“I know where it is,” she said to her mother who was looking away. “Grandmother has found it. The star that fell in the meadow has come for her at last.”
And Silfren held Snowpetal tight in her arms, and sang to her in a voice soft and low:
“Find me a Star
That will carry me far –
Around the Moon and back.
Find me a Star
That will carry me far –
And bring me all that I lack.”
Scallowflax and Tom Tattifer
Let me tell you… Let me tell you… there was a girl called Scallowflax who was all tongue-tied and gawkish. She used to hide in the shadows and watch while the others played Chainy-o and Farmer-in-the-Dell. Scallowflax would wander all by herself around the pigmires and trail her toes in the water pudge. She would sit all alone in the hollow in the middle of the Green and twist daisy chains all the day long to hang around her neck. And then she would wander out to the meadows and lie on her back to watch the skylarks rising and listen to their trilling song.
While Silverwing and Moonpetal would chase Hamsparrow and Bullbreath all around the alleyways, pretending they were playing hide-and-seek, then wait to be caught down by Pottam’s Mill and kiss them when no-one was looking, Scallowflax would wander out to the woods and watch the squirrels skittering from branch to branch. And then she would tarry back, all along the edge of Oakum Marlroot’s fields and there she would gather up scrags of corn and all the way down the path to her house she would twist them and plait them betwixt fingers and thumbs till there out of nothing at all, a straw doll would come, all twisted and braided with dried berries for eyes.
What did she do with them, these dolls made of straw? Why the old’uns would love them, would take them and cradle them and coddle them and coo, contented as pigeons with a pail full of grain. They would set them above their fireside hearths and over the lintels of their cottage doors. And the old’uns all swore that they kept the house clean, scurrying and tidying when no-one was looking. And Old Mother Tidgewallop said they kept the fever away and Old Nanny Nettleye lost all her warts as soon as she got one.
But Ravenhair’s mother said to Scallowflax, “Give one to me. You know that they bring good luck with the men. Starwhisper, your mother’s sister, made one of them dollies for me when Ravenhair’s father came. And now that he’s gone, why I sure need another to bring me more luck than any ribbon would.”
Scallowflax blushed and looked away and handed Ravenhair’s mother the straw doll that she’d made that day.
“I just make’em,” she said. “Like to twist and tug and plait arms and legs. Poke berries in for eyes. I just like to make’em. Don’t think about men.”
And Scallowflax blushed again. But next day and next she made more straw dollies, long ones and short ones plaited this way and that. And she took them on a tray all down to the Green, down to the hollow where the girlen sat.
“What you got there Scallowflax?” Ravenhair asked her. “What you been doing down by the pigmires and out in the meadow all by yourself?”
“Never you mind,” Scallowflax told her. “Just you look at these.” And she pushed out the tray.
“What be these, Scallowflax?” Silverwing taunted. “Just scraggy old dolls stuck with dried berries. We don’t play with dolls now, got better things to do.”
Silverwing lowered her eyes and glanced over to the far side of the Green where Bullbreath and Hamsparrow were wrestling and tumbling, hitching up their britches and rolling their sleeves. Scallowflax followed her gaze.
“Don’t you be looking there,” Silverwing reproached her. “See that Bullbreath, he been waiting for me. He’s boy-made-to-man now. He’s climbed the Shuttle Stone these three moons ago. Look at you, Scallowflax. You ain’t ready for the Red Grove yet, no way for sure.”
Scallowflax bit her lip and she felt her cheeks flush.
“You think you know all, just ’cos you got a scarlet dress,” she said. “But I been watching. Bullbreath don’t look at you.”
“Then who do he look at?” Silverwing sneered. “Don’t look at you, that’s for sure.”
Scallowflax bunched her fists till her knuckles turned white.
“These straw men ain’t no girlen dollies. Ravenhair’s mother tell me that. Tell me you need’em to be lucky with men. They’ll work a charm for you.”
Silverwing laughed and pushed the dolls away.
“We got our own charms, Scallowflax. Charms you don’t know about.”
