The Pesthouse (12 page)

The empty plant pot was big and strong, and glazed enough to withstand heat. Margaret was an old hand at striking fire. Soon — a dozen chit-chits at most — she had a flame and then a smoky oven in which to cook their breakfast. She was an old hand at fishing for birds as well, although the first few captives were too small to pluck and cook. But by the time the sun was high enough to offer some heat to the day in exchange for a little steam, Margaret had netted a fair-sized quail and a bird that she could not remember seeing before — a dappled brown and black — but fat and edible. She broke their necks and snapped off their wings, trying not to think either of home or of her dream birds. She split the carcasses open with Franklin's knife. It was not easy or pleasant to pull out the bones or tug away the skin and feathers. Rather than spoil the breakfast with down and fluff, she threw away good meat among the inedible waste. The forest is always glad of carrion. The remainder, all clean breast, she wrapped in the greenest leaves she could find. Now she had only to construct a spider trivet out of twigs and hang the bird meat from it over the pot fire, where it could cook in smoke.

Franklin didn't come back empty-handed, but he hadn't found the chance to use an arrow either. Rather than disappoint Margaret, he had spent too much time and effort lifting fallen logs to see if anything tasty was living underneath. The logs were mostly light and flaky, but the overnight frost had iced them in and made them almost unshiftable. He'd had to rock them free. But all his efforts did not produce as much as a snail. He had mushrooms, though. Mushrooms he could trust as safe. And a few nuts. He was disappointed to have failed as a hunter, while she, evidently, had managed so easily to trap fresh meat.

They sat together on the barrow, eating breakfast off carved ceremonial plates. They talked about the day ahead. They were almost eager to get on. 'I've heard,' Franklin said, trying to joke away his failure in the woods that morning, 'that on the far side of the ocean, no one uses bows and arrows. Hogs run through their woods ready-roasted with forks sticking out of them. All you have to do is take a slice whenever you're hungry.'

'But first you have to make the pig stand still,' Margaret replied. 'And that's not easy.' She liked it that he treated her as if she were a girl, easy to amuse.

'These pigs are trained. They come to you like a pet dog, if you whistle, if you know the proper whistle. And then you tell them,
Sit
. And then you put a little salt on them and dine like gods. That's what I heard.'

'That's what you hope.'

'That's what we have to hope.'

'You're a booster, then. A good luck man?'

'Well, yes,' he agreed. He liked the thought of that, to be her optimist. 'I always hope that the best has yet to come. I think that this...' He spread his hands to take in everything, from the sunlit forest to the mint, newly settled in its silver cup. He flexed his recovering knee. '... all this bodes well for us. We'll be lucky.' He didn't add that nothing could be worse than yesterday. It wasn't wise to challenge fate.

Franklin's mention of good luck reminded Margaret of her missing cedar box.

'You have to wear the necklace,' he said, getting up to find it for her, but also fearing he might not. 'I can help you put it on.' An odd offer for a man, she thought. But even though they hunted high and low among their few possessions, checking every bag, shaking out their clothes, examining the ground underneath their barrow, neither the box nor any of the three talismans was found. Margaret could remember touching them when she'd been at the Pesthouse. She could remember pushing the box under her bedclothes there so that Franklin's large hands could do no more damage to her piece of fragile, ancient cloth that he'd been rubbing with his thumb. But since? No, everything had been so hurried and disrupted. There had been no
since
. But she was angry with herself, nevertheless, and her loss was such an ill-timed setback, coming just when their improving fortunes seemed assured.

'It must have dropped out on the other side,' he said. 'We'd not have noticed it. It's just a little box.'

'Where? On Butter Hill. When I was on your back?'

'Perhaps. Or maybe in the orchard where I left you, below the bridge, by that fishing platform,' Franklin suggested, his optimism under pressure for a moment. He blushed. He knew in his heart that the loss of the box had been his fault. Perhaps he hadn't even packed it when they left the little hut. 'I'm sure we can't have left it in the Pesthouse, Mags,' he said.

