Текст книги "Beauty"

Автор книги: Robin McKinley

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

“Your horse,” he said to me. “I’ve left him in the stable for you. Thought I’d best tell you, so you could go down, say hello, settle him in; he’ll get lonesome by himself, now that all the little stuff is gone.” The little stuff was our riding and carriage horses, which had been taken away by their new owners. “And his saddle. It’s only an old one. A bit worn. But it’ll do you for a bit.”

I was looking at him blankly.

“Don’t gape at me, girl,” said Tom irritably. “Great-heart. He’s in the stable, waiting for you. I’m telling you to go say good night to him or he won’t sleep for worrying.”

“You can’t give me Greatheart,” I said at last

“I’m not giving him to you,” replied Tom. “There’s no giving about it. He won’t eat if you go off without him, I know it. He’s already been missing you these last weeks; you come around so rarely, it makes him uneasy. So you take him with you. He’s a big strong horse. You’ll find uses for him.”

“But—Tom,” I said desperately, wondering why no one else was saying anything. “He’s a tremendously valuable horse—you can’t want one of your Great Horses pulling a cart, which is all there’ll be for him with us. He should carry the King.”

“He wouldn’t like carrying the King,” said Tom. “He’ll do what you tell him to. I didn’t think I had to tell you to be good to him, but I’m wishing you’d stop talking nonsense to me and go down to the stable. He’ll be worrying that you don’t come. Night, miss,” he said, nodding to each of the three of us, “sir,” to Father and Gervain. And he stamped back up the stairs again.

We heard Ruth let him out; silence came to us on the backwash of the front door closing. “I guess I’d better go do what he says,” I said vaguely, still staring at the empty stairs. Father started to laugh: the first real laugh we’d heard from him since the trouble began. “They’re all too much for us,” he said. “Bless them, we’d best leave town soon before we have too much to carry away.”

“What is this horse that won’t eat if you leave it behind?” inquired Gervain.

I shook my head. “That’s all rubbish—he’s just giving him to me. I don’t know why. I used to lurk around his stable a lot.”

“Horses are the only things that will take her away from her precious Greek poets,” said Hope. “And Tom says she’s the only woman he knows who can ride properly.”

I ignored her. “One of Tom’s mares died giving birth; he said the foal might have a chance if someone who had the time and patience would bottle-feed it. So I did. I named the poor thing Greatheart—well, I was only eleven. That was four years ago. Tom usually sells them when they’re four or five. He let me do some of the training—not just the basic breaking to saddle; all his Great Horses learn some fancy steps, and how to behave on parade, how to stand at attention. Well. I guess I’d better go.”

“She used to read him her Greek translations,” murmured Grace. “And he survived.”

“It gave her governess fits” said Hope. “But then I’m sure that horse knows more Greek than Miss Stanley did.”

I glowered at her. “He was here for a while, then I took him back to Tom’s stable when he was a yearling—but I’ve visited him nearly every day—except, uh, recently.” I started up the stairs. “I’ll be back in a little. Don’t eat all the biscuits; I still want my tea.”

“Can I come along and meet your horse?” said Ger.

“Of course,” I said.

* * *

Twelve days after the auction I rode Greatheart, with Grace riding pillion, out of the city we’d lived in all our lives, for the last time. The rest of the family rode in the long wooden wagon we followed. Ger was driving, and Hope sat beside him, with her arm around Father, who sat on the outside. None of us looked back. We were traveling with a group of wagoners who made this journey regularly twice a year: It began in the broad farm country south of the city and wound its way from town to town to the far north; they arrived at their final destination with only a few weeks to spare before they turned back and went south again. These men knew the road and what dangers it might offer, and were always willing—for a reasonable fee—to have a few pilgrims journey with them. Conveniently for us, the train passed about ten miles from the village that was to be our new home. Hope and I agreed, during one of our late-evening conversations, that this made us feel a little less desolate, a little less cut off from the rest of humanity and the world.

I remembered, from several years ago, a family we had known a little whose fortunes in the city had suddenly collapsed; they had left in these same wagons with this same group. It had never occurred to me then to consider the possibility that we might one day follow them.

