“Gerald is watching the cockfight, Beatrice.” She looks unutterably bored with me, and turns her attention to Hugh. “Perhaps Master Hugh would like to go and join him for half an hour before we go home.” She gestures to where the sun is sliding rooster-red into the trees. It is a dismissal. I am almost speechless at her effrontery.
Hugh hesitates. “I’ll go and buy some sweetmeats,” he offers, and moves away with a backward glance over his shoulder at me. I pull a face at him, and he pulls one back.
Germaine gives an exasperated sigh. “You silly young things may act superior. I envy you your childish ignorance.” She shakes her head. “I live in the real world, Beatrice, where poverty and loneliness lie in wait for you at every turn. I just want to warn you, if you tell your father about Gerald and me, it is at your own peril. There are things I can tell about you, too.”
I step back. “Whatever do you mean, Germaine? You have nothing to hold over me.”
Germaine smooths back her thick, brown hair with both hands. “Nay, mistress? Nothing in the woods?”
For a moment I feel quite ill. Then I tell myself she cannot know anything for sure. I have been so careful. I put on an expression of bewilderment. Germaine places her hand on her hip and tilts her head, as if assessing my performance. “Don’t fret, my dear Beatrice.” She parodies my earlier, aloof tone. “Your secret is safe with me, so long as mine is safe with you. We all have secrets, you, me, your father, your mother…”
I stare at her, angry and puzzled. “What do you mean, my mother?”
Hugh is coming back, laden with marchpane and honeycakes. Germaine studies the drifts of bright-edged cloud visible between the branches of the oak tree. “It will rain, don’t you think, before the day is out?” She lowers her gaze. “Your mother? Oh, it is her business. Beatrice, I wish you were that good child I once knew, and not of an age to have secret lovers, but if you are so grown up, then you must be truly grown up, and not make such a fuss about things.”
I feel almost sick with relief. A secret lover. All she thinks I have is a secret lover? I want to laugh. As we all ride home together the long way round, stopping at the holy well on the edge of Freewith, I know that I must be more careful than ever now. Germaine is watching me. I must be vigilant, and leave no trail, no clues, which might lead her to Robert. If she were to find out that my secret was not a secret lover but a secret Scotsman, then I fear there would be no means of shutting her mouth.
On the way we pass Parson Becker, pale and dark-haired on his tall black horse. He raises his hand in greeting but does not smile. Once, this chance meeting would have fuelled my imagination for weeks. Now, I cannot think about him, because he symbolises the things from which my involvement with Robert has excluded me: honesty and truth, and more than anything, loyalty to the people amongst whom I live.
Chapter 10
The remedy is brewed, the comfrey leaves pounded to a poultice, the juniper branches and stalks of boneset in my saddlebag. Everyone is drinking milkthistle this morning, and swearing never to touch ale again. I collect spiders’ webs from the wild raspberry canes on the Pike during my morning watch, and set off into the forest straight after.
When I arrive at the cottage I find Robert standing behind the door. I jump back. “Robert, you frightened the life out of me!”
His face has its usual unhealthy sheen. His eyes are dull like boiled shellfish. He is propping himself against the doorframe. He is taller than I thought. I look up at him. “Robert, you are not fit to be on your feet. Get back into bed at once.”
He reaches out with his one good arm. I realise that he is stuck. I put my arms round him and take his weight. His fingernails scratch my wrist, and I wonder why I have not thought to cut them. I must shave him again too. He is so young, little more than my own age, with just a scattering of honey-coloured stubble, but it is more obvious now that he is standing up. I fit my shoulder under his arm and totter him to the bed. He is almost unmanageably heavy. His head rolls against the top of mine, and I wonder unworthily what small creatures from the floor might have taken up residence there. As we stop to rest he mutters, “Beatrice, my arm. The infection is spreading. It will kill me. Please, you must take it off.”
As if the words have drained him, his knees buckle. I ease him on to the bed.
“Lie down. Lean back.” I prop him against the roll of sheepskin at the head of the bed. “Robert, I have a new bayne to save your arm.” I pull up his grey blanket and support his arm on a log which I have padded with wool and linen. He has half torn off his dressings, so now I remove them completely. The wound looks no better, and smells foul. All his joints show a puffiness. I surround the injury with linen, then slop Mother Bain’s remedy in.
