Jackaroo

by Cynthia Voigt

  At last the Steward allowed the women to come forward, one at a time. The servants put into their baskets the measures of grain and the turnips, while the Steward wrote the record into his book. The crowd shuffled forward, in that unquiet silence.

  Gwyn moved steadily with the crowd and at last stood before the Steward. She identified herself and watched his hands turn the long pages over. Each page was ruled into columns, each column headed with the lines and circles that those who knew could interpret. When he found the column he wanted, his slow quill scratched marks in black ink. Gwyn gave her basket to be filled. Tad stood behind her.

  The Steward never looked up once at her, and while she stood there before him she studied the top of his head, where a pink scalp showed through thin blond hair. The firelogs crackled behind him. His pen ceased moving. He reached to dip it into the inkpot. His hands were white, the nails smooth and clean. The Earl’s signet was on his finger, the sign of the bear cut deep into the gold. Gwyn’s basket was returned to her, heavy now. She and Tad moved out of the room.

  She pulled Tad aside by the doorway. For a while he was content to breathe deeply of the clean cold air. Ahead of them, women called their children out of the group now huddled together for warmth, then moved quickly off, looking at the low sky with worried faces. Gwyn too hoped the snow would hold off. The King’s Ways were all bordered by rail fences, so you wouldn’t get lost in a snow, but they had ten miles to walk, long enough in good weather.

  These women had wrapped their felt shoes around with woollen rags and probably lined the inside with straw as well, uncomfortable to walk on, but it gave protection against the cold ground. Unfortunately, when the felt footwear got wet, as theirs had with melting snow, while they waited the long time in the Doling Room, their feet would be colder still on the journey home. Gwyn looked down to where her own feet were covered by the cloak, glad her heavy leather boots were hidden.

  But why should she feel badly to have warm, dry feet? Or guilty—because she felt guilty too—that she had good fortune and did nothing to share it. Even if she did give her boots away, that would be only one pair of feet, out of the many, kept dry and warm. Only one pair of feet out of the many. Still, she half wished she had the heart to give them, even though it would do only a little good.

  What her mother would say, though, and her father too if he were told, if she did that!

  “Gwyn, let’s go.” Tad pulled at her arm.

  Gwyn saw the old woman. The door slammed quickly shut behind her, and she hesitated in the pathway, her basket pulling her body lower, like an aged apple tree over-laden with fruit. “Which way do you take, Granny?” Gwyn asked. The face did not look surprised to see her. “We’re going east and could carry your basket.”

  She smiled up at Gwyn, showing a mouth where few teeth remained. “Osh aye, I’d be glad of the help and of the company,” she said. “It’s not so far.”

  “Tad”—Gwyn fixed him with her sternest expression—“you can carry our basket. It’s lighter,” she added quickly, as he opened his mouth to object.

  “Let’s just get going,” he muttered.

  Behind them the city walls rose up into the sky, the stone as gray as the clouds. Women and children moved between the oval gatehouses to enter the city through the narrow gate. Thinking of what might lie waiting for them in the narrow, empty streets, Gywn didn’t envy them their briefer journey home.

  Chapter 2

  EARL NORTHGATE’S CITY LAY BACK in the foothills, against the mountains that ringed the northern border of the kingdom. The King’s Way went off to the east, down hillsides, then up. Dark figures moved along it. Close to the city, the snow had been packed down by feet and the hooves of horses. It was firm underfoot, but often slippery. Their companion moved with stiff, shuffling steps, her hand on the fence rail, her head weaving from side to side. They walked abreast, Gwyn in the middle, Tad shifting his basket from hand to hand every few steps, glaring up at Gwyn every time he did so. The old woman’s basket pulled Gwyn’s shoulders, but she ignored that. The work of the Inn, from currying the horses at the stables to hefting bags of flour up from the cellars, from helping to turn the straw mattresses on the beds to stirring the vats of ale as they brewed, had made her strong and had taught her how to use her strength.

  The crone did not speak while she was pulling herself up a slope or creeping cautiously down one. When the ground was level, she talked to them.

