(2007) The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

  Any plans that Margaret had for heads on shoulders and holding hands had been postponed. She and Franklin had made up beds at the back of the shelter a little distance from each other, as brothers and sisters — and certainly half brothers and sisters — must. But their knees had touched for several heartbeats during their evening at the fireside, and they were content to stay in this good company until their eyes dropped shut. It was such a pleasure just to listen and to talk with friendly strangers. But Franklin, avoiding the true story of what had happened to them and their families in Ferrytown, had hardly started to amuse the net-makers with his account of how Margaret had fished for birds in the forest, when — silently, appallingly — the band of rustlers arrived.

  How had they been so careless? The eight travelers must have been half blinded by staring into their fire and deafened by their own conversations and their laughter not to have heard so many heavy feet surrounding them, or to have picked up on the sound of horses. They realized that they were snared only when, suddenly, the remaining brightness of the night from the moon and stars and from metal luster was blocked. Too ill prepared for trouble, too shocked to stand and run, they could only sit exactly where they were and look up at the silhouettes of six or seven well-armed men who, attracted — invited almost — by the smoke, the flames, the throb of human voices, had crept up as evenly as wolves on a sheepfold.

  Everyone could see enough by firelight to know what kind of men these were. Their faces were too weather-beaten to be townspeople. Their clothes were not the clothes of emigrants, designed for warmth and durability, but the highly colored, quarrelsome garments of men keen to be noticed and alarming. Their beards were tied in braids with ribbons. Their legs were bowed from a life on horseback. They were not clean. Their smiles were far too sharp to promise anything but cruelty.

  'Stand up,' one of them said, a short man in a long yellow canvas coat. He was a little older than the others and evidently the one most feared.

  The travelers did as they were told and tried to stay expressionless as another one of the group stepped into the shelter to inspect each of them, turning them round, feeling their arms, even touching the women and the baby. He touched Margaret too much and looked her too directly in the eye. He whistled through his teeth when he felt the strength and size of Franklin's arm. He fingered the piebald coat and laughed. 'Give me that,' he said. Franklin handed over the coat, hoping against reason that it would prove to be the only loss of the night. The coat was passed to the short man, who put it over his yellow one. It sat so high on his shoulders that the bottom hem reached only his upper ankles.

  Two of the other men went into the darkness of the shelter with brands lit from the fire to see what they could find and take. Another led away the horses and the mules. Another smashed the potman's pots that his son had unloaded and, not doubting their safety, left in view for anyone to steal or damage.

  Franklin and Margaret had no choice but to watch their barrow being unloaded, their mint plant being dashed onto the ground, and the now empty silver cup — their greatest wealth — and the ornamented platters being thrown into sacks along with the Joeys' and the Boses' best possessions (of which there were many).

  Now the short man came forward himself to take a look, oddly awkward in his many clothes but doubly threatening. 'Not her,' he said, referring to Melody Bose. 'Not him, too old,' he added, meaning Andrew Bose. 'Not that' — the granddaughter, hardly nine months old, not walking yet and so no use. 'We'll take the rest.' His companions came forward with rope and started looping it around their selected captives, beginning with the potman's terrified son. They made nooses for their necks and wrists, so that the Joeys, young Acton Bose, Margaret and Franklin could be joined and led away like the mules had been, in one long train.

  Franklin's last action before he, too, was bound and haltered by the rope was not exactly a heroic one, but it was thoughtful and intelligent. He saw a chance for Margaret. He reached across, not so quickly as to cause alarm among the men, and pulled the blue scarf off her head. They backed away at once. Few men are so tough or so intent on rape that fear of illness doesn't caution them.

  'Not her,' the short man said. 'We don't want her.' They gathered up their plunder as quickly as they could. Then, almost as suddenly and silently as they'd arrived, the silhouettes disappeared. The Boses' grandchild hadn't even woken to see her father taken as a slave.

