Crossing Over (3 page)

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Authors: Anna Kendall

BOOK: Crossing Over
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What does interest the Dead? For all my crossings, I still don’t know. Of course, I’m never here for very long, and only the elderly will talk to me. Yet I have the impression that the Dead are absorbed in something of which they never speak, not even to each other—unless words like Mrs. Humphries’s mean more than they seem.
“Look at the white stones under the water. See how they seem to shift shape.”
The Dead will stare at stones for years. At trees, at flowers, at a single blade of grass. What is shifting in their minds, under what unimaginable waters?
Mrs. Humphries had forgotten me. I pinched her hard. If I went back to Hartah without information, my second beating would be worse than my first. My pinch didn’t hurt Mrs. Humphries—nothing hurts the Dead—but it did remind her that I was there.
She snapped, “What now, boy?”
“Tell me about when you were a girl.” And I held my breath.
Childhood is the one thing that will sometimes get the elderly Dead to talk. Their adult selves, their long lives, the families they left behind—these mean nothing to them now. But themselves as small children: that will sometimes animate them. Sometimes, anyway. Perhaps it is because little children, in their simplicity, are closer to what the Dead are now. I don’t know. None of the actual children here has ever talked to me, or even seemed to see me.
Mrs. Humphries gave her little cackle and her old eyes brightened. “I was a rapscallion, I was! You would scarcely credit it, boy, but I was a pretty child, with hair like new-minted gold. But I wanted black hair, like my friend Catherine Littlejohn, so I—”
A family story, undoubtedly told and retold many times. It led to other stories. A prize chicken had been stolen from the Littlejohns and slaughtered for the Feast of the Winter Solstice. A nobleman, one Lord William Digby, had once ridden through Stonegreen and given Ann, that pretty child, a coin as gold as her hair. I listened carefully, watching the stones shift shape under the water.
And all the while, rage built in my heart that Hartah made me do this thing, come to this place, note with such desperation these trivialities from a woman months in her grave. A woman I would never see again. A woman who was dead, when I was not. I only felt that I was. Here, and there.
3
 
I DELAYED CROSSING
back over for as long as I could. Always I feared the dirt in my mouth, the flesh gone from my bones, the maggots and the cold and the darkness. What if one time, they didn’t pass? What if I became trapped in that terrible moment between life and death, forever awake in my rotting grave?
And I did not want to return to Hartah.
So I loitered by the mossy green boulder, and watched the Dead, and tried to get another one of them to talk with me. None would. They sat holding hands in their circles, or they sat alone, gazing at a blade of grass. One of them, a gentleman or even a lord in his velvet breeches and doublet, a short sword on his hip, lay full length on the grass. He stared straight up at the gray, featureless sky. He never even blinked. I wanted to kick him, but what if this should be the one time when a kick aroused a younger Dead? That sword was as real and solid as everything else here.
Some of the Dead wear strange dress, clothing I have never seen on my travels with Hartah. Crude fur tunics. Armor with red plumes on odd-shaped helmets. Long white robes. The old ones speak languages I don’t know, when they speak at all. But wherever or whenever their lost lives, they all behave the same.
Listening.
Watching.
Waiting with unimaginable patience. I don’t know what they wait for, what their calm gazes see. And they do not, or cannot, tell me.
When I had lingered as long as I dared, I took a sharp stone from my pocket. I rested my left hand against the Stonegreen boulder and drove the stone as hard as I could into my hand, harder than necessary. It does not take nearly as much pain to leave here as to come. But I wanted to inflict pain, and I could not inflict it on Hartah, so I cut my hand and crossed back over into the land of the living.
 
