The Bride's Farewell (20 page)

“Well,” he said, standing to greet her, “you may be just about the last person I expected to see today.”

“Are
you
John Kirby?” She could only stare. “I . . . it was the smith in town who sent me, if you please. He said you were looking for a boy.” She blushed. “For someone to help in the stables.”

“Well, I was, and I am,” replied Kirby. “But I wasn’t imagining that the someone who turned up would be you.”

“Nor was I expecting
you,
” she said, venturing a smile, for she was pleased to see him again. “And did you find a good home for the chestnut mare . . . for Desdemona? I have wondered about her many times since.”

He smiled. “Aye, to as soft-handed and meek a young lady as you can imagine, and I hear that they have never had an instant’s trouble with each other.” He shook his head. “You never can tell with horses.”

“I’m happy for them both,” Pell said, but her voice quavered with trepidation.

“And you?” John Kirby said at last, sitting back and frowning a little. “You’d better tell me by what fateful route you’ve arrived here from Salisbury Fair.”

“Please,” she said, and it seemed as if her entire body inclined into the word. “Please consider me for the job. It is one I can do.”

His face attempted to accommodate both a grin and a frown, arriving at neither satisfactorily. Instead, he shook his head and indicated that she should sit down.

“Now, then,” he said.

He listened carefully as she recounted the bare bones of her story, from Bean’s and Jack’s disappearance to her arrival here. She left out her time with Dogman, saying only that she had lived in a barn near the town. At the end, he shook his head. “You are not frightened of the world, are you?”

She answered softly. “I have not had the luxury.”

“Well,” he said after a moment, “I was looking for a boy, from one of the big houses by preference, with experience of the job and good references.” He tapped his fingers on the desk, musing. “But a decent boy isn’t easy to come by these days, and your experience is certainly”—he paused—“unusual.”

Neither said anything for a moment, and then John Kirby pointed at Dicken, who lay silent and polite at Pell’s feet. “He’s your dog?”

She nodded.

“There’s nothing more, is there?”

She could tell that her story caused him to consider what he was taking on. “Yes.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “There is.”

He waited.

“I have two children, sisters. I am all they have left in the world. They would have to accompany me.”

John Kirby watched her carefully, watched the color rise on her neck. “I see,” he said.

Tears pressed at her eyes.

“I must think about this.”

She nodded. A long silence fell. She knew that he was thinking of a way to say no, and prepared herself to hear it, squeezing her eyes shut against his words.

“You would have to work hard.”

She looked up.

“And keep the dog out of trouble.”

In the moments that followed, Pell felt tempted to beg and plead and swear commitment, but she said nothing. Despite what it cost her, she merely nodded, and waited.

“Well,” said John Kirby at last, a willing loser in the game of nerves, “I require a reliable boy who’ll work all day, and half the night if it’s called for, who’s good at his job and can handle the horses with problems as well as the others, who won’t oversleep or drink or cause trouble, who doesn’t require much in the way of pay—at first, in any case.”

Pell listened carefully.

He continued. “I have a child of my own and sympathy for your troubles. The children can stay, but—”

“They can work!” Pell half rose and spoke quickly. “They’re hard workers, and accustomed to horses.”

John Kirby nodded gravely. “So I will take you on, all of you, for two months, as a trial.” The expression on her face made him smile. “Now come and have a look at the place,” he said, and stood, leading her up to the room above the hayloft, which was snug and comfortable, a world away from the stinking hole in Osborne’s dairy. When they encountered another of the grooms, she greeted him soberly, and John Kirby watched her. “You’re not attracted to trouble, are you?”

Pell stared back at him, defiant.

“I didn’t say you were, but it’s as well to check.”

Twenty-four horses were stabled below, and he introduced each to her with a précis of relevant details: who in the household rode or drove which, what sort of feed each required, what exercise. All were housed in large, airy boxes, twelve on each side of the aisle. Iron hayracks held green hay that wasn’t dusty, and the straw underfoot looked deep and clean. The feed room smelled of bran and maize and oats, the tack room of leather and beeswax. In each of these places, Pell radiated such an intensity of contentment that John Kirby could feel it simply by standing beside her.

Privately, he felt pleased with his latest employee, with her quiet manner and graceful figure. Despite the unexpectedness of her.

Thirty-six

P
ell collected Frannie and Ellen from the inn and moved them all to Highfields, to the room in the hayloft above the barn. On the way, she stopped at a house with a great crowd of children playing games in front and offered their mother the brand-new pinafores she’d made for the girls in exchange for outgrown breeches and shirts. It was an odd request, and if the newness of the wool had been less alluring the woman might have refused on that basis. But in the end she relented, and Pell dressed the girls in worn breeches and shirts, so they would not draw attention to themselves around a stable. She cut their hair short, which neither child much resented, and together they looked like skinny boys with big eyes and open expressions.

The welcome John Kirby offered was bemused. Instead of the pretty little girls he’d imagined, Pell arrived with two ragtag creatures—three, if you counted the dog—that might have been boys or girls or anything in between. He frowned, and wondered what sort of witchcraft Pell practiced to have persuaded him to take them all on, in addition to the hound. But he had already discovered that he had no stomach for refusing her, and, in any case, something in her expression defeated his intent.

