Lisa

by Joan Van Every Frost

  She fell asleep picturing herself running the moorland trails after Toby, the purple heather thick with bees and the rabbit and fox tracks disappearing under their running feet. Then in her dream the light changed to sunset, a glorious burning sunset that set aflame the gorse and heather, splashing a red light over everything. Then Toby was gone, and all at once she was in a room where the red light turned to raging flames. A familiar figure that she knew she ought to recognize but didn’t came screaming soundlessly toward her, its clothing flaming and its arms held out in supplication. The blazing inferno erased even this horror, and the roar of flames became the thunder of hoofs as a rider with reddish-gold hair came bursting out of the fire on a huge flame-colored stallion. She feared and loved him at one and the same time, and he swept her up behind him on the horse as they pounded away from the flames and down a long dark corridor into wakefulness.

  The dream of fire and the flaming figure was a familiar nightmare, but always before the flames had engulfed her, too, just before she woke. Never before had she been rescued. She lay awake in the dark for quite a while listening to the muffled snores from below before her weariness led her once again into sleep, this time deep and dreamless.

  3

  “Lisa!” she heard from the bottom of her sleep. “Lisa! Time ter get up!”

  She felt stiff and sore, both from the long hard ride and from the wrestle with Uncle Henry. She groaned as she swung her legs over the side of the cot, and saw it was still dark outside. “Coming!” she called, realizing that one side of her face was sore as well. She dressed in the dark, shivering, and made her way downstairs.

  “Lord, child, watever ’appened ter you?” Aunt Tatty exclaimed when she entered the kitchen on her way to the courtyard.

  Lisa felt Uncle Henry’s malevolent presence as if he had been in the room. “I had a nightmare. I fell out of bed. I’m not used to it here yet,” was the best she could manage.

  Tatty seemed to believe her, telling her of a sister who had done the same thing and had never been right after. Her aunt was cooking enormous panfuls of eggs and meat and potatoes on the big coal stove.

  “ ’Enry’ll be back fore long. ’E went ter the market. From now on, ’e wants ter take you, too, so’s one day you can do it yerself.”

  So that lecherous old goat wanted to lie abed while she did the buying, did he? Never mind, it would get her out of the house. She had discovered to her satisfaction that the attic door had a rude but heavy wooden bolt on the outside. With tools from the store she could unscrew it and fasten it again firmly on the inside. Let him try to break off a two-by-four and see what Aunt Tatty would say.

  The meat and potatoes were heavy and greasy but filling. She and Tatty ate together hurriedly, shared the washing up, and went into the store. There Tatty systematically began to show her item by item what the shop contained and how much each item was.

  “And mind you, we don’t allow no bargaining ’ere,” Tatty said proudly. “If sommat is two-and-sixpence, it’s two-and-sixpence, and not a penny less. They think it’s too much and they can go sommers else.”

  Every once in a while someone would come in, nearly always someone Tatty knew by name. The big woman would chaff the customers and have them laughing before they left. She also usually suggested to them somewhere in the midst of the joking that they needed or wanted something they hadn’t asked for, and about half the time they walked out with it. When Lisa asked why there weren’t any prices posted, Tatty enlightened her.

  “Why, bless you, child, if the prices were on everything, we ud lose ’alf our customers. This way they pick out wat they wants and by the time they’ve asked you ’ow much it is, it’s ’alf sold. They don’t like telling you ter yer face that it’s beyond their pocketbook like, so they smiles sickly and buys it anyways. And if they decide ter go sommers else ter get it, they’ll find it just as dear and ’ave ter go ter two-three different shops ter find it, like as not.”

  Lisa was beginning to see that selling in a shop and being any good at it wasn’t as easy as she’d always thought. Tatty showed her how to make change an easier way than Uncle John used, and she taught her always to leave a customer’s money out in plain sight until she’d made the change so that no one would say afterwards they’d given her more than they had.

