by Paul Butler
Without thinking, I turned back to the interior of the carriage to stare at Thomas. There was nothing there at first, only multicoloured suns and darkness. As soon as I could see his outline, however, I spoke. “Are you looking forward to London, Thomas?”
There was silence for a second. The sun flashed on his face and I could see he was amazed, his pale-blue eyes wider and more alive than I had seen them before.
“You speak English!” he exclaimed.
I took my fingers from the window ledge and turned completely towards him now.
“Of course I speak English!” I said. I found myself laughing like a river suddenly bursting its banks. “What ever made you think I didn’t?”
“My father,” he said, his voice gentle. “He told me I shouldn’t try to talk to you because you wouldn’t understand.”
He continued to stare at me, but his pale-blue eyes were moist and smiling now. “All this time we could have been talking together!” he said with a laugh.
I felt warmed by his attention but suddenly shy about myself. Had I really not spoken a word in his presence? What a strange creature I must seem to him now! And there was something else rather disquieting in all this. However silent I had been, surely Mr. Ridley must have known I understood and spoke English. He knew the history of our family, that my first years were spent in this country before we were offered land in the Pale. He knew that, despite their Irish birth, both my parents used the English tongue. How could Mr. Ridley really have believed I knew only Irish? Unless, of course, he was deliberately misleading his son.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Thomas Ridley, perhaps noticing my frown. “I’m delighted you speak English and I’m glad we can get to know each other better before you go away again.”
The words took a moment to seep into my head. Away again. The echo came once, twice, three times. “What do you mean before I go away again?”
Thomas Ridley shifted in his seat and frowned.
“You haven’t spoken to your mother?” he asked.
“About what?”
“There is a convent school in France, Sheila. I think they mean to send you.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me!”
I must have shouted this rather than spoken it, because Thomas Ridley looked distressed and held out his hands as though to calm me. “Perhaps I have the whole thing wrong,” he said. “My father only mentioned it yesterday, and only then because I asked about you.”
I sat in silence listening to the grinding wheels. The patchwork world had plunged me into darkness again, it seemed. “How could any respectable English woman be educated in Catholic France?” I broke out suddenly. “No one would receive me.”
“No,” said Thomas Ridley doubtfully, his brow furrowed. “I must have got it wrong.”
I watched the shade of branches skimming across his troubled face and thought of my mother, how she flitted like a shadow from room to room as she prepared for the journey. I recalled a sickly smile directed at me once or twice; it had been like catching a reflection in a window. I was never quite sure if the look was meant for me or if she even remembered my presence for longer than a person waking from a sleep remembers the details of a dream. Could I rely on her?
“My mother would never send me away, especially without talking to me first,” I said with a conviction which took even me by surprise. Thomas looked at me with his pale eyes. There was a new kind of respect in his expression. The words, I realized, made me feel better. I was staking my land, proclaiming to the world that I will be moved no further. I was so certain of the justice and good sense of this stance, I became certain, too, that I had power to ensure its accomplishment.
Sunlight flickered into the carriage again, skimming Thomas’s hair like flame. “That’s wonderful,” Thomas said, his smile bright and genuine. “Then I was mistaken.”
I don’t know what I was expecting from Thomas Ridley, but it wasn’t this. I had spent so much time watching him play with his dog and groom his horses that when I longed for his attention I imagined him teasing me, pulling my hair, or tumbling me along the ground while he laughed. I had basked in a hundred pleasing daydreams of this kind. So his polite and solicitous behaviour was a surprise, and one that held some disappointment. He had set me quite apart from his more rambunctious side and I felt there was a barrier between us. I longed to scuffle, to prod his muscles, and tousle his sandy hair, but instead I had to hold back, smile, and answer demurely.
As my disappointment abated, however, I began to see a profound flattery in his manner. And it made me feel older than I had ever felt before. At thirteen I was not a girl anymore. But I had never until now seen myself as a woman. In Thomas Ridley’s pale eyes and polite smile I witnessed a reflection of the creature I would become. My mother, I had noticed, drew the finest manners even from the most boorish of men—Mr. Ridley for instance. Thomas was not like his father. And it was exhilarating to think that, of all men, it was gentle Thomas who should be first to reserve the best side of himself for me. These were the types of attentions, I realized—not the boisterous, physical ones—that ladies were gratified to receive. I had entered into womanhood at exactly the same moment I had entered into love. Suddenly the world was a vast, enchanted garden.
We rolled through the countryside for many hours, coming to a stop at an inn some forty miles from London. The journey would take two days, we had been told, so by the end of the next day we would reach London. Thomas Ridley opened the door and jumped down, holding out his hand to take mine. I stepped from the coach, returning his smile. The sunset burned between the trees and the dark inn swamped us in shadow. Every moment now confirmed the start of something new. Even the air had taken on a different scent, mingling hints of evening blossoms and wine. I found my steps slower, my back more upright. I still longed to jump on Thomas Ridley’s back and scuffle him to the ground, but the urge was giving way to something more delicate, something requiring stillness and silence.
“Thomas!” came a call from far ahead in the coach procession. I recognized Mr. Ridley’s voice.
