The Ghost's Child (5 page)

Any of the beaux would have gallantly replied,
You, Miss Maddy, if I may say so, are the world's most beautiful thing.
The pelican-boy only said, “There is nothing that's more beautiful than everything else in the world.”

If he knew that her heart jumped inside her chest — if he heard her blood sing, if he saw the debris tumble from her mind to leave her whole world clear — he did not show it. He only scuffed the sand with his toes and looked out over the waves. He showed no sign of noticing that time stood still when he said, “If I had to choose one thing — if choosing was the rule — I would choose a sea eagle. Sea eagles are the most beautiful things in the world.”

He might have had a proper name, but she always called him Feather. She liked to remember the sight of him with the great white bird in his arms. She sensed that, like a rambling seabird, he had traveled many blue miles with nothing to guide him except the sun and moon. He walked the water's edge like a wrecked and lost ocean bird which must wait for the wind to recollect it and carry it elsewhere. A stranded, migrating winged thing: when she asked where he came from, Feather would smile and shrug; when she asked if he meant to return to that place, he would simply smile again. His silence made Feather the smartest and most mysterious person Maddy had ever known.

That first afternoon, she walked home from the cove feeling giddy, his image a bright gem in her mind. Her mother and father were surprised to hear their taciturn daughter laugh. She woke early the next morning, when the sun was scarcely up, no longer laughing but filled with disquiet, certain he would be gone. She realized then that she would always feel this way: vulnerable to his loss. “Vulnerability is what love is,” she told the nargun, which was breathing under her bed. She finally understood why none of the beaux had ever won her affection. She had been waiting for Feather, and she had not even known.

That morning she went down to the beach running, then walking, then slowing — and running. Stepping past the trees, she did not see him, and the excitement in her heart congealed into a pool of bitterness. She hated herself for hoping he would be there, hated him for not being there. And then she saw him, in the distance, spare as a shadow on the sand; her heart began to thump again. When she came nearer, he showed her a sea snail suctioned to his finger. She had brought a bottle of lemonade for him, and he pulled the cork with his teeth.

Maddy went to the cove every morning after that, lacing up her walking shoes and setting off into the scrub without telling her mother or the housemaid where she was going. Every day, the first glimpse of Feather on the shore was like the taste of honey on hot bread. He often sat watching the ocean, his knees drawn up under his chin. The breeze sprinkled his shoulders with sparkly grains of sand. Water bugs would run across his brown feet, and he never brushed them away. Occasionally, hurrying from the trees, she would find him surrounded by seagulls. The birds browsed peacefully, close to him — some of them dozed in the narrow shade that leaned away from his back. They flew off crying the instant they saw her, and Feather would turn his head. It panged her that he could not fly with them, that he was left so alone — yet at the same time she was glad he was weighted to the ground. She always brought small gifts when she visited, sugar biscuits and bottles of cider hidden in her sleeves. In exchange for these presents, one day she asked, “Won't you tell your birds to stay?” Because it seemed to her that nothing could be nicer than to sit beside Feather in the cloudy midst of the gulls.

But Feather shook his head. “Why would I make them stay,” he asked, “when they want to go?”

“I wouldn't harm them,” Maddy said, ashamed.

“I know it,” Feather replied. “They know it too. But it is their nature to fly. It is what they need. You can't make them forget that.”

“That's not what I meant,” she muttered — disappointed, wishing he'd understood.

Feather looked at her closely, closer than he had looked before. “But I will stay,” he said.

That night Maddy lay in bed wondering if
I will stay
is another way of saying
this is where I want to be.
She knew nothing for certain about love, about the words love liked to use. But she felt she was lying in a hammock of gorgeous blossoms, that the world had forgotten everything except her. Her thoughts traveled over his skin, his mouth, rose with his chest as he breathed.
I am yours, you are mine, I will stay.
“Make it true,” she whispered secretly, so only the soundless nargun overheard.