Greatheart clopped along, nearly asleep, chewing meditatively on his bits; one of his easy strides reached as far as two of the small, sturdy wagon horses’. There had been a little difficulty about bringing him at all, for a riding horse was an expensive luxury; he was also a very visible incentive to any bold thief who might be watching us. But spring was well advanced, so there was no shortage of fresh fodder for my massive horse’s matching appetite, and I promised to break him to harness as soon as we were moved into our new home. Gervain shook his head over us, but I don’t think he ever meant to suggest that Greatheart be left behind. The wagoners shook their heads too, and muttered loudly that they who could afford to own a horse like that one could afford to travel in a parry of their own, with hired guards, and not disturb their humble company with flashy lures to robbers and cutthroats. But the train was doing some business for Tom Black’s stable too, and the story must have come out, for several of the wagoners came up to us during the first few days to look at Greatheart a little more carefully, and with a little more sympathy—and curiosity.

One of them said to me: “And so this is the horse that wouldn’t eat if you left him behind, eh, missy?” and slapped the horse’s neck jovially. His name was Tom, also, Tom Bradley; and he began to come to our campfire in the evenings sometimes as the days of the journey mellowed into weeks and we all grew more accustomed to one another. Most of the wagoners kept to themselves; they had seen too many travelers in reduced circumstances going to new, unknown homes and destinies to be particularly interested in them. They ignored us, not unkindly but with indifference, as they ignored almost everything but the arrangement of harness and the stacking of loads, the condition of the horses and wagons, the roads, and the weather. Tom Bradley’s visits were very welcome to us, then, because even with Gervain’s ready cheerfulness and optimism we were all inclined to gloom. None of us was accustomed to long, bruising hours either on horseback—which was preferable—or in the wagon, which was built to carry heavy loads, and not sprung or cushioned for tender human freight.

“Eh, now,” Tom would say; “you’re doing none so bad; and it’ll get better in a week or two, as you get used to the way of it. Have a bit of stew, now, you’ll feel good as new.” Tom knew all there was to know about cooking in a single pot over a small fire, and taught us how to bury potatoes in the embers. And when Grace’s saddle sores grew so painful that she could get no sleep at night, he mysteriously found her a sheepskin to sit on, and would take no payment for it. “They call me the nurse-maid,” he said with a grin, “the rest of ‘em do; but I don’t mind it. Somebody has to look out for you innocents—if nobody—did there’d be trouble soon because you’ve no proper notion how to take care of yourselves. Excepting of course you, sir,” he said with a nod to Ger, who gave a short laugh.

“I’m no less grateful for your help than the others, Tom,” he said. “I know little about wagons, as you’ve found out by now.”

Tom chuckled. “Ah, well, I’ve been twenty—nearer thirty—years at this, and there’s little I don’t know about wagons, or shouldn’t be, for shame. I’ve no family I go home to, you see, so I take to whoever needs me on these journeys. And I’ll say this to you now, as I’ll say it again when you leave us to go your way: I’m wishing you the best of good luck, and I don’t say that often. Nursemaiding is a mixed blessing, more often than not. But I’ll be sorry to see the last of you folks.”

The journey lasted two long months, and by the time we parted company with the wagoners we were all covered with saddle sores, lame and aching in every inch of bone, muscle, and skin, from sleeping on the ground, and heartily sick of the whole business. The only ones relatively unaffected by what seemed to us girls to be desperate hardship were Gervain and Greatheart; Ger was still as certain and cheerful as he had been ever since he first entered our town parlour over three months ago, and Greatheart still strode amiably along at the tail of the train as if he hadn’t a care in the world. We were all thinner, harder, and shaggier. Tom shook hands all around, and tickled Greatheart under his whiskery chin; wished us good luck as he had promised; and said that he’d see us in about six months. He would be coming to say hello, and to collect the wagon and pair of horses we were taking with us now.

The unaccustomed rigours of travel had deadened us to much looking around at the countryside we passed. Mostly we noticed the ruts in the road, the rocks under our blankets, and the way the leaves on the trees we chose to lie under always dripped dew. As we turned off the main road towards our new home, now only a few miles away, we looked around with the first real interest we had felt for the land we were traveling over.

