The Bride's Farewell (8 page)

A peculiar dark gray ceiling of cloud covered the plain, underneath which ran an illuminated blue stripe of sky and the bright yellow-green of rolling grassland. As they traveled, Esther collected plants to dry and sell for remedies in little cloth bags. “Dogstail,” she muttered as she walked along beside the wagon, “fescue, red clover, sneezewort, scabious, horseshoe vetch, cat’s-ear.” Evelina followed, picking her own bouquet of flowers, which she later abandoned in a basket to wilt.

Pell could see the mounds of barrows in the distance, and Esther warned her to remain vigilant against spirits of the dead, which would arise and scramble up her legs, sliding over her waist, across her ribs, and into the empty places in her heart. Despite not believing in spirits, Pell couldn’t chase away this fearful image, and all evening as they rode through the uncanny landscape she shuddered at the ghosts whose cold tongues lapped at their ankles, hissing and threatening and plucking at their hems. Esther gave each child a small bundle of mullein and white sage to ward off bogles and revenants.

The rolling plain seemed to stretch forever in all directions. They progressed slowly, for Esther’s wagon was heavy, and Moses showed no inclination to hurry up hills. As they rested at the top of one, they could see the ancient giant’s ring far ahead, its massive stones toppled like building blocks. Pell shivered at the weird arrangement of boulders and Esther swung out to the east, giving the ancient stone circle a wide berth, tying her skirts tight around her ankles as they passed, not wanting the spirits to run up between her legs and impregnate her with phantom infants. They hurried along, staying off the ground and keeping the children inside the wagon until they’d lost sight of the ring and the barrows surrounding it. Whatever her beliefs, neither woman would risk disturbing the dead.

Every so often Esther made observations about what lay ahead on the road or what would happen if they turned here or cut across that meadow. “Just beyond here is a baker,” she’d say, and place a few pennies in the grubby hand of one of the boys, who’d fly off across a golden swell of waving grasses and grazing sheep, and return with a loaf of excellent bread. She knew every byway and huddle of houses on the plain, down to a dangerous ditch or an old elm up ahead that would make a good stopping point.

Pell noticed that once or twice a day there would be travelers she knew, either to nod at or talk to in her quick Romany, with much gesticulating up the road and down the road, pointing east or west or both. But they never invited her to share a meal, or their tea, or to set down and stay, and there was something in Esther’s manner during these encounters that made Pell wonder, for the Gypsies they passed on the road seemed to walk and camp together in sociable groups. Perhaps it had to do with the children’s father, if there was one, for his name was never mentioned.

At every crossing of paths, Esther left scraps of cloth tied on tree branches, or piles of sticks and stones. She did not discuss their significance, or for whom they were intended, and Pell did not presume to ask. Perhaps, Pell thought, this network of pointings and signs added up to some sort of map; perhaps the world surrounding Salisbury Plain existed intact in Esther’s head, complete with every tree and hedge and fork in the road. This made Pell imagine her as an owl, floating silently over the countryside, aware of each stile, each fallen branch, each rut in the road, each mouse and shrew.

But she didn’t know where to find Bean or Jack, which would have been a good deal more useful.

As they traveled along a quiet stretch of road, Esther turned to Pell and asked, in a voice that assigned no importance to the question, “Your father is a preacher?”

Pell nodded, baffled by the woman’s ability to know things. “Yes. A nonconformist man of God. From Nomansland. He lived with us only when no one would pay him to preach elsewhere.”

Esther turned away with a weird smile. “I met a man like that once.”

“He is not the only one plying such a trade.”

“True.” And then, “I hoped to meet that man again.”

Pell frowned. “Most meet such men only when they cannot avoid it.”

“He wronged me twice,” she said. But did not elaborate further.

For a time they were both silent. Then Esther turned once more to Pell, with a slow smile. “And you? You left home to seek your fortune?”

“I left home on my wedding day.”

The other woman threw her head back and laughed, nodding her approval. Neither of them said anything more.

The midday meal was kettle broth made of hot water and bread with a bit of lard and a handful of grubby bram bleberries. Esther stuffed tobacco into her clay pipe and puffed away, sipping her tea, while Pell took Evelina onto her lap and showed the little girl her book of birds. The child’s eyes hardly dared blink, and it occurred to Pell that she had never seen a book before. In an atmosphere of near-religious awe, the child pointed to each bird, her finger hovering off the page, fearful of touching the picture and silent with amazement. Pell told her the names, which Evelina spoke in Romany along with the sound each made. Her favorite was a delicate pencil-and-watercolor sketch of a puffin, at the sight of which her eyes opened wide, astonished that such a bird—with its big bill and orange feet—existed.

Even after Pell put the book away, the child remained stock-still, staring at the place it had been, willing it to return, while Pell gazed at Evelina, willing the hard little face to take the place of the silent boy she’d lost.

Later, Pell found her squatted down, drawing her version of a puffin carefully in the dust with a twig, while the rest of the children gathered round hooting in disbelief. When she saw Pell watching, she stopped drawing and stared back with silent dignity, waiting for her to leave.

Esmé, who had been eyeing Pell with a look of misery and outrage since they set off together, continued to glare at every encounter, as if Bean’s disappearance indicated carelessness on Pell’s part. She had a disconcerting way of stealing up silently when Pell least expected it, hissing a single question over and over: “Where’s Bean?”

