Souls Dryft

by Jayne Fresina

  "If he spent more time in his own bed, he might not sleep during the sermon."

  My uncle stiffened.

  "Did you not say, Uncle, those men spend more time in other people’s beds than in their own? Just like their ruddy father, you said. The apple never falls far from the tree."

  The congregation held its collective breath. Parson Bartleby slammed his great book down on the pulpit, turning his eyes to the heavens. As I was sure to be punished now in any case, better make it worthwhile.

  "I hear the Captain is all brawn and pickled brains, and possibly the biggest fool in Christendom."

  The object of my scorn sat bolt upright again, his sleep disturbed. He lowered his eyelids immediately to half-mast, but I knew he still examined me. Eventually his lashes slid shut completely; thus, I was dismissed.

  Until he opened one eye for a second look.

  * * * *

  After the service, my uncle was anxious to get away before Parson Bartleby chased after him with a lecture, or one of the tenants came running with some complaint they wanted resolved. But a crowd swelled around the gate and familiar troubles flared, old quarrels easily re- ignited on such a hot day. Soon the exit was jammed, the disorganized funneling of the raucous mob nothing short of a wrestling match. The gate expelled one grumbling soul at a time, frequently without their hat, or a shoe, which, if they tried to fight their way back to find again, only delayed progress further, possibly resulting in a black eye, or a broken tooth.

  "Papa," Millicent warbled, "I dropped my kerchief!" She flapped her arms in horror at the prospect of leaving it to be trampled by commoners.

  "T’aint made o’ ruddy gold!" he spat. "I’ll get you another."

  "But papa—" Her protest ended on a little gasp, because Captain Carver elbowed his way to the edge of the crowd, holding out one square fist, in which he carried a kerchief, emblazoned with the letter M.

  A space cleared around him like the sea parting for Moses.

  Millicent leapt forward. "How kind of you to return it, sir. ‘Tis my very best kerchief, embroidered, as you see, by my own hand."

  He passed it to her without a word, evidently not a man to appreciate fine stitch, and then briskly turned his attention to my uncle. On that summer day he sweated, as we all did, and the back of his shirt was damp, clinging to his shoulders.

  "I see you have little control over the women in your household, Baron." After one brief glance at me, he added, "If you intend to find husbands for any of ‘em, you might bear in mind that a young lady’s behavior can never be too guarded, her will never too obedient and her manner," again he paused, looking in my direction, "never too chaste." He did very well with the words I gave him. Too well, in fact. "A woman’s reputation cannot be valued high enough," he added. "The loss of it brings ruin to her family."

  I might have instructed him to say those things to my uncle, but not when it could be heard by the entire village. This was too humiliating. And he knew it.

  He continued, "A gentleman, so I am told, should prefer a meek, pure wife. It would be a mistake to take anything less."

  The crowd around the gate listened avidly. Most, like Mistress Cobb, thought I was permitted a shocking amount of independence; I needed to learn my place, and this sweaty oaf would teach it to me.

  Stepping around my uncle, I curtseyed politely. "I am most obliged to you, Captain, for not marrying me. I wish you luck in finding another bride – someone desperate."

  He looked over my head. "Baron Deptford, I hear it runs about the place, coming and going as it pleases. And you allow this."

  "I am a forward thinkin’ feller, Carver." My uncle chuckled. "What’s she gone and done now then, to upset a ruddy great feller like you?"

  Before I might be accused of anything, I took a deep breath, turned to the crowd and cried, "Lock up your wives and daughters, for none are safe while the brothers Carver are here! Take heed, sirs; if you value your women, lock them up in chastity belts!" They all stared at me in great wonderment; I was certainly enjoying myself. "All of them — naught but shiftless rogues." With one finger I prodded the Captain’s proud chest. "Filthy," poke, "rotten", poke, "thieving," poke, "pirates!"

  Looking down at my ink-stained finger, he warned tightly. "I swear I’ll lay hands on her, if you cannot master this woman, Baron." A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead.

  "Best pick a battle you might win, Captain," said my uncle genially.

