Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “And I’ll go too?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s you that Montagu wants.”

  “Wants me?” Fanny said. “What for?”

  “You’re a beautiful girl, Fanny. But don’t worry. He won’t have you.”

  Have me? Fanny thought, remembering the things that Rose had told her. Henry was smiling his sunny smile again.

  “Think,” he said. “We’re going to Honfleur at last to see the slate houses and the cathedral that’s like a boat upside down, and then we’ll sail to Portsmouth on the Pamela. Not a bad chap, Montagu, to make all that possible.”

  But Fanny saw the worry in his eyes. It was more than worry; she thought that it might be fear. She wanted to ask him more questions. How did he know that Montagu wanted her? What did that mean? How great was the danger?

  Just then Rose’s pony stumbled and they caught a glimpse of her anxious face. Rose feared the forest. The day before, while she tried on dresses to see how they went with her ruby ring, Rose had told Fanny stories of rich travelers being robbed in Norwood and tied to trees and left to starve, and of innocent girls being kidnapped by the Gypsies.

  “They’ll make any English girl they can steal wife to the whole tribe, Fanny,” she had said. “At night you belong to anyone. They sell your children to people who have an evil use for them because their own children are too ugly and black to bring a good price.”

  Fanny knew that Rose was a fool. She had never imagined, when she imagined marriage, that she could ever feel toward a husband as Rose felt toward both of hers. But suppose the husband was a man like Montagu?

  Henry seemed to read her thoughts. He reached across and touched her cheek.

  “I shouldn’t have told you these things,” he said. “But you know no harm will come to you while I’m alive.”

  “I know. But what about poor Oliver?”

  Henry winked. “The Gypsies will cure his troubles.”

  At the Gypsy encampment, Henry opened the bottle of excellent Nantes brandy he had brought for the head Gypsy and poured out two cups. They drank and talked.

  “My friend is having a bit of unhappiness with his bride,” Henry said.

  The Gypsy immediately put on a solemn look. “Trouble of the spirit or trouble of the blood?” he asked. “She won’t do it for him.”

  “Then he should beat her on the bottom until she’s wet and stick it in.”

  “He doesn’t think that would change her mind.” Henry told him about Rose’s fear of witches. “She thinks they get in through the cunny.”

  “Sometimes they do,” the Gypsy said. “But usually they get in by the mouth. Where does she think they come from?”

  “Out of her husband’s dingus. She believes that he was bewitched by a cat.”

  “By a witch that had turned itself into a cat, you mean.”

  “Is that the way it usually goes?”

  “Yes. Then the cat would have turned into a woman in order to steal his seed, because witches have no seed, then turned into her husband in order to put the seed into the victim.”

  “I see it is a complicated case.”

  “What color was the cat?” asked the Gypsy. He studied Henry closely as he answered, as if to give him a silent warning that Gypsy magic would not work unless he told him the absolute truth.

  “It was a white cat.”

  “Then something strong will be needed.”

  “Not too strong. She’s a nervous woman.”

  The Gypsy looked down into his brandy for a moment. “Two pounds, then,” he said. “Including food and music.”

  Somehow the rest of the Gypsies knew that the bargain was struck. The women came out of the tents and began to cook and sing while the men played instruments.

  Nearly forty years after the Hardings had come to this encampment to drink the potion against the plague, the Gypsies still smelled of woodsmoke. Like very few other people in England, where there was hardly any firewood left after centuries of cutting, they could burn as much wood as they could poach. In London it was a rare sight even in midwinter to see a log burning in the andirons.

  Fanny liked it here. The aroma of a young pig cooking on the spit mingled with the damp ferny scent of the forest in spring. A Gypsy girl came out with a basket full of plucked larks, twenty or more of them, and showed them to Fanny with a wide smile before she arranged them on a grill beneath the spit. By signs she explained that the pork drippings would baste the larks and they would be delicious as a result.

