Текст книги "The Pesthouse"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

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It was a struggle, but in the end she got her way, though only after pulling off her scarf and threatening to sit in the middle of their path “until the both of us, my kid and me, are full of worms.” She liked the sound of that, “my kid and me.”

“I feel sorry for that child, and that’s the only reason,” Pa said eventually, justifying his surrender to the bullying and evidently dangerous young woman. Now that he had seen her scalp, the man was desperate to find some way to compromise and give his visitors a good excuse to leave. So finally he let her sit on the garden wall, among the woody stalks of dead vegetables, and feed Bella a little goat’s milk sweetened with honey and simmered. “We’ll not want that pot when you’ve done with it,” he said. “Just throw it down. I want to hear it break.”

The girl stood and watched, breathing heavily, too uneasy to ask any questions of her own.

“How far is it before we reach the ocean?” Margaret asked her.

“I’ve never even been.”

“Ask your father. Has he been?”

The answer was a shock if it was true. Perhaps he was lying, giving Margaret false hope, just to see the back of her. He’d never “witnessed” the ocean himself, he said, calling from the safety of his front door, and he hoped his fortunes would never make him want to or need to. He touched the end of his surprisingly elegant nose for good luck. But he had been to the nearby town many times – a one-day walk – to trade the produce of their farm, and he had heard that less than three days forward on foot from there, in the direction of sunrise, was a river that was widening and salty and that breathed in and out twice a day, spreading to its banks and then receding, as if its lungs were being pumped by some outrageous giant “a thousand times my size – and that’s not small.”

“Is that the ocean there? Is that where we can take the ships?”

“It’s near. It must be near. When there’s salt in the water, there’ll be ships in water, too. Sea ships. That’s what I’ve heard,” he added, repeating what everybody who’d never witnessed the ocean said about it, that you know it “like an old friend” when you come to it, that it roars at you like a cougar, that it smells like blood, that the ocean’s got only one bank, that if you drink a cup of it your piss turns blue.

Only four more days to reach the salt? The Boses did not seem to know whether this was good news or bad, nor did Margaret. At this rate it was possible that they might make it onto one of the last boats before the sea packed in for the winter. Exactly what they’d wished for. But four days was too soon to abandon any hope of finding Acton and Franklin, of just discarding them like cornhusks and getting on with life as if they’d never been born. How could they go aboard a ship and say their farewells to America without first knowing what had happened to their men? asked Margaret as they progressed among the little fearful farms toward a skyline that seemed to promise larger habitations.

“What other choice is there for us?” asked Andrew Bose. “We can hardly ask the sailors to wait around to watch the sea block up with ice while we stay on shore hoping for a miracle. There never is a miracle, in my experience.”

In Andrew’s view, the country was too wide and long for them to be able to pick out a single group of horsemen. And even then, even if they ran the rustlers to ground, they’d need another miracle to free their men, if they were still alive. “No, Melody and I have already thought it through. If Acton were still a child, then maybe things would be different. You have a responsibility to a child. But he’s a man. A married man, or was. He’s taller than me. He’s got more years ahead of him…”

“Let’s hope that’s true,” said Margaret.

“Let’s hope it’s true, sure. But also let’s be sensible. Acton could be anywhere. Your Franklin could be anywhere. They could be two days to the south by now. They could be on a ship already, as far as we know. You think they’d be squandering their chances for us? You think they’d hang around for us?”

“Your son could be fifty paces down the road and looking for his daughter.”

“Don’t argue, Andrew, not with her,” said Melody, and then went on to justify herself. Whatever choice they made would be a cause of misery, so maybe it was wiser that they made the choice that took them to a better place. “That’s what Acton would want us to do, if he was here. We’ve got the girl to think of, haven’t we? It’s not a selfish thing. It’s you that’s selfish in my eyes, just thinking of yourself and disregarding us.”

Margaret would not express an opinion yet. She listened to the Boses but would neither nod nor shake her head. They were not at the coast. They couldn’t see the ocean. They couldn’t guarantee passage on a ship. They couldn’t even guarantee a ship. So it was premature to punish themselves with cruel and difficult decisions. Anything might happen between here and there. She adopted her bullying voice again. “Come on,” she said. “There’s walking to be done. Let’s get on with it.”

