowing shoe to the great hoof. For a moment, he disappeared in a shower of sparks.

“Come outside,” the young man said at last, releasing the animal’s foot. Together they stepped into the farrier’s yard where a variety of horses stood tethered side by side, exhaling steam and patiently awaiting a turn. “I don’t know anybody by that name, and the other man, with dogs . . .” He frowned, shrugged, and shook his head. “You’re sure Pevesy is the right place?”

She was sure of nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So am I.” She could have cried.

“Don’t mind my asking, but what is it you’ll do now?”

Pell sighed. “I shall need to find work.”

“What sort of work?”

She paused. “I’m good with horses.”

“So am I,” he said, laughing. “Would you put me out of a job?”

“Only if I could, Mr. Ames,” said she, and smiled at him.

“We’ll ask my mother. If you’ll hold off till dinnertime, you can come home with me.”

Until then she made herself scarce, not wanting to inconvenience him. At midday, the young man led Pell and Dicken through the Pevesy streets at a brisk walk, till they reached a blue door with a small white horse painted on it. Pell stooped to examine it.

“My father painted it,” Robert said, “after the horse on the hill. It’s meant to bring luck.”

She’d take what was going, Pell thought.

Despite the bright day, the tiny house was dark inside, the table spread with a plain cloth on which was set bread, cheese, butter, and ham with a jug of beer. Robert Ames introduced her to his mother, explained that she was looking for a man by the name of Harris, or a poacher with dogs, who had stolen from her. Pell noticed that he didn’t explain her search further, adding only, “She knows our Michael.”

The woman’s face, pinched and suspicious, didn’t alter at either reference.
Stole what from you?
her expression said. She stared hard at Pell, and when Robert left the room a few minutes later she leaned in and spoke in a low flat voice. “He’s to be married,” she said. “And soon.” The rest was obvious:
So don’t be getting ideas about him.

Pell perched on the edge of a hard wooden chair, poised to leap up and flee. Dicken sidled up next to her.

“
He
can stay outside,” growled the woman, swatting at the dog. But a minute later, when Robert returned, Dicken slid under the table next to an old collie, making himself invisible in the shadows. As Pell tucked gratefully into bread and butter and ham, she could feel Dicken’s stare and, with a sigh, reached under the table with a chunk of fatty meat. A minute later, the dog stood up, wriggled round to Robert Ames’s knee, and laid his head on the boy’s thigh.

“You won’t be getting my lunch that way,” Robert said, pulling one of the silky ears.

“I will not have you feeding that animal,” hissed his mother “
Whssst!
” She aimed her broom at the dog. “Get out like I told you!”

Dicken scarpered and Pell looked away, ashamed.

“My aunt always needs extra help in the dairy,” Robert told Pell, and his mother frowned. “I’ll ask if she’ll take you on for a bit. You could board there, for now.”

Pell nodded, counting the time since Bean and Jack had disappeared. Five days. Five days that felt more like a lifetime, and no idea what to do or where to go next. She would take a job if it was offered, for now at least, and first solve the problem of having no money. In the meantime, anything might happen. People heard things, or were seen. Children reappeared or sent messages. Horses found their way home.

Despite a tendency toward despair, she remained unable to imagine that she would not soon be reunited with all that she had lost.

Twenty-one

B
ean’s clothes were taken away and the workhouse matron scrubbed him with water, and soap made of lye and soda, which hurt his skin.

“He’s not right in the head,” she told the girl who passed over the large jug of cold water. “Just looks and looks at you like that. Infuriating, it is.”

“P’raps he can’t hear.”

“Oh, he can hear, all right. And he can talk, I reckon, just don’t fancy it. DO YOU, BOY?”

The girl peered at the huge moon eyes, saw them blink rapidly to push back tears. “He’s not yet ten,” she said, “but his face is rather like an old man’s.”

“An old idiot’s, more like. Not right in the head, like I said.” The matron turned her attention to Bean, shouting close up in his ear, “ALL THROUGH NOW, IDIOT!”

Bean stared at her.

“See what I mean? He hears, he just don’t act.” She laughed an unpleasant laugh, and tossed him a small pile of clothing. “HERE, IMBECILE! PUT THESE ON.”

The girl took pity on him and picked up the clothes, handing them gently to the shivering boy. “Take ’em, there’s a good boy. They’ll warm you up now.”

Bean accepted the awful clothes with trembling hands and, crouching down, began dragging them over his limbs.

“He’s just the sort of brat I mean when I say certain of ’em shouldn’t be allowed to live. Just a burden on the rest of us. And what caused him to be that way-” She leaned in close to Bean again. “YER MOTHER HAVE LOOSE MORALS, DID SHE? DID YE KNOW WHO YER DAD WAS?” She turned to the girl. “See? He don’t even know who his dad was. Bet his mam didn’t neither. Lower than animals, that sort of folk. Should be smothered at birth.”

