Still disoriented by the sudden change from the radiance of the grotto pool to the dark slime of the streambed, Felicia had no words to answer. She noticed vaguely that Blaic was not there, and wondered if he ever had been.
“What has happened?” she asked.
“As if you don’t know! Don’t play the zany, girl.” Varley tightened his already painful grip. For a man with rheumatism, he was capable of remarkable strength when angry.
“Please, William Beech, you tell me.”
“I don’t rightly know. Mistress raised the house when she found her missin’.”
“That’s enough,” Varley said. “She know well enow what she has done.”
Aware that the blood running down her neck must make her a shocking sight, Felicia tried to speak calmly. “Pray continue, William Beech.”
For whatever reason—a love of gossip, a love of justice, or just that he had once found her desirable—William Beech did continue. His thick-witted brother, Harry, gaped at her over his shoulder. “Like I say, she roused the house and zent the boot boy off to wake me ‘n’ my brother. We’m zearched the garden high an’ low afore meetin’ up with the house lot down by stream. Just in time to zee you’m push her under.”
Chapter Seven
“This is intolerable!” Felicia said for approximately the fifteenth time that day. The village clock showed a trifle after noon. The clock resided in the tower of the town hall, an elegant building constructed only a few years ago. The ornate face of the clock was all that could be seen from the single window of the town gaol. It seemed, somehow, to add insult to injury that the prisoners could see so little except that clock, ticking off the weary seconds of their incarceration.
“Constable Richards,” Felicia began. “How do you expect the eight people in this cell to feed themselves on two plates of... of whatever this revolting mess is called?’’
Constable Richards acted very differently now that Felicia was under his “care.” He’d used to tug his forelock to her when she was out riding in the gig and always spoke most respectfully, whether or not she was with her father. Now, however, he spat during his speeches and his red face had a hard, shiny finish.
“Snatch and grab,” he said in answer to her question. “You don’t see them turnin’ their noses up at it.”
Her fellow inmates had already taken it all, fighting and snarling in the corners like beasts. Even those who’d come in together slapped at each other to be the first to plunge a dirty fist into the vaguely greenish “stew.”
Forcing down her rising gorge, Felicia said, “No, indeed. But, culinary skills aside, you are not overgenerous in your portions, Constable.”
“The county don’t pay me to feed you gaolbirds well. We’d have half the poor in Devon ‘ere stuffin’ their faces if the grub was good.”
“I promise faithfully not to tell them,” she said.
Constable Richards edged his girth a little closer to the open door. His thick fingers looked like bloated sausages as he reached out to stroke her shoulder. Felicia leaned away. He showed rather rabbity front teeth. In a lowered voice, he growled, “Is that friendly? You know what to do t’have zum proper food. What’d you do for a mouthful o’ white bread, zay? Or an apple? Hey? I be glad to show you a trick or two you maybe ain’t learned.”
Felicia turned away, flushed hot despite the freezing temperature of the gaol. “When I am released, Richards, I’ll not rest until you are dismissed from the post and a man with some humanity is given your position!”
“Fine words, your ‘ladyship’! But you ought to tike what you can while you can. You’ll be danglin’ zoon as the assizes are over, niver you fear! Them judges make short work o’ them as come up afore ‘em with a murder charge over ‘em!”
“My sister is not dead!” Felicia flung back.
“Not yet...no thanks to you!” He slammed the solid wooden door, setting up a clanging of echoes in the cell.
Felicia sat down in the dirty straw. This was only her first day in Hamford Gaol and already she did not know how much longer she could bear it. As a child she’d dwelt in a kennel like this, but since then she’d known nothing but gentility and cleanliness. Her father had never let her speak of her nightmarish childhood and with time, all had faded. She’d lost the perspective of the poor.
Her fellow prisoners did not suffer from this shrinking of the flesh. They huddled in their corners, conserving what warmth they could find. Their breath was like smoke when they spoke or coughed. They were only known to her by vague reputation.
