The Bride's Farewell (22 page)

If Pell had not already become accustomed to sorrow, she might have found herself unable to leave Highfields and Frannie. Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses, Dicken and John Kirby, Birdie and Dogman. Even Pa’s awful house with the tilting floor. All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul. As soon as she accepted one set of circumstances, another leaped up to mock her. Nothing stayed the same. Every day brought unwanted connections, losses and complications that broke her heart.

She reached down and felt for Dicken, on hand as ever to push the ground away as it rose up to meet her. All she never wanted to feel clawed at her heart.

She and Ellen set off.

Thirty-nine

W
hat a procession they made: the gray mare, the shaggy dog, the girl child with cropped hair, and Pell, who had lived two months in breeches and boots, and had only now, with some reluctance, gone back to dressing as a girl. Together they comprised a fraction of a circus, not quite a family, part of a menagerie; the pieces missing from each description left great gaping holes that Pell could not, in her mind, work out how to fill.

They walked and they rode. Dicken raced ahead until Pell called him back and chose another road. Ellen walked slowly at the rear, humming. She would still not sit on a horse. Slowly, they made their way to a place where two roads crossed. A sign pointed in one direction to London, in three others to Salisbury, Winchester, Southampton. Pell stopped and turned to Ellen.

“We’ll wait here,” she said.

“For what?” asked the child.

“For something to happen.”

Ellen wondered, then, whether the sister whom she loved, and whose judgment she trusted above all others’, had taken leave of her senses. But she was tired of walking and glad of an excuse to rest, and so they rested. By day they waited and watched the world go by, cooking on a smoky fire while Gray cropped the rich spring grass. By night Pell saw the moon grow fat and felt the tug of it on her own changing body. The sisters lay close together and looked up at the stars and slept and dreamed of a time when they would no longer wander the earth, searching for lost things.

With each person who passed by, they shared greetings and news, and announced that they were looking for a boy, and described that boy, and then waved goodbye, and waited for someone else to pass or for silence to fall once more. They talked to farmers on the way to market pulling carts or in wagons, young men on the way to meet young women, ladies in fine coaches and girls in simple traps, couples on foot, old men on ancient horses, shepherds driving sheep. It was a busy highway, and everyone had something to say, though no one had seen a boy this tall with sleek dark hair and no voice.

Day after day, Pell clung to a stubborn confidence. When Ellen looked at her inquiringly, wondering where they would go next, Pell stroked her hair and straightened her clothes, and asked her to help skin a rabbit or boil the potatoes left by the man who passed by this morning, or break the bread bought from the baker on his way to all the villages along the road.

They waited three days, and then three more, and three more. And then, halfway through the next three, they heard a low growl. And suddenly there was not one gray dog but two, and a joyous reunion, two gray-coated wraiths melding into one. Pell searched up and down the four roads and around the bend to find the source of Dicken’s doppel ganger, and then all at once he was there, the Gypsy boy with long legs and bones as sharp as Dog’s.

“Eammon!” Pell ran forward to him, unable to conceal her joy. She had waited, and kept her nerve, and they had come. “Where is Esther?”

He grinned at her crookedly. “Not far.”

She could see the wagon now, a half mile down the road. Eammon would give nothing away, and so she mounted Gray and urged her on to meet them. It was not until she had nearly reached the caravan that she recognized the driver sitting at the front with Esmé, holding Moses’s reins in his two thin hands. He climbed down, and she flung herself off Gray and caught him up in her arms, burying her face in the familiar smell of his hair. Esmé shadowed them, standing as close as she could to Bean without embracing Pell herself, shyly and a little resentfully reclaiming his hand at the first opportunity. She had not forgiven Pell for losing him once.

“Odd creatures,” Esther muttered, shaking her head. “I’ve no idea what to make of them.”

Pell’s eyes met hers over Bean’s sleek head. “So,” she said, “you found him.”

Esther nodded. And then all in a rush, Pell told her of Dogman and John Kirby and Andover, and the trip to Nomansland, and everything that had not gone as expected. When she spoke of the fire and the death of her parents, her eyes filled with tears and she turned away, but Esther’s expression did not alter. Both women were silent for a long time.

“And did you accomplish what you set out to do?” Pell asked at last, looking at the other woman closely.

“Yes,” replied Esther with her odd smile. “I met the man I sought all these years, and talked with him, and then I tapped my pipe out on his house.”

Pell stared, uncertain what reply this strange information required.

Just then they were interrupted by the reunion of Ellen and Bean and Dicken and Dog, and Pell smiled to think that the circus was, at this moment at least, a step closer to completion.

They stayed together for a week, camped beside a river. Pell told Esther over and over about the terrible fire in Nomansland and the terrible scene with Birdie, until the real events became just another story. Esther listened without comment, and only sometimes looked away with an inscrutable twist to her mouth. On the second day, Pell called Bean to her, which meant she also had Esmé, and pulled him close and told him about Mam and Pa and Sally all dead, and Lou married, and Frannie left behind with the horses, and he listened with the most serious of serious expressions, while Esmé—nearly as small and big-eyed as he—reached out and gripped on to his hand.

