Folk Page 10

  In the quiet, he reminds himself of what he came to tell Oline. Tomorrow is his daughter’s birthday. May has never been told about her aunt. He agreed to this pact when Vina claimed she would not be able to bear the tactless questions of a child, reminding her of her lost sister at any moment. Galushen has mourned alone, mused alone, and the secret has grown heavier as his daughter has approached the age Oline was when she died. But the agreement ends when May is sixteen, and more than anything, more than the giving of gifts, the merriment, the sight of his daughter’s proud face, he is looking forward to the lifting of this burden. If Vina will not share the memory of Oline, he is sure that May will, if only out of curiosity. She will delight in hearing of their likeness. How often he has thought that May could have been Oline’s daughter, had she lived.

  At the table that evening, Galushen’s wife and daughter compose their faces like two beautiful carvings either side of him, and glower at one another. Vina taunts May for her puppy fat. May counts Vina’s wrinkles. While they bicker, Galushen eats. He is slow, letting the food melt and meld on his tongue. Tonight it is a pheasant, well-hung. He relishes the dark flesh, the pork fat he has used to roast it. For eighteen years, he has tried to take two mouths’ worth of enjoyment from his food. His wife and daughter chew just long enough between speaking to sharpen their barbs.

  ‘You’ll grow out of it, as you grew out of dolls, and dressing up in your father’s hunting clothes,’ says Vina.

  ‘I’ll never grow out of it,’ May spits. ‘I’ll die playing the fiddle, if I can. So, I have to go and do this.’

  Galushen wipes his mouth. ‘Do what?’

  ‘She doesn’t play with spirit yet, she says,’ Vina starts before May can speak. ‘And Quayle the fiddle-master has declared that she must find her spirit. Which sounds like a dreadful game.’

  ‘I can’t bear it, how hollow my playing sounds beside his. And it’s not a game.’

  Vina laughs. ‘Hide and seek?’

  ‘I’m not a child,’ May shouts, and shoves back her chair.

  ‘You are for one more day,’ says Vina.

  ‘Stay,’ says Galushen to his daughter, ‘she’s only teasing.’ But May is pulling a long box out from under the table.

  She opens it the same way Vina opens her jewel case, ready to feast on treasure. ‘It’s a mock-up,’ she says. She lifts out a fiddle that is pale, rough-skinned, as if left out to weather, but the shape is perfect, each notch and curve. ‘All Quayle’s apprentices have to make one. It took me a month, at his workshop.’ She raises it to her chin, and mimes a bow across the strings. ‘Quayle says it’s good enough. It proves I’m ready.’

  ‘And what does this mean?’ asks Galushen.

  ‘It means I’m to go out and find my fiddle-playing spirit. All the true fiddlers do it. Nine days is long enough, Quayle says. I’ll just stay out, and when I find it, I’ll make my own fiddle like he did. I’ll be able to play like him.’

  Vina rolls her eyes. ‘But you play perfectly.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Which is why it’s time. Quayle says I should go tomorrow.’

  ‘Your birthday?’ says Galushen. His daughter’s eyes are pleading with him. ‘Nine days?’

  May nods. ‘And then the time to make my fiddle.’

  Galushen counts again. How many more days, then, will he have to wait before he can tell her about Oline? His heart will burst. ‘I’ll speak to Quayle in the morning,’ he says.

  May crumples in her chair, and Vina smiles, straightening the silver rings on her long fingers.

  Galushen rises early, while his daughter sleeps. Vina is already seated before the wide window of their hall, her hands wet with clay. This is Vina’s only pastime, when she is not rearranging her rings or her gowns or her tresses. She digs the clay from the riverbank herself – a strange sight, Galushen imagines – and moulds from it small round pots that she seals shut. The house is dotted with them, overgrown seed pods that rattle sometimes, if shaken. Galushen rarely touches them. They irk him, these pots that cannot be used. They smack of contrariness.

  ‘You have her gifts ready?’ Vina asks when he stands behind her to look out at the heavy morning sky. The air is damp and chill after weeks of rain, more like the first day of March than the first of May.

  ‘All laid out for her,’ he says. He has not told Vina that, as well as hunting garments, he has bought May the finest horse the stables at the High Farm had to offer.

