Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

“I’m going to take you down from here and wrap you up before you freeze to death,” he said. “Please don’t scream. There’s no need. I’m not going to hurt you.” She said nothing. Her body went limp in his arms.

He drew her gently down and, holding her under the arms-his gloved hand crushing one of her small, stiff-nippled breasts-he tugged a blanket out of his saddle-roll and pulled it about her, twice. Tiny shudders racked her wasted body, no more than a hundred pounds in all. Her lips had turned a ghastly purple, her teeth chattered, and her eyelids blinked frantically. She’s dying, Marc thought. He’d seen death like this up close, not on any battlefield, but in the alleys of central London where, every morning as he walked from his rooms to the offices of Jardin and Musgrove, he passed the casualties of lust and other hungers: prostitutes with the rags of their trade falling off their ruined flesh, their emaciated faces peering up at anyone foolish enough to bend down to them and venting a final curse or death’s-head plea as their eyelids fluttered and closed.

He opened his greatcoat and crushed her body in against his own warmth, cocooning her, willing her to survive. Foolishly he kissed the top of her head, pushing his nose into the thick, reddish curls, as if the least gesture of affection might astonish and resuscitate. Gradually the shuddering diminished, her cheeks went suddenly rosy, her eyes swelled with tears, and a pink sliver of tongue slipped out to lick her upper lip. Then she snuggled farther into the hug that held her.

The girl sighed, closed her eyes, opened them again, and said in a low, sweet, Sunday-school voice: “You gonna poke me?”

Her name was Agnes Pringle, and they were on a woodsy trail that, as long as she directed Marc, would lead them to her home. With the blanket and greatcoat still wrapped around her and Marc’s extra mitts on her feet, she insisted she was well enough to ride up behind him, holding tight with both arms around his chest. The horse moved at a sedate pace.

“You don’t mean to say your mother’s Annie Pringle?” Marc said.

“That’s right, Mad Annie,” Agnes said cheerfully.

Erastus Hatch, as promised, had explained to Marc who Mad Annie was, and had sternly warned him to steer clear of her squattery out on the marshland north of the surveyed concessions. The only route into it lay in a maze of trails, the miller had said (not without some admiration), most of which were booby-trapped and life-threatening to the unescorted. What lay at the heart of this mischievously mined moat was the subject of much public speculation and sustained moral outrage. “Just Mad Annie, a still, and her brood of ne’er-do-wells,” Hatch had suggested, “but you could get maimed trying to prove it!”

“You can just let me off at the end of this here path,” Agnes said. “I know my way up to the house.”

“I could make a lot of trouble for Hislop,” Marc said.

“And he’ll only make more for us.”

“But he assaulted you.”

Agnes giggled. “He did a lot more’n that to me.”

“He owes you a dress,” Marc said.

“We take care of our own,” Agnes said.

Hatch had warned him also about the infamous Pringle boys, Mad Annie’s obstreperous male offspring, and Marc decided not to be nonchalant about this errand of mercy. A military uniform out here could easily be misconstrued.

“Nobody’ll hurt ya,” Agnes said, sliding off the horse. She removed the greatcoat with a slow, purring gesture, rubbed it sensuously against her cheek, then held it up to him. She watched him put it on, then said, “What about yer mitts and this here blanket?” She started to draw the edges of the cloth away from her chest in a sad parody of seduction.

“You’ll need them if you aren’t to freeze,” Marc said. “You sure you can make it home?” He was gazing dubiously through a screen of cedars at an uneven open area that was likely a swamp come spring, dotted here and there with scrub bushes, the remnants of cattails, and stunted evergreens. Several hundred yards farther, on the distant verge of the clearing, he spotted several shacks and tumbledown outbuildings. No welcoming smoke rose from any one of them.

Agnes was in the midst of nodding “yes” to Marc’s inquiry when her eyes widened and her pale cheeks went paler. “Jesus,” she hissed. Then she wailed, “It’s Ma!”

From the cover of a nearby cedar stepped the woman known throughout the district as Mad Annie. Marc’s initial instinct was to laugh, for she was at first glance not a prepossessing sight. From Hatch’s descriptions and cautions, given in detail on their ride to Buffaloville, Marc had expected her to be a female of formidable bulk. But before him now, with her feet planted apart as if she were on snowshoes, stood a tiny woman clothed in a loose sweater, a lumberjack’s tuque, woollen trousers fastened at the waist and ankle with binder-twine, and a pair of mismatched boots. Her face was misshapen, like a badly aged apple doll. But it was her eyes that caught Marc’s attention. They were large and round-intelligent, belligerent, and curiously vulnerable. At this moment, they blazed with suspicion and imminent aggression. Marc could see nothing lunatic in them.

“Put the girl down,” she commanded.

“She is down,” Marc said firmly. “I’ve brought her home-to her mother, I presume.”

“Who I am ain’t your business, mister,” she said, assessing the uniformed rider and his horse with a single cold, bright glance. Then she turned to the girl, as if Marc were now of peripheral interest at best. Agnes wrapped the grey blanket twice around her and shuffled across to her mother.

“What’d the bastard do with yer dress?” Mad Annie said.

Agnes ducked away from a blow that did not come. “Tore it offa me.”

Mad Annie smiled with her lips only (she appeared to be toothless). “They do get excited at the sight of tits and a fur-piece, don’t they?” When Agnes peeked up to acknowledge her mother’s remark, Mad Annie cuffed her smartly on the back of the head.

Marc started forward in the saddle. He was still trying to square the image of this crone with Hatch’s colourful account of a matriarch who had “whelped” seventeen times, including two sets of twins, only the first three of her litter being traceable to Mr. Pringle, who had long since vamoosed or died happily by his own hand. Mad Annie caught Marc’s movement out of the corner of one eye and wheeled about.

“You stay right where you are, mister. You’re trespassin’ on Pringle property.”

“I suggest you leave the girl be,” Marc said. “She’s been kicked and abused enough for one day.”

“That so?” Without looking, she reached out and grabbed the blanket covering Agnes’s shoulder and hauled the girl before her. Agnes collapsed submissively at her feet. As she did so, the fabric parted, exposing her breasts, like two puffed bruises. “He pay you?” Mad Annie barked, glaring back up at Marc.

“It was Hislop, it was Hislop,” Agnes whimpered. “He did me every way all afternoon in that … that pigsty, and then he rips my dress and throws me out.”

Mad Annie ignored her daughter. “You poke her, you pay,” she said to Marc.

“Madam, I find you a repulsive and unnatural human being. I recommend you take your daughter, who has suffered an outrage and nearly lost her life, and care for her with any kindness you can muster as her mother and protector. Otherwise I shall have the law on you.”

Agnes was shaking her head at him.

“And I recommend you turn that ball-less bag-o’-bones around and hightail it offa my land before I do somethin’ beneficial, like blow yer pecker off.” From under her sweater, or through one of its several vents, she had drawn a pistol, and she was aiming it at the ensign.