The Bride's Farewell

by Meg Rosoff

  Thirty-four

  Pell retraced her steps, traveling back to Andover as fast as she could go, praying that one thing, at least, she could set right. She slept only in snatches, starting up each time in torment at the vision of her mam and pa, burning.

  On arrival, she went straight to the workhouse. As the master entered the outer room, she could smell the place in his clothing. Death and depravity, she thought, and it clings to him like a shroud. The smile he smiled at the sight of her made her blood freeze, and she wished never to see a face with that particular expression on it again.

  “Well, well. Good morning to you, miss.”

  “I’m here to fetch three children out.”

  “Three children, now? What a careless family you have. First one child, now three? Are they mutes, too? Or isn’t that any of my business? No, no, of course not. My business is right here, making a profit from the worthless poor.” He smiled again, this time at the desperate pallor of her face. “So today it’s three children. What a thing. Tell me, Miss Ridley, how has life taken such a turn for the better that you’ve come to collect three children?”

  A haze of darkness enveloped her. Her very bones felt worn out with sorrow.

  “Heavens above! Another mute! Perhaps that’s how the first one came by it. Runs in the family, does it? Like idiocy, they say.” He chuckled. “Excuse my mirth, miss. I’m just imagining a whole family of idiots. Did you say you were their mother, or their sister? Or perhaps both? You see quite a lot of that in idiot families.”

  “Frances, Sally, and Ellen Ridley.”

  “Of course, Ridley. I remember now. Been here all along, only you didn’t ask for girls. Common enough name, of course, didn’t occur to me they might be yours. Four children!” He ran his eyes slowly down her body. “And at your tender age.”

  She held her ground, made her mind blank.

  “Here we are.” Licking his fingers, he turned the pages of a large ledger. “If only you’d asked the last time, I’d have led you straight to them. Thought it a bit odd. Never mind, can’t be helped. Nothing lost, in any case, as it’s only been a few days. Only—” He looked up at her with the oily mock concern of a moneylender. “Oh, dear. We seem to have just two Ridley children listed here.”

  “There are three. If you’d check again . . .” Her jaw tightened.

  “No need, miss, no need.” He shoved the ledger at her. “Right here, you can see for yourself, it says here: Sally Ridley, nine years old.” He looked up. “Would that be right? Deceased. Just two days hence. Of fever.” He looked up at her. “Of course, everything was done to save her. No expense spared. Finest food and medicine available.”

  She gasped.

  The master stood grinning.

  “And . . . and the remaining two?”

  “Yes, of course. If you’ll wait here, the warder will fetch them for you.”

  It was nearly an hour before he returned with the warder, half dragging two creatures by what scraps of collars they had left. Their clothes were filthy, and they cringed and cowered.

  “Take your idiots and good luck,” he snarled, all interest in the game finished. “They’re hardly human, those two.” At a gesture from him, the warder dropped the children to the ground in front of Pell. He raised his hand as if to hit them and they recoiled, mewing with fear.

  “Idiots.” He laughed and left the room.

  Pell knelt to embrace the girls. “Come,” she said, noting how tightly the flesh stretched across their bones. “Come, Frannie, Ellen. I have cakes for you. Would you like cakes?”

  They fell upon her, frantic. “Cakes, cakes!”

  Pell took one hand of each and pulled them to the door. They had once been big girls of ten and twelve, but now their limbs seemed shrunken. Ellen’s dreamy eyes drooped with sorrow, and all the spirit had drained from Frannie. Once away, tears streamed down Pell’s face, of rage as much as sorrow.

  She stopped at the baker’s and bought a loaf and some sweet buns, which the children stuffed frantically into their mouths. She would have to take a room for them, but as they approached the inn the landlady placed herself squarely in the center of the entrance.

  “You’re not taking those filthy creatures indoors,” said she, indignant. “They can sleep in the barn with the other animals.”

  Pell protested, to no avail. So she took them to the barn and, with the promise of more to eat, installed them with Dicken in a loose box.

