by Meg Rosoff
As much as she might try to shut him out of her brain, she could not. By not searching, she continued to fail him.
Toward this end, she went on foot through all the parishes she could reach in a day’s travel from Pevesy, asking at each if a boy matching Bean’s description had been found. She visited every workhouse, finding exactly the same in each—squalor, hunger, misery, disease. At every place, she was told the same: “No one of that description has been brought here.” But she searched every corner regardless, saw the silent babies with robin-bright eyes, swaddled tight and left to stare at the ceiling in tidy rows; the elderly, or the prematurely aged, packed four or six to a bed, their rheumatic bones clacking, their withered limbs shifting, vainly, in search of comfort or warmth; the crippled and the mentally incompetent, lumped together to torment one another day and night. Worst of all were the able-bodied, the unfortunate or unlucky, who had somehow slipped over the line that separated respectability from penury and collapse. These were women abandoned by men, the ill or injured, widows or widowers, and children—unwanted, orphaned, or deficient in some way. She left each place, alone, with equal measures of relief and despair.
At every village, she asked for information. But Bean, it seemed, had melted away as surely as water into sand. Her journeys accomplished nothing, except to remind her how large was the area she searched, and how small the child she sought.
Twenty-nine
Pell depended increasingly on Dogman’s poaching, and on selling what he caught. The butcher in town never asked where her hares came from, and it was best for all that he didn’t. She had heard of poachers being jailed, or shot on sight, or hanged, and yet no village butcher went so far as to imagine life without wild meat, come by honestly or by other means.
When game was scarce he limed birds, selling robins and finches to dealers from London, who profited from the fashion for keeping a songbird or two in a cage by the front door. Birds of prey he sold to Gypsies. Deer were rarely taken owing to their size, and the danger of being caught, but fox pelts fetched a good price for coats and collars. Stolen pheasants had to be sold far from the manor on which they’d been bred, but were otherwise profitable, and even the thin winter rabbits earned something.
Pell helped repair his bird nets and oil the hinges on his traps; he showed her how to render the sticky lime from holly sap and mutton fat, and afterward to clean glue from the bird’s feathers in readiness for sale. She learned to prepare skins (fox, weasel, even badger) that sold for anything from a few shillings to a few pounds, depending on condition and supply.
He was twice her age, and she wondered at his past.
One early evening, as he dressed to go out with his dogs, she remained in bed watching him.
“Have you always lived like this?”
“Like this?”
“Alone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would you call me alone?”
“Alone but for me.”
“I see,” he said, pulling on one boot, then the other. And then, after a minute, soberly, “No, not always.”
“Ah.”
“I once lived with a hunter named Plummer.”
She waited, but he volunteered no more, and at last she sighed. “You are full of secrets.”
“It is women who love secrets.”
“What secrets have I? A birthplace, parents, siblings—dead, alive, and lost—an almost-husband, abandoned; a horse, gone. A man who owes me money. There is nothing mysterious in me. But you! You have no past, and nobody but yourself.”
“Nobody apart from dogs, badgers, foxes, and a horde of gamekeepers at my heels.” He looked up, his eyes amused. “And you. A multitude, I would call it.”
She frowned at him. “You are in love with solitude.”
“Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?”
His answers irritated her. “Where’s the cure in that?”
“Where there is no disease, no cure is necessary.”
“I see.” Her eyes narrowed. “So I am your disease, then?”
He picked up his gun. “You are my illustration. If I had spent the afternoon alone in my bed, I would not be standing here discussing mysteries when I should be halfway across Wiltshire after a hare.” He leaned down and kissed her. “Shall we agree on nothing today?”
“Nothing,” she said, determined not to yield.
He called his dogs and went out.
Throughout the winter months there was always a fire and always food on the table, and his presence affected her in ways she barely understood. It would not have occurred to her to ask whether he loved her more than he loved his dogs, and when they lay together she thought of nothing but the fathomless black of his eyes. Sometimes he came to her with great urgency, and at other times lazy with indifference. She watched him when his thoughts were elsewhere, and wondered what sort of creature he was.
Dogman disappeared now and then for a week at a time, hunting farther from home. When he was not with her, the urge rose up in her to go. One day in St. Mary’s she glimpsed Jack across the market square, dropped her basket, and raced as fast as she could through the crowd. At the main road, the London mail coach narrowly missed her, braking hard and swerving with near-disastrous results for passengers and horses, and the driver shouted that justice would have seen her trampled. But she ran on, and at last turned a corner to see a white mare, lovely enough to break her heart, but not Jack.
So much remained lost.
Their domesticity did not include the influences a woman likes to impose on a man. There were two wooden chairs, a table (solid, foursquare), a few pewter plates, one large iron pot and one small, and woolen blankets and sheepskins for the bed. When the tinker came to the door, she had the cracks in the pots filled, and from the peddler she bought two shirt lengths for him, white linen for new aprons, and a length of soft blue wool for a dress. The ribbons and buttons and velvets did not tempt her, and on the grocer’s cart, with the exception of a paper twist of salt, a mackerel fresh yesterday from the sea, and a bottle of cider, she spent not his money nor hers.
