The Bride's Farewell (15 page)

Twenty-seven

P
ell stumbled the miles of narrow roads to her home, leaning on Dicken with the arm that didn’t cause pain, and drank deeply from the bucket by the well when she arrived. She collapsed onto her straw bed and lay motionless throughout the night and all of the next day, despite Dicken’s insistence that she rise and greet him. She felt no hunger, only a vast thirst and an ever-increasing pain in her arm, but if she ignored both she found that she could stand it, or that the pain disappeared for hours at a time as she drifted in and out of wakefulness. She wanted only to shut her eyes against the world forever.

Two days had passed when she heard Dicken greet Dogman at the door with a whine of pleasure. He said her name and, when she didn’t answer, went away again.

When he returned the following day and again received no answer, he entered the little cowshed and found her feverish and damp, her face swollen black and green, one arm laid beside her at an unnatural angle. He said not a word but gathered her up in his arms, a little shocked at how easily this was accomplished, and took her to his cottage, making up a bed for her by the fire.

He gave her brandy to drink until her eyes rolled back and closed, and then he felt the broken arm through the swelling and pulled it back into position while she lay still, her face twisted in pain. He set the arm in strips of cloth dipped in egg white, exactly as he had set a multitude of broken animal limbs, relieved that the bone had not pierced the skin. The burns on her face he cleaned with a cloth soaked in boiled water, and for the fever he administered licorice and henbane tea. Her injuries were no worse than those he treated daily in his kennels; as a hunter, the mortal injury of a dog was something to which he had grown accustomed but not resigned.

He left her each night to go out, and on the fourth day he returned with his dogs in the morning to find her quiet, no longer tossing and babbling in waking sleep. She opened her eyes, seemed to recognize him at last, and for an instant glared at him and croaked out, “Where is . . . my money . . . ?” Her eyes drooped and fell shut before she could see that for the first time in many days he had smiled.

When she awoke the following morning, Pell at first thought she was back home in Nomansland, in her old bed with Lou. For a time she lay still, waiting for the shriek of squabbling siblings, for the sound of the tin tea caddy being opened, and the china clink as the top of the teapot was replaced. She even blinked sleepily, and tried to sit up, before realizing that one arm was bound up in a splint, and one eye still swollen nearly shut. Her face hurt.

When Dogman returned from hunting, she attempted to deliver a speech, telling him that she appreciated all he’d done (what, precisely,
had
he done?) and would now be going. But he told her not to speak, and went as usual to prepare food for himself and the dogs, leaving her to sleep again, and to wonder, as she fell asleep, what would happen next.

He gave her broth that was cloudy and strong-tasting, and with her one good arm she lifted it to her lips and drank it herself. Her limbs were bruised and tender, and one side of her face didn’t seem to belong to her. She remembered what had happened but couldn’t think how she had arrived here. The effort of remembering tired her, and she drifted off to sleep.

When next he returned, she felt so much better that she sat up and declared herself well enough to leave. If he would help her to gather herself, she would cease to impose upon his kindness. She was most apologetic for inconveniencing him as long as she had.

He said nothing, but waited, watched her swing her feet onto the floor and then sit trembling, until she dropped back onto the bed once more.

He did not lift a hand to help.

When she opened her eyes sometime later, they met his, dark and serious. He felt the broken arm carefully and set it down again, apparently satisfied with her progress. And left her, to see to his dogs.

The time came to replace the bandage with a fresh one, and the following day he unwrapped it quickly, holding the arm so that she could see for herself the violent multicolored bruising. He wrapped it again in clean strips of cloth, binding it more tightly this time. She made not a sound while he worked but watched him, the pain causing his face to swim before her eyes.

Two more days passed, and at last she was strong enough to sit without help. Dogman crossed the room to her with beef tea, but when he held her eyes and observed that she neither flinched nor looked away, he sat beside her on the bed, placed the tea on the floor, took her face in his hands and kissed her, with consideration for her injuries but without shame or caution. And when he had done kissing her, he returned to the big room with its woodstove and open fire to cook his breakfast.

Twenty-eight

F
rom that day on they lived as man and wife, though no mention was made of the change. He still went out poaching each night, and brought game back to sell, or to salt and preserve for the winter, coming to her in the hours before sunrise smelling of blood and earth. She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present.

In the solitary stone house with its roaring fire and orderly stores of food, Pell experienced vast waves of feeling she could barely acknowledge. But she found safety, too. While he slept, exhausted from a night’s work, she lay awake beside him, wondering how she happened to be here.

“Are you asleep?” Her mind could not rest in daylight.

“Yes.” Eyes closed, he pulled her close.