The girl gasped. “You mustn’t talk that way! He’s one of God’s creatures.”

“So says the likes of you.” Matron sniffed. “But God can’t help what’s thrown his way, whereas God-fearing folk can.”

One last time, the girl tried. “His clothes aren’t so bad. Someone took a care with them.”

“Probably stole ’em.” And with that, Matron folded her arms and closed the conversation. She had noticed the quality of his clothes, and would sell them on when she could.

Bean finished dressing and stood, head bowed, his hands clasped in front of him like a penitent.

“Come along now, we’ll take you to your dormitory,” said the girl, offering him her hand, but Matron stepped up and snatched him up by his hair, dragging him out of the room behind her. She was a big woman, and the child she dragged weighed practically nothing.

“Ugh! This’ll have to go,” she said, giving his hair an extra tug for good measure. “Probably crawling with vermin.” The three made their way along a long, cold corridor, Bean scurrying sideways to keep ahead of the huge raw hand dragging at him. At the end, they stopped. Matron opened a door and shoved Bean in with her foot. “That bed’s empty,” she said, pointing to a sack near the center of the room. “EMPTY, DO YOU HEAR? You can stuff it yourself if it’s not comfortable enough for you.” She slammed the door behind her, muttering about the undeserving poor, and how the master had the right idea in his running of the place, showing exactly what laziness brought in terms of wages.

Bean sat alone in the miserable room, trembling with unhappiness. He had no possessions, not even the clothes he’d arrived in, and despite the fact that his old clothes had not been recently washed, the quality of the wool and their careful construction had made them soft and comfortable on his skin. There was no hope that he’d find straw to stuff his bed, for the door was locked and the room’s only window far too high for him to reach. All alone for the first time in his life, without family or sister or anything familiar on which to rest his frightened eyes, he withdrew inside his head and curled up into the smallest ball he could make of himself, willing invisibility, wishing for warmth, hoping for kindness, praying for deliverance. None of which arrived.

Twenty-two

B
ean’s decision to leave Nomansland with Pell on the morning of her wedding could not easily have been predicted, for Mam doted on him despite his not being her child. From the time he was a babe, she could see straight through his pale skin to the blood pumping in tiny vessels below, and his legs never grew thicker—or straighter—than twigs. She feared for his health, slipping extras his way whenever she could.

“The son of a poor unfortunate,” Pell’s father had said on the day he turned up with the child. When his wife asked more about the woman, he explained it as a question of penury and paganism, a doubly sad case, and Pell’s mam wondered how much poorer than herself a woman would have to be before she began giving her children away.

Despite all manner of unanswered questions, she made a deal with her husband that night, accepting the baby on the condition that it would be her last. It was not in her husband’s nature to accept such terms, but he had resources other than his wife to fall back on and so agreed.

With a new baby in the house such a common occurrence, no one much noticed that Bean didn’t actually belong to them. From the beginning, Mam set him on her lap and sang to him while she worked, as she’d done with each of the previous nine. The sight of her gnarled, misshapen fingers against the baby’s smooth cheek made Pell look away.

The illness came to Nomansland via the usual route: London to Bournemouth on the coach, and then the slow, inexorable spread north and west, as cheerful carriers of fevers and plague traveled from village to village, selling trinkets, or household goods, or fish, or butchered meat to ladies who leaned in to catch every word of gossip from villages beyond their own, and caught every spray of spittle in the bargain.

First came the fever, the aches in the joints, and the cold that nothing could stop, then the burning that spread to arms and legs like a fire sweeping a field, and finally a fathomless cough that racked the entire body until it broke apart. George was the first to fall ill and—though nursed day and night by Lou and Mam—died having passed the malady on to his bed mates in the order that they lay: first James, then John, and finally Edward, sweet Ned, lying quiet and afraid, not wanting to be a bother, or to die.

Mam turned frantic and brittle, keening to herself in a way that made Bean cower, hands on ears, knees tucked under his chin, afraid. Each of her children’s deaths came as a physical blow, hammering her into the ground so that she lost height and emerged shrunken.

After Ned died, they sat numb and motionless, waiting for the disease to cross over and attack the others. But it never did. Bean still slept in the house, while the girls (dressed in rough linen and wool dresses with just a single shawl among them) stayed out of doors all winter and came home each day rosy with health. To the neighbors, it looked like carelessness to lose four boys and keep the girls, who weren’t worth half so much alive. For Mam, it was first the loss, then the disapproval of the loss that ruined her; the sense, somehow, that a lack of fastidiousness in blacking the stove might have caused her boys to slip away. No one much counted Bean as solace, what with his silence and his odd ways. Behind her back they called him the cuckoo in the nest.