The hours they passed together, being neither at night nor in daytime, had a tinge of unreality about them. They owned this time between darkness and light, and it was the perfect time for love, being not much good for anything else. He spoke to her with his low mesmerer’s voice, and never asked nor seemed interested in how long she planned to stay, what she would do, or where she would go next.
And then, in early spring, he announced that he would be leaving the following day to visit his wife and child. Pell blinked but said nothing.
“Where do they live?” she asked eventually, calmly, and when he told her she nodded. “And why do you go to them now?”
“My son needs teaching to hunt.”
“And she?” Pell could not bring herself to say “your wife.”
He drew on his pipe. “I married her when she found she was with child. But I could not live with her then, and I cannot now.”
She had known that his silence contained secrets, and in no way imagined this to be the last. She knew that he did not shrink from experience. And suddenly the thought of him leaving filled her not with terror but a renewed urgency about her own unfinished business.
He left her with meat salted and stored, a large quantity of flour, the cellar carefully packed with apples and the last of the winter vegetables, and stacks of wood under cover beside the house. He did not say when he would be back. When they parted he held her gaze, as if about to ask her something, but then smiled, and kissed her lightly. “Goodbye,” he said. “I will return when I can.”
His dogs followed him out.
After he left, the little house gradually lost its warmth. Dicken scratched at the door and ran circles round the place when she let him out, ignoring the rabbits in a frantic search for his lost friends. Pell imagined that Dicken was more attached to the familiar than she was, and pitied him, but each morning that arrived without the sound of Dogman’s return fi
lled her with melancholy. Would it be weeks or months? A single season, a year? She saw herself sitting and waiting, while everything that was hers lay forgotten—and knew that it was time to leave.
Dogman had left some money, and in a mood of opposition she applied to the elderly shoemaker at St. Mary’s for a new pair of boots. She ordered them stout rather than fashionable, in brown leather, the soles layered with cork for warmth and thick enough to stand up to hard walking. And although he was grateful for the business, which made a change from patching an endless stream of unsalvageable work shoes, the cobbler disliked her. He knew as little as anyone about the strange woman who came from nowhere and lived with the poacher, but her mere existence filled him with suspicion.
“Things ain’t what they was,” he grumbled, pulling a wooden last out of his collection and measuring her foot against it. “Half the county moving about, living where they oughtn’t. And another half can’t be bothered to work. Not when they can live for free on parish funds.”
Pell, who thought she had observed more of workhouses than he had, said nothing.
“Squeezing the parish to pay for every ne’er-do-well, every simple maid, and whatever bastards result.” He glanced at her sidewise, judging the effect of his words. “It ain’t right.”
“It can’t be much of a life in the workhouse,” said Pell mildly.
“Bed, fire, two meals a day? Nice enough, if you ask me.”
She hadn’t, but said nothing.
“And now each parish dumping its poor on the next.” He screwed his face into a disagreeable smile and lowered his voice. “We sent twelve of them these past months over to Andover. And good luck to ’em.”
Pell sat up straighter. Parishes dumping their poor? She’d never heard of such a thing. If true, it meant that Bean might be found where she hadn’t thought to look.
It took nearly a week for the cobbler to complete the job and present her with a pair of tall, shiny, conker-brown boots with sturdy sewn soles, after which she sold her hens at market, paid for the boots in full, and rolled her few belongings into a parcel.
One road in, one road out. At the southernmost edge of St. Mary’s, a stone marker pointed in the direction of Andover. With a shiver, as if someone had stepped on her grave, she set off.
Thirty
Bean had not grown accustomed to life in the workhouse. Instead, he grew thinner and paler and his skinny arms and legs shrank until his body began to resemble that of a child half his age. Hunger and neglect intensified the old-man look about his face. Old Man was what they called him in lieu of a name, and the extremes of abuse he suffered filled his joints and bones so full of aches and pains that the name soon began to describe his condition.
One day, the master and the matron walked through the wards, pointing at this child, or this youth, and that man, and they were pulled out and loaded onto a rough cart and taken on a day’s journey to Andover. The talk along the way was of all they had heard about the conditions at their destination, and none of what they had to say encouraged Bean. And yet, up until the moment they arrived, he maintained some hope that a new place must offer improvement on his current existence.
What he found made him think of Pa’s descriptions of hell.
Perseverance seemed the only course of action, and so he did what was necessary to outlast his fate. Crammed together with eighty other hungry, stinking men and boys, he slept on his hard, flea-ridden mattress at night, itched at his angry red flea bites with filthy broken fingernails, and ate his thin gruel not because it was palatable but because if he stopped eating it he would die. His sores bled and became infected, causing his legs to shake with fever when he tried to rise. He did what he was told to do as long as he was able, picking oakum until exhaustion stopped him, or helping to push the heavy handle of the bone grinder round and round until his body failed and he had to be half carried, half dragged back to his pallet.
On days that he was too weak to rise, one older boy, whose soul had not yet been squeezed dry of compassion, ate half of his bread ration and brought Bean what remained. The boy had to be quick to escape Matron’s eye, for it was her policy to pocket any unclaimed ration in exchange for the instructional adage that “no work earns no bread,” or “laziness pays no dividends.”
