The Bride's Farewell (4 page)

Recalling her sense of decency, Pell turned and introduced herself and Bean to the Gypsy woman, who nodded.

“Esther,” she said. Then, pointing to the children, “Elspeth, Errol, Eammon, Evelina, and Esmé.” She smiled grimly. “Same father for them all.”

Pell scanned the collection of identical features and the children stared back at her without emotion. She judged the eldest to be about twelve, with the hips and breasts of a woman. Esmé was taller than Bean. Like him, she had a face made old by hunger.

“He is your son?” Esther said, indicating Bean.

“My brother.”

Esmé emerged from beneath the wagon followed by Bean, whom Esther grabbed and held at arm’s length. She studied his face with a curious intensity until he wriggled away out of reach, trailing Esmé as if attached by a string.

Esther looked from Pell to Bean and back again, her gaze shrewd. “You have the same mother and father?”

The question startled Pell. “No. Pa took him in as a baby. From a parishioner too poor to raise him.”

Esther nodded. A dense silence flowed between her and the little boy.

“Does he ever speak?”

Pell shook her head.

“Mute in the family’s considered lucky. Absorbs all the bad fortune, so they say.”

“Not so lucky for him, then.”

“No.” Esther’s laugh was harsh. And then, “Have you something for the little ones?”

Pell reached into her bag and pulled out the remainder of her bread, which the woman secreted in the large pocket of her apron. Once the meal was finished, it was easier to look and judge the state of the wagon, which was warm enough, with the musky smell of too many children. And when Pell did (far too late) check in every dark corner for predatory men, there were none, only a few untidy piles of belongings.

Plates were rinsed in a bucket of rainwater outside the wagon, and the children drifted inside one by one. Elspeth, the eldest, presided while the rest settled side by side on feed bags stuffed with straw, some head to tail and some not. To her surprise, Pell saw Bean crammed in among them, though it took a moment to determine which child he was. His head rested on Esmé’s skinny arm, and he looked more peaceful than he had since they left Nomansland. Pell realized all at once how little she replaced the crowded family at home, and wondered what his decision to accompany her had cost him.

She made a space in between the pots and pans at the side of the wagon, wrapped herself in her shawl, tucked her purse into the front of her dress, and settled down to sleep. The drip drip drip of rain running on canvas didn’t disturb her, for she was dry enough, and could lift the cover an inch or two and whisper to Jack, who puffed a little through his nostrils in return.

Sleep came right away. When she awoke in the night, Esther was snoring opposite, tucked up, with one of the children muttering softly by her side. Pell thought how strange it was to swap one family for another, and how effortlessly the conversion seemed to have occurred.

Just before sunrise came the smell of smoke fires, a clamor of voices, and the general clanking and clattering of pots and of wagons ready to pull up stakes and move on. Shaking the sleep from her head, Pell checked first on Bean and Esmé—their positions unchanged from the night before—then pushed out into the damp air to greet Jack. He looked in fine spirits after his night under cover, luxury for a horse who’d spent his whole life out of doors leaning into a gale.

Torn between gratitude and self-interest, Pell produced a wedge of cheese, hidden away for later, and shared it out among the children for breakfast. They swallowed it down quick as stoats and stared hard at her with rapacious eyes.

As the sun rose over the horizon, the Gypsy family put out their fire and packed up the caravan in minutes, ready to set off before Pell had even finished her tea. She wondered at their talent for quick departures, and what circumstances had honed the skill. Bean looked from Pell to Esmé, reluctant to say goodbye to his new friend, and when Esther suggested they meet later that day by the cathedral, Pell agreed. Bean ran alongside and waved until the caravan entered the great stone arch in the city wall and was swallowed up in the crowd.

Eight

A
s soon as they emerged from babyhood, the male Rid leys hired out as farm laborers, taking turns to trail behind their father from village to village, reluctant acolytes in the art of religious hectoring. Edward hid whenever his father was at home, and would rather take a beating than accompany him out preaching.

At home, with their mother in a near-constant state of lying-in, Lou and Ellen had responsibility for the carding, knitting, and plaiting of straw (for hats and baskets), the cooking and mending, the churning, cheese-making, and bread baking. Bean’s delicate fingers made fine straight plaits that fetched a good price at market, while Sally, lame from birth, sat and knitted, her stubby fingers counting the stitches of fine stockings and jerseys and drawers.

Pell and Frannie gathered wood for the fire, fetched water from the well, and tended the cow and the pig, when they weren’t out on the heath shearing and milking and herding for Birdie’s father. With what Pell and the boys earned out of doors, and all that Lou, Bean, Ellen, and Sally accomplished at home, the pantry would be filled for winter with fruit in jars, apples set on racks, potatoes in the clamp, hanging bacon, and maize flour ground arduously by hand to save paying the miller. But no matter how they picked and pickled, preserved and bottled and saved, there never was enough to feed them all through the long cold winters, so that each new child was born into hunger, a hunger that barely deserved a second thought.

“Look what I have for you,” Frannie cried one fine spring day, tumbling in through the doorway clutching a basket bigger than herself filled with wool.

Sally limped over to see the raw fleeces, prodding them with a disdainful finger. “I’ll have them when they’re clean,” she said frowning, and turned her back on the younger girl.

