Folk Read online

  Ervet knows every name for a hare that there is. She kept Turpin home that way, one night soon after they were wed. ‘Dew beater, Fiddle-foot, Dweller in the corn,’ she cried, and he had laughed as she pulled him back behind the box-bed curtain. It was that night, she was sure, in their bed that reeked of the sea, that Turpin planted inside her the gleaming herring that swelled in her belly, all winter and into spring, slithering and flicking its awful tail. How glad she has been to be rid of it, this last month.

  The pot is still cold. Turpin is ready.

  ‘Mother will come at sun-up,’ he says, picking a sealskin off the hook and shaking out the salt. ‘And the wet nurse at midday.’

  She bites harder on her lip.

  ‘Be kind, Ervet. It’s a kindness my mother does you. She said a spring clean will do you good.’ He throws the sealskin about his shoulders. ‘I thought we’d name the bab Iska, for her?’ He leans to stroke her head and she flinches away from the fish-skin stink that is already on his hands. Turpin slams the door, leaving a spray of water behind him.

  ‘Go-by-ditch, Go-by-ground, Skulker in the ferns,’ Ervet mumbles, sinking back to sleep.

  She is woken by her own name, bellowed. Ma Turpin has in one clenched fist a crumple of rags, in the other the handle of a pail. Soon Ervet is dressed in one of Ma Turpin’s smocks, and all morning, while a bleary sun beckons beyond the cold stone walls of the cottage, Ma Turpin shows her what she does not wish to learn. How to scrub a hearthstone with sand to shift the herring grease. How to oil a sealskin just enough. How to sharpen gutting knives; how to gut and salt and thread so that always the smoking chimney will be hung with strings of curing bodies, like foul washing lines.

  Ma Turpin’s hands are barnacled with warts. When she scolds Ervet her voice is like a seal’s bark. Turpin’s clothes are crusted and unwashed, she barks. Turpin’s cup is dirty. There is not enough soap, there is too much grime. ‘What,’ she asks Ervet, ‘have you been finding to do all the long day that’s more pressing than making spick and span for your husband?’ They are standing in the garden, shaking out fish scales from the rug. Ervet looks over Ma Turpin’s shoulder at the green hill. Beyond it lies the marsh and the sweet scent of rushes. It is there Ervet has crept, all those long days of biting winter and dank spring, with Turpin out on the sea and the herring curled inside her, heavier and heavier. On the marsh is her father’s empty house, and she has left her fishwife tasks undone to go and mend its windblown slats, its salt-eaten floors.

  ‘My son’s one thing.’ Ma Turpin is glaring at Ervet. ‘But that bab’s his own, which makes it mine, and I won’t see it suffer in all this smirch. You see I won’t.’

  Ervet longs to drop the rug at Ma Turpin’s feet and set out for the marsh, right now. But it is Ma Turpin who drops the rug and rushes past Ervet, for the girl Werrity has come with the shawl-wrapped bundle. Ma Turpin seizes it from her arms and brings it to Ervet, leaving Werrity on the path.

  Inside the shawl, fishscale-patterned and smelling as much, are the grey eyes that never seem to close, just stare and stare at her, shining. There is the mouth that pops open and sucks at air.

  ‘See that,’ Ma Turpin barks, too close, her hot herring breath in Ervet’s own mouth. ‘It’s your milk she wants. It’s been a month now, Ervet. Time to take your turn, or your bab’ll take that no-good teat girl for her own mam. And we all know she’s nothing but trouble.’

  Ervet glances at Werrity, who scowls from the path. Let her, Ervet thinks. Let her take the bab, fishskin and all.

  ‘Ma Turpin,’ Werrity calls. ‘There’s been a mishap up at the High Farm. The stable girl Madden’s got bit by a horse and she can’t staunch the wound. Looked a mess, and my brothers have ridden off somewhere.’ She glares up at the hills above the village. ‘Will you come and see?’

  They both look at the bundle Ervet holds, then.

  ‘You know what to do and what not to,’ Ma Turpin says, less of the bark in her voice. ‘You stay put with your bab and I’ll be back round by tide turn.’ She is asking Werrity has she salt, is the wound very deep, as they stamp away down the path. When their voices have faded, Ervet steps out after them and begins to walk, taking the other path through the dunes, towards the fishers’ huts that line the shore.