  At that moment, Rufus and his wife arrived on the scene and thus, jammed in the gateway like a pea in a pod, my uncle was forced to address the enemy. "Master Carver," he grunted, his smile swept away.

  In reply Rufus raised his wooden hand to the brim of his hat. My uncle did not acknowledge Suzannah at all, as she was only a woman, another disobedient, ungrateful one at that. This part of Norfolk was full of them apparently. She kept her blank gaze upon the grass, her milk-white face, placid as a carved saint, beautiful but lifeless today.

  The Captain still seethed, grumbling and swearing under his breath. Spinning around to fight his way out, he found Bagobones underfoot, knocked her down and then tripped over her skirt. She expelled a tiny shriek, before he landed on her, crushing the wind out of her lungs.

  My uncle observed it all quite calmly, as if it was nothing unusual to see his youngest daughter grappling in the dirt with strangers. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in years, but to regain his feet, the Captain grabbed for the nearest solid object, which happened to be me, and threatened in my ear, "If you take counsel as much as you like to give it, I’ll see neither hide nor hair of you on our property again."

  But what he referred to as their property truly belonged to Sydneys, not Carvers. I would have argued this point, but suddenly we heard a shout, warning us to duck. We fell to our knees in the grass, and Hugh Carver sailed over us all on horseback, laughing uproariously at having chosen his own way out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Grace

  He skimmed over my head, so low, I thought he meant to land there, changing his mind at the last minute. I glanced down at my shoulder to be sure he hadn’t left a calling card. Perched now on the flint stone wall, the blackbird twitched his shiny black head, wondering what I was doing there. Evidently no one had worked in the garden for several years. Uncle Bob lost interest in it when Aunt Rose died and nature took over with the naughty relish of a teenager left alone in its parent’s house for the weekend.

  I’d already begun work to put the garden back as it should be and under the pink, trumpet flowers of bindweed, I found precocious wild strawberries, already producing tiny, sweet berries that burst on the tongue. Who knew what other treasures waited there, hidden by the lecherous, grasping tendrils of that weed?

  The sky was full of bruised clouds, pushed about by an unpredictably gusty wind; one minute the sun was bright and the next it was gone again, or became a frustrated flicker. While the sun shone, all was lazy and content. Birds perching in the ivy, patiently rehearsed snippets of song, and ladybirds came to rest on my hand, warming their wings. When another blemish crossed the sun and the yard grew dark, the blackbirds fell silent; the ladybirds scurried onward, suddenly remembering they had other things to do. Picking up strength, the wind made the ivy dance against the windows and rattled the gate like an angry guest.

  As I stood in the walled garden, footsteps ran by, trampling the clover. I heard the rustle of pages turning and the breathless giggles of a boy leaping down from the wall, his feet landing in the mud with a solid thunk. Once he had swung from the branches of a pear tree here, but the tree was long gone. He remained, repeating his little jump over and over. Time in this place could not settle into a steady rhythm; there was a fault in it, like a scratch in an old 45.

  There were a lot of odd things in that garden — things that shouldn’t be there. Plants that seemed dead one day rejuvenated the next. Leaves that turned brown and fell were replaced immediately with new growth, as if the garden moved at its own pace and didn't
wait for our seasons.

  I failed to register the heavy clunk of a car door, until I heard him call my name and immediately my mental portcullis trundled into life. Another blackbird flew out of the ivy above my head, swooped low over the garden and perched on the stone wall, distracting me for a few seconds. When I turned back to watch Richard passing under the honeysuckle, the clouds blew away again and the afternoon sun framed his tall figure as he fought his way through the overgrown bowers. My heart quickened. Today he wore no jacket, just a white shirt with a tie. You might wonder why I mention it, but this, for Richard Downing, was shockingly undone and very nearly casual.

  "Come to see what I’m up to?" I yelled. "Or did you plan to volunteer your services? There’s another shovel in the shed, if you’re interested." I didn’t think, even for a minute, that he came to help with the gardening. It would mess up his shoes and his spotless, white shirt. But I liked pricking at his temper. Frustrated by me, he could barely exhale in my presence. One of these days, he would just pop like a balloon.

