A comb
A petticoat
A flannel gown
My nightcap and another day cap
One shift
A pink ribbon given me by Jem at Chester Fair
Lady Maria’s silver knife on a chain
A Prayer book inscribed by Widow Trotter
A picture cut from a newspaper that recollects my mother’s face
The Household Book called The Cook’s Jewel wrapped in a fustian piece
Quills and ink a gift from Mrs Garland
My sewing bag containing precious locks of hair wrapped in a linen cloth
Stockings and strings
One pound, three shillings and threepence halfpenny
The Red Silk Gown and petticoat given me by Lady Carinna
Next I wrote the making of the Brandy Posset down. Then, laying down I thought of Jem so far away back down the benighted road and wished sorely I had left him on better terms. But in a few blinks of an eye I slept as sound as a dormouse.
X
Loveday blinked and then closed his eyes, feeling water stream down his cheeks like unstoppable tears. He was perched on the back footboard of the carriage, shaken by every rut and rock in the broken road. The rain was dripping inside his collar, chafing his old wound so it ached without end. This was the coldest place he had ever known. Sometimes he was sure he would die soon, but his bones did not fail, nor his hair turn white. For some strange purpose his ancestors were keeping him alive in this terrible place.
He had already been soaked while he waited, standing to attention by the carriage door while the others fussed around. His only moments of warmth were with Biddy. She didn’t call him names but talked to him eye to eye like a friend or cousin. True, her eyes were horribly pale, but they did not, as he had once believed, have the power to penetrate his skull with dangerous spirits. And she laughed with him, teasing him when he talked about home.
‘In my country the rain is warm as tea,’ he confided, as they huddled beneath the overhang of a roof, waiting for their mistress.
‘You are having me on there, Mr Loveday. How can rain be warm?’
He told her how he would pick a tray-sized lontar leaf to carry above his head, to shelter from the tea-warm rain. She shook her head again.
‘I don’t know how you think it up, Mr Loveday. Sheltering under a leaf. You must think I were born yesterday.’
Mr Loveday. He liked that. It made him feel for a moment like a solid man and not a fluttering ghost. Then she reached out and touched his arm. Leaning back against the dripping carriage Loveday’s eyes grew suddenly hot. It was the first time since passing to this strange world that any person had reached out to him in friendship. He could still feel Biddy’s fingers on his arm, and it warmed him more than a thousand fires. If only she knew him as he once had been; a hunter, a warrior, a man!
As the carriage shuddered and swung, the spirit that lived inside him, his manger, felt like a bird caught in a net. Commanding his limbs to balance on the narrow board, he released his spirit to go where it chose. Soon, somewhere else there was rain, pain, and misery – here in the limpid turquoise water the waves sucked and broke, with the rhythmic sound of the ocean’s heartbeat.
He was hunting with his clan; standing high on the harpoon platform, a warm rush of air refreshing his body each time the boat crested a wave. They were skimming just behind a vast bělelā, a black ripple-edged devil ray speeding beneath the water. Fear and excitement mixed in his veins. It was a monster, the length of three tall men, its wingspan even wider. It was an easy strike – he raised his right arm and drove the harpoon down deep into the creature’s back. The harpoon stuck firm and hard in the black shining flesh.
‘Stick another hook in. Quick, quick,’ he cried in triumph as he held the bucking rope. But from the corner of his eye he saw his younger brother, Surti, leap down from the platform onto the creature’s back, gaff in hand. Very fast, before he could form words of warning, the creature made its move. The vast bělelā raised its two great wings and wrapped them tightly around Surti’s body, knocking him flat and trapping him like an oyster in a shell. The boy gave a gasping scream, and Loveday watched as his terrified face was knocked flat against the creature’s night-black skin. Then, with a shudder of farewell, the bělelā tugged with all its might and vanished below the water.