The boy sitting in Matilda's lounge room on the flowery settee squirmed into a mortified ball. “Don't say this!” he cried, wriggling his feet and clapping his hands to his ears. “I don't want to hear about things like this!”

Matilda laughed too, at her elderly self and her younger self, and at the blushing boy. “But you should hear about it. This is important. Love is a very important thing in this world.”

“Love is horrible! It's stupid!”

Peake was on his four feet, looking angry, his envelope-ears pricked on his scrappy head; Matilda, for the first time in such a long time remembering everything so clearly, thought she might die smiling. Those days on the beach had been, perhaps, the sweetest of her life. She chuckled across the coffee table at the boy, who had pressed his palms over his eyes. “You're right,” she said. “Love can be horrible for those who aren't in it. Sometimes it's even horrible for those who are. Love isn't always a good thing, or even a happy thing. Sometimes it's the very worst thing that can happen. But love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night: it is one of the things in life that is truly worth knowing.”

The boy moaned and groaned in pain, digging his fingers into his eyes. Eventually he lowered his hands and slowly unknotted his limbs. “All right,” he said flatly, averting his sights. “You can tell me if you have to. But hurry up.”

. . . The world changes when something in it is loved. Words become feeble. Colors glow. Every moment vibrates with possible importance. And the heart that loves wonders how it lived, in the past, without loving — and how it will live now, now that it loves.

Maddy's mind, which had for so long been as teeming as Aladdin's cave, was empty, but for him. Feather was all that mattered, the single essential thing in the world. She thought about him ceaselessly, she couldn't chase him from her mind, not when being introduced to a duchess, not when spiked by a brooch, not when turning the last cards in Patience, not when crossing herself in church. Sitting at the table with Mama and Papa, Maddy didn't taste her dinner — she thought about him. Every hopeful beau flailed inconsequently in comparison to him. Blanketed snugly in bed, she wondered: was he cold, wherever he was? Were the night sounds making him scared? Did he have a coat for cool mornings, did he have enough to eat? Was he lying awake in the dark somewhere, thinking about her? What if he was? What if he wasn't?

Every day was the same; every day was different. Some mornings she found him walking the sandbar or sitting on rocks cracking mussel shells, and sometimes she searched the length of the beach and couldn't find him anywhere. He left no footprints in the dunes, no messages dug into sand. Standing on the deserted beach, Maddy would fight down her dismay, reminding herself that Feather was free — and that so, too, was she. She was still herself, the misfit who regretted she hadn't been raised by wolves. A vision of Feather sipping tea in a drawing room, surrounded by coy ladies who were tweaking his hair, would creep up on her and make her breathless, and she'd stamp it out like fire. The nargun read her thoughts, and laughed satirically. “You do not seem free to me,” it said. “Your heart is a prison, and you are locked in it too.”

But most days Maddy's life was worth living, because he was there. Sometimes she tried to see him before he saw her, to catch him at his wildest. As the bush track changed from dirt to sand, she would slow down and step silently. She didn't think of it as spying — rather, it was as if she were still on her quest for beautiful things. She'd crept through jungles to see jaguars, she'd sat like a statue by water holes while gazelles found the nerve to drink: this was the same. Hidden behind tree trunks and leaves, Maddy watched Feather dreaming, waking, falling asleep. She saw the ocean romp up to him and sweep around his knees. She saw him walk through water, the waves licking his hands, while all about him surged a shoal of tussling fish. She saw him resting like Pan in a bed of leaves, knowing that if she were closer she would smell the fresh-hay scent of him, smell the ocean and all that grows in it. He watched the high dives of spear-faced gannets, and she watched him watching them. Mostly, though, she watched him sitting motionless, studying the horizon. Maddy wondered what he was looking for, and what would happen if he saw it. It would be something that would harm her, she sensed, something she didn't understand.
Look away,
she wanted to beg,
look away.

