Then, with Damaris leading the pony, and Peter walking alongside to push back the low branches and keep the smuggler from sliding off one side or the other, they set off for Joyous Gard. It was only a stone’s throw—if you could have thrown a stone in that dense undergrowth—a few seconds of bobbing flight for a woodpecker; but when the trees suddenly fell back and they came out into the tiny clearing screened only by goat willows and gorse bushes and a wild-duck skein of wind-shaped hawthorns from the rife and the open marsh beyond, and pulled up at the doorway of the ruined cottage, Damaris’s smuggler slid off on top of Peter who tried to take his weight and then went over backwards under him. He had lost the kind of half-awakeness that he had had before, and the neckerchief was turning soggy red over the bullet hole.
But between them, Peter taking him under the shoulders and Damaris by the heels, though she was terrified of doing still more hurt to his wounded leg, they dragged him over the threshold and across to the far side of the one room, where the ragged thatch still clung to the rafters and at least there would be shelter from the coming rain.
At one side of the broken hearth, Lady sat upright on her bracken bed, like a prick-eared shadow among the other shadows, watching them.
‘Lady’s food!’ Damaris said, ‘I dropped it when I found my smuggler—I’ll be back,’ and she fled.
She was gone only a couple of minutes, but when she got back Peter was already carrying in armfuls of bracken and piling them into another bed. ‘I’ve shortened Lady’s chain,’ he said, ‘so that she can’t get over to the other corner just for a while.’
Damaris nodded, and emptied the bag of scraps in front of the little vixen. She hated to see how short the chain attached to the old dog-collar round her neck now was, but she quite saw that Lady must be kept close in her own corner for a while. She longed to stay and explain to her, and feed her scrap by scrap as she usually did; but today there were other things to be done first, and she left her to snap up the cheese rinds and crusts and bits of bacon in front of her, and went to help Peter with the bracken bed in the other corner.
They got the young man onto it bit by bit, while Lady, having finished her food, sat in her own corner and watched them still. Then they undid the neckerchief, and Peter got out his pocket-knife and slit the blood-stiffened breeks to above his knee and rolled the stocking down, and side by side they took a long careful look at the bullet hole. The man was still unconscious, which was maybe as well for him.
The bleeding had almost stopped again, but looking at her smuggler’s face under its ragged forelock of dark hair, Damaris had a frightened feeling that that might be because there was no more blood inside him to come out. She pushed the forelock back, and wondered rather desperately what they should do next.
Meanwhile Peter was examining the wound more closely. He had once helped to get a gamekeeper’s bullet out of one of the local poachers, and knew about such things; knew at any rate that a bullet that had passed through left two holes, the one where it had gone in, and a bigger and more ragged one where it had come out. Here, there was only the one.
He looked up. ‘The bullet’s still there.’
Damaris sat back on her heels and stared at him. ‘Can you get it out?’
He shook his head. ‘I daren’t. It’s lodged somehow.’
‘Who then? Doctor. Godwyn?’
‘Take a long time to get him, all the way from Chichester. Besides . . .’
Besides, neither of them knew how Doctor Godwyn might feel about smugglers and handing them over to the authorities.
‘There’s Matthew Binns up at the Big House,’ Peter said slowly; and again there was silence. Matthew Binns the Farringtons’ head groom was certainly the best horse-doctor for miles around, and not much doubt that he was deep in with the smugglers, the Fair Traders, but there was something dark and slantwise about him, and . . . ‘I don’t know,’ Damaris said. ‘He’s not from round these parts, or we’d have seen him before. He might be from a rival gang or something.’
She had heard ugly stories of what could happen between gangs.
And then the answer came to her, ‘There’s Genty Small.’
Genty Small the Wise Woman, who seemed to live half in the same world as other people and half in a world of her own—‘Cracked in the cock-loft,’ Peter had said of her before now—and who would not care if the young man was a smuggler nor what gang he came from, so long as he was hurt and needed her skill.
‘Do you suppose she’ll be able to get a bullet out?’ Peter asked, doubtfully.