  Starvation had reduced them to beasts, and food made them human again. They would eat anything put in front of them as long as there were no bones, retching, sometimes, with the strain on shrunken stomachs. Dicken stood beside them as they ate and ate until not another crumb would go down, and they latched onto him, locking their fists in his coat and sinking down into the straw in a stupor of satisfaction. At first, Pell tried to slow them down, but they howled until she gave in. When finally they lay asleep in the straw—whimpering, knees drawn up to swollen bellies, fists clutching the dog—Pell watched them sleep and brushed angry tears from her eyes, asking herself the same question over and over: How could this have happened?

  And then she stopped. She had no leisure to weep over what was past.

  She sent a letter to Mrs. Louisa Bellings in Lover, hastily scratched, telling her about Sally, and how she’d found Frannie and Ellen, and where they would wait for her. The next day she received a reply, saying Lou was on her way. While they waited, the children slept and ate, waking occasionally and crying out, or crying out in their sleep for Sally, cringing as if expecting to be punished for the noise. As soon as she could, Pell washed them clean with the soap used in the stable, an unnerving ordeal that left all three exhausted and dripping. The girls stayed with Dicken in the box while Pell fetched new woolen cloth for pinafores and linen for aprons. She stitched them bigger than need be—they would not always be so thin.

  Lou asked for Pell at the inn and was surprised to be directed to the stable. There she embraced her three remaining sisters, accepting the cries of the two younger and steeling herself against the place in her arms where Sally should have been, and Bean. Two children found. Two lost.

  From within the embrace, Pell whispered in her ear, “How could you have left them?”

  “How could I?” Louisa drew back. “It was you, Pell. You left, that was the start of it. And then Mam and Pa dead, and no one left to sort out what was left. We had nothing—no money to pay the rent, not even the good opinion of the village. When Mr. Bellings offered to have me despite all the talk . . .” She dropped her eyes, and when she raised them again the blue of them was like ice. “What would you have done? What would you have had me do?”

  Pell said nothing.

  “Do you think what I did was for my own pleasure?”

  “But Birdie—”

  It was the first time she had seen Lou angry. “You left him, Pell. You left, and you didn’t wait to see what happened next. Birdie never wanted to marry me.”

  Pell turned away.

  “What did you think would happen? There were so many broken promises. Don’t you see? It won’t ever be put right.”

  Pell nodded, her eyes swimming. “Tell me about the fire.”

  Thirty-five

  Lou left the next morning. Her husband expected her back, she said, and it was no use delaying; he would not stand for it. Pell promised to write from wherever they should settle, but she refused Lou’s suggestion that they return to Nomansland. “I can’t return, Lou. If it were the last place left on earth, I would not.”

  Lou dared not dissent.

  “We’ll make our way.”

  “But how?”

  Pell shrugged. “By some means.”

  Lou shook her head. “I would have the children if I could, but there’s no use thinking of it. Mr. Bellings will not.” She thought for a moment. “His niece works in Winchester, at the Wykeham Arms, at the edge of town. I’ve met her and she seemed kind. Perhaps she will help you.”

  And with that the
y embraced and, amid many tears, set off in different directions.

  Pell and the children traveled slowly. After ten miles of winding hilly roads, even Dicken stopped chasing rabbits and walked by her side, subdued. As she walked, she thought of her parents, and of Sally and Bean, and though the little girls cried for Lou, she said only that they were going to Winchester. By the time they arrived, all three were footsore and downcast.

  The Wykeham Arms was easy enough to find, and although Lou’s niece was not in evidence upon their arrival, at the mention of her name the owner offered a tiny room under the eaves, with supper not included in the price and Dicken to stay in the stable. It was cheap, and Pell accepted gratefully.

  A person accustomed to worse might expect to sleep soundly on a bed within four walls. But the room had no fire and no windows, was musty and cold, and Pell awoke constantly throughout the night. With the girls to comfort and be comforted by, she managed a few hours’ rest at dawn.