 
“. . . and dyed her hair black, like her friend Catherine Littlejohn’s,” Hartah finished. The woman in the tent burst into tears.
Again I lay under my table, but I already knew that this time I was not needed. The woman sobbed, “Oh, it
was
my mother! No one else could know those things, not all those details, not like that—oh! And she said she’s safe and happy. . . .”
“Yes. And that she loves you very much,” said Hartah. For these occasions he used a voice that Aunt Jo and I seldom heard: low, slow, completely scrubbed of his usual snarl. He sat far away from the women—our customers were usually women—both to not make them uneasy with his great bulk and to give himself an air of mystery. Hatred of him filled my mouth like rancid meat.
“My good mother! Oh, thank you, good sir, I can never thank you enough, you have given me a gift beyond price!”
But of course there was a price. Hartah exacted it, plus a promise of silence, from Mrs. Ann Littlejohn, born Humphries. He did the same with Catherine Carter, born Littlejohn, and with Joan St. Clare and her young cousin Geoffrey Morton. They had all lived in Stonegreen their entire lives, the Humphries and Carters and Littlejohns and St. Clares, as had their parents and grandparents before them. Their family secrets were shared secrets, and the dead Mrs. Humphries had known them all.
“A good day’s work,” Hartah said to me after the last customer had left the tent. He meant his work, not mine. Already he had forgotten the beating he’d given me this morning, blotted from his mind as completely as the grave blotted love from the minds of the Dead.
“May I go?” I tried to keep anger and fear from my voice.
“Yes, yes, go, who needs you now?”
Outside, long shadows fell across the faire field. Dusk gathered on the horizon, soft and blue and smelling of the night to come. Farmers drove their wagons, lighter by what they’d sold and heavier by what they’d bought, down the Stonegreen Road toward home. The cottagers of Stonegreen lingered at the remaining booths and at the ale tent, not wanting their brief holiday to end. Several, men and women alike, were drunk. They staggered about, singing and laughing, their merriment echoing from group to group. I found my aunt sitting in the shade of Hartah’s wagon. With no money to enjoy the faire, she had probably sat there most of the day. Wordlessly she raised her eyes to mine.
“A good take,” I said. “We will eat.”
She didn’t smile; all smiles had left her years ago. But she laced her hands together on her skinny belly, as if in thanks-giving prayer. I couldn’t stand to watch. Grateful prayer, for a crust of bread and slice of cheese! I stalked away, to the river, and found myself standing under the same great overhanging tree where I had sat with Mrs. Humphries in the country of the Dead.
Under the tree, staring at the dappled shadows on the river, stood the girl from the inn yard this morning. The girl with the long black braids. “You’re back,” she said, and I froze.
“Where did you go all day?” she continued. “I didn’t see you anywhere at the faire.”
She had looked for me.
She
had looked for
me
. And she didn’t know where I’d been. So why had she looked for me? I couldn’t think of anything to say, and so stood there, wordless, like the oaf that I am.
“Oh!” she cried suddenly. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
The bruise where I had hit myself with the sharp stone. It had bled a little, the blood had crusted over, and around the angry wound my flesh was puffy and red, rapidly turning purple. Foolishly I covered it with my other hand, clasping both in front of me. Then I realized that the gesture was exactly what my aunt had done, and I scowled ferociously.
The girl didn’t notice. She’d darted toward me, picked up my clasped hands, pulled them apart. She had removed the black lace mitts she’d worn in the morning, and the long white sleeves of her smock fell back over her arms.
“Did you cut yourself on—oh!” Immediately she put her left hand behind her back. But I had seen.
“Don’t tell,” she whispered softly, childishly, and the fear in her eyes loosened my tongue as nothing else could. I understood fear.
“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t tell, I never would. But you should be more careful. Not that it signifies—I assure you, it doesn’t! Not to me! It means nothing! ”
She nodded unhappily, tears in her eyes. The eyes were deep brown. Brown eyes, black hair—she should have looked drab, like a painting without color, but she did not. She burned bright in my gaze, a beautiful girl with one tiny flaw that signified nothing. Or, to some, everything.