So the subject of Acton and Franklin was dropped from their conversation (not to mention the subject of the unfortunate Joeys: the potman’s wife was probably at that very moment cracking jugs and water ewers on their behalf with no suspicion that her husband and her son had been picked out of their lives as easily as berries from a bush). Margaret and the Boses simply pushed ahead, keen to discover if there was any truth in the big man’s promises that the salt water was only four days distant.

That afternoon they almost reached the market town that he had mentioned. They could see its pall of smoke and what appeared to be a log tower, with a banner flying from it. But the days were rapidly shortening, and so, too early in the afternoon, they had to hunt for shelter. Their quarters for the night – a sheep pen – were cramped, no room for lying down, no room for lovemaking. They had to eat and then sleep with their chins on their knees. Margaret did her best to hold a cheerful conversation. She retold the story that she had been reminded of that day, with her grandpa and the stolen chicken and the sheep with three green bars. But the Boses – how could this be the same couple who had made love so noisily just one night previously? – seemed preoccupied and unamused. They thought the trapper’s hospitality had been foolish and unbusinesslike. “I’d take three sheep for a single hen anytime,” said Andrew. “Any fool would.” He did not understand why Margaret laughed and why his wife, after a moment’s reflection, joined her.

Margaret had recovered from her illness now, but she was exhausted and roughened by the journey and by the trauma of losing both Franklin and her family. Was she thinking only of herself and disregarding others, as Melody had claimed? What the Boses had said about taking passage on the first available boat might seem callous, she thought, but they were probably right. Franklin might have been taken in any of a thousand directions. He might already have met any of a thousand fates. If she had a duty now, it was only to herself and possibly, in the short term, to little Bella. Obtaining goat’s milk for the child that day had been immensely pleasing, especially when the girl had settled afterward and slept so contentedly. Carrying her had been easy.

Tomorrow Margaret would do the same – identify the safest house that had a cow or goat and use her wiles to procure more milk for her charge. She could not imagine parting from the child. She had nothing else, and there was no one to value. Bella was her only friendly flesh. So maybe she was now obliged to bite her tongue and stay on with the Boses, whatever they might decide to do, just to make sure that their granddaughter was given the attention – and the future – she deserved. It was strange, was it not, that a man whom she had scarcely known for seven days and a child whom she had known for only three should hold her thoughts, and perhaps her prospects, in their grip?

The rain outside the sheepfold was thickening and sleety. Margaret set her back against the corner of two walls and twisted her body so that Bella could lie across her lap and they could share the scarf, the blanket, and the tarp. It would be the coldest night so far. She offered her little finger to the girl’s hard gums. But Bella pushed the hand away. Her lips were chapped and sore from the salty food she’d had and from the cold, so Margaret dug for wax in her own ears and applied the honey-colored secretion as a lubricant. The child licked her lips, stopped crying for some moments when she tasted sweetness, and then cried out for more wax, tugging at Margaret’s fingers with her tough and tiny hands.

Eleven

Margaret needed to bully for milk three more times before her fortunes changed. For the better and for the worse. She valued these trips away from Andrew and Melody, and she knew they were glad to be free of her for a while. It was their chance to rest and recover their strength, as well as an opportunity to talk and complain freely behind her back. Having Bella entirely to herself, helping the baby to stand for a moment, rolling stones for her to crawl after, allowing her to explore her mouth, ears, and nose, tickling her – all that mothering was a joy.

Margaret had promised to reward the girl with milk, so over those few days, by trial and error, her begging and beseeching skills improved. She’d tie her scarf, put Bella on her hip, and head for anyone with goats or cows. She was ready to exploit the twin forces of a hungry and appealing child and what could be taken by the fainthearted as a diseased skull to get her way and get her milk and any other food that might be going spare.