  The previous night’s dinner of steamed pudding with ham arrived cold for breakfast, served by Lou’s niece on a wooden plate, and when Pell said who they were and how they had come, she greeted them warmly, disappearing to the kitchen and reappearing a few minutes later with a glass of warm elderberry wine beaten up with egg for Pell and hot milk with nutmeg for the children, saying it would do their spirits and their health good. The kindness did more to warm Pell’s heart than the drink.

  As Pell sipped her wine, she slowly unfolded the story of Nomansland—of the death of her parents, and her brothers, and Sally, and her search for Bean and Jack.

  The girl listened with sympathy. “What a dreadful story! Will you return home?”

  “No,” said Pell. “There is nothing for us there.”

  “What, then, will you do?”

  “I shall have to find work.”

  “You’ll need more good fortune than most to find work here,” the girl replied. But she gave Pell the names of places at which she might inquire and wished her luck.

  Pell left the children at the inn and went out searching.

  At The Bell, she was told that they wouldn’t take on a girl they didn’t know. The King’s Head had a livery stable where the man barely graced her request with an answer. The Swan required no new staff, now or ever. At the baker’s, it was suggested that she try the house across the road, where servants were always required, owing to the bad temper of her ladyship, but there the cook said she’d rather take on a basket of frogs than a good-looking girl with no references, and the housemaid wouldn’t consider a girl the cook wouldn’t have. The butcher looked so ill-tempered she didn’t stop, the post office had a waiting list of known and trusted local hopefuls. The grocer had daughters, the shoemaker an apprentice, the carter four sons. And at no time had she dared mention her sisters.

  Another day passed. Once more, Pell left Dicken and the girls and walked for miles, inquiring at each substantial house whether anyone required a scullery maid, a cook’s helper, a nursery nurse, a groom. Her rejection at each was accompanied by a greater or lesser degree of incredulity at her lack of references, or letters of introduction, or family connections. At last, on the outskirts of town, the owner of a large untidy farmhouse offered her a few days’ work sowing and bird-scaring. A shilling a day. “But you’ll have to get rid of that dog,” he said, and when Pell turned round in surprise, Dicken stood waiting for the slightest sign of recognition before greeting her with the enthusiasm of a long-lost lover. “I’ll not have any poacher’s dog hanging about my chickens,” grumbled the man.

  Disappointed as she was, she couldn’t blame him.

  As she returned slowly to the inn, Pell considered the possibilities. She could go on to Oxford, or apply for employment at the paper mill in Swindon. “They’ll take anyone,” Mr. Bellings’s niece had told her. “There’s fourteen from this town there already.”

  What remained? There was always London, with its new factories and its choking smoke, but she was not yet desperate enough for London. She had given up on Harris. Even if she found him, he would certainly have sold Jack. Evidence already confirmed him as a liar and a thief, and without Dogman she had no proof that he owed her money. As the event receded in history, her chances of a satisfactory resolution faded away to nothing.

  With these thoughts in her head, she made one final stop at the forge on the edge of town. She already knew the reception she would receive there—a girl at a blacksmith’s shop was an absurdity—but she was drawn to the smell and the sound of it, and the knowledge of how it worked and what she could do.

  In the yard, a farm horse stood patiently while a big-shouldered old man held one of the animal’s great hoofs between his knees.

  “Excuse me,” she said softly. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for work.”

  The man paused, holding his heavy hammer on the upswing, and looked at her with a puzzled expression. “For whom, miss? For your husband or brother? For your father?”

  “No,” she said, even more quietly. “For myself.”

  “For yourself?” The smile on his old weathered face broadened. “Why, of course! You may as well start here.” Still holding the heavy foot aloft, he offered it to Pell, chuckling.

  “I will,” she said, “if you’ll lend me your apron.”