I babbled on, trying to find words that would reassure her. “Only the superstitious say it matters. Only the ignorant. Why, I’ve heard tell that Queen Caroline has the same thing! And she is the queen!”
“The queen is a whore,” the girl said flatly, and I blinked. This girl spoke her mind freely. Spoke her mind, did not take enough trouble to hide the tiny sixth finger on her left hand, the same mark rumored of Queen Caroline. The mark of a witch.
“Be more careful!” I blurted, and looked around to see who else had heard her call the queen a whore. No one was near. “Take better care, my lady!”
“I am no lady,” she said, giving me the same smile as Mrs. Humphries when I’d called her a lady. Would all women, then, react with the same pleased amusement to my honoring them so? But I didn’t want to honor all women. Only this one, standing here with my injured hand still in her own small white one. She said, “My name is Catherine Starling. Cat.”
“I’m Roger Kilbourne.”
“My father farms at Garraghan.”
I didn’t know what or where Garraghan was, and I had no information I wanted to offer about my aunt or Hartah. But I didn’t need to speak. With a toss of her black braids, Cat said, “I don’t believe in witches, anyway!”
“You must be careful who you say that to.”
“I know. I am careful. I can trust you, I knew that right off this morning. You don’t believe in witches either, do you, Roger? All that foolishness—putting curses on people and sickening cattle and talking to the dead! Faugh!”
I said nothing.
She brought her left hand from behind her back and joined it to her right, still holding mine. “I’ll tell you what I do believe in, Roger,” she said with that luscious smile. “I believe in stars and flowers and sweetmeats and my doll!”
I saw it then. Her beauty had misled me, as had her pretty voice. She didn’t stumble over her words like the poor creature Hartah had kicked in the last town; her head was not too large nor her eyes blank. But her wits were not all present, and the mind in her head was younger than her near-woman’s body. It didn’t make me think less of her. It made me want to protect her, keep her safe from those who would make her childish tongue and sixth finger into excuses to hurt her. The warmth of her hands felt like the best thing that had come to me all summer.
Before I could answer, another voice, high with fear, called, “Cat! Where are you!” An older woman burst through the trees to the riverbank. “There you are! You know you are not supposed to—she wandered off, sir, I hope she has not troubled you—” At the sight of my hand in Cat’s, the woman stopped cold.
She was Cat’s mother: the same brown eyes, black hair, pretty features, although this woman’s hair was tucked up under a cap and her face was tense with worry. I hastened to reassure her.
“No trouble, mistress, none at all. We were just talking. She is fine.”
Mrs. Starling looked from me to her daughter, trying to assess the situation. I saw her take in my old clothes, too small for me at ankle and sleeve; my dirty hair; the hole in one boot. I saw her decide that whatever I had seen, I could have no influence anywhere, and so was no threat. But she was kind.
“Thank you, sir. Cat must go now; we start for home. Come, daughter.”
“Bye, Roger,” Cat said. “See you again!”
That would not happen, I knew. Not only because Cat was obviously the child of a prosperous farmer, but because she was beloved by at least one parent, who would do everything to keep her safe. I watched her go away, and in my breast warred a strange and bitter mix of regret, jealousy, and desire. I wanted Cat to stay. I wanted to go with her. I wanted to be her, sixth finger and all.
A sixth finger and impaired wits would be lesser afflictions than what I bore.
Slowly I left the leafy riverbank and went back to Hartah’s wagon.
4
 
WE SPENT THE NIGHT
at the same rough inn five miles from Stonegreen, and for once there was dinner for all three of us. I gobbled the bread and cheese, not knowing when I would get more. Even Aunt Jo ate well, sitting on the wooden bench as far away from Hartah as she could, her eyes cast down. Firelight turned one cheek rosy, which looked grotesque on her thin, lined face. Would my mother, had she lived, look like this? No. My mother, in my childish memory of her, had been beautiful.
Why
, I thought at Aunt Jo,
won’t you tell me where and how my mother died, you pitiful woman?
Aunt Jo raised her head. For an instant her gaze met mine. She looked away.

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