  After the meal, the head Gypsy made a sign and an old crone was brought out. She was chinless like the crone who had mixed the potion for the Hardings, but it seemed impossible that she could be the same woman. Whoever she was, she was ancient. Four young Gypsies carried her from her caravan to the fire like a bundle wrapped in a long black dress that was covered with glass beads and white buttons. Her face, brown as ale and hatched with wrinkles, peeped out of her head scarf.

  The young men lowered her feet to the ground and held her steady, asking anxious questions in Romany, until she found her balance. Clearly she was held in great reverence. Standing upright, swaying slightly, she was no more than four feet tall. She stared fixedly at the English visitors with the glittering green eyes that gave her her powers.

  In a surprisingly loud voice the crone said something in Romany. The head Gypsy explained, “She will cure the woman. But the men must go away.”

  “Have you got a football?” Henry asked.

  The man nodded.

  “All fellows to football, then!” Henry cried.

  While Fanny waited for the fortune-telling to begin, she listened to the men shouting in the meadow beyond the trees. They sounded like hounds, a mixture of baritones and tenors with Oliver’s deep bass belling beneath the pack.

  She heard her father calling for the ball, every word distinct: “To me, Oliver, to me!” And then a loud grunt as if someone had the wind knocked out of him.

  The crone had gone into a trance. She was quiet for such a long time that Fanny thought that she might not wake up again, but at last the old woman opened her green eyes and asked for Rose’s hand.

  “What for?” Rose asked.

  “She wants to read your future,” Fanny said. “It’s all right.”

  The crone traced a line on Rose’s palm. “I see a ship,” she said. “And a great storm. The lady will see monsters. She will see death by steel and death by fire, death by drowning and death by ice.”

  “Where does she see these things, Fanny?”

  “In the lines in your hand.”

  “But she’s in a trance, Fanny. Look at her.”

  “Riches, I see great riches,” the crone said. “A rich man will marry the lady. But before that, war. I see a child that is not the rich man’s child.”

  “But I’m already married.”

  “Nevertheless, I see a rich husband,” the crone said. “A new husband?”

  The crone lifted her glittering eyes. “Perhaps. Or a husband who becomes rich. I cannot see which.”

  The rest of the Gypsy women crouched on the damp ground behind the crone, giving each other wise sidelong looks at each prediction. They all wore the same expression and uttered the same gasps at the same time, as if they shared a single mind among their twenty bodies. Their swarthy faces shone. Rose wondered if they rubbed some sort of secret Gypsy grease on their skin. The sour smell of old woodsmoke coming from their clothes and hair was overpowering, and Rose covered her nose with a handkerchief.

  The crone, still holding Rose’s hand, seemed to go to sleep.

  “What does she mean, I’ll see monsters and death by drowning?” Rose said.

  Fanny had had her hand read by the Gypsies many times. “I’ve never heard that before,” Fanny said. “The rich man and the baby are usually part of it, though.”

  The crone stirred and looked at Rose’s right hand again.

  “I see a bear, very big and dark,” the crone said. “The lady’s child will be a daughter, and the bear will b
e its father.”

  The crone looked at Fanny as she told Rose’s fortune, as if she thought that Rose was too stupid to understand or remember it. “She will try to escape from this bear,” she said. “I see many voyages over water and land. She can go wherever she likes, it won’t matter. She cannot hide from him. The bear will find her. She owes him this child from another life and he will make her give it to him.”

  “A bear?” Rose said. “She must mean Oliver.”

  “It is no one she has ever seen,” the crone told Fanny. “But she’ll know him when the time comes. He will smell like a bear, a very strong smell. There is more, but I can’t quite see it. There is a veil of white in between. Like smoke, but it isn’t smoke.”

  Rose was not interested in the bear. She tapped the palm of her hand. “What about witches?” she said. “Do you see witches?”

  “No witches,” the crone said.

  “But there must be witches. Look for a white cat.” The crone put Rose’s hand back in her lap. “I only see what I see,” she said.

  “What a fool,” Rose said.

