The Girl from Rawblood Page 3

  “Do you know,” asks Henry Gilmore, “that you have the devil for a father? Your father is the devil in the night.”

  Something touches me once between the shoulder blades, light. Papa is at my back. “You go now,” he says.

  I go down through the house’s dusty innards, down the breakneck stairs. I go fast, eyes squeezed shut, listening for Charlotte Gilmore’s ghost.

  I wait, kicking at the fat white ducks that wobble across the yard. My skin prickles. The devil in the night.

  I go around the corner of the house to the livestock stalls. At the end, past the milkers, the tip of a velvet muzzle crests the stable door. The pony makes a soft sound. She thinks I’m Henry Gilmore.

  When I come close, she lays her ears down flat on her head. She backs into the far wall, trembling. She’s grown now. Sleek and stout. But she’s never liked me, since the day we took her from her dead mother’s side. So, actually, she’s hated me since the day she was born. I have a grudging respect for it—the strength, the consistency of her dislike.

  I put out my hand to her and chirrup. “I saved your life,” I tell her. “Tom and I did. He, Mr. Gilmore, would have left you.” The filly stares, nostrils flared. I think about Tom, and smarting wells in the rims of my eyes.

  As I cry, I feel the velvet of the pony’s muzzle on my arm. She is delicate; her lips fondle my sleeve. I feel the warm kindness of her breath, the comfort, the solid strangeness of her presence, her silken face. I have enough time to feel all this before her blunt mouth seizes my forearm in a bruising vice. I feel every one of her narrow columns of teeth. She shakes me, watching my pain. I punch her on the poll, hard between the ears. She smiles and tightens her jaws. Her dark horse eyes are bright as I beat her about the head.

  • • •

  My father casts pitying looks at the broken fences, strides delicately through the cow dung that covers the cobbles, dark and pungent. He goes to the trap and places a box under the backseat, calls me to him as if not quite sure of my name. Eyes dark and occupied with something.

  “What’s in the box?” I ask him. “That you put away.”

  “Money,” my father says.

  “Why?”

  “To settle his debts.”

  “Why should you?” I am indignant. “What he said…”

  “Pay it no mind, Iris. He is dying. And I have wronged him, in my time. It is good,” he says but not to me, “to make peace if one can.”

  I saw the quick shift in Henry Gilmore’s wasted face. I know that look, that blue contempt. I’ve seen it before, in another pair of eyes. Henry Gilmore found no peace from us.

  In the trap, we’re quiet. My arm sings with the dark, rich bruise left by the pony’s mouth. I open my mouth to the wind. It rushes in, cold and dry. It takes away the taste of the hot sickroom and Mr. Gilmore’s words. Fear is all through me. Disease.

  “It will not harm you, Iris,” Papa says. He sees my thoughts, as always. “It will not harm as long as you obey the Rules.”

  • • •

  In the black, my feet find the narrow ledge beneath my window. Light snow patterns my hands and face. I crawl across the slate. In the stable block ahead, one window throws out a weak guiding light.

  Fingers dug into crevices, I move across. Below is the long drop and then the flagstones. It pulls at me like the tide. The world is peculiar, pitched at a slant.

  At the second gable, I grasp the ridge and throw a leg over. Something skates away from my foot, and I’m sliding at great speed toward the drop. The night land rushes up. Cold streams run down my spine.

  My boots meet a yielding surface. I come to rest. Needling pain in my fingertips, which are rough, wet. The shaky gutter creaks. I’m ankle-deep in old mulch and the bones of dead birds.

  At the window, his hands reach to catch me. I scrape over the sill, inside. Something drums wetly in my ear. A heart.

  Tom says under his breath, “Made such a clatter, you did.”

  We are still. I think of Shakes at the other end of the stables. I think of my father and the Rules. A board groans under my soaked feet. The stables sigh beneath. Warm movements in straw, patient horse breath. Mice rattle lightly in the eaves. A spiral of snow puffs gently through the window. No one comes.

  “Getting too big for that,” says Tom at length.

  “No fear,” I say. I am still loose, weak. “Fine talk from you anyhow.”

