Folk Read online

  The first sign I had that the drowning had twisted her mind was when I got her upright. She turned right about and made a lurch for the pool, meaning to plunge herself back down into it. She wailed when I caught her and trapped her against me, sodden as she were and so cold she numbed my fingers. I had a task of it, herding her back down the slope, as she dug in her heels and scratched at my poor red hands all the way, shrieking to be let back. Get her home and soothed, I told myself. Warm her through like a griddle cake and she’ll calm sure enough.

  The fire dwindled while I rocked her before it, but I daren’t let go, despite the ache in my arms, and the chill in my own sides from holding her. Those shrieks did quieten to whimpers in time, though the echo of them still rang in my ears, even as she snivelled and gave in. We rocked and rocked until her breathing turned to long sleeping draughts, and I let the weight of her drop gently against the rug. I folded it up around her like a pastry pie and watched her then, stoking the fire, until dawn came white at the window.

  Nobody comes back from a wallow with a water bull. At least I never heard of it. It’s so rare to see one up and out of the sea, and the hunger that draws them is so fierce. It’s hunger for a soul. You can know that by the tatter that’s left behind.

  It were still the cloths for her wedding trunk I worked at, on the stool beside her bed, though that were perhaps useless toil now. I couldn’t let the patterns lie unfinished, but in my mind I planned other threadways, weaves that would wind her safe inside my house, stitches to keep man and beast at bay. I’d failed my own daughter in that way. But I would keep my granddaughter safe, whatever the burden upon me, whatever wiles it might take.

  Once, while I sat at my work, Plum in her fever opened her eyes and, seeming to see what I were at, asked for a wedding dress of waterweeds.

  Winfrid stitches blessings into her broideries, but she can stitch curses too. This is why my water bull does not come here to fetch me home. Some net of hers keeps him away, cast over the house like sticky cobweb.

  While she has me knotted up in her spell-soaked sheets, there comes another rat-a-tip-tap at the door. This one has Linnet Lundren behind it, with her butter-silk hair and her summer-brown legs, which she crosses neat in the seat beside my bed as she smooths her frock, all proper. Win smiles at Linnet as she closes the door on us, and I look snakes at Linnet as she smiles back.

  ‘Oh, you poor Plum, poor Plum pudding,’ she sings, loud so Win will hear, while she pinches my elbow with her hot fingers. She looks at me, all over, even though I’m swaddled up in layers of linen.

  ‘What was it like, Plum?’ Linnet whispers. She does that corn-dolly smile. Last time I saw her do it was two nights before the storm, before my water bull came for me. We were all gathered in the wool-stunk room of the bard house, while Quayle the fiddler scraped on and on, waiting for a teller to take the stage. The place was full of the shrivelled ears and soft-boiled heads of all the old folk, listening like they’d never heard those tunes before. I saw Linnet with Madden Lightfoot in the corner, and I sat down right by her. I hid the snakes in my eyes for once and was the sweetest Plum pudding to her, as if we’d be friends. I got my way. While the tune droned on, Linnet turned away from Madden and whispered in my ear instead. She took my hand and drew me out to the lane to play at Threads.

  The Love Hart Oak is on the bank beyond the lane, and there was Dally Oxley and his brother Pie, scuffling in the mud, the one pushing the other’s face to grate against the oak trunk, but when Linnet called their names and giggled in her golden way that makes me want to hiss, they hauled up straight and showed their faces serious. Even now they’ve grown taller they’re neither of them princes, not even handsome woodsmen who might fell a forest for a maiden, or slay a wolf for love. But Pie works in the stables sometimes, and I’d seen him thundering along the shore on the farmer’s colt, at a gallop against the wind, flying, and I’d dreamt of it often after.

  In my dreams before there were only those stitched-on kisses, lips pressed but not bitten, sighs with no soul behind. Even when I used to play the gorse game with the others, I got only a useless peck from Sandy Rincepan. Now I wanted a proper kiss, wet and warm, and I knew to get one I must play Threads with Linnet.