‘I’ll go and ask her. At any rate she’ll know who can, and meanwhile she’ll be able to help him with her herbs and simples. I’ll go now. You stay here with him and get a fire going and some water on to heat—she’s bound to want hot water—Oh and Lady’ll want some water, too.’
‘I’d not be surprised if I hadn’t watered Lady just as often as you have,’ Peter said peaceably, ‘you’d best tear me the hem off your petticoat before you go; I’ll need something more than this sopping neckerchief to bind up his leg.’
Damaris gathered up her skirts and untied the draw-strings at her waist, and the white cotton petticoat fell at her feet. ‘You can have it all,’ she said, stepping out of it. ‘It’s a very old one. I can always tell Aunt Selina we tore it up for polishing rags last autumn and doesn’t she remember.’
And she whisked out through the nettle-grown doorway.
All the way to Genty’s cottage she was wild with anxiety lest the Wise Woman should be out somewhere, gathering simples or the like. But when she came out into the wood-shore clearing just short of the village, Genty in a sacking apron was on her knees busy among the herbs in her garden, with her white nanny-goat tethered close by, while her little smoke-grey cat Grizelda sat in the middle of the grass path, watching her.
Damaris hesitated a moment. She knew Genty quite well: Aunt Selina always bought honeycomb from her to make her own renowned herb posset with which she dosed the household when they had colds; and Madge from the dairy went to her for green ointment for her chilblains and more than once for a charm posy to wear in church to help her catch the eye of whichever of the village lads she was interested in at the moment; but even so, she was a little shy of going alone to the cottage on the edge of the woods.
But as she paused at the gap in the sweetbriar hedge—Genty had no gate to her garden—the old woman got slowly to her feet and turned towards her; a brown-skinned old woman, tough and twisted as a tree root, with eyes that must have been the brightest blue when she was young, and a mass of hair that should have been grey but was still as black and glossy as a rook’s wing, bundled up under a man’s weather-faded stocking cap.
‘Good-day to ’ee, liddle mistress, would it be something for your Auntie, then?’
Damaris shook her head, getting her breath back, and as soon as she could, began to tell the Wise Woman about her smuggler—if of course he was a smuggler.
Before she had finished, she found herself inside the small dark cottage, for slow and gentle though she was in all her movements, Genty was not one to waste time when there was no time to waste. ‘And the bullet is still there,’ she was saying. ‘At least Peter thinks it is. And we’re not sure about Doctor Godwyn—not if he’s a smuggler; and Matthew Binns up at the Big House . . .’
‘You might be right not to trust that one. You might be right to come to ol’ Genty, aye, sure-lye.’ She was moving about, taking things from a cupboard in the corner and putting them into an osier basket that she had set on the table. ‘He’ll have lost a deal of blood, I daresay, aye, and like enough still losing it? Well here’s the means to help that; and fever-few seethed in milk—that’s a sovereign remedy against the wound-fever.’ She reached up and chose this and that from among the bunches of dried herbs and roots hanging from the smoke-blackened rafters. ‘Comfrey’s God’s own gift for the healing of a wound, specially if there’s a bone needs mending too—and yarrow that the good folk in churches call the Devil’s o
wn. . . .’
The little grey cat stalked over to sit on the bright rag rug before the fire, and Damaris stood in the middle of the narrow, crowded, firelit, many-shadowed room, and looked about her as her eyes grew more used to the shadows; seeing the pots and jars and dried bundles that crowded the wall shelves and hung from the ceiling and stood on the windowledge and left scarcely room for moving; and smelling the odd mingled smells of the place, and wishing that Genty would not take so long to consider each of the things she put in her basket.
But in a surprisingly short time, even so, the basket was almost ready, and Genty was opening an old carved chest that stood under the window. Craning to see what was in it, Damaris could only glimpse more bundles and a beautiful small case of painted leather with clasps that shone like gold. ‘This is where I keep all my wicked things,’ the Wise Woman said, unlocking it, and brought out from it something quite small, long and narrow and wrapped in fine white linen. She re-locked the case—the only locked thing, it seemed, in all the cottage—and stowed the key back somewhere inside her clothes; then, straightening up, turned back the linen folds. The window light slipped along the blade of a slim vicious-looking knife and a couple of other brightly polished tools the like of which Damaris had never seen before.
