Table of Contents
ALSO BY MEG ROSOFF
Just in Case
How I Live Now
What I Was
For Ann and Liz
One
On the morning of August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and fifty something, on the day she was to be married, Pell Ridley crept up from her bed in the dark, kissed her sisters goodbye, fetched Jack in from the wind and rain on the heath, and told him they were leaving. Not that he was likely to offer any objections, being a horse.
There wasnt much to take. Bread and cheese and a bottle of ale, a clean apron, a rope for Jack, and a book belonging to Mam with pictures of birds drawn in soft pencil, which no one ever looked at but her.
The dress in which she was to be married she left untouched, spread over a dusty chair. Then she felt carefully inside the best teapot for the coins put away for her dowry, slipped the rope around Jacks neck and turned to go.
Head down, squinting into the rain, she stopped short at the sight of a ghostly figure in the path. It had as little substance as a moth, but its eyes burned a hole in the dark.
Go back to bed, Bean.
It didnt budge.
She sighed, noticing how the pale oval of a face remained stubbornly set.
Please, Bean. Go home. Oh God, she thought, no. But it was no use appealing to God about something already decided.
Without waiting to be invited, the boy scrambled up onto Jack, and with no other option she pulled herself up behind him, feeling the warmth of his thin body against her own. And so it was, with a resigned chirrup to Jack and no tear in her eye, that they set off down the hill, heading north, which at that moment appeared to be the exact direction in which lay the rest of the world.
Im sorry, Birdie, whispered the girl, with a final thought for the husband that should have been. Perhaps at the last minute he would find another bride. Perhaps he would marry Lou. Anyone will do, she thought. As long as it isnt me.
Two
The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being freefree and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?
Theyd been on the road barely an hour when the night began to thin and they came to a village identical to the one theyd just leftone road in, one road out, and one longer, less-trodden path that circled round. Every soul in that place knew Pell well enough to know she shouldnt be up and riding away from home at dawn on her wedding day, so she steered Jack away and skirted each village dawn to dusk till the names grew strange and the people they passed started to look unfamiliar. Even then, to be certain, they kept on, stopping only once under a tree for a meal of brown bread and beer.
Bean rode, even when Pell slid off to walk, his frame so slight she doubted the horse noticed him at all. When she felt overcome by gloom and doubt and astonishment at what shed done, he smiled encouragement at her, but most of the time he sat silent, looking straight ahead.
Dont you want to go home, Bean? Her idea of freedom had not included him.
But he shook his head, and Pell sighed. Whats done is done, she thought, and no use looking back.
They were headed for the horse fair at Salisbury. It was less a plan than a starting point, but it led them into the great anonymous bulk of England where an infinite number of possible lives beckoned. Away from Nomansland, away from Mam and Pa. Away from Birdie Finch.
Hell make a good steady husband, her sister Lou had told her, more than once. And you like him well enough already.
But I can ride and shoe a horse better than he can.
Is that your best objection? Lou wished someone would look at her the way Birdie looked at Pell.
It will have to do, Pell laughed, and wheeled her horse off across the heath.
Lou watched them go, pressing her lips together with disapproval.
Everyone knew Birdie and Pell would be married. Theyd been betrothed practically from birth, or at least from the first time shed ridden a horse, just after she learned to walk, set up behind Birdie and holding on for dear life. That pony had no time for children, but Birdie stuck to him and Pell stuck to Birdie, first like brother and sister, and later with her head buried in his shoulder and her arms around his waist.
When were grown, hed say, youll be married to the finest blacksmith in two counties.
You ought to marry Lou, Pell answered. Shes the one wants a husband.
He looked at her, injured. Ive nothing to say to your sister, and you know it.
She couldnt contradict him, for it was true that Lou hated mud and horses equally, was the least likely person to attend a difficult calving or grab hold of a ponys mane and swing up onto its back.
There was a timean early timewhen the thought of marrying Birdie had made Pell proud, not least for besting Lou, who everyone knew would make the better wife. In those days, boy and girl spent every spare moment together, from first dawn till last light, and there wasnt a horse they couldnt catch, ride, and tame. Before she was old enough to know what kissing was, hed kissed her and said, There, now, that means well be married someday. And at first she believed him because she wanted to, and later because she couldnt think of anything else to believe.
On that spot, he said one day, pointing to the empty field just beyond his parents home. Thats where well build our house, and fill it to bursting with children. He held his arms out wide, to indicate multitudes.
Pell stared at him. A house full of children? She had only to look at her motherworn and shapeless with a leaking bladder, great knotted blue veins, and breasts flat as old wineskinsto reject that plan. And worse, even, than the physical toll was the grinding disappointment, the drudgery, the changelessness of life in this place.
Toil and hardship and a clamor of mouths to feed? Not now, Pell thought. Not ever.
Three
That first afternoon, they came to a hamlet consisting of four thatched wooden houses and two more made of cob. Pell stopped outside the one with the nicest garden, where a girl her own age fed soured milk and slops to the family pig. The girl had a face already pulled inward with troubles, but she wiped her hands on her apron and set down the bucket when she saw Pell. They considered each other while passing the time, one wondering who was the stranger with a child and a white horse, and what was she doing here, the other happy to observe a life of feeding slops to a pig, as long as it wasnt her life.
Are you traveling alone? asked the girl, though she might have answered that question on the evidence of her own eyes. When Pell indicated Bean she looked surprised. What, no father or husband?
Pell shook her head. I have no husband and never will. She was pleased to speak the words out loud.
