“They’re beautiful, Toby — but what are they doing here this time of the year?” she asked, puzzled.
It seemed that the mother bird had been frightened away or possibly killed after they had been laid the year before, and here they had stayed ever since, miraculously untouched by marauders. The six beautiful little speckled eggs looked so cold and pathetic and lonely that she felt like crying. She had heard even in Burresford that the red grouse that had become so scarce ten years ago on the upland moors were coming back again. They talked of the red and fallow deer as well, though she had never seen any. Toby said he had seen a red buck one year when he was just a child, but none since. These game animals were hunted avidly, and they kept for the most part to the wildest part of the moors.
The days of her week of freedom seemed to flick by with a horrid, unstoppable rapidity. She came on a Saturday and suddenly it was Tuesday, followed by Friday. She had gotten her color and wind back, and she and Toby provided them all one day with the makings for roast rabbits stuffed with onions and on another for a wild bird pie. She paid a visit to Rob and Annie, sick at finding Rob so changed and Annie so thin and sad. Every night she prayed as hard as she knew how for deliverance from her return to Burresford, but Saturday’s market day came anyhow, and she glumly made the trip in the cart with Uncle John to Dunwiddleston. Rebelliously she thought of running away, but where would she run to? She supposed she might find work in the mill in Burresford, but that was no better than the shop and hardly any better paid. Food and lodging would take what little money she could earn at the mill. She wondered how Henry had ever managed to save enough money to buy a business and eat meat three meals a day.
Once again she stayed in Dunwiddleston, and on Monday morning she set out on the long wearisome trip with the wagon of cooking utensils to Burresford. They started late because the pot peddlar had gotten drunk the night before and was paying for it that morning. When they pulled into Burresford that night, soaking from a sleety rain, she hadn’t the strength or will to do anything but stumble wearily into the shop.
“Well, look ’oo’s ’ere!” Tatty’s voice was hard and sarcastic. “If it isn’t little Miss I-Won’t-Be-Gone-Only-Three-Days ’erself. Ay notice you never bothered ter show up till closing time, did you now?” Tatty took in Lisa’s wet, bedraggled appearance with some signs of satisfaction. “But come back you did, didn’t you? Ay guess you found out right enough which side yer bread’s buttered on, didn’t you, dearie?” She began to douse the gas lights. “Come on, then, it’s time fer all of us ter be in bed.” There was no mention of supper.
“Dammit, girl, don’t never run off like that again,” was Henry’s greeting, “or next time Ay’ll beat you black and blue.” Lisa had no doubt that he would enjoy it.
The next day it was as if she had never left. The rain had continued through the night, and by the time she got to the market, she was wet through again. When she couldn’t for the life of her come up with her old bantering manner, Henry finally sent her home alone in the rainy dark, and Tatty put her to work scrubbing floors.
She walked into the storeroom with a candle in order to clean and found a strange sight. There were odd splashes of red-brown around that had never been there before. The top of the heavy table had the remains of a huge stain that had only partially been rubbed out, the stone floor around the table had the same coloring in the cracks, and a few of the crocks and jars on the shelves nearest the table were splattered as if from paint.
“We was given a live pig ter settle a bill,” Tatty said from behind her, “and we had ter slaughter it ourselves. I never saw a pig spout blood like that.”
Lisa set to work scrubbing, too miserable to think much about it except to curse their killing the pig in here instead of out in the courtyard. But maybe it had been raining. She fell back into daydreaming about running with Toby, which she could do at the same time she was working. Slowly she became aware of a ruckus going on out in front, and she went to the door to peer down the still dark passageway toward the shop.
Henry’s back end appeared, and she could hear him making some sort of soothing sounds. Then over his shoulder she could see the contorted face of a man perhaps in his early forties dressed in laborer’s clothes. He had a firm grip on the front of Henry’s shirt with one hand and was waving a wicked looking knife in the other.
“Damn yer eyes,” he shouted, “you and that witch killed ‘er. She’s dead, understand? She’s dead!” Tears ran down his face.