  Tom overtops me by a head now. His wrists shoot out of his sleeves like vines. “Blood,” he says, uneasy. “Smell it.”

  “The roof. Scraped a bit.”

  He takes my hands in his.

  “Just fingers,” I say. “It’s—”

  He pinches my arm for quiet, and I stop. He goes to the corner and does something. Soft sounds. Presently, a cool sliding on my hands. His fingers slip around mine. The cut-grass smell of horse liniment.

  Tom lives above the stables at Rawblood. Our friendship has slipped from day into night. Crossing the roof is crossing into another country. I break the Rules every night, like this.

  I want to ask him, Does it make you sad? Do you wish you were at home still? But I don’t. What would be the use? Tom has no mother, and I have no mother. Soon, his father will be gone, and he will have no one. I don’t know much about the world and so on, but I do know this: the scales are already heavily weighted in my favor, and this will tip them further.

  Too much goes unspoken between us lately. There’s too much untruth. My father, the disease… I am pulled in opposing directions. Strong, complex bonds. I don’t know what to do, so I test them all. I defy my father. I lie to Tom. I flout the Rules and court the disease. One day, something will give, but what?

  Tom says, “Stink.”

  I ask, “What?”

  “Wait.”

  Now he’s said it, I can smell it. The scent of decay. My boots are thick with mud and gutter rot.

  There’s rustling. He hands me straw in a musty clump, takes a rag. I stand like a heron, one-legged. He crouches at my feet. I bend, and we scrub, wrinkling our noses. I sway, and my hands clutch for balance. I seize Tom’s hair in fistfuls.

  “Let me. Leave it, pest, or we’ll both go down. Leave it.” We tip slowly to the floor in silent, shaky laughter. My fingers curl weakly through his hair.

  There’s no trouble on the way out. We move through the dark stable into the open air. When we’re clear, at the foot of Sheeps Tor, we shout. Our voices are high and silly. The air is fine needles. The last of the cloud is clearing. The stars are out, and the moon is up. It shows the bowl of white-dusted land.

  “Trout?” I ask. “Be rising.”

  Tom says, “Didn’t bring the line.” His chilly fingers find mine. They flutter, then hold. “Come on,” he says. “Show you something.”

  We climb. Above us, the rocks are flat and black against the sky.

  “Here.” Tom pulls me down into a shallow defile between the boulders. A narrow strip of turf snakes away, a path through the bulbous granite. The world is far overhead. It’s clammy, frozen, the rock closing in like teeth.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Down here,” he says and vanishes.

  I follow, but he’s gone as if into air. My hand slides along the lines of the slick rock passage. I turn and stumble, crack my shin on hard, cold stone. My breath hovers white before me. I think, I’m alone. He’s gone. My heart hammers, fit to burst.

  A black slit hovers ahead, dark against the jumble. An arm emerges from the crevice. “That’s it,” he says, guiding me in.

  Inside the cave, the match gutters far up above to where the walls taper to a point like a tiny steeple. The air smells of turned earth and the faint old tang of fox. The walls are bright green, covered in moss that shines and moves under the light as if under a caress. The chamber is wide enough for five men to lie full-length on the pale floo
r. Near the back, in the shadows, a tall crooked stone like an altar. On the dark stone lies a small button, bright red. A child’s shoe worn thin. A wooden spoon. A horseshoe, and something old and moldy that may have been bread. Behind, something gleams in the slanting shadow, something white and misshapen. It shivers. My heart is cold.

  It’s a trick of the light, of course. A lump of old quartz bathed in candlelight. But for a moment, it looks like bone and dead flesh. A corpse curled at the foot of the altar.

  Tom’s face is branded with shadow, dancing. He grins. The match fizzes. He says, “Listen.”

  Behind the walls, within the rock, shrill voices rage in unknown tongues, hammers ring on steel, the sound of distant slaughter. Thin sobbing, a whistling shriek, then whispers soft as breath. The sounds enclose us.

  “It’s the river,” Tom says, “running through the ground. It won’t harm.” It sounds like all the harm in the world. The match flares and spits.