And she tipped the tray over and the girls ran away to the boys-who-would-be-men and left Scallowflax to pick up her straw dolls from the grass of the Green. She gathered them together and laid them out on the tray, then went home to her mother’s tumbledown cottage. Went home and stuck the straw men on top of the kitchen dresser. Climbed the rackety wooden steps up to the loft, to her bed. But when she’d pulled on her nightshirt and combed out her hair like a mess of wild straw, she looked at her bed so narrow and cold and looked at the moon that glowed outside her window and then crept quickly down the stairs.
“What are you doing back down again, Scallowflax?” she heard her mother call from the parlour where she sat rocking in her great wooden chair. “Child like you should be in bed already, not wandering round the house.”
Scallowflax said nothing but climbed on a stool and reached up to where the straw dollies lay on the tray where she’d put them on top of the dresser. She scrabbled around, her fingers running over them, touching one then another until she found one that seemed to jump into her hand. She sprang from the stool all swiftly and quick and ran up the stairs before her mother could call her again. And there in the bed she placed the doll by her, alone on the pillow. She stroked its head gently as she lay there, its straw hair the colour of her own. She peered into its dry berry eyes, which did not look back at her, just gazed through the window at the cold white moon.
“You are Tom Tattifer,” she told him, but the doll said nothing at all and Scallowflax fell to sleep.
Early next morning when Scallowflax woke, she could hear the birds scratting and squawking, scurrying and rustling through the straw on the roof. And when she turned over, to her surprise, she found herself staring into a pair of dried-berry eyes.
“Tom Tattifer!” she cried. “I had quite forgotten you.”
She leapt straight out of the white linen bed and rushed to the mirror set beside the bowl of water and the jug on the dresser. She held up Tom Tattifer to let him see himself, but then to her alarm she looked at her neck and her shoulders and her arms. They were covered all over with mottled red rashes. At first she thought they must be sores, she thought she’d caught pond-fever or the night-sweating plague – but she did not feel ill, her eyes were clear, her tongue was pink. When she looked again at the rashes and sores she thought they seemed more like kisses and bites. She’d seen this before with the other girls, the ones who strayed to the wood with Longskull or Bullbreath. Tom Tattifer fell to the floor as she covered the marks with her hands.
Scallowflax looked around the room wide-eyed. The window hung half-open, the way she always kept it. Could someone have clambered up the guttering in the night? Could someone have climbed in and kissed her without her even knowing? She picked up Tom Tattifer from the floor and dusted him down and propped him on the dresser, up against the mirror.
Slowly and slowly she climbed down the stairs. Slowly and slowly she pushed open the kitchen door. Slowly and slowly she sat at the table where her mother was already sitting.
“Where have you been, child?” she chided, pushing across a bowl of porridge, already half-cold. “Been fussing about with your hair again, I reckon. I told you before – you don’t need no fancy ribbons like all them other girlen. They just showing off. All’s you need is a smart little bow to keep your hair back so it don’t fall in your face when you’re dusting and cleaning. And I can tell you now – there’s plenty of that today.”
Scallowflax prodded at the porridge with
her spoon. It had gone hard and lumpy and she was minded to push it away, but knew she’d better not.
“Come on, eat up. What’s to do with you child?” her mother began. But then she stared hard at her daughter.
“Why, you sloven. Here’s me telling you not to waste your time on ribbons when you ain’t got no ribbons or no bow at all. Look at you there with your hair all like that. You look like you been dragged through a haystack. What’s to do with you? Pull it back, child, before it falls in your porridge.”
Slowly and slowly, Scallowflax tugged back her hair. She could not look at her mother, and just squinnied down at her porridge bowl. But her mother stared at her. Stared at her arms and her shoulders and her neck. Stared at the red weals she saw there.
“Mercy, girl – what’s all this? You coming down with some pox? How’m I going to clean the house now? I don’t know, if it’s not one thing it’s another.”
Scallowflax dangled the spoon in her bowl.