Morris the poacher and his wife (famous for ribbon-stealing) sat in one corner. If convicted, they’d both be hung, for it was far from either’s first offense. He’d just cuffed her across the head for not being quicker at grabbing the food.
Dale and Choate had been taken up for being in possession of smuggled goods. If convicted, they’d never see Devon more, nor indeed any part of England, unless it be from the deck of one of His Majesty’s ships. Every day, their wives, mothers, and children would come and shout through the single opening in the wall. It was a melancholy scene, though the two bawds who also shared this spacious accommodation were of the opinion that it would not be long before the women joined in their antique profession.
One bawd nursed a babe at her breast, while the other was obviously not far off her day of travail. They dressed, even the pregnant one, in an exaggerated form of the present mode, tossed over with greasy ribbons and dirty bits of lace, while their wigs were teaseled within an inch. Felicia had seen each of them trade to the constable some tawdry bit of finery in exchange for a tankard of gin.
At first, Felicia had gagged on the stench of the open pot in the corner of the cell. She had not, as yet, brought herself to use it. The food did not tempt her, and she had only sipped from the common water jug. The water had probably not been changed in several days, and, moreover, the jug did not look as though it had ever been washed out. If it had not been for that, she would have bathed the scratches on her throat, which felt hot and stiff whenever she turned her head.
After a night and half a day, she no longer gagged, except once in a while. She’d already resigned herself to the fact of lice, after watching the two bawds comb each others’ wigs. As for her hunger, she remembered this gnawing within from her childhood. It would fade soon, hardly troubling her, before it returned tenfold. She could stand it until then.
Felicia closed her eyes and let her head fall forward. She’d not slept the night before, sitting bolt upright against the wall, filled with terror and loathing. So far, the others had ignored her, even when she was quarreling, at least partly on their behalf, with Constable Richards.
She felt something crawl along her arm and slapped at it.
“Ow!” cried out a voice not her own.
The poacher’s wife had sidled up to her and had tried to steal Felicia’s pin-lace from her very bosom. “Give it me,” Mrs. Morris whined. “T’feed me poor children. They going to be left orfangs once him an’ me has our necks stretched.”
“Don’t you believe ‘er!” the pregnant prostitute called out. “She ain’t got no manner nor mean of child in this whole world.”
“Go away,” Felicia said tiredly. “If I’m hanged, I’ll make you my heir.”
“Leave ‘er be,” growled Dale, or perhaps it was Choate. He was a big-bodied man with curiously thin legs. Though not more than thirty, his hands trembled like an old man’s. “She’s for the long hop, she is, so you leave her be.”
“I be for it too,” Mrs. Morris said proudly, like one asserting her right of seniority.
“Ah, you’ll plead your belly,” Choate, or Dale, said in his high piping voice. “They’ll put off your stretch for three months. She cain’t do that. She be quality.”
Grumbling, Mrs. Morris went back to her husband, who gave her another clout over the ear. She wailed for a time, then dropped into a repeated and offensively liquid sniffling.
“Niver you mind, dearie,” the pregn
ant woman said. “You have yer sleep. We’ll watch out for her.”
“You’re very kind. Maybe I’ll make you my heir instead.”
“Now, there’m no cause fer that kind o’talk. Young and pretty like you be, they’ll niver hang you. Transportation, as Gawd’s me witness. Me Jerry; he been transported to Barbados. I reckon even slavery’s better than hangin’. An’ one day, he’ll come back, drippin’ with pearls and gold, like as not! Zumtimes they do come back.”
“That they do,” said the other, patting her friend on the shoulder. “I’ve heard tell of lots as come back. Pirates, even. Them what they don’t hang.”
When Felicia awoke, the gilded hands of the town clock had wound around past three. She did not remember her dreams, except that they had been pleasant. It made waking to this squalor all the more difficult.
She moved, wincing at the stiffness of her legs and the numbness of her buttocks where they had been pressed against the cold stone floor. Something small fell out of her lap. For a moment, she recoiled at the unexpected movement, unsure whether she’d been used as a bed by some rodent or other. Then, realizing that the thing moved no more, she prodded it with a finger.
