Unknown - Heartsease

“No,” said Margaret. “It wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t. Please, I’d like to tell you. You look as though you’d understand.”

The needles clicked to the end of the row and the woman put them down.

“Tell me one thing first,” she said, “before I decide to listen. Do you believe, right in the honest heart of you, that you’ve done God’s will?”

“I’ve not thought of it that way,” said Margaret. “But yes, I suppose so. Once we’d begun we couldn’t have done anything else. It would have been wrong to stop.” “If you believe that,” said the woman, “really and truly, I’ll hear you out. Don’t you tire yourself, mind.”

So Margaret told her story while the needles rattled and the fat fingers fluttered and the motes drifted and shafts of sunlight edged across the room. All the words she needed came to her just when she wanted them. She never changed her voice, but let the story roll out in a steady whisper, even and simple, like water sliding into a millrace. All the time she watched the woman’s face, which never changed by the smallest wrinkle or the least movement of the mouth corners, up or down. When the story was ended she shut her eyes and tried to sink back into the darkness which had been her home for four days.

“Aye,” said the woman, “it’s wicked water, the

Severn. No, I don’t see what else you could have done, my dear. Thank you for telling me. My men are out sowing — that’s my husband and my son — and we won’t tell them what you and I know. They wouldn’t understand the rights and wrongs of it like we do, being women. My name’s Sarah Dore, and you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

“Oh, you are kind,” said Margaret. “But really I must go and tell Aunt Anne what’s happened to Jonathan.” “Maybe you must,” said Mrs. Dore, “but not till you’re well inside yourself. Two days you were that nigh death I fairly gave you up.”

“How’s Scrub?” said Margaret.

“Right as rain. My Martin’s got a way with horses, so he’s pulling a cart up in Long Collins.”

Margaret smiled.

“He won’t like that ” she said and fell asleep again, a silky, dreamless, healing sleep that lasted until she woke to the hungry smell of frying bacon. She got out of bed, found a dressinggown on the chair where Mrs. Dore had sat and, holding weakly to walls and banisters, traced the smell down to the kitchen, where the Dores greeted her as though she’d belonged in that family ever since she could crawl. She stayed with them eighteen days, and at last rode off after trying to say thank-you in a hundred different ways, none of which seemed nearly enough. Indeed, the day before she left Martin brought up from the beach a gull with a broken wing, which he set before bandaging the bird into a fruit basket so that it could not harm itself with its struggles. Margaret looked into its desperate wild eye and tried to tell it that it was safe here.

The gale had blown the winter away, and weald and wold were singing with early spring. Really singing — innumerable birds practicing their full melody among the still-bare branches of every hedge. As she crossed the smooth upland behind the Dores’ farm she saw a dazzling blink of black and white, gone before she could see the true shape of it, but she was sure it was wheat-ears. And then there were curlews, playing in the. steady southwest wind. The color of the woods had changed — beeches russet with the swelling of their tight little leaf-buds, birch-tops purple as a plum. And the larches were a real red with their tasseled flowers, and the sticky buds of chestnuts glistened when the sun came out from behind the lolloping fat clouds which rode up off the Atlantic.

But, more than anything, every breath she took was full of the odor of new growth, a smell as strong as hyacinths. In winter there are no smells, or very few and sour — woodsmoke and reeking dung heaps and the sharp odors man makes with his toil. But there comes a morning when the wind is right and the sun has real pith in it, and then all the sappy smells of growth are sucked out of the earth, like mists from a marsh, and the winds spread them abroad, streaming on the breeze with a thrilling honey-sweetness which even high summer — the summer of bees nosing into lime-blossom — cannot equal.

It was through such a world as this that Margaret rode home, with Scrub dancing and happy beneath her and all her blood and all her mind well again. (To be fair, Scrub was probably mostly happy not to be pulling the Dores’ cart.) She had to fetch a wide circle round Bristol, which seemed an even bigger city than Gloucester, and ask her way north many times; but all the people she spoke to were full of the kindliness of the season and answered her like friends. That night she slept in an isolated barn beside a beech-hanger, north of Chipping Sodbury. The air turned cold but she snuggled deeper into the tickling hay and made herself a nest of warmth where she dozed until the dawn birds began their clatter of small talk again.

It was another dew-fresh day, chilly but soft, with scarfs of mist floating in the valleys. The sun, an hour after it was up, became strong enough to strike caressingly through her coat, and the wind was less than yesterday’s and herding fewer clouds. She had started so early that she was hungry enough for another meal by mid-morning. As she settled to eat it in the nook of a south-facing dry-stone wall she saw, almost at her feet on the strip of last year’s plowland, a tuft of wildflowers: yellow and white, marked out with strong brown-purple lines which made each flower a quaint cat face. Wild pansies, heartsease. They must have been the very first of all the year.

She reached out to pick them so that she could carry home with her a token of that grimy but heroic tug, then drew her hand back and left them growing. All the time she munched the good farmbread and the orange cheese, she kept looking at them, so frail and delicate, but fluttering undamaged above the stony tilth.

It was dinnertime in the village when she came to Low Wood. She had worked her way round by well-known paths so as to be able to come to the farm without passing another house. Now she tied Scrub to a wild cherry, just big enough for the hired man not to have felled it, in the hollow of a little quarry where he couldn’t be seen from the road. She tried to tackle her problem Jonathan-style, so she used a knot which Scrub would be able to loose with a jerk or two — just in case she was trapped by vengeful villagers. The safest thing would be to creep up and hide until she could talk to Aunt Anne alone.

Primroses fringed the quarry, and celandine sparkled in the wood. She walked up the eight-acre, keeping well in under the hedge; then stole through the orchard. There seemed to be no sound of life in the whole village, though most of the chimneys showed a faint plume of smoke; no men called, no bridles clinked. She tiptoed along the flagged path at the edge of the yard and peeped carefully through the kitchen window.

They had finished their meal but were still sitting at the table — not in their own chairs at either end but side by side on the bench where the children used to sit. Aunt Anne’s hand lay out across the white deal, and Uncle Peter’s huge fist covered it. Their faces were shaped with hard lines, like those a stone-carver’s chisel makes when he is roughing out a figure for a tombstone. They both looked as though they had lost everything they had ever loved.

Margaret changed her mind about hiding; she stepped across to the door, lifted the latch and went in.

They looked up at her with a single jerk of both heads and sat staring.

“May I come back, please?” she said.

“Where’s Jo?” said Uncle Peter. His voice was a coughing whisper.