“Sure, I’ll have one for you by Monday. I might bring it up. Just the one?”
“One’s enough for me.”
“See you’ve got the prettiest girls in town,” said Irene.
“I’m not waitin’ all day, woman.” The slaughter-man barged in, slamming his empty glass down. Irene scowled, but went to fill it, not wanting the trouble. “So, everything well up at Rathged?” she said, ignoring the uncouth slurping at her shoulder. “Still got the ponies?”
“Yes. We’re fine. We’ll be well stocked this winter. Are you and Vince staying in Liverpool over winter again?”
“Yes, and we’re buying a place up in Manchester. The King Will, down on the canal. Should be good business. Hope we can come out next summer though. I don’t like it in town.”
“No, me neither,” said Callum. “See you on Monday then.”
* * *
The slaughter-man at the bar watched Callum leaving with his women. He had listened well, and noted the fat roll of money in his pocket. Rathged Farm. Ponies. He turned back to his friends, finished the dregs in his glass, and kept his own counsel. For now.
31
“Bontwerduu Pool. I’m going to see if I can catch a fish. The rain will have swollen the river, should be easy.”
Callum unhitched the pony and hobbled it above the bank. It stuck its nose down and began tearing at the grass.
They walked along the path and clambered down through the bushes and rocks toward the sound of the water.
Bethan and Magda lay down in the shade of a tree and Alice poked around on the bank, watching ants and throwing pebbles into the water.
Rolling up his trousers, Callum waded through the shallows with the fishing rod in his hand.
It wasn’t long before his cork bobbed down and the line cut a slice through the water. “Got you!” He flicked the end of his rod up and fought the thrashing fish to the water’s edge.
He looked over to the others. “Alice! Don’t go too far. Don’t go further than we can see you.” There was a flash of a tail in the pool and Callum concentrated his efforts once more. And soon there were three shiny trout on the bank.
* * *
“Mummy!” Alice slipped down the bank. “Mummy! Pony gone!”
Bethan sat up. “Callum—”
Callum waded over and threw his rod down. “What?”
“Pony gone,” Alice said.
They scrambled up the bank and raced along the path to the road.
The cart was there, traces and yoke hanging over the shafts as they had been left. But the pony was not.
Callum leaned down and retrieved the leather hobble that had been cast aside onto the grass.
“It’s been cut. Someone has stolen Mill Boy.”
“What are we going to do?”
There was a clopping on the lane and from around the bend Geraint and his father, Huw, came trotting down the road on their tired horses with their sheepdog close at heel, his tongue lolling out with the run.
“You lot look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Huw Thomas said, pulling up his horse and seating himself back in the saddle.
“Some bastard’s stolen the pony,” said Callum. “Did you see anyone on the road?”
“Not a thing, Gourty.” In an instant, Huw was all seriousness. “But Geraint can get the women back to Dolgellau and you can ride down the Barmouth road with me. Right—Geraint lad, you hear me, get those women and that cart up to the Stag and no arsing around.”
He leaned down and pulled Callum up onto his own pony, then kicked it on in the direction of Dolgellau with Callum bouncing, ungainly, behind the saddle.
Geraint was shy to be left alone with the women, and so he busied himself energetically with unsaddling his horse and getting it between the empty shafts of Callum Gourty’s cart.
“Now don’t you cry, Alice. Here, have an apple.” Geraint took a small red apple from his pocket. The pony pricked its ears, but Geraint pushed its nose away and gave the apple to Alice, sitting up on the seat. She stopped her snuffling and took it in her hand.
“Come, boy,” said Geraint, and he led the pony on and up the road with the dog zig-zagging across their path, snuffling about the hedgerows and verges as it went.
* * *
Back in Dolgellau at last, the girls sat and waited in the empty pub. When Irene had finished cleaning, she came over and sat down on the bench beside them.
“I reckon it’ll ’ave been one of those slaughter-men. They’re a rough bunch and no morals either.”
Bethan was very glum. “It’s a bad loss for Callum. For all of us, I suppose.”
“I know, love. I bet it is. But Huw will help. He’s not as hard as he looks when there’s the taste of being a hero in the air. I remember once when my car broke down, years ago up near his place when we were still living out here. He had his tractor towing it back to the village in no time.”
“Mum will be wondering where we are by now,” Bethan said.
The men came ducking in under the open door.
“No. Nothing,” said Huw. “We can’t do a thing more. It’ll be dusk soon.”
Callum sat, a frown between his eyes.
The pony was gone and nowhere to be seen. Not on the Barmouth trail nor in any direction they could make out, even though they had ridden Huw’s tired horse as hard and as far as they reasonably could.
“Now then, don’t you worry, ladies,” said Huw, looking at the downcast faces. “Geraint will get the cart back and you on it. And we ought to leave soon. Don’t want to be out in the dark, Gourty. Not with thieving townies around.”
“Are your horses fit enough for it?” said Callum.