  “Don’t let it go out,” I say. “Tom—”

  “Wait,” he says. “I’ve a… Wait.” He fumbles in his pocket, and the little flame dances, dims. Shadows lick up; the dark is coming. What happens to the white stone in the dark? Perhaps it is not always a white stone.

  “Tom,” I say, but flame rears up from the little candle stub, brave, scattering light. The walls leap into being, green and shining. He makes to put the candle on the altar.

  “No!” I say. “Not there.” We sit side by side on the cave floor. It’s sandy and friendlier than expected.

  “Who would make this?” I ask.

  “No one made it—it’s here, that’s all.”

  “People come here,” I say. The small shoe lies quiet on the stone beyond.

  “Old folk,” Tom says. He rolls the vowels, lengthens the Devon in them. “Turn your coats inside out to keep Saint Nick away. Walk three times widdershins ’round Bexley Tor under moonlight.” He sniffs, shrugs, draws his finger in a circle on the sandy floor around the candle. “Lo,” he says in a high pinching voice like Mrs. Brewer, who’s married to the butcher in Dartmeet. “For I have drawn the line in the sand, and no one shall touch this candle now, lest they die.” He looks at me and grins. “No one can put it out now. See, pest? Magic.”

  “What’s that noise?” A scratching, a faint sound in the distance, like stone rubbing against stone.

  “The river,” says Tom. “Told you already.”

  But it’s different. Stealthy. I look up, around. Shadows flicker. “What does it do?” I ask, looking at the crooked altar stone, the glistening quartz behind. I don’t like to take my eye from them somehow.

  “Now, you may give gifts here, pest, that the one you love mayn’t ever die.” Tom’s still in Mrs. Brewer’s voice. He takes a brown glass bottle from his coat pocket and drinks, grimacing, then stands and goes to the altar. He puts something crumpled on it. We sit and look at his father’s glove where it lies dirty, limp-fingered on the granite.

  Tom says, “Just in case.” He rubs his face hard. His cheek flushes red under his palm. “It’s nonsense,” he says, “like all those things.” But he leaves the glove where it is.

  I say, “We go to see him once a fortnight.”

  “I know,” says Tom. “Tom the stable boy harnesses the horses, shoves old Shakes up on the box of the trap. I know everything you do, pest.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say automatically. There’s a strange, thin bite to his words. The line between our daytime and nighttime selves blurs and wavers. I have the beginning of a headache. It’s so mournful, the sound. Stone grinding against stone.

  “What is it between them?” Tom asks. “Between your father and mine?” The bottle clinks on the floor.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Bad blood,” Tom says. “Mystery! Intrigue!”

  “Curses,” I say. “Ancient wrongs.” Our hilarity is brittle and raucous, the joke a feather’s breadth from truth. It’s thrilling, like walking on the clear ice where it’s thinnest over the pond.

  “They say things in the village,” Tom says. “About him, you. Rawblood.”

  “What?” I ask. The clear ice, and beneath—what? Cold, deep dark.

  “There’s a murdered girl buried at Rawblood.” He runs light fingers up the back of my arm. It gives me shivers, not entirely unpleasant.

  I bat him off. “Stop. Where? It’s not true.”

  “Some say she’s under the cellar floor,” Tom says. “Some say she’s in an attic, the pieces of her anyhow, in a chest bound with iron… But most likely she’s under the cedar tree. Buried beneath. The roots feed on her corpse.” The hairs on my arm rise to his light fingers. “It can be seen from a certain window of Rawblood. Her grave. It’s always freshly dug. Wet earth. You see it if you’re about to die.”

  “Ugh,” I say. His fingers stroke; they raise delicate chills.

  “Yup, it’s all rubbish,” says Tom. He shifts away a little on the sandy floor. I rub my prickling arms. “I know of someone who really—” he says, stops, and starts again. “My uncle Rob was a butler. The butler at Rawblood, as it happens.”

  “We don’t have a butler,” I say.

