“How long you had this?” Ninefingers demanded.
Scallowflax counted. “A week and a day and another week more.”
Ninefingers chuckled and began to mix a potion of figwort and yarrow.
“But this be a rum do, I tellen you for sure. Seen plenty of these markens, these last few days and more. Look to me like bites… look to me like kissen. Someone been a-kissen you, Scallowflax my child?”
Scallowflax hung her head. Ninefingers sat astride another chair, leaning on the back.
“Come now, girlen. You can tell me. Ain’t nothing Ninefingers don’t know, else how my potions going to work? Be it Bullbreath or Hamsparrow, Scatterlegs or Scarum?”
Scallowflax shook her head. She bit her lip. Her cheeks flushed red.
“Ain’t no-one kiss me. No-one at all. It be Night Fever, sure and true.”
Old Nanny Ninefingers rose to her feet.
“If it be Night Fever, this’en’ll do you, good as any other.”
She shook the brown bottle, once to mix it, twice for luck and thrust it into Scallowflax’s hand.
“Tell your mother she owes me a silver shillen, next time she pass this way.”
Scallowflax ran. Ran up Mallenbrook Lane, the water-pudge spattering her long pale legs, till she reached the Green in the middle of the village. There the other girlen sat. Today they didn’t ignore her. Today they reached out with their willowy arms and pulled her into their ring.
“What’s this?” Silverwing demanded, snatching the bottle from Scallowflax’s fingers.
Scallowflax said nothing. Silverwing prodded her and Moonpetal taunted:
“There was a girl who had a man,
And everybody laughed at her…”
“What’s this?” Silverwing asked again, twisting the bottle upside-down.
“Potion,” Scallowflax said at last.
“What you want with potion?” Silverwing quizzed.
“Potion for Night Fever,” Scallowflax explained defiantly.
“If you had Night Fever, you’d be lying sick a-bed, sweating and shivering.”
“This be Night Fever,” Scallowflax told her, and showed her the sores on her shoulders, arms and neck.
The other girls grinned and tugged at the scarves that each of them were wearing.
“You sure that be Night Fever, Scallowflax? Looks more like kissen.” Silverwing puckered up her lips.
“Who want to kiss you?” Moonpetal mocked.
Scallowflax stood in the ring, angry and flushed.
“I know who want to kiss me,” she said.
“So who is it, Scallowflax? Do tell us – who? Ain’t Bullbreath or Hamsparrow or any of the lads. We know who they kiss and ain’t you, that’s for sure.”
Scallowflax stared at the sky and then turned back and glared at the girlen.
“Why would I want to kiss any of them?”
“Who is it then? Tell us. Come on, tell us do!”
As Scallowflax clenched her hands tightly together, the marks on her arms stood out more lurid than wounds.
“I don’t see who it is,” she tried to explain. “He comes every night when my window is open. While I am asleep he holds me in his arms and kisses me before he steals away.”
There was silence all around the ring. Far off in the forest the pigs were squealing. Then Silverwing giggled and Moonpetal joined in. They pulled off their scarves and rolled up their sleeves. All the girlen on the Green were covered with red weals on their shoulders, on their arms and on their necks. Weals that looked for all the world like bite-marks and kisses.
Scallowflax ran. She thought she had been the only one. Scallowflax ran. Though she did not know how it came to be, she thought the marks were for her alone. Scallowflax ran. All the way back to her mother’s door, where she raced in and flung herself, breathless and flushed, into the chair by the kitchen table.
“What’s to do, child?” her mother asked her. “Did you go to Nanny Ninefingers, just like I told you?”
Scallowflax nodded and held out the bottle. Her mother took it and shook it and sniffed it.
“What be this?” she asked.
“Figwort and Yarrow,” Scallowflax told her.
“What she say you got, child?”
Scallowflax took a breath.
“Say I got Night Fever, maybe. But say it looks like kissens too. And when I got to the Green, all the other girlen there showed me – they got sores and marks, just the same as these.”
Scallowflax’s mother shut the door, and drew the bolts, one, two and three.