Henry started to say something again, but the knife waved threateningly and he stopped, though he was still backing up.
“You turned ’er out in the wet ter crawl ’ome, didn’t you? Or was she already dead? ’Er own childer ‘ad ter find ’er there at the door, and ’er with no blood left in ’er at all. She were white, and cold as them street cobbles she were lying on.” He shook Henry until his teeth rattled. “You butchers, you damned murderers, you killed ’er!”
Suddenly things began to come together in Lisa’s head. The women who skulked in when the shop was empty, wanting to see Tatty, who always gave them a mixture of dried ergot and tansy done up in a screw of paper. What better way to try for a miscarriage than to drink poison? But if that didn’t work? Lisa remembered the time the cow aborted, and how much blood had come along with the pitiful little lump of unborn calf. She had heard stories in Dunwiddleston of women who had the gift of inserting a wand of slippery elm in a woman to cause miscarriage, but she had always put these down as old wives’ tales. Now she thought otherwise.
She ducked back into the storeroom as Henry’s backside approached. That was no pig slaughtered here, she now knew. A living, breathing woman like herself had spouted all that blood. To bleed so much, she must have been dead when they carried her out in the street. It must have been done last night while she was sleeping. She thought of Tatty’s hurry to close the shop and have everyone go to bed. It must have given the two of them a nasty shock for her to have turned up late like that.
Henry and the grief-stricken husband passed the storeroom door and turned into the parlor. Swiftly from the kitchen came Tatty, her beefy face ablaze, and made the same kind of sound on the man’s head with a heavy iron skillet that Rob’s mallet had made when he killed the pony. As the man sagged, Henry turned and caught him.
“Now wat’ll we do with ’im?” he hissed at Tatty.
“You and Ay are going ter take ’im ter the river,” Tatty said calmly. “It’s only two blocks away. “Poor dear, ’e’s taken a drop too much, and the mud is right slippery on the bank of the river. Quick, out the back way!”
They had obviously forgotten her for the moment, for without a backward glance they went out through the kitchen and across the courtyard now dim with the first light, the man dangling between them. Lisa shivered and automatically finished the last of the cleaning up, then sat blankly and watched the first grey light of a wet, belated winter dawn show through the kitchen window. Bad enough she was trapped with a rapist, but now she knew he and Tatty were murderers as well. How many women had been dumped out in the street by these monsters to die, soon of bleeding or later of rotting?
Numbly she got to her feet as she heard them returning. Tatty was first through the door. “Lord luv you, child, you look like you’d seen a ghost.” She was determined to brazen it out.
“It’s no use,” Lisa said wearily. “You’d know soon enough anyway by the way I acted. I saw it all and heard it all.” She couldn’t stop shivering.
Tatty looked at her for a long moment, obviously considering something. “Go along up ter yer room and stay there. Ay’ll see you up there later on and we’ll talk all this over.”
What was there to talk over, Lisa wondered. She knew what they were going to decide; they were going to kill her. They really didn’t have that much choice, because they could never be sure she wouldn’t talk. Well, at least she finally knew how Henry had been able to buy the store. She watched the light outside brighten to full day and swing
on its way overhead and down the other side of the house before she drifted off to sleep, so exhausted that she no longer cared what they did to her. She had a different nightmare this time, that Tatty’s plates were all sweating big droplets of blood. She was trying to clean them off the floor, but scrub as she might, they wouldn’t come out.
The squeak of the stairs woke her later on, and she could see that the light outside had gone dim again. They were going to have to get rid of her after they killed her, and that was hard to do in broad daylight. She would be put in the river or buried somewhere, and they would say that she had run off, as countless desperate girls did all the time.
There was a knock at the door, and Tatty’s sweetest tones floated in. “Come on out, luv. Let’s go downstairs and Ay’ll give you sommat ter eat.”
