The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  I cannot account for time; how long have I walked? The ground beneath me is no longer tussocky, rough. It is dry, sandy. From somewhere comes a sweet scent, a dark scent. I realize with some relief that I am not where I had thought—not on the moor, not heavy-bellied with pain. It is all gone—the rain, the cutting wind.

  I open my eyes, and the way is straight before me. The night is soft, and I am light and young, walking the long Kent lanes to London. My feet and the black road. The eglantine is out in the banks, and the night is furry with the stench. (Of course, I called it sweet briar then. What did I know?) All I think of is Alonso’s face. It hangs in my eye in the dark. When coaches or horses come with hooves and winking lamps, I hide in the ditch. I am not a fool. Somewhere, I have lost my shoes, but it makes no matter. My feet are hard, and I am strong.

  The walk does not seem long. Time moves in a series of stutters until I am standing barefooted before the Chandos Club. But I must be tired—there is a fine film over all things. The walls and sky of London glow, unearthly. I speak to the porter, whose fleshy jowls hold secrets in their folds. He bars me. I stand on the flags and look at the lit window where he is, and my body seems to melt; each minute passes like a torment. I think I cannot endure it, but then Alonso is there, his vast shape filling the doorframe, blocking out the dirty lamplight. He hurries across the street. We stand straight before one another like opponents.

  “What is that school about?” he asks. “They cannot seem to keep you there more than a week.”

  “I wanted to show you,” I say. “Look. The irises are blooming in Kent.” I offer him the dead flowers. I take his hand tightly. We are silent in the hazy, greenish street. My feet curl against the cold flags, and my white-knuckled hand grips the grimy stalks. “Let me stay with you forever,” I say.

  Alonso takes me by the shoulders and says in the saddest way, “Yes, I will give you everything.” He talks, and through the wispy night, I understand his words—he means to adopt me or some such.

  I laugh hard enough to snap my stays. The world steadies a little. I say, “I do not want you for a father or a brother.”

  “You cannot want me,” he says. “I am good for nothing.” He is pleading, unlike himself.

  I say, “I’ll judge that for myself, thank you very much.” His pale hand lights on my shoulder. Every inch of the miserable street is alive with feeling.

  • • •

  The deluge blows lateral and sharp across the tor. The rain is blinding. Black skies are massed heavy above. Inside me is a furnace that leaks torrents of pain. The air is vibrant and darkening. Spikes of grass rise icy between my toes. For a moment, there are dead flowers in my outstretched hands. Where is the lamplight? Where is my bear? Time is fitting into itself like a Russian doll. I do not recall where I am or where I was going. It is not important. I stand in the blast of the storm and clutch my roiling belly. Dead flowers and the cloying fumes of the lamps. I am there, I am here…both, neither. She is all about me; her coldness is everywhere: in the storm, in the cloud, the rock; somewhere under my feet on a far-off London street.

  I know the ways and means that nature has, in bargaining. So I know that I am being offered a last chance to change my mind. I will not.

  I wish Alonso were here. Everything is happening now.

  • • •

  When I come to, my face is pressed hard to the ground. “Here,” a voice says. “Here.” My arm grasped by a pale mottled hand, dripping with rain. I grasp the hand, which lifts me gently to my feet. Rain washes grass and earth from my face.

  I say, “I can walk.” I am released immediately. Shakes stands before me, a small, blasted shape.

  “Of course,” I say, “it would be you who found me.”

  We stare, bitter.

  “I suppose you must come, then,” I say.

  He says something incomprehensible. I lead into the pelting torrent.

  The pain ploughs deep; it leaves deep furrows. It’s possible I may die of this. It’s something I have never before considered. Everything is hectic and spangled. Shakes’s dim shape is lit with stars. Each raindrop to strike my flesh is an explosion, a galaxy. I am weak with relief when I see the treacherous narrow path, the rock walls. Not far now.

  The crevice appears in the rock, black against the wet granite. Shakes pulls me toward it, our hands slippery with rain.