'Do you remember bringing it?' Margaret looked childlike suddenly. Her eyes were huge. He'd called her Mags, and that was melting her.

He nodded, shook his head. He wasn't sure. 'I'll go back if you truly want me to. I could do it in a day,' he said. He meant it, too. He'd run each step of it. He'd be glad to reunite her with her things and earn her gratitude. Then he remembered what had happened — what he had done — to the wooden bridge. He couldn't do it in a day. Maybe he couldn't do it at all. Maybe the river was uncrossable. But actually it wouldn't matter either way, crossable or not. Much to Franklin's relief, Margaret wasn't looking angry or tearful or childlike anymore. Her eyes were small again, and she was smiling at him now, a smile worth any box of treasures. She was not so greatly troubled by her loss but happy that a man would offer such a thing to her, that he'd go back, he'd do it in a day, if only she said yes.

She said, 'You can't go back, Pigeon. You'll have to be my good luck charm from here.' I'll run you through my hands, she thought, I'll rub and stroke each piece of you.

NEITHER MARGARET nor Franklin had seen or imagined such a straight and broad road before. People here must have land to waste, they thought, although there wasn't yet much evidence of people. They'd not encountered any settlements or signs of active farming since they'd descended from the forests after their three days of rest. The country was discarded. It had been abandoned long enough ago for fences to have flattened, for walls to have slipped and lost their shape, and for tough scrub, already chest high, to have colonized what must have been good fertile fields.

It had taken them the best part of the morning to leave the taller trees behind and enter the open lands. But thankfully, after several days without rain, the going was much firmer and less arduous. The barrow wheels did not sink into the earth. And it was lighter to push, as Margaret, now greatly strengthened by her convalescence in the woods, had volunteered to walk much of the time on her own two feet though with the help of one of Franklin's sticks.

Franklin, too, had been greatly restored. His shoulders were no longer fixed in pain as they had been after his one day of piggybacking and harrowing. His knee was strong again. So — though it was little cause for satisfaction — he could tell himself that Jackson had been incorrect to say that his brother's recovery would take a month and, therefore, spoil their chances of getting to the coast before the final boats. Franklin had predicted 'Three days, four days', and he had not been far out. Getting to the boats in time was still a possibility.

There had been animal trails that they could follow through the forest, but it had proved more difficult to find a beaten path across the scrub. They had to weave their way between patches of less strangled ground and along the sides of creek beds. For every hundred steps they took, they seemed only twenty closer to their destination. So when, from a raised fold of land, they spotted in the distance what looked like a long, straight escarpment relatively free of scrub and evidently heading eastward, they made a beeline for it, hoping to locate a freer route, less snagged by undergrowth.

The distant escarpment, after their first observation, had not been clearly visible for much of their journey that morning, so it had come as a relief and a surprise when they had crested an oddly regular esker of oval hillocks to gain their second view of what seemed now, on this closer inspection, to be an unnaturally shallow, flat valley without a river but flanked by parallel mounds as regular as the best-plowed furrow — except that no plow was big enough, not even in the fairytales, to throw aside so great a swath of earth. Initially, they were merely baffled. This was no escarpment provided by nature, unless nature had on this one occasion broken its own rules and failed to twist and bend, but had instead hurtled forward, all symmetry and parallels. But soon their bafflement was overcome by astonishment. What at first they might have mistaken for cattle turned out to be a horse-drawn carriage traveling at an unusual speed along the center of the valley surface, as if its route had been designed specifically for wheels and hoofs. Margaret, who could not see as well as Franklin, shook her head and looked at him. Something worried her about the escarpment. But Franklin said, 'I've heard of it. This has to be the Dreaming Highway. It takes us to the ships.'

They rested on the esker top, lunching on the nuts that they had gathered in the woods and on cold bird meat. They watched a pair of travelers with a string of eight laden mules progress without impediment or any deviation along the same track the carriage had followed.

'This makes me hopeful,' Franklin said. The optimist.

Margaret shook her head again. 'It worries me, Pigeon.' This nickname tease of hers, which thoroughly amused her when she applied it, was so disarming for Franklin that he broke into a smile and reddened whenever she said the word. 'That road makes me nervous now we're close to it.'