The least neglected habitations were the best for begging. Untidy homes, she found, and homes with little to boast of were unlikely to part with anything as prized as milk unless someone was holding a blade at the owners’ throats. But tidiness suggested composure and respectability. Tidy people were more easily coerced. They had more to lose. They evidently had more to prove. Why else the public display of houseplants or painted fences or trimmed hedges on their land?

Men were easier to browbeat than women, Margaret soon discovered. For men, a child was a mystery. She had only to tell a man, “Look at my poor girl’s dry lips – that’s thirst. And look at her skin. Those blotches on her nose, you see? That’s hunger rash. My darling’s only got a day or two to live, just feel her bones,” and he would rather part with his big toe than stand accused of heartlessness. How Margaret loved her newly invented, inventive self, and how powerful she could be with certain, tidy men. But a woman, and especially one who’d been a mother, would know that just a little redness around the nose was common to all children of that age. Some kids are red around the nose for fifteen years and never hungry once.

So Margaret chose her victims carefully. Once she’d seen a man on the land, preferably near a well-kept house with livestock, she would approach, first greeting him in the old American way, then showing him the child (her beauty first, her hunger next, and then the red nose and the dry, chapped lips), and finally, if all of that had failed, dragging off her blue scarf to show the evidence of flux. This last act always had the greatest effect. Men everywhere fear illness more than women do, she supposed. But it was more complicated than that. She could not know – especially now that Franklin was not around to tell her – that as the days passed and her hair grew a little longer, she became more strikingly unusual. In the first days after the shaving, she would have seemed ugly to most men. Her color was not good. The illness bleached her. Her lids and brows, though, were red from where each pinch of hair had been plucked out by the women in her family – her mother, her two sisters. But except for the scabs where her grandpa’s shell razor had nicked her skin, her scalp had been oddly white and ailing from never having been exposed to light before.

But now her color was a healthy one. Since Ferrytown she’d had good exercise in open air, if not good food, and she had what country people call “ripe cheeks, sweet enough to pick.” Even if she did not remove her scarf, anyone could see she was a handsome woman. Her eyebrows were light and thin as yet, but that need not declare her as a recovering invalid and possibly contagious. The black-haired people of America did not expect those rare, unlucky redheads among them to have the forceful facial hair of normal folk. But with her scarf off and her history of contagion clearly on display, her attractiveness was enhanced instead of betrayed. By the fourth day of her begging her regrown head hair had become tufty enough to hide her scalp entirely under a soft, springy carpeting, but not long enough to hide the good shape of her face, the candor of her forehead, the set of her mouth. Her great green eyes, which might not see too well over long distances, looked to any observers – and there would be many – as if they were the largest eyes they’d ever seen. They’d wonder whether they would dare to sleep with her. Was such rare beauty worth the risk? It was.

So on her last trip into the final farmlands of America in search of milk, on the morning before she and the Boses expected to reach the salty, giant-pumped river, the man she found mending his harnesses outside his neat wood cottage, with its pen of three fatly uddered cows, was easily – excessively – seduced. When Margaret arrived with Bella and called out her greetings from the boundary fence, the man, like all the others before him, took hold of something with which to defend himself (in this instance, a weighted leather strap) and ordered her to stay exactly where she was and state her business unless she wanted to be driven out of the county with blood on her back.

Margaret was used to these immoderations. The man – as old as Margaret’s father by the look of him, and not as tidy as his house – did not seem alarmed. Just aggressively cautious. She gave her name. She smiled. She was polite. She introduced “her” child. She said how hungry they both were. She asked if there were any chores, anything at all, that she could do in return for a little milk and some food, and then, before he could actually suggest any suitable work, she pulled down her scarf and let the blue material puddle on her shoulders.

She saw the startled look on his face and expected him, like all the others (at least once their wives had shown their faces), to order her to keep away from the house while he brought milk and then to feed the child and leave his land immediately, or else. But this man stepped toward her, calling out to someone in the house as he did so. And then she realized, not from experience but from base instinct, that pulling down her blue scarf, together with her smiling offer to do “anything at all” in return for milk and food, had been taken by this man to be an invitation to advance and put his hands on her. Her hair was not short enough to scare him off. “You’ll have the milk,” he said. “You’ll have it twice.” Another man appeared behind him at the door.