  10

  THE CHILD, named Bella after her dead mother, was the only dreamer on the Dreaming Highway that night. The three adults judged valueless by the rustlers had not had any rest. For the first time since leaving the Pesthouse, Margaret spent the night alone, too shocked and frightened to sleep but not allowed to offer any comfort to the net-makers or to seek from them any comfort for herself. The Boses had found a narrow, ferrous crevice, damp and unwelcoming but dark enough to hide them from any further passers-by or any returnees. Margaret had tried to squeeze in with them, but they had pushed her back with their feet and elbows, not wanting even to touch her with their hands. Their only conversation after that had been shouted, and brief — just long enough for Melody to warn Margaret to keep her distance 'or else'. She'd armed herself with a piece of heavy metal. If Margaret came too close, Melody was ready and prepared, she said, to do some lasting damage to Margaret's shaven head.

  The night had not been silent. Andrew Bose, chirring like a katydid, had kept up a muttered chorus of curses against humankind for its cruelty and its treachery, and against his own mother for ever having given birth to him. Melody had soothed the baby and herself with rocking and repetition, 'Son, son, son...', not daring to invite more misfortune by naming him out loud. And all around, the relics had made noises of their own. Trash disturbed by all the recent hoofs and feet settled back in place. Degraded concrete slabs shifted and wheezed as the night grew cold. Insignificant animals with outsized, moonlit eyes and only scavenging for scraps sounded to Margaret and the Boses as large and dangerous as horsemen. The taller metal shapes picked up any wind in their hollows and their tubes, and played their fluty monotones with it, competing to produce the saddest and most spectral sound.

  Margaret was trembling for a long part of the night, too shaken by her loss — her losses — to settle on a single emotion. In just a few days everyone she loved had been carried off. Bitterness piled up on bitterness. She had not expected to get any sleep, but nevertheless, once the Boses had rejected her, and she had exhausted herself with weeping and vomiting, she had moved her bedclothes onto the barrow and stretched out on her side, resting an arm across the empty space where Franklin had slept. Another good man gone, she thought, as if somehow it was her fault, that it was as inevitable that misfortune would attend Franklin once he was in her company as it was certain that the men in her family would beat with sticks that older, fine-mannered stranger who had proposed a midnight meeting with her all those years ago. Maybe it was correct what everybody said: 'Red hair, bad luck.' But then she had been lucky in other ways, hadn't she? Like no one else from Ferrytown, she was alive. Yes, thanks to Pigeon, thanks to him. His touch had rescued her twice, first when his strong slow fingers had massaged her feet, and then again with his sudden, quicker fingers, pulling on her scarf.

  She should not be angry with the Boses. Margaret knew that, despite her spinning emotions. They had a right to suspect and fear her shaven head, even though her hair was now a few days old and visible, an orange fuzz that felt like the nap of some fine cloth when she ran her palm across her skull. She almost had eyebrows, spiky and stiff. But still she could not expect them to risk exposing a child of Bella's age to a disease, even if that disease was clearly in retreat. Nor could she expect them to show much sympathy to her for the loss of her 'half-brother'. How could that compare to their loss of a full son and their granddaughter's loss of a full father? Nor could she expect them to stay quiet during the night, when their grief, their shock and their terror were so burdensome. Yet she was angry with the Boses. She was angry at th
e way they had turned hostile and despairing so quickly, creating more conflict instead of staying calm. She was angry that, only a short time after sharing a fire and their life stories with her, and at a time when the four of them should be unified and thinking of ways to help or rescue their men, they were threatening her with a strip of metal. Not that such a threat was frightening. The Boses didn't have the pluck or strength to do her any harm. They didn't have the character.

  Margaret's anger made the time pass more quickly. It kept her warm and busy. Keep your distance or else? The threat was so infuriating and unkind that Margaret succeeded in persuading herself that it would be easy, a pleasure even, to take the metal out of Melody's hands and give her graying braids some sharp, painful tugs. Or else she would happily find a strip of metal of her own and put an end to all that 'Son, son, son....' Melody, the crowd of emigrants who had stoned them on the shingle beach at Ferrytown, the short horseman who had stolen Franklin's coat, anyone ahead of her who'd dare to block her path — they all became one body, dropping to its knees under the thrashing weight of Margaret's metal strip.