“They may be tired,” said Huw, “and us as well, but if you can’t help a neighbor in need and the women there and the kiddy too … No, the ponies can rest well enough when they get home. Now, Geraint, you get these people home and then straight back.”
It was a very sorry end to an otherwise successful day, and they all sat silent on the journey home that seemed thrice as long as it had on the way down, with dark thoughts creeping in the mossy dusk and all of them wondering what sort of people there were abroad.
“You know it’s the last day of summer,” said Bethan, looking out across the fields at the dropping sun. “I just remembered.”
It was indeed.
AUTUMN
It was plain to see. In the cold light of day. That the walls of Crow’s Hall were only bare branches, and the girl’s bed was just a mossy bank, with the ceiling vaulted by trees and the sky her roof.
Yet still she would not cry out.
For the Spirit of Hope had come scratching at the bank, and it curled at her back in the cold of the dawn.
“Hope! That penniless fool?” cawed Crow, pulling worms in the field.
But she listened not to Crow.
32
It was that hastening time at the end of the year when leaves fall from the trees and threads of geese take to the sky.
Today it is a sky of palest blue. So pale it is almost gray. And the morning air is so damp with hovering mists that you can smell it.
Everyone at Rathged was tired as old horses with all the summer’s dragging of scythes, and bundling of hay and thrashing of oats.
Magda went down to light the stove. There was a footfall on the step. She switched her gaze to the door with a flurrying heart.
But it was only Bethan.
“Magda? You up? Just want to come and sit in your calm for a minute if that’s all right.”
“You are awake very early, Bethan.”
“So are you. Dad’s going to Barmouth tomorrow—do you need anything?”
“Just soap and some more thread.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“I am going to look for mushrooms,” Magda said. “I think it’s the last day for it. Will you eat some breakfast with me before I go out?”
She cut some cheese and took out a stool for Bethan and sat with her in the open back door, the
fire beginning to crack and the logs shifting in the stove at their backs.
There was a chill to the air already.
Bethan leaned over, resting her forearms on her thighs. She wiggled her toes in her boots, staring down at them, caked with dirt as they were.
“I used to be really into shoes,” she said. “You know. Before.”
Magda smiled.
“What about you, Magda? Don’t you wish it would all just—go away?”
“I thank God that I found this place.”
“God? You actually think he exists? Up there in the sky. Sort of sitting on a cloud or something.”
Magda laughed. “Well, I have to believe in something.”
“Magda, you’re so—I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Bethan sat up straight. “If you went back to Poland, do you think you’d find him again?”
Magda turned to her friend. “Even if I did, Bethan, Ivan did not want me.”
“You don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he will come back.”
They were silent for a while, looking out under the trees. “You’ll be lonely here, won’t you?” Bethan said quietly.
“Maybe.” A small cloud passed under the hazy sun. And a soft dimness fell across the orchard.
“Do you think we’ll be all right this winter? You know for food and stuff—”
Magda looked back under the trees. “We’ll get hungry just like the birds. But we won’t starve if we’re careful. It has been a good summer. Maybe the winter will not be so hard.”
“Callum says it’s the calm before the storm.”
Magda laughed. “He is not a man filled with lightness.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He has his moments.” Bethan paused. “If it hadn’t been for you helping with the dairy and all the other things, I don’t know what Mum and Dad would have done. Somehow you manage to keep everything in order. You’ve always got clean clothes and a tidy place—you’re not worried about—you know? When it comes?”
Magda looked away. “I don’t want to worry about things that haven’t happened.”
“Do you think you will go back to Poland? Really—”
“Look at me, Bethan. Do you think I’ll be going anywhere soon?” Magda got up like a full stop. Stood, hands over her rounded belly, looking out under the trees. “We must find boxes for storing the apples. It’s a good crop. But they will rot if we don’t store them well. And the mice. If it is dry tomorrow, we must start picking. And then we can make vinegar and start the bottling. I’m going to take Mrs. Gourty a tea later. You know she is not well.”
“I heard,” said Bethan.
“Maybe you want to come too? You should see Callum’s barn stacked high with logs and hay. He works hard. He is going to take some ponies to Barmouth soon. He has sold them to the man who runs the boat from Liverpool.”
“You’d think he’d be a bit lonely with only his mum up there.”
“You know he likes you.”
“Who? Callum?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Really?”
“He won’t spill out his heart without you tipping the jug a bit. Good men don’t grow in every hedgerow.”
Bethan laughed.
Magda gave her a look.
“All right. I’ll walk up there later. Is that good enough?”
Magda touched her on the arm. “Don’t forget to tell your father about getting the thread and soap.”
“You and your soap.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I won’t, Magda. I couldn’t bear the nagging.”
* * *
The woods were quite beautiful. It was cold and bright and the last leaves still drifted down between the damp gray trees.
Magda stepped from the path and began to climb the bank, poking with a stick at the leaf litter.
There! She bent down and cupped her fingers under the fat, round cap of Boletus edulis, with its nut-brown head and spongy gills. She poked about in the leaf litter again and found another. She cut the stem with a short knife and, pushing off a slug, she placed it among the bracken laid in her basket.
