Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  ‘Is she really a witch?’

  Louisa laughed lazily and threw herself onto the couch, smoothing her darned skirts.

  ‘Witches don’t exist. Not in real life. My mother just pretends they do.’

  ‘I don’t pretend anything,’ said her mother, coming into the room. She was as solid as a birthing sow, with a stiff-hipped gait. ‘I help where I can, that’s all.’

  Anna filled a blue glass bottle with pins, mare’s urine and a snip of Nellie’s hair. She corked the bottle, and together they went to the river and threw it in. Nellie couldn’t say why, but when she saw the bottle float away, relief flooded through her.

  When she got home, Rose was waiting for her. She took Nellie’s hand and kissed her cheek. Sometimes things happened for a reason, she said. Even bad things.

  ‘There are stories about you now. Nasty gossip. Some villagers say you sold your hair. Some say you lay down with that man and you cut your own hair off because you were ashamed of what you’d done. People like to talk, and they like best of all the kind of story that brings shame on the innocent. I won’t let them shame you, dear. Mother always said that talk and lies cannot touch us if we’re deaf to the sound of them.’

  The sisters would be spinsters. Rose’s fingers squeezed Nellie’s hand. Their mother’s wedding ring, which Rose wore, cut into Nellie’s skin. She tried to pull her hand away, but Rose had her tight in her grip.

  ‘My darling girl. We will turn our backs on them all. It is better this way.’

  Rose coughed harshly once or twice. Was she crying? But no. She had long been consumptive and it was the disease making her eyes teary.

  ‘I love you,’ said Rose. ‘Sisterly love goes beyond the dangerous infatuation that men can provoke in women. We must dedicate ourselves to sibling love and in this we will be pure. Safe and bonded together for ever, even beyond death. We will be happy, you’ll see. I chose to forgo marriage when you were babies. I was just a seventeen-year-old girl like you, Nellie. I have never regretted dedicating my life to you. You will not regret dedicating yours to us.’

  Nellie heard a mouse hurry across the wooden floorboards. Rainwater dripped in the gutters outside the window. She listened to Rose lying in the bed beside them, the rasp of her breath. What a weight Rose’s particular brand of love was. Nellie pressed her cold feet together and tucked her blanket tighter around herself. If Rose got better, she would stop her silly dreaming. A fish was not an omen. It was just a fish. A man appearing out of the blue was just a man. It was as simple as that.

  Mrs Langham shook her awake just before dawn.

  ‘Wake up,’ she cried. ‘Wake up. Here you are sleeping like babes and your sister has slipped away.’

  Nellie and Vivian got to their feet, going to Rose’s side in a flurry of panic.

  Mrs Langham busied herself, putting out the fire in the hearth, turning mirrors to the wall, opening windows to let Rose’s soul fly free. Nellie and Vivian crouched over the body, unable to move away, saying Rose’s name over and over, as if they could call her back to them. How could she have left them while they were sleeping? It was not possible, and yet the dead woman lying in the bed, her cheeks as cold as frost, was already not Rose. Their sister had gone, and in her place was the worn body of a 37-year-old woman. A thin, fragile-looking stranger.

  Rose’s words, spoken so long ago, tumbled over and over in Nellie’s head. That love endured, even beyond death. She held Vivian’s hand. They had been orphaned as children when their parents died, and now, as women, they felt orphaned again.

  ‘What are we to do?’ asked Vivian. ‘How will we live?’

  ‘We have not lost everything,’ Nellie whispered. ‘We still have each other.’

  ‘We only have each other,’ answered Vivian, and began to cry.

  Two

  The cottage was different without Rose. The sisters were different. They felt lost and uncertain. Rose had been in charge of every aspect of their lives. She alone had wound their father’s clock on the mantelpiece and opened and closed the curtains at the beginning and ending of each day, as if she controlled time itself. Without her, Nellie and Vivian let the clock run down. Rose had kept the pantry locked, and Vivian opened its doors wide. She took out jars of cherries and made a blancmange with their juices. They ate the sweet sticky fruit with their fingers until their mouths were stained red and their bellies ached.

