by C. E. Murphy
"Our first business will be making sure that chimney is clear enough for a fire," Glover said briskly. "Where's our lad Flint? He should be of a size to go up it."
Flint, when presented with this prospect, paled enough to turn his umber skin yellow, but Jasper would have been halfway up the flue before anyone blinked, had Glover not collared him with a warning about his clothes. Jasper looked in dismay at himself, then at the manservant. "But I haven't got any others!"
"There may well be something about that we can use," Glover said. "The house was well-sealed up and perhaps they left some necessities of that nature. Go on, upstairs with you to see if there's anything packed away." He gave the order naturally, but I saw it was followed by a certain way of carefully not looking at my father, who perhaps ought to have been the one making such suggestions.
Father, though, appeared not to notice. His attention was for the lodge, and I thought he looked better in the minutes since we'd arrived at the lodge than he had in weeks. He guided Maman to a chair without uncovering it, and held her hand as she looked around the lodge. "I haven't been here since I was a child," she finally said. "It looks smaller."
"You're taller," Father said with a smile. Jasper, upstairs, gave a yell of delight, and with eyebrows arched in amusement, I followed him.
To my own delight, the stairs spiraled downward as well. "There's a cellar! Maman, this is magnificent!" A few steps upward, I realized the stairs went much higher than the first floor accounted for, and echoed Jasper's shout. "Maman, a loft! Father, there's a floor and two-thirds up here! The roof space isn't wasted!"
"Excellent," Pearl said from below. "You may sleep in the loft, and warn us of fires."
I shot her a sour look equal to one of her own, and finished climbing to the first floor. Jasper had already opened the window shutters and was nursing a pinched thumb for his efforts, but the upstairs rooms were light enough to see a large, well-made bedframe tucked beneath the loft and chests snugged against the opposite wall. I climbed into the loft, which had two small garretted windows of its own, and which was just tall enough at its peak for me to stand up in. Pearl and Father would knock their heads on the oak beams, but the boys would have plenty of room, once something was done about beds. My heart beat faster than the climb accounted for: excitement, even joy, ran through me. This was so much better than I had anticipated that even its isolation couldn't deflate my mood.
"What about these, Amber?" Jasper waved a pair of trousers and a shirt obviously too large for him at me hopefully. I came back down to the first floor and tried them against him, then nodded.
"With a kerchief to cover your hair and face, because I don't know when we'll be able to have a bath and we must keep you as clean as we can. You're a brave boy, Jasper."
He said, "Hnh," dismissively. "It's just a chimney. I'd rather climb that than try to charm Beauty!" He changed clothes, dancing in the chill, then ran downstairs to display himself to Glover and get instructions for cleaning a chimney. Opal, having gone to explore the door beside the fireplace, returned with a broom, and Glover suggested that despite the cold we should go outside while the chimney was cleaned, to prevent soot getting all over us. He stayed to supervise Jasper, and with Flint's help I got both Beauty and the wagon into the stables before unhitching the nag and getting her some of our dwindling grain supplies.
Like the house, the stables had been exceptionally well constructed, and despite their long period of disuse, were in excellent condition. There were cracks to fill and a corner of roof to repair, but nothing that wouldn't keep a while. "I hope the barn is this well kept."
"Jasper and I couldn't get the door open," Flint admitted. "The bar and lock were too tight. But there's wood in the shed and most of it looked dry."
I hugged my little brother. "I think we've landed on our feet, Flint. How lucky we are."
"Have we?" he asked with more wisdom than I would have shown at ten. "Do any of us know how to make bread? Or raise chickens? Or what to trade for chickens, since we haven't any money left?" His brown eyes suddenly filled with tears. "All we have that's worth anything is Beauty, and I don't want to trade her."
"Neither do I." I hugged him again, then set him back with my hands on his shoulders. "We'll learn to bake bread and do all those things we need to do, Flint. We'll make it work somehow."
