by Priya Sharma
“It could have been a stray dog,” John said.
The sheep stared at them, accusation in its fixed eyes.
“It was Sweetheart,” Thomas replied.
“You can’t be sure.”
“Why do you think she’s run off?”
Nancy sat by Thomas’s legs, her presence giving her impunity, but Sweetheart was nowhere to be seen.
A crow landed nearby and paraded around the corpse. The bird’s liquid black eyes were shiny and dead looking. When Gideon shooed it away it squawked at him and flapped its angry wings.
“I need to find her,” Thomas announced. “Get rid of that sheep. Bury it or something.”
“Thomas, let me help you.”
“I don’t need your help. She’s just a dog.” Thomas turned away from John.
“Don’t be like that. You know what I mean. You don’t have to do this on your own.”
Thomas picked up his pace, leaving them behind.
“What will you do?” John called after him. “Thomas, what will you do?”
* * *
The pail clinked as Gideon shut the barn door. It was his turn to do the milking. There was the rotten, sweet smell of the hay. The docile cows in their stalls sniffed at it with their delicate pink noses.
A noise from the corner startled Gideon. Thomas sat cross-legged on the floor, his dog in his lap. Sweetheart shivered and shook. As Gideon came closer, treading slowly so not to startle them, he could see it was more than a fever. Sweetheart’s eyes were glassy in her seizure. Her rigid legs jerked. She had wet herself, the urine staining Thomas’s trousers in dark, irregular patches.
Knowing the severity of her crime, Sweetheart had stayed away all day, finally coming home to Ormesleep, where Thomas had found her as she hid in the barn. Telltale blood caked the fur of her muzzle. The sight made Gideon’s heart lurch in his chest.
Sweetheart stopped fitting and lay there panting. “I’m here now. I’ll look after you,” Thomas crooned, putting his head against hers. At the sound of his voice, her tail thumped the ground.
The long barrel of the shotgun glinted from where it was propped against the wall. The oiled dark metal waited patiently, knowing it wouldn’t be long. Thomas rocked back and to in a motion normally reserved for calming fractious infants.
“Is she all right?” Gideon took a few more steps.
Thomas looked up, his unguarded face contorted. The tears gathering in his eyes now spilled down his cheeks. Sweetheart tried to lick them away. “Go away.”
“Shall I get my dad?”
“No! Just go away!” Sweetheart became fretful at the sound of her master shouting so Thomas lowered his voice. “Get out.”
“You don’t have to do this on your own.” His father’s words came out. His father would know how to help. And Gideon wanted to help Sweetheart. He wanted to help Thomas.
“She’s mine. This is my business.” Thomas looked at Gideon as though he’d put a knife in him. “Stop looking at me.”
Gideon put out a hand.
“Stop looking at me.” Thomas’s lip curled into a lupine snarl, threatening to bite if Gideon came too close.
Gideon ran outside. The abandoned pail clattered on the cobbles. He knew his father would have wanted him to fetch him, but it didn’t seem right to. He had already intruded. He dithered in the yard. There was a ring around the moon to warm it, in shades of green and red. It would be a cold night.
The gunshot rang out. It was so loud that it filled the yard, and then the fields around Ormesleep Farm and then all of Ormeshadow itself. Gideon was surprised it took so long for the rest of the Belmans to come running from the house.
Treasure in Her Belly
IT WAS AUTUMN, BUT up on the Orme there were the last vestiges of summer in the warmth that lingered on the breeze. Down in the valley the leaves were already the colour of claret. Gideon loved autumn. It was the time of year that he filled his pockets with treasures. Rich conkers, smooth once prised from their spiky shells. Acorns in their cups. Then suddenly, the trees were bonfires. The blaze of reds and yellows burnt the boughs to stark blackness.
Here in Ormeshadow, autumn meant toil. A shoring up against winter. Stubble smoked from the harvested fields and wood was stacked under cover to season. There was foraging for nuts and berries. In every kitchen things were smoked or pickled and packed in stone jars.
Knowing the winter months would mean more time confined to the farm, Gideon and his father came up to the Orme as often as they could.
“Dad, where did the chair come from?”
“What, son?”
“The one in the kitchen, with the carvings on it.”
Gideon studied the chair whenever he was alone, which wasn’t often as the kitchen was the hub of the house. His fingers traced out the patterns on the back. Dragons and skeletons entwined with crowns, necklaces, lances, and swords. There were coins marked with long dead faces and rings set with gems. A hoard of treasure. The arms and legs were dragons, pockmarked with holes from greedy woodworms. Regal and dilapidated, the chair sat at the head of the Belman table.
Once his father sat in it at supper. Uncle Thomas took a seat on the far end of one of the benches, simmering just below the point of eruption, as though some unpardonable breach of etiquette had occurred.
“You mean the dragon chair.” There was no other chair in the house, only benches and stools. “It’s been in the family for generations.”
“It’s very fancy.”
“Once a man offered my grandfather his finest thoroughbred horse for it, but he wouldn’t have it.”
“Is it worth that much?”
“Something’s only worth what a man is willing to pay for it.”