“Hah!” His breath is indrawn sharply. The mixture oozes into the torn flesh then drips away past the splint. At the same time a solitary tear seeps past Robert’s eyelashes. I smooth his clammy hair.
“I have a treat for you, Robert,” I tell him. I bind the comfrey poultice in place, then light the juniper branches in the doorway, and step out over them. I fetch a small earthenware bottle from my saddlebag. “It’s a sort of Scottish wine spirit called…” I peer at the name inked on the leather-covered stopper. “… usquebaugh? Do you know it? I spent a fortnight’s wool money on it at the May fair.” I ease out the stopper and sniff. The fumes knock me back. Robert stares at it in wonder, then takes it from my hand and puts it to his mouth. He chokes, coughs, gasps for breath, then holds it out to me.
“Try it. It’s whiskybae.” He corrects my pronunciation. A scarlet flush is spreading up his neck.
I shake my head. “No thanks.” I restopper the bottle. “I brought it for you. Have the rest later. It seems rather strong.”
With no more comment Robert retrieves the bottle from my hand, removes the stopper with his teeth and drinks the rest of it. Then he sags against the log, curling protectively round his arm, a blank look of despair replacing the raw agony on his face.
“You do a lot for an enemy,” he says to me tiredly. I stay with him until he has gone to sleep.
May draws on. The woods are veined with bluebells. Their devastating blueness is like something forbidden, too wild and intense for respectable people. One day after leaving Robert I lie down in a hollow of the woods where bluebells cover every bit of ground. Their sappy scent fills the air. Their drooping, delicate bells feel cool and taut against my bare arms. I lie there realising that I think of nothing but Robert these days. Hugh, my future husband, rarely crosses my mind. I should be worrying about the danger he will be in when the men march on Scotland. Instead I worry only about the added danger to Robert, as anti-Scottish feeling rises.
I seem to be falling out with everybody, particularly with Germaine, who apparently thinks we have a mutual conspiracy going between us. She looks at me from under her eyebrows and makes demands she would not normally have dared. I watch her with my father – Mother is scarcely home these days – and wonder how a household can have gone so comprehensively wrong.
It is a humid spring, heat and dampness alternating with wind and rain. One sultry morning, with dawn coming up behind the hills and storm clouds rolling in across the bay, after I have stayed most of the night listening to Robert’s delirium, I accept that the treatment has not worked, and is not going to.
Robert has become unbearable. Even when in possession of his senses, he is always angry with me, calling me a heathen, and daring me to hand him over to the authorities, after having hidden him for so long. There are border laws against even speaking to Scots, and I have done far worse. He knows I cannot betray him now. The infection has stabilised with Mother Bain’s potion, but has not lessened, and Robert weakens daily, as fevers flash through his blood.
So, this hot, damp dawn, I stand wearily outside the cottage and consider how to go about taking an arm off. I am hoping that my overnight absence from the tower has not been noticed, and that those at home will merely assume I have risen early. The first rays o
f sun catch the morning mist and the tree trunks glow opalescent. There is a rustle to the side of me in the hazel thicket. It is a young red deer eating the cobnuts which have scarcely begun to grow on the branches yet. It looks at me but does not move away. If Hugh or Gerald had been here, with the stink of long-gone stag hunts in their hair, it would have fled. For some reason its acceptance of me gives me the strength to go back inside and say, “Robert, your arm, I don’t think it can be saved.”
The skin is peeling from his lips. His mouth moves stiffly, like that of the ventriloquist at the May fair. He whispers, “I know. Thank you. You’ve tried, Beatrice.”
I go back outside. I would rather he did not see me in tears. The deer is still there. It moves a little closer. We stare at one another. The sky brightens and shadows sharp as knife blades section up the clearing. Young hazel leaves rip and rustle as the deer tongues them into its mouth. Birdsong fills the woods, far into the distance. Slowly I calm myself, and accept that I cannot cut off Robert’s arm myself. It is beyond me.