  It was bafflement that made her father give Turpin his nod, in the end. Six herrings, Turpin had brought on the first day of courting, then twelve, and lastly twenty-four. They’d been laid out on the table, where her father had stared at them like rows of useless silver tools. Worth that much to you, is she? his narrowed eyes said. More fool you. Ervet had been glad to leave the smell of them and walk out with Turpin, to be his wife. A life with him could not be colder than one with her glowering father. The only sadness on that day, when the gift of fishes had done its trick and released her, was that her beloved hares could not follow her to Turpin’s house. They had been her only comfort, at the silent marsh house. They had been a gift, too, one her father came to rue. He’d come home from hunting one day with bulging pockets. Ervet, still a girl, had screamed to see them squirm, believing he’d brought snakes, but when he’d let out the three tiny leverets, she had laughed as they bounded around her feet, hind legs already as strong as trap-springs.

  Ervet does not hurry through the ridge of dunes as she often has, darting between the tuffets of slicing grass. Instead she clambers up the sand, better to look at the shore. Out over the grey sea the cloud is low, ruffled like a deep belly of fur. The bundle is squirming against her shoulder, that same twist and lurch she felt when it was swimming inside her, when she was certain of its silver gleam and strong tail. The grey eyes match the sea so well. How can she name it? Iska, she tries, and spits the name out. She slithers down the dune on to the wet shore. Her feet leave dints that well with water as she walks.

  Her father loved nothing as much as his tools. He made the cunning trap that caught the leverets’ blue-grey mother, and while Ervet coaxed the creatures from their corners that day, it was the scent of dark meat roasting that filled their draughty house. But he had let her keep them, and Ervet ate her hare supper with the three small bodies nestled soft as skeins of wool in her lap. Mawkins, she called them. She was only a child, then, and her favourite was the yellow-speckled one. He followed her about the house, while his grey sisters stretched themselves near the hearth, happy as dogs. She learned to smooth a finger along his scalp between his ears so that he would shiver and then lie still, letting her look into the puddle of his eye. When he beat his feet on hers she would lead him along the plank walk and up into the fields, where he ran his own mazes but always returned, to stretch his long yellow body beside her own, heart flickering under sun-smelling fur.

  All three mawkins Ervet kept, and they grew with her. And on the blue bright morning after Turpin carried her away, she went back for them. She needed her dresses, her woollens and shoes, after all, but her yellow-coated friend and his sisters were more in her mind as she knocked and pushed the door. No father in his carved chair. No mawkins on the hearth rug. She followed the scrape and chuck of tools on wood through to the leanshed.

  Two blue-grey pelts hung from the drying hook, blood black as tar dripping into a pail. On the workbench lay a yellow skin, piebald with purple stains, and beside it the skull, still flesh-streaked, still wet. Her father’s eyes blinked at her where she blocked the light in the doorway.

  ‘You’ve Turpin now,’ he said. ‘You’ll not be needing these old pusses.’ Ervet gripped the uprights either side of her, felt the wood grain slide through her fingers. ‘Besides, they’re the worst of bad luck to a fisherman.’

  She stared into the dark of the skull’s wide eye-hole until she and the leanshed and her father had all sunk inside it.

  Ervet squats at the foamline, scooping bubbles into her palm, where they vanish. When water trickles on to the head in the bundle, the grey eyes blink but still stare at her, all clouds and sea. She lets the fishscale wrapping drop into the foam. The grey underlayer of swaddl
e is hot in her hands. Turpin is out on this same gritty sea, dragging up fish from their hidden swarms, dragging them up and bringing them home on his skin.

  ‘It’s no good, Ervet,’ Turpin had said from behind the box-bed curtain, one night when, though frost still crusted the earth, she had slipped into the cottage from the deep dark of the small hours. She hadn’t meant to stay so long at the marsh house, but the hushing of the reeds as she worked at her mending, hammering back the fallen slats, sealing the gaps with yellow marsh mud, had lulled her so, she had been able to forget the fish sleeping in her belly.

  ‘We’ve a child coming,’ he had said. ‘Think of that. Where have you been?’ She was silent. ‘For pity’s sake, Ervet.’

  The curtain swept to one side and Turpin hauled himself up from the bed. He was still in the shirt he had put on in the chill of the night before, and as he moved towards her the stink of fish and sea seemed to wash right through her.