  As soon as there was any light, Margaret wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and clambered up a high rampart of rubble to make sure that the junkie was deserted. She could not trust her eyes entirely, but she listened carefully, turning into and against the wind. No whinnying. No brays. No dogs. No men. Not even birds. For the time being they were safe. Safe enough to run away.

  The Boses watched her from their hiding place. They seemed so weary and so old, suddenly, so frail and defeated, that Margaret — against her instincts to tell them nothing — called out to inform them that she was moving on, and that if they wanted to — and if they had any sense at all in their old heads — they could join her. 'At a distance, if you prefer,' she said. 'Otherwise you'll have to manage on your own. Make up your minds.' She sounded like her mother for a moment, impatient and practical, when what she truly felt was desolate and hollow.

  'Where will we go? How will we get there?' Andrew Bose asked eventually, after a whispered conversation with the ill-named Melody.

  'We walk. How else?' They might be in possession of a carriage and a boat barrow, she reminded them, but, without any horses to pull the former or anyone strong enough to push the latter, they had no choice but to leave behind anything they could not carry easily and go ahead by foot.

  'But where?'

  'I don't know where. Don't ask me where. We go. We carry on. That's what we have to do.' Again she recognized this tone of voice, not her natural, more respectful way of speaking, and not her mother's. It was the voice her brothers had often used to bully her. It was the voice she'd heard from Franklin just the day before, when he had made her take the Highway despite her worries. It 'will speed us to the coast', he'd said. Well, he'd been wrong. Horribly so. And she'd been right. I'll never take the advice of a pigeon again, she told herself — and it almost made her smile, just to imagine for a moment that she was truly saying it to him, that he was still there with her to be teased.

  Well, now she had the chance to take her own advice, to leave the old wide track and all the hard lands thereabouts and follow country routes, ones too narrow, preferably, for horses or groups of men. But Franklin needed her. She was not free to take her own advice. There was no one else who'd look for him if she didn't. So what she'd have to do was try to find where he'd been taken, no matter where it was, even if it meant continuing along the Highway.

  'Okay, it's true, I don't know what we ought to do,' she called out to the Boses. 'And nor do you. All I know is that I want my Franklin back.' She fought her sobs. 'And you must want your Acton back, too. Her pa. So what's the choice? There isn't any choice. We find the horse scuffs and we follow them. What happens then will happen then. We can't stay here. So let's pack up our bags and go. Before those men come back for us. Or something worse.' The Boses were persuaded by those last two words.

  They dragged their remaining possessions and the few things left by the Joeys out into full view from the darkness of the rubble cave and made their choices. Any food they had to keep. And water bags. But otherwise the hard decisions were their own. Margaret kept her fishing net, one of Franklin's knives, his spark stone, a thin blanket, one tarp, the comb, the hairbrush, the green and orange woven top that had been rescued from her room in Ferrytown, a spare undershirt and her blue scarf. She forced them into Franklin's back sack, leaving enough space on the top for what was left of their salted meat, the honey and her remaining taffies, as well as some damp tack from the potman's stores. The cattle skins would have to be abandoned. They were too bulky, as were her father's wading boots, which Franklin had for some reason rescued from the house, and — she hesitated — the coil of thick rope that might prove useful but was heavy. She hesitated, too, about the bow and arrows. Franklin would want to keep them, she knew. But she could not use them herself. Women were never trained to hunt, so taking them would be an empty gesture — as, possibly, would be the inclusion of Franklin's change of clothes. She did not want to challenge fate by adding them to her load. If she and Franklin ever met again — which, candidly and with bitter resignation, she doubted that they would — a change of clothes would not matter one way or the other. But if she took his clothes with her, it was guaranteed — they were so capacious — that they would weigh her down and use up space and energy. Throwing them out was shamefully distressing. A murder of a sort. Again she had to swallow tears.