A sooty apparition arrived at the stables door, smiling broadly. "I did it!" The smile collapsed. "Maman says I have to wash in snow because I'm too filthy to be let in the house. Opal is cleaning up the mess I made. She borrowed one of the dresses in the chests because nothing she has is practical enough. She looks funny."
"She looks funny? Come on, cinder-boy. A snow bath will find my brother under all that soot."
I didn't envy Jasper his bath: my hands were red and chapped before we'd finished snow-scrubbing him, and far more of his tender body had to be administered to in order to proclaim him something like clean. By the time we were finished, though, Opal had swept and wiped down the lodge's main room, and Glover had a small fire building in the hearth. We came in shivering to find the sheets had been removed from the furniture, and I stopped just inside the door, staring at ivory and fur lining the chairs and sofas, and the now-revealed mounted heads of animals on the walls. "I didn't know it was possible to use antlers in all of one's decorating."
"Not all of it," Opal called from upstairs. "The bed here is unscathed."
"An oversight, I'm sure!" I shouted back as Father came from the cellar with a tightly rolled bundle that proved to be an enormous brown bearskin rug to warm the floor with. Maman had located—or someone had located for her—a fox-fur muff and hat, and she sat in one of the furry chairs near the fire, watching the little flames as though they were all that kept her alive. Glover came from the kitchen—for that was what lay beyond the door to the left of the hearth—with a dinner of thin soup and bread, making the last of what food we had stretch, and we fell upon it with appetites worthy of the greatest feast.
Afterward, Flint and I dragged the straw mattresses and seat cushions in from the wagon for makeshift beds, while Pearl, who had too much pride to remain useless, and—like the rest of us—too little skill in anything to be useful, went into the cellar and returned minutes later with another, smaller black bearskin rug, which she brought up to the loft. It would do for the little boys to sleep on tonight, at least, and we would begin anew tomorrow.
We would never have survived the next weeks—the next months—without Glover's assistance. The morning after we arrived at the lodge, we girls gave him, with varying degrees of reluctance, all but one each of the fine dresses we had left; the lodge had plainer wear that was scratchy and ill-fitting, but much more practical for everyday working life. He took the gowns and left in the wagon, returning just before sundown with a tremendous variety of materials packed neatly into the wagon.
Among them, inconceivably, were books. Most were practical: books of cooking and building, books about gardening and animal husbandry. A few, though, were for pleasure, and Glover would only look pleased with himself when I turned, speechless with gratitude, to try to thank him. I hung the little stained glass rose in a downstairs window, eliciting gasps from the family, who had not known of its survival, and though every day was long and tiring, I spent a few minutes at the end of each sitting beneath the rose and reading a little bit of a story to my weary family.
Opal learned to make bread from the flour; Pearl, her mouth flat and her hair visibly whitening at the root, proved to be adept at sewing more than just beads onto dresses, and made our homespun clothes fit better. Father took up hunting with the guns that had been stored in the barn, and Jasper went with him while Maman cared for Jet, who loved the hunting lodge and its grounds more than any of us had ever loved our home in the city. Flint, given goats and chickens to master, was rarely indoors again. I joined him outside, learning to break the earth and plant seeds as spring came on. One afternoon, elbow-deep in mulch, I sat back on my heels to look at
him, hoeing elsewhere in our garden, and spoke to Glover as he passed by. "Glover, you were a manservant. How on earth did you learn all of these practical skills?"
"I wasn't born dressing gentlemen," he said in amusement. "I grew up on a farm outside the city, but I didn't want to farm. I wanted to live in a fine large house, so I learned to read and to speak well, and began as a footman before becoming a manservant."
"And now you're farming," I said in dismay.
"There's a world of difference when you've chosen to, Miss, rather than it being your unexamined fate. Mind the centipede, Miss, that it doesn't bite you."
I slapped the nasty little beast away, and, contemplative, returned to my mulching.
