by Meg Rosoff
The sky was a rough gray sea, splashing great plumes of rain through the wood, and Pell ducked her head low against wet branches that crisscrossed their path. Increasingly, it looked as if the last person to travel this way had done so months or even years before.
At a turn in the path, a fallen tree blocked the way, and she stopped. Dicken waited patiently while she stood listening to the creaking wood. It groaned and chattered to her in its strange familiar language, and eventually, with a sigh, Pell began to push through the dense undergrowth as best she could, limping around the far edge of the great vertical spread of roots. Brambles and nettles tore at her clothing, but Dicken tiptoed behind her weightlessly, placing each foot with precision before choosing a spot for the next. She emerged at last onto the path once more, brushed herself down, and walked only another hundred paces before the wood opened abruptly onto a long sloping meadow, washed clean by the rain and lit by a break in the sullen sky. Even Dicken stopped to look.
As Pell stared, Dicken bolted suddenly into the tall autumn grass. A moment later he sprang up, locked in growling embrace with a large paper-thin dog whom the golden field rendered nearly invisible. The strange dog bowled and pinned Dicken in no time, holding him with a firm grip on the throat that tightened when he tried to wriggle free.
“Leave him!” Pell shouted, trying to get a grip on the assailant, who slipped through her fingers like flax. Flipping and struggling on the ground, the dogs formed a single tangle of snarling fur, till all at once the strange dog released his grip and raced off. Dicken shot back to Pell like the youngster he still was, and pressed himself against her, trembling with nervous elation and fear.
Pell followed the other dog’s progress through the grass, and at last caught sight of the man. He had the sun behind him, but his outline was unmistakable. He stopped when he saw her, and they stared at each other, one no less surprised than the other. She strode toward him.
“I want my brother,” she said. “And my horse.”
His expression was blank.
“And my money.”
“What has any of this to do with me?”
“Your friend Harris is a thief.”
She saw him pause for the briefest instant. “Whatever he’s done is not my affair.”
“Whose affair, then?” The color in her cheeks rose and her eyes glinted with fury. “Look at the state of me! He left me with nothing.”
They glared at each other for a long moment until his dogs settled the matter. Spying a hare across the meadow, they raced from his side with Dicken close behind. The hare led the chase in long muscular bounds, swerving left and right, flipping backward along her length, and for a long moment it looked as if she were not to be caught. But the dogs stuck to her without wavering, one swapping the lead with the other, not losing position even when she changed direction, until finally it seemed as if the dauntless creature were finished. They hadn’t accounted for Dicken, however. Half a second’s enthusiastic distraction was all it took and the hare was gone, through a thicket of thorns where the dogs could only race back and forth, whining frustration. Pell silently applauded the hare.
Dogman looked at her. “I haven’t got your money and I know nothing of the horse. Or the child. I’ll have a word with Harris next I see him.”
Pell stared, her face flushed with anger. “A word? And how is that to help? Harris is a thief and you let him cheat me.”
He sighed. “I’m hardly responsible for every horse trader in Salisbury. It could be months before our paths cross again. And as for the horse, he’ll be long gone. It’s Harris’s business, trading horses. He doesn’t keep them to admire.”
“What about my brother?”
Dogman frowned. “I can’t see what Harris would be wanting with a child.”
Defeat silenced her. It had already occurred to her that Bean had followed Harris of his own free will. Her shoulders sagged. “When will you see him?”
“Hard to say. Five, six months.” Or weeks. Or days.
She gasped. “Impossible.”
He shrugged and walked off.
“Come back!” Grabbing his sleeve, she pulled him round to face her. “How do you expect me to live?”
“That’s your affair.” His eyes were cold.
“You owe me.”
“I owe you nothing.”
She followed him as he strode off along a path even narrower than the one she’d been traveling. The dense growth scraped past her, leaving raw tracks across her arms and face. Ahead of her, Dogman never slowed his pace, nor turned to look.