  The crone gestured Fanny closer and lifted her left hand in her own gnarled blue one. She examined the palm for a long moment, then looked at the right hand. She gave Fanny a look filled with sharp surprise, spoke a single word in Romany, and let go of her hand. All the Gypsy women’s faces lost expression at once.

  “What does she see?” Fanny said.

  No one answered. The Gypsy women looked at the ground, then moved quickly forward to help the crone rise to her feet. She had closed her eyes again. They picked her up, cushion and all, and carried her away toward her tent.

  “What did the old woman say about you? Why are they taking her away?” Rose asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then ask. I want to know.”

  “There’s no one to ask, Rose. They’ve all gone into the tents.”

  “What did she see in your hand?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rose stood up and shook out the folds in her dress. “Maybe it was another bear,” she said, giggling. “Don’t be afraid, Fanny. There are no bears in England.”

  With the women gone, the silence in the encampment was disturbed only by the faint crackle of the fire and the voices of the men coming from the meadow. Rose’s face was sullen.

  “Let’s go watch the football,” Fanny said.

  “I hate football.”

  Fanny did not coax her. She lifted her skirt and walked rapidly into the fringe of the woods, leaving Rose behind. By the time Rose noticed and began to call Fanny’s name, she had vanished into the trees.

  Oliver’s wig lay inside his upturned hat on the grass beside the playing field. Most of the players, woodcutters and swine drovers and poachers who lived in the forest, were dressed in rags. They were gaunt and unwashed, and they played football hard.

  Players not only sounded like hounds to Fanny, they behaved like a hunting pack, merging into each other so that each team became a single creature bent on a single idea, to drive the ball through the goal. Fanny never watched men playing the game that she did not feel the same deep feminine amusement. When they were like this, men were as they were meant to be. That was why football made them so happy. She watched Henry especially, a ginger-haired figure smaller than the rest running down the field behind Oliver, throwing his thin body this way and that as he kicked the ball ahead of him. Henry was far too old to be doing this, but he glowed with enjoyment like a boy.

  Oliver and Henry ran down the field, Oliver smashing everyone before him, Henry dodging along in his shadow and keeping a lookout for an opening to the goal. The players were breathing hard now, and the game was played in silence except for grunts and curses as men were trampled under Oliver’s downfield charge.

  Fanny heard Rose’s voice behind her. She was whimpering a little as she walked because the hem of her dress had been muddied.

  “They’re still playing,” Rose said. “Tell them to stop, Fanny.”

  “It’s almost over, Rose.”

  “They must stop,” Rose said. “I’m catching a chill. I hate it here.”

  “Oh, Rose, think of somebody besides yourself for a moment,” Fanny said. “Let Oliver have something to enjoy.”

  Rose flushed with anger. Fanny hadn’t known that she was capable of such feeling.

  “I hate you,” Rose said. “You and your father and his filthy black-haired Gypsies.”

  “Hate us? Do you, Rose? How sad, when we’re so very fond of you.”

  But Rose was already running out onto the field toward the sweating, cursing knot of players. She was shrieking Oliver’s name at the top of her voice.

  Oliver stopped in his tracks and looked away from the game. Behind him, Henry swerved to avoid running into him. One of the woodmen, a man nearly as tall as Oliver whose cheeks were covered with a rough beard, tackled Henry.

  The ball squirted into the air. Henry’s head snapped backward and he uttered a loud, comical “Oof!” and fell to the ground.

  Oliver had not moved. He seemed to be transfixed between Rose, who stood upright with a look of anger on her face, and Henry, who lay on his side in the mud with his left arm twisted behind his back.

  Oliver was trying to touch Rose, to cure her anger, but she wouldn’t let him near.

  The game went on, with the other team pushing the ball up the field. The tall woodman, who had been looking down at Henry’s inert figure, rose to his feet and trotted down the field as if to join his teammates at the goal, but then he swerved, ran faster, and vanished into the woods.

