Spring

‘. . . but I can’t take you there.’

  She lay on the bed next to him and he did not resist.

  ‘You want to go home but I don’t know how to show you the way. I know what’s wrong with you but I don’t know how to put it right.’

  They were closer now, hand to hand, fingers intertwined, clinging and cleaving, hold on.

  ‘I don’t know how to repay you for rescuing me from the car when we were so young, or ever to put right the harm done to you. I feel there’s nothing I can do, Jack, nothing at all.’

  He felt her tears on his face and he whispered something in her ear, his voice thick as if it came out of the shadows and the vales. His hand squeezed hers.

  ‘You’re doing it,’ he said, ‘you’re doing it, Katherine.’

  She held him and, as best he could, he held her.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know,’ he said, his hand slipping from her hair and face back to his chest.

  They were a long time silent, then: ‘They’re talking about you in The Square. Parlance is saying what’s wrong with you.’

  Jack stirred and almost laughed. He would have done so if laughing hadn’t hurt so much.

  ‘I’ve guessed what’s wrong with me,’ he said.

  She pulled back a little and looked at him.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not ill, not in the normal sense anyway. I’m growing, that’s all. Parlance got it almost at once. He said that’s why my wounds don’t heal. Obvious really. I’m a giant-born and this is what one day it had to mean. It hurts so much and I’ve been alone here, everyone around me but alone.’

  She nodded, her fair hair on his eyes and lips.

  ‘I don’t even know where home is,’ he said. ‘Jack isn’t even my real name – and growing like this hurts like hell. Normal hydden just don’t get this big.’

  Katherine looked around the little room with all its hydden-sized furnishings.

  ‘I don’t think you should live in this room any more!’

  He nodded and said, ‘Will you find somewhere I . . . where we . . . where you can look after me while I get better?’

  She nodded in return. His hand went to her face, then her cheek, and finally his fingers to her lips, feeling her.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ she said.

  He was closing his eyes and his breathing growing easier than for weeks. He was letting go.

  ‘Sleep,’ she whispered so quietly she could hardly hear her own voice. Sleep.

  He reached for her face again as if to be sure she was there. She stayed where she was and only when his breathing grew regular and deep did she leave.

  But she and Jack were not the only ones in Wardine to find a healing and new purpose that day.

  For Parlance, having cut short his startling diagnosis of the true cause of Jack’s illness, which he later confirmed by way of a written notice posted in The Square, had pursued the scent of brot that caused him to interrupt his speech with tenacity and verve.

  Much to the chagrin of the strong-armed brot-maker who had given Katherine good advice before she pushed herself forward towards Parlance, it was not her he chose. Nor any of the other brot-makers who had assembled at his bidding in the hope of finding she who made the bread that Festoon pronounced superlative.

  Yet when they were dismissed and the Wardiners all dispersed, that scent lingered still, visiting Parlance’s nostrils like a plague of exquisite gnats stirring him along and causing his heart to flutter as when he was a boy.

  ‘My lord,’ he announced breathlessly, having rushed to where his master sat impatiently awaiting his next meal in the open air, ‘supper will be late!’

  Before Festoon had time even to complain Parlance was gone, running hither and yon with his nose in the air, seeking out the elusive scent.

  He was fortunate that the air was heavy and still, for it gave him time to close his eyes and follow his nose right out of Wardine onto a rutted track that led who knew where.

  Upon it, her back to him, her gait rather slow, he spied a wyf most humble, poorly dressed, a small basket under her arm, her hair unkempt though not unclean. Parlance ran after her.

  ‘Madam, pray stop!’

  She stopped and turned hesitantly, her head low, her manner very shy.

  ‘Madam . . . I wish to ask . . . I mean to say . . . let me see the brot you have made.’

  She uncovered her basket and offered a loaf to him.

  ‘When I saw those other brot-makers with their big baskets full of lovely things, and their good natures and strong bodies . . . I saw no purpose . . .’

