The Stepsister's Tale

by Tracy Barrett

  From the forest shadows behind the man, a boy stepped out. Jane recognized him, as well; it was Will, the boy whose dark curls had nearly covered his face the day the roofers had argued with Harry. His hair was shorn now and his face was gaunt, making his large, dark eyes look huge. He ducked his head and then nodded shyly. Jane nodded back wordlessly. She suddenly felt timid and told herself, Don’t be silly. It’s just that boy who worked on the roof.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Will said. He reached out his hand, and Jane, confused, put her own in it. His hand was warm and rough, and he held hers briefly before dropping it.

  “Oh, it’s not— He wasn’t—” Jane was angry at herself for being tongue-tied, and besides, she didn’t know how to tell him that Harry wasn’t her real father without sounding heartless. In her confusion she led Maude away. Stupid, stupid! she told herself. Why not stay and talk with him?

  “They’re helping us because they respect our family,” Maude said confidently as soon as they were out of earshot.

  Jane shook her head. “I don’t think that matters anymore. They’re helping us because they’re our neighbors, and we can’t do it ourselves.” She wished she could go back and respond more graciously to Will’s sympathy, but it was too late.

  “It’s because of our ancient name,” Maude persisted stubbornly. Jane just shook her head without answering. Maude could protest all she wanted to and the ancestors could whisper at her all day and all night, but they wouldn’t convince her that the name Halsey meant anything special.

  They met Hannah at the door. “Did you have to give up?” she asked. “I can take another turn.” She strode down the hill. Jane called after her, but Hannah was already speaking to the man, who was by now up to his knees in the hole. The two adults looked up at the house and then at the sheet-wrapped bundle on the ground as they conferred some more. Then Hannah turned and came back up the slope. “Let’s wait in the barn until he’s done,” Hannah said. “It’s a little warmer in there.” She didn’t need to say why they couldn’t go back in the house. Hannah knew as well as they did what their mother would say if she knew they had been talking with one of the people of the woods.

  The barn wasn’t as warm as the parlor would have been, but at least they were out of the wind, and there was Baby’s flank to snuggle up to. Jane felt herself sliding into sleep when a gentle hand shook her shoulder. “Come,” Hannah said. “It’s time to get your mother and the girl.”

  They all stood at the graveside while Mamma murmured some words of prayer. They would have to wait until the priest returned in the spring to hold a proper service. She couldn’t tell from Isabella’s blank face and unblinking eyes if she knew what was happening. After it was over, they turned and trooped silently back toward the house, Isabella in the lead. Mamma put a gentle hand on her shoulder, but the girl shook it off without looking up. Mamma didn’t try again.

  When they reached the door, Jane knew she couldn’t go inside, back into the stench of illness and death and the sight of that empty bed where Harry’s corpse had lain. “I—I need to go to the dairy,” she said. “I just remembered...” Before anyone could ask what she had just remembered, she fled to the little stone building perched above the stream.

  The familiar, comforting smell of cheese and butter rather than the sight of the dead man, rather than digging his grave, rather than the sight of Isabella’s ashen face and dry, glittering eyes, tore a sob out of Jane’s throat. She closed the door so that only weak sun rays came through the tiny window high in the stone wall, and cried until she was light-headed, and then she cried some more. Every time she thought she was finished, a fresh sob jerked her chest.

  Finally, just as suddenly as it had started, Jane’s weeping ended. Mamma will be wondering where I am, she thought wearily. She didn’t want anyone to follow her here—she didn’t think she could bear being questioned—and she picked up one of the cheesecloths to dampen in the stream outside in order to wash the traces of the tears from her face and bring down the puffiness of her eyelids.

  She opened the door and nearly jumped back at the sight of a figure standing there. Harry’s ghost? But instantly she knew her mistake and recognized Will, the last person she wanted to see in her misery.

  “Are you all right, Miss?” he asked.