  ‘You’ve been too generous,’ says Vina, and Galushen thinks about the pact, his gift to Vina of sixteen years of silence.

  ‘I have only one daughter,’ he replies. He feels Vina bristle. On the day that May was born, he and Vina discovered in the same moment, staring at their daughter’s furious red face, that they had both been hoping for a son. Galushen had wanted a hunting companion, an ally in his image. Vina, he supposed, wanted a child who would not trouble her vanity by becoming too beautiful. Or, perhaps, too like Oline. Faced suddenly with this small, screaming girl, Galushen had spoken before he thought, and suggested the name Oline be given in remembrance. Vina had turned her face to the wall. He lost count of how many times he told her, over the days and weeks that followed, that he loved her more than he ever loved Oline. It would not have been enough to say that he loved her differently. Still, Vina did not take to her baby, would not hold her or look at her, as if punishing Galushen for his blunder. He carried his daughter out into the light spring air when she wailed, to spare Vina, and walked with her through the lanes of may blossom. Finally, he had named her for the month of her birth, and learned the first rule for his life as a father: he might love May, but Vina must feel the most loved of all.

  ‘You have only one wife, too,’ Vina retorts, dropping her clay, a wet clot, on the table.

  Galushen dons his fox-fur hat and walks down the hill towards Neverness village. The sky is sullen, and the ghost of the night’s rain prickles his face. He takes a shortcut through the orchard, where the trees drip here and there, and the long grass soaks his boots.

  When he reaches the row of workshops at the end of the village, he pauses to listen to the hammering and chinking of the woodcrafters’ tools. The first workshop belongs to the women of Neverness. He tried long ago to persuade Vina to join them, to soften the loss of a sister with female company. Wood carvings, the women make; close enough to clay work, Galushen thought, but Vina had refused, preferring solitude.

  The door of the last workshop is open. Inside, Quayle the fiddle-master sits with his small feet resting up high on the bench. He is tossing a fiddle bow into the air and catching it by the grip, again and again, and he does not waver as he turns his head and gives a nod of greeting.

  ‘You wish to send my daughter out into the wild, alone,’ Galushen says.

  Quayle flicks the bow so that it lands to hang neatly on the row of hooks above his head. ‘She is ready,’ he says. ‘You’ve heard her play. There’s nothing left for me to teach her.’

  ‘Then she’ll still be ready in a month, a year even.’

  Quayle shakes his head. ‘Leave it any longer, and life will begin to hurt and harden her. Or else, love might pierce that fresh young heart and ruin it.’ He shudders his narrow shoulders in disgust.

  ‘Nine days out there alone will surely be no better for her. Doesn’t she play well enough?’

  ‘She plays well enough that, with spirit, she might be a true fiddle-master. She has the desire to do it, and the nimblest fingers. But a fiddler without spirit is like, what?’ He glances at Galushen’s fur hat, his hunter’s coat. ‘It’s like a fox with no hunger. A stag with no pride.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Dull. Nobody wants it.’

  Galushen pulls off his hat and clenches it behind his back. ‘But nine days. Alone, no shelter.’

  Quayle leaves his seat and comes to lean by the door. He stands only as high as Galushen’s shoulder, yet seems to take up the whole space, blocking the light. ‘You can go home and tell her no, and she might as well
give up playing today,’ he says. ‘She could take up clay-work, like her mother. But my hunch is she’ll go anyway.’

  Galushen thinks of the gifts he has gathered for May, all meant to protect her in the wild, but by his side. He planned to take her hunting, show her the joy of the chase and the kill, but of birds and beasts, not this flimsy idea of spirit. That fine black colt is waiting for her at the High Farm stables even now. After he’d watched Madden, the stable hand there, ride the animal for him, he’d been seized by how much stronger, how much safer, a girl looked on horseback. He’d had a job of coaxing Trick and Robin to sell it, and had made a rash offer in the end, to secure that same strength for his daughter. He wants her to take it. ‘If she’s to go out on a hunt, then, might she ride?’ he asks.

  Quayle gives a high laugh.

  ‘Then how does a man – or indeed a girl – hunt down this spirit, as you call it?’

