The Stumpwork Robe (The Chronicles of Eirie 1) (5 page)

C
hapter Seven

Ana shivered, sporadic trembles shaking her bed as she refused her family’s entreaties. Her bruises ached far deeper than a mere stiffness and tenderness, they pained right through to a heart that beat a solid tattoo against her chest. As she tried to think, to assimilate, she felt as if she walked a narrow path on a foggy day, the mist thickening like soup all around. The occasional shriek issued from the Weald accompanied by the call of owls as they hunted for mice to pad out their bellies. From the Long
Field a bleat funnelled upward - deep, laborious, as a solitary wandering ewe called to the rest of the flock. A dark shade of navy coloured the night-sky, the stain unmarked by sparkle or glimmer. A crescent moon shaped like a piece of bitten fingernail had risen earlier and tracked west. At the moment it hung delicately in the sky, a lone adornment in the vast firmament. Bad weather approached, the edges of the lunar landscape blurred as if a large and careless hand had rubbed at the outline.

Bellingham’s eyes, his breath, his voice were as tangible as if he stood in the room in front of her...
Betrothed, betrothed, betrothed,
he shouted
.
Everything merged with the sight of her father as he lay lifeless on the bed. Then her mother’s voice saying ‘This will help.’ It cascaded over her head threatening to wash her sanity away. And the prophecy, that eldritch feeling, pulled at her:
Start walking, go on. Walk!

She jumped up and began to cram clothing and a rug in a tote,
rolling the few things tightly. A small miniature with a deft pencil sketch of her father followed, slipped down the side of the bag. Her dog, Hector, watched her sleepily, yawned and turned in three circles, to collapse and tuck his head firmly against his side. Ana went to kiss him, but something made stop. If she was to do this properly even he must be excluded from her life. ‘I'll not stay to marry Bellingham, and I can’t stay in the same house as Mother and Peter. I can never forgive them.’ Her muttering disturbed the dog and he grunted and burrowed his head deeper. Propelled by hurt, she turned away to grab the bag and climb through the open window, clambering on stockinged feet across the iron roof to the horse-chestnut tree by the back of the house, to jump and land like a cat on the ground. Creeping as quiet as a shade, she let herself in the kitchen door and set about piling some food into a cloth. Muslin bags filled with a little flour, dried meat, some cheese, one or two windfall apples, a knife. Time to be gone.

She pulled the door shut and with care, picked up her
father’s rowan crook. Its collar of silver bells glistened in the dark night and she thanked Aine the Mother that it was leaning against the doorframe. It was her most suitable weapon against attack from malign wights, and to avoid noise, she wrapped it in her jacket to silence it until she was behind the stables. There was a slight tinkle that seemed to ring as loud as the chimes of the Venichese campanile bells in the night air and she sucked in her breath for a moment, expecting Mother or Peter at the door.

Nothing!

With relief, she pulled low riding boots over the black breeches she had chosen to wear. She had knotted her hair and dragged on a dark woolen cap of her brother’s - she truly was a nightshade. A matter of moments and she was past the stables and in the middle of the Long Field, feet wet from the night dew but surely only the first of many discomforts she must endure. Not the least of which was the hurt she felt at her family’s shameless treatment of her. She would never understand, never! Then, as she hefted the bag onto her back, having unwrapped the crook and put on the coat, her bruised breasts pulled and tugged, as blue and yellow as if a horse had thrown her and stomped all over her body. As sharp as a goad, the pain prompted her to put her head down and continue through the pasture a quarter of a mile to the hawthorn hedge which separated ‘Rotherwood’ from the wildness of the Weald. She could hear the wights, their eldritch voices even now casting shivers down her arms. Throwing a last look back at the shape that was her home, Ana put a foot on the stile over the hedge and began to climb. Immediately the forest silenced. The total lack of sound crashed around her ears, more disconcerting than any noise, because for all of her life, Weald-wailing had run as a continual counterpoint to normal night sounds on ‘Rotherwood’. She grasped the crook firmly and with a tinkle of the collar of bells, she jumped to the ground to continue the journey she had begun.

