CHAPTER 3
Carefully stepping along the narrow path, they rounded a corner and emerged in a clearing. In front of them was a small house, whitewashed, with wooden shingles on the roof, a slat door in the centre, and two windows on either side of that. Attached to the building on the right was another building, perhaps a small stable or a workshop; on the other side, a slat fence surrounded a tangle of growth that might well have been a kitchen garden. With the little corner of Cat’s brain that was not concentrating on where she was putting her feet, she was reminded of an outdoor museum she had seen in Europe which had featured restored medieval cottages.
The determined woman steered them to the wooden door and pushed at it with her foot to see if it would open. It did not.
“Bibby,” she called, “come here, child, and see if you can get the door!”
The baby toddled around in front of her and tipped her head to the side.
“Doh?” she asked.
“Yes, dear, the door. Open it.”
“Bibby doh,” said the mud-covered little girl, then reached up to the latch with both hands and tried to pull it downward. At first it did not budge; then it suddenly popped down, and the door swung inward. Bibby stumbled in and fell on her hands and knees. “Waaah!”
“Oh Bibby! It’s all right, come, little one...”
They tried to manoeuvre past the wailing baby, who was scrambling up, her round bottom pointing in the air. The room they had entered seemed to comprise the entire cottage. On the right-hand wall was a large, open fireplace, with some live coals glowing in it; a door next to it led to the annex. Against the back wall stood a wooden table with a chair on one end and a bench on either side, and along the left-hand side of the room, its headboard under the side window, was a wooden platform bed covered in rumpled blankets and a multi-coloured quilt, to which they carried their burden.
“Wait, no,” said the woman over the wails of the baby. “We need to clean him up first. Put him on the floor here.” She crab-stepped sideways towards the fireplace and lowered the man’s legs down beside the green-and-blue-striped woven hearth rug. Cat supposed that after lying on the cold dirt of the forest floor some reasonably clean-looking floorboards were not the worst surface to be put down on, especially for an unconscious person who would not know the difference. She slowly got down on one knee, slid her arms out from under his, caught his head in her hands as she did so, and gently placed it on the cottage floor. Phew. He wasn’t exactly a lightweight.
The baby’s wails had quieted; Cat looked around to see that the woman had scooped up the little girl in a firm hug, taken a large handkerchief from her pocket, and was wiping off the light-coloured trails that the tears and snot had made on the mud-covered face.
“There, there, little one,” she said kindly, going on with the handkerchief to the sticky, muddy little fingers. “No need to carry on so.” She put her back on the ground, then briskly looked around. “Now then, you—what is your name, at any rate? Won’t do to be calling you ‘you’ just like that.”
Cat felt herself blush, for no particular reason. “I’m Cat—Catriona.” Somehow she felt that her full name was more appropriate to this place or this time, whatever or whenever it was.
The woman accepted it readily. “Catriona, then. Mine’s Ouska, or you can call me Aunt, like he does.” She pointed her chin at the man on the floor. “Now, let’s get him cleaned up. Can you see if there’s water in the bucket? Should be by the door.” She vanished through the door beside the fireplace, only to reappear a minute later with an armful of rags and towels. “They’re half of them smeared with clay anyway. Wonder if he ever cleans up that stuff!” she muttered.
Cat had found an enamelled bucket beside the front door (it was a wonder the baby hadn’t knocked it over and spilled it when she fell into the house) and carried it over to the man on the floor.
Cleaning him up even partially proved to be a messy and embarrassing undertaking. Cat was glad to see he was wearing some sort of linen or cotton breeches, tied at the waist, under the long pants, which Ouska had unceremoniously ripped along the legs in order to get them off without hurting his leg any further (Cat did not feel equal to dealing with an entirely nude, strange, injured, unconscious man in a magical place or time into which she had been transported without her volition or any warning). Fortunately, his tunic was laced all the way down the front, so they were able to loosen the laces and ease it off his arms without having to destroy it.
His hair was too mud-smeared to clean then; getting the clay out of it would take more than half a bucket of water and a few rags. They would have to wash his head properly, and Cat had no idea how they could accomplish this while he was still unconscious. His chin was covered in stubble, and his chest and arms, while slender, proved to be surprisingly muscular. His hands were long and slim, the fingers square-tipped with the fingernails clipped short. His face seemed tanned, although at that moment it had a rather sickly pallor that Cat supposed was due to his being unconscious.
Little Bibby, meanwhile, had toddled about the room, getting in their way, until Ouska unceremoniously picked her up, deposited her on the chair by the table, and told her in no uncertain terms to sit there and not move.
“Yit?” said the baby.
“Yes, sit. And be good, just for another moment.”
“Bibby yit,” she said obediently, and proved good to her word, babbling at them cheerfully as they worked to clean up the man on the floor.
There was a gash in the side of his left knee, and now that they had straightened out the leg, it looked like it had only been twisted, not broken. The older woman peered closely at the wound.
