“An old idiot’s, more like. Not right in the head, like I said.” The matron turned her attention to Bean, shouting close up in his ear, “ALL THROUGH NOW, IDIOT!”
Bean stared at her.
“See what I mean? He hears, he just don’t act.” She laughed an unpleasant laugh, and tossed him a small pile of clothing. “HERE, IMBECILE! PUT THESE ON.”
The girl took pity on him and picked up the clothes, handing them gently to the shivering boy. “Take ’em, there’s a good boy. They’ll warm you up now.”
Bean accepted the awful clothes with trembling hands and, crouching down, began dragging them over his limbs.
“He’s just the sort of brat I mean when I say certain of ’em shouldn’t be allowed to live. Just a burden on the rest of us. And what caused him to be that way-” She leaned in close to Bean again. “YER MOTHER HAVE LOOSE MORALS, DID SHE? DID YE KNOW WHO YER DAD WAS?” She turned to the girl. “See? He don’t even know who his dad was. Bet his mam didn’t neither. Lower than animals, that sort of folk. Should be smothered at birth.”
The girl gasped. “You mustn’t talk that way! He’s one of God’s creatures.”
“So says the likes of you.” Matron sniffed. “But God can’t help what’s thrown his way, whereas God-fearing folk can.”
One last time, the girl tried. “His clothes aren’t so bad. Someone took a care with them.”
“Probably stole ’em.” And with that, Matron folded her arms and closed the conversation. She had noticed the quality of his clothes, and would sell them on when she could.
Bean finished dressing and stood, head bowed, his hands clasped in front of him like a penitent.
“Come along now, we’ll take you to your dormitory,” said the girl, offering him her hand, but Matron stepped up and snatched him up by his hair, dragging him out of the room behind her. She was a big woman, and the child she dragged weighed practically nothing.
“Ugh! This’ll have to go,” she said, giving his hair an extra tug for good measure. “Probably crawling with vermin.” The three made their way along a long, cold corridor, Bean scurrying sideways to keep ahead of the huge raw hand dragging at him. At the end, they stopped. Matron opened a door and shoved Bean in with her foot. “That bed’s empty,” she said, pointing to a sack near the center of the room. “EMPTY, DO YOU HEAR? You can stuff it yourself if it’s not comfortable enough for you.” She slammed the door behind her, muttering about the undeserving poor, and how the master had the right idea in his running of the place, showing exactly what laziness brought in terms of wages.
Bean sat alone in the miserable room, trembling with unhappiness. He had no possessions, not even the clothes he’d arrived in, and despite the fact that his old clothes had not been recently washed, the quality of the wool and their careful construction had made them soft and comfortable on his skin. There was no hope that he’d find straw to stuff his bed, for the door was locked and the room’s only window far too high for him to reach. All alone for the first time in his life, without family or sister or anything familiar on which to rest his frightened eyes, he withdrew inside his head and curled up into the smallest ball he could make of himself, willing invisibility, wishing for warmth, hoping for kindness, praying for deliverance. None of which arrived.
Twenty-two
Bean’s decision to leave Nomansland with Pell on the morning of her wedding could not easily have been predicted, for Mam doted on him despite his not being her child. From the time he was a babe, she could see straight through his pale skin to the blood pumping in tiny vessels below, and his legs never grew thicker—or straighter—than twigs. She feared for his health, slipping extras his way whenever she could.
“The son of a poor unfortunate,” Pell’s father had said on the day he turned up with the child. When his wife asked more about the woman, he explained it as a question of penury and paganism, a doubly sad case, and Pell’s mam wondered how much poorer than herself a woman would have to be before she began giving her children away.
Despite all manner of unanswered questions, she made a deal with her husband that night, accepting the baby on the condition that it would be her last. It was not in her husband’s nature to accept such terms, but he had resources other than his wife to fall back on and so agreed.
With a new baby in the house such a common occurrence, no one much noticed that Bean didn’t actually belong to them. From the beginning, Mam set him on her lap and sang to him while she worked, as she’d done with each of the previous nine. The sight of her gnarled, misshapen fingers against the baby’s smooth cheek made Pell look away.