  “I don’t know your name,” she asked.

  “Gwyn, and this is my brother Tad.”

  “You’ll be eight?” the old woman asked Tad.

  “Almost ten,” he told her, angry that she had thought him younger than he was.

  Gwyn sighed at his rudeness and at his way of resenting truths he did not like. “I’m sixteen.”

  “Osh aye, you’d better marry soon. With your rich dowry, you’ll marry well. Have you been spoken for?”

  Gwyn’s cheeks flushed. She shook her head. Before Tad could say anything, she asked, “Have you a husband waiting?”

  The crone nodded but did not answer, because the Way rose up under their feet again. When she saw how much their companion’s steps pained her, Gwyn couldn’t be sorry that they were with her, however much time was added to their journey. Sparse trees, bare in winter, marked the hillsides between which they walked. Their branches were mounded with snow, while the pines and spruces held out their white burden, as if offering it from dark, feathery arms. Occasionally, rising smoke showed where a house lay under its heavy snow mantle, or little clusters of houses. The few women still moving along the Way passed them, at a hasty, uneasy pace, looking back, peering ahead.

  “Hap was one of the Earl’s gamekeepers,” the crone told her as the Way leveled. “Before his accident. Now we watch the southern pathway into the Earl’s forests, and Hap has permission to set snares so we can live. Come winter, Hap stays abed.”

  “Granny,” Gwyn said, “my father had a brother had a friend . . .”

  “That’s Hap. Aye, that’s my Hap.”

  “They say—my mother says—he could dance the legs off a rabbit.”

  “And he could,” the old woman said. “Not anymore, not for years now, longer than you’ve been alive.”

  “There was an accident?”

  “He was beating out the birds during one of the hunts and a horse rode over him—they say the beast panicked. They brought him home to me, over their shoulders, as soon as they could, but his knee would never mend right again. Winters, the cold pains him.”

  The Way went down, then, into a little dell where the forest edge made a dark smudge on the smooth white landscape. At the bottom of the slope the old woman stopped. “I go off here.”

  Following the trail with her eyes, Gwyn could see a low hut backed up under the first of the trees. “Let us come with you,” she offered.

  “Gwyn!” Tad exploded.

  “You can wait here if you like,” she snapped at him. If he couldn’t see how tired the old woman was, she could. “I don’t think there’s much danger of wolves this close to the city,” she added, as if she were seriously considering that question.

  “There’s no need. You’ve helped me along the worst of it.” The old woman tried to make peace.

  “It’s cold,” Tad added.

  Gwyn just started to move onto the track. “Granny? You had better hold onto my arm,” she said.

  “Can’t we even rest?” Tad demanded.

  If it had been just the two of them, Gwyn would have ignored him. But the old woman was breathing hard and looked near the end of her strength. It was probably a quarter mile through deep snow ahead of them. So they dusted the snow off some large rocks and sat down. Tad huddled close to Gwyn, for warmth not affection.

  The odd woman looked toward the dark forest, spreading like a cloak up over the hills. “We have two apple trees,” she said, “and that’s good fortune. And a little nanny who gives us milk. Old people”—she smiled at Tad—“are like babies when
it comes to milk. So we keep alive through the winter, and it’s easier the rest of the year.”

  “You have no neighbors?”

  She shook her head, quickly pulling her hood close again against a rising wind. “Nor children living. Just Hap and me and the dog.”

  “What do you watch the forest path for?” Gwyn wondered.

  “We watch the deer, if they start to come out foraging, rabbits and foxes, grouse and duck. We listen for the wolves, should they start moving down into the forest. We give shelter to soldiers, should need arise, and we know the travelers and hunters who come out and we watch for—anyone who should not be in the forest.” She hesitated and looked at the Innkeeper’s children and then lowered her voice even though they were alone in the white landscape: “Will he be Jackaroo then, think you?”

  “That’s a story,” Tad told her. “Just an old story.”

  The old woman didn’t argue with him. She looked quickly at Gwyn, whose only thought was of pity for those whose lives were so hard they needed such stories for hope.