  Quayle leaves the door and goes to the corner of the workshop, where a fiddle leans in the shadow. ‘I’d been out six days. Hadn’t eaten; nothing but stream water and bits of herbs I found. I was at the shore, cold, wretched, the dark coming down, and when I got to the far end, I heard it.’ He picks up the fiddle and walks towards Galushen with it tucked under his chin. ‘The roar in the cave there; it sang chords to me.’ He begins to draw his bow across the strings.

  More notes than Galushen can count are tumbling from the fiddle, clashing in his heart. The tune rolls low and tugs deep in his chest, the moon tugging a tide.

  ‘Spent the whole night in the cave.’ Quayle’s voice is raised over the storm of music that seems too strong, too sad, to be breaking from one small man. As it goes on, it conjures images in mist, a boat lost in the endless black, a voice deep in a cave. Galushen is enraged and enchanted at once, for while the sadness of the song makes him want to think of lost love, of Oline, he cannot summon her to mind. The music tells of someone else’s loss.

  When Quayle stops playing, it is like the sigh of a wave sinking back beneath itself. ‘See?’ he says.

  Galushen takes the fiddle and notes that the pegs that hold the strings taut are smoothed dripstones, snapped from a cave roof. The neck is driftwood, the fingerboard a mosaic of flat scallop shells. He admires the fine work of piecing them together into a thing of such beauty, both in sight and sound. He holds it to his ear and hears the faint hiss of the sea.

  ‘You made this afterwards?’

  ‘May will do the same.’

  ‘And the song that you played?’

  ‘It entered the fiddle, as it entered me, too,’ Quayle says. ‘It belongs to the cave. A memory left there.’

  Galushen walks home the longer way, where the path is not so steep. It passes the river, so high after the April rain that it is washing away the bank, sending clumps of grass into the swirling current. The water is deep brown. He can hear May practising as he climbs the hill, nearing the house. It’s a jig he knows, ladders and whirligigs of notes that run away with themselves, and that he has felt proud to hear her play. But now he can feel the lack in it, beside Quayle’s conjuring. The pang the fiddle-master left in his chest has not fully faded.

  May is playing in front of the largest mirror in the house. She has found the pile of gifts Galushen left for her, and put them all on. The garments were meant only to shield his daughter from the wind and wet; he did not think how she would look, wearing them. Now, in the russet deerskin cape, the black leather gaiters, the red fox-fur cap atop her hank of black hair, she looks like a blood-stained huntress.

  ‘Thank you,’ she calls as he passes behind her, and she plays harder, louder, smacking her bow down against the strings.

  There is lustiness in her playing at least. Quayle’s song was mournful, a feeling familiar to Galushen but one he does not want his daughter to know too well. If she learns to play with spirit, does that mean pain, too? May is so young. She is a joy to him. He wants that joy to remain, for it to suffuse them both when he tells her about Oline.

  At the table, Vina smiles at May as if a harsh word had never passed between them. ‘Nine days without an hour of fiddle practice,’ she says. ‘That must be the best of your birthday gifts.’

  ‘Much longer,’ says May. She has kept on the cape. ‘After I’ve found my spirit, I have to make my new fiddle. I can’t play the plain one then, can I?’

  Galushen chews but can hardly taste the deer meat. He is counting again, the number of days this might take, until he can share the truth with his daughter.

  ‘And where might you look, on your great hunt?’ Vina is still smiling. She has dressed today in a pale cloud-grey, with silver glinting at her throat and wrists, so close to the silver of her hair that Galushen keeps glancing at it. Her hair had changed while she was carrying May, the redhead he had married fading to a silver-headed mother. The shock of losing a sister, he’d supposed, finally showing itself in her body when it did not show in her demeanour.

  ‘I won’t just be looking,’ May replies. ‘It’s not like a game of hide and seek.’

  ‘How will you know when you’ve found it?’ Galushen asks.

  May is looking hard at her mother, trying to wither the smile still fixed on her lips. ‘It will be a new feeling. Not like any other. I’ll know.’

