Silvermay

by James Moloney

  ‘How will I know when he’s hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a fool, girl. He’ll let you know.’

  I stepped out through the door and went looking for Hespa, who was always going on about how wonderful little babies were. I wasn’t so sure, although I would probably change my mind when I had one of my own. But Hespa had been sent to gather raspberries and wouldn’t be back for an hour.

  ‘Looks like you’re stuck with me,’ I told the baby.

  He looked up at me with his solemn eyes and didn’t seem to object. Birdie had already washed him and swaddled him tightly in sheets she kept for my niece and nephews when they came visiting.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind being used for motherhood practice,’ I said, nuzzling him a little. Babies have the most delicious smell … well, most of the time, anyway.

  His expression didn’t change.

  ‘If your parents have no name for you, then I’ll give you one,’ I whispered. ‘Smiler, how’s that? And do you know why? Because it looks to me like you’re determined never to smile in your whole life. I’ll tell you something else, too. I’m going to make you.’

  I fashioned a makeshift crib for him in the shade of the willows and watched him sleep. When he woke again, we played. I even sang to him, which was a laugh because my voice usually brought shouts of, ‘Stop, stop!’ It was that pledge of mine, to make him smile, that had me doing these things. All went well until, as Birdie had said he would, Smiler let me know he was hungry.

  He didn’t confine the news to me, either. By the time I’d returned to our house, the entire village knew. What a sound! There was nothing I could do to calm him down, and even in Nerigold’s arms he raised the roof. Only his mother’s milk stopped the bawling.

  ‘Healthy lungs,’ said Birdie, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Little tyrant,’ I teased as I jiggled him afterwards.

  He took his revenge by burping a stream of sour milk all over my shoulder. Yuck!

  ‘Why does Hespa think babies are so delightful?’ I asked Smiler as I wiped the mess away from his mouth. ‘You’ll have to stop puking on my shoulder if you expect to win me over. Yes, you will,’ I added, then cringed at the babyish tone in my voice.

  The second day passed much like the first, except that when Smiler started up his wailing in the afternoon, Birdie was tending a neighbour’s boy who’d fallen out of an apple tree. It was left to me to place a pillow behind Nerigold’s back and keep her company.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  She continued to watch the baby as he suckled but I could see a frown on her face. After a long pause she said, ‘A village like this one, but last year I lived in Vonne for a few months.’

  ‘Father says Vonne is very grand. Do all the women there wear dresses like yours?’

  She switched her eyes to the folds of fabric around her legs. ‘There are many better than this. I don’t remember a lot about the place, to be honest.’ She shrugged as though she needed to apologise for this, then added, ‘When the baby came we were in a smaller town, further up the Great River.’

  Mention of ‘we’ brought Tamlyn silently into our conversation. I think she knew it and glanced up into my eyes, wondering what I would say.

  ‘He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?’ I said rather boldly.

  This brought more silence, and I began to regret my daring words until her face softened and she let me see a smile as teasing as the response that followed. ‘You noticed, then.’

  ‘Every girl in the village has noticed. You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Lucky!’ she said in surprise. ‘To have my baby, yes, very lucky. And luckier still with Tam … um, Piet to care for me,’ she said, embarrassed by the way she’d almost forgotten his false name. Just as well it was me she was talking to. She fixed me with a more serious expression. ‘But I don’t think about his looks, not as part of my luck. There are so many more important things. It hasn’t been easy for us in the last few days.’

  Our conversation had been leading to this question, like rainwater working its way down a hillside to join the stream. She knew it as well as I did.

  ‘I cannot tell you any more, Silvermay,’ she said, and to be sure that I didn’t ask she turned her attention back to the baby. He had finished feeding now and lay staring up at his mother with the same solemn expression I knew well by then.

  ‘Are you full up, my little Lucien?’ she said.

  ‘His name is Lucien?’ I blurted out in surprise.

  ‘Yes. I was hoping for a girl, you see. I was going to call her Lucia.’