This new object made her realize that the worst part of prison was the monotony. She seized upon this small mystery with a hunger greater than the hunger of her body. The moment she took it in her hand, Felicia knew it was of fairy-make. A slight tingle ran up her arm, not unlike the time some friend of her father’s had demonstrated the science of electric fluid to the family.
It was a small white sack, the mouth puckered tight by a golden cord. The stuff of which it was made was both velvety soft and resilient, finer than her very best pair of kidskin gloves. Embroidered on the side in the tiniest of stitches was a magnificently curling capital letter B.
In the top opening of the letter was the face of a man with gaunt cheeks and starved eyes. In the bottom opening stood the same fellow, his cheeks plump, his waistcoat unbuttoned over a bulging belly. The pictures were as tiny and clear as they’d have been if scratched by the pen of a monk working on a medieval manuscript.
“What’s that?” Morris stared greedily at the bag in her hand.
She scarcely glanced at him. “No one has come in here?”
“Nary a man nor mouse,” said the pregnant woman. “An’ every time I been in this plaice afore, it’s been runnin’ over with rats.”
“That’s right,” said her friend. The baby lay sound asleep in the dirty hay, its lips slightly blue from the cold. “Bit me zick and zore from top to toe.”
“Maybe ol’ Richards cleaned ‘em out,” Morris said, and had the satisfaction of listening to the others’ laughter at the preposterous idea. He laughed too, his black and broken teeth an unpleasant sight, though Felicia had seen worse in the mouths of prominent people.
Felicia wished that she’d thought to hide the mysterious bag from prying eyes but, on reflection, realized how utterly impossible secrecy was in the gaol. It was only natural that the others would be interested. Where had it come from? Did the B stand for Blaic?
He had not come out of the starlit pool the way Clarice had. She could only guess that when he dived in, he’d gone back to his own place—that Wilder World of which he had spoken. Clarice and Felicia had also returned to their own world, the younger gasping on the shores of a very real stream. Felicia saw again in imagination the slime-streaked figure being carried to the house while one of the grooms lashed a horse into a gallop, riding first for the doctor and then for the constable. She was certain she would never see Clarice alive again.
“Open it,” the fellow she decided was Dale urged. The others were as eager for something to break the monotony as she herself. Only Choate reclined in his corner and said, “What’s the odds? Only thing as would interest me is a tankard of good ol’ zider. I’d zell me zoul for a tankard o’ zider as me poor ol’ father made at harvest. But I’ll niver taste the like no more.”
He sniffed sentimentally and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Felicia untied the mouth of the bag and tugged the edges apart. “I think it’s empty,” she said, and felt the others’ disappointment go around the cell like a sigh. “Wait....”
She put in her hand and recoiled at the touch of something wet and cold. Then, slowly, squinting up her eyes in her reluctance, she pushed her hand in again. The smooth, wet sides of a hard rounded shape met her shrinking touch.
She traced the earlike shape at the side and thought, “A handle?”
Spilling a little, she pulled out a tankard of cider. The crisp tantalizing scent cut through the horrible stink of the gaol. Choate didn’t trouble to stand up. He scrambled over to her on his hands and ragged knees with remarkable speed. He made as though to snatch at the tankard, pulling his hand back at the last second. Much more slowly, he traced with a black-rimmed fingertip a bead of liquid condensed on the gleaming pewter.
The droplet went into his mouth. His eyebrows rose. Taking the tankard, he drained it without a second breath. His fellow smuggler watched, his pale tongue flicking over his lips.
“Is it?” Dale demanded long before the tankard came down.
Choate licked the foam off his upper lip with a grin of rare satisfaction. “As true as ever the ol’ man made!”
Dale and the others cowered back. “Devil’s work ...,” someone whispered.
Choate laughed and threw down the mug to clatter on the stone floor. “I promised the Black One my zoul in exchange. Now he can take it and welcome! ‘Tis my thanks I’m offerin’ him!”
“Don’t be a fool,” Felicia said. “It’s not devil’s work at all, and you mustn’t give up your soul.”
