The Bride's Farewell (17 page)

All day long, people passed him on the road, some noticing without interest, others thinking he must be dead, and still others curious at the sight of a child curled up in the grass by the highway. Some offered him water or bread, and a group of Gypsy travelers helped him to sit up and eat a nourishing soup, and sip tea to ease his various ills. Upon leaving him, they left word along the road, so that when Esther came to a crossroads, a variety of signs informed her—as another person might have been informed by a telegram or a broadsheet—of the condition and whereabouts of the child.

She laughed a little to herself, and shook her head, and wondered when the intricate game of hide-and-seek across Salisbury Plain would come to an end.

Thirty-one

A
ny attention Pell had earned as a determined runaway paled in comparison with that which she attracted now. Good food had brought color to her face and a new quality to her figure; she no longer looked so boyish or so young. Her dark blue dress was new and without worn patches; the apron she wore over it spotless white. She pulled her hair back and fastened it with a red ribbon, as for a pony that kicked, because the thought pleased her. Her boots shone over fine knitted stockings.

Dicken had attained his full size and his head reached her hip. The thick ruff of fur at his neck made him appear bigger than he was, and when she smoothed the seeds and burrs out of his blue-gray coat he looked ancient, majestic. His puppy capers had slipped away, and he trotted beside her with dignity. Despite a gentle nature, the mere size of him offered protection.

They slept as before in abandoned barns and cowsheds, with money enough to buy bread and cheese and beer. Dicken would eat at her table if she let him, would rather live off bread than catch his own dinner, but, despite the reproach in his eyes, Pell refused to share her meals with him. The warm days had brought rabbits out by the dozens; they were hungry and somewhat dazed, and made easy prey in the misty dawn.

She stopped occasionally to pass the time with other travelers, or with girls standing outside front gardens, sometimes with a child or two. The encounters left both parties dissatisfied: Pell tired and homeless; the other women moored in changeless harbors. After a few days on the road, her life with Dogman began to lose focus, blurring into a general picture of a past that included people and places she might never see again. When she contemplated the future, the pictures were hazier still, and no single track lay before her. Only two images remained clear in her head: Bean and Jack.

As she approached her latest destination, it began to rain, frozen rain, then hail—balls of ice as big as gooseberries that smashed the ground and exploded, scattering glinting shards in every direction. Pell took cover under the canopy of an ancient chestnut as the bombardment went on and on; it was nearly half an hour before she emerged again into the open, with a wet, icy soup underfoot.

Into silence.

No breath of air rustled the branches of the trees, no bird sang. She cast about, discomfited by the absence of noise. Above, on a bare branch, seven magpies sat still as stones, watching. “Welcome to Andover,” their eyes said.

A few minutes later found her at the door of the workhouse. The very air felt cold here; even the landscape fell away at the edges of the building as if anxious to be somewhere else. At a time in which news traveled slowly by coach and infamy built up slowly over decades, the name Andover had overnight become synonymous with abuse and fear. It was known as the worst of the places offering bed and board to the desperately poor, in exchange for breaking bones for fertilizer. Stories as far away as Nomansland reported that, as each day’s quota of rotting bones was delivered, the starving inmates fought tooth and claw for whatever traces of stinking meat and rancid marrow remained. And that was not the end of the unpleasantness, so it was said, but the beginning.

She reported first to the master, a florid ex-soldier. He smiled a smile avid with desire, and she looked away, unable to conceal her disgust.

“Ridley, you say? A mute boy?” His expression was ugly, repaying her dislike in kind. “I don’t think we have one of those.”

She fought an urge to run.

“Of course, if a boy’s unable to speak there’s no way of knowing where he might be. Dead and buried, most likely.”

Pell flushed. “May I look, to be certain?”

The man bowed, tucking one hand beneath his stomach, in a mockery of old-fashioned chivalry. “As you wish, Miss Ridley.”

Despite his offer, he did not move aside for her to pass. Pell hesitated for an instant, and it was enough. He was quick, grabbing her arm, digging his strong fingers into her flesh, and drawing her so close that she could smell the onions and brandy wafting up from his gullet.

“The boy isn’t here,” he breathed, his face inches from hers, his other hand pressing her against him. “But I have connections that would make finding him easier.”

Pell held her breath and stood perfectly still, imagining herself frozen, or dead.

“It’s not much I’m asking in return.” His voice rumbled low in her ear. “Just an hour or so of nothing that costs
you,
miss.”

Pell didn’t flinch. She met his gaze with her own, perfectly level. “If you do not remove your hand from my arm,” she said quietly, “I will cut your throat.”

His eyes widened as he felt the tip of Dogman’s knife pressed against the underside of his jaw. He drew away from her slowly, face flushed scarlet.

“You harlot,” he hissed. “You’ll never see your bastard again.”

But she could smell his fear, and knew him to be a coward. Still holding the knife, she walked past him and out the office door.

It took nearly an hour for her to search the boys’ ward. As she walked around the miserable room, she observed heaps of stinking rags, which turned out to be children huddled together for warmth, too exhausted and hopeless to move. Only their eyes followed her. She chose one or two emaciated creatures still with the energy to pluck at her skirt, and asked if they’d seen a child matching Bean’s description. One boy with a head like a skull answered that he had indeed seen such a child.