  While they were standing at the cash box, a woman came in with a shawl about her head so that her face was shadowed. Furtively she sidled up to them and motioned Tatty from behind the counter with a jerk of her head. The two stood in a corner talking in low voices, then Tatty put several herbs in a little screw of paper, money changed hands, and the women left.

  “ ’Aving trouble with ’er monthlies, she is,” Tatty commented. “Ay ’appen ter know sommat of herbs and such, and they comes ter me instead of them quacks with their fancy schooling wat don’t know nothing.”

  Sure enough, Tatty had a steady trade, all women, who came for herbs to cure their ailments: tea of raspberry leaves for easy childbirth, feverfew for external pain and internal fever, ground elder for gout and rheumatism, toothwort for toothache, smoke of coltsfoot for coughs and asthma, and numerous others. She even produced love potions on occasion. The women all came asking for Tatty, some openly, some furtively, and both Henry and Lisa would have to go fetch her out when a patient arrived.

  That afternoon, after more meat and potatoes and another nasty-sweet pudding, Lisa was set to work scrubbing the floors and walls. It was getting dark as she finished, and Tatty called her into the kitchen to set the table in the parlor. That night she ate alone a supper of cheese and bread and apples, with the wonderful pickles on the side, all of which she much preferred to the tough, greasy mutton. Then she minded the store until ten, while Tatty and Henry ate together and took their ease in front of the coal fire. By the time she was able to climb the stairs to her attic room, she was already half asleep.

  She went through the following days that turned into weeks and months in a haze of being tired all the time. She never seemed to have enough time to sleep. She had meant to get out to the horse fair to see Toby one more time, but there was never a minute to spare. The only good thing about it all was that she was also never alone with Henry, except to stumble sleepily through dark streets to the market, where she learned to haggle with a flair that had Henry awestruck. She would fix her blue-green eyes on the vendor, smile sweetly, and at the end leave him wondering how he could have let her have whatever it was for so little. The strange part was that she was as successful with the women as with the men. She flirted with the men and made the women laugh. Her natural gift for mimicry gave her their vernacular almost at once and set them all to laughing when she imitated themselves or some well-known character in the market. What they loved the most and never tired of was her dialogue — taking first one part and then the other — of a snooty rich woman trying to buy some onions from one of the market vendors. In truth, snooty rich ladies were never seen in the marketplace, but the playlet never failed to bring guffaws of laughter.

  “It’s a fair wonder,” Henry reported to Tatty, “ ’ow she steals from them and them begging ’er ter do it.”

  The winter was a nasty one, sleet and slush and a great wind howling that smelled of the sea thirty miles away. Like many of the folk in Burresford, Lisa had never seen the sea, but she had seen pictures of it here and there; even one of Tatty’s plates had a scene of a sailing ship on the sea. The bitter dark of those early mornings was enough to put chilblains on a statue. Her room was icy, and she took to going to bed in her cloak and woolen stockings. By ten at night in the shop her hands were so cold that she fumbled at making change and had to stand the hurt of warming them and her feet at the grate in the parlor before she could go to bed. Twice she fell asleep there in the parlor, but the thought of being awakened by the cold or worse, by Henry, drove her up the attic stairs most nights.

  When Christmas came, she begged to be allowed to go to the farm, but there was no one to be found who could be laying over in
Dunwiddleston for several days and Tatty didn’t want her gone longer. Tatty promised, however, that the next Dunwiddleston market day after the new year, they would try again to find someone to take her. So her Christmas was a dreary one, except for not having to go to the market and for the fat goose Tatty cooked all stuffed with apples and onions and nuts.

  Even in the daytime her room was dark and cold, but Christmas afternoon she went to bed to keep warm, lit a candle, and read ten days’ worth of newspapers that she had saved up and hoarded away from being used to start fires or wrap packages. Usually she was too tired to read once she got to her room, but on Sundays when the store was closed half a day, she often had a few hours after church and the midday meal to read her New Testament or newspapers she had filched.