There are men who will on no account trust their horses to a female groom, but John Kirby was not one of them. He consulted Pell when it came to the handling of a horse that balked, or bit, and although she never offered an opinion before it was required, she would tell him quickly and without hesitation what she thought. Often, the horses he found troublesome presented no challenge to her; she could refit a saddle to stop this one napping, talk a hunter into going clean over hedges, stop a chewer from chewing or a bolter from bolting—merely by changing what it ate, or how it was tacked, or shod, or ridden, or spoken to.

On arrival, she put Frannie at once to grooming and left her to work her way down one side of the row. Ellen was deathly frightened of horses, and nothing Pell could say would change her mind. Horses had delivered the bones to Andover each morning, the stinking wagon unloaded and then reloaded with the daily dead.

So Pell set her to cleaning tack, showing her how first to use a soft cloth across the surface of the soap with a bit of water, rubbing it into the old leather and wiping down the result. Ellen rubbed hard, removing sweat and wax and dirt until the harnesses shone like new. Next, she buffed saddles, one after another, swooping across them with long smooth strokes of stiff boar and soft badger brushes until the leather shone with a rich mahogany glow and her thin arms ached. Harness brasses needed careful rubbing with vinegar to clean, and iron bits were rubbed and polished like silver. And when John Kirby’s son toddled into the barn in search of his father Ellen lured him out from under the perilous hind feet of the horses and sat him next to her in the tack room, talking and telling him stories until his mother came to fetch him home.

Relieved of grooming, Pell went to work. She applied oil to forty-eight pairs of hooves, closed off the mouse holes in the feed bins, scrubbed every manger clean, and, at the end of each day, piled them high with new hay, swept the wide oak floorboards clean, and refilled every bucket with fresh water. With the three sisters employed sunup to sundown, it wasn’t long before every corner gleamed bright as day.

While Ellen could not bear to be near a horse, Frannie could not be kept away. Within a week of their arrival, she began to rise at dawn, standing on a box to heave the heavy saddles onto horses whose withers she could not reach. She galloped the ones that required exercise, nearly invisible in the flow of a mane, while Kirby watched with trepidation. Only the sweet perfection of balance and voice kept Frannie safe, for she was not strong enough to exert force against an animal weighing nearly a tonne. Kirby could barely bring himself to look, so certain was he of disaster, but Pell stood beside him in a trance of admiration, reliving her own days of being fearless and free.

The three sisters worked for the privilege of having work and of being together, with only Pell’s pay as a reward. And still John Kirby worried, and wondered if he’d done the right thing. But even he had to admit that the work was done, and done better than before, and that it cost him no more than it had before, and perhaps it was his tidy mind that added up the figures and couldn’t come to any sum that didn’t favor himself.

The two little girls with chopped-up hair and angel faces charmed the entire household: one with a calf’s soft eyes, the other an agile, grinning imp. Even the most dangerous horses settled for Frannie, who was the master’s favorite. And who could blame his attachment to the pretty boy-girl with flashing brown eyes and the same voice as her sister for calming a nervous beast?

Ellen watched everyone and knew everything, and if a tool or a farthing or a bootjack went astray you had only to ask her where it might be and how it got there. With everyone else occupied, she stood a little apart and saw the patterns in life; she was happiest with everything in its proper place, and every person, too.

One morning John Kirby arrived early to find Frannie mounted high on Midas, a tall bay thoroughbred of excellent breeding with an unpleasant habit of seeking to remove—by whatever means possible—any rider who settled on his back. In hopes of saving the life of the person foolhardy enough to mount him, he was always ridden with a complete arsenal of restraints. Despite this, his temper expressed itself in a spinning shimmy with such vertical intent that he was constantly in danger of toppling over backward upon his rider. If, for some reason, this failed to unseat the annoyance, he would accelerate to a gallop, drop his head between his forelegs, and somersault forward. So he was suicidal as well as angry, and Pell agreed with John Kirby that he should be sold at once.

She agreed, that is, until it came to her attention that Frannie had been riding him each morning with nothing but a headstall to guide him, galloping and whispering in his ear the entire time, then sitting back and settling him into a walk smooth as cream.

“He doesn’t like the curb,” she told Pell. “It hurts his mouth.”

And that was that.

When night fell, the sisters slept together on one straw mattress. Pell promised that she would never again leave them, but a kind of panic flared whenever she was out of their sight. Ellen, especially, woke howling for Sally and Mam at night, unable to settle until Pell pulled her close on one side and Dicken stretched out along the other. Frannie dreamed of Midas and it quietened the echo of crackling fire and cracking bones, but Ellen smelled smoke and the stench of burned flesh every time she closed her eyes, and refused to be comforted.

It would be untrue to suggest that John Kirby never imagined his own wife gone and himself embracing Pell, taking on the two little girls for his own. But it went against his better sense (and he had no shortage of better sense) to fall under the thrall of a young woman with so complicated and unconventional a past, and so he did not.

Thirty-seven