Loveday looked about himself, amazed. The crew was crowding at his back, gaping at the white foam where the bělelā had plunged, carrying the boy wrapped inside its wings. Someone had to do something. The discarded rope at his feet was unravelling faster than a snake darting into the bush. Grasping a second harpoon, Loveday ran to the front of the platform and dived after the disappearing rope. In a gushing eruption of spray he found the harpoon line and grasped it tightly. It pulled him crazily down into the water, dragged by the monstrous bělelā that strained and plunged at the other end of the rope. Surely the harpoon will loosen, he thought. Yet it stuck firm. He was descending fast from the sun-warmed shallows to the frozen indigo deeps. I must die, he told himself, rather than lose my little brother. I will never let this rope go.
Yet he needed air. His chest rasped with pain and his head felt as fat as a watermelon. Time wore on, like a net stretched around a monstrous catch. The bělelā ducked and weaved, trying to escape the drag of the rope. A terrible darkness dimmed Loveday’s eyes. Then, like a child being born to the world, he felt sunlight warm his back. Air and sunlight burst noisily around him. He gasped and blinked, panting until the pain in his chest grew less. The rope was still tight in his hand. He looked about himself. Loveday could see the bělelā’s shape trembling beneath the swell; its wings moving freely. Where was Surti? He had disappeared. Drowned, surely drowned, answered the grim voice in his head. They had surfaced in the bělelā’s feeding ground, where the creature now grazed upon plankton. Some way behind them trailed the boat, a line of men huddling at the prow.
Honour blazed in his mind. He had to avenge Surti. Like a ravening shark he launched himself out of the water onto the head of the creature. It was the work of an instant to thrust his harpoon deep into the bělelā’s brain and kill it. He enjoyed a moment of hot satisfaction – he hated that creature, he wanted to beat it to soft pulp for taking the innocent boy.
Soon after, the crew arrived and lifted the beast up from the sucking ocean, carrying the bělelā into the airy world of men. Loveday watched as the men slit open its hollow bladder of a body and found nothing inside it but plankton. Why had the gods done this to him?
He felt weak and confused. The sun was setting and the waves were chopping fretfully. He looked out across the uneasy waters, haunted by the boy’s pale face.
‘We must go,’ his captain Koti said, and the words brought an anguished pain to Loveday’s being.
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Wait.’ So they waited as the sun dipped into the sea in a red splash. He prayed, offering the father god, Bapa Fela, anything, any gift, any sacrifice. He had to find Surti alive. Otherwise, his happy life was over.
As if waking from a trance, he heard a commotion from behind him and a piping shout. The men were pulling something over the rail. Hope almost blinded him as he struggled through the huddling crew. Then, out of their centre staggered Surti, naked and shivering, his arm bleeding – but alive! Loveday ran to him and shook him by the shoulders. ‘You stupid boy,’ he said, ‘you are alive, but it is no thanks to your idiocy. Thanks only to the gods.’ And he embraced the boy and marvelled to feel the wriggling life inside his flesh.
After a sip of toddy, the boy told them that the bělelā had let go of him as soon as it made its descent. He had swum up towards the light, but in his giddiness had got tangled in the ropes. There he had hung, battered against the hull as the boat hurtled after its prey. ‘I called to you, but no one heard,’ he said.
‘You are wrong,’ said Koti, his wrinkled face very grave. ‘The gods heard you and witnessed your brother’s great courage. They have rewarded him with victory over the
bělelā and over death itself.’
The bělelā’s dismembered body slid across the floor of the boat, trailing gore and slime. It was a monstrous size – it would feed the whole village. The boy was safe, and grinning as the older men cuffed him. Everyone wanted to touch Surti and his brother, to take for themselves a little magic from the boy who had survived the bělelā’s embrace and the man who had avenged it. Loveday stood firm at the prow, a man whom other men respected, and women admired.
That day the light of his Bapa, the sun, had shone inside his muscled chest. It had shone in his mind like a ball of fire. He had not known, then, that it would be his last victory. That soon the strange ship would arrive. That soon his courage would be smothered like a beacon in a storm.
