The Pesthouse (19 page)

If she wanted, she could probably stop to milk a cow. If she wanted, come to think of it, she could find a good-sized stick and give those men a beating in their beds and be gone before any one of them could lift a finger to defend himself. If she wanted, she could help herself to the two horses, to punish the men for their repulsiveness, and make her journey to the coast a little speedier. But Franklin had explained to her an age ago how horses were an expensive complication for a traveler.

'What, worse than a barrow?' she had asked.

And he'd replied, 'When did you last see a barrow stabled? When did you last see a barrow eating hay? When did you last see a barrow rear up, or run off, or nip its owner?'

So Margaret just walked by, within sight of the cottage, leaving her deep footprints in the snow for anyone to follow, being reckless in the interests of speed but keeping quiet. She was still afraid. It was wise to be afraid. But as she passed she saw an opportunity too good to miss. There was a cold larder on the veranda at the front of the house, with snow swept up by the wind against it. Only men could be so careless with their food. In a moment she was opening it. In the next moment, she had helped herself to milk in a jug, a damp wrap of sour cheese and — joy beyond joy — three hen's eggs, already boiled hard and just a crack away from eating.

No one caught her stealing food, and no one heard her stealing away. Soon she had left the little fields behind and was back on home territory. There was the tree that marked the place where she had left the Boses. They would have spent the last two nights somewhere close, just waiting. Quite soon they would be reunited with their granddaughter. They would be angry. They would be shaking with anxiety. They had a right to be. But Margaret had a tale to tell. And there were eggs and cheese to feast upon.

ANDREW AND Melody Bose had left the meeting point only at first light that morning. They had spent two almost sleepless nights in a makeshift tent that they had rigged up using Franklin's tarp and Margaret's thin blanket as weather shields and their own finer blankets as bedding. There had been nothing they could do except eat and wait and argue once Andrew had returned from his expedition with no news of their granddaughter or 'that diseased woman' to whom they had recklessly entrusted her. They'd finished Margaret's taffies and the last gobbets of Ferrytown honey. They'd used up too much of their own salt fish, hoping to placate their nervous stomachs by constant feeding.

Once in a while Andrew had ventured out, armed with Franklin's knife, which was larger than his own net-maker's knife, to see if anyone or anything was moving. All he had seen the previous day had been the three cows, pressing up close to the cottage walls for warmth. Then, once the snow had begun to fall, the only sign of any living things other than themselves had been a distant curl of smoke from a chimney that was out of sight.

They made their minds up, talking in whispers through the night. If the child was not returned by first light, they would be coldly sensible. They could presume the worst had happened. Waiting any longer would be pointless. It made no sense to sacrifice themselves to whatever horrors had befallen Margaret and Bella during the last two days and that had previously befallen Acton and the other men. Wise people do not stay, as the valley floods, to witness for themselves how high the waters will reach. They get away. The Boses, then, would do the same.

MARGARET FOUND her sodden blanket and the tarp immediately. She didn't have to look around or call out any names to guess what had happened or what their reasoning had been. She could tell that the Boses had left only that morning. There were footprints in the snow, recent enough to have not yet lost their unambiguous shape. Later — indeed, for the rest of her life — she would wonder how easy it would have been to have caught up with them if she'd set her mind to it. If she had left immediately, then probably within just a few moments she would have been able to see them from the slight brow of the path. They would not have moved very quickly, especially without the fitter, younger Margaret to urge them on.

Margaret, though — could she ever admit it to herself? — was not inclined to hurry after Bella's grandparents. To catch up with them was to relinquish the child — and that was something she was not impatient to do. It might have crossed her mind during the previous few days how joyful it would be to have a child of her own — this child. The thought of stealing Bella away might have stained her daydreams briefly. But Margaret would never actually have done it. It would have been wicked. She would have felt guilty to her grave. No matter that the immediate parents were dead or missing, or that the grandparents were selfish and uncaring, or that Margaret would provide the girl with a kinder future — the theft of a child was unforgivable, even though the ties of every family in the land were already hanging loose.