She emerged behind him in a clearing before a worn stone cottage. Pell could just see the edge of a kitchen garden along the south side of the house. In a well-built enclosure just beyond, a spotted sow basked in the sunshine and, past that, two rows of shabby kennels stood side by side.
Dogman opened the door, then turned to face the defiant girl and her dog.
“Well?”
Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. “I’m not leaving.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m no conjurer.”
“I’ll wait. There is nothing else for me to do.”
Exasperation got the better of him. “Where will you wait?”
She cast about—at the house, the makeshift kennels, the henhouse, the woodshed, and finally, some distance away, a half-ruined brick building that might once have housed cows. Instead of answering, she stepped across to it, finding it neglected and empty. It smelled of animals but looked dry enough.
This will have to do, she thought. Despite having no hearth or proper windows, the shed had straw enough for a bed, and if she could live under cover and within four walls for the winter she would make do and not freeze. When Dogman produced her money or a better idea occurred to her, she would move on. But not till then.
When she turned around to gauge his reaction, he had gone.
Twenty-five
Pell and Dogman lived side by side without giving away that either knew the other existed.
She took water from his well and walked twice a week to the nearest village, four miles away, for bread. She took Dicken out to catch rabbits that she gutted and skinned and sold in town, and even made two acquaintances, Miss Eliza Leape and her brother William, owners of the village bakery. Miss Leape greeted the ragged duo with more enthusiasm than Pell had met in some time.
“So you are the girl who lives with the poacher!”
“I do not live with him,” Pell replied, surprised and discomfited.
“I have glimpsed him once or twice,” the woman confided. “He is very handsome, though not at all refined.”
Pell said nothing, only looked away.
Eliza gazed past Pell into some hazy middle distance, stoking her own romantic dreams. “Has he—” Here she paused, assuming an air of delicacy. “Has he made advances?”
Repelled by this line of questioning, Pell turned to go.
“Oh, please stay,” begged the girl, but the instant Pell relented she began again. “Are you very much in love with him?”
Pell flushed with outrage. “Why do you speak to me this way?”
The girl’s eyes widened rapturously and she clapped her hands. “I can tell by your face that you are! And have you encouraged him?” Eliza’s voice turned sly. “I would. Though, of course, I would never let it be known that we—”
“There is nothing between us,” Pell said coldly.
“Of course there isn’t,” replied Eliza with a wink. “But do take pity on me! I’ve been bursting with curiosity to meet the mysterious beauty who lives in the wood.”
It was impossible to recognize this description of herself, and Pell made her escape. Her relief at leaving the village was so great that she nearly ran the miles back to her home in the little barn. Thereafter, temptation to avoid the baker and her brother was strong, but she scolded herself for it. Perhaps this journey has made me strange, she thought, for I never noticed before how very little I like ordinary human society.
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Dogman set out hunting each day at dusk, and only if she happened to see him in the early dawn, and then only by the weight of the bag on his shoulder, could she tell what he’d caught. Birds were light, rabbits heavier. Sometimes there would be two or three big hares strung up across his back. Most days he returned in the dark while she still slept, and they might go two or three days without laying eyes on each other, or exchanging even the most cursory nod.
She did not like him. He had no humanity about him, and an abrupt way of closing down even the briefest exchange. His nature was cold and unyielding, and the only evidence she had of human warmth was the dialogue he carried on with his animals. If I were a hound, she thought, or a ferret, or even a rat, he would show more interest in my troubles than he does now.
The two of them shared nothing willingly—not conversation, meals, or information from town. But Dicken had other plans. Within a week, he could be found scrambling for the carcasses and entrails that were tossed into the kennel each morning, and despite Pell’s fury at his willingness to befriend her enemy, in some obscure way she was grateful for it, too.
She noted, too, that Dogman didn’t chase him away.
