NaGeira (7 page)

“Sheila!” my mother called.

I could not reply.

By the time I heard the door creak open, the sheet was covering my head. I knew they would see both of us right away. How could they not? Thomas Ridley’s feet were not covered, neither was one of my arms.

Not a word was spoken. I tried to imagine what they were doing as the floor creaked. Someone—Mr. Ridley, by the boar’s tread—came right to the foot of the bed. I expected the blankets to be pulled violently from us, exposing our nakedness. But there was only hush, then the soft creaking of the floor, then a silent
withdrawal to the exit. Eventually, the door creaked shut. I heard whispering outside, then louder conversation retreating to the stairs.

I lowered the sheet from my head. Thomas Ridley stared across at me, then closed his eyes and buried his face in the pillow.

———

Fear can defeat a person more surely than a sword, I realize now as I gaze at the calamity that is my life—the withered timbers of my walls, the cracked medicine jars resting on my shelf, the dried worms, my splintered crossbeam.

I could have answered my mother’s call and told her I would be down in a short time. Thomas Ridley could have hidden under the bed as soon as he heard his father’s voice. Why did we panic and let our silence give ourselves away?

I push myself up from the straw mattress and lower my feet to the cold floor. Another day in this settlement seems too much to endure.

I wish I could crawl back inside the past. I remember pulling the sheet over my head when my mother called my name. If I could go back to that time like a lizard re-entering its long-discarded skin, I could change everything. If I could answer, “Yes, Mother, I am dressing, I’ll be down soon,” the whole of my life from that moment on would have been quite different.

I find my old chest hammering at the thought. It’s as though this were a call to action, as though part of me believes I could change it all now. I’m sorry for the disappointment that must
inevitably descend from my brain to my pulsing veins and racing heart. It’s true my whole life turned on this single omission. But it’s also true that, once the moment was past, absolutely nothing could be done to change it. I am stranded in old age and misery and I can never return.

At least the dream of going back has given me energy to rise. I make my way towards the door and open it wide. The sky is clear-blue with strings of unmoving clouds very high above the earth. The bright sun kisses the grass and the tops of the trees sparkle in the undulating breeze. The world before me would make me feel almost serene were it not for one detail. David Butt is moping beneath a canopy of branches only a few footsteps from my door. His shoulders are sloping and his hands are buried in his breeches. He gives me a mournful stare when he sees me.

“I’ve brought you firewood,” he says with a sullenness that belies the helpful gesture. Close to his feet is a generous pile of broken sticks and branches. He bends and scoops some up in his arms. Turning with his burden, he approaches the cabin jerkily, like a scarecrow learning how to walk. I move inside and out of the way as he makes for the fireplace and lowers the bundle onto the floor.

“Thank you,” I say, pulling back my chair and sitting.

He turns to me as he dusts himself down. “I saw her this morning,” he announces, his voice strange, almost cracking. His green eyes catch the sunlight from the doorway and their watery paleness reminds me, for a moment, of Thomas Ridley. “She was on the wharf, pacing, staring out at the sunrise.”

He sighs, biting his lip, then crouching down by the firewood again, fingers the twigs at his feet. “I watched from the house for
a while,” he says, picking up a short stick. “I threw on my clothes and followed her out. Things had gone so well recently, I assumed she was sleepless for me as I have been sleepless for her.” He breaks the stick in both hands. “But when I came up to her and touched her shoulder, she spun around and slapped me in the face.”

“Did she say why?” I ask.

“She called me a filthy little ruffian,” he says with a nervous laugh, “and told me I must never lay a hand on her again.” He stares at the broken stick. He is breathing hard and shivering. He says nothing for a while.

“So, what happened then?”

He looks up slowly. I notice red rims around his eyes.

“You must help me, Sheila,” he says. “You must help me get away from here. You must tell me how to survive in the woods.”

There’s a sickening thud in my chest.

“Why would you need to do that?” I ask. “What happened, boy?”

“It’s Sunday,” he says, standing. “No one was up. They might never know.”

“Know what?”

“Nothing. Nothing that concerns you.”

“You’re scaring me, boy.”

“I couldn’t stop myself,” he whispers. “It happened before I knew it.” He puts his hand to his forehead and his eyes flash desperately. “It’s all your fault!” he exclaims. “It’s your responsibility to help me!”

