Well, the problem with creatures is how they latch onto you with their eyes, and the smaller and skinnier the creature, the bigger and more determined the eyes. “Take him back,” she told them, but they danced away and meanwhile the thing managed to scruffle its front half up onto her lap faster than she could push it off. She turned impatient with Eammon, who just grinned and said, “He likes you, all right.”
What was left of her heart sank for being burdened yet again with attachment.
The next quarter hour was spent digging the creature out of her sleeve or from under her skirt or trying to untangle it from around her feet, and Pell thought it had probably been stolen and missed some person at its proper home.
But Esther looked at the animals dispassionately. They were not babies but scrawny adolescents, old enough to have lost their needle-sharp teeth and endearing expressions. “Whoever owned them didn’t much care for them,” she said. Which was a sentiment there was no arguing with, especially once Eammon explained that they’d found the animals already nicely packaged in the sack, with a large stone thrown in for good measure.
The rest of the little ones snatched them away and took them off to worry till the poor things cried for help and quiet, and there was nothing to do but claim them both back and feed them bits of bread and milk till they curled up together, eyes closed and whimpering. Pell ate a meal not much better than the one she gave them, and when the time came for sleep, the children took the bitch and Pell pushed the dog away from her so that it curled up tight in a miserable ball alone beside her on the cold ground. And finally, half-asleep and wholly impatient, Pell pulled the shivering creature in beside her, where, with an almost human sigh of gratification, it placed its head against her heart and went immediately to sleep.
The next day at dawn when she rose to light the fire, the animal followed exactly at her heel or under it. She looked down and, despite the appeal in its eyes, would not grudge it either bread or feeling. But Eammon and Errol saved her thinking about it further by whistling the pair off across the fields, and almost before the tea had finished brewing and the breakfast had been cleared, they were back with three fat rabbits killed clean, and the creatures happy with a carcass to chew in addition to whatever scraps of skin and bone didn’t go into the pot. After just a few good meals both animals looked less like ugly crows, and with rabbits in the pot Pell found herself accepting their presence more gratefully. Not that it mattered a whit whether she accepted them or not.
In daytime, the two would join the muddle of children at her feet until she drove them away, and at night the bitch was banished to a place underneath the wagon, while the dog waited till Pell was asleep and crept round silent as a thief so that next time she woke it would be there, with its spine against the curve of her belly where she’d once kept Bean, and its head pressed as near as possible to the beating of her heart.
It didn’t have a name at first, though the little ones called them Dicken and Dog. And despite Dog being a bitch, and despite Pell wanting to come up with something better, the names stuck.
Sixteen
Pell’s father’s family were clergymen of the worst sort: charming, immoral, and unkempt, with livings too small to keep a family and behavior unbecoming men of God. Each generation spawned another more engaging and worthless than the last, capable of providing neither a living nor spiritual guidance, unless someone needed guiding to an inn. They had always tended toward the outer edges of religion, and Pell’s father, educated to a point that made his position impossible in every social sphere, compounded the sins of his fathers by declaring himself a nonconformist, a Primitive Methodist with a firm belief in God’s love for the poor and the weak—which Pell considered a lucky coincidence given the state of his finances and temper. As for her mother’s family, what they lacked in fecklessness they made up with a talent for hopeless marriages.
Pa’s best quality was the fact that he was so often gone. What he got up to while preaching out on the road remained a mystery that no one in the family wished to solve, but there were rumors, and one day he arrived home with a boy baby swaddled up tight in the shape of a bean, and turned the child over to Mam to bring up as her own. Pa never said whose baby it was, but the dark hair and huge eyes matched one or two of his other children well enough to raise certain conjectures.
Birdie’s family were the other sort—the hardworking, honest, resourceful sort of family. He had a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather, all with a lifelong dedication to lifestock. It was Birdie’s family taught Pell everything she wasn’t born knowing about animals, and it was Birdie gave her Jack. Not that Jack was the sort of gift a person would receive gladly.
From the start, he was an odd-looking creature, with big raw joints under his dull coat, and every bit of him awkward and badly attached, or so it seemed. His dam, a plain, bad-tempered thing with not much to recommend her, first failed to produce enough milk and then compounded the insult by losing patience and kicking him away. None of the other mares would have him.
Birdie’s father was all for letting him die, not believing there’d be much use in him, but after a good deal of begging and bothering he handed the foal over to Birdie, who handed him over to Pell. She recognized at once that he was more a burden of work than a gift, but she took pity on him, hauling him up onto her lap and dipping her fingers in mare’s milk so he could suck. And eventually the poor thing got so displeased with her interference that he picked himself up, shook her off, and drank from the bucket all on his own as if to say, “There, I hope you’re happy now.”
It was her first hint that she’d been given something worth having.