And then one evening, Dicken disappeared. She feared that he’d come off badly in a fight with a stoat or a fox and lay injured and bleeding somewhere, but no matter how long and how loudly she called, he did not appear. Having searched the kennels and the outbuildings, she walked for hours on narrow lanes and paths, covering miles in the dark, shouting his name and whistling, falling over branches and into ditches and jumping at every noise and shadow.
She returned to the barn exhausted and slept fitfully, until the hour before dawn and the end of a poacher’s day, when Dicken gamboled home, greeting her with all the enthusiasm of a long-lost friend and not a whit of conscience. His coat was muddy and thick with burrs and seeds, and he had a bad bite on one side of his face caked black with blood, but he trembled with happiness and Pell could almost fancy that he grinned at her. She cleaned his wounds as best she could and tied him indoors, cursing Dogman. But Dicken paced and whined and sulked until she let him go, and then he was off to the kennels like a shot, hanging back while the other dogs ate their fill, and then darting in for leftovers as befitted his lowly status.
Later that morning, she nearly tripped over a plucked and cleaned pheasant on her doorstep. Dogman was nowhere to be seen.
She intercepted him at dusk as he set off with his dogs.
“What is this?” she asked, holding up the bird.
“Looks like a pheasant.”
“Stolen?”
He shrugged. “Likely to be.”
“Am I to be jailed for thievery?”
He almost smiled. “Only if you turn yourself over to the law. Don’t forget to take your dog. He killed it.”
“You’ve made a criminal of him, then.” She knew that she sounded absurd.
Dogman raised an eyebrow. “He comes by it naturally. Leave it at my door if you don’t want it.”
She cooked the pheasant that night over an open fire. On his return from hunting, Dicken crunched through the carcass.
Another week passed. It had become bitter cold in the cowshed. In desperation, she lit a fire in one corner; it produced a roomful of smoke but no warmth. Piling stones into a rough hearth against an outer wall, Pell kept the fire fed day and night with wood she collected herself. She could have helped herself to Dogman’s woodpile while he was out, but she would not lower herself to steal. Or to ask. The fire heated the wall, until the bricks absorbed enough to warm her at night. It wasn’t much, but better than none. A thick layer of straw, hay, and grass protected her from the freezing ground, and she piled more hay between her blankets, and on top of her to sleep. She desperately missed Dicken’s warmth.
With one living in darkness and the other in daylight, Pell and Dogman barely glimpsed each other. But Dicken loped more and more between the two, first leaning toward, then adopting the realm of the night, so that now he returned to her only at dawn. Then he would sleep, so that he became useless to her, despite the spoils she found by her door most mornings. She counted Dicken’s days as a hunter by his wounds, until she lost count. There were gouges and tears, more often than not a limp, or dried blood that, once cleaned, gave way to puncture marks where he’d been bitten—whether by his quarry or by one of his companions it was impossible to tell. These wounds she dressed, and as soon as the next night’s hunting came around, he cried and paced, desperate to go out again.
Pell had been living in the cowshed for nearly a month when Dicken returned home with a particularly nasty bite on his hind leg. Despite her attentions, it refused to heal and she watched, helpless, as it began to ooze a foul-smelling pus, causing him to hobble about on three legs and whimper in his sleep. She tied him indoors and walked to town for herbal medicines, using her precious store of shillings for powders and poultices that did not work, and bandages that Dicken tore off and left in tatters. As she ran out of options, she became increasingly frightened, and on the day she awoke to find him shivering and dull-eyed with pain she hammered on Dogman’s door.
He opened it at last, half-asleep, pulling on a shirt with the hand that wasn’t holding a shotgun, and she stared at him for a long moment, unable to ask for help.
“My dog,” she said at last. “He’s ill. I’ve tried what I know. . . .”
He followed her to the cowshed and knelt beside the animal, lifting the poultice she had wrapped around his leg. They both caught the stink of rotting flesh.