Eammon and Errol had different games in mind, running off across the plain in search of things to eat. They disappeared so often, and for such long stretches of time, that no one seemed to notice their absences, or to find it surprising when they appeared now and again with a scrawny chicken or rabbit for the pot. Pell asked if Esther ever worried she might lose them, and she replied that if one or two children went missing there’d be more food for the rest. Nothing in her face indicated whether this was her version of a joke.

On one particular evening, the boys turned up with a bag they’d half carried half dragged from some distance away. Pell had disposed of her scruples and felt pleased at the thought of meat that night. But what they pulled out of the sack was wriggling and whining and glad as day to be free, with two pointed faces, a soft black and gray coat, and a body swinging wildly in all directions attached to two wild sweeps of tail. Once separated, the creatures looked ugly as skinned rabbits, all ribs and bony legs and long straight feet, and just two more mouths to feed as far as Pell could see. When she asked the boys what their plans were, and could she put the beasts in the pot for dinner, Eammon grinned, picked the male up by its scruff and handed it to her, saying, “He’s for you.”

Well, the problem with creatures is how they latch onto you with their eyes, and the smaller and skinnier the creature, the bigger and more determined the eyes. “Take him back,” she told them, but they danced away and meanwhile the thing managed to scruffle its front half up onto her lap faster than she could push it off. She turned impatient with Eammon, who just grinned and said, “He likes you, all right.”

What was left of her heart sank for being burdened yet again with attachment.

The next quarter hour was spent digging the creature out of her sleeve or from under her skirt or trying to untangle it from around her feet, and Pell thought it had probably been stolen and missed some person at its proper home.

But Esther looked at the animals dispassionately. They were not babies but scrawny adolescents, old enough to have lost their needle-sharp teeth and endearing expressions. “Whoever owned them didn’t much care for them,” she said. Which was a sentiment there was no arguing with, especially once Eammon explained that they’d found the animals already nicely packaged in the sack, with a large stone thrown in for good measure.

The rest of the little ones snatched them away and took them off to worry till the poor things cried for help and quiet, and there was nothing to do but claim them both back and feed them bits of bread and milk till they curled up together, eyes closed and whimpering. Pell ate a meal not much better than the one she gave them, and when the time came for sleep, the children took the bitch and Pell pushed the dog away from her so that it curled up tight in a miserable ball alone beside her on the cold ground. And finally, half-asleep and wholly impatient, Pell pulled the shivering creature in beside her, where, with an almost human sigh of gratification, it placed its head against her heart and went immediately to sleep.

The next day at dawn when she rose to light the fire, the animal followed exactly at her heel or under it. She looked down and, despite the appeal in its eyes, would not grudge it either bread or feeling. But Eammon and Errol saved her thinking about it further by whistling the pair off across the fields, and almost before the tea had finished brewing and the breakfast had been cleared, they were back with three fat rabbits killed clean, and the creatures happy with a carcass to chew in addition to whatever scraps of skin and bone didn’t go into the pot. After just a few good meals both animals looked less like ugly crows, and with rabbits in the pot Pell found herself accepting their presence more gratefully. Not that it mattered a whit whether she accepted them or not.

In daytime, the two would join the muddle of children at her feet until she drove them away, and at night the bitch was banished to a place underneath the wagon, while the dog waited till Pell was asleep and crept round silent as a thief so that next time she woke it would be there, with its spine against the curve of her belly where she’d once kept Bean, and its head pressed as near as possible to the beating of her heart.

It didn’t have a name at first, though the little ones called them Dicken and Dog. And despite Dog being a bitch, and despite Pell wanting to come up with something better, the names stuck.

Sixteen

P
ell’s father’s family were clergymen of the worst sort: charming, immoral, and unkempt, with livings too small to keep a family and behavior unbecoming men of God. Each generation spawned another more engaging and worthless than the last, capable of providing neither a living nor spiritual guidance, unless someone needed guiding to an inn. They had always tended toward the outer edges of religion, and Pell’s father, educated to a point that made his position impossible in every social sphere, compounded the sins of his fathers by declaring himself a nonconformist, a Primitive Methodist with a firm belief in God’s love for the poor and the weak—which Pell considered a lucky coincidence given the state of his finances and temper. As for her mother’s family, what they lacked in fecklessness they made up with a talent for hopeless marriages.

Pa’s best quality was the fact that he was so often gone. What he got up to while preaching out on the road remained a mystery that no one in the family wished to solve, but there were rumors, and one day he arrived home with a boy baby swaddled up tight in the shape of a bean, and turned the child over to Mam to bring up as her own. Pa never said whose baby it was, but the dark hair and huge eyes matched one or two of his other children well enough to raise certain conjectures.

Birdie’s family were the other sort—the hardworking, honest, resourceful sort of family. He had a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather, all with a lifelong dedication to lifestock. It was Birdie’s family taught Pell everything she wasn’t born knowing about animals, and it was Birdie gave her Jack. Not that Jack was the sort of gift a person would receive gladly.

From the start, he was an odd-looking creature, with big raw joints under his dull coat, and every bit of him awkward and badly attached, or so it seemed. His dam, a plain, bad-tempered thing with not much to recommend her, first failed to produce enough milk and then compounded the insult by losing patience and kicking him away. None of the other mares would have him.

Birdie’s father was all for letting him die, not believing there’d be much use in him, but after a good deal of begging and bothering he handed the foal over to Birdie, who handed him over to Pell. She recognized at once that he was more a burden of work than a gift, but she took pity on him, hauling him up onto her lap and dipping her fingers in mare’s milk so he could suck. And eventually the poor thing got so displeased with her interference that he picked himself up, shook her off, and drank from the bucket all on his own as if to say, “There, I hope you’re happy now.”