  “What do you want?” Her words were tight from her recent weeping and from being startled, and she was glad that she was still in darkness so that he couldn’t see her face, streaked and swollen with tears, as she knew it must be.

  He held out the shovel. “Didn’t want to take it into the barn,” he said, his voice suddenly hard. “Didn’t want anyone to think I was there to steal one of your fine cows or goats.”

  “No one would think—” Jane stopped herself. She took the handle. “I’ll put it away.” She tried to hide her weariness and her storm of crying, and was relieved that she sounded cool, almost detached.

  “Suit yourself,” he said indifferently, and turned away. Jane knew she should feel irritated and Mamma would expect her to say something to make this forest boy mind his manners, but she couldn’t muster up the energy to care that he had addressed her so insolently. She watched him walk back down to where he and his father had dug Harry’s grave, his broad shoulders hunched against the wind, which had picked up and now was blowing icy little drops of rain into her face as she stood in the open doorway.

  When she finally sighed, closed the dairy door tight, and made her way up the hill, the sun was barely above the trees. As she trudged up to the house, she glanced behind her. Nothing. Nobody. Then why did her back feel the prickle of gazing eyes as she went?

  Chapter 9

  The next day, Hannah filled a bucket with water and slopped it over the floor of the parlor. She and Jane rolled up their sleeves to their elbows and their skirts to their thighs. They scrubbed the wooden planks with a heavy brush that Hannah had unearthed in the kitchen. Hannah dug sand from near the river and scoured the pots with it until they gleamed.

  The work took Jane’s mind off the bundle that they had deposited in the cold ground, and off the boy who at one moment seemed to want to befriend her and at another treated her with indifference, even coldness. She threw open the windows of the South Parlor when Mamma was in the dairy, despite Isabella’s protestations against the cold, and aired the room thoroughly, turning over the cushions and thumping them. Under Hannah’s direction, Jane and Maude dragged the mattress on which Harry had died far away from the house and set it on fire. Thick black smoke poured out along the ground, barely rising into the air and stinging their nostrils as the damp straw struggled to burn.

  Hannah took Maude out to hunt for medicinal herbs and edible roots, and Maude came back showing more animation than she had exhibited for months, talking about how you had to be careful what you picked and how you picked it or the fairy-people would do something that caused the medicine not to work, or even to be harmful.

  “Why do the fairy-folk want to hurt us?” Jane asked Hannah.

  “It isn’t that they want to hurt us, Jane. They’re playful, is all, and they can be spiteful, like little children. If we do something that they don’t like, they’ll do something to pay us back, or if they’re bored, they’ll play a trick just to be irritating. Any harm isn’t done on purpose.”

  “So you have to be careful,” Maude said, with an air of superiority, now that she knew something that Jane didn’t. “Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you.”

  “But they sometimes take our babies and leave their own behind, don’t they?” Jane looked at Hannah.

  “I’ve heard of that,” the woman said, “although I’ve never known it to happen.”

  I wish the fairies had taken Rose instead of her dying, Jane thought. Even a changeling sister would be preferable to the loss. She sometimes felt incomplete, as though a piece of her had died along with her twin, even t
hough she couldn’t remember her. How much easier it would be if she had someone like Rose she could really talk to, not Mamma, who refused to face the reality of their lives, or Maude, who was too young to understand it.

  After Hannah had been there a week, they sat in the South Parlor drinking an herb tea that Maude had concocted. Mamma had finished hers and was nodding by the fire as Hannah showed Maude how to clean and bandage a blister that had burst on Jane’s palm.

  Hannah took Jane’s hand in hers and inspected the work. “Your grandmamma would have been proud of how hard you’re working,” she said, glancing at Mamma, who showed no sign of hearing.

  Jane was startled. “Grandmamma Halsey?” She had only hazy memories of an old lady in lace and velvet who had died shortly before Papa had left for good.

  Hannah nodded. “She had so much energy, and couldn’t stand to see things not done properly.” After a pause, she continued, “You look more and more like her every day.” She nodded at Maude. “Both of you.”