  When they ran out of food in the cupboards and went hungry, growing thin-cheeked and listless, Mrs Langham sent over food parcels and they accepted them without fear of hurting Rose’s pride. The vicar’s wife offered them charity from the paupers’ fund, giving them money to tide them over until they felt they could work again. Mr Langham brought planks of wood and mended the broken front door.

  For months after the funeral, the sisters wept. All through March and April they clung to their home and to each other. They slept late in the mornings and refused to leave the cottage. The rooms were humid and full of the smell of the river, but they didn’t care. They became immune to the rotten stink of riverweed and the cloying perfume of balsam flowers opening in the heat of spring. When frogs squatted in the butler sink in the scullery, belching loudly on the windowsill, Nellie lifted them, dry and cool in her hands, and took them back to the river. Green newts shimmied in under the cracks in the door. Vivian put them outside but they came back, like messengers from the river, reminding them of its closeness. The cooking range rusted. Even the light through the thin glass windows seemed damp and watery. And still the sisters cried, adding their own salt tears to the wet little riverside cottage.

  May brought hot weather. Day after day, the glaring sun scorched the land. The cottage was a waterless ship then, beached and cracking in the drying afternoons. Bedding hung from open windows like windless sails; the door and window frames shrank ever more crooked. Finally the sisters had no more tears. They, too, were dried out.

  ‘If you’re willing to work,’ Mrs Langham said when she called to see the sisters, ‘we need women to take picnics to the labourers in the fields.’

  ‘We’ll do it,’ said Nellie, her lips stained red with cherry juice. ‘We’d be glad to.’

  They collected jugs of tea and parcels of bread and cheese from the kitchens, crossing the water meadows, following a group of other women with their arms full of picnics. All along the river where the men were working, yellow buttercups smothered the green banks. Church bells for a wedding pealed in the distant village, the sound drifting across the fields.

  The labourers coppicing the willows had put down billhooks and saws and settled themselves under oak trees where it was shady. Swallows – the first of the season – darted across the sky. They brought a new summer on their wingtips. Vivian marched on ahead, catching up with the other women handing out picnics. Nellie stopped to watch the birds. They swept towards the river where a man waded in the shallows, a bundle of canes on his shoulder. It was him. Joe.

  He heaved the canes onto the shoreline and climbed the bank, grabbing at bushes to pull himself up. It looked to Nellie as though the river was reluctant to let go of him. Finally he stood on the bank. When he turned his head in her direction she stumbled forwards, horrified to be caught staring, treading on her skirts, nearly dropping the jug she was carrying.

  He waved and called loudly to her.

  ‘Do you have a drink there for me, Miss?’

  ‘Cold tea,’ Nellie called back, lifting the jug, liquid spilling down her arm. She cursed her clumsiness. Now she had no choice but to go to him. Perhaps it was the hot sun that made her feel slow or the way he stared so openly at her, but Nellie stumbled again as she walked. Sunlight dropped through gauzy clouds. She offered him the tea and his face lit in a slow smile. She could smell the river on him, a familiar odour of green weeds, mud and washed stones. Nellie found herself lifting her face to breathe in his watery scent.

  ‘Hello, Poacher,’ he said. ‘Stolen any more fish lately?’

  The day was murderously hot. A
curl stuck to her face. She had forgotten to brush her hair that morning and her long plait was coming undone. She laughed, her cheeks reddening. ‘We didn’t steal it. Honestly, I told you, it came through the door.’

  He took the picnic she offered him and said he’d take her word for it. He settled himself on the ground, cross-legged, eating hungrily.

  ‘The name’s Joe Ferier. Sit down with me.’ His request sounded cheerful, ordinary. ‘Keep me company for a minute or two. That can’t do any harm, can it?’

  ‘I’ll just wait for the jug and be on my way, thank you.’

  She stood stiffly, watching the swallows dipping to drink in the river.

  ‘All the way from Africa,’ Joe said, pointing at them. ‘Imagine that. A whole winter spent on another continent and then they find their way home. We humans would need a map or a compass, but those birds don’t have either.’

