I had never been to Low Sorrell, but I knew it was only three miles down the road. It would take little more than an hour to ride there and back, and the mare seemed ready to trot as quickly as I wished.
The road wended among several hills and then down into a quaint valley. Ancient stone walls stitched across a patchwork of tilled fields, meadows, and bracken. I passed a stand of aspen trees—a copse of New Forest, not bounded by any wall—and lingered for a few minutes beneath their trembling shade. By the time I reached the cluster of stone houses near a small bridge, my mood was greatly improved.
I halted before a building I took to be a public house. The village was not, I was forced to admit despite my good cheer, as charming as Cairnbridge. The grass in the commons was yellowed, and the houses were stained with soot and patches of moss that gave them a scabrous look.
It was only the damp air that made everything look shabby, I supposed, for the village was close to the bogs. However, the people who went about had the same dilapidated look as the buildings. Nor did any of them greet me, though a few treated me to sidelong glances. These people were not country squires and well-to-do tradesmen, I reminded myself; rather, it was the tenants who dwelled down in the lowlands.
As no one stopped to greet me, I took it upon myself to speak to a gray-haired man passing by, inquiring if he knew where I might buy butter. He muttered several harsh-sounding words and made an odd motion with his hand, then turned his back to me.
I had no idea what to make of this reaction, but I decided it best to seek out someone who was used to speaking with a customer. With that in mind, I ventured into the public house. A haze of smoke hung on the air, along with a sour smell. The rumble of conversation filled the room but fell to a hush as I entered. A dozen rough faces turned in my direction. I could only wonder what I looked like. Was I such a fright after my ride?
No, that was not why they stared. My dress, though very simple to me, was of fine black linen, not coarse gray homespun. I saw there was not another woman in the place. However, if I had intruded or broken some rule, then the infraction was already committed. I might as well make my inquiry.
“Good day,” I said to the bald man who stood at the plank of wood that served as a counter. “I wonder if you might tell me where in the village I could purchase butter.”
“There’s none you can buy here,” he said.
I was taken aback—though at this point not entirely surprised—by his harsh tone. “I was told in Cairnbridge I might do so.”
He scowled, as if I had accused him of lying. “There’s none here in Sorrell, but cross the bridge and keep going until ye reach the third croft. Ye can talk to them there.”
That I could trust these directions I was far from certain; however, I thanked the man. He gave a curt nod without meeting my eyes. At the same time his hand dropped behind the counter, but not before I saw him touch his thumb and middle finger together three times. It was, I thought, the same motion the man outside had made.
“Good day,” I said again, and, keeping my chin up, I walked to the door and into the sunlight. I heard a burst of talk behind me, but I kept moving, returning to my horse.
My hands trembled as I took the reins. I did not know what I had done to earn such strange consideration from the men in the public house. Perhaps it was only to be expected that men who were obedient in their landlords’ presence might turn surly in their own village with a cup of ale at hand. All the same, their looks, their behavior, had left me unsettled. The day had lost any luster it had held. The air was damp, the clouds dreary. I wanted only to ride as quickly as I could back to Heathcrest.
No, I should not be so easily deterred by a few rude looks. I had come on an errand, and I would see it done. I rode along the muddy street, crossed the bridge, and followed the track.
I soon came to a row of small farms or crofts in the meadows along the stream, and in front of the third I saw several cows grazing, which I took for a hopeful sign. I tied the mare at a post, then followed the footpath up to the croft. It was less a country cottage and more a hovel of gray stones with a wattle-and-daub chimney, but there were nasturtiums blooming in the yard and violets beside the front step; these encouraged me onward when my steps might otherwise have faltered.
As I neared the house, a young man—taller than I, but very thin—came around the corner. When he saw me he stopped short, and his eyes went wide. The bucket he had been carrying slipped from his hand. White liquid flowed over the ground.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, taking a step toward him. “I’m so sorry.”
