The Wolf in the Attic (24 page)

She raises my head in her hands and looks down at me.

‘Anna me dear,’ she says, ‘You is most welcome.’ It is a lovely smile she has, and for a second I can see that she must have been as beautiful as Jaelle once. I just wish that her long teeth did not look quite so much like fangs.

17

T
HERE ARE FIFTEEN
or twenty of them around the fire, men and women mixed. They are all ages from twenty to sixty it seems, and they all have the windburnt, bony faces of people who have been living out of doors for a long time. I never remarked on it before, but there are no children. Luca is by far the youngest here.

Jaelle sits by me as she did in Wytham Wood, and I am handed a tin bowl full of stew and a wooden spoon. I am very hungry, but it will be a race, I think, to see if hunger or tiredness wins out tonight. As I spoon the food down – it tastes dark and gamey this time, like kidneys – so Jaelle dabs at my gashed knee with a wet cloth and clucks every time I wince.

‘Tain’t bad,’ she says. ‘These things always looks worse than they are.’ She stops and stares at me as I am eating, until I have to stop. ‘You done had your first bleed Anna, ain’t that so?’

I feel the heat creep into my face, and can only nod. She pats my arm. ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of, girl. Means you are a woman now, well on the way to being growed up.’

‘I need a bath,’ I tell her in a low voice. ‘It’s filthy and feels horrible.’

Queenie draws near with a wide can of steaming water.

‘No bathtubs here,’ she says brightly. ‘But we’ll see what we can do for ’ee.’ She looks me up and down, and her face becomes solemn. ‘We is all daughters o’ the moon Anna. We feel the waxing and the waning of it in our bodies the way no man ever can. ’Tis our gift and our curse. We brings forth life, but must bleed for it. Blood must be paid for everything. Open your legs.’

‘What? No!’

‘Do as I say girl. You needs to be washed.’

I look at the others around the fire, my knees clamped together. ‘But they will see!’

‘No-one will look near us, I promises you that,’ Queenie says firmly. ‘Now you do as I say.’

She pulls aside my sodden knickers and peels off the wool sock, handing it to Jaelle. The younger woman takes it and sets it in the fire. I smell the blood on it as it burns. Then Queenie wipes me down like I am a little baby, and dries me, and hands me a clout of linen.

‘Use that. ’Tis a heavy bleed for one so young. You’ll change it again in the morning.’ She strokes my cheek. ‘’Tis a wonder you were able to keep your feet at all today.’

‘She’s white as a daisy,’ Jaelle says.

‘Eat up,’ Queenie tells me. ‘I’ll make some tea as will help. But you needs rest, more than anything.’

‘What about the Roadmen?’ I ask. ‘There are I don’t know how many outside the wood.’

‘You don’t be worrying about them curs,’ Queenie tells me. ‘They won’t come nigh my fire, not on a night of moon.’

I am too tired to really care, my mind fuzzed over like a barley sugar left in a coat pocket. I see Luca across the fire, and will him to look at me, but he is busy talking to that horrible rat-faced old man, Job. He has brought me here. Maybe that is all he ever meant to do. Queenie says. I don’t know why I keep looking at him, or why it should seem so important that he not ignore me.

‘Drink this,’ Jaelle says, offering me a tin cup. ‘There’s wholesome stuff in here. Mint and dandelion and Angelica root, and feverfew for the aches and pains.’

I sip the hot liquid cautiously. It tastes like minty mud, and Jaelle laughs at the face I make.

‘Every drop, girl. That’s real medicine that is, as good as any bolus you buy in a shop. It’ll settle you, flesh and bone.’

I drink it back. The warmth is welcome, at least. Jaelle strokes my hair. ‘Such a pretty girl,’ she murmurs.

Sleep starts to sink down on me like the curtain at the end of a play. I am blinking and yawning, and the tin cup clinks aside. Jaelle stretches my old blanket over me.

‘Lie here now, Anna, and take thy ease. There ain’t nothing in the night to worry ’ee, not no more.’

‘Why am I here?’ I ask her, blinking.

‘Don’t you be worrying about that now my sweet. Sleep. Sleep, Anna.’

My knapsack is here beside me, and Pie too. She looks so out of place, like something left abandoned by a passing child. I hug her; I feel the same way myself.

I thought that when we came here and found Queenie and the others again I might feel as though I could belong. But instead it feels more like I stepped off a cliff that day I walked out of the old house on Moribund Lane, and I have been falling ever since.

Too tired even to stay afraid... I yawn, and watch them go about their business around the fire. One woman is sewing, though how she can see to do it in the firelight I have no idea. Another is scrubbing out some pots with a bunched handful of grass and a third is slicing up meat on a tree-stump, licking her thumb and smiling.

Men come and go across the campsite, and drop bundles of wood down beside the embers. One of them carries a small axe, another a billhook. For the first time, I see that they have made a series of hurdles out of chopped saplings interwoven on upright stakes. These are set up along one side of the fire, either to help reflect the heat or to hide the light. Hanging from the hurdles are little dangling bodies. I see rabbits there, and squirrels, and a cock pheasant with the feathers reflecting back the firelight like jewels. I wonder if the Romani have guns, to shoot these for their food. I have seen none, and I don’t want to. Knives are bad enough.

My head sinks back, too heavy to lift. Above me, five pointed stars made of twigs are dangling all over the campsite. Like Christmas decorations, I think hazily.

And I suppose I sleep at last, with my old blanket around me and Pie, and my feet pointed at the fire.