When Margaret and Bella had not returned to their rendezvous tree by late afternoon, Andrew Bose acted out of character. Anxious, fretful, and exasperated by Melody’s demands that he “do something on his own account for a change” rather than just cussing their misfortune and feeling sorry for himself, he volunteered to do exactly what she suggested and risk “a little scout” into the nearest fields.

He left his wife in charge of all their possessions. She would, she said, make as much smoke as she could if the missing couple were to return in his absence and as much noise as she could if a stranger approached and offered her “any inconvenience.” She was pleased with herself for sounding so spirited in such worrying circumstances. In fact, she had discovered, and liked herself for it, that she could be tougher– steelier, to use the older word – than she had expected. Acton first. Now Bella. She still felt strong and calm and ready to be tested further, although she acknowledged in her heart that the prospect of Andrew’s being the third loss to the family was one that was mildly amusing to her imagination only so long as it didn’t actually happen. He was thin water, though. No denying it.

Her husband set off across the strips of field toward the wood cottage that Margaret had identified, just before noon, as promising. Andrew, whose distance eyesight was still sharp despite his age, had clambered onto the same tree trunk as Margaret and agreed that, yes, her eyes were not deceiving her, that was a man outside the house and those were cattle, though he could not specify whether they were shes or hes.

“Take your knife,” Melody instructed him, but he thought it better to arrive at the dwelling empty-handed. He doubted that the inhabitants would want any nets mended – they hadn’t passed a decent river for days – and knew for certain that he would not be able to use a knife effectively for any other purpose. He had no plan in mind, other than to take no great risks. He’d satisfy his wife’s challenge and no more. He would walk as quietly as he could, keeping to the shade and to the low ground as much as possible, and see what he could see from a safe distance.

He did not approach the house directly by its path but followed a line of trees and then a highish loose stone wall that provided good cover. The only sound he could hear, apart from the entirely natural disharmony of birds and wind and branches, was the half gate of an abandoned hut that was swinging noisily on the last of its leather hinges and repeatedly banging its jamb. But by the time Andrew Bose had reached the end of the wall a dog had begun barking. You can’t creep up on a dog. Andrew waited. There was no point in running away from a dog. He expected it to arrive with its inquiring nose at any moment. He would do his best to charm it. Perhaps he should have brought that knife. Stabbing a dog would be no more difficult, surely, than gutting a good-sized fish. But not only did the dog fail to arrive, it also stopped barking after a while.

Andrew counted to a hundred before he dared to stand a little and look over the wall toward the house. There was a dog, its head between its paws, safely leashed at the side wall, but no one was looking out across the land to discover why his guard had been making such a din. The only movement Andrew could spot was from the back of the house, where there were at least three cows in a deeply slurried pasture. For a moment he was tempted just to stand up and call out Margaret’s name. If he shouted loud enough and then ducked behind his wall, he would be able to hear any reply but no one would be able to see who’d done the shouting or where from. But they might untie the dog. And, as he had seen, the dog was a large one. Even if they did not release the dog (and a clear sense of theyhad already formed in his imagination: theywere the same group who had already taken Acton), if they decided to chase after him, what chance would an old, tired man like him stand? No, he would stick to his current policy and stay both quiet and hidden. He skirted the front of the house, still pressing close to fences, walls, and hedges, until he reached the boundary of the cow paddock, on the opposite side of the house from the dog. There he could hope that his odor might be masked by stronger ones.

He waited for another count of a hundred, watching for any movement. There was nothing. He felt reasonably satisfied that unless the rooms were occupied by drunks or men without legs or hostages tied up, the only living creatures within the grounds of this house were the cattle and the dog. So, thinking not only of the heroic tale he would be able to tell Melody later that day but also of how he would never forgive himself if this first chance of finding his granddaughter was refused, he walked across the pasture, using the cows as shields as much as possible, and pressed himself up against the rear of the cottage. Again he waited and listened. Nothing, other than the sounds that empty houses make. So, with his heart racing and his mouth dry, he peered between the shutter boards in the larger of the two windows into the long, single room, half expecting to find Franklin, Acton, and Margaret trussed in ropes, with little Bella crawling in the dust. But all he could see was a table with a pair of leather boots on it and two bed boards covered in a tangle of blankets. Otherwise the house was unfurnished and certainly not permanently inhabited.