He retreated, and his left hand curled in as he tapped thumb and middle finger together. My cheeks burned, and my eyes stung. To receive another such reaction was more than I could bear that day. I started to turn, to head back down the path.
“I suppose she’s come for butter,” said a reedy voice from the direction of the house. “Don’t just stand there like a lump of peat, Corren. Pick up the bucket and go fill it again. The red cow has been complaining all morning—I’ve told you she needs milking twice a day.”
The young man snatched up the bucket and ran back around the house. A woman stood on the steps of the house. She was wrapped in a gray shawl and leaned on a crooked stick that served for a cane. She gestured to me with a hand that was every bit as bent as the cane.
To leave was still my instinct. But the woman motioned to me again, and as it was the first encouraging gesture I had seen since coming to Low Sorrell, I could not resist.
“There’s a girl,” the woman said as I approached the steps. “Come in, come in. I’ll get you the butter. It’s ten pennies a pot. That’s robbery, I know; but when robbers roam the roads, even honest folk must resort to thievery to make a living. What times, these are! Come in, my dear, I said come in. And you’ll have a cup of tea, of course.”
“Tea?” I said, surprised by her words.
She squinted at me. “You aren’t simple, are you, dear?”
“Yes,” I managed to say. “I mean, yes, I’d like tea very much, thank you.”
I followed her into the house. The front room was spare and dim, but it was neatly kept, and there was a bowl of yellow nasturtiums on the table. I felt no fear as I accepted a seat and a cup. The tea was warming—fragrant with rose hips—and I felt myself restored as I sipped it. My host was not, I saw now, so old as I had thought. Her crooked limbs must have been the result of a malady of the bones, not the product of age.
“This chair,” I said, noticing the seat I had taken. “It’s very like the one in my room at—in the house where I live.”
“At Heathcrest Hall, you mean.”
So there was no hiding who I was. “Yes, at Heathcrest.” I touched the arms of the chair, which had been bent and braided of willow branches.
“My nephew fashioned it. I imagine he made the one you have up at Heathcrest as well.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and then realized I had yet to introduce myself, so I set down my cup and did so.
“I am Cathlen Samonds,” she said in reply.
“Samonds!” I said. “But your nephew—it isn’t Mr. Samonds, is it? The farrier in Cairnbridge, I mean.”
“Aye, he’s the very one. My brother is his father. Or he was, that is, when he still dwelled with us in this world.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but she only shook her head and drank her tea. “I suppose that’s how the chair came to be at the house,” I went on. “Mr. Samonds—that is, your nephew—said he went there often as a boy. He must have brought the chair there.”
“Aye, he made several things for the house—chests, stools, and other things. The chair would have been a gift for Mrs. Quent.”
“She was his mother’s cousin, I understand.”
She nodded, then took a nasturtium from the bowl and ate it, flower, leaf, and stem.
“The young man out there,” I said. “Is he your son? I’m sorry I startled him. I will pay for the milk.”
“That’s m
y neighbor’s son. I’ve never married. Besides, I like to believe any son of mine would have been a bit less thick.” She laughed, and her teeth were as crooked as the rest of her. “But he’s a good lad in his way. And you need not worry over the milk. It’s good to spill a little now and then, to give back to the ground what we take from it.” She took another flower and ate it.
“Thank you,” I said, and didn’t know what to say after that. I sipped my tea as Miss Samonds ate flowers.
“I imagine they were right wary of you in the village,” she said. “To tell the truth, I’m surprised they spoke to you enough to tell you how to find me. You must have had to draw it out of them.”
“Indeed, they were very strange to me,” I said, setting down my cup. Now that the subject was broached, my curiosity had to be satisfied. “Such looks they gave me—just as the boy out there did—as if I were the most frightful thing, and they would make this peculiar gesture. Why would they do such a thing?”
“Because you have Addysen eyes.”
“My eyes? What do you mean?”
