The Brides of Rollrock Island (5 page)

“Crossed?”

“To protect you from seal-love, she says. Theirs of you, and you of them.”

“What do you mean, crossed?”

“Crossed is with crosses tied on you, front and back.” He drew a big
X
on his chest, and sketched one on his back with a thumb.

“Tied of what?”

He shrugged. “Bands, she says, crossed bands. Whatever bands are made of. Anyway, that’s what she said; I’m just telling you. She’s as old as Rollrock, Gran-Nan, and she knows an awful lot.”

“I seem to have heard of this.” Dad nodded. “This crossing. I’m sure I remember some old ones, men and women, who wore those crossings over their clothes.”

“I’m sure I’ve never heard anything of the like,” said Mam, her face made frightening by a shaft of lamplight. “What has Misskaella’s illness to do with these seals? And is everyone out there gossiping about my daughter?” she said to Ambler. “And having opinions?”

“Oh no,” he said. “It’s only Gran-Nan has this bee in her bonnet.
Dad and Mam have sent me up so’s she will stop her nagging at them, bless her. She’s worked herself right up, I tell you, full of fear and nonsense.”

I looked at his calm bright face. How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

“Well, I thank you,” finally I said. “Go about crossed. I will remember that.” I held on to the toffee box, and like everything else in the room, and beyond it the house, and beyond
that
the town, it seemed to be part of a very odd dream. I was grateful for its hardness and heaviness, its decorative surface; I held to these in the uproaring inaudible storm.

“Grand,” said Ambler. “I’ve done what I was told, then.”

The parcel’s shine and detail disappeared as the lamp withdrew, Dad thanking Ambler all the way out and sending respectful good wishes to his grandmam.

Mam stayed, a stiff-standing shadow above me. “Did you
really
do all this?” she said low and venomously.

In among all the noise, I clawed in vain for her meaning. “All what?”

She threw out a hand and I flinched away, but she only meant to point toward the front lane. “Bring these … 
creatures
. Have you that power?” Yellow light slanted and swung on the hallway wall; Dad must be holding the lamp high to show Ambler his way among the seals. “And bring us the
attention
,” she went on, even more incensed, “of Doris Cartney and such old blitherers? Sending up her grandson? For everyone to see?” She puffed with rage next to me.

“I did not
mean
to,” I said humbly. “I did not
intend—
”

“But you did.” I twitched again as Mam swept away to the door. “You did anyway, whether you meant it or not.”

Then she was gone, and Dad was back in the doorway. I lifted the toffees into the lamplight, showed them to him. We looked helplessly at each other.

Then Mam returned; she showed him something. “From that gash Billy had,” she said, “down his leg, mucking about in the mole-rocks that time.” She threw it across to my bed, and the bandage unrolled, and would have gone off the side if I had not caught it. “Tie it up like he told you,” she said shrilly, “crossed front and back. And wear it day and night. I’ll not be shamed like this again. Leave her the lamp,” she said to Dad, her voice low again, as if it came from a different person. She snatched the lamp from him and put it just inside the door as if she were too afraid or disgusted to come farther into the room. With a last glare at me she pulled the door closed, and I heard them go away to the kitchen, and my sisters’ breathless questions begin.

“Toffees,” I whispered, the word as weighty and rich in my mouth as the box felt in my hands. I put it aside and picked up the roll of bandage. I remembered Billy’s cut shin. He had not cried or dramatized over it, but only admired the length and depth of the injury, the gleam of bone at a couple of places in the sponged wound. He had hissed through his teeth as Mam had bound him up, bound the sides of the wound together to heal. He had been such a
boy
about it, dry-eyed, set-jawed, smudged with blood.

I shook out the length of bandage, found the middle point and put it upon one shoulder. Aslant down to my waist, front and
back, I took it, crossed the bands and brought them about my middle, slanted them up the other way.

The instant they met at my ear, quiet fell inside me, and the lightless flaring went out of all things. My heart continued pounding hard for a time, but as the stillness went on, that too eased. I held the ties together, and I wept a little at the terrors I had undergone these past two days, at the relief from them, at the simplicity of the remedy, and with gratitude toward Ambler’s Gran-Nan Cartney, who had been kind and bullheaded enough to have it brought to me. Through the wall to the kitchen came the murmurings of my sisters aghast and agog, the rumble of Dad reassuring them, quiet snaps now and then from Mam. I rose and undressed in the reawakened roaring, wound the bandage again and this time tied it, pulled on my nightgown over it in the wondrous peace, folded away my clothes and hid the toffee box among them. I laid myself to bed in the lamplight and the quiet and the blessed solitude, and before long was properly asleep.

A high-summer morning. Tatty was first at the door.

“Oh, but look!” She let the door swing wider and bobbed down out of sight beyond the others. “What’s this? A delicious
thing
. Oh, there’s a note. Oh!” The note must have dived off in the breeze, for she leaped out the door.

We crowded onto the step and watched her chase it along the street, and stamp it stopped. She carried it back, in her other hand a glazed bun with jewels of rock sugar scattered over the top.
She scowled at the paper, straightening it with the littler fingers of her bun hand. “It doesn’t make sense—Oh, I have it upside down, is why. So: ‘For the … For the …’ ” She stopped to scowl some more.

“Let me see.” Ann Jelly tipped herself off the step.

But Tatty held bun and note away from her. “ ‘Little,’ is what it says! ‘For the little one.’ The little one?”

“That has to be Misskaella,” said Lorel.