The basket grew heavier as she ambled through the forest with her eyes to the ground. She was briefly content in her distraction, for by looking for the one thing she could find she might perhaps forget the thing she had lost.
The hours passed almost pleasantly so: birds rising and falling to the forest floor as she passed, and the crisp autumn haze lifting through the trees as she scrambled over damp gray rocks and twisted tree roots. She could almost feel that Babula might be ahead of her, under the broad trees of the forest back home. “Where you find one, Magda, you will find others.”
Oh, there are so many. You should have brought another hamper, foolish girl!
She sat down, leaned her back against a tree, and rearranged the precious hoard teetering in her overfull basket. She closed her eyes and tried to push the thoughts of Ivan away.
She woke with a bumblebee buzzing past, clumsy and cold, making the most of the last of the year before it folded its wings and crawled into the earth for the winter. It was time for her to get back home too. She got up, ready to make her way down the slope.
But from the corner of her eye she caught a movement through the trees. She almost shouted out, thinking it was Callum Gourty, for it was definitely a man leading a pony, parallel to her on the slope some two hundred feet away.
But she realized in an instant it was not Callum Gourty at all. The figure was taller than him and, on the pony’s back, a child. Instinctively, she dropped down behind a tree.
The man had not seen her and trudged laboriously up the slope, the rein looped behind him, his figure wavering behind the tree trunks until it could be seen no more.
Magda did not know of anyone who lived nearby. Surely they would have heard of someone living so close as this.
She sat crouching for some time, afraid. But the figure had disappeared on the slope above her.
She made her way down the bank as fast as she could go. Bad thoughts that she was not alone in the forest snapped like wolves at her hurrying feet.
When she came to the stream, she followed the gushing water to a fallen trunk that made a crossing, and soon she was out onto the long grass of the meadows, and up on the other side of the dell.
Above a bluff of craggy gray rock, she could see the Gourtys’ place, several ponies with noses to the ground, grazing on the gray-green hill above the farm. Their stocky shapes moved slowly, tails swishing, as they nibbled at the short grass there.
Magda held the basket firm and made her way up toward the house, glancing back at the forest on the hill behind her now and then, pleased to come to the wide wooden gate and the smell of hay and pony. She crossed the cobbled yard to the door of the farmhouse with the comforting smell of woodsmoke in the air, came into the porch and knocked on the door.
“It’s me,” she called out. “Magda.”
The door opened and Callum stood in the entrance, as if he had been making his way outside even as she raised her hand to knock.
“Magda. Come in, come in.”
He prodded about in her basket and she held it out. “You’ve got a nose for it. I can never find a thing, and then you just point down and there they are.”
Magda beamed, but hid her pride a little. “I’ve come to see your mother—”
“Well, she’ll be pleased to see you. She hasn’t come down yet, so why don’t you just go up?”
“I saw someone in the woods,” said Magda. She pointed back across the fields. “Over there. A man with a pony, and a child. I’m sure of it.”
Callum looked over at the bank of trees. “Oh, aye.”
“You don’t sound very surprised.”
“Not really.”
“But who can it be? There’s no one else living near here, is there?”
Magda saw on the table several hareskins laid out. Callum followed her gaze. She looked up at him.
“The child on the pony? Is it his?”
“Yes.”
“And there is a woman?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“How does he look after a child on his own?”
Callum laughed. “He can look after his child all right. The boy’s clean enough and fed enough, but maybe it’s a funny thing being stuck up in these hills with just Robin for company.”
“How do you know him?”
“He bought a pony off me about six years ago. That’s how we first met.”
“Where does he live?”
“Never you mind, Magda Krol! But I’ll tell you this, Robin’s likable enough and, even if he doesn’t say much, when he does it’s worth hearing. But he likes to keep himself to himself pretty much.”
Magda put her basket on the table and looked more closely at the furs. “They are well cured. He made them like this himself?”
“Reckon so. Hare mostly.”
Magda put her fingers into the softness of them. “They would make some good winter clothes. For the baby.”
“Yes. I reckon they would. I was going to take them to Barmouth, but I’ll give them to you instead. For a cheese or two, perhaps?”
“Would you? I would like that very much.”
“Fair enough, take them when you go. Well, I better get on with the pony now, but Mum will be pleased to see you.”
“I’ll come and watch after I’ve seen her.”
“Right enough.” Callum pulled on his boots at the door and Magda lifted a kettle of water onto the stove and drew a small paper packet of seeds from her pocket.
“What are they?”
“Poppy seeds.”
“You’re a proper witch, aren’t you, Magda?”
“Witch?”
But Callum Gourty just smiled at her, lifted a bridle from the hook in the porch, and stomped out into the yard.
* * *
While the tea steeped in the pot, Magda looked again at the hareskins. There were ten of them, enough for a small jacket and trousers. She thought about the strange man and his lonely child disappearing under the trees.
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