  He did not hear her words, for the scent was so evocative of life itself that no words were needed. He broke the brot open, put it to his face, and took in its scent.

  ‘It is magnificent,’ he said, ‘it is perfection.’

  ‘Sir, I . . .’

  ‘But wait,’ cried Parlance, ‘what other things are you hiding in that broken basket?’

  For broken it was, from use not carelessness.

  ‘A dumpling,’ she replied, ‘and other things, but those other wyfkin . . .’

  ‘A dumpling?’ repeated Parlance breathlessly, ‘made by your fair hand?’

  ‘But my hand yes, but fair no. It is freckled and I . . .’

  ‘What else Madam have you there?’ said Parlance in a low and urgent voice, as if he had the feeling he was within reach of jewels in a national treasury which any moment now might be stolen and lost for ever.

  ‘Nothing much. A tartlet or two, some flead crust, puff and plain, and Wardine scrumpet.’

  ‘A scrumpet!’ cried Parlance. ‘But I thought that art was lost?’

  ‘Not so, Mister Parlance, I have the recipe in my head and the feel of it in . . .’

  ‘In your freckled hands,’ he said, grasping them tightly, much to her surprise, and dropping to his knees.

  ‘Sir, let me go!’

  ‘I cannot, I am commanded by my Master to hold on to you and never let you go. Marry me! I am not much but together we may tread the road of dreams. What are yours?’

  ‘To travel far from Wardine!’

  ‘Granted. Utter another!’

  ‘To be loved for what I am, which isn’t much. You’re mad, sir, or bad, sir, or blind. Look at me!’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I am lame,’ she said, ‘and plain, and my dreams are silly. Let me go.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I feel as I see and as my nose directs: beauty pure and simple and the hydden wyf I wish to be bound to as she to me. I am not much to look at, and I am short, and I shout in the kitchen and I can offer nothing but life in the shadow of the greatest hydden on Earth, namely Lord Festoon.’

  She looked at him and felt his hands on hers – strong hands as hers were, a cook’s hands, rough, gentle, confident.

  ‘Have you a father I should speak to?’ he asked. ‘Or brothers?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Not even a husband,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘The first is dead, my brothers have fled and there never was a husband or even a swain. Look at me sir!’

  ‘I see only flour in your hair where flowers should be,’ he said, ‘and that is my only note of doubt, now and for ever. Marry me! My knees are hurting but I must kneel until you give your consent.’

  ‘I don’t even know you!’

  ‘You don’t need to. Just ask yourself how many hydden are there on this Earth who would be roused to passion by the thought of scrumpet. Not many. Therefore, please marry me.’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Charmaine,’ she replied.

  Parlance’s knees were so sore from this lengthy proposal that it was a struggle rising again. When he did he took off his hat.

  He found there was the same height between them bar an inch or two, but which suited them both as they kissed to the scent of brot and swooned at the blissful thought of eating scrumpet together.


  84

  HEALING

  Jack’s healing began when Katherine found the courage to share her doubts and feelings of helplessness with him, for that enabled him to share his own with her.

  Within a few days she found a place for him behind Festoon’s residence, but out of sight of the street and with an access and view to the river which made it private.

  Parlance brought him one kind of sustenance daily, Katherine brought another through her presence and her touch. Before, she had just been trying on the surface, her self-consciousness and awkwardness getting in the way. Now she was herself and that was what he needed.

  That and her encouragement – as he found his confidence and strength again.

  As the weather was so warm she persuaded him not to wear a shirt to get the air to his skin. He would have liked to swim, but the river was deep and filled with dangerous pools and under currents. There was a skiff in the lee of the bank, old and half-rotten.

  ‘Why not repair it?’ she suggested.

  It was all he needed for him to set to, repairing it for lack of something better to do. Bending, straightening, banging, twisting, lifting and reaching . . . each little movement brought new life to his back.

