by Meg Rosoff
Pell would have liked to speak more to the woman, to prolong her moment of hopefulness, but Bean sat forward and chirped to Jack, loosening his rein and moving off, so she had to follow. She looked back to wave, and saw the woman still standing, watching, reluctant to let the letter out of her sight.
Pell turned toward the road ahead once more, and closed her eyes. A vision of Salisbury Fair filled her head, with nothing beyond.
Five
By midafternoon, they had joined the highway, where a slow trickle of humanity headed for the fair. From every direction they came, in caravans and traps and farmer’s carts, on foot in little chattering groups, or all alone dragging heavy loads. As the day wore on, the trickle became a stream and the stream a river. Some rode or led or drove horses in strings or pairs, and Pell was glad Jack wasn’t the kicking sort but only huffed once or twice at mares he fancied as they passed.
It became difficult to maneuver, and when a thickset young farmer backed his horse into Jack, Pell turned to him smiling, in expectation of an apology. Instead, he leaned in close to her and whispered, “What’re you selling?” with a smile that made the blood rise in her face.
She reined Jack hard, cutting through the crowd and setting off a volley of complaints. Behind her the farmer laughed unpleasantly, and Pell forced her mind away from him to the happy distraction of horses bound for market. Some were driven, some ridden, and some led; some strode past graceful as gods, others looked broken down and ready for the knacker’s yard. There were grays and bays, chestnuts and roans, Roman noses and deep chests and high bony withers, but most were just big honest beasts looking for a good home with someone who would work decent hours beside them and feed them decent food. Which was what the men wanted too.
At least half of the horses on the road were colored Gypsy types splashed all over black or brown and white with big domed heads and feathery legs. But even among so many the same, there were gaits and heads that drew your eye and said look at me.
And Jack as good as any she saw and better, Pell thought.
Passing through a little village and over a narrow wooden bridge, Pell found herself riding beside a middle-aged man with a pleasant face, who, after some time and one or two sidelong glances, ventured a conversation.
“That’s a very fine pony you have there, miss,” he said.
Pell continued to look straight ahead as if he hadn’t spoken, but his voice sounded friendly and it felt wrong, somehow, to snub him. She offered the slightest of nods.
“Are you taking him to market?”
Below Pell’s elbow, Bean craned his head to look at the man, and smiled encouragement.
The man smiled back. “It’d be a shame to sell him, now, wouldn’t it?” He addressed his comments to Bean. “Or perhaps you’re buying?”
With her back straight and her chin high, Pell pressed Jack to step out ahead. Bean looked across and shook his head.
The man kept pace. “May I inquire, then, as to your mission in Salisbury?”
“No,” said Pell primly, and both the man and Bean laughed. Defeated, Pell glanced over at him. From his immaculate green livery she guessed that he worked for one of the big houses. His face was round and open and he rode an elegant chestnut mare, leading a matched pair of bays with long necks and fine heads. The three animals claimed more than a full share of his attention, and it showed some horse manship that he managed to keep in step with Jack.
Pell had prepared a polite rebuff to any further attempts at engagement, but this proved unnecessary, for at that moment a young lady just ahead waved a large white handkerchief to catch the eye of her friend, causing the chestnut to spin sideways, eyes bulging. Another rider would have lost his seat, Pell thought, noticing how quietly her companion followed the mare’s temper, how he sat still and calm without leaning on her mouth to right himself. She was a spooky creature, scared of her own shadow and not interested in proving otherwise to anyone. Bean giggled.
“You’re sensible wanting rid of her,” Pell said, thinking, That mare’s had more than a few guineas wasted on her and will have again.
He glanced over, pleased at eliciting a response at last. “Aye, but just look at her. There’ll always be someone wanting such a fine-looking mount, and willing to take the rest with it.”
“She’s fickle as fortune,” murmured Pell.
At that he nodded, adding in a low voice, as if talking to the horse, “You’re right there. But it’s hard to blame her, poor thing, for she had a bad fall over a fence with a fool of a rider. How do you tell a horse to settle and trust you after that?”
“You just tell her.”
The thought seemed to amuse him. “Go on, then.”
Pell rode up, drawing even with the mare’s head, then leaned over and spoke softly in her ear. “That’s enough, now—”
“Desdemona.”
Pell looked startled.
“The much-wronged wife from a play by Mr. William Shakespeare,” the man said, with a raised eyebrow. “So I am told.”
Pell laughed. “All right, then. That’s enough, now, Desdemona, you won’t fall again.” The mare flicked one ear back to catch the girl’s voice. Pell turned to the man once more. “You see? It’s what she’s been waiting to hear.”
He laughed softly. “But who knows if what you’ve told her is true? Depends to whom she’s sold and how she’s ridden.”
“Well, then,” Pell said coolly, gazing straight into his eyes, “she’s perfectly right to be anxious, is she not?”
