Red Spikes (5 page)

The servants help the bride down. The picture comes to me of Annie when she were little, sitting on her step, her white aproned lap full of pine-seeds; she were pinching the skins off them one by one like you do, chattering like she’d never stop. She’s another creature now, in that dress and bearing. She’ll never be back on her step and simply dressed, shining with her own beauty alone and unbejewelled. Likely I’ll never speak to her again – or she to me except as a high to a lowling, thanking me for some service – holding the gate, maybe, for her to pass through on a grand horse such as this – for they have plenty of horses, the Lord and his son. Likely she’ll call me
Mister Michaels
then, not
Arlen
, not
you great puddin-head
as she did when I tickled her that time, not
darlin
as she said once, very low and growly and daring, and quite near her parents’ ears.

Now they have all sailed into the clearing like ships into harbour, the whole party. Horses are tethered, cloths are spread, baskets are swung down from shoulders. The clean faces of the High House, with their ornamental collars below and their headwears above, laugh and smile and look about with pleasure. ‘What a lovely setting!’ says one of the ladies, and everyone agrees: ‘Lovely. Lovely.’

I’m an only son,
I said to my friend Tater, sticking my chin out.

Uh-huh?
He peered at me as if he couldn’t believe me.
So?

So I’ll come into the house, one day. I’ll come into that little
bit of land, and whatever stock
—
Tater went weak at the knees with laughing. He leaned against the front of the Eel and Basket and shook. I looked very frosty at him, but he only laughed even harder.

Eventually he knew better than to laugh on, or I would have thumped him.
But your Gramp’s got to die first,
he spluttered.
And then your dad! And even then, she’d have to
share with that fierce ould Nanna of yours and that mother! That
mother! I’d be looking to share a rolling barrel with ten pound of
sharp rocks before I’d move into your house with that tongue and
those eyes!

Truly I never thought the thing so hopeless until he said that. That’s how far a girl’s smile and a girl’s shape can bend the world for you.

But she did love me; she said so!
You’re a fine man,
Arlen Michaels,
she said out back of the Eel at Midsummer, and she’d had only a little ale.
And you’ve a good heart.
I can still feel her finger, poking me in the chest – that finger there with its rings, that hand in its Lord’s hand, the lace cuff resting across the knuckles in the sunshine.

Those lips so graciously smiling now, I can still feel their kiss on my mouth. I floated home that Midsummer Eve, tipping the fieldwalls and the treetops with my toes. The future ran out ahead of me like a carpet roll kicked open down the Town Hall steps. Kisses, wedding, children; step, step, step. And on all sides, people clapping me on the back, people smiling – yes, even my mam. One touch of Annie Stork’s lips and everything remade itself around me full of hope and sweetness.

But then, as I’m waiting for my next chance for kisses – still floating a little from the first one, even, still surviving on that – Mam brings the news home, don’t she, of Lord Gowper’s son returning from his uncle’s, of that launderer’s girl Annie Stork catching his eye.

She’s pretty enough,
said Nanna.
You can see why she
would.

Mam shafted me with one of her side glances, where I sat by the door, blown from a day’s ditch-digging for Parson Hubble and with my face already burning from what she’d said.
Been saving herself for some such, that one.
Always thought herself above the wash.

Too good to slap and scrub, eh?
said Nan with a cackle.

Unless a lord’s soft hand is doing the slapping, it seems.

They’ve done with eating, now. The lutenist is picking out something slow, and some of them are drooping and sliding to their cushions. Annie Stork isn’t among the droopers. She’s upright and thoughtful, as if she must keep watch on all the happenings, to make sure they don’t tatter into dreams and she find herself in her grey smock again, a lone laundry-maid sitting in an empty clearing.

‘Rest awhile, my love,’ says her new husband, touching her gleaming sleeve.

‘No, I must . . . go into the forest,’ she says with her new accent all clear and cool, and a modesty that no other laundress in the town would show.

‘Who can accompany you?’ he says, half-sitting up.

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I’ll not go far.’

And up she gets and comes straight for me! She’s seen me, my great eyes, she’s
felt
me staring all through the picnic and the entertainments, she’s out to tear me from the bush here and shame me and send me away! Or worse, she’ll make her toilet behind this very bush, within my sight and hearing, unaware of me. I huddle and freeze and burn while she passes.

She goes, thank God, quite far in among the trees. Not invisibly far – I can still see her head when she stops, before and after she squats, while she bends and turns, arranging her clothing. I can see that when she’s done, she glances back towards the clearing, then turns and makes off
away
, farther into the forest.

I come alive all over in that serious way, as when you first see the bunny you’re going to have that night for dinner, and your full attention fixes to the back of its neck and tells the rest of you exactly what to do. There was something un-bridely in that glance of Annie’s, something serious and certain, something that calculated her chances. I get out of that bush – I swear, without a rustle, I’m so intent – and I follow her.

Quickly she goes, down to the stream. She takes off her embroidered slippers and gathers her cloak and her skirts and underskirts all up and steps sure-footed across the water-glazed stones. Then up the steeper far bank she goes, yellow and white and glittering against its darkness, thin black branches hurrying down across the shape of her. I can’t follow her yet; it’s too open. Once she tops the slope and goes on, I will come out of the thicket here. I’ll go wide, so that if she comes back on a sudden she’ll not see me.