“I knew it, I knew it. Knew it all along. It’s that boy Greychild. Nothing been the same since he came to Brunt Boggart, since Crossdogs found him all out in the woods. Now you ain’t going near him no more. Now you ain’t going down to the Green. You ain’t going to the meadow, you ain’t going by the river. And you ain’t going near the wood no more, not now, not ever again!”
“Mother – I didn’t,” Scallowflax wailed. “Ain’t nobody kissed me, though I wish they would.”
Scallowflax’s mother shook her head.
“If’n I believe you. If’n you say true. If it ain’t Greychild, then what Longskull says is true – maybe he weren’t the Wolf after all. Real Wolf is still out there in the woods. Real Wolf still coming and breaking down fences and stealing all Snuffwidget’s wine. Real Wolf been creeping around at night and climbing up into all the girlen’s rooms.”
She unlocked the door.
“You better go warn’em, Scallowflax my child. You better go tell’em to close their windows at night and don’t stay out late all down by the wood.”
Scallowflax raced away, though her legs were still shaking and she’d hardly gathered breath. The girlen were lolling around in the hollow, grinning and giggling and showing off their kiss-bites, bold and brazen as you like. Scallowflax leapt into the midst of them, gabbling wide-eyed:
“Stop! Stop all your jesting. My mother just told me. Ain’t no Night Fever. The Wolf is come back. It be Wolf who comes to you, each night while you’re sleeping.”
The girls stopped for a moment and looked at each other. Silverwing tugged her dress up higher and showed off a new kiss mark, just above her knee.
Scallowflax stared.
“Who’d you think did this?” Silverwing asked her.
Scallowflax looked confused.
“Wolf,” she said. “Like my mother told me.”
Silverwing shook her head.
“Ain’t no Wolf. I know who did this. I saw him sure and sure. Why – it was Bullbreath. Ain’t no Night Fever. Ain’t no Wolf. Ain’t no flower rash or coarse sheets itching.”
Then Moonpetal shook her hair back and pointed to her shoulders.
“And this kiss was Scarum,” she whispered with a smile.
“And this was Scatterlegs,” Dewdream declared.
“Larkspittle did this one,” Riversong told them, baring her neck.
One by one the girls showed where the boys had touched them and let loose their names. Then they turned to Scallowflax.
“So come on, Scallowflax – we asked you before. Who’s been a-kissing you? Ain’t no dream lover coming in the night, twitching at your curtains like you told us, that’s for sure. Who want to kiss you, Scallowflax?”
“Ain’t no-one you know, or likely to know,” Scallowflax replied defiantly.
“Tell us,” they pleaded.
“I been kissed by Tom Tattifer!” Scallowflax spat and turned away from the girlen in the hollow. “I been kissed by Tom Tattifer, for that is his name.”
“Tom Tattifer? – Tom Tattifer!” the girls chanted after her, but Scallowflax said nothing and ran all the way home.
She rushed past her mother in the kitchen and right the way up the rickety stairs. She burst into her attic room and stared at the dresser beside her bed. The dresser was empty.
“Where is Tom Tattifer?” she said.
Scallowflax hunted hither and thither, peering under her bedstead and into
the cupboard, pulling the dresser away from the wall to see if Tom Tattifer had tumbled down there.
“What’s all that noise, child?” her mother called up to her from the bottom of the stairs.
“Tom Tattifer, Tom Tattifer! Where is Tom Tattifer?!” Scallowflax shrieked in reply.
“Hush, child and come down here. Let me speak with you,” her mother said.
Scallowflax rammed shut the drawers of the dresser and slammed her bedroom door before stamping down each step of the stairs.
“Sit there,” her mother said sternly, pointing to a chair.
Scallowflax shook her head and remained standing where she was. Her mother turned away, turned her back on her daughter and stood gazing out of the window, across their tiny herb garden and out to Oakum Marlroot’s fields.
“Where is Tom Tattifer?” Scallowflax demanded between gritted teeth.
“Let me tell you…” said her mother. “Tom Tattifer is gone. Gone where you’ll never find him.”
“But why?” Scallowflax cried. “He never did no harm.”