He laughed again, pleased to be bested, and she noticed that his face wasn’t a bad face, if you were the sort of girl who cared about such things.
Having established a connection, they rode together companionably, speaking of horses because it was a subject neither seemed likely to exhaust. When the man turned off to claim lodgings at The Queen’s Head, Bean looked up into Pell’s face as if searching for something. Not finding it, he lowered his gaze and sighed, dejected for reasons he kept to himself.
Six
It would be impossible to tell Pell’s story without reference to the worn clay walls and dark low rooms of home. Her father built the place himself before he and Mam married, hacking bricks straight out of the ground and piling them up to make walls thick enough to keep out the wind and rain (and the light and warmth of the sun). A roof of heather, reed, and mud topped it off, so that in the end it huddled like a heap, nearly invisible at the edge of the hamlet of Nomansland, itself crouched on the very edge of the New Forest as if liable at any moment to tumble down the hill into Wiltshire.
Those lime-washed walls of rubble and straw had moments of charm in summer when honeysuckle and wild roses scrambled up the front and poppies, foxgloves, and honesty grew every which way from window frames and patches of dirt. But inside was damp and crumbling and held the smell of smoke forever so that winters passed in a long succession of near-fatal bronchial ailments. There was one oak chair passed to Mam from her parents, and a wedding clock given by an aunt, now dead, which no longer lent support to the desired illusion of gentility.
“The only hours requiring our attention,” roared a drunk Joe Ridley one night early in the couple’s marriage, as he swept the clock from its place of pride above the hearth, “are those given to man that he may heed the Lord’s bidding!”
The glass clock face smashed with a sickening crack, and Mam hurried to sweep the poor broken thing up and hide it away.
One room downstairs with a fire and a pantry, and one room upstairs were all Pa had managed to build twenty years ago when money and drink were in short supply and he still hoped to convert the world to his faith and Pell’s mam to the view that she hadn’t made the direst mistake of her life in marrying him. The hints had all been there if only she’d paid attention: the low ceilings, the walls not straight enough to support proper windows, the chimney built of straw and mud so it caught fire on windy nights. And no shortage of windy nights.
Upstairs there was no fire, but the chimn
ey breast passed through Mam’s side of the room, and on freezing winter nights with the wind and filthy rain seeping in through the thatch and Pa fallen down drunk at the inn, the little girls would sneak one at a time into the marital bed. If Pa snored at home, they’d wrap themselves in blankets on the floor and huddle up together against the warmth of the chimney till morning.
Beside the fire stood a table of hewn oak carved all around with roses, Ridley’s wedding present to the young wife whose parents already hated him for his views without any need of discovering precisely what they were. They recognized the few types of marriageable men at a glance, and knew that a passion for God and a meager glimmer of charm were all that disguised the catastrophic weakness within.
The wedding table was big enough for eight, and rocked—because the floor was not flat or the legs not square, either of which condemned him.
Within a decade, his wife had presented him with enough children to fill the table, stifling the cries of the first time, and thereafter squeezing them out with silent resignation. The preacher was proud of his wife and her resistance to death by childbirth, despite the many practical problems her productivity raised. Her forbearance was something to lay claim to, like a hen that laid three seasons out of four, and he took his God-given marital rights without guilt, and occasionally with force. George, James, John, and Edward followed Pell and Lou, and after them came Sally, Fran, and Ellen. Nine children plus Bean. Four now buried in the churchyard at Lover.
The children went to work as soon as they could walk, according to capacity and inclination: Lou, Sally, and Ellen at home with Mam, and Pell up on the heath with Birdie, later followed about by Frannie on a pony no bigger than a dog. In appearance the two sets of girls couldn’t have been more different: three always tidy, with hair tied up each night in rag curls; the other two dressed like banshees in torn skirts, with brown legs, and hair thick and tangled as a hawthorn hedge.
Edward might have been a scholar had he possessed the foresight to be born into a different family, and was often to be found half hidden in a stand of grass, reading or practicing his letters. The girls laughed at him without malice.
“Come for a ride,” Pell would call from the back of her horse, looking for all the world like a centaurine, with her bare legs and tangled mane.
Edward gazed up at her admiringly, squinting slightly, and begging her silence with a warning finger pressed against his lips. But he needn’t have bothered. She would not give him away to Mam or Pa or Lou or anyone else who might want him for work.
The older Ridley boys showed signs of having inherited their father’s appetites, and Nomansland parents guarded their daughters fiercely. Despite proscriptions, however, more than one local girl had been known to pass a pleasant afternoon in the corner of a meadow or barn with George’s or James’s or John’s mouth pressed to her warm skin.
“Kiss me, you heartless girl,” George begged Birdie’s sister, laughing, and then, not waiting for an answer, slid her pinafore up over her waist as she sighed some small protest and breathed his name in little gasps. They were only young, but the girl’s father beat her soundly on discovery of the game. His subsequent encounter with the Ridley boy was conducted in private, but despite living within spitting distance of each other, the boy and girl never spoke again.