Thomas immediately took off, running over the crusted earth and gravel. He wove between coaches, disappearing from my sight.
“Just helping the young lady down, Father,” I heard him say breathlessly.
“I told you not to bother about that,” came the gruff reply. “Go with the boy here and see our horses are treated well.”
A chill came into the air. I pulled my coat more tightly around my shoulders.
CHAPTER FIVE
London is a sewer, but I long for it now. In London, I was accused. In London, I was imprisoned. In London, I smelled the stench of purgatory from the cells below and I heard the wailing from that dark place. At night I thought that sound might extract my spirit. I thought it might circumvent death entirely and deliver me straight into the fiery belly of hell. London meant all these things to me, but if I could leave this desolate, friendless place and go back there now, I would think seriously about it.
I wasn’t old then, of course, and age, it seems, is the worst of all crimes. Perhaps the people here spurn me because I remind them of what they will become. I am the skeleton swinging from the gibbet. Commit the crime of living too long, the wind sings through my bones, and this will be your fate.
Is this why these people hide and crouch from the world when they come to the door? Is this why I receive so little open thanks when I help them? The boy David Butt brings me firewood, and Elizabeth Rose will beg her husband for partridge in the fall so she may bring it to “the crone.” Of course, she won’t mention the source of her debt. She will call it charity, and the people down below will brim with pride that such generosity lives among them.
I miss London because it levelled all people to dirt. This whispering settlement targets only me. Something smarts inside my brain at this. Why should I be reduced to dispensing cures to people who despise me? Why should I accept their grudging favours in return? Surely this is not my i
ntended fate. This must be some accident, some fault in the great design which went unrepaired. Where are the children and grandchildren who should be looking after me? How came their blood to be spilled onto the senseless, useless rocks? Generations of my family venerated their old people. They were as respected as pharaohs. But here I am, staring at the smouldering log which gives barely enough heat. Even for this small comfort I had to humour a child who distrusts me.
And things grow worse. For the second night running, the June air has turned icy with the falling of night. I don’t know how I can survive another fall and winter. Listening to the crackling of the fire, I close my eyes and try willing myself into a happier time. I hardly notice the knock at the door. It must be close to midnight. The people of this settlement never come to me this late. No doubt they imagine demons and serpents guarding my door at night while dark revelries take place within.
The knock comes again and I open my eyes. Pulling the blanket tighter around my shoulders, I push myself up from the chair.
It’s not timid enough for David. Surely Elizabeth wouldn’t have returned at this hour. I shuffle across the boards and pull the door open to find the dark outline of Sara Rose.
She isn’t shuffling her feet like David, nor is she cowering and glancing down to the settlement like her mother. She is perfectly still; her moulded shoulders are like the branches of a proud young tree, her slim waist clearly defined above her hips like a woman, not a girl. Without asking, she picks up her skirts and walks around me into the cabin. I turn around and close the door. She stands looking at the fire. I start shuffling back to my chair, but she beats me to it, lowering herself into my cabin’s only real seat with the confidence of a great lady. She gazes at the fire.
“Are you going to deny it?”
It is more of a statement than a question.
I make my way slowly to my bed and lower myself onto the straw mattress. She doesn’t take her eyes from the fire.
“Deny what, child?”
“I’m not a child.” Now she turns to me, her eyes moist and resentful. She is pretty. David Butt is right about that. Her full cheeks show red, even in the muted glow of a dying fire. Her hair is golden. Her eyes are large and greenish-hazel, and her lips, when they are not pouting, must be generous and shapely. I believe I looked a little like this myself once. In appearance she is the fair maiden of legend. But what pride and what presumption!
“I am eighty years old, Sara. You are thirteen. To me that makes you a child.”
She makes a disdainful hissing sound and looks back towards the fire.
“You’re trouble. You’re an outcast. I’ve been warned about you a thousand times.”
If I were not tired and old, I would get up and box her ears. As it is, my anger dies almost as quickly as it flares. I am left in some bleak limbo of acceptance.
“Who warned you about me?” I ask wearily.
“Father, Grandfather before he died, Mother … everyone.”
“Your mother!” I laugh.
She glares at me.
“What did you come here for, Sara?”
My voice is steady and I meet her stare. She casts her gaze back to the fire.
“You must undo whatever you have done to me.”
“And what is that?”
“I know David Butt comes here. We followed him, my sister Emma and I. We waited in the woods behind your shack until he left.” Her fingertips push away a strand of hair that has fallen over her cheek. She looks deeper into the flames. “Emma believes he is in love with me. We know what you did. You cast a spell to make me feel the same about him.”
“How could you know this?”
She turns and glares at me again.
“I’ll tell you how. Next day, I saw him on the wharf and something came over me. I couldn’t help flirting with him. It was just in fun, at first. But when I felt his rough hands with my fingers, something changed.”
“People feel what they feel, child. You had never been near enough to him to notice before.”
Her eyes narrow. “How could I feel such a thing for David Butt? He has no property, no boats of his own. He has no parents, even—”
“His father was killed in a storm, Sara,” I interrupt. “His mother died of fever.”
“I will not fall in love for charity!”