We were well inland now, far from any sight or smell of the sea; and it was a hilly country, unlike the low-lying and many-rivered area we had left. We parted from our companions of the road at dawn, and in the late afternoon we found ourselves on the main, and only, street of Blue Hill. Children had cried a warning .of our approach, and men had looked up, shading their eyes to stare across their small, hilly, carefully cut and tilled fields. We saw young wheat growing, and corn, oats, and barley; there were cattle and sheep and pigs and goats, and a few sturdy, shaggy horses in harness. Most of the men went back to their work; newcomers would keep, but the daylight wouldn’t; but in town there were a dozen or more people collected and waiting to welcome us, and to look us over.

Ger, wizard-like, produced an aunt with six children, who ran the tiny public house; it was she who had heard that he wanted to bring a new bride back to the hills he’d grown up in, and had written him about the empty smithy in her home town. Her smile made us, waifs in the wilderness, feel that perhaps we weren’t utterly lost and forsaken after all. She introduced us to the other people who were standing around, several of whom recognized Ger, or pretended to, as the young lad from over the next hill who’d gone south to the city over ten years ago. Ger’s birthplace and childhood home, Goose Landing, named for the fine winter hunting, and our new home, Blue Hill, had no particular boundaries beyond the little main streets; the farms and fields spread themselves disinterestedly between the Sign of the Dancing Cat, in Goose Landing, and the Red Griffin, Ger’s aunt’s establishment.

Ger’s aunt’s name was Melinda Honeybourne, and she was a widow of four years, having taken over the entire management of the Griffin, which they had owned together, after her husband’s death. She told the two eldest children, who were standing bashfully at the Griffin’s front gate, to look after it and the younger ones, while she climbed into our wagon and came with us “to see our new house.” I picked up the two smallest children and put them in front of me in Greatheart’s saddle.

The house was located beyond the edge of town and isolated from it by the eyeless backs of the village houses, by a few stands of trees left at this far end of town where they were in nobody’s way yet, and by the gentle undulations of the land. Most of the farms lay east of the village in an irregular patchwork of forest and field and stream, on both sides of the main road. Goose Landing lay mostly out of sight beyond the big forested hill to the southwest, with farmlands creeping round its feet and clasping hands at its skirts. The nearest town to the north was Sunnyfield, a three days’ journey, perhaps, through the heavy forest to Blue Hill’s northwest, but no one ever went that way, and it was at least a week’s journey to go around it. Our house’s back was to this great wood that no one passed through.

“Although I’ve no call to say I’ve come to see it, for see it I have many times. Since I could not be certain when you’d finally be coming I’ve been going up once a week, twice when I could manage it, or sending one of the older ones, to open the windows and let some fresh air inside. A closed-up house stales overnight, or nearly, and that’s no proper welcome.” Melinda addressed herself to Grace, who was riding in the wagon. “You’ll find it clean enough to move into, miss, though of course you’ll be wanting to scrub it yourself once you’ve settled. But it’s been boarded up and empty for two years, and the dust was sticky-thick on everything, so Molly—she’s my eldest—and me, we washed everything right well, three months ago, when we heard you were coming for sure. Moving’s a sorry business at best, and it’d make things a bit more comfortable for you. Mind you, though, you’re welcome at the Griffin till you’re fixed up the way you like. I’m used to sudden company for bed and board, and I like it.”

Grace began to thank her for her trouble, but she brushed it away, saying kindly, “And you needn’t worry that you owe us anything, for be sure I’ll take it out of young Ger here when he gets the shop going again. Ah, we’re all delighted to be having our own smith again; it’s a long way from this side of the hill to the Goose forge, you know, and we’re not all of us too pleased with young Henney’s skill besides. You’ve not forgotten the right ways of doing things, there in that city, now, have you, Ger?”

“No indeed: I’m still as clever as the devil himself,” Ger said, and Melinda laughed; but he’d seen Father wince when she, noticing nothing, had spoken with a countrywoman’s scorn of towns.

The two babies I had collected were named Daphne and Rachel; Daphne was the elder, and would answer direct questions after a long pause spent considering the inquirer’s motives. Rachel said nothing at all, and held on to Greatheart’s mane with both hands. Both of them seemed delighted to be sitting six feet above the ground and not at all frightened, although somewhat annoyed at my desire for conversation.