  “Like Grandmamma? But everyone says what a handsome woman she was!” Maude exclaimed, and both Jane and Hannah said, “Hush!” But Mamma didn’t stir.

  Hannah leaned in closer and spoke quietly. “And so are you. Maybe you’re not pretty like what’s fashionable, or even like Isabella.” The three of them glanced out the window at the drive, where the girl wandered aimlessly, kicking at pebbles. “But you’re tall and strong, and you have lovely hair, at least when you take the trouble to comb it.” She put a finger under Maude’s chin and tilted her face up. “And clear, smooth skin and beautiful smiles.” Maude grinned, and Jane tried to see her sister with a stranger’s eyes.

  “You always say that,” Jane said. “But I don’t think it’s true.”

  Hannah smiled. “No girl your age thinks she’s pretty. You just wait a few years.”

  The conversation turned to a clinical discussion between the herb-woman and Maude concerning the difference between the treatment of blisters and of burns, and Jane lost interest. She went to milk Baby. She hoisted the bucket—it was getting lighter at each milking, which worried her—and took it to the dairy, intending to check on the cheese, which usually progressed slowly in the cold weather. Maude had come to the dairy while Jane was in the barn and was now skimming that morning’s milking. Good thing that Jane had come in at that moment; there was no telling how much of the sweet cream would have disappeared down Maude’s throat if nobody was looking.

  “Do you think Hannah’s right, that we’re pretty?” Maude bent farther over her task.

  “Don’t let your hair get in it,” Jane said. She pulled the curls off Maude’s cheeks and held them behind her neck. “I don’t know,” she said. “Hannah loves us, so she thinks we’re nice to look at. But Isabella doesn’t like us, and she said so, too, that day her comb got broken. So maybe...maybe it’s true.”

  Jane hardly ever thought about what she looked like, since hardly anyone but her mother and sister and Hannah, who was like a second mother, ever saw her. Her face was just her face, and her body was her body—a body that was capable of shoveling out a stable and taking care of delicate newborn puppies and chicks and milking a stubborn cow. She looked down at herself. She had always walked past the glazed mirrors in the upstairs hall without a glance, but from what she could see now, her legs were long and straight and the outline of her body dipped in and out in a way that made her think of the portrait of Mamma in Papa’s empty room. Was that beauty?

  She didn’t think that Mamma, at any rate, would say it was. Mamma always admired the more delicate kind of girl that they saw in church—a girl named Lavinia, for one, the daughter of one of Mamma’s former friends, who now pretended not to know her. Lavinia and her younger sister had skin that must rarely be exposed to the sun, and their hands were smooth, not rough with the calluses and blisters that farm work raised on Jane’s palms.

  Jane sighed. If Hannah wasn’t just being kind, she was blinded by her affection for them. Maude’s arms were muscular from all her churning over the years, and now her face was red with exertion. She seemed to feel Jane looking at her and paused in her work. “What?” She sounded indignant.

  “Nothing.” Jane left Maude and went about her own chores.

  After Hannah sent word home that Harry’s infection had spread no further, Hugh and his father came to the house. They repaired the broken pump in the kitchen, replaced rotten wood in the pantry with sound planks, and laid hay, mown from the little left in the yard, in the barn. When Jane brought them some of Maude’s herb tea, they put down their tools and drank it gratefully.

  Hannah’s husband gave his empty mug back to Jane and surprised her with a warm squeeze of her hand. “You call on us if you have need of anything,” he said. “We don’t have much but our labor, but you can have all that we can spare.”

  Jane nodded her thanks, unable to speak for the sudden stinging in her eyes and the hard place in her throat. She glanced at Hugh, who was silent, as always, but who was looking at her with something like compassion in his hazel eyes. Why would Mamma say that Hannah’s family was not fit for them to associate with? When did any of the fine people she used to know help them? And what of that man, Will’s father, who had dug Harry’s grave? Even though he was one of the people of the woods, he had proven himself more of a friend than the people Mamma used to go to parties with.