Glover brought us into the small village when we would not have gone on our own. Opal, with her pretty face and her open smile, was welcomed instantly, making friends and no few swains, though most of her would-be lovers were already married and—once or twice—already widowed. Pearl's beauty wasn't enough to overcome village reticence, not with her natural arrogance and her now two-toned hair, as inches of it had gone white before we were willing to venture into town. People looked at me as they always had, as if they couldn't help themselves, and as if they might find answers in my asymmetrical features. Flint's way with animals was rumored ahead of him, and Jasper's charm made him a place in the village, as did Jet's childish enthusiasm. Maman remained apart, but the villagers accepted that without question: her people had owned the lodge, and so it was not, it seemed, to be expected that she should mingle.
Father's hunting ability, though, and his permission to hunt the lands, would have made us popular even if we had all been blighted with the pox. He brought in venison for trade twice a month, and smaller game more often: rabbits, pheasants, partridges, even fat squirrels, and the opportunity for meat won the villagers over.
"But they live surrounded by this forest," I breathed to Glover once. "Why do they not hunt?"
"The lands aren't theirs," he replied, "and they're afraid."
"Of what? Maman's family are absentee landlords, at best. It's been decades since anyone has lived at or hunted from the lodge. What could possibly keep them away from the hunt?"
"There are rumors of a beast in the forest, Miss. One who protects it from anyone who lacks the right to hunt."
"Beasts," I said with an unladylike snort, "can't tell who does and who doesn't have the right to hunt."
"And yet the villagers believe." Glover smiled at me, and went to help Father parcel up rabbit in exchange for a length of nicely woven wool.
As summer wore on, my hair lightened to match my name; Opal's became bright with sunshine, and, by the summer cross-quarter day, Pearl took a scissors to her own hair and hacked off the sable length of it, leaving white flyaway curls, when it had been straight before. I watched her do it and was still stunned at the transformation from a prematurely greying beauty to an unearthly creature whose hair and skin seemed equally pale. Her green eyes were terrifying in the midst of whiteness, and she made no effort to tame her alien aspect.
Unexpectedly, the villagers became easier with her after that, as if she had been denying something they all felt was obvious, and now that she had accepted it she could belong. It wasn't long before I realized one or two of them would always approach her when we came into the village, drawing her to the side and murmuring a question. She almost never smiled when asked, but she would go away with them and come back a while later, looking serenely satisfied, which was not an expression I was much used to on my oldest sister's face. One young woman named Lucy, who was lush of form and frank of tongue, called Pearl away often, and after a few weeks I could stand it no longer. I cornered my older sister when we arrived home, demanding, "What do they ask you?"
Pearl's eyebrows had gone white, too, and they rose a little. "For blessings, mostly. On their children, or their pregnancies, or the crops."
"Why on earth would they do that?"
"They think I'm a witch."
I stared at her. "Are you?"
"Maybe," Pearl said, and would say no more.
The harvest season meant harder work than any of us—save perhaps Glover—had ever known in our lives. Opal and Father bore it stoically and Pearl, ill-temperedly, while the boys complained without surcease and yet did their fair share of the work.
I loved it. I had no idea why, but I did: the relentless effort of bending and picking and digging and packing felt wonderful. I learned to make jam from wild berries, puckering my mouth when they were tart and wondering if we might grow sugar beets with any success over the next season. The jams and parsnips and carrots and dried meats went into the cellar, where it remained cool all the year around, and before winter came on we picked apples and pears from the trees that had proven to bear them. I pickled tomatoes and sweated over rose hip jelly, stored beans and traded for spices, and, remembering my sisters' love of perfumes back when we could afford such things, delved into one of the books Glover had brought. There I found recipes for rose water and amber toilets. I conspired with Glover, who brought me vials for the perfumes, and I brewed them in the barn, where my sisters rarely went. The boys, who often ventured there, were sworn to secrecy, and, as they clearly had secrets of their own, did a fair job of keeping them.
I was leaving the barn one afternoon just before the winter equinox when I caught a glimpse of Glover standing unusually idle in the garden. We had turned the soil over already, leaving it ready for next spring's planting, and there was little enough left to be done there. Curious, I went to hail him, then saw that from where he stood, he could gaze unimpeded through the rose window in the house, yet barely be seen from indoors. I knew without error where his attention lay: on Opal, who had set a small loom near the window, and was learning the craft.