  “There’s no one then, bold enough, brave enough, to stand for the poor when the Lords get greedy, or when times are bad?” the old woman asked them.

  Gwyn shrugged.

  “And if I told you I had seen him once?”

  Gwyn didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to hurt the old woman’s feelings.

  “Osh aye, then, and maybe I didn’t; it was so long ago I wasn’t even as old as yourself. I never know what’s memory and what’s dreams, not anymore.”

  “We’d best be on, or it’ll be dark before we get back.” Gwyn changed the subject. “My mother worries,” she explained.

  “She always was a worrier, that I remember clearly,” the crone said. “And you’ll have eight more miles along the Way for her to worry about, and she’ll be right to worry, these days.”

  They trudged through the snow, Tad behind and the old woman on Gwyn’s arm. “You’ll have a mug of nanny’s warm milk before you go on again,” the old woman said to Gwyn. “You’ll warm your hands at our fire. And I could find an apple for a boy, even in this winter.” She turned to look at Tad, sulking along behind them.

  He opened his mouth to tell her that they had baskets of apples in their cellar and bins filled with potatoes and onions, but Gwyn glared at him. He snapped his mouth shut, but he might as well have spoken, Gwyn saw, looking down at the old lady’s wrinkled face.

  She didn’t know what had happened to Tad, to make him the way he was. He was as bad as a Lord, the way he acted. He hadn’t been whipped enough, he hadn’t been given enough work—but her mother had been so afraid to lose him and Da had given way to her in everything concerning Tad. Well, her father had waited so long for a son and had suffered the loss of two before Tad had been born. Her mother too, although neither of them spoke of it, had watched anxiously over Tad during his first years, keeping him in during bad weather, keeping him away from other children when there was contagion nearby, nursing him night after night when his little body wracked with the cough that brought up any food he got down. And Tad, unlike his two brothers, had turned three, then four, and on. Gwyn’s hand often itched to smack him as he rested beside a fire while others worked, but she knew why her parents cherished him so. She had lain awake for the three nights her mother keened over the last, dead within a week of being born, dead in the morning who had been alive the night before. She had seen Da’s helplessness before her mother’s grief, and his own grief, too, with no son to inherit the Inn.

  As they came nearer to the little house, Gwyn heard the old woman take in a sharp breath and felt her stumble as she tried to rush forward. Gwyn looked up from the snow underfoot to see a dark shape flat on the snow, motionless. The door of the hut stood open. Smoke rose in a scrawny curl from the chimney. They hurried forward, ignoring Tad’s protests.

  The dark shape was a dog, a brown and black dog with bones jutting out under his coat and his blood dried on the snow around him. The snow near the door was trampled with footprints. The old woman didn’t look twice at the dog, but stumbled up to the door and through it. Gwyn hesitated, looking down at the dead animal while Tad caught up to her.

  “Let’s go home, Gwyn,” he asked, pleading.

  Gwyn just stood there. It was a skinny, scruffy dog, and it was hungry before it died.

  “Something bad has happened, Gwyn,” Tad whispered at her. “We can’t go in there.”

  Gwyn nodded her head, then followed the old woman into the house. She didn’t know, really, why she did that. She could have put the basket down on the doorstep and fled. Whatever had happened, there was nothing she could do now.

  Inside, the air was chilly. Gwyn saw, in the one room, a fire burned down to bright ashes, a rough table with two stools beside it, a shelf for dishes and mugs, a shelf for food, a ladder leading up to the narrow loft, and a bed beside one wall on which two old people huddled together like children.

  Gwyn went to the door and grabbed Tad’s arm, pulling him inside. “Just be quiet,” she told him. He knew better than to argue with her.

  Without looking at the couple on the bed, the old man mumbling into his beard and the old woman rubbing helplessly at his shoulder, Gwyn took some wood from the box and put it over the coals. Calling Tad to help, she blew on it, gently at first and then, when the little flames licked upward around the logs, more strongly. “You watch that,” she told her brother. He didn’t answer, but he obeyed her.