“Ain’t pox, mother. Ain’t pond fever or night sweats. I reckon it’s just them old sheets. They rub me all night. You know how I told you they were all coarse and rough. They make my skin itch so I can hardly sleep and all night long I toss and turn.”
Scallowflax’s mother took hold of her arm and stared at it hard. She looked her in the eye and then she looked away.
“Could be you’re right, child. Could be you’re right. We’ll have to get’em changed is all I can say. Eat up your porridge before it goes cold then get back upstairs to strip down your bed.”
Scallowflax didn’t want to say that her porridge was cold already. She scooped it down slowly, still squinting at the marks on her arms. She slopped her bowl into the kitchen sink, then clattered up the twisting stairs to the attic room where she slept. There she peeked at herself again in the mirror. The marks were still there right enough. And right enough, they didn’t seem like sores at all, but like the kisses and the bites she’d seen on the other girls.
Scallowflax turned around and began to peel the sheets from her bed, while outside her half-open window she heard the birds all singing. But as she gathered up her sheets, she had the strangest feeling that someone was watching her across the room. Scallowflax turned around, expecting to see her mother standing there at the door, to make sure she stripped the bed as quickly as she could. She’d heard no footsteps on the stairs, and when she looked there was nobody there. But there on the dresser, beside the mirror, Tom Tattifer sat watching her. His dried berry eyes seemed to follow her every move, as Scallowflax closed her own eyes so that she couldn’t see him while she bundled up the coarse dull sheets and threw them down the stairs like a billow of clouds full heavy with rain.
Her mother gathered them up and thrust them in a tub of suds and left them to soak the morning away, while Scallowflax brushed out the kitchen and scrubbed the scullery and beat the rush matting out in the backyard till her mother appeared with the basket of sheets and they wrung them and twisted them and hung them on the line to dry.
“Mother, mother, can I go now?” Scallowflax begged.
Her mother scowled and cast her eyes around to find more chores for her daughter. But they’d worked so hard, she could see nothing at all.
“Be gone with you, girl,” she said. “Get out from under my feet. Just stay away from the corn fields. I want to see no more of your dollies made out of straw. Your Aunt Starwhisper used to make’em, and you know what happened to her.”
Scallowflax gathered up her skirts and ran, ran down to the meadow where the other girls sat, playing a game of pit a-pat, their hands held up in a ring, clapping and chanting:
“There was a girl who had a man,
His name it was Tom Tattifer.
There was a girl who had a man
And everybody laughed at her.
Tom Tattifer said he’d marry her
All on a winter’s morn,
But when she came to meet with him,
Tom Tattifer had gone.”
Scallowflax sat and watched them, waiting to see if they’d let her join in. She looked at her arms to check whether the kiss-marks and bite-marks had gone. She ran nervous fingers round her shoulders, round her neck, wondering if the telltale sores were still there. But what tale would she tell if they asked her? For Scallowflax had no notion how they came to be there at all.
Silverwing turned and stared at her. Scallowflax smiled, hoping she’d invite her to sit in the circle and join in their game. But Silverwing turned away, raised her hands with her palms facing out and started the round again:
“There was a girl who had a man,
His name it was Tom Tattifer…”
Scallowflax watched the girls and wished she had dresses like them, cut full above the waist. She wished she had fancy ribbons from the Pedlar Man to tie through her tousle of straw-coloured hair. She wished she was not covered all about with strange red marks on her shoulders and neck. She looked up at the girls again, expecting to pinch herself with envy at their clear fresh complexions and their unblemished skin. But suddenly she noticed they all wore long sleeves and had bright silken scarves wrapped around their necks. Scallowflax wondered what they were hiding – for the weather was warm, a late summer lingering on into autumn, too fine for the girls to be covered this way.
“But when she came to meet with him,
Tom Tattifer had gone…”
The rhyme rattled on and on. Scallowflax gave up wondering if the girls would let her join in. She turned away and began to pick daisies, their petals like fingers of ice, their hearts as warm as the sun – till her lap was filled with flowers. And then she set to make a daisy chain, slitting her thumb-nail through the flowers’ green stems, then linking them through, each one to the next, till she’d made a long necklace to hang round her neck. Then with what she had over she made bracelets and rings and a garland to twine around her head as she sat in the hazy sun.