I continue to stare up at him, waiting, hoping for some explanation other than the one I most fear. He turns away suddenly,
shaking his head. “She’s gone. Sara’s gone. One moment she was mocking me, eyes like darts, tongue like an arrow. Then she was choking, my thumbs on her neck, squeezing.”

My head goes dizzy. I lift my hand to my temple and groan.

“But it wasn’t my fault!” he says with such certainty I almost believe him. “She made me do it!
You
made me do it too, with your spells! What kind of wickedness gives hope where there is none?” He stares at me with frantic eyes, then blinks a few times as though waking from a dream. He begins pacing in a semicircle around the firewood, opening and closing his fists.

“There is no hope for you, boy,” I say, watching him. “A murderer can never live in peace. The act will eat away your soul.”

He looks at me, startled, and stops pacing. “I’m not a murderer! I’ll tell everyone it was your fault.”

“How could it be my fault? I’m too old to have strangled Sara Rose.”

He begins pacing once more, but in the opposite direction. “If they find the body, I’d say you put me under a spell. If they don’t, I’ll say you put Sara under a spell that made her wander off into the woods and never return. They’ll believe either of those explanations easily enough.”

“Why would they believe such nonsense?” I’m genuinely curious, aware that a mystery might be opening to me at last.

“Because they’re all terrified of you,” he says with eyes narrowed. “And it isn’t nonsense. How do I know you didn’t plan this whole thing? How do I know you didn’t want me to murder Sara?”

I’m suddenly too tired to hear these questions, and tired of watching this young fool pacing and circling. How do they know
I don’t cause drought and mist and cold? How do they know I don’t cause the fish to disappear from the bay and the beasts to run away from the woods? There is no end to such foolishness and no defence against it either. Why don’t these idiots build me a scaffold, hang a noose about my neck and be done with it?

“What did you do with Sara’s body?” I ask feebly to change the subject.

“I took it out in Uncle Seth’s boat and threw it into the bay beyond the cove. It might wash up around here. It might be pulled out into the ocean, or wash up somewhere else.”

He’s pacing more slowly now, calmed by his decision to put the blame on me. I put my hands on the sides of my chair and prepare to rise. “Well, if I’m the murderer,” I say, “you don’t need my help. Let’s go down together and see who they believe.” I begin to stand but he leaps towards me.

“No!” he says, flapping his hands urgently to sit me down. “No, you must not!”

“But you said there was no danger they would blame you.”

“That’s only if I can’t survive on my own.” His fingers tremble over my head. “I don’t want to give you away.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I tell him, settling down again.

“I need to know all about the forest. I know you have charms to protect me.”

———

I shouldn’t have helped the boy. Murder is murder. Concealment is not only wicked, but futile. But I did feel responsible. I should have warned him when he first came to me that
love could not be forced. I knew his passion was unhealthy, but the boy drew me inside his desire. I felt its heat and its compulsion. And now he has committed the worst of all crimes, there is still something about this clumsy, foolish boy I cannot refuse. Once again I am inside his feverish mind, looking out.

I picture him weaving his way under the pine-scented canopy. I wonder if the amulet I gave him helps him sense the forest’s pulsing heart. Does he hear the man of the forest in the rustling leaves? Will he harvest the mushrooms I told him about? Will he set rabbit snares when he gets far enough into the interior?

The settlers have been yelling Sara’s name for some while, but no one has come up the hill. It is still early and they are not panicking yet. Perhaps they suppose she has skipped along the shore or rounded the rocks to the next cove. Or maybe that she has hidden herself in someone’s home as a jape. But when the sun climbs higher and the waves roll and sizzle for hours on end with no sign of her, things will change. Beyond the settlement—the cluster of homes, the ribbon of beach, and a few bald rocks—there is only an endless murmuring ocean and a vast and unexplored forest. Few have troubled to learn the ways of the woods and, for most, including the Rose children, being lost is the same for an hour as for a hundred years.

Already there is tension in one man’s voice, and I can sense him listening hard as his call of “Sa-ra-Sa-ra” echoes around the cove, then dies into silence. This must be Simon Rose. He is trying to decide how angry he should be.

“Sara!” he calls sharply this time. Judging from the voice, he has climbed a little way up the hill. What would it take, I wonder,
for Simon Rose to knock on my door? How desperate would he have to be? And what would that extraordinary meeting be like? Two people who have lived for forty years in the same small settlement exchanging words for the very first time.