  So my little Smiler had a name, after all. First, I’d been given a false name for Tamlyn and then a lie about the baby’s. Any fool could guess they didn’t want to be found. That was why Tamlyn had looked for me especially when he finally threw back his hood on the first night. Afterwards, when attention turned to Nerigold and the baby, he had come to me. ‘Thanks for keeping my clumsy secret,’ he’d whispered and then slipped away before I could ask why he had lied. It was an act of trust and I’d accepted that trust without question. There was a pay-off for me, I had to admit — something I quite liked the idea of. I was the only one who knew his real name, so didn’t that make me closer to him than anyone else in the village?

  Lucien, I repeated inside my head as I settled to sleep that night. It was as good a name as any, but whenever that little boy was with me I’d go on calling him Smiler.

  Through those first days, Tamlyn worked in the fields and afterwards bedded down in the Grentree house. I saw him only when he came to eat the evening meal with us. That didn’t stop me talking about him. What I’d said to Nerigold was true: the girls in the village, including me, gossiped about nothing else.

  My beloved Hespa was especially smitten. If a scribe wrote down every detail of Tamlyn’s appearance, as listed by Hespa, he’d run out of ink.

  ‘I wish he’d offer six gold coins to my father,’ she said.

  ‘He’s married,’ said Rose, a sometime friend of ours who was in the village for market day. Into those two words she managed to cram not just a hint of disapproval but also a sigh of longing that we all recognised in ourselves.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said Hespa a little too deliberately, and she made a show of swinging her long dark hair over one shoulder as I’d seen her do sometimes to catch a boy’s eye.

  ‘Well, not officially,’ Rose agreed, ‘but you shouldn’t get any ideas, Hespa. He belongs to Nerigold. I mean, he’s father to her little boy, after all.’

  Hespa ignored her and said to me instead, ‘You’re so lucky to have him coming round each night to see the baby. Does he smile when he plays with his son? He always seems so serious when I see him around the village.’

  Rose jumped in before I could answer. ‘I know, and it just makes him more handsome, don’t you think? Like he’s above all the stupid little things that go on around him.’

  Hespa’s question made me think. I’d set myself a silly goal with Lucien, but it hadn’t occurred to me that his father never smiled either. She was right, though, and Rose had noticed it as well.

  ‘They’ve had a hard time of it,’ I said, repeating what Nerigold had told me. ‘Their families must have chased them off, and there are lots of miserable fools around like Mr Nettlefield who care more about marriage vows than love. No wonder Nerigold is sick when no one would take them in. If T … er … if Piet doesn’t smile much it’s because he doesn’t have a lot to smile about.’

  Both girls stared at me in surprise.

  ‘You know a lot about him, then,’ said Hespa.

  ‘Only what Nerigold has told me. I don’t think she cares much that he’s so good-looking. When we spoke yesterday, she almost cried about the way he cares for her.’

  ‘Cares for her!’ sniffed Hespa. ‘Can’t she call it love, the lucky …’ Whatever word she’d been going to spit out died on her lips when she saw my face. ‘You like her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, t
hough I didn’t try to explain why. Perhaps I couldn’t until I knew her better.

  The following day, Tamlyn didn’t march off to the fields with the other men. Father had heard of his boast about fixing roofs and had borrowed a ladder from the Grentrees. Tamlyn spent the morning up on our roof and I’d never seen so many females of all ages stroll in and out of our house or simply wander by. Still, I should be the last to poke fun at them. When we sat down at the table for lunch, I almost knocked my mother over in my rush to grab the seat beside Tamlyn. There was no harm in it, I told myself; just the fun of having someone new and different around for a change.

  I watched him with Nerigold afterwards, before he returned to the roof, and felt the guilty touch of envy that Hespa had given way to so petulantly.