“Why didn’t he sell it?”
“It’s a family heirloom.” His father’s pause added drama. “And it’s a treasure map of the Orme.”
Gideon rolled his eyes and play punched him in the ribs. They fought until they were laughing so hard that Gideon got a stitch.
“I’m serious.”
“About what?” Gideon wiped his eyes.
“It’s a map. The carvings reveal where the treasure is. If only I knew how to read it.”
Gideon laughed again.
“If you don’t believe me, ask your uncle Thomas. There’s not a Belman man or woman who doesn’t know the tale.”
“Except me. And Mother.”
John stopped smiling and put his hands in his pockets. “I meant to tell you all the Orme stories, but I wasn’t sure if we’d ever come back here.”
Gideon wanted to bite his own tongue off. With a few words he’d made his father sad. He tried to rally him.
“What would a dragon want with treasure?”
“Dragons are like magpies. They like sparkling, glittering things. Things fashioned from the bounty of the earth, gems and metals from deep in the ground. Some people used to think gold attracts dragons, but I don’t know if it isn’t dragons that attract gold.”
“Who made the chair?”
“Jonah Belman. He was your great-great-great-grandfather.”
Gideon whistled as he tried to imagine someone so old.
“Jonah wasn’t much of a sheep farmer, but he had a talent. He knew wood.” John snorted. “Jonah’s carving. Thomas and his dogs. Me and my book learning. Your mother, the seamstress. All that skill languishing in Ormeshadow. Anyway, Jonah was a dreamer who could spend hours whittling at wood, looking for the shapes in it. So when an afternoon went by and he hadn’t come home no one was surprised. But when night fell his wife got worried. As dreamy as he was, his stomach normally brought him back to the real world.
“In the end Jonah was gone for three whole weeks. His family thought he’d been swallowed by the sea. They found him wandering on the Orme, raving. His arm was broken. His clothes were in tatters and he’d grown a beard.”
“Where’d he been?”
“No one ever found out. He said he fell down a hole and landed in the belly of th
e Orme. And he was thin because down in the dark all there was to eat were tiny blind fish that lived in rock pools. He could tell how far he’d fallen from a single shaft of light streaming into the darkness. He was lucky he didn’t snap his neck when he landed.”
John Belman spoke as if he’d heard the story from Jonah himself.
“What’s that got to do with treasure?”
“Seawater and treasure were what he found there.”
“In her belly?”
“Dragons have as many bellies as cows, and not all for food.”
“That’s silly.”
“No! Listen! There’s gold under the Orme. Jonah carved it all into a chair.”
Gideon thought of the sceptre and the crown.
“So why didn’t he go back and get it?”
“He didn’t want it. He said if anyone else did they’d have to work it out for themselves from the chair. He was a delicate soul by all accounts. People said a stint underground sent him mad.” John looked at him sideways. “Do you hold such baubles and trinkets to be the most valuable things in the world?”
Gideon considered the question.
“No, not to have riches for themselves, but I care for what you can do with them.”
“And what would you do with a fortune?”
“I’d buy us a house of our own in Bath, with a library full of books stacked from floor to ceiling. There’d be a wardrobe full of pretty dresses to make Mother happy.”
His father laughed. “What about you? What would you want for yourself?”
Gideon nearly replied, My own room with a big bed in it and a window but thought better of it.
“I’d learn everything there is to know and give lectures at the assembly rooms for everyone who wants to listen.”
His father used to take him to the assembly rooms in Bath. He didn’t understand all of the lectures, but he watched the upturned, eager faces of the audience and their animated conversations afterward.
“Dad, what was important to Jonah, then, if he didn’t care for gold?”
“Gideon, I think when a man has spent three weeks down in a hole with no food, no warmth, and no hope of rescue, surrounded by a king’s ransom, he comes to understand the true value of things.”
They walked on, Gideon considering the lesson in this.
An Argument
GIDEON WOKE UP IN the dark. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was, even though he’d slept in the closet for years.
Once, soon after their arrival, Maud made Charity sleep in the closet and put Gideon in the bed upstairs with the boys. The girl had screamed loud enough to wake the dead as soon as the door was shut on her. Maud left her there, angry because Charity never minded anything she was told.
That night Samuel had stayed awake, kicking Gideon as soon as he drifted off into dreaming. When Gideon finally kicked him back, Samuel ran from the room and told his uncle. John Belman came in and sat at Gideon’s feet, admonishing him for his ingratitude when his cousins had been so welcoming toward him. He was disappointed. Very disappointed.
Samuel swung on the bedpost as Gideon received his telling off. Charity’s screeching continued from below and everyone was secretly glad when Thomas came home and bellowed at Charity that if she didn’t stop crying he would give her something to cry about.
The next night Charity had her own bed, as narrow as a plank, in the attic, and Gideon was glad to return to the privacy of his closet.
Lying in the dark, Gideon could hear someone moving about in the kitchen. He got up and peeped through the gap in the door panels, expecting Thomas. The figure lit a lamp and put it down before him on the table. In the smoking yellow light, Gideon could see it was his father.