“Listen to the wind. We’ll need more wood in.”

He would not be roused.

“There’ll be no hunting tonight.”

“Hush.”

And, a little while later, “The dogs are dreaming.” By the fire she could hear the high-pitched yips of their somnolent chase.

He half opened an eye and yawned. “Of what?”

“Of rabbits.” It was daylight but howling a storm. She could see her breath, and the fire needed stoking. Yet she could not bring herself to leave. “I’ve things to do.”

“Yes, go,” he murmured, adjusting the grip of his arms so that she could not. When eventually she pulled free, he slept on, undisturbed.

She learned nothing about his past, despite telling him about Birdie and Bean and how she happened to be out in the world alone. She also told how she’d come to be injured, and as he listened his eyes narrowed.

The following week, he returned from hunting with a package wrapped in brown paper. She unwrapped it slowly. Within lay a hunting knife, small and razor-sharp, in a slim leather sheath. She looked at him.

“For next time,” he said, and showed her how to slide the knife in its sheath into the top of her boot each morning, until after a time it became a habit so ordinary, she nearly forgot its existence.

His two coursing dogs lived in the house, and he allowed Dicken to stay as well, for the dog wouldn’t leave her, and wailed for hours if locked in the kennel with his terriers.

He was, she learned, a hunter by trade and a poacher by choice. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been gamekeepers since before the enclosures, but the niceties of employment did not suit him.

We are both outcasts, she thought.

She did not want to live idly and, once recovered, she swapped two big hares for two laying hens, then the following week two more, until she had six hens, which would mean forty-two eggs a week when the warm weather came.

On some days, the butcher’s cart came along the road. The butcher would buy whatever Dogman had killed and save her a trip to the market at St. Mary’s. With the proceeds, she bought flour and tea, as there was no shortage of game, and tended the parsnips, leeks, and potatoes in Dogman’s garden, piling manure and straw around the plants to keep them safe from winter frosts. He never asked her to cook for him, but she did, and when they ate together her day was ending and his just beginning. He cleaned his gun and traps while she fed the hens and knitted new stockings with wool that she had bought in town. Before the hard days of winter set in, he slaughtered the pig, and for a week stayed at home with the job of butchering. The dogs feasted on bones and scraps, and Pell roasted the head. Dogman salted the flitches and sold the rest.

When he returned to hunting, her own company and the company of the hens suited her during the day. Dicken showed up one morning proudly holding one of her best layers limp and terrified in his mouth, and she scolded him, returned the distressed creature to the henhouse, and constructed a makeshift lock for the door out of leather pulled through two holes and knotted tightly. Dogman raised an eyebrow at the inelegant contraption, but it kept predators out. Dicken dared stalk the hens only if she was absent. She had seen him from the window on sunny days, sliding close on his belly and staring at them hungrily when they picked and pecked at the earth. Sometimes she felt sorry for him, his instincts so at odds with hers.

On occasion, she allowed for the possibility that her condition resembled love. She was busy, had enough to eat and enough solitude, and, in addition, something like a deep attachment to another person. His passion seemed to release her from a long confinement, and she felt free for the first time since her days racing Jack across the heath. And yet, while Bean’s disappearance remained unsolved, she could not be happy.

Sometimes she imagined him dead—murdered or starved or drowned, unable to cry out, with no one to save him or to give him a decent burial. She saw him exploited and left to rot because he had no voice to protest or say who he was.

As much as she might try to shut him out of her brain, she could not. By not searching, she continued to fail him.

Toward this end, she went on foot through all the parishes she could reach in a day’s travel from Pevesy, asking at each if a boy matching Bean’s description had been found. She visited every workhouse, finding exactly the same in each—squalor, hunger, misery, disease. At every place, she was told the same: “No one of that description has been brought here.” But she searched every corner regardless, saw the silent babies with robin-bright eyes, swaddled tight and left to stare at the ceiling in tidy rows; the elderly, or the prematurely aged, packed four or six to a bed, their rheumatic bones clacking, their withered limbs shifting, vainly, in search of comfort or warmth; the crippled and the mentally incompetent, lumped together to torment one another day and night. Worst of all were the able-bodied, the unfortunate or unlucky, who had somehow slipped over the line that separated respectability from penury and collapse. These were women abandoned by men, the ill or injured, widows or widowers, and children—unwanted, orphaned, or deficient in some way. She left each place, alone, with equal measures of relief and despair.

At every village, she asked for information. But Bean, it seemed, had melted away as surely as water into sand. Her journeys accomplished nothing, except to remind her how large was the area she searched, and how small the child she sought.

Twenty-nine