Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

They spent the night together in the dry shelter of the stone-and-metal cave, all of them, three “families” sharing their provisions as travelers should, sharing the fire, and glad of the company. When they had eaten and Margaret had handed round her taffies as a treat, especially for the potman’s boy, they took it in turns, according to their seniority, to tell the stories of their emigration so far.

The carriage family was from a riverside community much farther south than Ferrytown and on the opposite bank. There was no work or trade for them anymore. The river was narrow there, and so, while it had once been good for fishing, it was not suitable for ferrying and profiting from travelers as Ferrytown had done. The old man, Andrew Bose, and his wife, Melody, had been net and creel makers, employing eight hands and growing rich from their efforts. Their son, Acton, had been a fisherman and fish merchant. “Also doing well for himself,” added Melody. “He was much admired.” But when the village started to empty as striking out offered better prospects than staying put, the fish and net trade beached itself. Acton became his parents’ last remaining customer for nets. They became the only ones to buy his fish. The Boses hoped to sit their problems out. Things would get better. Only a fool would leave the riverbank, because whatever happened there, you would never run short of water or food. But then their daughter-in-law died in childbirth, and Acton determined to leave for somewhere less ill-fated. His parents were too old to stay behind alone, though their son had not insisted that they join him and the baby. On the contrary. But it was time for all of them to “face the facts and leave.” So once the child had been weaned by the last of the village pay-moms and cut her first two teeth, they’d shuttered up their house and joined the exodus. Andrew had his tools with him, he said. There was bound to be work for a net maker as soon as they reached water. Net makers were always valued and respected wherever there were boats.

The potman and his son, both named Joey, had traveled from the south from a market town where, once the region’s farms had failed and folded and their owners had joined the emigration, there was no work, no market, no demand for pots, and so no supper on the family table. The elder Joey had made the future easy for himself by sending his wife and their three other children ahead in the company of neighbors. Then he’d traded some silver for the mules, loaded up his stock of finished pots, his tools, and some powdered fixing clay, and followed on, taking his time. He and his son had survived during the two months of their journey so far by doing pot repairs in exchange for food and lodging. The Joeys had been in Ferrytown ten days before, and they had sealed the cracks in several of the guesthouse’s earthenware water ewers and stapled broken plates and dishes in many of the wealthier homes. “My wife knows it’s her job to break as many pots as she can, ahead of me,” he said. “She does the damage. I do the repairs.” In just a few days’ time, he hoped, he’d meet up with his wife again, somewhere on the coast. “I’ll find her, you can bet. She’s got a laugh can shatter clay. That’s why I married her.”

Any plans that Margaret had for heads on shoulders and holding hands had been postponed. She and Franklin had made up beds at the back of the shelter a little distance from each other, as brothers and sisters, and certainly half -brothers and-sisters, must. But their knees had touched for several heartbeats during their evening at the fireside, and they were content to stay in this good company until their eyes dropped shut. It was such a pleasure just to listen to and talk with friendly strangers. But Franklin, avoiding the true story of what had happened to them and their families in Ferrytown, had hardly started to amuse the net makers with his account of how Margaret had fished for birds in the forest when — silently, appallingly — the band of rustlers arrived.

How had they been so careless? The eight travelers must have been half blinded by staring into their fire and deafened by their conversation and their laughter not to have heard so many heavy feet surrounding them or to have picked up on the sound of horses. They realized that they were snared only when, suddenly, the remaining brightness of the night from the moon and stars and metal luster was blocked. Too ill-prepared for trouble, too shocked to stand and run, they could only sit exactly where they were and look up at the silhouettes of six or seven well-armed men, who, attracted — invited, almost — by the smoke, the flames, the throb of human voices, had crept up as evenly as wolves on a sheepfold.

Everyone could see enough by firelight to know what kind of men these were. Their faces were too weatherbeaten for them to be townspeople. Their clothes were not the clothes of emigrants, designed for warmth and durability, but the highly colored, quarrelsome garments of men keen to be noticed and alarming. Their beards were tied in braids with ribbons. Their legs were bowed from a life on horseback. They were not clean. Their smiles were far too sharp to promise anything but cruelty.

“Stand up,” one of them said, a short man in a long yellow canvas coat. He was a little older than the others and evidently the one most feared.

The travelers did as they were told and tried to stay expressionless as another one of the group stepped into the shelter to inspect each of them, turning them round, feeling their arms, even touching the women and the baby. He touched Margaret too much and looked her too directly in the eye. He whistled through his teeth when he felt the strength and size of Franklin’s arm. He fingered the piebald coat and laughed. “Give me that,” he said. Franklin handed over the coat, hoping against reason that it would prove to be the only loss of the night. The coat was passed to the short man, who put it over his yellow one. It sat so high on his shoulders that the bottom hem reached only the top of his ankles.

Two of the other men went into the darkness of the shelter with brands lit from the fire to see what they could find and take. Another led away the horses and the mules. Another smashed the potman’s pots that his son had unloaded, and, not doubting their safety, left in view for anyone to steal or damage.

Franklin and Margaret had no choice but to watch their barrow being unloaded, their mint plant being dashed onto the ground, and the now empty silver cup — their greatest wealth — and the ornamented platters being thrown into sacks along with the Joeys’ and the Boses’ best possessions (of which there were many).

Now the short man came forward himself to take a look, oddly awkward in his many clothes but doubly threatening. “Not her,” he said, referring to Melody Bose. “Not him, too old,” he added, meaning Andrew Bose. “Not that”—the granddaughter, hardly nine months old, not walking yet and so no use. “We’ll take the rest.” His companions came forward with rope and started looping it around their selected captives, beginning with the potman’s terrified son. They made nooses for their necks and wrists, so that the Joeys, young Acton Bose, Margaret, and Franklin could be joined and led away like the mules had been, in one long train.

Franklin’s last action before he too was bound and haltered by the rope was not exactly a heroic one, but it was thoughtful and intelligent. He saw a chance for Margaret. He reached across, not so quickly as to cause alarm among the men, and pulled the blue scarf off her head. They backed away at once. Few men are so tough or so intent on rape that fear of illness doesn’t caution them.

“Not her,” the short man said. “We don’t want her.”

They gathered up their plunder as quickly as they could. Then, almost as suddenly and silently as they’d arrived, the silhouettes disappeared. The Boses’ grandchild hadn’t even woken to see her father taken as a slave.