Now he was confident, though disappointed. He walked around to the front of the house by way of a side gate, and – this surely was courageous for an aging net maker – went inside. Other than a damaged harness and a leather strap that somebody had dropped on the doorstep, there was nothing more to see than he had noticed from the rear window. Just leather boots and bedding. But fresh hoofmarks in the earth outside suggested that horsemen – only two or three, so far as he could tell – had recently departed, probably only that afternoon. There was nothing to suggest that Bella and Margaret had even reached the house or that there was anything there to be feared, other than a tethered dog that now, for reasons of its own, began to bark again. Andrew thought he heard shuffling and a voice, a baby’s cry, perhaps. A bird? It was time for him to flee.

It was dark by the time Andrew found his wife again. She was shaking and hardly able to breathe. Her period of mild amusement on her husband’s departure had been short-lived. As soon as he was out of sight, she could no longer admire herself as tough and steely or ready for greater tests. Without her husband’s timidity to measure herself against, she soon felt unprotected and exposed. Even though there had been no strangers to offer any “inconvenience,” every bird and every cracking branch terrified her. Every shifting shadow made her jump. She’d never known such fear and anxiety before. What if neither her husband nor her granddaughter came back to her? That would be worse than losing Bella’s mother. That would be worse than losing Acton. It was not that she loved Andrew better than her son (indeed, she did not) or was so deeply attached to her granddaughter that the thought of life without her was impossible. It was rather that she was alone.

Melody was relieved to see her husband fit and well, despite the dreadful fates that she had imagined for him, and to know that she herself would not be left entirely on her own in the middle of a hostile land, a widow and a destitute, with not a hope in the world. But she was still distraught when he returned and she saw that he was unaccompanied. She listened to his account of finding only an empty house and no sign of their granddaughter or Margaret. She kissed him and embraced him, glad of his warmth, but she was annoyed with him again. “Did you call for her? Did you shout her name?”

“I did everything. There’s not a sound. There’s no one there.”

“A woman and a baby just don’t disappear without a trace. Something bad’s happened, I’m sure of it now…”

“There were horsemen there.”

“There were horsemen? Andrew, you never mentioned horsemen. Did you speak to them?”

“I didn’t see them. Just fresh marks.”

“They’re lost. I know it in my heart. They’re lost.” We all of us are lost, she thought, unless we make it to the boats.

Margaret hadn’t had to run like this for years, not since she’d been a girl and dodging boys in games of free ’n’ freeze or taking part in races to and from the lake. She’d never had to run with a baby in her arms, taking care not to let the child’s head bang against branches or walls but still not slowing down to pay attention to her distress. But she was younger than the two giving chase and marginally more desperate.

Before the first man at the front of the building had managed to grab hold of her arm, she had instinctively run forward and to the side of him. If she had turned and run away, he would have caught her at the gate and hauled her back onto his land. Then what? But he was not expecting her to rush toward him and then take off just out of reach. Now he had to waste a few moments of advantage to turn himself around and take stock.

Margaret headed for the cottage door. The second man, a little younger than the first and simpleminded to all appearances, or maybe half asleep, just stood and watched. He hadn’t any idea who she was or why his elder was now calling out, “Bring her down!”

Margaret veered again and took the path that led around the east side of the house and into a horse paddock. A dog, which had been sleeping, shot out at her on its leash and missed her calf with its teeth by the thickness of a reed. She felt its breath. A moment later the first man cleared the corner, too, but snagged his ankles in the leash and hit the earth. The simpleton followed after, just sauntering, in time to see his buddy rolling on the ground, the dog beside itself with fury, and the fur-haired woman climbing the back fence, already too far gone to hear him say, “Blue devils, Charlie, what’s goin’ on?”