  At first he just sat in the skiff staring at the water flowing past, unwilling yet to test his craft and the paddle he had made against it, or himself.

  Stort appeared and made a shower for him out of an old water tank set in a tree with a hand pump, a bucket and a hose. It looked crazy but the very fact of having to raise the water, adjust the bucket and move about to get under the sporadic flow was the exercise he needed.

  At first Katherine came at times agreed, but gradually she came when she wanted and left when she wanted too.

  Stort was their most frequent visitor, their joint companion. He too could be silent, their conversation sometimes no more than a shared listening to the river.

  But mostly it was Jack and Katherine, sitting watching the flow of water, enjoying the warm nights of Summer.

  Often Jack would stare across the Severn to the opposite bank, or watch the Bilgesnipe ferryman and his boy come and go. One day he waved to him and got a wave back, one side of the river acknowledging the other.

  The Bilgesnipe was surprised. Wardiners were friendly folk and paid him well, but they were superstitious too, for a ferryman is a stranger between worlds and get too friendly with him and who knows if you’ll wake up in the wrong place.

  No matter to Jack, he liked to raise a hand once in a while, for he had been alone for a time and knew what a greeting meant.

  Some nights when he and Katherine and Stort were sitting on the bank they’d see the glow of a fire on the ferryman’s side and hear him play the tuble.

  The water and its dangers lay between them, but when the tuble played and the fire glowed who was to say how far or near they were?

  ‘Across there is where we’re going,’ Jack would say, ‘when I’m better and our time here is done.’

  Katherine agreed.

  Stort too.

  It was time for a generation to move on.

  One evening when Stort wasn’t there, Katherine said, ‘You’ve been silent these last couple of days. Is anything wrong? Are your burns hurting again?’

  These days she had learnt to be more direct than him.

  He shook his head.

  Finally: ‘It’s just that . . .’

  ‘What, Jack?’ demanded Katherine, frustrated.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to say but it’s difficult . . .’

  Her heart began to thump. He was looking across the river at a world they had to find a way to return to, whether as hydden or humans. It seemed he did so with longing but without her in his sight.

  ‘You want to go back to Brum don’t you?’ she said, because he had said more than once that he felt at home there as he felt at home in the Hyddenworld.

  Then, more hesitantly, she dared ask: ‘Are you . . . I mean . . . are you trying find a way to . . .’

  ‘To what?’

  It was his turn to get frustrated.

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re trying to say, Katherine.’

  They were standing now, facing each other.

  She had never felt so distant from him, or the fear of losing him so deeply.

  ‘Are you trying to say goodbye?’ she said finally.

  He stared at her in astonishment and stepped closer.

  ‘Goodbye?’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘What are you saying then?’

  The river stirred in the semi-darkness beyond the bank, swirling along, dark, cool, deep.

  ‘I’m trying say hello,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to say, well . . . I don’t want to cross the water back to whatever’s over there without you. I’m trying to say I love you and . . .’

  She reached a finger to his lips as she had once before on the bridge over the Thames.

  ‘Don’t say any more but what you just said, Jack.’

  ‘I love you Katherine,’ he said.

  ‘I want to cross the river with you, only you,’ she replied, ‘because I love you too. And . . .’

  He kissed her to stop her saying more too. There was no need for words.

  They held each other tight until, not long after, Stort showed up and sat nearby, waiting.

  The ferryman played his music.

  The Severn flowed on by, a barrier, a link, the great unknown beneath the surface. The distant bank seemed no distance at all.

  ‘Mr Barklice and I couldn’t work love out at all,’ said Stort to no one in particular.

  ‘Nor can we,’ said Katherine breaking free from Jack, ‘but you’ll know it when you find it!’

  With each wound that healed, each new scar that did not break, they came nearer telling each other what they really thought; and strangely Stort was part of it, friend and catalyst, a good companion to them both in those slow days of Autumn.