Sara gets up from the chair and faces me. “My family are the leaders of this community. We always were. I and my sisters will marry suitable men, men of property and standing.”
“Then you will go far afield, young woman,” I say, “for I see none about here who can be described thus.”
“You’re right,” she says, her shoulders straightening. “The Roses are the only family of standing in this settlement. My father is in contact with a family in Bristol.”
“So, why are you here?”
“Tell me why David Butt came to see you.”
She stands over me now, her eyes keen yet somehow a little frightened.
“I never reveal the purpose of a visit,” I reply with what I hope is enough defiance to deter her. She watches me carefully, trying to sift clues from my voice. I decide to distract her with a challenge. “If you have feelings for David Butt, it is because you have feelings for David Butt. Since you’re so proud of your bloodline, why don’t you draw upon your natural nobility and fight these inappropriate desires in yourself? Here’s a chance to prove yourself, girl. The higher the rank, the more control you must exert over your feelings.”
It seems I have struck the right note. Her body relaxes a little and she glances around the cabin as though waking from a daydream. “Of course I have the strength to fight these feelings. I’m not in love with David Butt and I’m not afraid of you.”
She turns quickly and walks to the exit. She opens the door and turns back to me. “If I find you have been practising witchcraft,” she says, “I’ll tell my father.”
Before I have a chance to reply, she strides into the night, leaving the door open behind her.
———
I haven’t slept much tonight. It’s colder than any grave in my cabin and a strange paralysis has gripped my heart, preventing me from rising and throwing more logs on the fire. These are not really my logs, a stubborn voice tells me. I did not gather them myself, nor did my kin. These logs are a favour squeezed out of an unwilling boy. My body refuses to move and make use of them.
Perhaps it is the overweening young Sara Rose who has reawakened my own pride. Whatever the cause, I am like a sick animal refusing food, rejecting the state in which I find myself. Warmth and food will keep my heart beating, but they are no longer my friends. They make me survive merely to suffer indignities. I want to reject all sustenance that stops short of restoring me to the woman I should be: a proud, brave, well-loved soul who died in spirit when her family was stolen or slain. How could such a woman scrape for favours the way I do? How could such a woman have lived so long beyond her time?
Yet live I did. Not only did I live on, but I lived on in health and fitness, with appetites and wants. My wits did not scatter to the winds. I did not withdraw into a sweet cave of madness where I might see my family about me still.
I used to think there was a reason I was spared. In the early years, after I first arrived here, I thought the settlement would reclaim me somehow. They might come to me, I thought, and suggest I move my house closer so that I would be in the cove with the rest. I hated the sea, it is true, yet I could have been persuaded. But month after month, year after year, nothing changed. The fear and pity they felt for me hardened into something immovable. They heard I had cures, so they came to me once in a while. But they were usually alone and rarely talked more than they needed. Children never came. One day, four years after my arrival, I looked out of my window to see young Simon on the brow of the hill staring at my cabin. His fingers were in his mouth, and his eyes were round like full moons. I recognized him from the blue wool jacket I had heard one of the women praise. He stood there swaying from side
to side like a doll. The sun shone upon the path and the breeze whispered in his blond hair. Was this some emissary, I wondered, sent to recall me to life? Silently as I could, I slipped through the doorway so that I could see the child up close. When I turned the corner of the house and emerged onto the path, I saw he was crouching to the ground, gathering something up in his tiny fingers. I took a step further and he raised himself up again. There was a movement from his infant arm and dust flew into my eyes, pebbles scraping my cheek then scattering around my feet. It was so unexpected, I shut my eyes tight. Phantom suns glared in the darkness and I heard his small feet scurrying down the hill.
“I’ve been warned about you a thousand times,” the girl, Sara, said. The words have me blinking once more as though she, too, had hurled dust in my eyes. “Father, Grandfather …” she said. Why would Simon Rose talk evil of me? Had he turned events upside down in his mind? Does he believe he was attacked by the strange woman on the hill? That sunny day almost forty years ago was the only time there has ever been direct contact between us. I’ve seen him down by the wharf when I’ve had to go into the settlement. I’ve seen him on the path and in the forest when he is hunting. But he always looks away. Once I saw him with Sara when she was no more than three winters old. They were together under the canopy of pine, father crouching low, talking softly of the forest to his child. I spied them through a lattice of branches which dripped with melting snow, and felt the magic of their communion. He was drawing the child into the detail, the tattered edges of the cone where the birds had made their meal. In the gentle crow’s feet of his smiling eyes I saw a kindness that was familiar to me, and, in the silent wonder of the child, I saw something too. I was in Ireland again, removed from myself and watching. Simon was my father, and I was that child whose eyes searched the boughs for the finches which had disappeared like spirits. So lost in their world was I that I neglected to remain hidden.
“There!” cried young Sara, clapping her hands and turning to her father. Her search for the missing birds had unearthed a different prize and she pointed at me as though she had won a game. I smiled at them both, but Simon’s expression had changed already. He picked up his daughter, turned, and made his way from me. “No!” came the cry of the daughter who stared at me open-mouthed from over her father’s retreating shoulder.