Charlie soon explained. “You’d better wake up, boy. We missed our chances there. We’ll get her, though. She owes us now.”

“She’s got a kid.”

“So it won’t be nothing new for her.” Any woman was a rare commodity for squatters like them. A beauty was too good to lose. They wanted her.

It did not take them long to saddle up their horses, equip themselves with cattle prods and rope, and ride around behind the house in search of Margaret. The men spread out, riding fifty paces or so apart, close enough to shout out to each other and to control a wide stretch of the land. Margaret, with Bella wailing, more frightened by the dog than by anything else, had scrambled through a choke of rocks and ended up above the house, looking down on the roof timbers. She was breathless, and angry, mostly with the men but partly with herself for having been so dangerously and laughably ambiguous. “Anything at all.” Not the wisest of remarks. She’d cracked her knee during the climb and caught the back of her hand on a thorn. She sucked the blood away, quieted Bella with a little finger in her mouth, and tried to think what she should do.

It was tempting, actually, to pick up several rocks and see if she could put some holes in their thin roof, or even damage their milk cows. She thought that probably her danger would prove to be brief and somewhat comical. Perhaps her only problem now would be getting back to the Boses by a circuitous route, though the thought of trying to amuse them with an account of her adventures was not promising.

It was only then that Margaret saw that the two men had mounted up and armed themselves. They had not spotted her yet, but a golden rule of hunting said that nothing from a bee to a buffalo could evade two mounted men for long, except three mounted men. Her first thought was to try to reach one of the other habitations in the neighborhood and beg for help. A young woman with a child, escaping from two likely rapists, could surely expect the offer of help and safety from any normal home, if there were other women, anyway. She could see the roofs of two small steads within easy reach, though no sign of people. If she could see another woman or a child, then she would head that way. But there was no one. There wasn’t even any smoke. For all she knew, these places might be abandoned. Most places were abandoned nowadays. Perhaps these two men were simply passing through. Their high-tacked horses seemed to suggest so. Maybe they had rustled their three cows and moved into the empty cottage for a day or so of butchery. Salt beef would see them and their dog safely and fatly through the winter. Perhaps the other buildings were harboring similar men, from the same band of riders possibly. Margaret did not need reminding how cruel and murderous such groups could be. She’d seen them take her Pigeon away. She’d seen the woman on the highway, raped and stoned to death. No, Margaret dared not take her chances at another house. The best thing she could do was get away from humankind and horses altogether. She had her breath back now. She made a sling out of her blue scarf, wrapped it around Bella, and tied the child to her back. She’d carry the baby the way Franklin had carried her down Butter Hill.

This would be a game of hide and seek. Margaret’s best plan was to avoid open ground entirely. A stand of trees reached into the flat land around the farmsteads and spread along the low escarpment in patchy clumps, not thick enough to frustrate horses but offering shade and camouflage. But then again, she thought, that is exactly what the men would expect her to do – run for cover. She’d do the opposite.

The countryside was undulating rather than hilly, and the undergrowth was thick though low, so it was good for riding and not so good for walking. There was an open meadow just before the trees, cleared by farmers years before but long disused. Margaret looked behind her to see if she was in sight of the horsemen, but they had not cleared the escarpment yet. She ran into the middle of the meadow and, after some long moments of panic, found a hollow big enough to lie down in. She pulled as much dry vegetation and dry foliage as she could find within reach over the two of them and lay on her side, cradling Bella. With one eye, she watched the sky for shadows. She was good at lying still and breathing silently. All she could hope for now was that Bella wouldn’t cry and wouldn’t want to play.

As she had hoped, Charlie and the simpleton kept to the edge of the trees, peering in among the trunks and pursing their lips to make those “Come to me, cat” noises that men seem to think are flirty and seductive but that are menacing for women. The nearest they came to Margaret and Bella was forty or so horse lengths away, but the baby, placated first by a finger and then by a little sweet ear wax, kept quiet, happy, it seemed, to stay in the undergrowth and watch the clouds with Margaret.