The View From the Cart (3 page)

Standing it on the table, I moved back for a better view. I could scarcely credit that I had made it myself. It seemed perfect. No gaps to let the rain in, the sturdy little house stood foursquare. It merely needed a front wall with a door and a smoke hole under the eaves to be complete. And decoration, I thought. It called for some elaboration to make it purely my own.

I made the additions, losing myself in the amusement it provided. The decoration consisted of rowan berries from a cluster I had saved for a healing potion, threaded into the walls in intricate designs, as well as a variety of seedheads from grasses and weeds which grew around the house. A row of beechmast outlined the edges of the roof. A home for the faeries, I decided, glancing briefly over my shoulder, afraid that I might be inviting something into my hut that I might afterwards regret.

Hungry and tired, I realised that the sun was low on the sky, and Edd should be back with the children. The church was a good distance away, but I had expected them home before this. The priest would have arranged a small meal to celebrate the new Christian, there would have been dancing and a song or two - it would all take time, I supposed, and there would be no haste to return to the ratty bent thing that I had become.

Finally, they appeared down the tussocky path, weary and quiet. Edd's arm remained locked for a few moments when he set the baby down, and I realised what a weight he'd carried so far. Wynn was pale, red juice on her face from the fruit she'd eaten. She was the first to notice my little straw house. Her face came alive and her hands reached out to it. ‘Oh!' she cried, in real delight.

Edd turned to look. I saw surprise, admiration and then fear cross his face. ‘It's a faery house!' he hissed. ‘Destroy it! What would the priest think?'

My laugh was a little forced. ‘Nonsense!' I said. ‘Just my little amusement during a long day. I'll smash it, if you want me to.'

I raised my fist over the toy, but then lowered it again. Wynn had whimpered in protest, and the baby also seemed very taken with it. I found myself fiercely reluctant to break it.

‘I'll put it outside,' I said. ‘It'll blow apart in a few days.' Edd made no protest and I clumsily took it up and shuffled out and around to the back of the hut with it. There was a small place under a thorn bush which seemed the natural spot to place it. I set it lightly on the ground, and tried to straighten my back before going into the hut again.

Two things happened. For the first time in over seven months I stood unbent without pain. And something rushed past my head, with a whirring of wings like a little bird. Bewildered I turned my head from side to side and raised my arms to the sky. Then I lifted my feet one by one, disbelieving, my heart stopped from shock. I was cured.

With a loud cry of triumph, which echoed over the moors like the call of a seabird, I flew back to the hut to show myself.

Edd stared at me as I rushed in. ‘I am cured!' I sang, a madwoman with my hair outflung.

Wynn ran to me, throwing her arms about my thighs. ‘I prayed for it!' she boasted. ‘Just as Father Brendan said we should.'

‘Then I thank you,' I laughed. ‘With all my soul.'

‘But the faery house
really
did it,' she added, suddenly solemn. I lowered myself to be level with her face, the stiff muscles only mildly complaining.

‘We must not place our faith in faeries,' I said, gently. ‘But perhaps they have given our Lord a little help?'

She nodded wisely, and I hugged her to me. She and I were restored to each other thanks to the end of my crippledom and I rejoiced in it. We all slept soundly that night, after a day we would not quickly forget.

Edd attributed the cure of my crippled back to Cuthman's baptism. It seemed plain to him that the washing clean of the child's soul had drawn God's favour down on us. The priest had said something in his blessing about the purity of a newly christened child being a great force for good. He had said, too, that he sensed an unusual innocence in our child, hinting that Cuthman might be special in time to come. ‘He has a glow to him, like an angel,' he had murmured to Edd, blushing a little, my husband noted, at his fancy. ‘And I think it too,' Edd maintained, a trifle defiantly.

‘I never saw it,' I spoke shortly, mindful that where the priest had seen an angel, I had glimpsed a demon. ‘But perhaps now he has been blessed, I shall find him as you do.'

‘It is plain to see,' Edd persisted. ‘And your mended back is the evidence of it. Can you doubt it?'

At the time it seemed to me that he had heard more in the priest's utterances than was in fact spoken. It was many times the case that I misjudged my husband and dismissed his words when I should not have done.