But she stops, halfway up the bank. She turns to the left and runs lightly along it, quite far and I can’t follow yet. Then she pauses where the trees thicken, just under a spreading ash there, and she moves about only a little, seeking something.

I am watching her closely. I am straining my eyes and my hunter’s skin and my hunter’s mind. When she finds what she’s after, my shoulders drop, as hers do, with the relief of it.
There you are,
her whole body seems to say. Who is it? I search the forest in front of her, but I can’t see no one.

She steps forward. She bends low.

‘Milady?’

Annie Stork snaps upright. I jolt like a startled cat myself. It’s one of the ladies, calling out from the clearing.

‘I’m coming!’ Annie calls, her voice all panic and guilt, and she runs back along the slope.

‘Do you need assistance?’ cries the lady.

‘No, no,’ says Annie from the far side of the stream.

‘I’m coming back now.’ Quickly she steps across, and then stamps her feet dry in the grass there, and pushes them into the slippers, and smooths her skirts. Then she pauses, right by my thicket. I drop my gaze so my eyes won’t draw hers. She’s close enough for me to reach through these leaves and touch the gold thread upon her yellow cloak. I could whisper, and she would hear, and those up above in the clearing would not. I could grasp that white neck and bring her down, so sudden and strong she’d not have time to utter.

As if she heard that thought, Annie puts her white hand with its rings to her collared throat. She looks up towards the clearing and she calms herself, breathing deeply twice, huffing the breaths out. And she sets off up the slope, not hurrying now, step by slow step, a laundress no more.

The blood beats in my head and hands as I watch her go. I don’t move until I hear people greet her and scold her up there. Then I’m across the sunlit stream in three quick strides, up the soft dark slope beyond. I follow the trail of her small disturbances in the thick leaf-mould along the slope.

When I get there I can’t see anything. My hunter’s mind has left me, that clearest, cleverest ice-drop at the centre that knows things without words or doubt. I’m just a boy peering around in a forest, not knowing what to look for. There’s no extra movement anywhere, no sound, nothing furtive. Only forest going about its quiet business.

I’m about to bend as Annie did when I see it: a scrap of sacking wedged in a fork of the ash, just above my head. The two rotted ends dangle.

Seeing the sky through their weave, I don’t want to look below. My hunter’s mind says to me,
Turn and go,
while you still can choose. This, you don’t want to know.

Anyone watching would think the air had turned to aspic, is how long it takes me to lower myself. The rest of the cloth is a flat tangle on the forest floor, near invisible. My hand goes out to it snail-slow. The very tips of my fingers catch the edge of the sacking, and lift it through the thickened air, and cast it back.

Underneath is other cloth, finer, paler, with a shape inside. I don’t want to touch it.
And you don’t have to,
says my hunter’s mind.
See? You’ve a second chance to walk away.
Take it, take it. Go.
My breath, through my teeth, sounds like a straw broom sweeping a stone step.

The white cloth is stained and stiff. Its wrinkles stick a little to what’s inside, but then come away.

How did I know – because I did know, the way Annie moved, the forest pounding around me, this voice in my head – that I was walking up to a door, that when it opened, what was behind it would knock the head from my shoulders and set it rolling, rolling, all known things turning to flash and shadow before my eyes?

Inside are curled the remains of a tiny, tiny child. Hung in the sacking, high away from the beasts, it died and dried and all smell went out of it, and it fell, this little leather creature. Its skull-face peers out from where ants or some such have nibbled the leather away. Its hands aren’t big enough even to grasp the tip of my finger.

And it lay here – how long, how long? There’ll be a time to apply myself to that question, but for now, that it lay here
at all
and that I, Arlen Michaels, breathe above it, that I have it in my eyes, is enough and too much for me.

I cover the child with the white cloth, with the sacking, exactly as they were before. When I stand, it’s as if
I
were the one as lay stiff-dead under the trees all this time; my knees and hips and elbows crack straight, my head is as heavy as rock on my neck, weighted with eyes and thoughts.

Someone else does my walking for me, out of that place, widely around the hill. Take the long way, Arlen, and you’ll not meet anyone. ‘Annie Annie Annie,’ I whisper like some mad person. It seems the only thing I can say or think, for a while.

I walk out onto Clear Top into all the sky. I stride to the edge and look out over town, that mottle-stone place running with gossip and judgment. My heart beats hard, and Annie’s finger prods my chest again.
You’ve a good
heart,
she says. Prod, she goes, prod-prod. How I glowed at that girl’s touching me! But now I see: a good heart’s not that daffy grinning, floating away fresh-kissed across the fields; it isn’t that chestful of passion you bring to her prettiness, all full and flaming.

A good heart is when a girl that you loved, a girl who has pained you and chosen another in your stead – chosen two others! – places in your hands this precious and dreadful thing, the means to her own ruin. And you could tell it abroad, and everyone you know, from the lads up to your own mam and dad, would say you were right to tell, would nod and shake your hand and say,
That Lord-son
should know what kind of a wife he’s got him,
and you could shine all bright and right in their outrage, glamorous in your injuries and your lost love. But you keep silent, because you can do that, too, and a
good heart
would do that, a
fine man
, a man who truly loved Annie Stork.