Singing My Sister Down and other stories Page 11

  She comes to him. She twirls. She passes on.

  She did not even see him, I think.

  And he, he might not care a jot; he reaches for the next raggy woman in her garish dress, with her eye-paint and her brass earrings and her mouth like a hole in her face, and he spins her too, as if she were noble as his lady.

  ‘Strike me!’ I’m saying in the bushes. ‘Knock me down with a goose-feather! What’s the man up to?’

  I keep watching. I think, maybe the third time he’ll have built up rage enough to strike at the minx’s heart. But the third time passes, and the seventh, and the twelfth. All the magic numbers pass, and then the music changes, and a shout goes up, and each man takes hold of the woman in front of him, and some men grasp men and some women women, and the big circle breaks up into many smaller circles. Mullord, he isn’t lost in there – he’s taller, and cleaner of skin, and smoother-haired than any of them – but he’s as lost as a lord can be among rag-tags, a witch in his arms and his wife in the arms of a fox-eating thief.

  I don’t see the moment his lady notices him, whether she has the grace to startle, or whether she cries out in joy to see him there, the best of both her worlds dancing at the same fire. But I see them partnered in the dance, just like gipsies, as if they care no more and no less for each other than for any of the mad-caps whirling around them. They move on with no glance back, but give themselves entirely to the next man, the next woman the dance whirls into their path.

  But she deserves killing, for what she does to Mullord’s heart! She deserves beating at least for stupidity, running away from the finest, wisest lord that ever lived. And here he is – he lets her play, lets her have her way, never shows her the pain she causes him. She dances, and he dances with her as if none of it mattered: not her night’s carousing in the courtyard of his keep; not her snuffing out the life, perhaps, of good loyal Minnow; not our long ride after her over the hills and down the Plunge—

  ’Tis I who hold the mattering, the bitterness, on his behalf, on behalf of us all. I hold and stir and carry it back and forth among the bushes, until it curdles into a poor kind of sleep. All night I lie where I can lift my head and see the fire and the dancers, where I can hear a change – though no change comes – in the music or the mood, where I can wait in sick discomfort, for morning and for sanity.

  As night lifts into the first grey of dawn, I walk the curving road around Heaven Seat. Mullord has gone on ahead to fetch our horses. I’m to walk the mistress – on the keep’s best mount, that she helped herself to – around by the road to meet him.

  I feel as if I’ve breakfasted on grit, as if sand has been rubbed into my eyes, as if moss-clumps have been shaken through my clothes and left them damp and itchy. I’ve dreamed so many endings to these dreadful days, I cannot tell whether this is just more dreaming.

  And when she speaks, I cannot tell if it’s her or my own mind speaking. Her voice is ragged from the long night’s singing and smoke.

  ‘You don’t care greatly for me, do you, Berry?’

  ‘It is not my place to think of you any particular way, Mistress,’ I say, without turning to her.

  ‘I asked you a question; have the grace to answer it.’ The voice is soft and rough, and perhaps knows my answer already.

  Field and forest are utterly silent around us. It’s that moment when the birds pause between waking and heralding the dawn. The road leads us into thicker grey air, full of silty shapes that might become green, might become brown, with time, with light. I search my own grey heart for some truth. It’s a long search, while the horse idles along beside me, his great warm head at my shoulder.

  The mistress makes some patient movement with her arm, perhaps to push her loosening hair from her eyes. The expensive sound of sleeve against bodice enrages me anew. A dress such as my Gerdie would never dream to wear, the new dress, freshly boned and beaded and trimmed, in which Madam made her first grand entrance into the keep two nights ago, graciously acknowledging the gipsies’ yodels of admiration – now that rich dress is singed, and splashed with wine, and its lace-bands are torn off and given to some witch-woman back at the wagon. Hours of work, it will take, to bring it back from such a state, hours Mullord will go sleepless about his duties, hours the mistress will no doubt sleep away in her feather bed, aware of naught but her own comfort.

  I wait to speak, until I know my voice will not shake with anger. ‘Mullord sees something in you,’ I finally say, ‘beyond your beauty and beyond your rage at the world. If he sees it, I believe it must be there.’