And so the months unfolded, and then the years. Edd expected that we would have more children, so that we could care for more sheep and prosper accordingly. Each new child meant an additional flock of twenty or more could be grazed on the moors, watched over by its young shepherd. Edd himself had little feeling for sheep, preferring to grow corn in the good upland ground and mill it into bread. The beasts we did own were mainly confined close to the buildings, foraging on the riverbank. Edd had taught two of the dogs to bring the sheep back if they wandered too far, which was a great fascination to me to watch. The dogs and I had a bond that I valued. Their great brown eyes would watch me, reading my thoughts, waiting to find a way to please. But I never attempted to teach them tricks, the way Edd had done. For me they were friends more than servants, warm bodies in the night and good signallers of some alarm or change.

I could not openly admit to myself or my man how deathly afraid I was to give birth again, but he came to understand and accept the truth of it. It seemed certain that I would once again be crippled, and it was too much to require of me. Despite the miraculous events on the day of Cuthie's baptism, I was not fully mended after all. I could stand straight, bend and turn, but walking over the moors for more than an hour together would bring an ache to the same place as before, and prevent me from sleeping that night. I treated myself with care, a cracked vessel which could stand no sudden knocks or bumps.

It was a hardship for me to avoid the union which created new life, but I was adamant. If ever I was tempted, I only had to recall the agony I had suffered and I was easily suppressed. If Edd became urgent, as he would sometimes in the warm depths of the night, I found other ways of pleasuring him, which was itself a satisfaction. We remained friendly, as we'd always been, with the shared labour of the land and stock and children to bond us.

Wynn and Cuthman grew robustly, taking their place in the family quickly and readily. My son was spoken of as Cuthie by everyone. Wynn seemed to admire him, with a mixture of big-sister patronage to ensure he never forgot his place. I came upon them one breezy day, in the lee of the hut, playing quietly together. It took me some time to understand what they were doing.

Cuthie had my little straw house, long since forgotten, set down before him, and was poking a large stick through its doorway. ‘Come out!' he was saying, in his deepest tones. ‘Come out, you faery!'

Wynn was watching anxiously, her hands clasped tightly before her. ‘Oh, Cuthie, no,' she pleaded. ‘Don't hurt the faery.'

At first I was amused at their childish fancy. But then I looked more closely at the house. It had been over two years since I made it, yet it was as perfect as it had been on that first day. Slowly, I crept closer to them, hoping not to disturb the game. Cuthie's rough jabbing with the stick seemed certain to break the little house into pieces, yet it held together. I gave it my full scrutiny, coming ever closer. The beechmast was still around the roof edges, but the rowan berries had come away from the walls. Instead there was a different design, made of the red seed-covered spears of dock, which gave the walls a bristling appearance. Wynn must have done it, I supposed, and admired the fancy handiwork.

As my shadow fell across him, Cuthie finally looked up at me. Defiance came into his eyes. ‘I not care,' he said. ‘Faeries be sinful.'

I nodded at him. ‘That's so,' I said, wondering where he had learned this piece of doctrine.

‘No!' cried Wynn. ‘Not sinful. The faeries are lovely. See how well they keep the house you made, Mam. They honour you for it. They told me so.'

I remembered, then, the thing that had rushed by me, whirring so quickly I couldn't see it, when I first took the house outside. A great fear gripped me. Since the holy church had come, talk of faeries was altogether forbidden. My grandmother had told me she saw some once, dancing on a sunny hillside, but that they were disappearing - going away to places where the humans still understood their powers and the new Church had not yet come. My mother would never speak of them. When I told her one day that I believed there was a tiny faery swinging in the foxgloves beside our house, she slapped me hard on my cheek.

‘How can you speak with someone so tiny?' I asked Wynn, resolved to be a kinder mother than my own had been.

‘They can grow bigger when they talk to us,' she told me, with absolute seriousness.

Cuthie rattled his stick again, and shouted ‘Out! Out!' I tried to peer into the house, but it was in shadow, the stick filling most of the doorway.

‘Cuthie takes God's part,' Wynn explained sadly. ‘God speaks to him, and tells him to destroy the faeries. But the house will never break.'