  In the cave, everything is pale and green with some kind of moss. It glows, filled with a nimbus. I waddle across the sandy floor. On the low stone altar has been placed a child’s hoop earring, an egg…other indistinguishable things, rusted, rotten. I sweep them all off. The egg breaks with a soft sound.

  Shakes places his lantern on an outcrop and stares at me with his clouded blue eyes.

  “It is called eclampsia,” I say while I still may. “Do you understand? There is nothing to be done. If you wish to be of help,” I tell him, “be still. Be quiet.” It killed the others. It will not take Iris.

  I take the scrap of cloth from my pocket. It is dark with Robert’s blood. I put it on the altar and say the necessary thing. Then I eat it. The linen is like sawdust in my mouth. I am swallowing, dry; I think it’ll never go down, but at last, it does. The pain rises; everything goes red and orange. I don’t know much else after that.

  • • •

  My eyes have gone again, but I know the scent of Alonso’s skin. His hand is on my brow.

  “She is well?” I ask. “I cannot see.” I am glad of my blindness. I could not bear to read his face.

  “She is,” he says.

  A great shout goes up within me, and I am at the same time abruptly bone-tired. As if each part of me were stitched to the cave floor. But there is no time for rest.

  I say, “Give her to me.”

  Something settles in my arms, a decided weight. I take my time; it is not to be believed just yet. I trace soft little legs, arms, touch fingers and toes the size of sultanas. Outside me, in the air, she is both awesome and tiny. A small mouth seizes the tip of my finger, and a chasm opens in me through which I perceive a world larger than the one I have known.

  Nothing can ever be the same now.

  “She is looking at me,” I say. “I feel it.” I am afire.

  “She is,” Alonso says, then goes on, very fast, “Her eyes are dark, soft and dark. Like sun on deep water. She looks at everything. She is quite red and small, but I think she will have very white skin, like you. She will be very, very beautiful, like you.”

  “Iris,” I say. “Iris. Hello.”

  “The first gift you ever gave me,” Alonso says. “Irises.”

  I smile to myself. Iris and I have talked of this many times over the months. But the name is new to him.

  “Are we alone?” I ask. I mean, is that little stump of an old man lurking in a corner, watching me?

  Alonso says, “We are alone.”

  For a time, there are only small sounds. I acquaint myself with my daughter’s form: her soft head, her ears like rosebuds.

  “You should not dislike him,” Alonso says. “He brought me here to you. He has always cared for me, since I was small.”

  I recall, for a moment, Shakes’s old face, running with rain. Then Iris’s hand finds my finger like a starfish, and I am seized by a joy that is so deep it resembles pain.

  At length, I say, “My eyes. I am afraid, Alonso. It feels different, unlike the other times. The dark is different. It is as if something has been cut… Do you think,” I ask, and I keep my tone even, “that I will ever see her?”

  “You may, Meg. It often returns. Very often.” Alonso cradles my head with a hand. His other hand rests on her, protective. Iris talks to him. She talks shrill and clear like a brook in spate.

  “Loud!” he says. His voice has strings, golden apples, bellows in it.

  I feed Iris. It is like nothing I have known. The world has
been pried apart. The kingdom unrolls before me. Blindness is a small price to pay for it.

  I say to Alonso, “Each time, you saved me, instead of them.”

  The bloody horror of it. The little limbs. Three linen-clad bundles. Their lives taken to save mine. My hand tightens as I think it, and Iris bleats, outraged.

  “I know,” Alonso says. “I am sorry for it. But there was never a choice… Not for me.”

  “I thought I could never forgive you.”

  “And now?” In his voice, I hear shaking and hope.

  All these years, I have chosen not to see. He is not a bear. He is not a tree to lean on. He is a man and an imperfect one. He is arrogant and frequently ill-humored. He is childish, held in thrall to his past and chronically addicted to morphine. His heart is restless, quick, and deep.

  “I can,” I say. “I can forgive.”

  On the hill, she showed me the long walk from Kent to London. The walk ends here.