Simon Rose is silent again as he listens for his Sara’s reply. I hear his boots scrape against the dry earth as he turns and goes back down to the settlement.

He will have to come again; it’s inevitable. And eventually he will have to come to me. His other daughters might already know that Sara came to see me. They definitely know about David’s visits—Sara told me that. Soon they will realize that both Sara and David are gone, and they will connect the two. It occurs to me for the first time that I’m in rather an awkward position. I had better start thinking of some answers.

Another call comes from somewhere down in the settlement. This time it’s Elizabeth Rose. The quality of her voice is quite different from that of her husband. Simon’s call was tense and threatening. Elizabeth’s has all the pain of a wounded animal, of a wolf mourning its cub. The grief of it shakes me and makes me feel a turbulent sadness of my own.

I too was taken from my mother at thirteen years old, pulled from her world and her protection. And while I wailed and mourned the loss, I saw but little grief from her. Elizabeth Rose’s plaintive cries remind me of the nurturing tones I was denied. Suddenly I am envious of the dead. It puzzles me that, of all tragedies that have befallen me since, it is this one—my own abandonment—that is stirred by the sound of a mother’s grief. I have more recently lost my own children, yet that loss seems not nearly so close. It is not the first time I have felt my
girlhood days returning more vividly than the ground that lies between. “Old fools are babes again,” my playwright acquaintance once grumbled in his misery, the damp walls dripping around him. He was not old himself, and I thought he was being dramatic. But now I see what he meant. These days I feel the girl in me returning.

———

Some while after we were discovered, when the footsteps had died quite away, Thomas Ridley moved under the sheets. He slipped off the bed, pulled on his breeches, and fumbled with his shirt buttons. He gave me one swift, terrified glance—a hint of apology perhaps in his pale-blue eyes—and was gone.

I journeyed the remainder of the way to London with two of Mr. Ridley’s servants, a tall man and a white-faced woman. They were waiting for me as soon as I opened my bedroom door. “We’ve been sent to escort you the rest of the way,” the woman said with dry urgency, taking my arm and hurrying me downstairs and into the carriage. The man and woman remained, one on either side of me, blotting out the daylight from that moment on.

Through the confusion of it all, I was exhilarated still. The scent of Thomas Ridley was in me. Every sensation of the previous night—his nose nuzzling into my neck, the warmth of his legs, the sweat-dampened arch of his neck—was alive, skimming over my imagination just as swallows dip and hover over the surface of a lake. Even while the woman on my right cast her censorious glance upon me, the coach wheels rumbled his name:
Thomas, Thomas, Thomas.

I expected this punishment. It was inevitable that we would be separated for a day while my mother made up her mind what to do, and part of me dreaded explaining things to her at the journey’s end. But I knew these problems were minor. There was a great joy pulsing in me like a rainbow bursting at the seams. When the smell of London’s woodsmoke began to permeate the coach, I became excited again. It would not be long before I would see Thomas again, perhaps even at supper.

But when we arrived at Mr. Ridley’s house, I was hurried by the two servants up two flights of stairs. Seeing no one but staff in Mr. Ridley’s hallway entrance when we passed through, I refrained from calling for my mother lest it annoy her. I was shown into an attic room with a bed in the corner, a large fireplace, a little food and water already prepared on a tray. On a desk were rolled-up charts and papers. As soon as the door was shut, it was promptly locked from the outside. I went to the window.

It was getting dark. A man was lighting lanterns one by one in the alley far below. Workmen drew carts, the wheels scraping against the cobbles. Women passed by shops with baskets on their heads. Some joked and called to one another. I turned my head slightly and listened to the movements within the house. There were many footsteps, none of them very near, some running up, some down or across; furniture was shunted across floors, and there was a regular babble of voices. I attended very closely to these. Sometimes I fancied hearing myself talked about. I strained to distinguish Thomas, his father, or my mother. Sometimes the muted syllables of a man seemed to form words like, “All right, Thomas, go and fetch her to supper,” or a woman’s
soft tones would seem to say, “She’s been punished enough. Can I fetch her?” But then something would be added to render my interpretation senseless: “… into the drawing room,” the man would add, or, “… opposite the fireplace,” the woman would conclude. The voice I thought I recognized became one I knew I did not.