John Belman took off his coat and sat in the dragon chair. Gideon opened the door a fraction, ready to go to him, despite the late hour, but another voice stopped him.
“John?”
It was his mother, her voice full of unfamiliar timidity.
“John, is that you?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t turn to her. Gideon wasn’t used to this indifference. Whenever John Belman came into a room, he always sought out his wife’s face first.
“John, it’s late. Come to bed.”
His father snorted.
“Come to bed, love. Please. We can talk there. We’ll wake Gideon if we stay here.”
“I’m forever at your bidding, aren’t I?” Such unaccustomed sharpness.
Gideon waited for the flash of anger that was his mother through and through. Instead she was meek when she put out the candle she carried and sat beside her husband.
“I was frightened. You went off in such a state.” She still looked frightened, even though he was back.
“Where’s Thomas?” John asked.
“He went out soon after you.”
“Is Maud back?”
“No. Not yet.” Maud had been gone for a full day, helping Mother Wainwright to deliver Hettie Dorcus’s baby.
“Were you glad to see her out of the way?”
“It wasn’t like that!” Clare hissed, showing some of her mettle. “It wasn’t planned!”
“Don’t you dare speak to me in that tone. Don’t you dare so much as look at me the wrong way ever again!”
John Belman was furious. He leant over, the back of his hand raised. Clare sat, transfixed, not making a sound. Gideon’s cry stuck in his throat and he thought it would choke him.
“Go on, do it, then, if it’ll make you feel better.” The look on Clare’s face suggested that making him feel better was the last thing on her mind. They waited for the blow to fall. John’s hand hovered, already losing momentum.
“Clare, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” John reached for her. “I don’t know what came over me.”
She flinched even though the danger had passed. His face hardened.
“It would suit you well, wouldn’t it? For me to be the villain. In all these years I’ve never put an angry hand on you.”
“No, John. It’s my fault. It’s always my fault, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, you know.”
“No, tell me.”
“You still blame me for us having to leave Bath. You miss your pens and papers and precious library.”
“When have I ever blamed you?”
“No, you never said it aloud. But you didn’t blame your precious Lord Bellingham, either, did you?”
“I resigned, didn’t I? It was the greatest protest I could make.”
“If I’d been you and a man embarrassed my wife that way I would have taken him outside and bloodied his face!” Clare’s whispering was loud and angry.
“Clare, he was a muddled, lonely old man. Sometimes he got confused. What he said was improper, yes, but he never touched you, did he? He never harmed you.”
“Harm? Harm?” They were locked together, struggling over their discordant truths. “No harm that you were left without references and no work to go to. No harm when my reputation was questioned when it was him who told me to sit on his knee in front of all those fine people. No harm when we had to leave our home.”
“We have a roof over our heads and a living.”
“Yes, scraping in the dirt.”
“So this is why you did it, Clare? To punish me?”
What had she done that was so terrible? Gideon tried to think what it might have been, but there was nothing.
Meanwhile, John and Clare were no further on. The argument was circling back to the start.
“I love you,” he said.
“You say you love me. I hear the words, but I don’t feel them. How can I not feel them?”
“I don’t know. I tell you every day. I don’t know what other people mean when they say I love you, but I know what I mean and it’s the same every time I say it. It means I will be loyal, I will be faithful, I will be gentle, and I will be kind.”
Clare shrugged, unimpressed by kindness.
“Teach me, then. Teach me what it is you want.”
“I can’t. It’s either in you or it isn’t.”
“And it’s in Thomas?” His voice was flint.
“No.” She sounded confused. “Yes.”
“Then it’s in me, too.” They were oblivious to everything now. The world had been reduced to only the two of them in a circle of lamplight.
“No, it’s not. You’re saying what you think I want to hear.”
“Clare, I don’t understand you. What do you want?”
“I want the sort of love that can’t be cured.” The words bubbled up. “The sort of love you’d kill for. Die for.”
The dragon chair screeched as John jumped up. He seized her shoulders, forcing her to her feet. She was a rag doll in his hands.
“Isn’t it better to have the sort of love that you live for?”
Her mouth was sullen, like Charity’s when she’d been thwarted.
“If I died for you, would that prove how much I love you? Would it?” John didn’t release her.
She didn’t answer him. Nothing was right. Nothing he said. Nothing he could do. Gideon wanted to shout. To make her listen. To break her stubborn silence. He knew he wouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t trespass.
John let her go and she dropped back onto the bench.
“Go back to bed,” he told her. He put on his coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Never you mind.”
“You won’t go looking for Thomas, will you?”
“No.” John’s voice was like a knife’s edge. It was a mistake to say his brother’s name.
“When will you come back?”
“I said go to bed.”
Clare obeyed. John blew out the lamp. He sat like a king stripped of everything but his throne, which was only a fancy wooden chair carved with imagined beasts. John cried.
Gideon hesitated. He’d never seen his father cry before and it frightened him. He wanted him to stop. He was fused to the floor by the cold that numbed his feet. It kept him there as his father left, quietly closing the farmhouse door behind him.
Gideon ran to the door when he could finally move, suddenly more afraid of his father’s absence than his tears. “Dad?”