She had a plan. During the evening as she sat alone in her room,
intermittent shivers shaking her body, she had dwelt on her mother’s perfidy. Unaware of anything her family might be suffering, her grief had kept her insulated. Had she been more cognisant, she may have understood her mother’s fear-driven actions a little better. Certainly she would never have countenanced a marriage to Bellingham but she may have understood the desperation. As it was she knew only that she must leave, get as far from her mother’s perceived disloyalty, from the assault, from the memory of her father’s death as possible. Whilst lying in Adelina’s van, she had heard her friend and the Amritsands merchant talking of leaving at dawn. And suddenly her solution had presented itself.  In the midst of her pain, she grasped the idea as if it were her only lifeline. She would go with them. Of course they would agree; they pitied her! She could use their sympathy as her ticket of leave and travel as far as the Raj because by the Spirits, she never wanted to return to her home. Ever. Having planned her escape, hoping to meet them on the other side of the Weald, she left no note for her family. Her loyalty was done.

The black boles of Weald trees surrounded her, leaning down over her, suffocating and ensnaring as they marched in dark, shadowy lines. Many were in the throes of discarding summer leaf and Ana’s face was brushed by falling foliage like moths on her face, or spiders. The floor of the forest crackled loudly under foot in the uncommon silence and she cast tentative glances sideways, the flick of amber eyes and the moving shape of a shade keeping pace behind the shrubs of yew and holly.
Gloom pervaded. Ana longed for lunar brightness to illuminate her
path but the snippet of light which had guided her to the Weald was long gone, buried beneath the mean swathes of cloud drifting across the sky. A light drizzle had begun and whilst the heavy canopy of evergreen verdure protected her like a vast umbrella, every time she stepped from the shield of evergreen to the broken spaces of deciduous, her face was moistened with the lightest wetness, a kiss, a promise of weather or something else to come.

Footsteps sounded behind her, to the side of her, in front of her and her heart clanged in her chest. She tried to be mindful of the Weald, its tricks and vagaries. Her life had been built on the foundations of such knowledge. Of course there would be footsteps... the Others knew she invaded their domicile. They would track her, trick her, deceive her, grieve her. But, she thought, they can damage me no more than I have already been hurt this past month. So she tried not to care, the benefit of suffering a deeper pain blunting the edge of her fear of the unseelie. But to be safe, she stopped and pulled off her coat and hat, turned them inside out and put them back on again. Almost immediately she heard disgruntled whispering and the padding of feet away from her.

She longed to rest, to light a fire to ease her remorseless aches so she
halted under the thick branches of a spruce and felt around for twigs and pine needles that had been kept dry by the resinous canopy. Scrabbling in her bag for the flint she had grabbed from the mantel as she left, she stroked sparks off it with the knife. Within minutes she had a tiny flame burning, the smoke hanging abjectly under the branches, adding even more to the moist fug of the night.
She chewed a windfall, mindless of the overtly sweet, autumnal flavour,
staring out into the dark with her back firmly against the tree, knees scrunched up and held by one arm. The Weald had begun to speak up again, a vicious invective, but more familiar in its tone than the silence. Words flittered in the dark… snickering, the occasional howl and eerie whispering. Ana listened, trying to determine a word or a sentence. Mostly it was an indefinable hiss, a message designed to increase paranoia and fear. But occasionally out of the sibilance, she heard
‘Go home, go away, begone. Or you’ll be lost and forlorn.’

‘Oh, be silent,’ she yelled, but the blackness swallowed her shout and she heard laughter. She reminded herself that she had the fire and the rowan crook with its precious collar of silver bells and she banged it on the ground. Its tinkling tones would send shivers over the sniggering spriggans and sprites whose task it was to unsettle her. For an hour she sat ignoring their games, defiantly shaking the crook like some odd, nocturnal morris-dancer.