They all drew away from me, looked down on me.

“I’m not little.”

“Not widthways, it’s true,” said Billy. “But height-wise you’re the littlest in this household, not counting the odd mouse.”

“There, then,” said Tatty jealously. She pushed the bun and note at me and dusted off her hands. “Let’s get on.”

“She can’t just
take
it,” said Ann Jelly. “She can’t just
eat
it.”

“Why not?” Billy hovered, unable to take his eyes off the bun.

“What’s on out there? Not seals again, is it?” And Dad was there in the doorway.

“Here, Dad, whose writing is this?” Bee snatched the note from Tatty and held it up.

“ ‘For the little one.’ ” He lowered the note, eyed me and the sparkling bun, took up the note again. “Someone very old, from that curling writing. And the shakiness. Someone very old and frail.”

“So someone very old and frail is soft for our Missk?” said Billy in tones of hilarity, and the others prepared to laugh along.

“Or wants to
poison
her,” said Tatty.

“Give me that,” said Dad.

I handed him the bun, and licked my fingers of the sticky sweetness they’d picked up from it. He broke the bun apart—
silence fell around me at the sight of its soft yellow insides. He sniffed both pieces.

“I will eat it, to test,” said Billy. “If you want.”

Tatty pushed him off the step. “As if he’d rather risk his only
son
, when he has all these
daughters
spare.”

“Here, eat it, Misskaella.” Dad handed the bun back.

“Now?” cried Billy.

“She’s full to the brim of porridge!” said Ann Jelly.

“Where I can see you,” said Dad. “And all the rest of you. Otherwise you’ll have nagged and badgered it out of her before you reach the end of the street. And it is for her.” He flapped the note at them. Billy turned away and kicked a cobble.

“Shouldn’t she be made to share?” said Lorel longingly.

“I don’t see why,” said Dad. “Is there anything in the note about sharing?” He pretended to read it again. “Why, I don’t believe there is.”

“He doesn’t mind losing
you
, Missk,” said Tatty. “As long as the rest of us aren’t poisoned.”

It was a waste to cram the bun, so light and sweet, into my mouth so fast, to gulp it down under all those envious gazes without properly enjoying it. Dad shooed us off as soon as I’d secured the last mouthful. We went silently, me still chewing.

“Who can it be,” murmured Billy at my elbow, “so old and frail and in love? For the
little
one,” he added sentimentally. “For the
little
one, that I would bounce upon my knee. For the
little
one, who I’d like to put my hand up the skirts of—”

“Stop it, Billy,” said Ann Jelly. “It is not Misskaella’s fault some old grandpa’s taken to her.”

“Or a grand
mam
,” I said indistinctly, poking stuck bun scraps
from my teeth with a finger. “A grandmam could have
made
that bun.”

“Never,” said Billy. “That’s a mainland bun, that sort. That’s a Cordlin-baker bun, that Fisher gets in sometimes.”

I tried to enjoy the last tastes of exotic Cordlin.
Was
it some old man acting fond? Was that better than the bun’s being something to do with the seals, and my attraction for them?

When we came home that afternoon I went straight in to Mam. “Can I see that paper,” I said, “that came with the bun this morning? Did Dad show you?”

“Whatever do you want that for?” Mam looked up from scrubbing the table.

“To examine the writing. I never saw it properly. Only Dad and Tat got to see it.”

“Too late; I have burnt it in the stove. You will have to wait until he favors you again, whoever it was.” And she went back to scrubbing, hard.

On my birthday, a pair of thin socks, shop-bought socks with roses embroidered on the cuffs, was left on the little snowdrift at the door.

“Your lover man has left you a present, Missk!” Billy carried the socks in high over his head, and deposited them by my porridge bowl, from where Tatty immediately snatched them up.

“Oh, stop, Billy,” said Ann Jelly. “It’s Ambler’s granny has put them there.”

“She would have had Ambler bring them,” said Grassy, “as she did before.”

“Besides, she is dying,” said Bee. I looked up, shocked. “Or so I heard,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“Praps she is hoping Missk will come and cure her?” Billy went noisily to his porridge.

“She would have
said
, then,” said Grassy. “She would have sent Ambler to ask. How are we to know that, from a pair of sock-lets with no name on them?”

“Well, someone wants
something
from our Missk. Who else would these fit? Look at them!”

“It’s true,” said Lorel. “For all the rest of her roundness, she does come down to tiny feet.”

“Like a seal.” Tatty was so taken up in her nastiness, she did not see Mam start toward her from the stove. “The way they—Ow! I was only
saying
!” Her spoon dropped and spilled porridge on the table, and she held the back of her head, and glared in outrage at Mam, who ignored her, taking up the pot ladle. “They have those tiny tails, I was going to say, to push their great fat selves along!” And for
great fat selves
she turned her glare to me, as if
I
had hit her.

“Ask Fisher who bought the socks,” said Bee to me across the table, “and we will know who is your admirer.”

I would not, and so that afternoon Bee and Lorel went down with the socks to Fisher’s store themselves. They came back disappointed. “He says they were not bought from him,” said Bee. “He has never carried that style, he says; perhaps they were bought in Cordlin.”

“They look quite fresh,” said Mam, taking the socks from Lorel and examining them. She put them to her face and sniffed. “Lavender. And camphor. They have lain for years in some old lady’s camphor chest.”

“See?” said Ann Jelly at Billy, all smug. “Ambler’s granny. A last gift before she passed on.”