The illness came to Nomansland via the usual route: London to Bournemouth on the coach, and then the slow, inexorable spread north and west, as cheerful carriers of fevers and plague traveled from village to village, selling trinkets, or household goods, or fish, or butchered meat to ladies who leaned in to catch every word of gossip from villages beyond their own, and caught every spray of spittle in the bargain.
First came the fever, the aches in the joints, and the cold that nothing could stop, then the burning that spread to arms and legs like a fire sweeping a field, and finally a fathomless cough that racked the entire body until it broke apart. George was the first to fall ill and—though nursed day and night by Lou and Mam—died having passed the malady on to his bed mates in the order that they lay: first James, then John, and finally Edward, sweet Ned, lying quiet and afraid, not wanting to be a bother, or to die.
Mam turned frantic and brittle, keening to herself in a way that made Bean cower, hands on ears, knees tucked under his chin, afraid. Each of her children’s deaths came as a physical blow, hammering her into the ground so that she lost height and emerged shrunken.
After Ned died, they sat numb and motionless, waiting for the disease to cross over and attack the others. But it never did. Bean still slept in the house, while the girls (dressed in rough linen and wool dresses with just a single shawl among them) stayed out of doors all winter and came home each day rosy with health. To the neighbors, it looked like carelessness to lose four boys and keep the girls, who weren’t worth half so much alive. For Mam, it was first the loss, then the disapproval of the loss that ruined her; the sense, somehow, that a lack of fastidiousness in blacking the stove might have caused her boys to slip away. No one much counted Bean as solace, what with his silence and his odd ways. Behind her back they called him the cuckoo in the nest.
The village carpenter was so old, he ought to have been hard at work on his own coffin. Unable to keep up with so many dead children, he enlisted Pa to hammer together coffins for the two younger—one for John and the smallest for Ned, both without a single right angle. Pell hated it. She imagined a shoddy coffin could hinder a person’s access to whatever heaven there might be, cause him to overshoot somehow, or fall out and plummet back to earth in flames.
For the funerals, Pa claimed precedence over the vicar of Lover and, once established in the church pulpit, refused to give it up. “These innocents,” he began, “shall be saved, and gathered up to the kingdom of heaven by His mercy. Yet here today before Him stand sinners doomed to plunge downward, down to the darkest circle of hell, where ye shall find rivers of flame to melt the very flesh off thy bones, accompanied by the terrible screams of a thousand lost souls. Repent!” By now he had begun to shake with self-righteous ire, and seemed to have forgotten where he was, and why. “Repent, oh ye sinners, lest the Devil scourge ye till his lash runs crimson with thy blood and thou beg for mercy not forthcoming. Repent, lest he pour red-hot lava over the filthy tools of thy fornication and run through thee with his fiery pokers. Then ye shall think to repent, too late!”
Crucially, he seemed to have forgotten that the majority of souls gathered in the church that day were members of his immediate family, for whom sorrow and loss and overwork had relevance, and poverty, and rage against the vagaries of fate. But fornication?
Louder and longer he preached, calling for flames and trumpets and angels
and demons to behave in ways that (to Pell) seemed unlikely in so unprepossessing a setting as Nomansland, and for the wrath of God and the punishments of Satan to be visited upon them all with an unseemly range of sadistic reproofs.
Mam acknowledged none of the many words he spoke, but sat looking straight ahead with empty eyes, and gained no solace from his sermon. When the hymns began, accompanied by exhortations and shouting, Pell slipped out.
The doctor from town declared the problem to be typhus. Not that he’d come out to visit the family when it might have helped, but four deaths in such close proximity required official inspection against the possibility of epidemic.
“Definitely typhus,” he told Mam, looking down his nose at them all, and Pell supposed they must have looked filthy to him, despite being as clean as their existence allowed. It was no use blaming Mam, who walked on earth like something inanimate come partway to life.