“There it is,” said Melinda.

The street had faded to a track, which then led vaguely over a small rise in the ground; and there in a shallow dish of a meadow stood a little weather-brown wooden house with a shed beside it, and a smaller shed built out from the larger one. At first sight the house seemed as tiny as a doll’s, delicately carved out of matchsticks, till I realized that this was die effect of the great forest that began only a few hundred feet behind it, with saplings and scrub growing up nearly to its back door. There had once been a fence around a kitchen garden in the back, but it was a jungle of vines and great leafy things gone to seed. A third shed hidden behind the other two we discovered to be a stable, with only two narrow stalls and a leaky roof. There was a well on the small hill we’d come over following the road from the town, but a lovely bright stream jingled its way down from the forest and took a generous bend to be convenient to the forge before it disappeared behind another small hill, heading away from the town.

We had all been dreading this final moment of finding out just what we had come to, and we all took heart at the quiet scene before us. The late-afternoon sun gilded the early-summer green of the meadow, and stained the pink and white daisies to a primrose hue; the buttercups were flame-coloured. The house was neat and sturdy and, as we dismounted at its stoop, contrived to look hospitable. Melinda marched in first, as we stood looking around and at one another, and threw open windows, talking to herself as she did so. She poked her head out of a second-storey window and said, “Hi! Come in! It’s none so bad!” and disappeared again.

She was right. It had been well built, and had survived two years of vacancy with little worse than a few drafts around warped window sills, and a front door that had fallen slightly in its frame and stuck when it was fully closed. The house was a long rectangle, the dividing wall cutting the first floor into two rooms roughly square; the kitchen was at the back and the parlour up front, with a fireplace facing into each room from a central chimney. Upstairs was a hall running half the short length of the house to the chimney, with a bedroom on either side; each had its own tiny fireplace. Up a ladder and through a hole you emerged in a doorway in the peak of the roof, one side of the frame being the chimney again; a wall ran away from you in both directions, cutting the attic in two. The roof sloped sharply on two sides, so the attic rooms were almost triangular; Ger, the tallest of us, could stand up straight only while standing one rung down on the loft ladder.

Everything was beautifully clean; there wasn’t a cobweb to be found, and the first two floors were waxed. Melinda grinned at our lavish compliments and said she’d tell them all again to Molly, who had done most of the work, and was young enough still to take pleasure in wild flattery. We laughed and clattered downstairs again, feeling that we had at least one good friend.

Father insisted chat we unpack at once, and sleep in our new home. “We thank you, my dear,” he said to Melinda, who blushed, “but we have been sleeping on the ground for so long that mattresses on a planed level floor will be a splendid luxury,” but we agreed to come to the Griffin for supper.

“You’ll save having a lot of people coming here to gawp at you,” she said, “when you’re trying to get your proper work done.” We would also stable our horses there till Father and Ger could repair our own stable. “Your young lady’s pony here,” Melinda remarked, surveying Greatheart, “needs a barn of his own. The little ones will all love him. He’s a giant’s horse, just like in the stories us mothers tell them.” She petted him, refused to be driven back to town, and set off on foot. “I have to add a little more water to the stew,” she said, smiling, “to feed all the extra mouths.” Daphne and Rachel were parted reluctantly from the “young lady’s pony” and trotted away in their mother’s wake.

We were lucky, because everyone in town liked anyone Melinda liked, and everyone was predisposed to like the new blacksmith. Melinda told us that the lack of one had been the chief topic of conversation around the fireplace at the Red Griffin for two years, and if she heard “Ah, what we best need is a proper blacksmith now” once more she would heave a barrel of beer at the speaker.

Ger had the shop going again—bellows mended, the oven for making charcoal patched air-tight, and tools laid out—within a week of our arrival, while the three of us girls were still airing the bedding, mending socks, and figuring out the whimsical nature of the kitchen ovens. Father spent an afternoon in the stable, measuring and whistling and measuring some more, and in three weeks we had our horses under their own roof; and he was building a pen for them, enlarging the hayloft over them, and thinking about a coop for chickens. Melinda had offered us a few pullets.