“Robert.” I go and kneel down beside him. “I can’t take your arm off. I’ll have to get someone else to do it.”
“If you call the doctor then you and I will both hang.”
“You’d hang. I’d burn. That’s what they do to women traitors.”
He turns his head away. “Who owes you a favour? Whose mouth can ye shut?”
“There is someone who’ll do it and maybe not talk. Not someone who owes me a favour, but a sawbones called the Cockleshell Man. He’s a bit of an outsider himself, so perhaps won’t be as bound by the law as the rest of us. Anyway, if you remain silent, he might just assume you’re a hermit like the last one.” I stroke Robert’s damp face, and he winces, as if all his flesh were a wound. I walk back to the tower to saddle Saint Hilda.
People say many things about the Cockleshell Man. I try not to think about them as I ride through the clifftop woods towards Mere Point. He does the jobs which no one else will do, hacking off diseased limbs and pulling out rotten teeth, but people say he also casts spells, and that he has a secret tunnel from his cottage on the clifftop to one of the caves in the cliff face, where he conducts his magic. Certainly no one goes near that cave, for fear of meeting the Cockleshell Man lurking at the back.
It is necessary to pass my cousins’ tower in order to reach the crofter’s cottage where the Cockleshell Man lives, so I call on my aunt to give myself an excuse for being over this way. Gerald is standing watch on the battlements. I wave to him and he blows me a kiss.
This tower is more elegant than ours. It has decorative triple-arched windows with golden sandstone lintels and mullions, as well as the usual arrow slits. Some of the windows have beautiful painted glass in them, and there are stone carvings over the door and around the battlements. I consider that really I should not mind living here with Hugh, and that surely firm friendship and a shared sense of humour are as good a basis for marriage as I am likely to find in the Westmorland hills. Yet somehow, today, the idea seems even more ludicrous than ever.
Aunt Juniper comes to the door as I arrive. “Good morning, Beatrice. Hugh is on watch on Beacon Hill. Do you want to go up and join him?”
We exchange kisses. “Good morning, Auntie. I may go up that way later.”
She looks pleased. She does most of the matchmaking in the district, and I suspect she finds it frustrating that her nearest relatives are turning out to be most resistant to her plans. She leads the way into the kitchen where she is burning young bracken to make soap. Its eye-watering smell hangs in the room.
“Here, you can pound lime for the soap while we talk.” She passes me a mortar of limestone already fired and crumbling. “I wish Gerald and Verity thought as much of each other as you and Hugh do,” she adds. “Verity seems to drive Gerald away. Can you not speak to her about it, Niece?”
I sit down at the long elm table. I am not in the mood to be tactful. I take up the pestle to pound the limestone and reply, “Auntie… Verity does not want to marry Gerald. To be honest I don’t think she wants to marry anyone. She likes to do things her own way, and she thinks Gerald would be like my father, and interfere.”
My aunt looks at me, astonished, across the rank-smelling ashes of bracken. “But it is all settled. She and Gerald must have one of the towers. What other possible arrangement could there be?”
I sigh, and gaze away towards the high windows in the upper storey of the kitchen, where a gallery runs round and doves are crooning among the rafters. “I don’t know, Auntie,” is all I can reply.
On my way out I pass the hunched figure of Uncle Juniper, and he hugs and kisses me and tells me in bloodthirsty detail how his fighting dogs are doing. By the time I remount Saint Hilda and ride off across the springy turf towards the clifftop path, my nerves are in a worse state than ever.
Chapter 11
The tiny cottage of the Cockleshell Man is half hidden in woodland near the edge of the cliff. I tether Saint Hilda to a tree and walk up the path between beds of medicinal herbs. On either side of his door stand crams, long rakes with which he scrapes cockles out of the sand. Valerian, the vile-smelling phew plant, is growing by the wall. When there is no reply to my first knock I break off one of its bright pink flowers, smack it against the wall to remove insects, and suck its revolting juices to soothe away my panic.
I knock again, my stomach turning with fear. What person in their right mind comes to the door of the Cockleshell Man? Yet, after a while, when the door opens, he stands there on the threshold like any man. He is tall and broad-shouldered. His face is encased in thick, light-brown hair and a beard. He looks as if he has just woken up. His expression is wary.