  She handed the threads out, there under the Love Hart Oak, and ‘hup!’ she cried, and the four of us flicked up our hands. For a flash in the light I saw the threads we’d thrown and their hues as they twirled, russet, green, marigold, dun. Then Linnet swung the lantern down, holding up her skirts to make the light catch at her long brown legs, and we peered into the mud.

  There was my russet crossed with Pie’s dun, and Linnet’s marigold twisted up with Dally’s green.

  ‘All matched!’ Linnet said. ‘Plum and Pie, oh, Plum Pie, the best kind! Go on,’ and she nudged at me, smiling all the while at Dally, who looked like he’d won a whole summer of cream.

  I stumbled out of the lantern light to the gap in the back of the Love Hart Oak. It was a struggle to get into, my dress caught on crags of bark, and I wince to remember now how I bit my lips to plump them up. How I wanted that kiss, and to smell the boy smell of stables and sweat so close and to feel so in love, for that is what I believed would happen, inside the Love Hart Oak. I waited.

  ‘I’d rather kiss a sheepdog,’ said Pie’s voice through the gap, then yelled, ‘I’d rather kiss Dally!’ His boots stamped back down the bank and Linnet squealed as if at a good hard pinch and I heard Pie say, ‘When’ll I get my turn with you, Linnet Lundren? Dally might’ve got the face but I got the way with my hands.’

  Linnet screamed and laughed and I don’t know where it was they all ran to, since I stayed in the oak a very long time.

  All this I remember with Linnet at my bedside.

  ‘What was it like, Plum, Plum pudding?’ she asks me again, sly, and she pinches my elbow again, and this time I don’t hide the snakes in my eyes. Because corn-dolly Linnet shall never know what it is to love a water bull. Cross-stitch kisses and the Love Hart Oak and the gorse game are for sillies. Trunks of sheets and frill-edged gowns are for daft-headed maidens. They are broidered burdens, for marriage is not love. A stable-boy husband, stinking of horse dung, a hearth rolling with babs, that is not love. Love is a dance with a water bull, it is the pleasure that poured from his fingers into me.

  Win may be keeping my water bull out with her stitches, but she’ll not keep me in. For three days the thrum he set drumming in me has grown faster, deeper, and louder than my own heartbeat. It tells me what to do.

  I put it down to the nightmares that must shadow the mind of any half-drowned person, but Plum looked blank at me from her bed when I spoke of that cursed night, trying to nudge out the truth. She’d tell not a word of the dreadful chase nor how he got hold of her, how he plunged her down, but those that have come so close to death often forget.

  I spin a fine tale as I spin my yarn, and nothing goes better with broidery than stitching out a story, so Plum’s been well fed with warnings. There’s a tale for every kind of trouble, and the water bull tale I’ve told more nights than any other since Plum’s been old enough to listen. I were readying my old bones to stand and tell that very tale when she went creeping out of the bard house, the night before the storm got up. She thinks I don’t see but she’s threaded tight to my heart and I felt the ache in my ribs before I saw the empty place she’d left, off to make mischief.

  Three days I brought possets to her pillowside and kept my patience, with not a word nor a sob from her. She lay, making knots of her hair around her fingers, and when I went to smooth the sheets those tiny shells, smaller than mustard seeds, lodged in the creases of my palm.

  When Linnet Lundren came I were glad to see a friend, come to make whatever mild chatter those little birds do between themselves. And it did seem to lift her soul, for right upon Linnet’s leaving, Plum asked me, sweet as strawberries, ‘May I have a clean dress on, Win? I’ve a longing to step outside and smell the sea. Can you find me one out of your chest and we�
�ll go together?’ It were nearing dusk, but so daft with joy I were to see the light back in her dark eyes, I clambered right up the loft ladder thinking of just the woollen dress to keep her warm. I were elbow-deep in the clothes chest, up there under the eaves, when I heard the creak and turned to see the ladder were tipped away.

  I leave Win’s howls and the house behind, following the eel bend of the river downstream for the sake of the damp water air that hangs there, to feel it soak into my skin, to make my eyes as dark as the deepest pool.