  ‘Swallows don’t go to Africa,’ Nellie said. This she knew for a fact. Anna Moats had told her. ‘In winter they sleep in leaf mould in forests. They wake up again for the summer, just like hedgehogs.’

  He laughed and pulled a small book from his knapsack. ‘Is that right? Tell me, can you read?’

  Nellie looked at the book’s title.

  ‘Birds of the British Isles.’

  ‘Good. Take it and read it. Swallows do not hibernate in leaf mould. Now, will you sit down with me, seeing as you have borrowed my book?’

  ‘All right,’ she said, grinning, finding a place among the buttercups and thistles. She put the book in her pocket. ‘But not for long. I have work to do.’

  ‘Not for long suits me fine,’ he said, smiling at her.

  Joe liked to talk. He said words never cost anybody anything. He was a traveller. Passing through on foot, looking for work. He came from a place in the north. A seaside town with brightly painted houses and so many seagulls the air was filled night and day with their calls.

  ‘They sound like crying babies,’ he said. ‘A terrible sound. Crying babies. I couldn’t get away from there quick enough.’

  He’d been a traveller since he left home aged fourteen. It was a good enough life. There were many like him on the road. He pointed to the earth track worn by the cows who wandered the same way each day, up to the farm to be milked and then back out to graze. He never wanted to walk the same road twice. Time wore out your shoe leather no matter what, and a travelling life was better than one spent walking over the same paths, the same fields, until the day you died.

  Nellie stole a look at him. His trousers were too short, his thin ankles poking out of them. His shirt was mended and neatly patched at the elbows. She would have liked to ask who had done the mending for him. His face was tanned and fresh with youth, his nose straight, a well-shaped mouth with a moustache hiding his top lip. His dark hair receded at the temples. A black felt hat was on the grass beside him. It had a collection of blue jay feathers stuck in the band. She reached out and touched the feathers, hoping he wouldn’t notice her curiosity.

  ‘This is a fine meal,’ he said, peeling a hard-boiled egg. ‘Last farm I worked at we got what the pigs refused to eat. They gave us bread you’d break a tooth on.’

  ‘Everybody likes Mrs Langham’s picnics. Old Hang’em – I mean Mr Langham – is the meanest beggar you ever clapped eyes on, but she’s a decent sort. She’d give away Langham’s boots if she thought somebody needed them more than him.’

  ‘Sounds like he needs to watch where he leaves them then,’ said Joe, and Nellie laughed. She was surprised by how pleasurable their conversation was.

  In his knapsack was a sketchbook and a roll of papers. He was a self-taught artist, making a record of the countryside as he travelled. He unrolled a watercolour of a big house surrounded by trees. It was a place not far away. Hymes Court. Nellie knew it vaguely.

  ‘I’ve plenty left to learn,’ he said, studying his painting closely, poring over it. ‘And you, Miss?’ he looked up. ‘What about you? What do you like to do?’

  She cleared her throat. ‘My name is Eleanor Marsh. My sister calls me Nellie. I’m a good worker, ask Mr Langham.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. But what do you like to do? Do you have a pastime, a passion?’

  ‘A passion?’

  She was not sure she had ever spoken that word out loud. She told him she loved to swim. It was the finest feeling she knew.

  A breeze picked up and rustled the leaves in the poplar trees. Nellie felt cool air against her face and saw the hairs rising on Joe’s wrists. The day was golden with sunlight. Was it possible she was in love? Could it happen this fast? But Vivian’s romance novels were full of people who met at the top of a page and were in love a paragraph later. Why shouldn’t she fall in love the same way?

  Joe smiled and got to his feet, brushing eggshell off his waistcoat. His glance journeyed over her shoulder, and Nellie turned her head.

  Vivian, with the small hands and feet of a woman not made for farm work, hurried towards them. A heat haze blurred in front of her. There were pale sweat marks on her blouse. Her heart-shaped face was pink and flushed under the wide brim of her straw hat. Her blonde hair curled around her cheeks, and her eyes were wary.

  Nellie looked again at Joe. He was watching Vivian, studying her the same way he looked at his painting, as if there was more to discover. She thanked God that Rose wasn’t here to see this.