But for the moment, now that Bella seemed to have been delivered freely to her by the adversities of travel, Margaret did not feel wicked in the least. Or even compromised. She was not stealing a child. She was merely being slow. Anyway, she told herself, the grandparents had made their own decisions — good ones, possibly — and they had willingly abandoned Bella or, at the very least, relinquished her. Margaret had kept to the rendezvous. Margaret had returned the child to the promised place. It was the Boses who had walked away, heartbroken no doubt but of their own free will. They probably had not believed that their son's daughter would show up again after such a prolonged and baffling absence. They would have shed tears. They would have argued about what was best to do. But, in the end, they must have felt that they had little choice but to protect themselves and press on with their journey Already they would be getting used to the loss of their granddaughter. They were not to blame. Hard times make stones of us all.

So Margaret did not hurry on to catch up with the grandparents. She dawdled. She persuaded herself that her first duty was to feed Bella with some stolen milk and mashed white of egg. Then she had to feed herself with cheese and Bella's yolk. Then there was her blanket to be wrung out and her possessions to pack.

She realized at once, when she lifted up her back sack, that it was emptier than it ought to be. There was a water bag inside. There was the died-back mint, still in its pot. Her comb and hairbrush had not been touched. There was the spark stone and the fishing net, which Andrew Bose had dismissed as 'the work of ten thumbs'. But her taffies and her scraps of food were missing. So was Franklin's knife. Margaret dug into her clothes and checked each item, getting increasingly annoyed and upset when she could not find what she was looking for. The green and orange woven top that her sister had made for her and that she loved and wore only for best was not inside. Margaret hissed to herself. She could imagine Melody Bose wearing it as if it were her own. She muttered out loud a thought she knew was hollow, but because the theft of her clothes had come before the keeping of the child, it allowed her to feel that what she was about to do was justified, if only thinly; that her top was payment for the girl, a fair exchange. So, now, in Margaret's readjusted view, the Boses were not innocent. They were to blame, after all. They had brought this loss, this separation, on themselves. They'd crept away like thieves, abandoning their blood.

'I'll love you, though,' she said to Bella, and pressed her own wet face against the child's.

THE NARROW country path preferred by Margaret soon joined a wider and more regular track, with waymarkers and mounting blocks for riders. Her route became a little busier and then much busier, and not only with emigrants heading eastward and impatient for the first hint of a salty wind. There were farm workers with baskets of produce and barrowmen with sacks of late-season silage for sale and trappers going into town to trade in hides and tallow, hogs and fur. There were
unhurried
horsemen with panniers of goods and children riding backsaddle, and
hurried
horsemen riding in and out with documents and messages, taking little care to avoid pedestrians or the droves of sheep and goats destined for the slitter's knife. There were journeymen — weavers, skinners, coopers, carpenters, wagon-makers, shoemakers, hatters — with tools, and bands of hired hands, all competing for a day's labor, as well as beggars, hucksters and salesmen waylaying anyone who was unlucky enough to catch their eye. Please help. Please buy. Please give.

The only travelers who were not pursued by the pesterers were a pair of what appeared to be, according to the loop of white tape tied across their shoulders, Baptist pilgrims, looking as beyond reproach as they could. Baptists never helped or bought or gave, so they were rarely bothered. They'd freely pray for anyone, and express their pity. But prayer makes the weakest soup. And pity doesn't settle any bills.

Everyone on that wide road was going to or coming from Tidewater, a town that had to be passed by anyone hoping to escape America from those flat quarters of the coast. It was the sort of busy and attentive place where you would find it hard to travel faster than the news of your coming. Beyond Tidewater's buildings and beyond its double set of defensive walls, the ground sloped gently to the scrub-covered shores of the estuary, so much slower and broader than the river at Ferrytown, browner, too, and turbid with silt. For once the groups of emigrants were outnumbered by people who had not yet decided to depart from their birth country but who, like the residents of Margaret's town had been, were more attracted by the prospects of local wealth and consequence than by the distant promises of life across the ocean.