  ‘Such a face! Is that your feeling, now, for your own husband?’ He gripped her by the shoulders as she retched, her belly heaving, the fish inside churning, and when he tried to bring her close to him she pushed his chest.

  Ervet had sat in the garden, then, breathing the night air clean and fresh as stream water, letting herself chill in it until the pinch of the cold faded. When the moon had sailed right across the sky and she no longer felt anything at all, not even a flicker of fishtail against her ribs, she stumbled indoors and set about lighting the fire. This much she could do. This she had done for her father, a thousand thankless times.

  When she lifted the pot of water, pain tied a knot around her belly and pulled. She gasped, but did not drop the pot, and stood bent over until the knot loosened. When the pot was on and the fire steady, she was nearly at the box bed when the knot tightened again.

  ‘Turpin?’ she said. ‘Turpin?’ He woke with a grumble and looked right past her to the glow of the flames.

  ‘That’s better, Ervet,’ he said, stretching, and got up to go and warm himself. ‘We’ll make a fishwife of you yet.’ She let herself fall into the fishskin sheets and curled herself up there, listening to Turpin stamping his feet and splashing water across his face.

  ‘Don’t go out,’ she called. ‘Not tonight.’ There was quiet and she knew he was bending to look through the window.

  ‘It’s calm as noon out there, Ervet. It’ll be a good catch.’

  ‘Please. Not tonight.’ The knot was squeezing the breath from her. How to keep him here, how to make him untie it for her and bring her back to herself? ‘Dew beater, Dew hopper, Layer with the lambs,’ she cried out. ‘Fiddle-foot, Light foot, Skulker in the ferns.’

  The splashing and stamping stopped.

  ‘You curse your own husband.’ Turpin’s voice was clenched. ‘Then so be it. If you’d have the fish alive, swimming out beyond reach, and me dead.’ She felt it then, the thrash of tail, and sea water poured from her. Turpin was gone.

  The bundle squeals and writhes against Ervet. She remembers the knotted night, time tangling into day, then evening. It had been Ivy Rincepan who finally pushed open the door and found her. Ivy had set down her own pudding of a baby and used her hard hands, her hard grasp, to set Ervet free. ‘You’ll know what to do,’ Ivy had said, lowering the squalling thing towards her chest. Ervet had shaken her head and turned away.

  She takes another handful of foam, but when she looks up, along the shore, she lets the water seep through her fingers. There, on the black rock that runs down the shoreline like a charred spine, stands a hare. Its head is high, sniffing the sea wind that ruffles its yellow pelt.

  ‘Dew hopper, Light foot, Layer with the lambs,’ Ervet murmurs. The hare watches her as she steps along the thinning strip between the sea and seaweed line, past the Webbe brothers’ fishing hut, towards the shore end. When she reaches the black rock, the sea has covered her path and lifted the seaweed up on its furling shoulders.

  Ervet hefts her bundle higher. The hare takes the shore path in halting lollops, keeps on where the sand turns earthy and traces the edge of the marsh. When it reaches the point where the plankwalk juts out away from firm ground and into the reeds, the hare turns its puddle gaze on Ervet.

  ‘Go home,’ she whispers, but she walks alone with her grey bundle along the plankwalk, her feet finding the safe spots amid the broken slats.

  Ervet unhooks the loop of plaited reed at the marsh-house door and breathes in the first deep draught of wind-dried wood and old smoke. The rosemary sprig lies on the table where she left it, browned leaves dropped and scattered across the wood she waxed. Beside it, the cradle basket the Webbe boy, Verlyn, had woven for her, still unused. She leaves the door open, for the wind, for the hare, and rosemary leaves scuttle across the floor. She flinches as she thinks of Ma Turpin’s broom, of fishscales, of Ivy Rincepan’s tut as she coddled two babs on her lap. But when she goes to lay her bundle in the basket, she finds she misses the heat of it against her breast.

  She watches the bundle for a while. The marsh house is whole again, its wind-warped slats straightened, its rush roof wadded deep and dry. There is nothing left to mend. It is just as it was when her father vanished, a week after her wedding to Turpin. She’d supposed he was glad to be rid of her, and of her mawkins. Perhaps that was what he had waited for. She feels the chill the wind brings where her chest is still damp with sea water. The only part of the house she has not touched is the leanshed.