  With a burst of laughter, the man put down his hammer, untied his old leather apron, and placed it over Pell’s head. It dropped heavily onto her shoulders and she hesitated only a moment before wrapping the ties twice around her waist and knotting them in front. Then she picked up the hammer, took from him the four remaining nails, hefted the hoof in one hand, and leaned her shoulder against the shire’s in a polite request for him to bear the weight of the leg himself. Being a sweet-natured creature, he complied, and she hammered the remaining nails into the shoe—taptaptap—three taps per nail with perfect accuracy, just as she’d been taught as a girl, straight and smooth, flattening each neatly where it emerged from the wall of the hoof.

  The unfamiliar exercise left her flushed and a little breathless, but it was worth the effort for its effect on the old man. He gaped at her, mouth open, as she lowered the hoof, ran her hand down the great horse’s neck, and murmured “Thank you” as close to its ear as she could stretch.

  When she turned to face the farrier, she summoned up her courage and said in as clear a voice as she could muster, “I’ll do whatever odd jobs you can find for me.” The weight of need compressed her chest, so that her words emerged tentative and weak. “Anything at all.”

  It took a minute for the man to regain his wits. Then he scratched his head and called out, “Daniel! Who was asking for a boy? John Kirby up at Highfields, was it?” He turned back to Pell. “Get yourself up to Highfields, half a mile out of town by the post road, and tell John Kirby I sent you. Mind you,” he added with a chuckle, “I’d give something to see the man’s face when you turn up.”

  She could have thrown herself at the old man’s feet with gratitude, but settled for an expression of thanks so earnest, he flushed with pleasure. As she and Dicken set off, the blacksmith stood watching, hands on hips. “Of all the things,” he muttered, still grinning and shaking his head. “Daniel! Did you ever see such a girl? Of all the things.”

  At Highfields, Pell headed straight for the smart-looking stables and asked for Mr. John Kirby. A groom directed her to the tiny office at the end of the aisle, where records and pedigrees were kept in huge leather-bound books, and a serious man in a smart green jacket, black boots, and white breeches sat sorting invoices and receipts. When he looked up and saw Pell, the expression on his face changed at once.

  “Well,” he said, standing to greet her, “you may be just about the last person I expected to see today.”

  “Are you John Kirby?” She could only stare. “I . . . it was the smith in town who sent me, if you please. He said you were looking for a boy.” She blushed. “For someone to help in the stables.”

  “Well, I was, and I am,” replied Kirby. “But I wasn’t imag
ining that the someone who turned up would be you.”

  “Nor was I expecting you,” she said, venturing a smile, for she was pleased to see him again. “And did you find a good home for the chestnut mare . . . for Desdemona? I have wondered about her many times since.”

  He smiled. “Aye, to as soft-handed and meek a young lady as you can imagine, and I hear that they have never had an instant’s trouble with each other.” He shook his head. “You never can tell with horses.”

  “I’m happy for them both,” Pell said, but her voice quavered with trepidation.

  “And you?” John Kirby said at last, sitting back and frowning a little. “You’d better tell me by what fateful route you’ve arrived here from Salisbury Fair.”

  “Please,” she said, and it seemed as if her entire body inclined into the word. “Please consider me for the job. It is one I can do.”

  His face attempted to accommodate both a grin and a frown, arriving at neither satisfactorily. Instead, he shook his head and indicated that she should sit down.

  “Now, then,” he said.

  He listened carefully as she recounted the bare bones of her story, from Bean’s and Jack’s disappearance to her arrival here. She left out her time with Dogman, saying only that she had lived in a barn near the town. At the end, he shook his head. “You are not frightened of the world, are you?”

  She answered softly. “I have not had the luxury.”

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “I was looking for a boy, from one of the big houses by preference, with experience of the job and good references.” He tapped his fingers on the desk, musing. “But a decent boy isn’t easy to come by these days, and your experience is certainly”—he paused—“unusual.”

  Neither said anything for a moment, and then John Kirby pointed at Dicken, who lay silent and polite at Pell’s feet. “He’s your dog?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s nothing more, is there?”

  She could tell that her story caused him to consider what he was taking on. “Yes.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “There is.”