  He and his lawyers maintained that Uncle Bob never owned that house. According to them, my family were merely squatters here, or, as Richard so charmingly put it – cuckoos. He expected me to step down from my claim, of course, and concede to his almighty superiority. When I, the newly assertive Grace, rebelled and clung to the house like the ivy on its walls, he set his team of lawyers to the task of proving his case.

  "I didn’t want to do this," he’d said to me. "But if you insist—"

  "Get on with it then."

  A few days ago, after Uncle Bob’s funeral, we’d had our first meeting with the lawyers in Yarmouth. To prove his case, Richard had an entire folder stuffed with impressive-looking papers, garnished with seals and embossed with stamps. His lawyers treated me in such a condescending manner, I was surprised they didn’t offer me a lollipop on the way out, while Richard continued to look at me as if I was unhinged and likely to stab someone, should I get my hands on a sharp object. As they threw their legal terms and Latin phrases over my head, I turned to Uncle Bob’s solicitor, hoping for a well thought out, concise and swiftly effective defense of my case. He was fast asleep, or passed out drunk. I couldn’t be sure which, but his breath, blown across me in regular intervals, suggested the latter.

  Afterwards, I’d taken a stroll along the seafront, watching gulls glide overhead, the sea breeze clearing away cobwebs and putting color back in my cheeks, as effectively as a good, hard slap across the face with a tennis racket. That day the clouds were low, rolling across the waves and kicking up a fine mist of salty rain.

  Where was the end of time? Was it out there, somewhere to be reached by ship? Or was it here, at Souls Dryft?

  In the taxi, on the way back to the Inn, I made my decision. I packed my bag, paid my bill and came out to the house. I rang my mother, just before I checked out, and her main concern – which, in all fairness, probably should have been mine too— was whether I’d found another job yet, surreptitiously suggesting I was the only person in the world who couldn’t find one. Everyone she knew had work to go to, proper work, not "scribbling stories". Even someone called Norma’s sister’s cousin’s niece, had a nice teaching job at a private school and she’d only just got her degree.

  Stupidly I expected my family’s support in this quest to save Uncle Bob’s house.

  "That old place needs far too much work, Grace," my father said worriedly, before handing the phone back to my mother.

  "It’s time you stopped with these pie-in-the-sky ideas, Grace," she exclaimed. "I’m sure Richard knows best." They didn’t even know him, yet they took his side over mine. "Marian’s sold several properties for him, you know. He’s a very successful land developer, very savvy. He knows what he’s doing."

  Unlike me, of course.

  "I do hope you haven’t been rude to him, Grace. You can be so abrasive."

  So I moved into the house to protect it from his pirate villainy. Uncle Bob, Genny – and all the others – were relying on me to save that house from his clutches. I hired some local workmen, but they spent most of their time gorging themselves on biscuits and copious amounts of tea – when they weren’t laughing at my underwear on the washing line.

  Finding me gone from the Inn, Richard must have assumed that his humorless legal team scared me into defeat. Today, he found he was wrong and they’d failed.

  Looking impeccable as usual, he stepped gingerly along the wooden planks forming a makeshift path across the mud. I was painfully conscious of my tattered state in comparison to his. My clothes were filthy already. I had no hope of a bath, because I couldn’t figure out how to get hot water through the plumbing.

  "I see you’ve moved yourself in," he muttered.

  "Yep." Truth be told, I couldn’t afford to stay at the Inn any longer. Unlike this annoying construct of my imagination, I did not have a seemingly endless supply of money.

  I could almost hear the cogwheels of Richard’s mind grinding and clicking through options of dealing with this. Before he could speak, his phone rattled to life and he turned away.

  Wiping my filthy hands on my equally filthy t-shirt, I went inside to make a cup of tea. If Richard Downing hung around me much longer, he’d soon suffer a few stains. As he said once himself, I was an accident waiting to happen; he ought to stay away if he meant to keep that shirt so crisp and clean.

  However, his footsteps followed mine, drawn by something beyond his haughty self-control.