* * *
Suddenly his body was tumbling through the air. He landed with a thump and found his mouth pressed hard into mud. What place was this? Rain, pain, and trouble returned. He looked about and found he was lying in the road, flung from the carriage into a rut of earth and stone. Dragging himself upright, he saw the carriage was tilting awkwardly, its back wheel hanging at a wounded angle. Could his troubles get any worse? Mr Pars and George were trying to calm the whinnying horses. Suddenly the carriage door opened and his mistress demanded to know what in the devil’s name was going on. Loveday peered into the gathering twilight and groaned.
XI
The Great Midland Bogs
Being Martinmas, November 1772
Biddy Leigh, her journal
* * *
An English Rabbit of Cheese
Toast your slices of bread then pour as much wine over as will soak in. Cut up a plate of cheese, very thin and lay it thick over the bread. Set it before the fire and brown the top with an iron shovel heated in the fire. Serve it away hot.
Biddy Leigh, her best way, 1772
* * *
Our rescue was pitiful when it arrived. The only inn Mr Pars could find was a place fit only for trampers, so we must take our own food and bedding. Mr Loveday had cracked his head when the carriage tumbled, and all his fine livery was a slutching mess, poor fellow. But as I rode nervously behind George on one of the horses, the sunset gave a sudden burst of crimson glory, reflected in rain that shone like mirrors across the fields. Once the rain stopped it was a fine ride through a land of bright waters and mysterious black woods.
The inn was indeed a shattered ruin, for the landlord’s wife had run off with a journeyman and left him to the drink. We had drifted four long miles off the highway, and the blackened inn was sinking in the winter bogs. Yet we had to bless our fortunes, for the roof leaked only in certain rooms, and a couple of hearths did throw out a little heat after much of a struggle with my tinderbox.
While Mr Loveday aired my lady’s sheets, I set to scratching up a supper. With not even time to change from my own damp clothes I had in one half-hour some welcome tea steaming and hot brandy to mix a punch. Our bill of fare was the remnants of Mrs Garland’s Yorkshire Pie, still sound and savoury, fried bacon, and a hillock of toasted rabbits that disappeared as quick as I made them. The last of the seed cake was eaten too, with a douse of brandy sprinkled over it to warm us.
‘She will not eat those beggarly scraps,’ said Jesmire, the spiteful old cat, when I took a tray of food to my lady’s door. Yet I did see a slice of brandied cake disappear. I knew my mistress well enough by then, and she was a slave to her sugar tooth.
After supper Mr Pars got up to attend to some business with my lady. Then just as the rest of us settled down to a fire-bright doze in the parlour, we heard such a racket start up from my lady’s chamber that we all jumped like startled sheep. One moment we heard Mr Pars speaking in a low rumble, and the next Her Ladyship crying out fit to burst her lungs. Wanting to get a proper earful, I made a pretence of clearing up, then loitered in the hallway. I could not hear a word of Mr Pars’speech, only that he sounded to be complaining in an unhappy manner. But my mistress’s lighter voice came right through the wall, crying out, ‘You will indeed,’ and, ‘Cannot? I will!’ Mr Pars’ words were again as clear as mud, then she yelled, ‘Be off! Get out!’ The door banged open and I scarce had time to disappear.
When I came back to the parlour, Mr Pars had returned to his deep chair by the fire and was complaining to the others. ‘She says we must all lose our positions. As soon as the carriage is mended I must lead you all back home while she goes to London alone.’ When I offered him his tankard he clutched it so tight his knuckles were white.
‘Well, I for one should welcome it,’ said George. ‘She’s worse than the dog’s mother.’ He was settled right above the fire like a great pink hog, his boots off and his wet stockings releasing clouds of steam.
‘Mind your tongue before a lady, George.’ Mr Pars glanced in Jesmire’s direction, then took a deep draught and narrowed his eyes for a moment. I never saw him look more angry than when he wiped his bristled jowls and stared into the fire. ‘And if your old place as coachman at Mawton were taken from you, too?’ He spat into the flames and glared at the old coachman. George looked baffled for a moment, then a fuddled frown creased his brow.
As for me, what did I care if I lost my position? Why, me and Jem could then find work in town and soon be married. Yet what of my five guineas bonus? There was a long silence as the fire crackled.