We three girls didn’t fare quite so well, particularly at the outset; we realized in those first weeks just how spoiled we were, and how unsuited for a life without servants, There’s an art to scrubbing a floor; not a very delicate art, but one that must be learned. I, who was a rougher article to begin with, developed calluses almost at once; my sisters’ tender skin developed blisters, and the coarse material of our new working clothes chafed them. We didn’t talk about our difficulties, beyond the sharing of hints about making things easier that we discovered the hard way; and slowly, as the weeks passed, our darns got less lumpy and our puddings less leaden. We went to bed every night numb with exhaustion, in the beginning, but we grew stronger, and with strength and increasing skillfulness came cheerfulness. Melinda, who almost never stopped talking, had a sharp eye for all of that, and in among her inconsequential chatter she let fall, as if by accident or as among knowing friends, any number of helpful suggestions that we silently though no less appreciatively put to use.

Our first winter was an easy one, the natives told us, and we were as grateful as we could be, although it seemed like a very harsh winter to us. We had never seen more than a few inches of snow on the ground at one time, nor for longer than a few weeks. Greatheart grew & winter coat as thick as a Persian rug, and the long white feathers that grew below his knees entirely covered his huge feet; his short sharp ears were lost in his grey forelock. He was alone in his stable, except for the chickens, since Tom had come through in the autumn, as promised, and collected the two hired horses and the wagon—and complimented us on our progress.

By the time Tom had come and gone I had trained poor Greatheart to go in harness; I was much more conscious of the loss of his dignity than he was, for he had the sweetest of tempers. There wasn’t, as it turned out, very much training to it; Ger traded a mended plough for some second-hand harness that could be patched and enlarged to fit our huge horse; and I put it on him and told him to go forwards and he went. He understood almost by instinct the difference in strength and balance of pulling a weight instead of carrying it. Father built a small wagon for him, and Ger strengthened it with iron fastenings and added some ropes and chains for grappling big logs. The horse developed the white marks that come from wearing a collar in the dark dappled grey hair of his shoulders; but perhaps Tom Black had been right, because he did not seem to miss carrying the King.

Even the canary came through the winter in good health and spirits. He was a very useful bird, because he gave Grace and Hope and me something weaker than ourselves to worry over; and he sang as though he appreciated it.

We had had no time to think of a name for him before we left the city, and it was some weeks even after we’d moved into our new home that Hope, putting water in his dish one morning, looked up suddenly and said, “He still doesn’t have a name!” Grace and I stared back at her, and then at each other, in dismay. We were silent several minutes, Hope’s hand still poised over the water dish; and then the canary, as if impatient, burst into song. We looked at him then, and Grace said, “Of course. Why haven’t we thought of it long since? Orpheus.” I made an incredulous noise and she smiled and said, “A little sister like you, dear, will upset the best-regulated mind”; and Hope laughed and said, “Orpheus! It’s perfect.” And Orpheus he became, except that it degenerated over the months to Phooey. I still called him Orpheus, however, and he still sang.

The following summer, a little over a year after we arrived, Gervain and Hope were married. By that time, another room had been added to the house, opening off the parlour, for the newlyweds’ bedroom; and the local mason built a chimney for it. Father made them a big bed with a tall scallop-edge headboard for a wedding present. Ger and I had had the two attic rooms, and Grace and Hope had shared one of the bedrooms, while Father had the other. Grace invited me downstairs, but I was fond of my attic, and knew besides that she would like having a room of her own again. There had been a small storm about my being shut off in the attic when we first moved in, but I had insisted. Sharing the little room with my sisters, I said, we’d be as crowded as potatoes in a good chowder; someone had to move upstairs, I was the youngest, and besides I liked the attic.

Father had cut a window for me in the vertical wall, which overlooked the now re-established garden and beyond that the great forest. When I was not too tired, which happened more often as I grew accustomed to the work, I would stay up an extra hour and read by the light of one precious candle. But candles were too dear to waste often on so profitless a pursuit as reading, even if my eyes didn’t soon become too heavy to prop open, I’d been able to keep half a dozen of my oldest, most battered, and most written-in books from the auction. In our new life it was the reading I missed the most. The daylight hours were spent working, and much of the evening also, mending clothes and tools and bits of this and that by firelight. “This and that” for most of the spring had consisted of my taking over most of the necessary sewing to free Grace, who was the finer seamstress, to work secretly on an embroidered counterpane for the wedding.