Immediately they were old enough, the boys moved into the barn, where there was more space and no chance of catching a glimpse of female flesh. On this point the clergyman was uncharacteristically clear. He would have no obscenity in his house. He would have poverty, violence, drunkenness, starvation, and disease, but at any state of undress he most decidedly drew the line. Not that such sights would be likely at the best of times, the change from day to night clothes being the stuff of wealthier households.
It was a tangle of a family, for better or worse, a right complexity of children, all knotted up with love and jealousy, and all competing for anything they could get—food, boots, underclothes without holes, a shawl, a piece of bread, a kind word from Mam. Each acquisition took on the status of treasure in times so tight you thought you might die for the want of half a spoonful of dripping or a shoe you couldn’t see through. But they were accustomed to such conditions and thought nothing particular of them.
Seven
Pell and Bean approached Salisbury along a busy thor oughfare that traversed half a mile of slums. Beyond the city walls to the north, Pell could see the tip of the lacy cathedral spire rising up toward heaven, while here on earth stinking sewage collected in ditches beside the road. Drivers slaughtered lame or exhausted animals casually where they fell, then butchered, hung, and sold them on the spot to avoid transport into town. Where fowl were killed, feathers thickened the river of blood, and out of the corner of every eye lurked the shadowy darting figures of rats. Dirty women and children stood by the road watching the parade, some offering drooping bunches of mint or parsley, ginger beer, or pies with grubby pastry for sale. A sheepdog lapped at the foul soup.
When a long dray pulled by eight horses parted the crowd, its load of barrels jostling threateningly on the deep ruts, Jack stumbled and slipped sideways into the ditch. Pell steadied him, but as he clambered out, legs dyed pink to the knee with blood, he splashed stinking water onto the immaculate breeches of a gentleman riding past.
“Keep hold of your horse, for pity’s sake,” cried the man, making no attempt to conceal his disgust. He sneered at Pell, pulling a fine linen handkerchief from his pocket with which to blot the filth.
“Let it be,” said his companion. “No point ruining your gloves as well.”
For the briefest of moments, Pell saw herself through their eyes—her clothes worn and patched, Jack thickset and countrified in comparison with their mounts, Bean with his odd watchful look. She felt ashamed, despite a conviction that the men were neither braver nor cleverer than she, only luckier in their conditions of birth.
Every inn they passed had horses tied two or three to a box and their owners likewise stacked in haylofts, in rooms above the kitchen, by the root cellar, or wherever else they could be packed four to a bed and charged for the privilege. Not that Pell had any intention of staying in a hotel, what with her entire fortune adding up to next to nothing.
She and Bean stopped just outside the city gates, in an area crowded with ponies and wagons. They found a few square feet of empty space and had just settled in, making themselves as comfortable as possible, when it began to rain. Pell sighed, rolled up their blankets, and led Bean and Jack over to a stand of trees where they might be sheltered from the main force of the downpour. Ragged and wet, they stood gazing out onto a large rectangle of trodden dirt and grass, wishing themselves elsewhere. All around, Gypsy families in bender tents and wagons lit fires under cover and called to one another in rapid, incomprehensible patois. Their grim, confident faces frightened Pell.
Another half hour passed, and a skinny girl emerged dripping from the wall of water and tugged at Pell’s sleeve. “Ma says you’re to come to us.”
Following the direction of the grubby finger, Pell saw a Gypsy woman, lean as a whippet with high cheekbones and thick red hair, her wagon tied up with patched canvas and looking barely more inviting than spending the night soaking wet out of doors. The woman stared at Bean, and Pell hesitated for a moment, wondering what the offer entailed and whether they might be better off in the rain. Warnings against the filthy minds and homes of Gypsies had been fed to Ridley’s children with their mother’s milk; Pell’s father considered association with the heathen race an abomination.
But as the torrent showed no sign of abating and her dress and hair streamed water, practicality won out. She nodded thanks and led Jack over to the wagon, where the woman immediately took hold of his headstall, tethering him beside her own horse under a makeshift canvas cover. Pressed up against the big cart horse out of the worst of the downpour, Jack chuntered contentedly while Pell wrung out what clothing she could, hanging the blankets beside a small iron stove that threw ou
t no more than a suggestion of heat. They would dry, given time.
The rain stopped and as if on signal the edge of the wagon spilled Gypsy children. One of the big girls lit the fire under a three-legged pot, waited for its contents to boil, and then ladled out into bowls. Pell peered at the soup as she passed it along but could detect nothing in it besides turnips, nettle, and onion. She cast about for Bean, who squatted beneath the caravan with the skinny girl, prodding a large toad with a stick. Both children were silent, with big dark eyes, pale skin, and dark hair. For an instant, with the light just so, it was like looking at a single image reflected in a glass.
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.”