  The door through to it hangs crooked on the salt-rusted hinge. On the threshold she smells rot, the green seep of the marsh water. The bench is bare; the hooks and ledges where her father’s tools once glinted are all empty. But high in the corner, three pelts still hang, two blue-grey and one yellow. Cobweb knits about her fingers as she pulls one down.

  She scrabbles in a drawer to find needle and thread, the finer kind meant for cloth and broken skin. Mother’s work, stitching up. Her father had said this even as Ervet mended a slit in his palm, once, and neither had said she was no mother, not then.

  The pelt is tough and soon speckled with her own red blood as she pushes the needle in, out, through. It is not dainty work. There are tears where her father was rough as he skinned. When she is done, she sucks the blood from her fingers.

  ‘Flincher, Snuffler, Yellow speckled one,’ she whispers, as she lifts her sleeping bundle from the basket and unwraps the damp grey linen. She folds around the pink skin a new, soft-furred one. The feel of fur warmed from within is soothing sweet. Ervet lies down on the old rug and folds herself around her mawkin.

  It’s wet in there. Hark doesn’t care. There’s only a few drips get through the ox-hide, once you’re in. It’s the getting settled that’s the slippery bit.

  ‘If you get it wet, it stinks more,’ his brother Dally once warned him, but Hark thinks a bit of beast stink will set things up nicely, make the girlies reel and pinch their noses.

  He’s listened to his older brothers quarrel on and on about the best kind of answers to what the girlies ask, which is nearly always the same. Just last week, he’d been swinging on the field gate with Dally and Pie, watching the black ox rip up daisies in the midday heat, while they debated just this question.

  ‘The best way is to fright them,’ Pie had said. ‘That’s what they want, it excites them. You seen what they get like at the gorse race.’

  ‘Don’t want to fright them like Crab Skerry did. Best stay alive,’ said Dally, and both Hark’s brothers had snorted with laughter.

  ‘This in’t like that, though,’ said Hark, and tried not to think of that blackened boy in the gorse.

  ‘Well, what you say depends on who it is comes along,’ said Dally. ‘If you get one of the pretty girlies, you want to make the most of it. Keep her there. When I got Linnet Lundren once, I kept her talking till that golden hair of hers was all frizzed up and her dress was wet through.’

  Pie had pushed Dally off the gate then, into the dried rut of mud underneath, so Hark slid into his place.

  ‘How do you
scare them best?’

  ‘She don’t belong to you,’ Dally grumbled, dusting off his knees.

  ‘You have to think what it is girlies care about,’ Pie said, and paused. Pie takes it very serious, but he’s eight whole years older than Hark, so he’s been doing it longest.

  ‘Nice dresses?’

  ‘That’s one thing. But why do they like nice dresses?’Hark thought hard. ‘’Cause they like things pretty and nice? ’Stead of interesting things?’

  ‘Dally likes nice dresses, don’t he?’ Pie swung a foot at Dally and missed.

  ‘When they’re wet,’ said Dally.

  ‘They like pretty things,’ Pie went on, ‘because they think, if they look all frilly and act all lady-ish, they’ll get married quicker to a handsome fellow and make a heap of babs just like their mammies. And that’s what they want. Any dunnock knows that.’

  ‘Babs?’

  ‘Babs and a good soaking.’ Dally had grabbed Hark’s feet and somersaulted him backwards into a patch of nettles.

  But here Hark is now, just him and the waterfall and the slime to get over. It’s one thing avoiding the slews of green when you’re in your trousers and you can watch your feet. When you’re stitched into an ox-hide and you’re too small to reach the eyeholes, things are more tricksy. It was bad enough bouncing against the tree trunks on the way through the wood, getting his feet in all the mushy leaves. Hark can’t see any part of himself, and he nudges at the dripping rocks with his toes, trying to sense where there’s grip, where there’s slip.

  It’ll be like a room once he’s in. There’s so much water even this time of year that it makes a proper curtain, and the rush and splatter of it wipes out most other sounds. He can still hear a few dawn birdies in the wood waking each other up, telling each other how much they’ve got to do today, like his mam at the kitchen table. She’ll be there now, spouting tea into Dally and Pie’s mugs and making steam fly everywhere, hot steam, while the vapour in Hark’s eyes is the cold kind. His stomach clenches for a moment, wishing for tea and a bit of honey bread, but you couldn’t bring bread in here, it’d just turn into a soggy sponge.