  When Hannah and her family left late that evening, it seemed like all the life in the house went with them.

  Chapter 10

  It was the hardest winter Jane could remember. Mamma said that there had been a worse one when she was a girl. But in those days there had been servants to ride deep into the forest and fetch dry wood to stack in huge piles for cheerful fires, and there were woolen blankets and hot things to drink whenever anyone wanted them. Now it took all day to find a few logs that weren’t half-rotten, that could dry out in a day or two and provide some weak and smoky heat in the fireplace. They still had blankets, but they were damp and riddled with moth holes, and their mustiness made Maude sneeze incessantly.

  Despite the chill and damp outdoors, Jane preferred the forest to the house. At least among the trees nobody complained, nobody whined, nobody looked at her as though she should somehow know what to do. She took to wandering in the woods—never very deep—even when she knew that she would find nothing to eat.

  One morning she saw a late honeybee, coaxed out of its hive by an unusually sunny sky, and followed it for a while in the small hope that it would lead her to its tree. Hannah would probably know how to remove the honey without getting stung. But she soon lost it and was about to turn back when she thought she heard something moving in the brush. She paused on the path, decided she must have been mistaken, and was starting to move on when something grabbed her wrist and yanked her, sprawling, behind a tree. She drew in her breath to scream, but a hand clamped itself over her mouth and whoever was holding her hissed, “Hush! King’s men!”

  A burst of sound, and two horsemen thundered past her. She caught a glimpse of faces set in grim purpose, of drawn swords, of cloaks billowing behind the riders as their mounts sped past, their legs flashing, the large animals tearing down the path just where she had been standing. They disappeared, leaving her with her heart thumping even faster, she felt, than those gleaming hooves had pounded.

  The hand on her mouth loosened, and she whipped around. She found herself looking into brown eyes and said furiously, “What do you think you’re—” when a short, hoarse cry sounded deep in the woods, farther down the path. Furious words followed, protestations, then the crack of a blow, and then an oath. The words died on her lips. What could it mean?

  She didn’t have to wonder long. A horse’s snort, the creak of leather, and then the thud of hooves—much slower than before—reached her ears. Laughter, men’s mirthless laughter, as though in mockery or triumph, followed, and then, returning in the
direction where they had disappeared just a few moments earlier, came the two horsemen on their sleek mounts. The second was followed by a man on foot, who stumbled on the uneven path. He was thin and ragged, and his hands were bound in front of him; the rider held the other end of the rope and tugged the man—no, a boy, tall and lean, but a boy nonetheless. The first horseman now carried a longbow, and a quiver of arrows hung over his shoulder. Jane knew in an instant what had happened: the boy had been caught poaching, shooting game that belonged to the king.

  The boy caught sight of her even as she pressed herself back against whoever had dragged her behind the tree. His eyes looked wild, and he opened his mouth, but no sound came out of it.

  Jane waited until she was sure they were out of sight and hearing, and then she wrenched herself out of the hands restraining her. She staggered to her feet and turned to face her captor. “Who are you and what...” She stopped. It was Will.

  “You’re welcome,” the boy said coldly as he, too, rose to his feet. “Would you rather I had left you to be trampled? Or to be taken by the king’s men?”

  She was almost too astonished to speak. “Why would the k-king’s men want to take me?” she finally sputtered.

  “Why not?” he asked. “You were here near a poacher, so you were probably helping him.”

  “A poacher? I’m not a poacher!”

  “The king’s men don’t know that, and it’s easier to pick you up and punish you than to ask questions. That’s what they do, now that the old king has turned over the forest to his son.”

  Jane was speechless with indignation.

  The boy kicked at a bush and scowled. “It’s not fair. They make it too easy for poachers, so that anyone in want is so tempted that he can’t resist.”