(2007) The Pesthouse Page 13

  'Your son could be fifty paces down the road and looking for his daughter.'

  'Don't argue, Andrew, not with her,' said Melody, and then went on to justify herself. Whatever choice they made would be a cause of misery, so maybe it was wiser that they made the choice that took them to a better place. 'That's what Acton would want us to do, if he was here. We've got the girl to think of, haven't we? It's not a selfish thing. It's you that's selfish in my eyes, just thinking of yourself and disregarding us.'

  Margaret would not express an opinion yet. She listened to the Boses, but would neither nod nor shake her head. They were not at the coast. They couldn't see the ocean. They couldn't guarantee passage on a ship. They couldn't even guarantee a ship. So it was premature to punish themselves with cruel and difficult decisions. Anything might happen between here and there. She adopted her bullying voice again. 'Come on,' she said. 'There's walking to be done. Let's get on with it.'

  So the subject of Acton and Franklin was dropped from their conversation (not to mention the subject of the unfortunate Joeys: the potman's wife was probably at that very moment cracking jugs and water ewers on their behalf with no suspicion that her husband and her son had been picked out of their lives as easily as berries from a bush). Margaret and the Boses simply pushed ahead, keen to discover if there was any truth in the big man's promises that the salt water was only four days distant.

  That afternoon they almost reached the market town that he had mentioned. They could see its pall of smoke and what appeared to be a log tower, with a banner flying from it. But the days were rapidly shortening, and so, too early in the afternoon, they had to hunt for shelter. Their quarters for the night — a sheep pen — were cramped, no room for lying down, no room for lovemaking. They had to eat and then sleep with their chins on their knees. Margaret did her best to hold a cheerful conversation. She retold the story that she had been reminded of that day, with her grandpa and the stolen chicken and the sheep with three green bars. But the Boses — how could this be the same couple who had made love so noisily just one night previously? — seemed preoccupied and unamused. They thought the trapper's hospitality had been foolish and unbusinesslike. 'I'd take three sheep for a single hen anytime,' said Andrew. 'Any fool would.' He did not understand why Margaret laughed and why his wife — after a moment's reflection — joined her. Margaret was recovered from her illness now, but she was exhausted and roughened by the journey and by the trauma of losing both Franklin and her family. Was she thinking only of herself and disregarding others, as Melody had claimed? What the Boses had said about taking passage on the first available boat might seem callous, she thought, but they were probably right. Franklin might have been taken in any of a thousand directions. He might have already met any of a thousand fates. If she had a duty now, it was only to herself, and possibly, in the short term, to little Bella. Obtaining goat's milk for the child that day had been immensely pleasing, especially when the girl had settled afterwards and slept so contentedly. Carrying her had been easy.

  Tomorrow Margaret would do the same: identity the safest house that had a cow or goat and use her wiles to procure more milk for her charge. She could not imagine parting from the child. She had nothing else, and there was no one to value. Bella was her only friendly flesh. So maybe she was now obliged to bite her tongue and stay on with the Boses, whatever they might decide to do, just to make sure that their granddaughter was given the attention — and the future — she deserved. It was strange, was it not, that a man that she had known for scarcely seven days and a child that she had known for only three should hold her thoughts — and her prospects, possibly — in their grip.

  The rain outside the sheepfold was thickening and sleety. Margaret set her back against two corner walls and twisted her body so that Bella could lie across her lap, and they could share the scarf, the blanket and the tarp. It would be the coldest night so far. She offered her little finger to the girl's hard gums. But Bella pushed the hand away. Her lips were chapped and sore from the salty food she'd had and from the cold, so Margaret dug for wax in her own ears and applied the honey-colored secretion as a lubricant. The child licked her lips, stopped crying for some moments when she tasted sweetness, and then cried out for more wax, tugging at Margaret's fingers with her tough and tiny hands.

  11

  MARGARET NEEDED TO bully for milk three more times before her fortunes changed. For the better and for the worse. She valued these trips away from Andrew and Melody, and she knew they were glad to be free of her for a while. It was their chance to rest and recover their strength, as well as an opportunity to talk and complain freely behind her back. Having Bella entirely to herself, helping her to stand for a moment, rolling stones for her to crawl after, allowing her to explore her mouth, ears and nose, tickling her — all that mothering was a joy.

  Margaret had promised to reward the girl with milk. So over those few days, by trial and error, her begging and beseeching skills improved. She'd tie her scarf, put Bella on her hip and head for anyone with goats or cows. She was ready to exploit the twin forces of a hungry and appealing child and what could be taken by the faint-hearted as a diseased skull to get her way and get her milk and any other food that might be going spare.

  The least neglected habitations were the best for begging. Untidy homes, she found, and homes with little to boast of were unlikely to part with anything as prized as milk unless someone was holding a blade at their owners' throats. But tidiness suggested composure and respectability. Tidy people were more easily coerced. They had more to lose. They evidently had more to prove. Why else the public display of house plants or painted fences or trimmed hedges on their land?