“No telling what harm is, and when it’s going to come,” her mother said gently, turning back from the window. “I told you about your Aunt Starwhisper. She used to make them dolls.”
“And the old’uns all loved them,” Scallowflax protested. “They’d take them and cradle them and coddle them and coo, and set them above their fireside hearths and over the lintels of their cottage doors. Now they all tell me I can make dolls just like Starwhisper. Say I’ve got a gift for it, just like her.”
Her mother paused and gazed at her daughter for a long time and long before she made any reply.
“So you have, child. So you have.”
Scallowflax frowned. “Where did she go, Mother? – my Aunt Starwhisper. I only seen her when I was a little’un. How come I don’t see her no more?”
Scallowflax’s mother turned away again and gazed back out of the window, far away down the Pedlar Man’s Track.
“Starwhisper is gone, child. Can’t tell you where. But she ain’t never coming back.”
Scallowflax lay in bed that night and gazed around the room. The dresser seemed so empty now that Tom Tattifer was gone. The window stood half-open, letting in the light from the moon. Scallowflax tossed and turned awhile then finally fell to sleep between her clean linen sheets.
All night she dreamt of Aunt Starwhisper. Dreamt of the meadow and the flowers and the girlen as they all sat around in the hollow on the Green. Dreamt of their kiss-bites on their shoulders, arms and necks. Woke up sweating, but Scallowflax told herself that now that her mother had hidden Tom Tattifer away, she wouldn’t find herself covered in sores ever again.
She climbed from her bed as dawn touched her window and she swung one foot onto the shivering floor. She tugged back the mass of tangled hair from her face and tiptoed over to the dresser. She rubbed her eyes and stretched as the curtains flapped round the window in the cool morning breeze. And then she peered into the mirror and saw that her arms, her shoulders and her neck were covered all over with kiss-bites bright red, same as they ever were before.
Greychild, Scritch and the Eye of the Glass
Let me tell you… Let me tell you about Old Granny Willowmist. Old Granny Willowmist lived in a cottage right by the Green in the middle of Brunt Boggart, the Green where the girlen would gather round the mossy hollow and the boys would come and sit and sing. The girlen would swap ribbons and the boys would wrestle and Granny Willowmist would watch them all the long day long. And she would remember her own sons and she would remember her daughters and wish they were still with her now. But they were gone off far away to other villages over the hills and around the bend of the slow running river, gone off with other girlen and boys.
So Granny Willowmist was all alone. She was happy enough chatting to Old Mother Tidgewallop, Old Nanny Nettleye and the rest. And helping round the village, drawing water and spinning and knitting. But at night her cottage was empty. The wind rattled at the window-frames and all she could do was stare at the moon. So when Crossdogs and Hamsparrow brought the WolfBoy home, it was Old Granny Willowmist who took him in. It was Old Granny Willowmist who taught him, patient as patient, how to sit at the table and eat all proper with knife and fork and a napkin tucked under his chin. It was Old Granny Willowmist who taught him, patient as patient, how to talk all proper, with ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’ and ‘how-do-you-do’. And it was Granny Willowmist who gave him his name.
“I call you Greychild now. Ain’t no WolfBoy. Never was. Just a poor boy lost, grown up in the woods. But now you got a home. My home is yours and you can live by me and fill up the empty room my own sons and daughters have left behind.”
But in the end Greychild took to roaming again, all night under the moon, and never coming back till dawn, then lying a-bed half the day long until he took it into his head to get up and expect Granny Willowmist to fetch him his breakfast before he went out to wrestle with the boys and let the girlen ply him with kisses.
Till in the end Granny Willowmist said to him, “Greychild, this will not do. You eat more food than all my sons ever did all put together. You give me no help, you fill your room with spiders and frogspawn and twisted sticks and bits of stones. Time you did some work to pay for your keep.”
So she took him by the ear and dragged him, howling and complaining, all the way down to the river that muddled its way around this middling village. Dull and sludgy and slow, it dragged its way in a great lazy bend all around the backs of the cottages. There was just one narrow hump-backed bridge to take you over this river – and by that bridge, Scritch sat. Scritch wore a coat the colour of dung and squatted all day by the sluggish stream. His eyes were sharp in his leathery face, darting quick, on the look-out for anything that glittered, glistening in the water, in the shallows by the bank. No matter what it was, be it fish or tin or silver, Scritch would have it, quick as a flash.