Maddy would never forget the moment when all the loveliness she'd seen on her travels around the world crumbled into insignificance — when she knew for certain that Feather, homeless on the beach, tousled and tameless as a flash of lightning, was the most beautiful thing in the world. Cathedrals were ruins, compared to him. Stained-glass windows were mud. Only undiscovered rain forests came close to being as beautiful as he. In this moment Maddy saw there was something miraculous about him: miraculous like the sun returning each morning, miraculous like a living bird inside a lifeless shell, miraculous like the way rain can turn a dead world green.

It happened on a day like most others. She hadn't known Feather for very long, although it seemed a long time, and she wished it was. Maddy had stepped onto the beach unseen, as she had done many times before. Feather was sitting on the sand and considering the clouds, as she'd seen him do so often. Apart from his hair jinking on the breeze, he sat as still as stone. The ocean itself, with its succession of waves, seemed more likely to stand up and walk than did he. Maddy paused in the shadows, not wanting to disturb him — longing, at the same time, to run to him, fall against him, hold his wrists very tightly, bite her fingernails into him. A fleck appeared in the blue distance, catching her eye; as it drew nearer, the fleck became a petrel. Maddy watched the bird come closer and closer until finally it swooped steeply to the ground and skipped across the sand to Feather. In its beak it held a wan sardine. Feather thanked the bird, took the fish between his fingers, and swallowed the sardine in a gulp.

Maddy gasped. She knew then that she would certainly die without him. Hearing her, Feather looked around. He was not always a gentleman, so he didn't stand. His gray eyes squinted, he shaded them with a hand, and when he saw her he smiled. “Hello,” he said. “I was hoping you would come.”

She crossed the sand and knelt beside him. “Have you missed me?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but not much.”

She smiled, because
not much
seemed another way of saying
I love you.
She had done nothing lovable — she'd talked to him and listened to him and told jokes and bad stories about herself; she had sat with him while the sun set, she'd let her love for him shine in her eyes — and yet, Maddy was suddenly sure that he loved her.

The petrel had scuttled to the water's edge, fearful. Feather called it to him and it returned cautiously. When it was close enough to touch, it puffed out its chest and plumped down in the sand, allowing her to stroke its sooty head. In exchange for such trust, Maddy spoke about the nargun that protected her, and about things she had seen in remarkable corners of the world. When the breeze blew her hat sideways, Feather smoothed back a fluttering strand of her hair.

That afternoon Maddy went home and informed her mother and father that she was in love with a wild man who dined on raw fish.

“Ha!” The boy on the settee jumped out of his slouch, wagging his finger at Matilda. His face was lit as a child's face always is, when he sees and understands something to which everyone else seems ignorant and blind. “
You're
going to be in trouble!”

“How did you guess?” asked Matilda. “It never occurred to me.”

M
ama and Papa were amused by their daughter's unexpected news. “Feather who?” Mama inquired, flopping like a length of satin across her chaise longue, fanning her face with a manicured hand. “I've never heard of anyone Feather. It doesn't sound like a particularly good family. Sounds like a tribe of dustmen, if you ask me.”

“How does he earn his money?” the iron man asked, jocular and lazy after a big lunch, determined not to leave all the twitting to his wife. “Stealing leftovers? Raiding picnics?”

Maddy looked from one to the other, disappointed to feel herself crestfallen. She should have expected this reception, yet her happy heart had not. The air in the library seemed suddenly thick to breathe. From walls between bookcases her ancestors glowered accusingly at her. “Feather doesn't need money, Papa,” she said. “He spends all day at the beach.”

“All day at the beach?” Mama was taken aback. “Doing what — flapping his wings? Or is he a fisherman, is that what you're saying? Am I to be mother-in-law to a pirate? Or is it that he is simply shiftless? Shiftless is acceptable, assuming he's independently wealthy.
Is
he independently wealthy, Matilda? Please say yes.”

Maddy, standing like a specimen in the center of the room, felt as if her teeth and tongue and throat had all turned into glass. She tightened her fists, she would not bend. “Feather owns nothing, Mama. Only the clothes he wears.”

Papa shook out his newspaper. “Sounds a sensible chap to me.”

Maddy spun to him hopefully. “Papa, he is! You would like him —”