  Gwyn unpacked the old woman’s basket onto the table. As she took out the last turnip, the old woman called her name. She went to stand by the bed.

  “Hap?” the old woman croaked.

  Gwyn looked into an aged face. The man’s hair was whitened, like snow-bearing clouds, and his beard was as tangled as the hair on his head. His eyes were red with weeping and his lips rolled into his mouth the way lips did on the toothless old. He sat hunched forward on the bed, covered by a worn quilt that was as dirty as his hair. His head swung back and forth.

  “Gwyn, the Innkeeper’s daughter, at the Ram’s Head,” the old woman said.

  The eyes focused on her.

  “She walked me home.”

  The man coughed and wiped his sleeve across his eyes and nose.

  “I thank you,” he said. He started to move on the bed, to sit up straighter.

  “But what happened?” Gwyn asked.

  “They came, three of them, and took our nanny—it was just after you had gone.” He coughed again. “And the dog followed them out, but he hasn’t come back yet. I couldn’t close the door against the dog, could I?”

  “No, of course not,” his wife soothed him.

  Gwyn asked, “The soldiers came?”

  “I didn’t know them,” the old man said to his wife. His withered hand moved up to indicate the bottom half of his face, “but they were bearded.” They spoke to one another, ignoring Gwyn. “I’m worried about the dog.” His voice was rough, like unplaned wood, and he coughed as if his words irritated his throat.

  The crone’s eyes met Gwyn’s and the old head gave a shake. She didn’t want him to know yet.

  “And how will we live, without the milk nanny gave,” he asked, his voice shaking.

  “Osh aye,” the old woman crooned, nodding her head and getting up, as if that question told her what she waited to hear. “We’ll live on the Earl’s Dole and apples, and when the thaws come the snares will fill.”

  “We’ll never be able to buy another goat,” he reminded her.

  “No, we won’t. So maybe we’ll die, this winter or next, and that’ll be together like everything else we’ve had from life, good or ill.” She moved clumsily around the room, hanging up her cloak on a hook behind the door. “They’ll try to eat her, as I think, and they’ll find her tough. They’ll lose teeth on our nanny. She’ll have her revenge,” she told him, her laughter creaking like an ill-hung door.

  “You’re a terrible old woman,” he said to her, but a smile washed over his face.


  “These children have built up the fire again. Isn’t that nice?”

  “We have to be going now,” Gwyn said. “But I wanted to ask you where—” She came close to the old woman who stood at the table, her hands moving among the turnips. Gwyn lowered her voice and picked up a turnip, standing with her back to the bed so that her low words would be muffled. “—I could move the dog?” she asked softly.

  “Yes, I do see.” The old woman nodded her head, and her eyes filled with tears which she blinked back. “I won’t try to keep this one long. You’ve a sharp eye as well as a good heart, Innkeeper’s daughter.”

  “Tad, come along,” Gwyn said. They left abruptly, pulling the door sharply closed behind them. Gwyn shoved their basket into Tad’s hands again, with an expression so fierce he didn’t dare question. She picked up the dog’s hind legs and pulled it around the side of the hut, dragging it into the trees that crowded close to the little building. Only a patch of blood marked the snow where he had lain. This she kicked snow over, to conceal it, knowing that the wind—which had blown her hood back from her face—would finish the work.

  From inside the house they heard the old man’s rough voice rise up again. “But who could it have been to do such a thing to us?” His coughing drowned out whatever answer his wife gave.

  Gwyn took the basket from Tad and they hurried away along the path. She didn’t speak and neither did he. Their footsteps scrunched in the snow and the field flowed white up at them. They moved quickly, side by side. As they reached the Way, Gwyn realized that Tad was practically jumping beside her, and she shoved aside the heavy feeling that seemed to be pushing against her chest to look curiously at him.

  Words burst out of him: “I bet I know who did it. Gwyn, listen. Gwyn? He broke into wild laughter. “Jackaroo!” He doubled over, slapping at his knees. “It must have been Jackaroo!”