For a time, they stabled him with a cross-eyed pony scarcely bigger than a dog, but it was Pell he thought was his mam. Birdie’s dad shook his head at the two of them, thinking what a waste of time it was rearing the ugly thing. But he was a stubborn little nix with a magnet eye, and at the end of a year his coat had started to turn from dull black to gray, and against all expectation the bits that didn’t fit looked to be joining up. At three he was pure white except for his muzzle and a black mark the size of a penny on his left flank. He had a big intelligent head, a thick arched neck, and gaits so sweeping and free, no one ever thought to wonder why she’d saved him. It was said that Arab horses had been bred to New Forest ponies a century ago in an attempt to improve the breed, and once or twice every generation the Arab blood emerged. Even if you hadn’t known about the rogue ancestor, you might have guessed by the size and the shape of him, so different did he look from the rest of the scrub ponies. It branded him superior and strange all at once.
Pell began backing him as soon as he was strong enough to bear her weight, and he didn’t act as if he minded, only at the beginning turned to look at the odd new thing. When he was three and a bit, they’d ride along the moors with Birdie and his mare, Maggs, just walking or jogging with a loose rein so he’d get used to the feel of her, until one day Maggs flushed a brace of grouse by nearly stepping on them, and the noise and the flapping startled her into a dead run with Birdie hanging on for dear life. Jack seemed to consider the situation before making up his mind to follow, and then off they went at a gallop. Pell imagined one of his legs down a rabbit hole while she died of a broken neck, but Jack seemed born knowing what to do with a field full of holes, and never put a foot where it oughtn’t to be. And that was only one of his talents, for that was also the day she discovered he could fly.
For those poor souls who can only think of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you wait at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling w
on’t stop till you’re good and ready for life to be ordinary once more.
The problem being that she never was.
Seventeen
The Gypsy children passed their time running and rolling and darting in and out of the horse’s legs and bickering over anything edible. They took turns on Moses, who had feathered ankles and a steady plodding stroll, balancing on him like circus acrobats though he took no notice of them, flyweight creatures that they were. When one child lost interest in riding, it would slide off and allow a different one to scramble up in its place. Their mother didn’t interfere except with a look or a hssst to indicate danger. The activity and clamor of them distracted Pell from her troubles, for which she was grateful.
After another day on the plain, they began to descend into a hilly vale and Esther stopped and said, “Look.” Pell followed the direction of her gaze, and for a moment her heart stood still in wonder. She had heard of such things but never imagined that she would see it with her own eyes. It faced left with all four limbs straining outward, its long curved neck thrown up across the hillside. It may once have been pure white, but now its outline bled into the surrounding hillside, and the graceful chalk body was dappled all over with flora, blurred, but with the clarity of its spirit intact.
“Legend says he once had a boy rider,” Esther mused. At this, Esmé frowned, and glared at Pell, for there was no sign of the boy.
They might have stood all day just looking, but Esther slapped the reins, and Moses lifted his mighty head and walked on. For half a mile the white chalk horse stayed on their right, changing position as they moved around it, until eventually they entered a wood and it danced off without them.
By noon, the autumn sun had taken the chill off the day, and it was a beautiful evening when finally they left the main road. Esther stopped for a conversation with a small encampment of Gypsies by the side of the road, then led her family onto a tiny twig of a path that opened into a quiet meadow, hidden from the road by a long stand of dense hedge. While Esther built a fire and boiled the kettle, Pell turned Moses out to graze, watching as he stood switching flies. With the white horse still skipping in her head, Pell brushed tears from her eyes with an impatient hand.
Elspeth fetched a china teapot and a stack of cups, holding the pot steady as Esther poured hot water over a handful of dried leaves.
“I have business to the south,” Esther said, “so will accompany you no farther.”
Pell’s heart sank, but she nodded, as Esther stirred her tea round and round, sipping it up through her front teeth with a hiss. That night Pell slept badly, dreaming of Nomansland.
The next morning, they came to a stone marker pointing toward Southampton in one direction and Pevesy in the other. Esther nodded goodbye to Pell, her eyes already on the next stretch of road. Circumstance had postponed her business for some years and she felt impatient to get on.
The children crowded around Dicken, sad to see Dog’s twin go his separate way.
“You can take him with you,” Pell told Eammon, who grinned and tried to lure Dicken to follow the wagon, until Esther put an end to that plan and sent him scampering back.
“I hope you find the boy,” Esther said to Pell, but did not turn to look at her.
As they disappeared down the road, Esmé threw a stone over her shoulder in a final gesture of good riddance, and only Dog and Evelina looked back with any degree of longing.
Pell gazed down the road after them, utterly dejected. Alone, poor, and shabby, on a fool’s mission, she wondered, for an instant, if even Nomansland offered more solace than this.