“I’m to catch and shear and wash them, too?” Frannie snorted. “I’ll have your job instead.”

“All right then, it’s yours,” declared Sally, hurling a half-knitted stocking at her.

Frannie picked up the work and examined it: perfect, without a single false stitch. To her credit, she surrendered at once. “My stockings would make us all lame,” she declared, giggling, and raced out the door without a backward glance.

And so Sally was left with the grease wool. She hauled the heavy basket up with a sigh and dragged it to the lean-to barn, where she found Lou and Ellen churning milk. Lou peered over into the basket. “What are we expected to do with
that
?” She poked a finger at the filthy wool.

“Frannie ought to clean it.”

“Yes, and I suppose she will—once the lambs and foals are born and fed and weaned and old enough to fend for themselves, and if we’re all still alive and haven’t forgotten the job altogether. Then, perhaps.”

“She says she fancies my job because it’s easier,” said Sally, her face sulky, and Lou kissed her.

“Never mind, sweet. She fancies herself a boy as well, and that’s no nearer true.”

Ellen looked on with interest. Older only than Bean, she made a feature of not attracting attention. In the scrabbling scrum of siblings, Ellen was the most reluctant to claim ground for herself, to instigate a row or take sides in a complaint. She was soft where Frannie was angular, slow where Sally was brisk; Lou loved her for her dreamy eyes and kept her close.

In the absence of a serviceable parent, Lou fussed over the little ones, soothed their feelings, and taught them all the manners and skills she knew. Thanks mainly to her efforts, there were times—with ponies in the garden, plums on the table, sun on the front wall, and Pa with the boys, a day’s or a week’s walk away—when happiness nudged at the cottage walls. All the joy that any of them could remember was lit by the low slow dwindling light of long June evenings with work finished and nothing urgent to do but knit and talk or race back and forth across the heath on horseback.

On winter nights when he wasn’t drunk, and sometimes when he was, Pa schooled George, James, Edward, and John in reading and Bible and history and how to add up numbers and preach to an empty church. Of the boys, only Edward paid attention to book learning. But it was Pell who sat with her back to Pa, plaiting straw for hats and going over each lesson in her head, while George and John made faces and pinched each other and James prayed to God to be somewhere else.

Mam didn’t hold by schooling. “Turns out boys too clever to be useful,” she said. “And girls no good to marry.” Well, and wasn’t she just the perfect example? Ignorant as a thistle, married to a drunk, and pushing out baby after baby, each of which had to be clothed and fed until it grew up and left, or died.

No one in the parish was what you might call well-off, and by the time Pell turned ten she and Lou had an expertise in stretching ends past straining point in an ever-hopeful and ever-futile attempt to make them meet. It was a skill practiced by every child in Nomansland, and each learned it from its mam who had, of course, learned the same way.

The only thing of which there was no shortage was ponies. As commoners, Birdie’s family had ownership and responsibility in equal measure—for herding and marking and selling the horses in good times, and for finding enough food to keep them alive in bad. But each horse needed trimmed feet and the ones that worked required shoes, and that made more than enough work for William Finch, and every other farrier in the parish.

It was for this reason that Birdie’s father took on whichever Ridley girls were available to work, and gladly, for they were cheaper to employ than boys, and hard workers. As the years passed, however, the decision caused him some unease. For despite the bloodlines of his own children, each a pure horseman dating back ten generations, William Finch could not help noticing that the quickest learners, the best workers, and the children with the greatest natural affinity for the job did not belong to him.

Nine

O
nce inside Salisbury’s walls, Pell and Bean competed with half the population to cross roads crammed with the other half. Everywhere, fierce desperate little dogs raced back and forth, nipping and growling at the hocks of sheep and cattle to stop them stampeding down the long sloping chute of a high street. Jack pricked his ears forward, tossed his head, and danced crabways. There were so many sights to take in, so many people, so many varieties of bread and cheese and pies and ale and sweets; so many villains, cheats and players, vagrants, opportunists, showmen, and bawds. Salisbury was unnerving for a country horse, and exhilarating, too. Jack longed to plunge headlong into the chaos and add to it.

It seemed as if the entire equine world had found its way to the horse fair. Men led big cart horses harnessed by twos and fours with polished brass and gleaming leather, brood mares still suckling late foals, and stallions available for stud. And always some boy galloped full tilt with nothing but a bit of rope for a bridle, scattering all manner of panicked creatures in his wake. Pell saw a child escape death by half an inch under the wheels of a wagon, while a big handsome white bull with a ring through his nose—docile as a lamb one moment—turned and ripped open the belly of a screaming cart horse the next. Some of the younger boys cheered for the bull as the poor horse’s entrails sagged from the wound and the awful smell of organs came to Pell in a gust so strong she could taste it. The brawl that followed was fueled by blood and mud and looked certain to end in more death.

She turned Jack away from the scene just as Joe Ridley entered Salisbury through St. Ann’s gate in search of his renegade children. They passed within twenty yards of each other on either side of the frumenty seller’s striped tent, Pell and Bean heading toward the grounds of the cathedral, Joe Ridley to the nearest tavern.

In the cathedral close, among the restless horses and old-looking children, Pell found Esther camped near a man and wife, not young, with a splayfooted cob tethered to an ancient wagon. For an instant, Pell wondered why Esther had settled here, away from the Gypsy encampment.