“Your eyes are green. It isn’t a common color, at least not around here. There’s only one family in this county as ever had green eyes in it, and even then it was just the daughters. Not that there were ever many sons of that family.”
“The Addysens, you mean.”
“Aye, the Addysens. And I’m guessing by your look you want to hear all about them. You’d better take more tea, then.”
I hesitated, for I knew I should hasten back to Heathcrest before the children rose. However, by then my curiosity could not be denied. I accepted another cup of tea.
“There’s no older family in the county than the Addysens,” Miss Samonds said, “though there were the Rylends, who were every bit as old. Earl Rylend dwelled up at Heathcrest Hall, as you must know. Your own Mr. Quent was raised in his household like a son. But the earl had no child of his own who lived to inherit his name. When he was gone, the house, but not the Rylend name, went to Mr. Quent.
“I cannot imagine that he sought it!” I was not certain why I felt it necessary to make so vehement a defense of my employer, but that Mr. Quent was someone who aspired to a title out of vanity I could not imagine.
Miss Samonds shrugged, then went on as bees droned in the yard outside the window. The Addysens, she said, had long made their home at their lodge at Willowbridge, some miles to the north. The last Addysen squire to dwell there had been Marwen Addysen. For a time he had served as a captain at a garrison in Torland, but he had been called back when his elder brother was thrown from a horse and broke his neck. This all happened nearly a hundred years ago.
Much to the dismay of his family, Marwen brought a wife back with him, a young woman from one of the Torland clans. However, the deed was accomplished; there was nothing to be done. By then Marwen’s father was near to death and indeed soon passed. So Marwen became squire at the lodge at Willowbridge, and his wife the lady of the house.
“What was she like, the woman he brought from Torland?” I asked, and took another sip of tea.
Miss Samonds laughed. “Oh, she was a wild thing, Rowan Addysen was! Or at least so the stories say. It was said if there was a ball she would dance every song, and when the musicians stopped playing she would run outside and dash off her shoes and dance in the grass by the light of the moon. She was lovely too, and generous. All the accounts say she was much liked by all who met her.”
“And she had green eyes?”
“Aye, that she did. So did each of her three daughters, and so did all of their daughters. So it was that to have green eyes was to have Addysen eyes. But she never had any son, and she raised her daughters mostly by herself, for Marwen died when Willowbridge Lodge burned to the ground one night when Rowan and her girls were off at a ball.”
It seemed the daughters themselves were peculiar in their way. For one thing, none of them took their husband’s name when they were married. Not that their husbands liked the idea much, but that was the price of getting Rowan Addysen’s approval—and more importantly, a part of her fortune, which was enough to rival that of the Rylends. So it was that her daughters were able to find men who would agree to that peculiar condition and Rowan’s daughters kept the name Addysen, and gave it to their own daughters as well.
“But not to the sons?” I asked.
Miss Samonds shrugged. “As I said, there were never many sons that came out of that lineage. My nephew is one of the few. But Rowan Addysen only said her daughters had to keep the name. And maybe that was why the men agreed so quickly when they accepted their portion. For a daughter doesn’t have much chance to carry on a man’s name, does she? And by the time her granddaughters married, Rowan Addysen was in the grave, and none of them who took a husband kept the Addysen name for their own.”
What a strange story! But that Rowan Addysen was a fascinating character could not be denied. “Are there many of them, then? Rowan’s granddaughters, I mean.”
“Aye, there were near to a dozen. Not all stayed in the county, of course. Some went back west to Torland to take husbands there, and some met an early death, as some do. Yet a number of them stayed here.”
“And they all had green eyes.”
Miss Samonds set down her cup. “Some less green, some more. But, aye, every one of them.”
But Mr. Samonds’s eyes were brown, I recalled. This was peculiar and made me think of Miss Mew. Only female cats were ever tortoiseshells, and only Addysen women ever had green eyes. How was it such a trait could be passed only to daughters, not sons? I did not know. However, interesting as this was, it did not explain the reaction I had gotten in the village.