I
T IS LONG
into the night, and I think I am awake. I open my eyes above the edge of the blanket and my face is stiff with the cold. The fire has died down into red embers and low flames that grasp feebly at the blackened wood. Everyone is sleeping, and so quiet is the night that I can hear the breath of the sleepers. I look up, and above the trees the stars are glinting and sparkling like frost, millions of them. They gather in an arc that carves clear across the sky. I look for those that Pa taught me, but the familiar ones seem lost in the welter, a vast span of spangled light. I never imagined there could be a night sky like this.

I stand up, and the blanket falls from me and I step as quick and quiet as a cat around the fire. I feel light as a dragonfly dancing on the air.

Luca lies with a blanket up to his chin and an old wool cap on his head. He looks much younger while asleep, all the lines faded out of his face. But I can see others beneath the skin, as though his flesh has too much bone beneath it, and the black hair at his nape continues in a line down into the collar of his shirt. He looks as doll-like as Pie in the night. If I raised him up I almost think his eyes would spring open and there would be nothing but black glass in the sockets.

The wood is long. It streams along the slope of the down for more than a mile. But it is narrow, too. I step through it without a single twig so much as creaking under my feet and look out to the west, where the land rises up to Whitehorse Hill.

There is a fire burning up on the hilltop, high and bright.

T
HE OLD YEAR
has died and the new one is begun, but the dark still lies heavy and cold across the world, and winter hangs deep in the night. I begin walking uphill. I am barefoot, coatless, but I feel no chill. Looking at my arms I see the frost glitter bright upon them, yet my breath makes no cloud. I walk with huge, easy strides, eating up the ground, and in no time at all I am on the hilltop on the eastern edge of the ancient hill-fort, and the bank rises up before me like a wave frozen in the grass.

The fire is crackling and roaring and there are shadows dancing around it, but it seems almost that the light flows through them. It is like seeing the sun dappled through the leaves of a living tree. There is no sound but the click and rush of the flames.

And beside the fire there is a pale horse, and on its back is the man who called himself Gabriel. But he is no Oxfordshire farmer now. He sits naked on the horse, and his white torso is daubed with circles and sigils of red clay, and on his head are the antlers of a great stag, and in his eyes is the same light which burns in the distant glimmer of the stars.

‘Daughter,’ he says to me. He holds out his hand, and in it I see a sprig of mistletoe, the berries upon it as bright as pearls in the moonlight.

18

I
N THE EARLIEST
red glow of the morning the camp comes awake, the women first. I lie and watch muzzily as Jaelle bends and blows at the grey ash of the fire, and feeds the sparks she raises with dried grass and bark which she takes from a leather pouch. Then she sloshes water around in a tin and sets it by the growing blaze, and bit by bit she builds the fire again until it has light and heat once more.

I get up with the blanket around my shoulders, and crouch by the flames for a second. My stomach feels almost normal, but my knee throbs and there is a black scab of blood on the wound.

‘Don’t pick at it,’ Queenie says from a mound of rugs on the other side of the fire. ‘Why must young ’uns always pick at these things?’ Then she turns over and pulls a blanket over her head.

‘Queenie ain’t much of a lark,’ Jaelle says, grinning.

Someone walks past me and dumps a dead rabbit at my feet, making me start back in shock. The little eyes are wide open.

‘Think you could gut and skin that?’ a voice says. I look up and it is the old man, Job, sneering down on me from his hairy rat-face.

‘Well?’

I touch the rabbit – still warm. ‘Is it dead?’

Job laughs, a horrible wet sound. ‘You ain’t much use, are you? Is it dead!’ He snorts with contempt and walks away.

I leave the fire and the rabbit. I want to pick up Pie, but somehow I can’t after that – not in front of these people.

Luca is standing on the eastern edge of the wood. Beyond the trees the land is open and rises slowly to the horizon. And the sun is just above it, still stained red from its rising. The light is cherry-bright on the grey trunks of the beeches and there are birds singing all through the wood, a glory of sound.

Luca turns and glances at me irritably. ‘You make a lot o’ noise.’

‘It’s not like walking on a carpet.’

‘You got to pick your way more careful, like. And keep looking all around, all the time. That way you gets to see things that ain’t common or everyday.’

‘What like?’

He is staring out at the sunrise. He points across the open fields. ‘Out there, come spring, you’ll see the hares come, if you sit quiet enough. They jump up and prance and dance and box each other, mad as March. ’Tis a sight to see. That’s how this place got its name. We calls it Boxing Hare Wood for ’em, though the name ain’t on no map. Hares is sacred animals, creatures tied to the moon. Some o’ the Romani hunt ’em for sport, but not us – not my kin. We sets traps for rabbits and squirrels, and we’ll take a pheasant or a pigeon, but not a hare. They’s things of beauty.’

It seems an odd thing for him to say, and as he speaks he has almost a kind of wonder in his voice. I sit beside him in the dead brown bracken.

We watch together as the morning grows. At last I say, ‘Are they still out there?’ It is not hares I speak of, and he knows it.

‘They’s always out there Anna, like rats in the hedge. Sometimes close, sometimes just a lonesome man on the track miles away.’

The answer is not enough for me. ‘Luca, who is the man on the pale horse?’

He frowns, and looks down at his hands. ‘He is the leader o’ the Roadmen. He’s more than that, too. He comes and goes like some ordinary man in the world, but he’s…’ He trails off.

‘What?’

‘I shouldn’t be speaking of it.’

‘Speak to me. I won’t tell anyone. I want to know.’