Morris, braver or meaner than the rest, said, ‘That there bag ain’t natural! If it ain’t the devil, and it ain’t the loaves and the fishes like what parson tells of, what is it?”
She chose the word they’d understand best, though she knew that if Blaic was listening he’d be enraged. “It’s just the pixies.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Morris nodded. “That’s all right then.”
The others seemed to agree. Her husband asked, “What else is in there?”
After that, the gaol was a merrier place. Anything they could think of in the way of food, the small bag supplied. Being of simple tastes, their flights of culinary fancy extended no further than cider served beside sausages in sputtering grease—on which Felicia burnt her fingertips as she pulled out the plates. The cider was as heady as champagne; the smooth casing of the sausages squeaked when bit, bursting into succulence. Felicia also took out a bottle of milk for the baby when it woke up in the middle of the noise and cried.
“What about you, miss?” the mother asked, sitting gorged over what must have been her fourth plate of sausages. “You ain’t had a bite, not a bite.”
“I’m not very hungry,” Felicia said.
“Oh, now...you’d best eat lest them what give you that...” she nodded toward the white bag in Felicia’s lap “think you be ungrateful. My ol’ mam used t’zay, ‘Niver madden the fairy-folk if ye kin help it.’ Zeems they take offense that dreadful easy. No more ‘n a word’ll do it zo that they make the cow run dry an’ the hens not to lay. She’m be powerful zmart, my ol’ mam.”
“Where is she now?”
“Be to home more’n laik. T’isn’t her, you zee, t’is my ol’ dad. He what showed me the door.” She picked up her baby and rocked it gently without saying another word. Felicia respected the woman’s memories, though she now suspected that the wench was not very much older than she herself.
The sun had fallen quite low by now and the buzzing snores of the full-bellied prisoners echoed around her. Felicia sat in her spot, her ringers idly tracing the initial on the white kid bag. Slowly a feeling of self-pity stole over her. She tried to keep it at bay, but she had little meat to feed her confidence. The white bag could not help her there.
Why had no one come to see her? Even now, she did not know if Clarice was alive or dea
d. Surely someone — Doctor Danby or Justice Garfield — should have come by now to at least tell her whether she was charged with murder or only attempted murder. If it had been Blaic who had given her the bag as she slept — and who else could it have been? — why hadn’t he told her what was happening at Hamdry Manor?
He could have enspelled the others long enough to speak to her if he did not care to be seen by them. She could only assume it was because the news was so bad he didn’t dare tell her. Staring down at the gift, her ringer stilling, she wondered if this magic bag was the price for absolving Blaic of his part in her sister’s drowning.
She had to believe he had meant well. Surely he would not have gone to so much trouble just to hurt her, or Clarice. After what she’d seen of the pool, she had no choice but to believe he was exactly what he said, one of the mysteries of life turned to flesh. Remembering the solid muscle of his arm, Felicia blushed to think how attractive she’d found him from the first. If he were but a man ...
The fast-setting sun gilded the cell with red-gold beams. The temperature dropped with the sun. This night would prove colder than the one before. The little bag would not dispense a quilt for her, nor a warm woolen coat. With a resigned glance at the pot in the corner, Felicia said softly, “A glass of sweet milk and a bun with currants. Please.”
She drew out these things and sat nibbling them while the sun dropped ever lower. The bun was a good one, chunky with currants and lemon peel, sprinkled with cinnamon and glazed with honey. She thought idly that the food in the Wilder World must always be exceptional.
She’d no sooner eaten the last bite and sipped the last drop than she heard the clanging of the outer door. This sound, she’d already learned, heralded the approach of Constable Richards and his skinny minion, the one who actually dirtied his hands with the abominable meals. She smiled to herself to think that, tonight at least, the meal would be returned uneaten.
Glancing around with affection at her fellow inmates, Felicia saw that the tankards and greasy plates had all vanished, along with the tumbler she’d drunk from. The People believed in leaving no evidence, it seemed.
Kissed by Starlight Page 10