  ‘Is that your sister? What’s her name?’

  ‘Vivian,’ said Nellie, her throat too dry to say any more.

  Louisa Moats, the old midwife’s daughter, had stood beside Vivian when she first arrived at the riverbank, telling her about the dance in town. After the annual horse fair, a group of horse dealers had paid some musicians to set up a band and play all night in the beer gardens of the Rose and Crown. She’d danced until the heel of her boot had fallen off.

  ‘So I took them off and carried on barefoot.’ She lifted her skirt to show off a dance step. ‘You should have come. They have a gramophone with stacks of recordings. You should have some fun while you can.’

  Vivian could imagine Louisa throwing off her shoes. At school, she’d been a slow-witted girl, always barefoot, dirty necked. Now she was a woman, unmarried, and still slovenly.

  ‘I was right as a mailer that night. Couldn’t stop dancing, even danced on the way home.’

  ‘You use such odd expressions,’ said Vivian, and knew she sounded stuck-up, like she thought she was a grand lady. It wasn’t such a strange expression either. Rose used to say the same thing. As prompt as the mail, as right as a delivered letter; satisfied and timely. That was all the expression meant.

  ‘Look at her,’ said Louisa, nudging Vivian, acting as if she hadn’t heard her. ‘The wheelwright’s wife. What a sight.’

  Vivian stared, though she knew she shouldn’t. The wheelwright’s wife sat leaning against a tree, a baby at her exposed breast. Milk glistened on the infant’s chin and spilled from the corner of his red mouth. Field flies drifted around the baby’s sticky cheeks, the mother batting them away with her hand. Such a sleek and plump infant. He gazed at his mother with open adulation, as if she was everything he would ever desire in life.

  Vivian wondered what it might be like to be so very loved by an infant. To have those dark-lashed eyes look at you that way, like you were sweeter than all the plum cake and honey in the world.

  ‘Is that your sister over there?’ Louisa tipped her chin towards the river. ‘Do you see her, sitting alone with a man? I didn’t know she was courting.’

  Vivian turned reluctantly away from the sight of the baby. She looked back across the field, startled by the sight of Nellie in conversation with a man.

  ‘She’s got her heart set on that one,’ said Louisa, nudging Vivian in the ribs. ‘And he looks pretty happy too.’

  Vivian didn’t answer her. She hurried towards Nellie, all thoughts of the baby quite forgotten.

  ‘Hello again, Miss,’ said Joe as she arrived. ‘Joe Ferier. You remember me? I came in a boa
t and rescued you in the floods.’

  Had he rescued them? She didn’t remember it that way. He lifted his hat. His eyes seemed to have sunlight in them, small flecks of gold in the brown. He reached out and shook hands with her, gripping her fingers firmly, the way Vivian imagined a man might take a girl’s hand to lead her into a dance. Then he let go and stepped back, smiling at both women, looking from one to the other, a hand shading his face from the fierce sunlight.

  ‘It’s the eyes. You’ve got the exact same eyes. There’s the resemblance. You wouldn’t know you were sisters unless you looked at your eyes.’

  He was studying them openly and Vivian felt irritated by him. A helpless sense of dislike rose up in her and made her cheeks burn. She knew how he saw them. Spinsters. Sad old maids to be pitied and laughed at. No doubt they looked as sombre to him as the shadows the trees threw over the river. He saw right into the heart of them. The flimsy romance novel she carried in her pocket, the frog’s bone and lucky rabbit’s foot in Nellie’s purse.

  ‘We have to collect the jugs,’ she said. ‘So if you have finished, Mr Ferier, then we’ll leave you to get back to your work.’

  She grabbed her sister’s arm, but Nellie was staring as if the man might turn into something else at any moment, something extraordinary, a feathered fish or a fur-covered snake.

  ‘Nellie?’ Vivian raised her voice. ‘Come on. We must go.’

  By the time they joined the gang of women returning to the farm with empty jugs and baskets, and Vivian looked again, the men were all cutting willow canes and she couldn’t make out which one Joe was.