‘But you have been baptised, Wynnie. You're God's child, too.'

She shrugged. ‘Not like Cuthie,' she said.

I took the stick away from the little lad, then, and told him the faeries had all gone away, as he wanted. He only partly believed me, but it was time for the meal, so he let me lead him into the hut.

Cuthie's third winter was a harsh one. Snow drifted against the hut, seeping through the walls, so that we were always cold and damp. We ate salt meat and oatmeal, with a carrot or two, poorly roasted in the fitful fire. The snow-laden air made the fire smoke and fail to draw, and it seemed to me that we sat for weeks in the near darkness, shivering and sick. Edd took it hardest, struggling to keep the grain dry in the linhay, where starving rats and mice braved his rage and stole or spoiled much of it. He brought it in, but the warmth of the hut, feeble though it was, set a mildew on it. We had beets, well covered with sods and sacking, which were meant more for the sheep than for us, but we ate some of them. They took most of a day to cook, so we chewed the fibrous slices raw, suffering the gut ache that followed.

The children were miserable, penned in with nowhere to run and play. Edd and I cuffed them many times each day, banging them down to sit still and stay quiet. I thought of Spenna, along the valley, with her five brats in a hut the size of mine, and trembled for her. I craved her company and laughter, her stories of our young days when she ran free on the moors and cast charms to catch a good man. She claimed to remember it better than I did, saying that I had gone with her many a time, but I knew otherwise. She had gone with other village girls, never me. I had never taken part in such pranks. My memories were of lying with her under the apple trees, chewing the long grass and telling secrets together. It was Spenna who heard me tell of my mean-hearted mother and my wish to live beyond the borders of the village.

Spenna knew charms for everything, and she passed them on to her own daughters, which I had never dared nor wished to do with Wynn.

Edd began to cough that winter. Something settled on his chest which he never truly shook off again, and after that any cold wet weather would start him off. He learned to breathe more shallow, afraid of the pain I could often see if he took in air right to the depths. His hair thinned and turned grey, though he was not an old man. He let his beard grow, straggling and parti-coloured, which gave him a wild look. We all grew thinner that winter, but Edd became gaunt, his hands and wrists bony and stretched-seeming.

My own proclaimed cure on the day of Cuthman's baptism was not as complete or permanent as I had then assumed. I regularly awoke to a stiffness that took much of the day to shift. If I walked up to the nearest tor, I was limping and bent before I reached home again. But the pain never returned as bad as it was in those early months, and with effort, I could be nearly normal in my daily tasks.

Spring came at last. We gave the sheep as long as we could on the new grass, and then killed two of last year's lambs, bringing a bounty of meat. Edd took one into market and traded it for bread and a newly weaned red heifer calf. It seemed an enormous good deal to me, but Edd grinned and said I'd never had much sense of value.

‘Tis safe, see,' he explained. ‘That lamb be grown and killed and butchered. No more to do but store and eat him. If we're to have good beef, ‘tis two years of worry and watching first. Not certain. The calf could die tomorrow, worth nothing.'

‘Then why?'

He grinned again. ‘I felt lucky,' he said.

I thought of his coughing and the vicious snow and the rats, and wondered what spirit was in the man to say what he did.

The heifer attached herself to us from the first, having none of her kind to be with. Wynn took special charge of her, moving her from byre to grassland and back again. The beast's rump broadened as she grew and she became handsome. It seemed that Edd had been right in his gamble, though there was a long wait yet before the slaughter.

‘Wynny's a quick pupil,' he remarked. ‘She can take on some sheep in a while.' Like any father, he took a special pleasure in his girl child.

On the moor above our hut, half a morning's walk away, stood a granite dolmen, mossy and weathered, but securely upright as it must always have been. The great table slab was high above our heads, and the space beneath it easily large enough to lie down in. Shepherds had sheltered there for generations, some using it as a night refuge, and my children loved to play there. They talked about it now and then, as the ‘blood place', which I assumed at first was due to the reddish streaks down the stones which I recalled from the days when I could walk so far. But overhearing them one day, I realised that this was not what they meant.