‘A barber-surgeon I once did a good turn to gave me these and showed me how to use them when he was too old to use them himself any more.’ Genty shook her head over them. ‘I’ve no liking for the Cold Iron; but if the bullet be still there—aye well, there’s things that the Cold Iron has its uses for.’ She tucked the linen-wrapped bundle down the side of the basket, and turned back to the cupboard. ‘Clean rags for bandages.’
‘I’ve left my petticoat there,’ Damaris told her. ‘It’s quite clean.’
‘Can’t have too many—they’ll be needed another day,’ said Genty, and added them to the basket. ‘Lights now, my dearie. The day will be fading soon, and we shall need light to work by.’
‘We’ve got an old lantern, but we’re short on candles to go in it.’
Genty rummaged in another corner, and added a handful of tallow dips. From somewhere beyond a low inner door she brought a pipkin of goat’s milk; she laid turfs over the fire, and disappearing up a steep ladder-stairway that must lead to her sleeping place, she came back with a rough brown blanket smelling of rosemary.
‘You take that,’ she said to Damaris, ‘an’ the milk, an’ don’t ’ee spill it. And to the little grey cat, ‘Now my lover, mind an’ guard the house an’ keep all happy till I come back.’
Then she went out, shooing Damaris ahead of her and leaving the cottage door wide open behind.
Chapter 4: Skills and Remedies
BY THE TIME they got back to Joyous Gard the light was going fast. Snowball was fading from a solid pony to a pale shadow in the dusk, and the first fine mizzle rain was spitting down the wind that had begun to rise.
Peter had got a fire going on the broken hearth, and filled both their water pots and a chipped cup with water, and the biggest pot, propped over the fire, was coming up to the bubble. The eyes of the little vixen lying nose-on-paws in her own corner caught the flamelight and shone unwinking like two green elf-lamps in the gloom. In the other corner, the young man lying under their moth-eaten horse rug, was awake again, and his face turned anxiously towards the doorway and the dusk beyond, though he made no move to reach for the empty pistol which lay beside him. He relaxed with a small sigh when he saw that the comers were only Damaris and a little old woman carrying a basket.
‘You again,’ he said.
Genty dumped the basket and knelt down at his side. ‘Been playing hare-and-hounds with the Customs men, have ’ee?’ she said. Then as he made no reply, ‘Aye well, no questions asked and none to answer. Now let old Genty take a look—but first a listen, my dearie.’
And she pulled his jacket and shirt open and bent to press her ear to his chest. As she did so, they all saw the oilskin-covered packet that hung on a grubby white ribbon around his neck. He made a quick fumbling movement to hide it from their eyes. Genty put her own tree-root hand over his, and moved both it and the packet aside. ‘Whatever you have there is no concern of ours,’ she said. ‘’Tis just your heart I would be listenin’ to . . . An’ ’tis a good strong one that ye have plodding away there under your ribs.’ She sat back, drawing his shirt together again. ‘Light the liddle ol’ lantern, boy, and we’ll take a look at this knee.’
She turned the rug aside, and gave her attention to the bullet hole below his left knee, while Peter got the lantern lit and held it close. ‘Aye, ’tis still there—and the sooner ’tis out the better,’ she said after a few moments.
The young man drew a small harsh breath. ‘Who?—You?—’
‘Aye, me,’ said Genty. ‘’Twouldn’t be the first time, an’ like enough it won’t be the last. Now, we’ll need hot water—that’s for you to see to, liddle mistress.’
‘We’ve only got the two pots,’ Damaris said anxiously. ‘One’s nearly boiling, and the other’s standing by. Shall I put that one on the fire as well?’
‘Aye, do that. ‘Twill serve for a start, and we can get some more from the spring later if need be.’ Genty was busy among the contents of her basket. She had brought out the slim white bundle containing her surgeon’s tools and laid them on the flat log that served in Joyous Gard as a table; now she brought out dried leaves and roots and gave them to Damaris. ‘Now Lover, put these leaves in the boiling pot, that’s just for bathing the wound after. Take it off the fire and set it aside when I tell you. Put the rest in the smaller pot, bring it up to the boil and keep it boiling—gently, mind, gently as a sleeping pigeon. Feed the fire liddle by liddle, so’s the heat stays steady. An’ whatever ye do, whatever ye hear, don’t ’ee stop stirring the liddle pot with this—’tis a sprig of rowan wood—nor don’t ’ee take your eye from it to look round.’