I started to ask this question, but it appeared Miss Samonds had anticipated it.
“They’re not thought of as a good thing these days,” she said. “Eyes of green, that is.”
“Why is that?”
Up to this point, Miss Samonds had been talkative and open, but now her expression grew closed, even canny. She seemed to be thinking.
“The great oak tree on the commons in Cairnbridge,” she said at last. “Do you know what happened to it?”
“It burned some years ago. That was what your nephew Mr. Samonds told me.”
“Aye, it did burn. Nearly twenty years ago now.”
“How strange that they have not planted another in its place.”
“You think it strange? And did you know there was an old stand of Wyrdwood near the village that burned that same night? Would you think that strange as well?”
I recalled the dark smudge I had seen atop the hill just north of Cairnbridge. “I don’t know what you mean, Miss Samonds.” All the same my breathing quickened, as if I did know something, and my hands felt damp. I pressed them against my dress.
“No, you don’t know, do you? I wonder if it is good or ill.” She shook her head. “Well, you should ask Mrs. Darendal about it, all the same.”
“Mrs. Darendal?”
“That’s right. She’s still the housekeeper up at Heathcrest, isn’t she?”
I nodded.
“Ask Mrs. Darendal, then,” Miss Samonds said. “She can tell you what happened better than I can. Ask her what happened to the oak tree on the commons in Cairnbridge nineteen years ago.”
Before I could say anything more, she had risen and fetched me a pot of butter. I paid her, then found myself at the door. A mist was falling outside. I pulled up my bonnet and ventured out into the damp. However, as I reached the bottom of the steps, I remembered and turned around.
“Miss Samonds, you still haven’t told me. The gesture the men made with their hands—what does it mean?”
She did not look at me but rather into the mist. “It’s a sign,” she said. “A sign against poison and bad luck.” She tightened bent fingers around her cane. “A sign against curses.”
The door shut, and the violets beside the step lowered their heads as the mist turned into rain.
BY THE TIME I returned to Heathcrest, Jance w
as waiting for me. He hurried out of the stables as I rode up, took the reins, and helped me down. It was an act for which I was glad, for I was drenched through, and my fingers were so numb I could hardly pry them from the reins.
“Are ye well, miss?” He held me steady. “Are ye hurt?”
My mind was as numb as my fingers. “Hurt?”
“I went to Cairnbridge, but ye weren’t there. An’ then I heard word about Deelie Moorbrook’s cow, an’ my mind can only get to thinking. So I ride back here, an’ ye weren’t back yet. I was just going to ride out to try to find ye, only then I see ye coming up the hill. Are ye sure ye aren’t hurt, miss?”
I assured him I was just cold and explained that I had gone to Low Sorrell to buy butter. He gave me a startled look, but he said nothing as he led me to the house.
Inside, he called for Lanna, and when she saw me her eyes went wide. She led me up to my room and helped me out of my sodden clothes. Soon I sat before the fire, wrapped in a shawl, drinking hot tea.
“Thank you, Lanna,” I said when at last my shivering subsided.
She appeared quite relieved. I supposed I had given everyone a fright.
“Well, I know it was foolish of me to ride so far,” I said. “But at least we shall have butter on the table tonight.”
Lanna treated me to one of her rare smiles.
“The children—they haven’t risen already, have they?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
So I had been gone too long after all.
“I will see to them at once,” I said. Despite Lanna’s looks, I set down my cup and rose. “There, I’m quite well, thanks to you,” I assured her, and though my legs were not so certain as my words, I went downstairs.
I found Clarette and Chambley in our parlor. They sat at the table, books open before them. They had not seemed to notice my approach, and I paused in the doorway. Their heads were bent together. Clarette’s hand was cupped between her mouth and Chambley’s ear.
The Magicians and Mrs. Quent Page 36