His expression was not fatuous, but soft, and I suddenly understood why my father's manservant had been willing to help us, uncompensated, for all these months. I doubted, even then, that he intended to put himself forward: Opal, being the woman she was, would marry him out of gratitude for what he'd done for us, and his was not the face of a man who wished to be rewarded unless his lover's sentiment was as strong as his own.
And still, what a strange gift it must have seemed to him, for our family to fall on hard times that he could help us through. In the city, Opal would have remained impossibly far above his station. I wasn't proud of having often not even noticed our servants, but that I had not remained fact. At least in the world as it had become, he could earn her notice, even her friendship, which was more than he might ever have expected before. He was not so much older than she: not yet thirty, I thought, and Opal was approaching her twenty-first birthday now, after nearly a year in the lodge. The difference between Maman and Father's age was considerably greater; Maman was, I believed, barely ten years Pearl's elder, although her constant fragility made me think of her as much older. Opal could do much worse than Glover, and in a village of men either already married or not yet bearded, probably would.
I stepped back and opened the barn door again so I could close it with more vigor, its thump alerting Glover to my presence. He returned to the work he'd been pursuing—fetching wood for the fire, as it turned out—and I helped, taking a load almost as heavy as his into the lodge.
The main room was warmest, of course, and we spent most of what I advisedly thought of as our idle time in it. In truth we had vastly less idle time than we once had, and it was rarely idle at all, as evidenced by Opal's weaving and Maman's stitching, and—surprisingly—by Pearl's pouring over a book I was unfamiliar with. Father held a knife and a long piece of wood in his strong hands, pare by pare creating a board for a bedframe that would in time go into the loft, and Flint sat by the fire bent over a piece of leather that began to look like a bridle. Jasper lay on the bearskin rug with Jet and a piece of slate and chalk, practicing letters with the little one, and as Glover placed another log on the fire, an overwhelming brightness filled my eyes and chest.
"Look
at us." My voice cracked and I swallowed, smiling through a tightness in my throat. Pearl looked up, white eyebrows elevated, but rolled her eyes in disdain as I continued. "Look at us. When do you last remember, in the city, us all being in a single room together, bent to our individual interests but still a family?"
Glover took a discreet step backward, toward the shadow of the kitchen door, clearly dismissing himself as part of the picture I saw, but I said, "Don't leave, Glover. You've become part of this family too. An integral part, I dare say. We would never have made it this far without you."
"Miss," Glover protested, but he smiled, and ducked his head when Opal smiled her agreement toward him.
"We've done well," I insisted. "I don't know that I would go back to what we had, even if I could."
"I would," Pearl said dryly, but Father gave me an odd, approving smile while Maman kept her attention fiercely on her stitching. The boys were entirely unmoved by my emotion, and as such, caused me to release it in a quick laugh. I went happy to my next task, and if I imagined Opal's gaze lingering thoughtfully on Glover for a few moments, I enjoyed that little dream as well.
The longest night came on us only a few days later, and I, expecting nothing, brought out the perfumes for my sisters and Maman, and new winter boots that I'd traded other vials of perfume for, for all the menfolk, including Glover, whose visible surprise was worth having snuck around the village behind his back. Then Maman, who had spent nearly a year in almost absolute silence, rose and went upstairs, only to return with warm and beautifully stitched cloaks for all of us, even—as I had done—Glover.
More gifts: sleds for the little boys from Father, leather-worked pendants of our favorite animals—or in my case, of a rose, a reminder of the garden that had burned—from Flint, warm dresses and new shirts all around from Opal, who said, "Next year I'll have woven the fabric, too," almost defiantly. Glover had pretty things for each of us girls, which I thought covered the excuse to give Opal a necklace of opal, the pendant gleaming with depth, and for the boys, hand-carved horses and a carriage whose wheels turned smoothly.