The other girls had gone, scampering and skipping away through the lush grass of the meadow by the river. But Scallowflax didn’t care. She had her necklace, her bracelet and her rings. She had a green garland to wear in her hair. And she’d done as her mother had told her, she’d not been down to the corn field, and she’d made no more straw dollies.
That night she slept a long deep sleep, as though she was diving deep into the river that wound through the meadow. When she woke she tossed her hair as if it might be straggled and wet. She climbed from her bed, her nightgown soaked, but then she realised she had been sweating, not floating in the dream river’s darkness. She stood in front of the mirror and stared at her face. She looked at her arms, her shoulders and her neck. She was kissed again. Bitten and kissed. The marks were bright red. Scallowflax gasped. The chain of flowers still clung round her neck. When she looked back to her bed, the rings of wilted petals had slipped from her fingers and lay scattered across the pale rumpled sheets. Beneath the bracelets of twisted green stems, her skin was scarlet and raw. Scallowflax tore the flowers away, sure that they must have caused the sores.
She took a deep breath, ran her fingers through her straggly hair and sluiced cold water across her face from the earthenware bowl. Then she felt a sudden shiver, as if someone was watching, someone was with her, and looked up to see, on top of the dresser, there was Tom Tattifer staring down at her, sitting where she’d placed him before she went to sleep.
She stumbled downstairs, quicker than quick, quicker than that.
“Where have you been?” her mother chided. “The morning’s half gone and your porridge is cold. And what are those sores that I see on your arms? Turn around, child – there’s more on your shoulders and look what is this, right here on your neck?”
Scallowflax shook her head.
“It’s my own fault mother. It’s a rash from the flowers. I made a chain of daisy stems, all down by the river in the meadow. And now they have bit me, this way and that. I’ll never go there again.”
But each and every morning the strange marks came, florid and r
ed, again and again.
“What is it child? Whatever’s to do?” Even her mother was worried and puzzled. Scallowflax shook her head and stared down at the cold bare flagstones on the floor.
“It is the Night Fever, mother,” she whispered under her breath.
“If it be Fever, then sure there’s a cure,” her mother declared. “Take you off to Old Nanny Ninefingers. She’ll know what to do. Whatever anyone got, be it plague or ague, pox or palsy, she got the potion to cure you.”
And Scallowflax went, all down Mallenbrook Lane, on the way to Pottam’s Mill. There sat a cottage, grim-thatched and shadowing, but inside Old Nanny Ninefingers was singing as she busied around her pots and herbs, mixing this and that. Scallowflax peered in through the window and then she rapped on the door. At first Nanny Ninefingers didn’t seem to hear her, because she was singing so loud. Scallowflax turned away. What could she say to her mother? How could she explain that she’d been all the way down to Nanny Ninefingers’ cottage, all down Mallenbrook Lane, but Nanny Ninefingers couldn’t hear her – and so she’d come home again? Scallowflax had her hand on the gate and was about to scurry down the rutted lane, when Old Nanny Ninefingers espied her through the musty glaze of her window.
“Wait child!” she called. “Was there something that you wanted?”
Scallowflax turned back. Nanny Ninefingers flung open the front door and ushered the young girl into her kitchen. Scallowflax stared wide-eyed at the pestles and bowls and crushing-hammers, the heavy wooden rolling pin and rows upon rows of bottles and jars.
“Sit down, sit down,” Nanny Ninefingers fussed. “What be the trouble? Always is trouble when girlen your age come to me.”
Scallowflax said nothing. She pointed at the sores, all up and down her arms, on her shoulders, on her neck. They were worse now, these few nights past. Nanny Ninefingers frowned and poked and prodded and walked all around the girl where she sat. Outside a jackdaw cawed, flapping through the branches.
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