The work had broken down into a routine for each of us. Ger worked in the smithy; his ability was such that before the first winter was past there were people traveling thirty miles to come to him. Father’s old skill with wood had gradually returned to his fingers and brain, The tiny lean-to that was built against the blacksmith’s shop was enlarged, and Father built carts and cabinets there, and patched roofs and walls in town. His hair had turned snow-white, and he moved more slowly than he once had; but he carried himself tall and straight, and he could talk and laugh again. And I suspected Melinda of falling in love with him. He was gentle and courtly to her, as he was to all women, including his daughters; but

I thought he displayed a special grace for Melinda. And she, who was simple and kind and forthright, blushed often when he spoke to her, and twisted her hands in her apron like a girl.

Grace and Hope divided the house-work between them, and I did what was left over, the odds and ends that were neither house-work nor shop-work; and often thought that it would have been much more convenient if I had been a boy—not least because I already looked like one. Ger and I and Greatheart pulled fallen trees out of the eaves of the forest, and Ger taught me to split wood, chop it, and stack it. This was the greatest portion of my work, for there were several fireplaces in the house and two more in the sheds to provide fuel for, plus charcoal to cook; and the forge fire, and the kitchen fire, had to burn whatever the weather.

My big horse’s strength grew famous, and several times that first year we dragged some undraggable object from where it was stuck fast: an old stump clinging bale-fully to the soil, a wagon sunk axle deep in spring mud. We also hauled wood for some of the people who lived in town; and in exchange we were sent home with beer and blankets—we were southerners, and correctly presumed tender—and mincemeat pies at the holidays. I never really had time to think about the suitability of my new role, or of how it had come about. I was becoming more boy than girl, it seemed; and perhaps since I was short and plain and had no figure to speak of the townsfolk found my ambiguous position easy enough to accept. The men took their caps off to my sisters, curbed their ribald tongues, and some of them even made rough bows; I was hailed with a wave and a grin, and familiarly called “Beauty,” The name had been adopted without the flicker of an eye, so far as I could see: like that of the fierce yellow mastiff who looked after the Red Griffin, who answered, if she was called reverently enough and was in the mood, to the name of “Honey.” When Great-heart had hauled yet another malignant old stump out of the ground, and the two of us, plus the owner of the land and all his neighbours, were covered with dirt and splinters, I was clapped on the back and given mugs of small beer.

When spring came I dug up the garden and planted it, and weeded it, and prayed over it, and fidgeted; and almost three years of lying fallow had agreed with it, because it produced radishes the size of onions, potatoes the size of melons, and melons the size of small sheep. The herb border ran wild, and the air smelled wonderful; the breezes often stirred the piney, mossy smell of the forest with the sharp smell of herbs, mixed in the warm smell of fresh bread from the kitchen, and then flung the result over the meadow like a handful of new gold coins. I pruned the apple trees—there were also the remains of an old orchard, and a few of the trees were still productive—and had high hopes of the next winter full of apple jelly.

3

Ger had made us all promise—although I ! was the only one who had any inclination , that needed to be curtailed—never to walk I in the woods behind our house without either him or Father for company; the latter reference was courtesy only, because Father was no woodsman. I assumed that Ger meant deep forest, and one afternoon wandered into the first fringe of the big trees with horse and cart, picking up dead wood to be cut up for the house fires; the light scrub that had grown up around the meadow the house sat in had been cut down and burned during our first few weeks here. But Ger saw me from the shop window and came after me, angry; I

was surprised to see him angry and explained that I did not mean to disobey orders, and that I was well in sight of the house—indeed, as he had seen me. He relented, but said that he did not want me walking even this near the tall forest trees. This conversation took place during our first autumn, and the leaves were red and gold; it was cold enough already for our breath to hang visible in the air.

He looked up at the tree we were standing under, and sighed. “I’m probably being over-cautious, but I’d rather it were that than foolhardy.” He paused, and rubbed a hand over his chin, considering me. “Have you ever wondered why ours is the only house out this end of town—a. full quarter mile from the next house in? And why we take all our drinking water from the well on the hill, when a good stream runs right by the house?”