  I walk past the other waterfall, where I used to beg fates from the fortune-telling ox, but I know my fortune now, and it is with my water bull. I go on, down a path hidden in blackthorn that drags its fingers through my hair and brings the grey dusk down closer. The Oxley house is at the wood’s edge. I can hear the thwack and chuck of splitting logs. As the path spreads open into the Oxleys’ clearing, there is not Pie but Dally, the axe high above his head, a grimace on his face as he brings it down – crack.

  I snake my hair between my fingers. I’ve only my nightdress on, so I am white as a ghost girl in the twilight as I walk towards him. His lips purse as he looks at me all over, but with no linen swaddles to hide me now. Like ivy, I wind my arm around his. Like ivy, I twine myself about him. His heart thumps against my breast. The axe thuds to the ground.

  It is not like diving with my water bull. I have to push Dally down to lie with me, and my breath does not turn to water nor my veins to pulsing weeds. What my body is for, what I and my water bull know so sure, Dally does not know after all, and I am sorry for him. His look when I up from our bed of leaves is as startled as when I crossed the clearing all white in the dim, and that is because I have shown him something that butter silk Linnet never could.

  My nightdress is smirched but I am warm as I walk away from Dally through the trees. I am not afraid of the dark. There’s no light in my water bull’s secret cave. When the creepers brush and tease at me, I think of weeds and currents, and it is not far at all to the other edge of the wood and the ale room lights.

  The ale room glows between the forest and the shore, and I hear the tumble of voices, and the wheeling notes of Quayle’s fiddle within, as I sail right past and down on to the sand. The sea hushes so gently, and the stars make it like milk so fresh it still foams, so I step into the foam of it and crouch to wash myself. The cold tingles me, and the fiddle song from the ale room curls in my ears, and I long so for my water bull, who swam from this sea so far up the river for me. I think perhaps he will taste me in the water, so I wash and swash and wait for that arm around my waist. There is nothing, just lap-lapping waves, the sad fiddle tune and the woodsy wind from the shore.

  The wind brings me louder voices, the ale room hurly grows behind me and there is laughter, the clank of cups. It’s all lads in there, under Ma Prowd’s owl eye. I remember Ma Prowd’s brothers, Trick and Robin, both tall and one of them broad as an ox. I’ve seen them fight in the ale room. I begin to pick my way back over the dunes, thinking of those big, wrestling bodies, their sweating backs. The door of the ale room swings open, with a roar and a slice of lamplight from inside, and then there’s three lads out, sitting on the barrels by the ale room wall. They don’t see me in the black beyond the ale room glow. Neither is Trick or Robin, but one of them is Dally Oxley. He must have followed me. This makes me smile, and I am still smiling as I walk towards them. I am close enough to smell the beer steaming off them, when one of them looks up and then jumps backwards, falling right over his barrel. How easy it is.

  ‘I told you,’ says Dally. ‘See? Right by the house, she were.’

  I don’t look at him. I stare right at the other lad who is staring back at me. It’s Sandy Rincepan. He used to be a tub of a boy, but it’s true he’s become brown and sturdy as a dray horse. I’ll give him another chance, I think. I reach out a hand and stroke his cheek. I let my hand rest on his neck.

  ‘You’ll get your fill of kisses now, Sandy,’ Dally says. He grabs the other lad by the collar and they shove back through the ale room door.

  We sink behind the barrels, Sandy and I. He’s more of a thrust to him than Dally, it is closer to the thrum the water bull makes in me, but he whimpers like a pup and I laugh at him and push myself back up to the barrel top. ‘I shall have a bull of a man,’ I whisper down at him as he tries to button his trews, and I am still laughing as he thumps through the door after Dally.

  The thrum has left me wanting my water bull, not these fumbling boys, and I think I will go back to the sea, and swim and swim until I find him, when out of the ale room slams a huge hulk of a man. Before I can see his face, the grip of his giant hands is around my thighs and I am slung over his shoulder like a sack. He begins to run in great shuddering strides that bump my head against his back, and he smells of sod and malt and sweat.