  Men were easier to browbeat than women, Margaret soon discovered. For men, a child was a mystery. She had only to tell a man, 'Look at my poor girl's dry lips — that's thirst — and look at her skin. Those blotches on her nose, you see? That's hunger rash. My darling's only got a day or two to live, just feel her bones,' and he would rather part with his big toe than stand accused of heartlessness. How Margaret loved her newly invented, inventive self, and how powerful she could be with certain, tidy men. But a woman, and especially one who'd been a mother, would know that just a little redness around the nose was common to all children of that age. Some kids are red around the nose for fifteen years, and never hungry once.

  So Margaret chose her victims carefully. Once she'd seen a man on the land, preferably near a well-kept house, with livestock, she would approach, first greeting him in the old American way, then showing him the child (her beauty first, her hunger next, and then the red nose and the dry, chapped lips) and finally — if all of that had failed — dragging off her blue scarf to show the evidence of flux. This last act always had the most effect. Men everywhere fear illness more than women do, she supposed. But it was more complicated than that. She could not know — especially now that Franklin was not around to tell her so — that as the days passed and her hair grew a little longer, she became more strikingly unusual. In the first days after the shaving, she would have seemed ugly to most men. Her color was not good. The illness bleached her. Her lids and brows, though, were red from where each pinch of hair had been plucked out by the women in her family — her mother, her two sisters. But, except for the scabs where her grandpa's shell razor had nicked her skin, her scalp had been oddly white and ailing from never having been exposed to light before.

  But now her color was a healthy one. Since Ferrytown she'd had good exercise in open air, if not good food, and she had what country people call 'ripe cheeks, sweet enough to pick'. Even if she did not remove her scarf, anyone could see she was a handsome woman. Her eyebrows were light and thin as yet, but that need not declare her as a recovering invalid and possibly contagious. The black-haired people of America did not expect those rare, unlucky redheads among them to have the forceful facial hair of normal folk. But with her scarf off and her history of contagion clearly on display, her attractiveness was now enhanced instead of bet
rayed. By the fourth day of her begging her regrown head hair had become tufty enough to hide her scalp entirely under a soft, springy carpeting but not long enough to hide the good shape of her face, the candor of her forehead, the set of her mouth. Her great green eyes, which might not see too well over long distances, looked to any observers — and there would be many — as if they were the largest eyes they'd ever seen. They'd wonder whether they would dare to sleep with her. Was such rare beauty worth the risk? It was.

  So on her last trip into the final farmlands of America, in search of milk on the morning before she and the Boses expected to reach the salty, giant-pumped river, the man she found mending his harnesses outside his neat, wood cottage, with its pen of three fatly uddered cows, was easily — excessively — seduced. When Margaret had arrived with Bella and called out her greetings from the boundary fence, the man, like all the others before him, had taken hold of something with which to defend himself (in this instance, a weighted, leather strap) and ordered her to stay exactly where she was and state her business, unless she wanted to be driven out of the county with blood on her back.

  Margaret was used to these immoderations. The man — as old as Margaret's father by the look of him, and not as tidy as his house — did not seem alarmed, just aggressively cautious. She gave her name. She smiled. She was polite. She introduced 'her' child. She said how hungry they both were. She asked if there were any chores, anything at all, that she could do in return for a little milk and some food, and then, before he could actually suggest any suitable work, she had pulled down her scarf and let the blue material puddle on her shoulders.

  She'd seen the startled look on his face and expected him, like all the others had (at least once their wives had shown their faces), to order her to keep away from the house while he brought milk, and then to feed the child and leave their land immediately, or else. But this man stepped toward her, calling out to someone in the house as he did so. And then she realized, not from experience, but from base instinct, that the pulling down of her blue scarf, together with her smiling offer of doing 'anything at all' in return for milk and food, had been taken by this man to be an invitation to advance and put his hands on her. Her hair was not short enough to scare him off. 'You'll have the milk,' he said. 'You'll have it twice.' Another man appeared behind him at the door.

  WHEN MARGARET and Bella had not returned to their rendezvous tree by late afternoon, Andrew Bose acted out of character. Anxious, fretful and exasperated by Melody's demands that he 'do something on his own account for a change', rather than just cussing their misfortune and feeling sorry for himself, he volunteered to do exactly what she suggested and risk 'a little scout' into the nearest fields.

  He left his wife in charge of all their possessions. She would, she said, make as much smoke as she could if the missing couple were to return in his absence and as much noise as she could if a stranger approached and offered her 'any inconvenience'. She was pleased with herself for sounding so spirited in such worrying circumstances. In fact, she had discovered — and liked herself for it — that she could be tougher — steelier, to use the older word — than she had expected. Acton first. Now Bella. She still felt strong and calm and ready to be tested further, although she acknowledged in her heart that the prospect of Andrew being the third loss to the family was one that was mildly amusing to her imagination only so long as it didn't actually happen. He was thin water, though. No denying it.

  Her husband set off across the strips of field toward the wood cottage that Margaret had identified, just before noon, as promising. Andrew, whose distance eyesight was still sharp despite his age, had clambered on to the same tree trunk as Margaret and agreed that, yes, her eyes were not deceiving her, that was a man outside the house and those were cattle, though he could not specify whether they were she's or he's.