“Never spoke a word, did ’e? They put ’im to work on the crushers, dint they, though ’e warn’t likely to live long doin’ that sort of work. Delicate thing ’e was, miss.”

“Was?” Pell’s heart stopped.

“Gone now, ent ’e, miss?”

“Dead?” Her voice shook.

“Not dead. Left, miss.”

“Gone where? When?”

“Disappeared, not long ’ence,” the boy said. “Dunno where to, miss.”

Her face fell, and the boy took advantage of the moment to insert his cold bony fingers with utmost gentleness into her pockets, feeling for bread or coins. He found a scrap saved for Dicken, stuffed it at once into his mouth, and looked up at her with burning eyes.

“Being mute, ’e warn’t likely to tell us, now, war ’e?”

Thirty-two

D
ogman’s wife received him without enthusiasm.

Their son, a half-grown fair-haired lad, hung back in the shadows while his mam made tea, and emerged only when called upon to fetch more wood for the fire. The boy snatched glimpses of his father, torn between excitement and fear.

The pretty woman beside the hearth tended a baby with pursed lips and a pale nimbus of fine hair. “We called her Winnie,” she cooed. “After her gran.”

Dogman looked at the baby and nodded.

“Do you want to hold her?”

“I’ll leave that to the father.”

His answer didn’t suit her. “What brings you back?”

With a tilt of the head, he indicated the boy. “Time someone taught him to hunt.”

“Gareth could do that.”

“Could. Won’t, though.”

She puffed out her feathers like a hen. “Don’t start taking issue with him.” She sounded querulous to her own ears, and scolded herself for taking up his bait, and so soon. “He’ll be back anytime now. Doesn’t stay away so long nowadays.”

Dogman didn’t comment.

“And besides, the boy’s at school now. Doesn’t need to learn your ways.”

“So you say.” He looked away from her. “Tom . . .”

She persisted in needling him. “No one calls him by that name now he’s grown.”

He sighed. “Thomas. You want to come hunting?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“And who’s to pay the fine, or visit the lad in prison when he’s caught with a doe or a grouse that don’t belong to him? I’ll not be worrying about transportation neither, do you hear? Won’t have my son sent half round the world in chains.” She stopped, wiped a film of sweat from her forehead, and leaned her arms and head up against the great wooden beam of hearth in an attitude of defeat. He saw for the first time that she was expecting another child. “I thought I’d be rid of you by now, and your hold over us.”

Dogman stood up abruptly. His expression hadn’t changed, but the dog at his side looked up at him and trembled. “I’ll come at dusk.” As he went out, he heard her muttering her disapproval to the boy, or perhaps to herself.

Every night, Dogman called for Tom and they set off. The boy had to run to keep up with his father’s long strides as they walked for miles in the dark. At first it was agony for him, tripping and falling over every ridge and stone, catching every branch in his face or chest. Great sobs of self-pity welled up in him as he stumbled along behind the terrifying figure of this man he barely knew, who marched through the woods in seemingly endless pursuit of nothing at all—for they rarely stopped to draw breath, much less to trap something.

For more than a week the man pretended not to notice Tom’s desperate gait, his ungainly attempts to keep up; for more than a week he gave his son’s misery and his clumsiness time to pass. And much to the boy’s own amazement he began to feel how things were underfoot, began to sense the shape and camber of the ground, and to accommodate it as he ran. Slowly, he found himself knowing how and where a branch would spring back, his eyes detecting shape and movement where before there had been nothing but impenetrable dark. He heard things he’d never heard before, sounds that told him how near he was to water or to stone or how the land dipped up ahead. Now when he stood perfectly still he could hear birds flying or calling softly; he could hear footfalls that weren’t his own. The difference between one rustle and another let him know a bird or a mouse was nearby, or merely the wind. And all this he learned without being taught, merely by following Dogman when he walked and stopping to listen when he stopped. As he learned more, he began to relax, to walk more quietly and yet more freely, to hold himself less fearfully and embrace the dark.

When he had accomplished this first part of the boy’s training, Dogman, too, began to relax, to know the job could be done.

On the nights that followed, his teaching commenced in earnest. He taught the boy to lie perfectly still and wait for the moon or a lantern to reflect light on a pair of red eyes. He taught him how to make and set snares for rabbits and foxes, to fasten each carefully along well-used paths and adjust the tension to kill cleanly. He taught him to speak to his dogs so that they knew what was expected, and would bowl and kill or retrieve the prey, as he liked. He taught him to move silently through dry woods; to catch birds on misty mornings in low nets they couldn’t see; to treat a rat bite and draw a goose without leaving a mark on the body; to net dens or lure a badger from its sett.

Each morning he returned the boy to his mother, and disappeared before she could thank him. Which was just as well, as Tom’s mother had already paid her penny a day in advance for his lessons, and was angry at the waste, on top of everything else. She didn’t know where Dogman slept and didn’t care.

The boy learned. Dogman didn’t speak a great deal, but when he did, his son listened. Thomas felt proud of his new skills, and though he didn’t exactly enjoy the company of his father, he feared it less. After a month, Dogman began to feel that his duty had been discharged, at least for now. At the beginning he had wondered what sort of son he had, but by the end he knew: avid enough, clever enough, willing enough. But enough his mother’s son as well, so that he dragged his feet, just enough, unwilling to abandon himself entirely to the job at hand.