  ‘We’ve had people telling us what we are and what we’re meant to be all our lives,’ said Jack, ‘but now we’ve got to find out what we want to be.’

  That first real touching they explored in Mister Kipling’s house had opened the doors on more. It wasn’t chaste but it wasn’t much more than that either, not then, not yet. It was slow as the river itself. Sometimes he slept in her arms; sometimes she in his. There was no hurry towards a goal to which they knew they were going together. It was easier to let the flow take them, as it took the river, to where they would go when the time was right.

  One afternoon Jack was sitting on the bank alone when he heard a splash across the river and a shout. He looked across the water and saw the ferryman’s boy’s head bobbing up and down. The river flow was heavy and that boy was going to drown.

  Jack did not hesitate.

  He jumped into his skiff, released the lanyard and shot across the water as Arnold Mallarkhi had taught him one night. Like a bolt from a crossbow he went, arcing with the current, his eye never leaving the boy’s head. But at least he could swim, which often ferrymen can’t.

  The shout had barely faded but he was there, heaving the boy into the gunnels, turning the boat into the flow to make it easier to steer, paddling fierce and strong to get to the ferryman’s wharf, heaving to and holding fast while the boy was hauled back safe and sound onto dry land.

  ‘He be all I got,’ said the ferryman heavily. ‘What shall I pay you?’

  Jack stood on the bucking skiff, the water good beneath the planks, the boy sopping, the Bilgesnipe wanting to balance things out, which is natural enough.

  ‘Teach me to play the tuble,’ said Jack without thinking.

  Teach me to save the world.

  So the ferryman did, through the evenings that followed, real Bilgesnipe music, for which Jack discovered he had an ear.

  85

  FAREWELL

  It was the Wardiners’ tradition to light a Lammas bonfire, which they did a week or two after the first day of August when the pagan calendar said Aut
umn began. They liked to rest a few days before their own festivities, to enjoy the fullness of Summer in the mellowing of leaves and the slowing of the river, and to make preparations for feast and ritual.

  ‘They want you to light the fire, Jack,’ Stort told him.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘They asked the High Ealdor, but he refused, said you’d do it better. You’re their second choice.’

  ‘Who’s building it?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘We are,’ Jack corrected him with a grin.

  ‘We are?’ exclaimed Stort.

  Jack had been a cloud over the village when he first came. Now, as Samhain approached, he seemed to be its heart. He had suffered fire not once but twice, and each left different scars, which gave him a certain gravitas.

  ‘We built a bonfire before and look what happened then!’ said Katherine.

  They built it all the same.

  Then, the day before the night of its burning, when Wardiners claimed that spirits start to roam, three new spirits roamed right into Wardine, carried over on the ferryman’s boat: Master Brief, Mister Pike and Barklice.

  ‘My dear friends,’ cried Festoon, ‘I am delighted to see you, as are we all.’

  ‘Tell me, Master Brief, have you ever seen this gentleman before?’ said Pike, winking at Jack.

  Brief eyed the trimmed-down Festoon very fiercely.

  ‘Never, he’s a stranger to me and rather gaunt. Barklice, you know him?’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ said Barklice.

  ‘Jack,’ said Brief, ‘we know you, and Mistress Katherine, who’s got colour in her cheeks, and Mister Stort, scrivener lately of Brum but soon to return we hope, oh and Parlance – we know him. But this gentleman . . .’

  Brief shook his head.

  ‘He’s a stranger to us!’

  Festoon looked at them magisterially.

  ‘That’s a very great shame,’ he said, ‘for I was planning to have a midsummer feast this very night.’

  ‘A frugal feast, my lord?’ asked Brief, eyes twinkling.

  Festoon smiled in a conspiratorial way. Diets are good, but breaking them once in a while is better.

  ‘You’re welcome all,’ he said, ‘very welcome, and frugality be hanged. This will be a feast of feasts, of food rich to the point of nausea, refined to the limit of existence, exotic and overblown to a degree beyond the nth!’