Using nearly the last of her money she bought a brown loaf, broke off a piece, and spread it with rosemary and lard. Dicken’s huge soft eyes projected such a picture of loyal, careworn amity, and in so beseeching a manner, he might have been the canine incarnation of Edmund Kean. She threw him a crust, but far from snatching it and swallowing it down, he delicately sniffed and picked it up carefully as if deciding which would be nicer, to starve or eat crusts. He was a funny old thing, grazing on weeds or whatever else he might find about the place, but it was with rabbits that his true passion lay. She would see him freeze, watching, ears pitched up, body rigid with excitement. And Pell would hold her breath and wait and wait and at the last moment whisper, “Go!” and he’d go, in a frantic chase of perfect joy. And although sometimes he won and sometimes the rabbit won, she never tired of watching.
Staying with Esther had reduced life to a series of prescribed choices. That field there catches the morning sun. No one ever bothers with that barn. Half a mile from here we’ll stop. But Pell didn’t know the route or whose field lay fallow at what time of year, or where there was a sunny clearing in a protected wood. Being a stranger, she would always be an object of suspicion, even without the Gypsy dog at her side. She had to keep a sharp eye out for a place to sleep, and couldn’t stop worrying till she’d found it; it didn’t do for a single girl, and a flibbertigibbet with a guilty expression, to be caught without shelter as night came.
In the evenings everyone would be out, the children playing games in the dust, hens scratching for grubs, cats prowling, women leaning over their front gates for gossip, men returning from work. When Pell passed through they fell silent and watched, six or eight or ten pairs of eyes, until after she had greeted them and passed by with excruciating slowness, smiling a little if any happened to return her greeting, but otherwise looking neither left nor right. And then before she was even out of earshot the murmuring would begin—the conjectures on her dress, her origins, the theory of who she was and why a girl like that was abroad, alone, far from home, leading such a dog, and at this time of night. Even if they remained silent, she could read their thoughts as clearly as if they had spoken out loud, for she had lived her whole life in such a place. As for Dicken, there was little for him but stones and curses, despite his good nature and his talent for friendship.
Tonight, she stopped by one garden gate to ask a young woman if she might exchange a fat rabbit for fruit from her orchard, and the result was an apron full of sweet hard pears, a thick slice of cheese, and another of bread and butter.
Pell reached down to thank Dicken, and he took the opportunity to pluck a pear gently from her pocket and retire to the side of the road, out of reach, to gnaw on it.
She tossed a pebble at him, and he looked up at her, af fronted, before returning to his pear.
They walked on.
Eighteen
At the edge of the New Forest, Moses shifted his weight off one huge hoof and sighed contentedly. How many times had Esther guided him back across Salisbury Plain, plying whatever trade she had chosen that week in order to feed her children? Such joy to stop here on a cool autumn evening, standing ankle deep in grass while the world around him slowly filled up with dark. The wild shouts and giggles of Esther’s children rose and fell in fierce cadence across the meadow, until night came, and one by one they clambered into the wagon, settled, and fell quiet. Anyone passing would have imagined the world silent, except for the har rumph of a drowsy horse or a restless child.
For those few hours, the children were alone. Esther had unfinished business a few miles away in Nomansland with regard to two grievous crimes. For nearly a decade she had been unable to revenge herself of these crimes, and satisfaction might have continued to evade her had she not recognized a long-lost relation at Salisbury Fair.
She set out to renew her acquaintance.
The inn she sought occupied an uncomfortable position on the edge of Nomansland, neither here nor there but split in half, with its front door in Hampshire and its rear in Wiltshire. It was not at all usual for a woman to enter the place, and even less usual for a woman such as Esther, and so she stood outside and waited, and waited, and at last had enough of waiting. A handful of men at the bar looked up as she entered, their faces hostile, wondering at her business there. He did not recognize her at first.
“Am I so changed?” asked she, with her hard crooked sm
ile. “You are not.”
“Time alters us all,” the man mumbled, rising uneasily from his place by the fire.
She held him with her gaze. “Some more than others. A babe, for instance. So that his own mother might barely recognize him.”
The man’s eyes flew open, and he staggered a little, then fled the bar with the woman close behind. He stopped in a place where they might not be overheard, straightened himself, and mustered the voice calculated to overawe his parishioners. “Would you have had me abandon my son to a life devoid of Christian virtue?”
Esther shrugged. “He was conceived well enough without it.”
“But a Christian child,” the preacher stammered, “surely you understand . . . required a Christian family to raise him....”
The appeal met no sympathy. “You pledged a sum of money for that privilege.”
“I did, yes, but times were difficult. . . .”
“Difficult?” Esther’s impassive eyes flared. “Did I ask for a sixth child? You were welcome to the bastard, on the terms we agreed. But I received no such terms. And in the meanwhile my own five have near starved, year after year, rejected by the father that conceived them. He believed the fiction you told, that your child was conceived in desire. That I was willing.”
Ridley cast about, like a hare for a thicket. “What do you want? I have no money, and the child is gone.” And then he began to mutter something about God and His ways, but she stepped closer and spat in his face, her mouth twisted with a terrible intensity of loathing.