Damaris did as she was bidden. Behind her she heard Genty telling Peter how to fix the lantern so that the light fell where she wanted it; and then how to steady the smuggler’s knee. ‘Keep it turned out a liddle, your hand under it—so—now hold steady. . . .’ And after that there was a time when she was only too glad to keep her mind on her boiling pots and think as little as might be about what was going on behind her.
She listened to the fine rain hushing across the roof and the spatter of it coming in where there was no roof to keep it out; and the rustling of the fire and the soft bubble of the boiling pots, and smelled the pungent steam that rose from them, making her eyes water. But she could not keep herself from hearing Genty’s voice saying, ‘Now—further this way—ah-ha—Do ’ee bear with it a while longer—’ and the harsh gasping breath of her smuggler under the Wise Woman’s probing, any more than she could keep herself from smelling the dark slaughter-house smell of blood. The vixen whimpered, made uneasy by the smell. Damaris fed the fire little twigs and bits of bark from the pile beside it, and stirred the brew with her rowan twig, and tried not to shiver and feel sick. In a little there was a sharp gasp behind her, almost a cry cut off short, and then a long sigh, and Genty’s voice: ‘Tch, tch! He’s off on his travels again. Well, ’twill be better for him so, till this be safe out.’
And then there was just the rain and the soft sea wind in the trees again for a while, and then Genty calling to her to take the bigger pot from the fire and set it aside to cool. A few moments later the Wise Woman said crooningly, ‘Ah now, there ye are, ye liddle varmint—come to ol’ Genty . . . co-ome . . . co-ome . . . There, ’tis out an’ all’s over.’
Damaris let her own breath go as though she had been holding it all the while.
And after that everything seemed to go suddenly quick and easy.
Genty bathed the wound and covered it with a kind of poultice of the leaves that Damaris had been boiling, and tightly bound it with strips from her old petticoat; and Peter and Genty between them eased the young man out of his jacket and rolled it up to make him a pillow, and Genty shook out
the rough brown blanket and added it to the horse rug, pulling them both warmly to his chin. The scent of rosemary stole out from it to lighten the darker smells that had gathered in Joyous Gard.
Then she took half the milk which had been warming beside the fire, and poured it into a pottery cup which she had brought with her, and added some of the liquid from the smaller pot; lastly she took a small leather flask from her basket, worked out the wooden stopper and poured in a few drops of some thick amber-coloured fluid. A faint sleepy smell was added to all the other smells in the place. And as she slipped an arm under the young man’s head to raise him, Damaris saw that her smuggler was halfway back inside himself again.
‘Drink this. ’Tis sleep you need now, Lover.’
The young man’s eyes were open but hazy, searching their faces with a frown of bewilderment. ‘Come now, do ’ee drink, there’s no harm in it, only sleep; an’ sleep be what you need, aye, sure-lye.’ Genty tipped the rim of the cup against his teeth, and he gulped down the warm brew, without, Damaris thought, really knowing that he did so.
She looked across at Peter; and he looked back at her and swallowed. There was blood on his hands that he was rubbing at with a spare bit of rag, and she thought he seemed a bit greenish in the upward light of the lantern.
Genty laid the young man down and again pulled the rugs to his chin, tucking his empty pistol in beside him like someone tucking in a child’s toy. Then she beckoned Peter to bring the lantern over to the other corner, where Lady lay watching all that went forward, her eyes unwinking, her white-tipped brush wreathed across her muzzle, her injured paw thrust a little awkwardly out from her side.
‘So here’s another wounded one,’ said Genty. ‘Oh the ways of men an’ their traps. . . . But this one be nigh on mended. Give her a few more days, an’ then ye must let her go; ’tisn’t good for the creatures of the wild to bide too long with humankind, lest they lose the way back to their own world after all.’