  She gives a tiny, mirthless laugh. We round the bend beside the Seat. Up among the trees a horse greets the master with a whinny.

  ‘Continue, Berry.’

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘My lord sees something in me, you say. But does Berry see?’ She’s not jesting; she’s asking me for a piece of myself, without telling me how she’ll use it; whether she’ll toss it away, and Berry with it, or hold it in her heart to fester and poison my life with.

  I stroke the bay’s head for comfort. There’s no care inside that great skull; nothing will ever come out of those tunnel nostrils, that soft-leather mouth, but grassy air.

  ‘Why, I see the rage, as we all do. And I see the beauty, for no one could miss that either.’ That prickle of lightning, which doesn’t know its own power.

  The tree-shadows muffle nothing – not my voice, not the mistress’s fine ears. ‘But the other thing – I cannot lie to you, Mistress. I do not see it.’

  We wait at the bottom of the path. The sun creaks a little higher at the edge of the world, and I can see the mistress’s face composed, raised to the scrubby hillside, her beauty no less for the absence of its usual colour, for the shadows exhaustion has painted around her eyes.

  ‘I will tell you, Berry,’ she says, her voice broken to a croak, ‘I cannot see that other thing either.’

  And in that moment I glimpse it, in that ruefulness, in that bearing. Danced to a rag and faced by only herself in the morning, still she is straight-backed and undiminished.

  She turns to me, and a comb from her head tinkles to the road. The hair falls sumptuous on her shoulders, unrolls down her back, pools in her lap. She meets my eye, her face white and cool.

  ‘So we must both trust my lord’s sight,’ she whispers, ‘and hold onto that trust, mustn’t we? ’Tis all either of us can do.’

  I bend to retrieve the comb. As I straighten, I find myself smiling. I have never looked her full in the face before.

  She does not smile back; I never expected that. There won’t ever, I don’t think, be smiles and kindnesses out of this Mullady. She regards me a moment longer with her shadowed eyes. Then she turns her head, and I turn mine, and we both are still, listening to the master and horses come down the hill.

  I LOVED ANNIE STORK and she loved me. We never done the dancy-dancy, but I most certainly thought we would end up wed. I were looking babies into that girl’s eyes, even if I weren’t putting them into her below.

  So smack yourself, Arlen Michaels, smack yourself in the head and get out of this bush and away from here. What do you want to cause yourself such pain for? You ought try always, don’t Nanna say, to add to the tally of happinesses in the world and good works, in everything you do. You ought be trying for no one’s harm.

  Well, I aren’t. No one’s harm at all. Or at least no one’s but my own, and what should that matter?

  Ooh, there sounds the horn, off among the trees. Soon they’ll be here, and I won’t have the choice to run off. I dither, bunching my shirt-neck with my nervous hands. The white ribands loll down from the trees all round the clearing. How can I bear to walk away from them? How can I bear to stay? All those small evidences of the Lord-son’s riches are like this, like watching Baker Marten pull from his oven some vast cake I will never get a piece of.

  Now it’s voices. Some of them still sing the song that swept the happy pair out of town. Some call and laugh over the music. The footfalls of th
e two horses thud uneven and slow through the whole hill. Now it is too late; now I must stay put or I’ll be seen. Fool. Knot-head. What are you doing, hiding, peeping, like Dotty Cinders through women’s winders? Why aren’t you off fishing or dogging or being of some useful help to someone?

  There’s movement, the colour on something, the Lord-son’s sleeve, maybe, or that cloth around the horse that is like a broidered tent. Hup, here they come.

  The leaves wag in front of my face, in front of my great sad sigh. Here come the two splendid lord’s beasts in their tents, and borne upon their backs the Lord-son in his robes and Annie Stork in her bride-raiment, oh my gracious, white as a waterfall and with that yellow cloak over all, stiff with gold-thread embroidery. Don’t know why you’re so surprised, Arlen. You saw all this down in the square before you took flight up here. Don’t know why your heart is choosing now to split, tube from chamber and all your blood pour out the opening.

