by Evie Wyld
She finished her cigarette and turned to make her way back down, and nearly walked straight into a pony. It stood just a couple of feet away, walnut brown and barrel-like. The surprise made her stumble and she held her hands up in front of her, expecting the creature to start and run away, but it stood and looked at her with its long-lashed eyes. Its nose was patterned with a cream-velvet heart. She took a careful step forwards and still it did not move, reached out her hand towards its nose. It let out a snort, coming white from its coaly nostrils, but accepted her touch. The muzzle was cold and smooth. The pony’s forelock was muddled through with burrs, it smelled of her father’s potting shed. It lifted its lip a little, its teeth large and tea-stained. The air was still.
‘Hello, Antony,’ she said. It blinked, and in its eye, she saw the whalebones reflected behind her, the figure of a girl standing in front of them; she turned, afraid, but no one was there, and there was nothing now in the pony’s eye, it was clouded with age.
As the pathway wound downwards around the hill, Ruth looked again for the swimmer but did not see him. She passed by the derelict shepherd’s hut and a large crow flew up from it – she could just make out the ribs of some dead animal sheltered by the remaining wall – and the wind blew its scent onto her – that rot again, from the boys’ school, something long-ago dead.
With the path flattening out, and not ready to return home just yet, Ruth found herself back on the coastal track, winding towards the rocks. There was a kind of waxy residue on her hands from the pony – she wondered if they produced lanolin, like sheep did. The Bass Rock looked not unlike the pony, in its stillness, its disregard for the weather. A fishing boat blinked by the side of it, and it was that which drew her attention to the change in the weather. The clouds had dropped down low and the sky turned a dark yellow, suggesting snow. It was certainly cold enough. The water blackened, and quickened, sending sharp little waves with white at their blades towards the shore. It was quite beautiful and, in a moment of romance, Ruth climbed over the rocks towards the beach to get a better view, imagined herself with a shawl and a lantern a hundred years ago, watching for a ship. She stopped when she saw a figure alone on the beach and had to refocus her eyes. A naked man stood facing the water: the swimmer, his arms held high above him as though he were beckoning something down, as though he were conducting the storm.
He turned his face to greet the rain and wind from the north, confirming that this was of course Reverend Jon Brown, his white buttocks clenched in rapture, his hair sticking up on his head and on his shoulders too, like an old dog spat out of the sea. The wind carried a few notes of what he called into it, but none of the sense of it, if there was any.
Ruth crawled backwards until she could properly get her footing, and made her way towards the house, smiling and then laughing. The man really was a lunatic. She felt an excitement about telling Peter, and then a thread of disquiet. She wouldn’t risk it. She would talk to Betty. Betty would laugh.
III
Sarah sings as she walks, a tune I can never quite catch. She has gathered up her hair on top of her head to keep it out of the way and the stray hairs are thick like red straw. I catch glimpses of her neck as she moves ahead of me, and while all of our faces and arms and legs are coated in the dirt thrown up by the rain, her neck is milk white. And the rain worsens. It rains through the night and all day, but it is not cold. The air is heavy, in the early parts of the morning, like a blanket weighing on us. The loud patter of drops on leaves and the way it moves the scrub around us, jumping off the spring-green growth, weighing down branches, makes me think of us moving across the belly of a gigantic scaled beast, warmed by its blood. It is true that ten days’ walk from home the seasons appear to have changed; where in our village the mud makes all black and anything that stands out against it pale and dead, the thick green of the woods here is a different country.
We come to a break in the path where the roots of a large oak have churned the earth enough to make room for us to sit close to each other and rest against the trunk and receive some shelter. Cook is laboured in her breathing, she coughs less now, but when she does you can hear things coming up. Sarah watches her and winds the stalk of some leaf around her thumb over and over.
Father closes his eyes and the Widow Clements is silent and sits with her arms folded across her chest. She stares hard into the woods.
Sarah stands and moves beyond the clearing. ‘I will be back,’ she says, disappearing into the darkness. She is gone before anyone can object, though Father’s eyes open and he sits up straighter.
‘She will have gone for a piss,’ my father says. The Widow Clements turns away from him and leans her head against the tree roots, like it pains her.
Sarah has been gone a long time. Cook holds her head in her hands. ‘We should go,’ says the Widow Clements. ‘She has run off.’
‘No,’ I say and everyone looks at me.
Father nods. ‘We wait. Perhaps she is lost.’ Cook stands and bellows, ‘Sarah,’ into the woods, but Father hushes her. The shouting has exhausted her, and she sits back down unsteadily.
But Sarah does return. Nobody speaks when she does. We are tired and I am grateful that her absence has meant we have not moved. If the voices come again, I would rather hide than run. I would make myself and Sarah a shallow grave and sink down in it.
She has the roots of some plant gathered in her pinafore, and she digs a hole in the earth and quietly and slowly prepares a small fire, using a flint and some twine she has managed to keep dry. Watching her work builds a comfort in me. Her white hands move quietly and efficiently, with a certainty that shows how many times before she has done this. I feel embarrassed about our efforts to light a fire in the rain, which she must have watched in frustration these past days. Father’s face also betrays a look of discomfort. In this moment he must feel a child is taking charge, and I feel pride on her behalf. There, Father, I think in a voice I don’t recognise, she is not for you. The Widow Clements looks away. Cook is delighted by the fire, and keeps making little noises of approval, like a sitting hen.