  Fanny ran out onto the field and knelt beside Henry in the cold mud. His eyes were open. There were beads of sweat on his face. He was dead.

  12

  Fanny could barely remember the old man, but she recalled his story vividly. She was a child when she heard it.

  “This is Captain John Pennock, my uncle,” Oliver had said, holding Fanny in his arms so that she looked straight into the fierce bearded face of the old man, whose visible skin, from the bridge of his nose to the top of his forehead, was covered with scars—saber cuts, bullet holes, burns.

  “He’s come from America,” Oliver said.

  Oliver put Fanny down on the floor and she found herself standing in front of two dark, silent children about twice her own age—a Nipmuck Indian (she remembered the tribe) named Magpie and a Negro called Coffee. Both were slaves. They sat under the table during supper, taking scraps of food from Captain Pennock’s hand.

  As a reward for Captain Pennock’s loyalty to the Protestant cause and for the wounds he had suffered in nearly thirty years of war against the pope, King William of England had granted him a tract of ten thousand acres along a river in the colony of Massachusetts, but far to the west of Boston.

  “The river is called the Connecticut by the Indians,” Captain Pennock said, pronouncing the word syllable by syllable, “and on its banks I built a city in the wilderness as God had ordained I should do. You’re a very pretty child.”

  The old man looked at Fanny, and no one else, as he talked, speaking very simply. From time to time he paused and smiled, seemingly anxious that the child should understand everything he said.

  Fanny squirmed in embarrassment and Oliver whispered in her ear. “He’s taken a liking to you because his own little girl was captured by the Indians and he can’t find her,” he said.

  Captain John Pennock was not Oliver’s blood uncle, but had married Hope Barebones, Oliver’s father’s sister, late in life. She had been murdered by wild Indians who had been incited by the papists in Canada to attack Pennock’s city in the wilderness.

  “The savages tore the son my wife was suckling from her arms and dashed out his brains against a tree,” Captain Pennock said. “Then they killed the grieving mother with a hatchet and stole my daughter.”

  Pennock had gone from village to village among the Indians, searching for his daughter, but had never found a trace of her.

  “Ev
erybody say she dead, hung up in a tree because she worth nothing,” said Magpie, the Indian girl, from beneath the table. She had traveled with Pennock as his interpreter.

  “If she is dead, it is God’s will,” Pennock said. “But I think she is alive, hidden in some village. She had red hair and freckles like all the Pennocks, and a birthmark like this one under her hair, so they will never be able to say that she is a savage, as is their habit when speaking of English people they have stolen.”

  He brushed back his white hair, which was slightly pink even at his age, and held up a candle to show Fanny a red birthmark on his scalp. It was round, like a wax seal. Fanny saw that even before Pennock pointed it out to her.

  “It is the Pennock seal,” he said. “If you ever see a girl with this mark on her scalp, you’ll know that you’ve found Thoughtful Pennock.”

  Despite the tragedy that had befallen him, Pennock believed that America was a paradise set aside by God for the English. That night at supper, the only time Fanny ever saw him, he had described streams so full of salmon and alewives that the fish crowded each other out of the water and onto the banks and drowned in the air. He told of strawberries and blackberries growing wild in the forest and the meadows, and about a wonderful kind of winter deer with flattened antlers that was as large as a horse and so brainless that it would stand still and let itself be killed while gazing like a martyr into the hunter’s eyes. From the windows of his manor house, which had been rebuilt from the ashes after the Indians burned it, Pennock said that he could see for twenty miles in all directions on a clear day and never see anything that had been touched by any other hand than God’s.

  The old man died after returning to America. As a young man, Captain Pennock had ridden beside Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and in Ireland, and because Oliver’s full name was Oliver Cromwell Barebones, and because Oliver was Hope Barebones’ nephew, Pennock left his lands and all his other property in America to him.

  When, on the day after Henry’s death, Alfred Montagu came to the house in Catherine Street to pay his respects, he mentioned this inheritance to Oliver.