He would stare into the water, his eyes glinting with silence. The silence spread across the ripples, shimmering and steely, then darted down to the shingly pebbles that lay on the bed of the stream. The silence filled everything, like the silence that spreads beneath a heron’s shadow as it sits and wills its prey to swim too close to the silver blade of its beak. And quick as a heron when it strikes, Scritch’s hand would dart into the water and grab whatever he’d seen, grip it tight and pull it out. He would fling it onto the bank and clean it down and sluice it in a pail of fresh water. If it was fish he’d cook it and maybe he’d eat it for his supper or maybe he’d sell it to one of the wifen. And if it was tin or silver, why then he’d melt it down and smelt it and twist it into trinkets to trade with the Pedlar Man next time he came around.
Scritch would sit all day by the river, watching and waiting. He hardly spoke to anyone, but when he did, his voice was like a crow’s – all dark and croaking. He knew the sky, he knew the clouds, he knew the water. That’s all he needed to know. But now Granny Willowmist stood beside him, still grasping Greychild tight by the ear.
“What?” Scritch squawked. He was staring at Greychild. Greychild peered back at him, then tried to pull away.
“What?” Scritch uttered again, his eyes darting away to the water. “What you want come troubling me?”
“Scritch,” Granny Willowmist pleaded. “This be a good boy. He needs to work. Do you have anything for him? Anything he can do?”
Scritch said nothing. He stared at the water. He squinnied the sky. He hardly looked at Greychild. Then he nodded.
“See them pots.”
Greychild looked over at a pile of broken earthenware. He looked back at the weather-eyed man, wondering what he meant.
“Clean’em,” said Scritch.
Greychild turned to look at Granny Willowmist, to see what she would say. But Granny Willowmist had vanished. She’d already set out, back along the winding path that led right to her door. Greychild looked this way and that. He gazed towards the watchful wood, where his mother had left hi
m. He looked at Scritch. Scritch looked at him, and then repeated.
“Clean’em.”
And so Greychild began. All day, every day, down by the river, cleaning the broken pots which Scritch flung over to dry in a pile on the bank. Big bits, little bits, all of them shattered, all of them broken. Bits from old pots made long ago and tossed into the river.
“No good to me,” Scritch told him. “Only want shiny things – fish, tin, or silver.” His eyes glistened in the drizzle which was falling around them. Greychild wiped the back of his hand across his dribbling nose.
“Who made’em?” he ventured, pointing at the broken pots.
Scritch shrugged.
“Don’t know. No-one knows. Older than the old’uns. All broke now. All gone…”
Greychild swilled the mud from the broken pieces of dull red earthenware, but as he pieced them together he could see they were graven with patterns, all mazy and swirling, in shapes he’d never seen before.
“What do they mean?” he asked Scritch. But Scritch wasn’t listening. He was gazing into the water again, as the dull rain ran down his back.
So day after day, Greychild washed and cleaned the broken pots. Then he pieced them together, trying to match the patterns. Bit by bit he’d stick the broken parts together with a gummy resin that Scritch showed him how to collect from the roots of the bluebells that grew in the woods. Then he’d put them in the window of the old wooden shed where he and Scritch would shelter when the rain got too bad. Sometimes the mothers and the old’uns would come and pore over them, and rake through the trinkets that Scritch had made from bits of tin and silver, the ones that the Pedlar Man hadn’t taken, the ones that were crooked, twisted or misshapen. Scritch would sell them cheap. The women were happy enough with them, always bright and shiny. Then they’d look at the pots and pick them up and peer inside and put them back. Some days they’d buy one, but not very often.
“No good to me,” Old Mother Tidgewallop told Greychild. “All cracked and broken. Tain’t no good to look pretty on my mantle-ledge. And tain’t no good for putting stuff in. All leak out the holes.”
Brunt Boggart Page 13