Lisa was silent. The wooden bar across the door would give them some problems, for it would take a lot of force to break it and a lot of noise besides because the shop was still open. The knocks and wheedlings continued for some little time. She could hear a whispered conversation going on outside the door, the tones urgent, hurried. At last the stairs squeaked and thumped once again, and she knew she would be left for a while at least. What would she do if she were in their shoes? They could always starve her out, and they must know she had no water but what was in the pitcher. But what would stop her after she got desperate enough from shouting out the window to passersby on the street below? No, whatever they were going to try would have to be tried tonight. Late enough, they could attempt to force the door without anyone hearing.
Lisa went over to the tiny window and looked down. A thin rain had started again, and she could see the wet cobbles glistening below. She thought of shouting, but who would believe her? The window sill was black from coal smoke grime, as were the bricks of the house wall. The only thing of interest she could see was a grimy metal drainpipe running down from the slate roof not far from her window. If she could just reach that, she might be able to climb down to the street. If it broke or she slipped, she would no doubt break her neck, but even that was preferable to being left to the caprices of her monstrous captors. The gleaming cobbles looked very distant and hostile; she could almost feel the initial battering blow of their striking her falling body. She shivered and pulled her head back in.
After the fresh, rain-drenched air, the inside of her room had a peculiar, acrid smell, one so familiar she had hardly noticed it before. Of course, it was smoldering coal. As she paced up and down, the smell became stronger, and all at once she became aware of a puff of smoke coming under the crack of the door. Dear God, they were going to try to smoke her out. But how could they as long as she could lean out the window? And how long could she do that? All night? The next thing would be to set fire to the door. The brick and slate construction would allow them to burn down the wooden door without igniting the whole house.
Lisa tore the two rough muslin sheets from the cot and knotted them together. She pulled one end through the crack of the half of the outward opening window nearest the drainpipe, and knotted the sheet around the hinge. She dragged the cot over next to the window, stood on it, and wriggled through the small opening while holding the sheets. As she dangled outside the window, with her feet she walked herself over toward the drain, a round tube bracketed to the wall by metal strips in two or three places on the way down. She began to slither down the pipe in jerks, hampered by her useless hand. Halfway down, a bracket above her came loose in a rain of falling plaster, and the pipe began to lean away from the wall as it pulled loose from the other brackets and then from the slate roof with a screech of metal. She slid faster, tearing her good hand, and then the whole drain came down with her and she landed jarringly on her feet on the cobbles amidst a terrible clatter of falling metal.
Without stopping to see if her captors were following, she picked up her skirts and plunged down the street, dodging among the few people out in the rain.
“Stop! Thief! Stop ’er!” came Henry’s bellow not far behind.
She knew if she could stay free for five minutes or so, she could outrun him all right. She remembered his wheezing when he’d tried to rape her, and she was newly from ten days of running with Toby across the moor country. A man made a grab at her, but she dodged and crossed the street. At the next corner she turned, then crossed diagonally again. She pounded through a dark warehouse district, her footfalls and breath the only sounds she could hear. Then she was in the midst of houses and people again, and she slowed to a walk. She noticed that there were women hanging out of windows and strolling along the street, laughing and calling to each other. Dear heaven, she’d ended up in the brothel district.
A rough hand gripped her shoulder. “Watcher doin’ tonight, girlie? ‘Ow much fer a toss, or d’ye look ter see the race first?”
She jerked her arm away and turned to see a husky man with a tough, bearded face, a mill hand or quarry worker or warehouse man from the look of him. He wasn’t more than in his late twenties, but his teeth were brown stumps, and the lines were already cut deep in his face.
She glanced past his shoulder, but could see no sign of pursuit. “Watcher goin’ on about?” she said, falling into the street talk. “Wat race?”
“They’re comin’! Lissen, they’re comin’!” came a chorus of voices along the other side of the street. She saw how the crowd had thickened. “A quid on the sorrel!” “Taken, and raise ’e un on the black!”