  Dally’s voice flies after us, ‘Leave her be, Trick. She’s only a chicken-head girlie,’ but we go on, turning up the path to follow the eel-river bend. Soon we are passing right by the back of Winfrid’s cottage, and I think of her trapped up there under the eaves, but when I cry out the man clamps a stinking palm across my mouth.

  ‘Find us a secret place, shall we?’ he says. His breath is heavy. ‘Safe from eyes and ears.’ I kick at his chest and he thwacks me across my back so hard it takes the breath from me. I gasp and gasp and a thick darkness comes over my eyes, but I can hear him saying, ‘You like that, girlie? I like the sound of you liking,’ and when my breath starts to come easier he thwacks me again.

  I see nothing any more, but I hear the waterfall and know he has followed the river right up to the pool. My back hits the root-knotted ground. I try to look up, but he is only a shadow against the speckled sky, and the stars blur like snowflakes when he pulls my nightdress up over my head. I do cry out when he digs into me, but he turns me over and digs in again while my mouth fills with grit and leaves.

  ‘Let me hear you liking,’ he says, and he whacks my back once more.

  As I gasp, the waterfall gasps above us, and my mind goes back to the leap, the dive that took my breath away and left no need for it, only the water and my water bull. It is my water bull’s brindled arm that lifts me up now, that catches me close against his smooth skin, his seal-pup smell. It is his gentle beast strength that carries me to the pool’s edge and his dive that saves me, plunging into deep water. No need for breath down here, my love. He wraps me in weeds and kisses me and we float in a dance, his arms about me, back to our home in the cave.

  All night long I were trapped, frantic as a mouse in that wind-raddled loft, too afraid to jump lest I crack a bone, soon too hoarse to shout any more for help. As the dark sank down and my spirits with it, I begged for Plum to be safe and her mind put back rightways. How I knotted myself up that night, how my bones ached with the tearing of my Plum away from me. I wept myself ragged and as I lay close under the thatch edge, staring out at the prickle of stars, I believe I saw visions: a man as big as a water bull tramped along the river path, a sack on his back that my mind’s eye made into Plum. I shook such dreads away, fearing I’d be mad by morning.

  When dawn did come, I were shivering, though the clothes chest stood right beside me. I’d not the courage in my heart to look at dresses made for my lost girl. Then I heard steps on the path, a thump at the door, and I remembered Ivy Rincepan would be round for her eggs. With strength from somewhere I’ll never fathom I stamped and yelled, and Ivy Rincepan pushed the door and saw the ladder and soon had me down, though my poor numb feet slipped on every rung. I didn’t stop, but shouted my thanks as I ran away and up the dew-sodden bank and through the dripping trees to the waterfall.

  Her night dress floated like milk curds in the pool. The prints of her little bare feet lay in the mud. Down and down I stared into that dark water, searching for bubbles, for breath, for a hint of her, but there was nothing.

  Day in, day out, I sit by the pool, watching and waiting for my sweet Plum to come back to me. And while I wait, I fish up the wee
ds that wave in the currents here. I put my stitches to the only use I can and I’m sewing her a weed wedding dress. I float it in the shallows to keep it soft, and so that she might see it. From time to time I add green weed ribbons, to make it prettier, pretty enough for a water bull bride.

  Gad watches as Sil crawls across the floor, clutching the newborn baby with one arm. She huffs out raggedy breaths and her knees scrape the boards. Her eyes are fixed on the chest in the corner. She heaves and capsizes, rolling on to her side.

  ‘You’ll have to help, Gad,’ she pants. ‘Get the fire tongs.’

  There’s no reason for her mother to need the fire tongs now. But there has been no reason for anything the last few hours – Sil’s curses, Father leaving in a storm for the ale room, this blue, wrinkled thing bursting from her mother – so Gad obeys. She runs back up the stairs and holds the heavy iron tongs out to Sil.

  ‘Open the chest. Box at the bottom.’

  From under heaps of the woollen blankets and shawls that Sil is constantly knitting, Gad hauls out the box, black and cracked like an old boot. She brings it and places it beside her mother, but her hands are taken up with the shrivelled baby.

  ‘Use the tongs.’