And then Pell asked if he would come with her and Ellen, or stay here with Esther and Esmé, and his big eyes widened, and he grasped Esmé’s hand tight. And Pell saw that there would be no parting them, nor would she try. For a moment Bean gazed at her with a particular expression, not of happiness, exactly, but content. And when Pell saw that he had found his place in the world, a great heaviness rose out of her chest and dispersed in the pale blue sky.

Ellen, for years an invisible child, now came to the fore. She and Pell were the last remaining unclaimed members of the clan. They had each other, but nothing and no one else.

What next, Pell asked herself, unable to give voice to her wishes and fears. She had solved one quandary only to be faced with another. John Kirby had said she could return, but even as she considered it she knew she would not.

The next day, she would give a small book of bird drawings to Evelina, say goodbye to Bean, and hand over what money she had left to his mother, thus repaying a family debt of which she knew nothing. The woman, whose home was a wagon with a canvas roof laid onto ribs, a shire horse, a hundred square miles of back garden, and a clutch of children, would once more set off across Salisbury Plain.

That night they all stayed together and ate from the same pot, animals and children together. And when they slept, they slept as a single family composed of like, rejected, and unmatched souls.

Pell and Esther were the last awake, sitting up late into the night saying not much of anything, while all through the countryside, stories spooled out in soft exhalations from every house or hut under the night sky.

Forty

P
ell planned their journey carefully. They walked quickly, stopping only to eat and drink, and occasionally to rest. They spent a night near Amesbury and continued on early the next morning. When at last they arrived, she left Gray and Ellen together at the house with Dicken and walked out alone to meet him.

It took only a few seconds for his dogs to know she had returned, and to run and greet her with wild sweeping tails.

He emerged from the kennels, expecting something but not her, and stopped when he saw her, tilted his head, looked again, and, utterly composed—or so she imagined—waited for her to speak.

“I’ve come back.”

He nodded slowly. “So you have.”

“I didn’t know whether I’d find you.”

He frowned. “Where else should I be?”

She said nothing.

“I told you I’d return.”

“You did.” Her voice trembled.

“And you couldn’t find it in your heart to believe me?”

“No.”

“You have no experience with faith.” It was not a question.

She looked around, from the house to the kennel to the cowshed where she had once lived. “No.”

He turned away to the kennels and the job he’d been doing.

“I’ve come to ask if you’ll have us back.”

“Us?” He dumped a carcass and a bucket of entrails among the dogs, and the frantic clamor subsided to snarls and grunts.

“Us.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve brought a horse. And Dicken. And one of the girls.”

“What girls?” He bent over a bucket of clean water, not looking at her. His bloody hands swirled pink streamers in its surface.

“My sister.”

“What have you done with her?”

Ellen had already emerged, not taking her eyes off him until she reached Pell and grabbed onto her. She peered out, fearful of change, of being left behind. But Dicken lunged at him with such an excess of delight, such a full wriggling rage of happiness, that he had no choice but to say the dog’s name, and wrestle him down, and return the greeting.

The child watched, encouraged. But then he turned to her frowning.

“Who are you?” His face was stern.

She took a deep breath. “My name is Ellen . . .” But immediately she faltered. “Mam and Pa are dead, and there’s just us now.” She turned to Pell, searching desperately for a reason that he might accept them. “We’re all very clever with horses,” she said, remembering, proud of the fact. And then, with a pang of conscience, “Except for me.”

He struggled to maintain his frown. “I have no horses. What use will you be to me?”

Ellen pondered the question for a long moment, frightened and resentful all at once.

“What use will you be to us?” she asked at last, a little uncertainly, and Pell felt a surge of pride. The girl’s eyes were coal-black and wide with anxiety, but there was the spark of something in her that would not be dominated.

“That remains to be seen,” Dogman said. He turned back to Pell. “Well? What use will I be to you?”

“We could find out. If you’ll have us.”

He considered this. “Have you? As what?”

“As . . . what you like.”

He didn’t answer.

“I am so tired,” she said softly.

He stood, motionless, surveying the little group. The scrawny, defiant child with her sister’s big dark eyes. The dog. The pretty mare. The girl who was no longer a girl.

“All right,” he said at last, without changing expression.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have us?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“What answer did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” She searched his eyes. “Why will you?”

“Why will I have you?” He paused. “Because you’ll have me. It’s the same for both of us, don’t you see?”

She thought for a minute and shook her head. “No,” she said in a whisper.

He turned to Ellen. “Are you hungry?”

The child looked at Pell. She was always hungry, of course she was. But it wouldn’t do to own up, and to this man, a stranger. Pell closed her eyes to hold off the feeling that might any minute sweep her away, and Ellen, unable at the last to contain herself, or to be truly frightened of him, squeaked, “Yes, please.”