  To her, the New Testament was like a fairy story, for the human values Jesus proposed seemed to have little to do with what was preached in church, let alone what she saw around her. Children were still being starved and beaten and worked to death in the mills. Women were little more than slaves, completely dependent on their husbands’ whims. Whatever they might have had as property or dowry before marriage automatically re: verted to their spouses, and should they have been unlucky enough to have married a man who beat them or starved their children by drinking up all the money, they had no recourse. Animals were treated even worse than women and children, for everyone knew that they had no souls and little feeling. Horses being beaten bloody, dogs running starving and covered with sores in the streets, and cats literally being pulled apart by children while adults looked idly on were commonplace sights. Lisa thought every now and again of the pony, and decided that he was the lucky one to have died.

  The newspapers offered much more fodder for her imagination, for the things they spoke of seemed distant indeed from her drudgery in the shop. There were scientific marvels like telescopes and cameras and hot air balloons, bridges and tunnels and dams, ocean liners like the Himalaya and the Great Eastern and locomotives and subways and airships. She read about foreign countries like France and Germany and India that she couldn’t even imagine, about financial happenings dealing in unreal sums of money, about social events attended by the kind of people she would never meet, about bloody murders, ingenious robberies, and brutal punishments. There were times when she longed for the quiet, stable world of the Farmer’s Almanack.

  In January Henry and Tatty kept their promise and sent her with a farm wagon full of cooking utensils to Dunwiddleston, where she stayed overnight with relatives of Aunt Sarah’s. As the country became more and more familiar, she felt an excitement that knew no bounds. The few trees around were bare, but the heather knew no seasons and spread its green mantle as far as the eye could see. A thin, pale sun cast its cold light over all, but Lisa didn’t care. Her beloved heath ran upward from the road to become upland moor along the distant hills. She gasped with delight as a rabbit broke and ran across the road, and she followed the flight of a distant kestrel with joy.

  Even Dunwiddleston, which had always seemed to her both small and ugly, now seemed homey and warm. The folk she was staying with, a married daughter of Aunt Sarah’s brother, made her welcome and asked endless questions about life in Burresford as they pressed on her a huge country supper. Fresh eggs and butter and good rough rye bread, a ham, winter apples that had been stored in the cellar, and all kinds of preserves reminded her by contrast of the endless mutton and potatoes served by Tatty.

  The following day, even before seeing Uncle John, she sought out the man she had come with and told him she wouldn’t be going back until the next week. She knew that this would infuriate Henry and Tatty, but she simply could not face going back after only a day. The thought of having to spend the moorland spring locked up in that odorous town was cruel, but even more cruel was the knowledge that it would be a whole year before she could hope to return, not just the five months that seemed like five years she had already put in. She felt as if she were out of prison but would soon be locked up in her cell again.

  The matter of her transportation settled, she found Uncle John in his old stall behind eggs and loaves of Sarah’s bread, butter, and fresh cheese made of sheep’s milk. A haunch of mutton hung on a hook behind him. This time of year there were no vegetables to speak of and few eggs; the cheese was from the milk of a ewe he kept for milking. Much to his discomfort, Lisa threw her arms around his wrinkled neck and gave him a resounding kiss on the cheek. His nearby stallmates crowded around to greet her and hear news of Burresford. She felt so buoyant at being home that she plunged into a series of imitations of the folk in Burresford that had everyone laughing until they gasped for breath. She showed off what she had learned in the larger market and drew another laugh when she demonstrated unobtrusive ways of thumbing down the scale to weigh heavier. Blue-green eyes sparking, dark red hair flying, she held her audience enthralled by her sheer exuberance.

  On the way home in the cart, Uncle John asked her how she liked it in Burresford as if all of her previous antics had never happened.

  “I hate it.” Her voice was dead.

  “They been mean?”

  “Mean in every way except that they don’t beat me.” She left out the story of Henry’s rape attempt. “I don’t mind the hard work so much, but I don’t like the house, I don’t like the shop, I don’t like Burresford, and I don’t like Henry.” She had long since stopped thinking of him as Uncle Henry.