  The fruit-juice flagons were also too heavy to carry, even the empty one, but she filled a water bag with juice and hung it on its lanyard around her waist, together with the larger bag still nearly full of now stale water from the river at Ferrytown. Then she filled her stomach with the remaining juice. She offered it across the clearing to the Boses, but they shook their heads and wiped their lips defensively, as if the mere mention of sharing a spout with her was enough to smear them with contagion.

  The little clay pot over which she'd cooked their breakfast birds while she and Franklin had been resting in the forest was not worth keeping, she thought, and then she thought again and remembered a chilling moment from the night before. Those metal scavengers, those people rustlers, whatever they were, had thrown out her mint plant, the one intimate thing remaining in her possession that she had shared with her family. Margaret stepped into the cave with the clay pot and felt around with her foot until she located the earth and the plant. The mint was damaged, both by the assault of the previous evening and by the season. Few leaves were left. Soon there would be none. The mint would draw back to its roots until the spring. But still she scooped the earth and the plant into the pot and nestled it among her clothes at the top of her bag. This was not sensible, she knew. Why bother with a plant that grew wild anyway? But Margaret was determined to defy the scavengers, in some small way at least. The mint would live.

  It did not take her long to find the traces of the horsemen and the mule train. Pack animals are not discreet. Their bowels leave steaming messages. Their hoofs leave runes. And mules can never pass a scrap of bush without tearing at it with their gravestone teeth. The men — this much was clear — had gone back to the Highway with their pillage and their hostages and, lit by the moon and the night-vision of criminals, had headed east like everybody else.

  Margaret led the way, and the Boses, grumpily — and with good cause, Margaret had to allow — followed twenty paces behind, stopping whenever she paused to examine the track, looking away when she glanced back to see if they were managing. They did not wish to catch her eye. She had become a dangerous mystery to them. Why was she so angry and unreasonable? Why was she impolite? Why didn't she pull that scarf back on to hide herself? They did not understand her lack of respect, and she could not be bothered to shout out her explanations: that she was angry because anger was purposeful, that she was impolite because courtesy was an impediment, that her scarfless head — and this surely must be welcome — would keep strangers at a distance.

  The Boses fo
llowed on, taking it in turns to carry their granddaughter in a sling across their chests and taking it in turns to complain about the burden. They were glad at least that they didn't have to gaze at Margaret's unnerving bald scalp. Their view of it was obscured by the few mint leaves that protruded from the top of Margaret's back sack and tickled the nape of her neck when she walked, a touch of green against the red of her new hair, a combination that anybody not as beset by troubles as the Boses were might recognize as beautiful.

  So they followed the Highway from sunup until sundown, hardly exchanging a word all day, not sharing food and not daring to rest in case they fell too far behind their abducted men. There were no other travelers ahead of them for Margaret to frighten off with her bare head, although in the afternoon, behind them to the west, they could see and hear from a rise in the road that a convoy of farm carts, a large number of travelers on foot and some cattle were moving slowly in their wake. Apart from hoof prints and dung, the only — chilling — evidence they found that other emigrants had passed recently ahead of them was an abandoned cart with the bodies of a half-dressed woman and a dog draped across its deck and its load of household furniture and effects scattered around. Their boxes had been kicked open, their bags turned inside out. And, possibly, any man fit enough to work or sell had been added to a line of captives that already included Franklin, Acton Bose and the Joeys.

  The woman's body was warm. She'd died that morning. The blood on the crown of her head was sticky and her limbs were not yet stiff. Margaret covered her face and legs. The dog was alive but injured badly, though still vigilant enough to growl and show its teeth when Margaret went to it with a piece of tarry stone to finish what the rustlers must have started. She knew that what she'd have to do was ugly, and probably unwomanly in the Boses' eyes. But she would not regret it. She thought of her own dogs, Becky and Jefferson. Better to be ugly and unwomanly than to leave a loyal dog to suffer. She guessed it had done its best to protect its human family. This was its recompense. It took three blows.