The first stranger to hold Margaret's eye, despite her best efforts to hide her face, was a nut-brown man carrying two geese in a basket. He put on a show of admiring Bella, though he didn't try to hold her fingers or touch her cheek, as true admirers would. Margaret had to lean close to hear what he was saying. He had what was known as a Carolina twang, that is, a way of speaking that suggested words were rubbery and could be bent and stretched, though only once he'd softened them with chewing. 'Your boy's very sweet,' he said, cooing theatrically but mistaking both the child's gender and her parentage. 'What's the little fella's name?'

'His name is Jackson,' Margaret said. Why not, indeed? Better not to give the child's actual name in case the Boses were inquiring thereabouts.

'Now that's a good-old Yankee name.'

'His father was a good-old Yankee man.'

'You don't want to buy a good-old Yankee goose, by any chance? A fine and meaty bird.' He pointed at the smaller of the two.

She laughed. 'Is it fine and meaty enough to take us on its back and fly us east, across the sea, and put us down in some safe place?'

'She would have been, if I hadn't clipped her wings. She lays five eggs a day.'

'And if I buy your obliging goose, where should I go with her? Where can we spend the night, within a day's walking from here? Can you suggest a winter lodging place, if we don't make it for a sailing?'

She was not sure, but Margaret understood the goose man to say, 'The Ark's ahead, on the far side of the town. You could be there by this afternoon. There's always work to be had in there and food for free, if you can settle for the rules and do your bit. Though there're no eggs or geese in there, as far as I've been told. Best get one now.'

'Did you say
ark
? she asked. She didn't recognize the word.

'The Blessed Ark. It's where the Finger Baptists live. It's safe, at least. You'll not be touched.' The man laughed, as if he'd made an unusually clever joke. 'No, that's for sure. You'll not be touched in there.'

'Do you advise me, then.'

'I'd say you're best off going to the Ark and seeing winter out on this side of the water rather than risking a passage now, especially with the kid. The weather's up and running, and it can only get worse. They say a ship departed yesterday at sunup but came back in again at sundown, full of green faces. Couldn't keep their stomachs down in waves like that. The ship had just been tossed about. Too overloaded, see? Couldn't even ride the tide. And far too small. They'd send a sieve to sea if they thought there was a profit in it. The bigger ships start to come again at first blossom. That's four months yet. A goose — two geese! — is what you need to see you through.'

Margaret took the man's advice but not his goose. She would make her way to the Ark. He'd said that it was safe, and, after the horrors and abductions of the last few days, that was what she wanted most. She was relieved, in fact, to be advised that her departure from America would have to wait at least until the spring. She did not follow the obvious and the quickest route through the middle of the town, though. She was certain that the Boses would be there and possibly they might have parked themselves at the town gate to see if their granddaughter showed up. Surely they would do that at least. Margaret tried not to give them too much thought. She'd not abandoned them, after all. They were the deserters. The honor debt was theirs, not hers. She'd follow her instincts, even if they were selfish and undutiful, and not try to burden herself with doubt or guilt. She'd just spend a little extra time walking around the outer walls, rather than passing through them into the clutter of people and buildings.

At least the longer route was free of beggars and salesmen, and it took her past Tidewater's wells and middens, where she found rotting scraps to wash and eat. A woman who leaves her home and family must end up as either a prostitute or a destitute. That's what the Ferrytown widow who narrated doom-laden stories each evening had told the diners in the guest house on several occasions. Well, what was eating rotting scraps of food if not the habit of a destitute?

It took Margaret until the middle of the afternoon to reach Tidewater's eastern gate and the road that led along the river bank toward the sea. The birds were mostly dressed in white and either screamed like ghouls or scampered in the mud in synchronized groups, as if they had only one brain to share between them. The smell of water was overpowering, both energizing and nauseating. The wind was sharper than any wind she'd known before. It cut into her face and made her eyes water. It chapped her skin. It tugged at her scarf. It deafened her.