  The shaking in him grows. I think I hear him weep. That seems right. I weep too, into his shirt cuff. I lie back, Iris a plump little pillow on my breast. Two hands are playing with my hair: one very large, one indescribably tiny. There is the dim sound of rain in the distance. Almost immediately, I am asleep.

  • • •

  I smell Shakes before I hear him. He is moldy against the clean scents of blood and sand and rock. (I had not thought sand and rock had scents, but I live in a new world now.) And there are other men with him, and Alonso. Iris stirs, makes bird sounds in my arms.

  “Try to bear it.” Alonso’s voice is in my ear.

  I am lifted onto something. My every fiber protests—I am torn up like carded cotton.

  The men grasp the canvas. I hear their oily fingernails. They heave, and they strain. I feel their suspicion, their dislike. It comes through the touch of their hands on the canvas. They think I belong in a cave.

  The litter lifts, and the ground veers away. I am carried, swaying. As we leave the dark and come into sunshine, the warmth and light are like an endearment. There is a strong scent, which is acrid and despairing.

  “Alonso,” I say to the great expanse of dark. I know he will be there.

  “Yes.” He is beside me.

  “I smell burning here.”

  There is the tramp of feet. Somewhere, a blackbird gurgles, high and long. Iris stirs against me. How can I know what is happening in Alonso’s face?

  “Shakes made a fire of all the trees along the path,” he says at length. “He set them alight with kerosene. They burned…so brightly, even in the dark, the rain. I saw them from Bell Tor.” He says, “I can never repay him.” His voice is taut with colors; it has a shape. Perhaps in time, I will learn to parse these shapes and colors, learn the language of voices.

  “We will have to change many things,” I say. “Alonso! Where will she sleep? We need a nursery.” We had settled on a bare box room for the nursery. It has large windows; the light floods in. How beautiful, we said, it will be when painted white and blue. That was ten years ago. We have not touched it. How paltry was our hope.

  “She will sleep with us,” Alonso says, “and in time, we will contrive.”

  “And,” I say, “I want more women around me.”

  “It seemed to me,” Alonso says, “that you were not overly fond of Eliza or of Chloe.”

  “I am,” I say. “But there are some of the household I do not like. I would have you let that butler go, for instance. He stares. It is unnerving.” I hold my breath. If it did not work, then I will never sleep soundly.

  “Gilmore?” Alonso is quiet a moment. “I fear he was not well, my Meg. They found him in his bed this morning. Heart, perhaps. I do not know…”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  My own heart performs a peculiar stutter—there is relief, and then the great, black weight descends. I test it, the darkness. I let my guilt wrap about me. I settle it firmly on my shoulders. I must do so, for I will carry it to the end of my days.

  Alonso is saying, “I will go to tell his brother, who has Trubb’s Farm over the way. He was a Devon man, for all his citified ways.”

  I recall dimly a Henry Gilmore and a Charlotte Gilmore, seen and spoken to outside church. She cannot bear children. One of those shameful snippets you come by, if you are neighbors in the country. Did Robert come here to be near his family? I never asked why he took this remote post on Dartmoor. All these things I did not know. The dark weight hangs a little heavier. I am laden with sorrow and sudden fear. What have I become?

  There is always a high cost for strong witchery; I will pay for Robert’s life in ways I cannot fathom. It has begun already; I am blind. But Iris is hot and small on my neck. No, I would not change the bargain.

  I sway, suspended in air. The breeze combs through my hair. We go across the moor, and all the way, I have the image in my mind of a great summer tree, wreathed in flame.

  • • •

  “Iris,” I say. “Oh small person, oh light in the dark, oh little baby, will you not hush?”

  She cries. Her screams go through my head like bolts slammed home. She is feverishly dull and fretful. She is perfection. Three weeks since we brought her home, and each day, she grows in beauty. I feel it in her flesh. She is strong and growing and mine.

  The red drawing room is filled with the August sun. I walk through the beams, straight paths of heady warmth. Iris weeps. Her face is tiny and wet on my shoulder. Sometimes, I cannot accept that she lives outside me now. Her every breath draws my heart after it. Each one of her tears is like a blade.