  Stepping down into the house, I rested my hand on the stone wall and felt that childish excitement, like an electric buzz. Sometimes I had quick glimpses of the other folk who lived there, especially when I came in suddenly and caught them unawares, going through their daily tasks, taking care of the house. Almost as soon as I saw them, they were gone again, but with each passing day their images lingered a little longer, as if they grew accustomed to me.

  My daydreams drifted by like feathery clouds, the kind Aunt Rose would have called mare’s tails. And then I came back to reality, such as it was.

  He stopped in the doorway, bending his head to fit under the low lintel.

  "I’ve only got tea," I said. "Suppose you want some?"

  He hesitated. "Sure. Thanks." Now he came all the way in, looking around, eyes slightly puzzled, mostly annoyed, as they often were in my presence. "I don’t understand why you’re hanging onto this eccentric notion, Grace. Your great uncle had no right to leave this house to you. It wasn’t his to give. Those are facts. You’re being illogical."

  I sighed heavily. "But you don’t want this house. You want to kill it."

  "Kill it? The last I checked it didn’t have a pulse."

  Ah, that’s where he was wrong. I spun around and suddenly found him closer than expected. "Surely you can buy some other poor old house, on which to work out your frustrations and your Freudian control issues." I poked him in the chest with the muddy finger of my gardening glove. "You’re not having this one!"

  Looking down at the mark on his shirt, he drew a deep breath, struggling to keep his patience and his composure.

  "Maybe," I added, removing my gloves with a dramatic flourish, "you ought to let your temper out, once in a while, for a nice gallop. Then you might not be so bottled up and need to smash other people’s homes all to pieces, just to make you feel better, you wretched … pirate."

  Today I was a warrior woman flourishing the pennant of my family’s pride. If there was a clock, it would stop ticking. The house held its breath.

  Abruptly the old teakettle broke the trance with an ear-piercing whistle. I almost forgot the cloth for the handle, but Richard passed it to me, saving my hand from a nasty burn. He began lecturing me on the conduction of heat, as if I just came out of an alien pod and knew nothing about life on Earth. I poured water into the teapot, trying to ignore his closeness. But it wasn’t just the physical space being encroached upon. The pirate laid siege to all my senses.

  "What exactly do you think you can do with this house
then?" he exclaimed. "If I’m going to kill it, what’s your plan?"

  "I’ll renovate this place and bring it back to its former glory."

  The breeze gathered strength, dispersing the smoky clouds. Sunlight warmed the flagstones, staining them buttercup yellow. Now, entranced by the image of myself painting, plastering and wielding a hammer, I got a little carried away. Perhaps I’d be in a magazine – one of those glossy, ideal home publications – with a story about how I rescued the house from the bulldozers.

  Richard sputtered scornfully. "Do you have any idea how much that would cost? The only thing to do with this place is knock it down and sell the land. This is prime —"

  "I’ll manage."

  He scratched his big nose in a quick, frustrated motion.

  "Why don’t you go back to more important things, Downing? Surely you’re neglecting business. Don’t you have other, bigger ships to seize and plunder?"

  I half expected him to yell, "You’ve not heard the last of this, lady," just like a cartoon villain, and race off in a squeal of tires. Instead, he pulled up a chair and waited for his cup of tea. For some equally bizarre reason, I poured it.

  "I wouldn’t put too much work into it yet." He tossed in several heaping spoonfuls of sugar, stirring just a little too hard. "Don’t bankrupt yourself over something that will only be dust in a few months." It wasn’t the first time he was so indelicate as to mention my state of near poverty.

  "All you think about is money!"

  "Naturally, you’re too spiritually advanced to ever think about it."

  I scowled.

  "You can’t win," he added quietly. His words drifted with the sunbeams, hovering in the air. "I’ve offered you a compromise – a generous one. I don’t understand what else you want, Grace."

  I thought about that, staring past him to the window. "Happiness," I said. "I suppose that’s all I really want. Happiness."

  His gaze rippled over me. "Okay, little Orphan Annie."

  With a sigh I slammed the kettle down.