  The servants help the bride down. The picture comes to me of Annie when she were little, sitting on her step, her white aproned lap full of pine-seeds; she were pinching the skins off them one by one like you do, chattering like she’d never stop. She’s another creature now, in that dress and bearing. She’ll never be back on her step and simply dressed, shining with her own beauty alone and unbejewelled. Likely I’ll never speak to her again – or she to me except as a high to a lowling, thanking me for some service – holding the gate, maybe, for her to pass through on a grand horse such as this – for they have plenty of horses, the Lord and his son. Likely she’ll call me Mister Michaels then, not Arlen, not you great puddin-head as she did when I tickled her that time, not darlin as she said once, very low and growly and daring, and quite near her parents’ ears.

  Now they have all sailed into the clearing like ships into harbour, the whole party. Horses are tethered, cloths are spread, baskets are swung down from shoulders. The clean faces of the High House, with their ornamental collars below and their headwears above, laugh and smile and look about with pleasure. ‘What a lovely setting!’ says one of the ladies, and everyone agrees: ‘Lovely. Lovely.’

  I’m an only son, I said to my friend Tater, sticking my chin out.

  Uh-huh? He peered at me as if he couldn’t believe me. So?

  So I’ll come into the house, one day. I’ll come into that little bit of land, and whatever stock—

  Tater went weak at the knees with laughing. He leaned against the front of the Eel and Basket and shook. I looked very frosty at him, but he only laughed even harder.

  Eventually he knew better than to laugh on, or I would have thumped him. But your Gramp’s got to die first, he spluttered. And then your dad! And even then, she’d have to share with that fierce ould Nanna of yours and that mother! That mother! I’d be looking to share a rolling barrel with ten pound of sharp rocks before I’d move into your house with that tongue and those eyes!

  Truly I never thought the thing so hopeless until he said that. That’s how far a girl’s smile and a girl’s shape can bend the world for you.

  But she did love me; she said so! You’re a fine man, Arlen Michaels, she said out back of the Eel at Midsummer, and she’d had only a little ale. And you’ve a good heart. I can still feel her finger, poking me in the chest – that finger there with its rings, that hand in its Lord’s hand, the lace cuff resting across the knuckles in the sunshine.

  Those lips so graciously smiling now, I can still feel their kiss on my mouth. I floated home that Midsummer Eve, tipping the fieldwalls and the treetops with my toes. The future ran out ahead of me like a carpet roll kicked open down the Town Hall steps. Kisses, wedding, children; step, step, step. And on all sides, people clapping me on the back, people smiling – yes, even my mam. One touch of Annie Stork’s lips and everything remade itself around me full of hope and sweetness.

  But then, as I’m waiting for my next chance for kisses – still floating a little from the first one, even, still surviving on that – Mam brings the news home, don’t she, of Lord Gowper’s son returning from his uncle’s, of that launderer’s girl Annie Stork catching his eye.

  She’s pretty enough, said Nanna. You can see why she would.

  Mam shafted me with one of her side glances, where I sat by the door, blown from a day’s ditch-digging for Parson Hubble and with my face already burning from what she’d said. Been saving herself for some such, that one. Always thought herself above the wash.

  Too good to slap and scrub, eh? said Nan with a cackle.

  Unless a lord’s soft hand is doing the slapping, it seems.

  They’ve done with eating, now. The lutenist is picking out something slow, and some of them are drooping and sliding to their cushions. Annie Stork isn’t among the droopers. She’s upright and thoughtful, as if she must keep watch on all the happenings, to make sure they don’t tatter into dreams and she find herself in her grey smock again, a lone laundry-maid sitting in an empty clearing.

  ‘Rest awhile, my love,’ says her new husband, touching her gleaming sleeve.

  ‘No, I must . . . go into the forest,’ she says with her new accent all clear and cool, and a modesty that no other laundress in the town would show.

  ‘Who can accompany you?’ he says, half-sitting up.

  ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I’ll not go far.’

  And up she gets and comes straight for me! She’s seen me, my great eyes, she’s felt me staring all through the picnic and the entertainments, she’s out to tear me from the bush here and shame me and send me away! Or worse, she’ll make her toilet behind this very bush, within my sight and hearing, unaware of me. I huddle and freeze and burn while she passes.