The doctor required the bedding to be burned, which was no bother, it being straw. He also insisted that they fill in the night closet and dig it anew, and that the house be scrubbed top to bottom. And then he departed in his smart gig, hoping never to be summoned to such a place again.
These jobs fell to the girls. Despite the futility of scrubbing packed earth, thatch, and sod, Pell and Lou attempted to comply, while Mam sat downstairs wearing one of her two remaining expressions. Neither parent had ever offered much in the way of support, but the girls knew that any assistance that had come their way in the past would come no more.
What with payments now due the doctor, the gravedig ger, and the carpenter, the death of the boys dealt the family a near-fatal blow. Any money saved from years of hard work, Pa used to maintain an unflagging state of drunkenness. Lou busied herself in the kitchen, calculating stocks of flour, apples, and potatoes against the remaining eight family members and the remaining months of winter. The result offered no encouragement, and her busy preparation of meals disguised a rising anxiety. Slicing vegetables into a deep iron kettle with a precious bit of lard, she added dried sage and thyme from the summer garden, and cooked the mixture slowly over the fire, attempting to invoke the spirit of stew. But even after she had performed all her considerable magic, the meals remained stubbornly short of satisfying.
They ate in silence, Sally fussing for more bread where there was none, Mam translucent with sorrow, Pa snoring drunkenly beside his soup, and Lou pressing a portion of her meager share onto Ellen, who sat beside her, staring wretchedly at her plate. Pell took as many meals as was seemly at Finch’s. And all of this Bean observed with his silent, all-noticing eyes.
What he decided, he told no one. With the exception of Pell, eventually, by his actions in the dark, on the morning that she awoke with a blind determination to leave home.
Twenty-three
Robert Ames took Pell to meet a woman as sour-faced as his mother, who looked her over as if she were a market pig and led her up a narrow staircase in the stone barn to a tiny dark room that stank of old milk. In it lay a straw mattress without even a cover or blanket, and nothing else.
“You’ll be needing to keep it decent,” she scowled at Pell. “No visitors, no drink, and I’ll not be having that thieving dog round here neither.”
Pell tried to imagine what visitors she might consider inviting round to the stinking tomb while the woman kept talking on the subject of sin, and “every girl’s sworn duty to avoid foul temptations.” She pronounced the words with poisonous disdain, as if they had the power to corrupt the very tongue that spoke them.
Pell left Dicken chained up with Robert at the forge, where he pined until the moment she escaped from the dairy and came to him. Each evening she held his head in her hands and ran her aching fingers through the thick ruff of fur around his neck, full of remorse at his imprisonment. And despite his impatience for food and freedom, he burrowed against her, sighing devotion until she set him free.
It pained her to keep him tied up day and night, but it was impossible to do otherwise. Work commenced before first light and lasted until after dark, and sixty cows required leading from pasture to dairy yard to be milked and back again, twice a day. In addition, there was the churning, the lifting, turning, and wetting of cheeses, the hauling of buckets so heavy they left Pell’s fingers ridged and bloody, the cleaning and mucking out, and a thousand other duties. Robert’s aunt, Osborne (after her dead husband—no Mrs. Osborne, either), seemed determined to wring as much value as possible from the daily shilling she paid her workers, minus sixpence a week for lodging. Instead of six milkers for her sixty cows, she employed only four—and girls, being cheaper. Supervising all the work herself saved additionally on a foreman. Local people told of the water she added to her milk and the chalk to her cheese, forcing her to find markets farther abroad; and as for the health and vitality of her employees, she was perfectly indifferent.
On Pell’s first day of employment, Osborne cornered her in the cool room and pinned her with a narrow dead gaze. “I don’t know what a girl like you is doing in this place, but my nephew’s due to marry four weeks hence.” She paused to let this fact sink in and, not satisfied with Pell’s reaction, added, “And a nice decent girl she is, too.”
“In which case I wish him every happiness,” replied Pell stiffly.
“Do not pretend you misunderstand my meaning,” hissed the older woman.