  Galushen gives up on his meat. His mouth is dry, and he takes a great gulp of wine. Vina does not look at him, but goes on questioning and encouraging May. She sounds delighted with the whole plan. When May takes her advice and goes to begin packing the food and belongings she will need, Galushen waits until she is out of earshot, and takes another long draught from his cup.

  ‘Today should have been the day to tell her,’ he says.

  Vina’s smile is sly. ‘That you’ve spent half your fortune on a horse for a gift, and she can’t even take it with her? Trick and Robin will be laughing at you in the ale room for months, getting drunk on your gold.’

  ‘No, not that.’ Galushen’s cheeks are burning.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘The pact. Sixteen years, we agreed. Then she would be old enough, and time would have passed to ease your memory.’

  Vina is staring at him. ‘You cannot be thinking of that.’ Her eyes are cold, testing.

  ‘What else? I kept my promise, I’ve said nothing. There’s no need to keep such a secret any longer.’

  ‘All these years, and you are still thinking of her?’ Vina hisses, as May runs past the open door and up the stairs. ‘How dare you?’ Her chair screeches and clatters to the stone floor as she stands, still holding her cup of wine.

  ‘But we must tell her.’

  ‘Oh, spare me.’ Her voice is a growl. Wine flies from her cup as she throws up her arms. ‘You think she doesn’t know? That she has never heard so much as a whisper all this time? The village is full of gossip. She has friends – that urchin-child Gad, for one, always prattling. You’re a fool if you think there’s any secret to be told.’

  Galushen reaches out a hand to calm her, but she jerks away and lets the cup fall and shatter on the stone.

  ‘You married me, Galushen. It’s me who’s been here with you, sixteen years and longer,’ she shouts. ‘It’s me you love.’

  Galushen watches his wife storm from the room, her bracelets clashing. He drains the wine from the jug and swallows it down to quell the burn of shame in his throat. If it’s true, that May knows all about Oline, that she no more wants to talk of her than Vina does, he is indeed a fool. And worse, one whose daughter has never asked him, has never come to hear the truth from his mouth.

  The three of them stand together by the stump of the oak tree that used to shade the back of the house. Galushen misses that tree, lost in the Great Storm. But he will miss his daughter more. May is wearing the russet cape, the red fox-fur cap, and has on her shoulder the bag Galushen made, with knife, flask, flint and cured meat all inside. Vina pats her daughter’s shoulder and smiles her farewells, but Galushen seizes her and will not loose her from his arms.

  ‘If you pass b
y here, leave me a sign,’ he whispers through her hair. ‘Don’t be afraid to give up.’

  May nods. She pulls away from him, and as she runs down the hill she waves her arms in goodbye, but does not turn. He watches her cape flying in the squally air, until she is as small as a blood-red bead rolling into the trees at the valley bottom.

  When she has been gone only a few hours he goes to the oak stump, looking for some mark she might have left. He kicks at the few heads of clover that are poking from the grass, then sits there until the last smudge of light has left the sky.

  The next morning, he wakes with a start, and remembers. He should not have let May go. He should not have listened to Vina, either. His mind’s eye roves the most treacherous places his daughter could be wandering: the deep clefts along the coast; the shore cave; the steep-sided headland. It is still dark, but dawn is a fine time for a huntsman to be out, should anyone see him. He searches for his slingshot and tramps down the hill towards the wood.

  The rain has stopped, but the world is deep in dew. His daughter has slept out, somewhere, in this dank, chilled place. There are wood pigeons, dozy on their roosts. There will be grouse, a few pheasants, nestled in the low bushes. He walks in the half-hearted light of dawn, the slingshot dangling loose at his side. The wider paths have been trodden recently. Someone has hacked a few wands from a hazel tree. When he reaches the edge of the wood he can hear the river, rushing, swollen, eating away at its banks. He wonders where Vina comes to dig the clay for her maddening pots.

  Hunger begins to nag his stomach, along with doubt. May is bold, and he has taught her to look after herself out here. She wouldn’t risk the clefts, or the cave. And if Vina was right, and May already knows about Oline, it can wait a little longer before he speaks to her. He can find a way of broaching it that will not reveal his foolishness. What he cannot shake off is the anger, that he could have confided in her long ago, and been rid of this burden of secrecy.