After an entire winter in Andover, Bean came to two separate realizations. First, that he would die if he remained in this place any longer, and second, that he did not want to die. Having found that there was no hope for him at all in the world inside, he waited for the first mild day, presented himself to Matron, pointed at the door, and watched as she (aghast at his audacity) drew herself up to her full aggrieved height of five feet nothing and saw him out.
“My charitable house is not a prison,” said she, hauling back the great iron bolts of the door, and arranging her face in an expression of utmost forbearance. “Any one of you is free to leave at any time if that is what you so desire.” It was a motto unlikely to inspire her inmates, there being so little prospect for survival in the outside world.
“Like I said,” she told the master, “the boy’s not right in the head. He’ll be dead in a day, I reckon, but that’s none of our concern. We’ve done the very best for him, and if he chooses to throw it back at us we shall have to turn the other cheek.”
The master did not comment. He never commented, a propensity for silence being all that he had in common with the boy who limped off down the road away from him. Bean’s head burned with fever, the slightest touch of workhouse clothes against his skin caused him pain, and the bones within his frail body ached. Yet he felt determined to get away no matter what trouble it brought, and in a frenzy of dread he pushed himself on until the place receded from sight.
When he had shuffled and staggered nearly two miles, he left the road and curled up like a fox cub in a stand of golden hay, snuggling down in the sweet-smelling grass while the sun beat down and warmed his wretched frame. The smell of warm grass and the sound of birds, after months of nothing but captivity, cold, and misery, caused in him a delirium of bliss. He fell at once into a deep sleep, in which his mind filled with images of Pell and her white horse. Occasionally he woke, but minutes later would sink back into unconsciousness. For more than a day he lay in his nest of hay, panting, shivering, and sweating, more dead than alive. Until, finally, he entered a place of dreamless rest, and once more waited for his luck to change.
All day long, people passed him on the road, some noticing without interest, others thinking he must be dead, and still others curious at the sight of a child curled up in the grass by the highway. Some offered him water or bread, and a group of Gypsy travelers helped him to sit up and eat a nourishing soup, and sip tea to ease his various ills. Upon leaving him, they left word along the road, so that when Esther came to a crossroads, a variety of signs informed her—as another person might have been informed by a telegram or a broadsheet—of the condition and whereabouts of the child.
She laughed a little to herself, and shook her head, and wondered when the intricate game of hide-and-seek across Salisbury Plain would come to an end.
Thirty-one
Any attention Pell had earned as a determined runaway paled in comparison with that which she attracted now. Good food had brought color to her face and a new quality to her figure; she no longer looked so boyish or so young. Her dark blue dress was new and without worn patches; the apron she wore over it spotless white. She pulled her hair back and fastened it with a red ribbon, as for a pony that kicked, because the thought pleased her. Her boots shone over fine knitted stockings.
Dicken had attained his full size and his head reached her hip. The thick ruff of fur at his neck made him appear bigger than he was, and when she smoothed the seeds and burrs out of his blue-gray coat he looked ancient, majestic. His puppy capers had slipped away, and he trotted beside her with dignity. Despite a gentle nature, the mere size of him offered protection.
They slept as before in abandoned barns and cowsheds, with money enou
gh to buy bread and cheese and beer. Dicken would eat at her table if she let him, would rather live off bread than catch his own dinner, but, despite the reproach in his eyes, Pell refused to share her meals with him. The warm days had brought rabbits out by the dozens; they were hungry and somewhat dazed, and made easy prey in the misty dawn.
She stopped occasionally to pass the time with other travelers, or with girls standing outside front gardens, sometimes with a child or two. The encounters left both parties dissatisfied: Pell tired and homeless; the other women moored in changeless harbors. After a few days on the road, her life with Dogman began to lose focus, blurring into a general picture of a past that included people and places she might never see again. When she contemplated the future, the pictures were hazier still, and no single track lay before her. Only two images remained clear in her head: Bean and Jack.
As she approached her latest destination, it began to rain, frozen rain, then hail—balls of ice as big as gooseberries that smashed the ground and exploded, scattering glinting shards in every direction. Pell took cover under the canopy of an ancient chestnut as the bombardment went on and on; it was nearly half an hour before she emerged again into the open, with a wet, icy soup underfoot.
Into silence.
No breath of air rustled the branches of the trees, no bird sang. She cast about, discomfited by the absence of noise. Above, on a bare branch, seven magpies sat still as stones, watching. “Welcome to Andover,” their eyes said.
A few minutes later found her at the door of the workhouse. The very air felt cold here; even the landscape fell away at the edges of the building as if anxious to be somewhere else. At a time in which news traveled slowly by coach and infamy built up slowly over decades, the name Andover had overnight become synonymous with abuse and fear. It was known as the worst of the places offering bed and board to the desperately poor, in exchange for breaking bones for fertilizer. Stories as far away as Nomansland reported that, as each day’s quota of rotting bones was delivered, the starving inmates fought tooth and claw for whatever traces of stinking meat and rancid marrow remained. And that was not the end of the unpleasantness, so it was said, but the beginning.