  I speak to her, and she quiets. She speaks back to me in her strange, wailing voice. I tell her stories of myself. I tell her about the Bantrys’ farm—the animals, not the people. I will not tell her tales of sorrow or of fear. I tell her about Peter the donkey and his patient eyes and pot belly. I tell her about the golden hens and the dirty, spiny-backed pigs.

  We talk like this for some time. “They were my friends,” I tell her. “Although I have had other friends, and good ones, since. I had a friend at Rawblood who is gone now. A woman, pale and sorrowful…”

  I knew the moment I was carried across the threshold with Iris in my arms. She is gone. She was the cold core buried deep at the heart of the house. No longer. The very air in the halls and rooms is changed. Everything moves faster and rings brighter now. How weighty and thunderous it was—her presence. Now, going on through the days is just that—going on. Her terrible, dark glamour has been lifted from us, and we are merely people. Irritable people, kind people, everyday people who darn shirt fronts and make jam and spill inkpots and tread mud into the house. And this is as it should be.

  Ours shall be all new beginnings, I promise Iris as her cries become shorter and sweeter.

  “There was also a man called Robert,” I say. “He was not handsome, but beautiful—as beautiful as a woman—and determined.”

  Iris answers me in a descant of bubbles and trills.

  “He had coppery hair, though darker than mine. We looked somewhat alike, perhaps like brother and sister. I had a brother, but he left me to a dark farm with Mr. Bantry and belts and whips and other things… No, hush, hush. We will not speak of it. Robert’s face was like…it was like music.” Iris breathes deep. She’s going. I tell her softly, “He gave his life for us. Or—I took it from him, that you and I might live.” I am shocked to find that I am weeping. I have grown soft indeed.

  The house creaks a little, and an eddy of air shivers through the room. I lift my head from her forehead where it has been resting gently. Iris breathes like factory machinery. She always sleeps as though it were hard work.

  I tip my face in the direction of the parlor door and say, “Come—sit with us, Alonso.”

  He comes without a word and sits with a great creak. The shape of him is mountainous, the ottoman suddenly a s
illy, fiddly thing. His hand lies on mine, and his finger strokes Iris’s cheek.

  “You should not have survived,” Alonso says. His breath on my face. The faintest trace of Spanish in his words. “Nor should you, little one. But you did. Your lives are rare gifts, and I will always remember it.” His caress.

  I want to ask And how long did you stand there in the doorway, my love—what did you hear? But what good would it do—to know? We sit, Iris sleeps, and I think how alike they are: the sensations of danger and of love.

  The bark of the cedar tree beneath my fingers. Sun warmed. He says nothing, but he’s here. He’s always here, in the summer, in the evening. Light on old bones. I feel his attention, where he sits, back against the vast cedar trunk. His skin. The scent is everywhere. Parchment, malice. Why must it have been he who helped me? Impossible to owe such a debt.

  “Come,” I say.

  Still, he says nothing. But he comes. I hear the creaks of his passage. I hear the summer grass beneath his uncertain steps. The knife slips across my fingertip like silk. I reach through the warm air. I put my blood on him where he stands before me. Trace the deep sockets of his eyes. I say the words, and the tree and the earth shiver.

  “Have them, then,” I say. “Have your sight, and my thanks.”

  His surprisingly long lashes are viscous with my blood. And tears, because Shakes weeps then. Color and light creep into him. I feel it. I yearn. His wonder fills the air. Silent, heavy.

  I may do this magic once only. So Shakes will see, and I will be the blind one now.

  • • •

  There is the soft sound of cloth on glass and the reassuring bustle of a broom. Chloe and Eliza talk quietly as they clean. I have found that if I lie still, they think that I am asleep and speak very freely—as if my bandaged eyes had stopped up all my senses, not just one. I have heard the talk of the autumn fair. I have heard of Chloe’s little brother, Tom, whom she loved but who died as a child. Their lives are tantalizing and bright, their likes and dislikes strong and fully formed. They have been masquerading as scenery, but they are full of action.