  The roof needed more than a single day’s work, and by the end of the second day, something was troubling me; something I couldn’t see and so couldn’t name. It wasn’t until I was trying to sleep in the bed I now shared with Nerigold that the mystery gave up its clues. They never touched each other. That was what I’d missed. In all my childish spying, I had never seen them steal a kiss, never seen one brush up against the other accidentally in the deliberate acts of affection I saw between my sisters and their husbands. Oh, there was tenderness, but it didn’t bring the tension to their bodies that I thought of as love.

  I looked for it even more as the days passed, until they began to catch me out and I’d turn away blushing. But all I observed was their devotion to the baby that bound them together.

  During those first days, I spent more time with the little thing than Nerigold did and, despite his greedy ways, my heart warmed to him more and more. Whenever it was left to me to wrap him in fresh cloths, I left his arms free and he repaid me by waving them about stiffly, with wrists cocked in that cute way babies have when they’re so new to their bodies. And all the while, I kept up my quest to make him smile.

  Birdie found me at it one time when I was too engrossed to hear her coming.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Silvermay,’ she cautioned. ‘Babies don’t smile until they’re six weeks or more.’

  Six weeks! Tamlyn and Nerigold would be long gone by then. But, like a fool, I didn’t give up.

  That night, a late summer warmth made our house stuffy and, as I sometimes did when I couldn’t sleep, I went out to look at the stars and the moon. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed, and I almost laughed out loud when I saw the tall frame and long hair. So that was it. All the affection they denied themselves during the day was saved for secret meetings at night.

  ‘Nerigold is fast asleep,’ I told Tamlyn. ‘Will I go and get her?’

  ‘No, don’t wake her up!’ he said quickly, as though it was the last thing he’d want. ‘She needs all the rest she can get.’

  His response was so adamant I almost apologised for suggesting it. And if I’d taken a moment to think about it, I already knew Nerigold didn’t sneak out to meet Tamlyn at night. Didn’t I share a bed with her these days. So why is he lingering near our house? a taunting voice asked in my head.

  4

  On Top of the World

  Before I quite knew it, Tamlyn and Nerigold had been with us for a week. Nerigold was still frail, which made Birdie walk around with a constant scowl.

  ‘I think your mother’s getting tired of me,’ Nerigold confided.

  ‘Not of you,’ I assured her. ‘Of your illness. She doesn’t like it when her potions don’t cure the patient. That’s what’s upsetting her.’

  ‘But we’ve been here too long. We should move on so that your house can get back to normal.’

  ‘No, you can’t go yet. Every man in the village wants him to fix his roof,’ I said. ‘Except Mr Nettlefield, of course, and his roof leaks more than anyone’s, so it serves him right.’

  Nerigold laughed at this and didn’t speak about leaving any more. She was happy among us, I could sense it. As for me, there were reasons why I wanted all three of them to stay. I just didn’t want to think about which of them I wanted to stay the most.

  It was no surprise that I had trouble sleeping. Worse still, when I escaped into the moonlight again a few nights later, my eye immediately caught sight of Tamlyn sitting with his knees up and his back wedged against a stall.

  ‘Why are you watching our house like this?’ I asked him bluntly when he rose and came to me. ‘It’s not so Nerigold will come out to join you, I know that. I’ll bet you’re here every night,’ I added, guessing wildly.

  He didn’t correct me or take offence at my tone. ‘There are things I can’t tell you,’ he said wearily, then he did something that made the stars explode in the night sky above my head. He reached across casually and squeezed my forearm; just the briefest touch, but it was warmly meant and came with these words. ‘You’ve been very kind to Nerigold. She talks about you when we have our minutes together. And the way you are with Lucien, or should I say Smiler …’

  I gasped. ‘How did you know?’

  His face was mostly hidden in the darkness but I saw his lips curl upwards at the edges.

  ‘We should call you that name instead,’ I teased him. ‘Just now is the first time you’ve smiled since you got here.’

  ‘Did I smile?’ he asked, as though it was a genuine question. And if that wasn’t enough, he raised his right hand and touched the corner of his mouth.

  ‘The other girls think your serious expression is more handsome.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to smile more often so they won’t look at me.’