'What is there to be nervous of?' A question, not a challenge.

'It's just too bare. I don't know what it is but... it's open ground. You know,
exposed
. There's not a tree on there to hide behind. I feel we shouldn't even step on it. Not one single toe. We have to find another way. We have to hide ourselves.'

Franklin was impatient to move on swiftly, as the mules and the little carriage had done, and thereby reach the ocean soon. 'Why hide ourselves? You only have to hide your head. That blue scarf of yours should do it. No one need know that you've been ill. Your color is healthy today. Just cover up.'

'My scarf won't make us safe. The roads on this side of the river are dangerous, all of them.'

'Who told you that?'

'Everyone in Ferrytown.'

What 'everyone in Ferrytown' had known, according to Margaret, was that the journey to the coast, rather than becoming more straightforward once the river had been crossed, became more hazardous and deadly. 'Why do you think we kept that wooden bridge a secret?' she asked. 'Not just for the ferry fees. But to stop anybody fleeing back to our town on the safe side of the river.' She'd heard her father talk about it many times when he was working on the ferry. Once in a while — too often for comfort, actually — bodies would be pushed ashore onto the shingle landing beach or caught in the weed beds, the bloated corpses of people who had tried to swim back across to Ferrytown and drowned. And every few days a little group would be waiting on the eastern side, terror on their tails, begging to be taken back to the settlement by ferry.

She said, 'I've heard of people there with gaping wounds, and widows with the pieces of their murdered men and sons in sacks, and tales of little boys and girls, hardly big enough to climb down off their mothers' laps, who've been taken by the gangs and sold or put to work. We had to turn them back, of course.'

'You turned them back?'

'Well, yes. Don't frown at me. There wasn't any choice. That's what our consuls said.'

Ferrytown's failure of charity to these westward refugees, according to Margaret's uncomfortable explanation, was simply a business decision. The town was geared to take in paying emigrants from the west, help them part with some of their wealth, then ferry them out eastward as speedily as possible. Any westward refugees who made it back to Ferrytown would not be paying guests but 'beggars and schnorrers'. All they'd do, apart from eat and use up money-making beds, was spread alarm. With their stories. And the expressions on their faces. And their wounds. The far side of the river would become a place to fear.

'Pigeon, think of it,' she instructed him. 'What would happen if the migrants learned that Ferrytown might be their last safe place? They'd never leave us, would they? Would you? Imagine, then, how huge our town would be. Big and poor and as crowded as a beehive. And think, if people found the wooden bridge, we'd wake up to an even larger herd of strangers with not a scrap between them to pay for their beds and suppers. We couldn't let them cross. It's unkind, yes, I know it's unkind, but that's the truth of it.'

'Why have the wooden bridge at all?'

'For us. Not them. Who can say when we might need to run away ourselves? Or on what side of the river safety will prefer to live next season? The bridge is our security.'

Franklin laughed uneasily and pulled a face.
Is
not
Was
? She hadn't even guessed, then, what he had inflicted on her bridge. He wouldn't tell her either. What difference could it make, except to have him seem a fool? He wouldn't be her Pigeon anymore. He'd be her turkey — big, stupid and clumsy. Instead, he steered their discussion back to the long straight track where time ago, he supposed, great vehicles and crowds had hastened between the grand old towns —
cities
was the word he'd heard — and the people of America had been as numerous and healthy as fleas.

He found, in his eagerness to change the subject from the bridge, an uncharacteristic bullying and determined tone to his voice. 'This will speed us to the boats,' he said. 'We have to take a chance. The winter's closing in on us. You've seen the frosts. The snow is never far behind. And anyway, this barrow is exhausting me. You think, because I'm big, that I can't ache?' He began to blush, embarrassed to sound so much like his brother — except that Jackson would not have admitted to aching or exhaustion.

Margaret held her hands up in comic submission, but conscious, too, that, for the first day at least, she'd not made the barrow any easier to push. 'Let's not make the big man ache,' she said.