  “Ah lass, Ay wish we could keep you, but as it is Ay don’t know how we’ll make the rents this year. There’s foot rot in the sheep wat with all the wet, and Ay’ll ’ave te r’ire sommun ter ’elp with the shearing ’less me joints gets better. Ay don’t look fer a good year at all.”

  “And Rob and Annie and Toby? How are they doing?”

  “Worse’n us. Auld Rob got kicked in the stomach and can’t hardly get out of bed, so Annie and Toby are ’aving ter do it all. Rob do look bad ter me, all yellow like. That doctor in Dunwiddleston says it’s ’is liver, but don’t seem like ’e can do much about it. Ay ’m feared Rob’s like ter die soon.”

  Lisa remembered the ill-omened trip to Burresford and wondered if that hadn’t foreshadowed worse things to come. She could still see in her mind’s eye that pathetic pony all cocked up in back like a child’s hobby horse and hear the soft thud of the mallet’s fall. They travelled in silence for a while, then Lisa said, “I’ll make out all right, don’t you and Aunt Sarah worry. And some way I’ll get back as far as Dunwiddleston anyway. I’ll get out of Burresford, see if I don’t.”

  They were passing Hartsite now, its grey stone walls seeming grim and forbidding. Even the gardens at this time of year appeared bleak and bare. That was the trouble with man-made things in this country; you took away the heather and gorse and drove out the wild animals, and crops did poorly and sheep sickened. When Toby’s father named the horseman who had left such havoc in his wake, she had paid little attention, preoccupied as she was with her own troubles. Now, however, it all came back to her, and she wondered if at this minute the man with the gold hair might not be watching them pass by from one of the dark windows. She should hate him, and yet ...

  At the farm, Tippy came out, his tail wagging, and Aunt Sarah, dried up, undemonstrative old Aunt Sarah, hugged her with tears in her eyes. Lisa was suddenly conscious of how small-boned and slight her aunt was. After the beefy pair she had been living with, her aunt and uncle both seemed small and dessicated, as if they had given all of their body juices to the harsh earth. She could see the bones of their skulls under the weatherbeaten skin of their faces, and she felt a twinge of foreboding. These people were all she had except Toby, and they looked as if one day soon they would dry up entirely and blow away on one of the great winter winds that come sweeping in across the heather from the distant sea.

  After helping them unpack the cart and then sitting down to a feast of chicken served with carrots and potatoes and dumplings, followed by a dessert of baked apples with cinnamon and clotted cream, she saw the afternoon
was half gone. Uncle John went out with Tippy to check on the sheep in the nearby folds and to bring in the two cows while the weather was good, and Aunt Sarah sat nodding in front of a peat fire, her sewing lying forgotten in her lap. Lisa put on the old skirt she had left behind when she went to Burresford, tucked it up under the cord that served for a belt, and began to run toward Toby’s. She had dreamed of running like this through the heather so many times that the actuality had a dreamlike quality, as if her feet never touched the ground. The dream vanished fast enough, however, as she discovered that the five months of drudgery had robbed her of her wind and left her feet tender.

  Overlooking Toby’s farm, she gave the familiar bird whistle call. She could see Toby down in the yard nailing a shoe on one of the big draft horses. He cocked his shaggy head a moment, then went back to the shoeing. She gave another call. He dropped the horse’s hoof as if it had burned him and took off at a run across the farmyard. In five minutes he had breasted the hill and stood looking from side to side, his face like a dog’s that knows there is a sheep hidden nearby.

  Lisa could stand it no longer, and she rose up laughing not ten feet from him. With an inarticulate cry of delight, he ran to her and lifted her clear off the ground. Then pulling her by the hand, he set off up the rising heathland with its mixed gorse and heather toward the real moorland, a solid sea of heather. What he wanted to show her was a nest of red grouse eggs, a rarity on the edge of the moor where the farmers had hunted them all out.