  'Take your knife,' Melody had instructed him, but he had thought it better to arrive at the dwelling empty-handed. He doubted that the inhabitants would want any nets mended — they hadn't passed a decent river for days — and knew for certain that he would not be able to use a knife effectively for any other purpose. He had no plan in mind, other than to take no great risks. He'd satisfy his wife's challenge and no more. He would walk as quietly as he could, keeping to the shade and to the low ground as much as possible, and see what he could see from a safe distance.

  He did not approach the house directly by its path but followed a line of trees and then a highish loose stone wall that provided good cover. The only sound he could hear, apart from the entirely natural disharmony of birds and wind and branches, was the half-gate of an abandoned hut that was swinging noisily on the last of its leather hinges and repeatedly banging its jamb. But by the time Andrew had reached the end of the wall a dog had begun barking. You can't creep up on a dog. Andrew waited. There was no point in running away from a dog. He expected it to arrive with its inquiring nose any moment. He would do his best to charm it. Perhaps he should have brought that knife. Stabbing a dog would be no more difficult, surely, than gutting a good-sized fish. But not only did the dog not arrive, it also stopped barking after a while.

  Andrew counted to a hundred before he dared to stand a little and look over the wall toward the house. There was a dog, its head between its paws, and safely leashed at the side wall, but there was no one looking out across the land to discover why their guard had been making such a din. The only movement Andrew could spot was from the back of the house, where there were at least three cows in a deeply slurried pasture. For a moment he was tempted just to stand up and call out Margaret's name. If he shouted loud enough and then ducked behind his wall, he would be able to hear any reply, but no one would be able to see who'd done the shouting or where from. But they might untie the dog. And, as he had seen, the dog was a large one. Even if they did not release the dog (and a clear sense of they had already formed in his imagination — they were the same group who had already taken Acton), if it was decided to chase after him, what chance would an old, tired man like him stand? No, he would stick to his current policy and stay both quiet and hidden. He skirted the front of the house, still pressing close to walls and fences until he reached the boundary of the cow paddock, on the opposite side of the house from the dog. There he could hope that his odor might be masked by stronger ones.

  He waited for another count of a hundred, watching for any movement. There was nothing. He felt reasonably satisfied that, unless the rooms were occupied by drunks or men without legs or hostages, tied up, the only living creatures within the grounds of this house were the cattle and the dog. So, thinking not only of the heroic tale he would be able to tell Melody later that day but also that he would never forgive himself if this first chance of finding his granddaughter was refused, he walked across the pasture, using the cows as shields as much as possible, and pressed himself up against the rear of the cottage. Again he waited and listened. Nothing, other than the sounds that empty houses make. So, with his heart racing and his mouth dry, he peered between the shutter-boards in the larger of the two windows into the long, single room, half expecting to find Franklin, Acton and Margaret trussed in ropes, with little Bella crawling in the dust. But all he could see was a table with pair of leather boots on it, and two bed boards covered in a tangle of blankets. Otherwise the house was unfurnished and certainly not permanently inhabited. Now he was confident, though disappointed. He walked around to the front of the house, by way of a side gate, and — this surely was courageous for an aging net-maker — went inside. Other than a damaged harness and a leather strap that somebody had dropped on the doorstep, there was nothing more to see than he had noticed from the rear window. Just leather boots and bedding. But fresh hoof marks in the earth outside suggested that horsemen — only two or three, so far as he could tell — had recently departed, probably only that afternoon. There was nothing to suggest that Bella and Margaret had even reached the house or that there was anything there to be feared, other than a tethered dog that now, for reaso
ns of its own, began to bark again. Andrew thought he heard shuffling and a voice, a baby's cry, perhaps. A bird? It was time for him to flee.

  It was dark by the time Andrew found his wife again. She was shaking and hardly able to breathe. Her period of mild amusement on her husband's departure had been short-lived. As soon as he was out of sight, she could no longer admire herself as tough and steely or ready for greater tests. Without her husband's timidity to measure herself against, she soon felt unprotected and exposed. Even though there had been no strangers to offer any 'inconvenience', every bird and every cracking branch terrified her. Every shifting shadow made her jump. She'd never known such fear and anxiety before. What if neither her husband nor her granddaughter came back to her? That would be worse than losing Bella's mother. That would be worse than losing Acton. It was not that she loved Andrew better than her son (indeed, she did not) or was so deeply attached to her granddaughter that the thought of life without her was impossible. It was rather that she was alone.

  Melody was relieved to see her husband fit and well, despite the dreadful fates that she had imagined for him, and to know that she herself would not be left entirely on her own in the middle of a hostile land, a widow and a destitute, with not a hope in the world. But she was still distraught when he returned, and she saw that he was unaccompanied. She listened to his account of finding only an empty house and no sign of their granddaughter or Margaret. She kissed him and embraced him, glad of his warmth, but she was annoyed with him again. 'Did you call for her? Did you shout her name?'