He looked at the wound, prodded it with his finger, then replaced the bandage and left. A surge of wrath rose up in her. It was his fault they were here, his fault she had no money, his fault her dog lay dying. And him so uncaring that all he could manage was to walk away and leave her to cope alone with the situation he had wrought. She held her head in her hands, shaking with fear and rage, and cold.
But he was back, with a twist of paper and instructions for Pell to hold Dicken while he placed one hand over the dog’s muzzle, parted the lips of the wound, and poured a vivid yellow powder straight into the suppurating flesh. The dog struggled wildly, but Pell kept one hand firmly against his flank and the other on his shoulder, and Dogman talked to him in the low voice Pell remembered from the fair. After a few attempts to struggle free, Dicken dropped back, exhausted.
Dogman stroked his head and stood up. “Get him to take water if you can.” And then, without looking at Pell, he went out.
Pell sat with her dog, thinking of every animal she’d ever nursed, the ones she’d saved and the others. She tried to dribble water down his throat, but his head lolled sideways, so watery saliva spooled out onto the dirt floor. His eyes looked sunken and he panted in harsh, ugly rasps that sucked his rib cage nearly flat. He no longer seemed to recognize her voice.
At twilight she left him to fetch water from the well and escape the sound of his breathing. When she returned sometime later, he lifted his head a little in greeting. Later that night, he managed to swallow when she dribbled water into his mouth, and feebly tried to lap more. She let him drink until his head rolled back and his eyes closed, then ran to the kennels to find Dogman and give him the news. He didn’t change expression, only tapped his pipe against one leg and nodded, and when she thanked him he turned his back on her and appeared not to have heard.
Pell kept Dicken away from the kennels for more than a week, until he had lost his limp and the wound began to turn pale and flat. She and Dogman encountered each other more frequently, whether by chance or design was impossible to know. She was less careful to avoid him, but he was no more cordial than before. He continued to treat his animals with more courtesy than he treated her, acknowledging her not at all.
By this time, Pell and the baker’s girl had become familiar enough to exchange histories, for surely it was the responsibility of itinerant buyers of bread to provide not only rabbits and pheasants in exchange, but stories as well. Pell’s story of leaving Nomansla
nd greatly pleased Eliza, who had seen her sister married off to a man in greater need of a servant, she said, than a wife. She had watched her sister grow ill with overwork, and finally die of a fever caught after the birth of her third daughter. At the funeral, the husband had turned the children over to Eliza and refused to have them back, saying he had no use for girls. The three children were all that remained of her sister’s short life, and for Eliza and her brother, surrogate parents to the unwanted babes, they served as lasting, hungry reminders of only one of the ways a marriage might end.
Eliza told this story with mournful satisfaction, and swore to Pell that she would never marry. Her vow inspired sympathy from Pell, who chose not to notice how well such a position suited the girl’s plain face and advanced years.
In exchange, Pell gradually revealed her reasons for leaving home, and much of what had happened since, and Eliza listened to what she called Pell’s “adventures” with the rapt attention of a woman who has never strayed more than a mile or two from her place of birth. When it came to the reality of Pell’s life in the woods, however, Eliza had no interest, and clung to her own version of the story.
There was, of course, no flirtation with Dogman to pass the hours the way Eliza insisted upon imagining it, and the freezing shed was not nearly so adorable and snug as she painted it. Pell’s days were spent covered in rabbit blood and gore, collecting wood and plucking birds, fetching heavy buckets of water from the well, and worrying about the months to come. The dairy money was nearly gone, and when winter rabbits became scarce she would have nothing left to barter. Her gray woolen dress had been patched so many times that the apron she wore could no longer be depended upon to conceal the holes. She saved her stockings by walking barefoot except on the very worst days, and meanwhile grudged the farthing’s worth of wool it took to mend them. It grew colder day by day, and how she would cope when the ground froze hard she had no idea.
She voiced these doubts to her friend, and Eliza’s eyes widened. “Can you knead bread and shape loaves?” she asked.