  She goes, thank God, quite far in among the trees. Not invisibly far – I can still see her head when she stops, before and after she squats, while she bends and turns, arranging her clothing. I can see that when she’s done, she glances back towards the clearing, then turns and makes off away, farther into the forest.

  I come alive all over in that serious way, as when you first see the bunny you’re going to have that night for dinner, and your full attention fixes to the back of its neck and tells the rest of you exactly what to do. There was something un-bridely in that glance of Annie’s, something serious and certain, something that calculated her chances. I get out of that bush – I swear, without a rustle, I’m so intent – and I follow her.

  Quickly she goes, down to the stream. She takes off her embroidered slippers and gathers her cloak and her skirts and underskirts all up and steps sure-footed across the water-glazed stones. Then up the steeper far bank she goes, yellow and white and glittering against its darkness, thin black branches hurrying down across the shape of her. I can’t follow her yet; it’s too open. Once she tops the slope and goes on, I will come out of the thicket here. I’ll go wide, so that if she comes back on a sudden she’ll not see me.

  But she stops, halfway up the bank. She turns to the left and runs lightly along it, quite far and I can’t follow yet. Then she pauses where the trees thicken, just under a spreading ash there, and she moves about only a little, seeking something.

  I am watching her closely. I am straining my eyes and my hunter’s skin and my hunter’s mind. When she finds what she’s after, my shoulders drop, as hers do, with the relief of it. There you are, her whole body seems to say. Who is it? I search the forest in front of her, but I can’t see no one.

  She steps forward. She bends low.

  ‘Milady?’

  Annie Stork snaps upright. I jolt like a startled cat myself. It’s one of the ladies, calling out from the clearing.

  ‘I’m coming!’ Annie calls, her voice all panic and guilt, and she runs back along the slope.

  ‘Do you need assistance?’ cries the lady.

  ‘No, no,’ says Annie from the far side of the stream. ‘I’m coming back now.’ Quickly she steps across, and then stamps her feet dry in the grass there, and pushes them into the slippers, and smooths her skirts. Then she pauses, right by my thicket. I dr
op my gaze so my eyes won’t draw hers. She’s close enough for me to reach through these leaves and touch the gold thread upon her yellow cloak. I could whisper, and she would hear, and those up above in the clearing would not. I could grasp that white neck and bring her down, so sudden and strong she’d not have time to utter.

  As if she heard that thought, Annie puts her white hand with its rings to her collared throat. She looks up towards the clearing and she calms herself, breathing deeply twice, huffing the breaths out. And she sets off up the slope, not hurrying now, step by slow step, a laundress no more.

  The blood beats in my head and hands as I watch her go. I don’t move until I hear people greet her and scold her up there. Then I’m across the sunlit stream in three quick strides, up the soft dark slope beyond. I follow the trail of her small disturbances in the thick leaf-mould along the slope.

  When I get there I can’t see anything. My hunter’s mind has left me, that clearest, cleverest ice-drop at the centre that knows things without words or doubt. I’m just a boy peering around in a forest, not knowing what to look for. There’s no extra movement anywhere, no sound, nothing furtive. Only forest going about its quiet business.

  I’m about to bend as Annie did when I see it: a scrap of sacking wedged in a fork of the ash, just above my head. The two rotted ends dangle.

  Seeing the sky through their weave, I don’t want to look below. My hunter’s mind says to me, Turn and go, while you still can choose. This, you don’t want to know.

  Anyone watching would think the air had turned to aspic, is how long it takes me to lower myself. The rest of the cloth is a flat tangle on the forest floor, near invisible. My hand goes out to it snail-slow. The very tips of my fingers catch the edge of the sacking, and lift it through the thickened air, and cast it back.

  Underneath is other cloth, finer, paler, with a shape inside. I don’t want to touch it. And you don’t have to, says my hunter’s mind. See? You’ve a second chance to walk away. Take it, take it. Go. My breath, through my teeth, sounds like a straw broom sweeping a stone step.