Footsteps behind her jerked her head around. Close now, it sounded as if someone was infinitely weary as the steps dragged and she held her breath, lips bitten and chewed. The drizzle created a gauze like curtain of the smoke and pushing through it, seeming as if all the woes of the world sat on his shoulders, a small wizened man shuffled under the tree, offering no harm, nothing really as he neither acknowledged Ana nor asked permission to share her warmth but merely sat himself on the other side of the fire. The Fir Deac, she thought, elated and anxious to be in the presence of such an Other. She counted off the details of his appearance - small stature, yes. Long grey hair, yes. A faded coat the colour of a raspberry, yes. A dented black hat. Yes, it’s him! Wet and shivering, he repeatedly wiped a dripping nose with a dirty scrap of fabric.

Prudently she left the little man to warm himself as it was known that if a mortal allowed him to sit unmolested in his insular pleasure in front of the flame, good luck could only follow. He rested briefly and then stood and faced her. Saying nothing, he lay twigs on the ground and then turning, tapped his ear. Knowing to acknowledge him would destroy any beneficence, she began to stow things in her tote. The Fir Deac shuffled away, his eyes not having once met Ana’s. She raised her eyebrows in awed astonishment at such a strange confrontation and bent to scoop up the twigs to throw on the fire. It was then she saw the shape of an arrow pointing away. Puffing out a grateful breath at her good fortune, she almost forgot what else the kind wight had done. He had laid his finger on his ear as though listening for something.

Ana stood still, head cocked away from the spruce tree. The Weald had lapsed into pregnant silence, waiting. Then sweet and clear, the trill of a starling burst through, more melodious than could be imagined and harbinger of the dawn. She ducked under the spruce foliage seeking some sky. To be sure,
there
the sky had lightened imperceptibly.
There
was east! A relieved sigh puffed out because in her room, in her grieved and injured state, she had wondered if the Weald might be the death of her and she hadn’t cared. She certainly had never imagined good will coming from this odd place. What a quaint little man, full of gratitude because he was welcome to wipe his nose in front of a fire. She pulled the tote over her shoulders and picked up her crook to head easterly, knowing Others were an intrinsic part of life and could not be avoided, just treated with cautious care.

The rolling heaviness of the Weald began to give way to clearings and spinneys in the drab light between night and day. She glimpsed fields and green hills in the distance as the sun arose in a sluggish way and at the foot of the green downs she could see the grey ribbon of the Barrow Highway. Walking steadily,
she entered a dappled glade full of ferns and mosses... a pretty
place. A small stream tinkled over pebbles and despite the grey day, the water sparkled with invitation. Balm to Ana after the potential menace of the Weald, she wandered to a small pool, a crystalline loop to the side of the rill. Around the edge, like the perfectly scalloped hem of a Venichese robe of state, waterlilies floated; moon shaped discs upon which alighted leggy leaf-dancers, their bodies and wings iridescent in the gloaming.
She knelt at the water’s edge, trailing her fingers back and forth and then
splashed a handful on her face. The ripples reached to the outer edges of the pool, calmed, and then presently a mirror-like surface reflected an image of the surrounding elms and beech of the coppice, alight with autumnal hues.

But l
anguorously within the deeps a paler colour filled the
expanse of gold until Ana saw a white face, dark waving tresses and a sinuous body. It smiled at her; an enticing and beguiling gaze. Green eyes as perfect as jade and as clear as crystal drew her to the very edge of the pool.
She leaned closer and the face floated immediately beneath the surface so
she could discern the jaw, the mouth, the cheeks and nose of… ‘Pa?’ she whispered as she reached out a finger and traced it over the water. The woman’s image had faded and in its place, Ana’s father’s likeness smiled back. Two ripples set out in concentric circles as tears fell from Ana’s cheeks into the water. ‘Pa, is it really you?’ The image nodded and she blindly reached out a hand the better to stroke the face she so loved and that she had missed more than she thought possible. As her hand reached down, strong fingers laced around her wrist and dragged.

But Ana was mesmered, bewitched by the face that so haunted the deeps of the pretty waterway. She neither struggled nor shouted, merely relaxed
into the grasp drawing her closer to the watery grave. The visage of the figure, fully satisfied it held its prey, reverted to a pale as death woman’s face. Only as it smiled and revealed its jagged teeth would anyone have realised it was one of the deadly waterwights of the Weald.