“Aye?” His small grey eyes stare at me. His clothes reek of fish and salt water. I step nervously back and almost fall over a sack of cockles beside the path.
“Come you in,” he says abruptly, and turns to lead the way into his dark house. “I see it isn’t cockles you’ve come for, since you see fit to trample all over them.” He smiles, and I realise this was meant to be a joke. “What is it? Are you afraid of me?”
I nod. His face seems to redden, though in the dimness it is difficult to tell. I say, “I’ve come to ask you a favour.”
“Oh?” He indicates that I should sit down on a bale of straw by the window.
Chaff leaks out and hovers in the light as I seat myself and arrange my skirts.
“I know you act as a sawbones,” I say to him.
He frowns. “Aye. I butcher the unfortunate.” His large hands clench and unclench, as if already hefting axe and saw, and I begin to feel rather faint.
“There’s a man with an injured arm, sir. It will not heal. The infection is threatening to spread and kill him.”
He nods. “Who might this man be?”
I suddenly notice something astonishing. Draped across the rough table in the corner is an embroidered shawl woven in lilac silk and wool, and patterned with cream lilies. I know it very well. I embroidered it myself as a gift for my mother two Christmases ago. I stare at the shawl, and I stare at the Cockleshell Man, and I do not answer his question. Instead I say, “Sir, I don’t know your real name, but I’m Beatrice Garth of Barrowbeck Tower.”
The look of shock is there and gone. He too glances at the shawl, then back at me. I ask him, “Do you know my mother?” It’s possible of course that my mother has had treatment from him, and paid with the shawl, but I don’t think so. She would have paid in silver, or cheese, or mutton, or sheepskin. She would not have given away a garment I had spent weeks making for her. I wait for his reply, trying to stifle my feeling of disbelief, to make sense of things.
He crosses to the door and closes it, his head half turned away from me, and says, “I am acquainted with her.”
I rub my hands across my face and ask, “Do you want me to return that shawl to her?”
He emerges from the shadows. A beam of sunlight shines on the filmy surface of his jerkin, showing up the blue-green glister of fis
h scales. He shakes his head. “Nay. I thank you. She’ll come and get it herself.”
Behind the shock of discovering that my mother appears to visit this man, is something else, an awareness that here is someone whose mouth I really can shut, someone who needs my silence as much as I need his, someone who would be murdered in his bed if my father were to find out what I have just found out, no matter how innocent it might be.
I look up at him. “I hope I can rely on your silence if I tell you that… the man with the injury is a Scot.”
The Cockleshell Man’s eyes widen briefly. “Is he indeed.” He laughs. “You’re your mother’s daughter all right.”
The notion that I am trying to pressurise him doesn’t appear to have occurred to him. He asks, “Is he in much pain, yon Scot?”
I glance over my shoulder, jittery that even indoors such a word should be said. “Yes, terrible pain.”
“Then there’s no time to waste. There are things I need to collect. You can wait here for me.” He opens the door and strides out, leaving it swinging behind him. I run after him.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
He is heading into the clifftop woods, his stiff breeches cracking and flapping. “I’m going to find some little friends who’ll help me,” he calls back over his shoulder. “You’ll not like ’em, lass.”
I cringe. What can he mean? Elves and goblins? Whatever have I started? I cross myself, a Popish habit for which Father would have beaten me.
When the Cockleshell Man returns there are no elves or goblins with him, only a small leather bag hung at his waist. He seems relieved to find me still there, and I realise he thought I might not have waited. I wonder how often the Cockleshell Man finds that people have not waited. He opens a chest next to the hearth and withdraws a serrated metal saw with a bone handle at each end, and also a bone-handled knife. He hangs these from his waist with the small leather bag. I support myself on the window frame, feeling sick. He looks at me. “You can help me, Beatrice Garth. Take down the third jar from the left, on that shelf over the door, and count out twenty seeds into this.” He hands me a beechwood mortar and pestle. “He’ll not feel the knife, if we do have to cut him.”
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