“Hmm, there is something stuck in it—a piece of twig, or wood. That’s got to come out, or it’ll fester.” She rose to her feet. “I don’t think he’s got anything here to pull it out with; I’ll have to get it from my house. Meantime, we need to stop him bleeding all over, though.” She took the cleanest of the rags, and twisted it snugly around the leg, then pulled the quilt and most of the blankets off the bed. One brown blanket, woven of a coarse, brown material with several holes in it, she spread over the mattress, clicking her tongue as she did so.
“Fit for nothing but the horses, that is!” she muttered. “Well, it won’t matter if it’s spoiled, that’s for certain. Come on, Catriona, let’s get him on the bed. He’ll be a bit more easy there.” Between them, the two women moved the man onto the bed. Throughout any of it, he had shown no signs of recovering consciousness, but his breathing was even and did not seem laboured to Cat’s inexperienced eye. She picked up another one of the blankets and laid it lightly over him.
Ouska took down Bibby from the chair and made short shrift of getting her cleaned. She stripped her of her clay-encrusted little knee-length tunic and the sort of drawers she wore under that (not, to Cat’s relief, a diaper—that would have taken the level of the messes just one step too far) and simply stood her right into the water bucket, which was just big enough. The baby squealed, but more in surprise and fun than in displeasure. She was rinsed off from head to toe, then lifted out of the bucket, rubbed dry with one of the coarsely-woven cloths, and bundled into a clean set of drawers and tunic which Ouska had pulled from a carved chest beside the bed; all of it was done with such quickness and efficiency that Cat barely had time to follow, let alone help.
“There,” said Ouska, using the damp towel to wipe down the chair Bibby had sat on, the floor where the man had lain, and the front of her own blouse and dress, and then bundling the clay-covered rags into the corner by the fireplace.
“Know how to work a pump?” she asked Cat.
“I—I—well, I don’t know!” stammered Cat. “I’ve used some, at camp, but I don’t know what kind you have here.”
“Oh, never mind,” said the older woman kindly but briskly. “You’re not from here, I forgot. Yes, I know—we can talk about that later. You’re a bright girl, Catriona; you’ll see how it works. The pump is outside, on the side of the sh
op. The handle creaks a lot, but you just need to work it a few times and it’ll start. Don’t overfill the bucket; we can’t have you hurting yourself as well.” And with that she handed Cat the bucket with the remaining muddy water and turned her in the direction of the door.
When Cat came back with the cleaned, filled bucket (the pump had indeed been easy to figure out; it was just like the ones they had had at the summer camp Cat had attended when she was twelve), there were some candles lit on the mantelpiece, and Bibby was sitting at the table munching on what looked like a chunk of cheese and a piece of coarse bread (artisan bread, they called it where Cat came from, but somehow she had the feeling that in this place they didn’t have bread like that for reasons of trendiness—instead, it was probably all they knew). Ouska was folding some of the blankets into a little pallet in the corner beside the table.
“The little one can sleep on here for tonight,” she said. “The chamber pot is in the corner over there; there’s a privy out back if you need it or want to empty the pot. There’s the cheese and bread, and the water is quite good to drink. I’m going to try to get back as soon as I can, but it might be some time. I will try—”
“Get back?” Cat interrupted, forgetting for the moment her awe of the older woman. “Where are you going?” Anxiety made her throat feel dry at the thought of being left alone with an injured, unconscious man and a tiny child in a situation that still had her utterly bewildered.
“Now, child,” said the older woman soothingly, “don’t fret yourself. I told you I need to get my tongs to get the stick out of that wound of his; there’s nothing here to do a clean job with. Besides, it’s getting on to nightfall, and I need to get the chickens in and be sure Uncle is looked after. You’ll do fine, girl. As I was saying, I’ll hurry back; but even if I’m not here soon, I’m sure you can manage. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” She gave Cat a probing look. “No, don’t think to yourself that I couldn’t know that because I’ve only just met you.” (Was she a mind reader?) “I know things, Catriona, and this is one of them. So don’t,” she repeated, “fret yourself.”
She turned to the door, then seemed to remember something. She swung around, went over to the bed, and lifted the lid on the chest from which she had taken little Bibby’s clothes. It seemed to be full of some other cloth items—clothing, for the most part. Ouska dug into the bottom of it and brought out some brown and green pieces.
“Here,” she said, holding them out to Cat. “You need to get out of those muddy clothes; these should do you. They were his wife’s; you are much of a height and build. And it’s not as if she’ll be needing them any more.” Something in Ouska’s voice told Cat that she did not think much of this woman, whoever she was, or had been. Cat took the clothes from the older woman, careful not to smear them with the clay that was covering her own clothes (would she ever be able to get them clean?). Ouska turned to the bed, laid the back of her hand on the man’s forehead, and gazed down at him with a peculiar soft look in her eyes. Then she shook herself.
“Hmph,” she said, briefly, and turned back to the little girl who was still sitting at the table, happily crumbling bread on the surface. For just a moment, Ouska rested her work-worn hand on Bibby’s hair, which was drying into short red-blond curls sticking out like feathers all over her head.
“You’ll do fine,” she repeated to Cat, then walked out of the cottage into the dusk which was falling outside.