Pell said nothing. No words would alter the fact of Osborne’s dislike. When the woman turned on her heel and departed, Pell trembled with unexpressed feeling. She would not acknowledge her humiliation.
In her meanness, Osborne offered nothing but bread for the evening meal, and Pell learned to scrounge and save slivers of cheese when she could. The discarded rinds she saved for Dicken, who gnawed them happily. Even in the poorest town, enough was thrown away to keep a dog fed.
When she could, Pell sat with Robert Ames at the forge for her supper. Robert teased her about the stink of old milk and cheese in her clothing and hair, but she barely smelled it anymore. Sometimes she watched him work, silently correcting him where she knew she might do better. He merely grinned when she told him she’d learned the farrier’s trade in Nomansland, so unable was he to imagine any female at such work.
One evening, a pale-haired girl with tidy features and a pretty, peevish mouth interrupted them, and Robert introduced her as his wife-to-be, Cecily. Pell smiled when Robert took the girl’s hand in his, but the girl did not smile back, and Pell wondered at the number of enemies she had made merely by virtue of an acquaintance with Robert Ames.
Osborne’s own daughters had long since given up the backbreaking hours of dairy work in favor of marriage to farmers, one with a little shop outside Salisbury, the other nearer to home. The sisters had hoped to be set up as milliners by their doting father, to sell lengths of silk ribbons and finely plaited crowns. But he had died of overwork inconveniently young, and the dream of the hat shop dissolved. What neither girl would consider was the sort of work Pell did, the dawn to dusk slavery for their embittered mother. They were a close family, Osborne assured Pell, but neither daughter came to visit.
Pell stayed three weeks in Pevesy. She bit her tongue and worked the long exhausting hours, but Osborne’s mean ways made each day a trial. Her acquaintance with Robert Ames flourished in the face of so much opposition, but Pell would not be alone with him, nor even call him her friend, for propriety’s sake. And yet his family and his bride-to-be buzzed around her like wasps.
One evening at dusk, as Pell returned from a visit to the forge, Robert Ames’s fiancée appeared at her side, silent as a vole, with a face like stone. She pinched Pell’s arm hard and stared at her, lips pursed, eyes drawn together in a squint of fury. “If I tell you where to find the man you seek, will you leave us for good?”
Pell nodded, stifling the impulse to cry out.
“My father bought a rabbiting dog from a man, a poacher they say, a few miles out of town.” She held out a slip of paper with a map sketched on it, but as Pell reache
d to take it the other girl snatched it back. “Only if you promise to leave and not come back here. Ever.”
Again Pell nodded, and Cecily slapped the paper into her hand. “Take it and be damned,” hissed the girl in her pretty little voice, and hurried away.
The next day, having collected her few belongings and her last week’s salary, Pell fetched Dicken and walked out onto the road, thinking of nothing but the future. She did not say goodbye to Robert Ames or to his aunt.
Twenty-four
The sketch was not easy to follow, and Pell wondered if she’d been lured away on a hoax. No distances were marked, and only a scrawled reference to a farmhouse indicated that she might be on the right road. They made slow progress, doubling back at every wrong turn and false trail, and sometimes standing where two paths crossed, unable to choose forward, backward, left, or right.
Darkness descended rapidly and it began to rain. A general feeling of wretchedness overtook her, and with no obvious shelter nearby, she and Dicken crawled into the base of a large dead tree that offered some small protection from the wind. A colder, more lonely place could barely exist on earth, Pell thought, and though she was not much given to tears, she cried and cried, her entire body shaking with desolation. Dicken licked at the tears for salt and when she pushed him away, lay quietly beside her, waiting for her to be once more what she was.
They curled together in the night like wild things.
The next morning, aching and chilled to the bone, she turned off along a road so narrow and overgrown that she felt certain they’d gone wrong, or that the girl had played a trick on her. She studied the sketchy lines on the paper, turning it round and round, and even when most convinced she was lost for good, couldn’t bring herself to consider another plan.