  “No,” says Tom with intonation I cannot place. “Not now. My dad was older than Rob by nearly twenty years. He took care of him. More like a father than a brother, I suppose. He doesn’t talk to me much, Dad. But he’ll tell stories about Uncle Rob. Anyhow, one morning, Rob had not come down to servants’ breakfast. And when they went up into the eaves of Rawblood to look for him, he was there, cold, dead in his bed. Eyes wide like pebbles, like he’d seen something. And you’ll never guess, pest—it was on the day that you were born. How d’you think that plays in the village? My dad sets a store of anger on it. Daft ideas. Says it was Rawblood that killed him. That Rob’s life was taken, because he did something, something to displease your father…” Tom starts, recollects himself, looks at me wide-eyed.

  I shrug, my heart beating fast.

  Tom says, “I look like him. Like Uncle Rob.” The drink’s in his voice now, a little. “Apart from his red hair. And now you’re thinking, ‘Oh, that’s why they can’t get on: makes the old man sad to see his son look so like the brother. I understand now.’ But you’d be wrong, pest. That’s not why he hates me. It’s worse, because there’s no reason to it. ‘Rawblood’s ill luck for the Gilmores.’ How many times have I heard it from him? But he sent me off there all right.” The bottle clinks softly in the sand. “Sold me like a pony.”

  I take his hand. The candle flickers. The shadows move. Tom’s words hang in the dark between us, mingling with others I have heard. He did something to displease your father. The devil in the night. I see him in my mind: Robert Gilmore, who I never set eyes on. Quick one moment and dead the next. Perhaps it was the disease. Perhaps it killed him. The ice is thin, thin…

  Tom clips me over the head. “Thought you might turn tail, pest,” he says, “when you first came in here.” He’s strained, light. “Eyes like a barn owl.” His hand holds mine tight.

  “Didn’t though,” I say, flooded with relief. The world shivers and rights itself. The dark tide retreats.

  “No,” he says. “Too right. You didn’t. Here.”

  The liquid catches in my throat. It’s like drinking gas lamps. I cough and drink again. Candlelight falls, beautiful and restless, on everything.

  “I like it,” I say. I mean the cave, the drink, the moor outside, the light within. I mean the warmth at my side where he sits. His messy head haloed in the candlelight. I am giddy with the reprieve—from what? I play with Tom’s bootlace and imagine his foot within. Shapes dance on the shining green walls. The dim roof above is infinite.

  “What would it be,” I ask, “not to die, ever, anyhow? If by putting a glove on a stone, you could do it? Might be awful.”

  “People shouldn’t die,” Tom says. “Just shouldn’t.” W
hen I look, I see something is happening. He’s stiff, pale, arms locked around himself. He shakes with something violent. “Put out the light, Iris.” The whites of his eyes gleam.

  “Magic,” I say. “Remember? Can’t put it out.” I don’t want the dark. I am strange of a sudden. As though my mind is growing, pushing gently at my skull. The sound. It’s like the earth is moving. Readying itself to bury us. Or as if the stone is breathing. I don’t like it.

  “Just—put it out.” His voice thick and cottony, his mouth awry like a child’s. The candle hisses on my licked thumb. The dark drops down on us like a weight. He’s gone, the cave is gone… Am I gone? Behind us, within the rock, the battle rages; gurgling voices speak long incantations. Beneath it, Tom is crying, small sounds.

  He says, “I should be minding the farm.” He doesn’t say home. “I should have been there, these years, learning to mind it. But I wasn’t, and now all I know is horses, so I’m no good.”

  I put my hand into the dark. It comes to rest on his face, which is hot and wet. I find odd bits of him to hold—a collar, an elbow—and take them tightly. Sadness comes from him like breath.

  Tom folds his arms about me. He breathes by my ear. He smells of drink, thick and acid, filled with juniper. His hand on my back is large and flat, then small and insistent. “No point in it. He’s done,” Tom says into my hair. “It’s as good as finished.”

  I think of Henry Gilmore’s drawn, translucent face. The afternoon light on his dying skin. “I know,” I say. I cannot say it will be all right.

  His heart thumps hot against my collarbone. I want to climb inside his flesh and pluck the suffering from him. I fumble for his hand. His warm palm closes on mine. Around us, the river rises in a torrent, burbling mad. Voices like stone grinding on stone. I don’t mind it now. Something good moves between us like a living thing. Tom starts. He says, “Look, look.”