  Oh, that won’t stop them, I thought, but I didn’t tell him.

  ‘People smile because they’re happy, don’t they?’ he said, and again it was as though he was working this out for the first time. ‘I’m happy when I visit your house. Perhaps it will happen again.’ This time he was making fun of himself.

  ‘You’re very welcome, you know,’ I assured him. ‘My sisters have heard about you and Nerigold. They’ll come for a visit themselves next market day.’

  ‘You have two sisters,’ he said cautiously, waiting for me to confirm it.

  ‘Both older than me, of course, and both of them married. I was supposed to be a boy, especially when I turned out to be the last. Father would have liked a son to pass all his skills onto.’

  ‘With the hunting birds.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s good with horses, too, and he’s the best archer in Haywode.’

  ‘He should have taught you instead,’ said Tamlyn, teasing me in return. Another tentative smile tried to break through.

  I had just the reply to shock him. ‘He did! I’m not afraid to hold a hawk on my arm, and I can handle a bow. Not as well as he can, that’s true, but I can hit the bullseye three times out of five.’ It was more like two from five, actually, and only on a good day. I was getting carried away, but I would never have to prove it, so what did it matter. ‘I’m better than any boy my age, and I’m the only girl in the village who can ride a horse at full gallop.’ The memory had me laughing. ‘What a scandal that was! The elders went about shaking their heads and muttering because I rode like a man, which made my skirts creep up, exposing my legs up to the knee.’

  I was twelve then and hadn’t cared.

  ‘What did your mother think?’ he asked.

  ‘She told the old ferrets to close their eyes if they couldn’t bear the sight of my legs. It was her idea that I learned to hunt. She’s not from around here, so the elders and all their rules don’t worry her. She grew up in Nan Tocha.’

  ‘One of the mining tribes,’ Tamlyn commented. ‘It’s dangerous work, they tell me.’

  I knew that more than he realised. ‘My grandfather was killed in a cave-in. Birdie took me there after he died so I’d get to know her family. I have a dozen cousins who showed me all over the mountains and even down one of the mines.’

  It had been the most frightening hour of my life; firstly climbing down into darkness, and then, of course, they’d played tricks, leaving me stranded in the pitch-
black and hooting ghostly noises until I begged them to rescue me.

  I was suddenly aware of how much I’d been talking while he stayed mostly silent.

  ‘What about your family and Nerigold’s?’ I asked. ‘She hasn’t told me much at all.’

  ‘And she won’t, Silvermay.’

  ‘Well, maybe you can’t tell me who they are, but you can still tell me what they’re like. Your parents, for starters.’

  Tamlyn thought about this for a long time; so long, in fact, I had to prod an answer out of him.

  ‘They can’t be very nice if they’ve banished you like this. Were they always so harsh? I mean, they must have loved you as a boy.’

  ‘Harsh,’ Tamlyn repeated in a murmur. ‘Yes, that’s a good word for them. As for love, I don’t know.’

  That sounded ridiculous to me. ‘How can you not know if you were loved or not? When parents yell at you they’re angry and when they hold you close, that’s love.’

  The moonlight lit up a face that had once more become deeply serious. ‘Not everyone has a family like yours,’ he said with such sadness it was painful to hear him. ‘And not every heart can feel love as easily as you say. All the world should have a heart like yours, Silvermay.’

  And he went back to his lonely vigil with his back against the wall.

  If sleep had been out of reach before I ventured into the night air, afterwards it fled to another kingdom. We had stood beneath the moon and spoken of love. Not a love between him and me; of course not. I wasn’t pretending for a moment that we had. But even to say the word out loud to any man was a first for me, and, no matter how I told myself otherwise, there had been an intimacy in the things we’d said that seemed stronger than any of the girlish dreams I’d painted inside my head since he arrived in the village.

  Nerigold was feeling better in the morning. ‘Your mother says I should walk in the sun for a bit. Will you show me around the village? All I’ve seen so far is the inside of this cottage.’