As she heard the hoofs of the running horses striking the cobbles, the man grabbed her arm again and, smelling the gin on his breath, she knew she was going to have trouble. His grip lightened for a moment as he craned his neck to see the horses, and she threw her whole weight against the pressure of his fingers. As she jerked out of his grasp, she lunged off balance into the street. She would have made it across easily before the horses were upon her, but she tripped on a loose cobble and went sprawling. She was struggling to rise when she saw that the big sorrel with the rider with the red gold hair was upon her, his mouth open in shouted warning. Someone in the crowd screamed and as in a dream she saw the great hooves slowly rear up above her, the rounded red underbelly with its pale saddle girth, then nothingness. Black nothingness.
4
Lisa opened her eyes on a room she had never seen before, papered in pale yellow with a pattern of little orange flowers with green stems. The bed she lay in had a real mattress — she could never remember lying on anything so soft — and a yellow satin comforter. A fire snapped cheerfully in the small fireplace, though she could see from the quality of the sunlight coming through the window that it was afternoon, still early for lighting fires. A tea kettle on the grate had begun to whistle, which was probably what had awakened her. She had no feeling of location, nor any memory as to how she had come here. She started as the white door to her room unexpectedly opened.
“Well, so you’re finally awake again, Lisa,” a tall woman she had never seen before said. The woman was dressed in a plum-colored gown. She had black hair, pale, translucent skin, extraordinary large dark eyes, and generous plain features that gave her something of the mien of a friendly horse.
“Pardon me, ma’am, but where am I? Who are you?”
“I see the head injury hasn’t worn off after all,” the woman said. “Never mind, before long you’ll remember everything. I am Mrs. Lewis. I used to be a nurse.” She put down the tray she was carrying that had scissors, bandages, a teapot, a little jug of milk, and a cup and saucer. She poured boiling water from the kettle by the fire into the teapot, then raised Lisa up, plumped the pillows behind her, and straightened the covers. She leaned over and looked from one of Lisa’s eyes to the other and nodded. Then she poured out the tea, put a little milk in it, and handed the cup to Lisa.
“How did I get here?” Lisa asked, blowing on the tea that was still a bit too hot despite the milk.
“Young Master Eric had you brought,” Mrs. Lewis said, “and wasn’t the doctor angry about it. But Eric just said that with as low
an opinion as the doctor had of other physicians about, he should be happy to treat you.”
“But I don’t know any Master Eric!”
“Never mind,” Mrs. Lewis said again, “you’ll remember it all soon enough.” She turned her head, listening. “Here comes the doctor.”
There was a tap on the door, which was opened by Mrs. Lewis. Suddenly Lisa knew where she must be, for the man who walked in was unmistakably Dr. Jarrell of Hartsite.
“So you’re awake again,” he commented as he put his bag on a chair by the bed. He wore dark trousers and a white shirt open at the throat that made him look younger than she remembered despite his beard.
“How do you feel? Are you dizzy? Nauseated?”
She shook her head carefully, wincing. “My head hurts a little, and my hand feels sore,” she answered.
“Your bad hand?” he asked, his eyes intent.
She was suddenly aware that the hand was lying uncovered on top of the comforter. Her face hot, she snatched it under the covers.
“Don’t be upset,” he said gently. “I’ve seen lots worse. But is that the hand that hurts?”
“No,” she snapped, “it’s my other one.” She saw with a shock that the palm of her right hand had bruising and a number of nasty-looking scabbed-over cuts on the palm. “Why, how did I get those?” she asked wonderingly.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “They don’t somehow look as if they could have come from the accident. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I don’t know ... I can’t remember anything,” she cried, suddenly panicked.
“There, there,” Mrs. Lewis soothed, “don’t be afraid. A blow on the head often plays tricks with your memory, but only for a while. Tell us what you do remember.” They both acted somehow as if they had seen through all this with her before. As she talked the doctor watched her carefully.
“Well,” she began, “I live with my aunt and uncle on a farm not far from Dunwiddleston — nor far from here either, if this is Hartsite.”
Lisa Page 4