‘How did you find anything dry enough to act as kindling?’ Cook asks.
‘A mouse nest in a hollow log.’
The Widow Clements clucks in disgust.
‘The fire will see to the droppings,’ says Sarah, but the widow is not appeased. We move closer to the flames.
‘Well, now we have fire, I will go and find something to eat – there may be some mushrooms or perhaps fish in the stream,’ my father says, starting to rise.
‘No,’ says Sarah, not looking up, ‘the mushrooms here are all poison and the stream has gone underground.’ Father stays half risen, that look again, that he is the child. Something dark crosses his face. He remains on the floor.
‘But,’ she says, ‘I found some salsify and nettle.’ She takes several roots from her pinafore and nestles them deep in the flames. While they blacken, she asks us all for our tins and places them in the stream of water coming off the leaves of the tree. The smell of the roots is good, like potatoes done in the embers. Why one of us did not think earlier of collecting rainwater in our tins, I can’t say. I feel stupid in light of her shrewdness. For how long has she lived on nothing but roots and vines? I think, allowing myself a shred of pity, which feels better than the embarrassment of inaction. It is not the life I would give her. I would find meat for her, I would make money to buy bread. I wallow a moment in the image of us, our small children at my feet, my hand on her knee. But then out of her pinafore she takes a dead hare, and Cook gurgles with delight. It is like some magic trick.
‘I found her in the same log with the mice,’ she says, ‘sheltering from the rain.’ There is a small smile of triumph on her face, she knows she has surprised us, perhaps she knows that she has saved us, when we thought we were saving her. I have such a feeling of admiration, and underneath that the wish that it had been me that had provided the hare. But after a moment, Father smiles, then laughs, and everyone,
even the Widow Clements, softens at the idea of roasted hare. Sarah holds out her hand to me, and I pass my knife. She skins and cleans the animal with her careful hands, and there is a quiet reverence from the rest of us, the moment the flesh is shown to be deep scarlet, and the smell is only of blood and grass. We have passed out of reach of the rot. Once the thing is speared through with a sapling branch, and resting on the embers with the salsify, she squats down by the entrails and looks at them closely, pawing through them with a stick.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask. She looks up quickly, as though she has forgotten I am there. She looks to see if anyone else has noticed, but they are concerning themselves with turning the hare, and drying their boots out by the fire. Everyone’s mood is lifted at the smell of the meat and Father and the Widow Clements exchange soft words.
‘I am just checking the health of the animal,’ she says.
There is a pause and then I start laughing. ‘I’d say it’s not doing well.’
Sarah smiles, sweeps dirt up around the entrails and wraps them round the end of her stick so that she can pick them up.
‘When we’ve eaten, we’ll burn them,’ she says, ‘so nothing comes scavenging.’ She leans the stick against a tree, and collects the tins of rainwater, which she places in the hot earth next to the fire. She drops in the nettles, pinching hard with her forefinger and thumb to avoid the sting. After they have soaked a little, she goes around again and pinches them out, throws the leaves into the fire where they hiss. She takes each of us our tin, and if there is any distrust of what she has given us, she lays it to rest by telling Cook, ‘If you just let them soak a little moment, then take out the leaf, it doesn’t fur your tongue.’ Cook nods and takes a sip of her warm drink.
‘It is good,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Sarah.’
Sarah collects the salsify from the fire, lays the roots on four broad leaves, and rolls them until their black skins come off. The leaves steam with rainwater. She wraps one around the base of each root and distributes them among us. It smells sweet and woody and Sarah breaks another one in two, not using a leaf to shield her fingers from the heat, then she puts half in her mouth, and chews, letting the steam cloud out of her. It tastes like sweet chestnut, and it is the best thing I have eaten in two years. Sarah sucks the taste off her fingers, and then sees to the hare. She takes it off the stick, using my knife to slide it onto more leaves. Then she takes the head off, and the rest she cuts down the backbone with a sharp crack and across the ribs so it is in four equal parts. She hands these out, and keeps the head for herself.
‘You should have more of the meat,’ I say, offering her back my hindquarter, which I badly want to eat.
‘No,’ she says, ‘I prefer the head,’ and she demonstrates by chewing on the ear, which crackles and then comes away from the tiny skull. She looks up at me smiling.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
If the roots were the best thing I have eaten in two years, the hare is the most beautiful thing I have eaten in the entirety of my life. I am struck dumb by the chew of it, the sweetness of it. I could eat five hares this way in one sitting. I try not to show my amazement, and watch how Sarah slips the teeth of the hare’s head into her pocket.
‘It seems we are always sleeping here,’ Sarah says. The others have fallen hard into slumber. For myself, I have a quickened heartbeat, and a tension in my body that makes me feel I could walk another ten miles in the dark. I want to speak, I want to climb a tree.
‘They are tired,’ I say. ‘They are old and we have walked a long way.’
‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘how far we could get without them.’ She says it so lightly that it sounds not the slightest bit cruel – it sounds like just a thought.
‘I feel I could make the coast and back before they wake.’
Sarah smiles. ‘I bet you could,’ she says. She moves next to me so that our legs touch. She takes from her pocket a small wooden box and the teeth from earlier. She drops them one by one into the box so that they make a light hollow noise, like rain does when you are inside and warm and dry. She blows on the open box, as though the teeth are hot, and then she carefully closes the lid.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘It was my mother’s – she made it.’
‘What is it for?’
‘It’s for me.’
‘I do not understand.’
Her teeth are white in the dark. ‘What is your bit of cloth for?’
‘To remember.’
‘But when your sister and mother sewed it, why were they sewing it?’
‘To practise, to teach my sister how to.’
‘Show me,’ Sarah says. I find the swatch in my pocket and hand it to her. She turns it, looking at it from the last of the firelight.
‘See,’ she says, holding it up, ‘there is creation in this – the stars they have sewn, the coloured threads. There’s story here, they talked this into life.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But I see a little of what she means. Agnes is living in the line of thread that leads from the centre of the little black starburst, in her movements, my mother in the cross-hatching next to it, the moment held in the making.
‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ she says, moving a hand down to her belly, ‘you can see how they felt in each stitch, you can hear the words they spoke to each other and into the cloth.’
I look at the piece of sacking, and for a moment I see it, but it hurts to look.
‘What do you keep in your box?’ I ask, to move the talk a little from me.
‘That’s my secret.’ She does not say it unkindly, but I suddenly want nothing more than to open it and see what is in there.
‘I liked watching you make the fire and cook the food,’ I say instead. My eyes feel large and my body is very warm. It is the effect of having eaten well, and the tingle of the nettle tea in my gullet.
‘I liked cooking for you,’ says Sarah.
‘Tell me, what did you see in the hare guts?’
‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘they are just guts.’ But she says it with a tremor in her smile, and looks away.
She gets up and walks to where the guts are leaning against the tree, takes the stick and places it on the fire.
‘I was only thinking,’ she says, coming back and sitting next to me, the fire flaring a little around the entrails. ‘I was thinking about what happens next.’
‘Were you asking them?’
She looks at me, as though we are sharing a joke, but she sees my face is serious and she takes a moment.
‘I don’t care if you were. I’m only interested. I’m interested to know what you saw.’
She looks at me a long time. In silence I can hear my heart beat.
‘Only blood,’ she says. She crawls forwards and upwards onto my body. The feeling I have is so strange. I am not alarmed. I am something else. The darkness behind her moves like water. Every hair on my skin stands and throngs and is made of fire. Sarah kisses me and moves against me, and even as it’s happening, I am not sure that it is.
When I wake in the night, I am unsure of what took place. Sarah is no longer next to me, and someone vomits in the darkness. I hear it again and again, the turning out of a stomach, Cook, I think, from her deep gasps. I do not move to help her. There is a dread on me. I wish I could take Sarah and leave, that we would make the sea journey alone. Another sound in the dark, a deep moan. Someone else sick too.
II
On a morning in March when the boys had long been back at school and a gale blew outside, Betty answered the door. Ruth hadn’t heard the bell, the wind was so loud, rattling the windows and gripping over the chimney. But she heard his voice and sank lower in her chair, before getting up to receive him.
‘Mrs Hamilton,’ said Reverend Jon Brown, ‘we haven’t seen you in church for quite some time now.’ He leaned and kissed her on the cheek, which surprised her, though she tried to look as though it hadn’t. He smelled of the sea and his cheek was so cold i
t felt wet.
‘We’ve been busy,’ she said, trying to muster the degree of friendliness that might not offend but might also have the reverend on his way sooner rather than later.
‘I’ll fetch some tea,’ said Betty and the two women waited hopefully for it to be refused, but Reverend Jon Brown said, ‘Splendid,’ and showed himself into the drawing room. Betty and Ruth exchanged a look.
In the drawing room, the reverend added a log to the fire and sat in the armchair.
‘I thought you liked it cold, Reverend.’
‘Oh, I do, in matters of God. In personal matters, though, I like to be as cosy as the next person.’
‘Personal matters, Reverend?’
‘Yes. Is Mr Hamilton here by any chance? Not on one of his trips again?’ The way he said trips suggested to Ruth that he knew something about what those trips involved. It made her hate them both.
‘He is home, but he’s working. Do I need to disturb him?’
‘Well,’ he said, adjusting the cushion behind him, ‘it’s about young Christopher and so really I’d prefer to talk to you both.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘Nothing to worry about, just some issues I thought might be well brought up with you both before Christopher returns.’
‘What issues?’
‘Mrs Hamilton, I’d really rather Mr Hamilton were here too. They are his boys after all.’
Betty brought in a tray and set it on the occasional table. She eyed the two of them, wondering no doubt what she had walked in on.
There was a game of chess going on, but Ruth didn’t know the rules.
Ruth would have fetched Peter herself, enabling a moment of connection between them, against Reverend Jon Brown. But she didn’t want to leave the man alone in her home, she felt like he might pocket something.