It was Jesmire who spoke up next. Her features took on a right know-it-all simper. ‘Mr Pars, pray do not be offended if I declare a little superior knowledge on this subject. May I tell you that dismissal is something of a refrain of hers? It is not in my nature to gossip, but she has very little grasp of genteel behaviour. Whims run through her mind like the changing weather. The facts stand that without us she would not have the slightest notion of how to proceed. By the morning she will doubtless have forgotten her hasty words.’
Mr Pars acknowledged this with a nod of his head, but he was still nearly purple with choler.
‘So it’s prob’ly fer’t best if we forget it, Mr Pars, sir,’ said old George peaceably.
Soon afterwards the others went to bed, and I began to clear the place. But our steward remained, his stout body slumped in his chair, jowls set and lower lip jutting deep in thought. As I picked up his tankard he met my glance.
‘One strange matter,’ he said. ‘Your mistress said a very odd thing. I didn’t care to share it in company.’ His voice was slurred with liquor for he had drunk hard from the inn’s store.
‘And what’s that, sir?’ I said, my fingers cramping with the mass of cup handles I was trying to carry.
‘That she would dismiss us all – save for you.’ He blew out a plume of smoke and watched me steadily. ‘Now all this evening I’ve been asking myself why she should make so much of our Biddy Leigh.’
I truly was too weary to mull over it.
‘Sir, if I knew the answer to that I’d be the first to make summat of it.’
At that he jumped up and started to knock the ash out from the bowl of his pipe most violently against the mantel. Then he stood up straight, very large and towering above me. His expression was quite hately, as if he’d as soon see me rot as wish me good night.
‘I’m watching you, Biddy Leigh. You women think you can bury your filthy secrets out of sight. But I will find you out.’
‘Sir, there’s nowt—’
‘Shut those saucy lips of yours, girl. And get this place neat before you finish.’ With that he took his wavering candle and marched off to his chamber.
* * *
It took a few days until the local blacksmith had mended the carriage and we got back on the road. Mr Loveday was shaken and his coat still stained, but no one but I cared a whit about that. As for me, I couldn’t forget Mr Pars saying he was watching me.
I tried to put it from my mind once we settled into our next lodging at the Star Inn, where I was making our new quarters ready by collecting some rubbish thrown away in a basket. Once I was alone on the quiet backstairs, quite from habit I had a rifle through it, helping
myself to some good sheets of paper that had clean backs. Pressed amongst those was a sheet of blotting paper that I also slid into my pocket.
That night I got out the papers to see what quality of stuff I had garnered. It was the blotter that caught my eye, for written upon it again and again in backwards writing were words that looked familiar, though I couldn’t read the odd-fangled loops. Recollecting that a looking glass hung by the inn’s stairs, I picked up my candle and moved very softly onto the landing, where the looking glass soon reflected my pale figure growing closer.
Slowly I lifted the candle and saw my own face peering forward in the mirror, my eyes making gleaming enquiry back at myself. Pulling out the blotter I held it to the glass and read it the right way about. It spelled again and again, as if being keenly practised:
Sir Geoffrey Venables, Baronet
I heard a warning creak behind me on the boards.
‘Biddy Leigh. What are you doing here?’
Lord! I nearly dropped the candle and set my skirts alight. In the mirror I saw Mr Pars himself coming up behind me across the landing.
‘Just wiping a smudge from me face, sir,’ I said smartly, rubbing at my cheek with the edge of the blotter. ‘I have no mirror, sir.’
By then he was right next to me, so I turned about, all the time praying he might not ask to see the paper clutched inside my fist.
‘Mirror? A kitchen maid has no need of a mirror, girl. Give me that taper. The draught just blew my candle out.’
So then I had to fold the blotter and place the end in my candle flame. Sir Geoffrey’s name seemed to stand upon it so boldly before my eyes that I thought Mr Pars would ask me where I had found it. But instead he took it and did not notice at all. I bobbed low and wished him good night and he went back to his chamber, the paper burning down fast. It was a mighty fright he had given me. Yet who was it practised Sir Geoffrey’s name?
An Appetite for Violets Page 7