The Brides of Rollrock Island (14 page)

“What is it?” She shone her lamp at me, dismissed me and returned to Mam simmering on her step.

“My name is Nance Winch. I’m wondering if you’ve had any dealings with my son Naseby.”

“Why would I have?” She looked Mam up and down as if any children of hers must be well beneath contempt.

“He has gone missing from his wife and children, three nights running, at full moon. That sounds like your work.”

“Ah,
sounds
like it. Which is Naseby Winch?”

“Very tall,” said Mam. “Thin. His hair is nearly golden.”

Misskaella thought on that, but only to tease us, I felt. She touched her chin with two fingers of her pipe hand. “So many come, you see. It is not easy for me to keep account of them all.”

“Oh, I’m sure you never forget to take their money.” Mam looked pointedly up at the moldings over the doorway, and at the lace bosom-trimmings. “Just think—is he one of the ones who’s paid you, or one who still owes half his family’s livelihood for the favor you’ve done him?”

As Mam flung all this, the witch’s face, far from reddening and enraging as I’d feared, broke open, open and opener, into a kind of pleasure. She leaned against the doorpost, took a
pull of her pipe, swung the lamp a little. “Let me consider now. Your golden-haired boy, tall, slim, wife and children—though of course he wouldn’t mention those to
me
, for I might turn out to have scruples.” The smoke popped and puffed out with her words and then rose free and hovered over her forehead. “Hmm,” she said, and smoke streamed from her nostrils. “I cannot say, really, that I remember a golden Naseby. No, I really cannot say.”

“Can you say”—Mam leaned closer into the lamplight—“that without doubt you do
not
remember him?” I would have found her dangerous in that stance, in that light.

But the witch didn’t. She began a laugh, which then caused her to cough. She finished the cough smiling. “You know? I cannot exactly
not
remember him, either. But this is a small town, Missus Winch, Naseby’s mother,” she said, as if she found the names delicious. “I would have seen him about the place, without a doubt. Only I can just not quite put my finger on whether he has appeared on this step as you and”—she waved a smoky hand toward me—“your daughter?”

“My daughter.” I saw Mam try to be rude and withhold my name, but Misskaella looked so expectant there, perched curious above her neat boots like a fat thrush on a fence post. “Bet. Elizabeth.”

“Just the way you and
Elizabeth
Winch here have appeared. Or perhaps he was less polite, coming to the back door, if he felt he had something to hide? I cannot recall. I just … cannot …” And she grasped after the memory with her few free fingers in the smoke.

“And such a
pretty
daughter, Nance,” she said over Mam’s next question. She cast me a dark look, as if prettiness were something regrettable. She might well reach out the doorway, I thought, and peel off my prettiness like a mask.

She turned back to Mam, spoke very softly, almost in a whisper. “Just as you were pretty yourself, when you married … Who is your good man?”

Again I could tell that Mam did not want to give her the name. “Odger.”

“Odger, of course. Odger Winch,” she said in a breathy rush, and I thought of my old dad, his face after Mam slammed the door, and I felt for his defenselessness, and Naseby’s and Snell’s and Byrne’s—and even Mam’s standing there, with the witch extracting humiliation after tiny humiliation from her, the pair of us at her mercy in the night, her whole house behind her, her whole beautiful garden around, calculated, laid out, paid for. “Do give my regards to Mister Winch.” She rocked as if that idea were so funny that it
hurt
. She might be a little drunk, I thought.

Mam turned to me. “Come, Bet.” She started down the steps.

Misskaella pushed herself off the doorpost, raised the lamp and made a grotesque face of wounded innocence at me. I swung away from the insult and started after Mam.

“Good night, Nance Winch! Good night, Elizabeth!” There were many humiliating notes in that farewell, but the overriding one was of great satisfaction.

By the time I had closed the gate—Misskaella still at her door, rocking, smoking, watching, very possibly laughing—Mam
was well along the street. I had to run to catch her. “Where are you going now?” I muttered as we crossed the top of the main way.

“Only out of sight of her, to collect myself. Don’t look back.”

But I already had. The witch bowed this way and that in the lamplit doorway.

Out we went along the top road. At the first stile, Mam sat, head bent.

We caught our breath. When we were recovered, still she sat and thought.

“You really think Naseby would go to her?” I ventured to ask.

“We should have left. The minute Able Marten bought his Ivy, we should have gone as the Summerses did.”

“But perhaps he is just like Dad said, musicking. How can you know?”

“Money, is how I can know. Worrying about money. Sophie is worrying, Odge is making noise. But Floss Granger was down at Fisher’s this morning, ordering up a pair of new shoes for herself.
Something a bit pretty
, she says over that book of Fisher’s. Floss Granger wears out shoes down to her
foot bones
if the fishing is poor. And those Mace daughters, all of them in new dresses. So the fishing is fine but Naseby’s keeping money from Sophie, and Odge is helping him, in whatever enterprise. What else could it be?”

“A musical instrument?” I said. “A fiddle, like Fernly’s. Or a cow? He’s talked about farming before. A piece of land to till?”

“I’d know. He’d tell me. He’d not be so secretive. He’s pulled the wool somehow over your father’s eyes. But where is he right now?”

“He might be home by now, sitting at his own table with Sophie.”

“Some old barn or shed, out of people’s sight and hearing. Think about it, Bet.”

“Don’t be daft, Mam—this is
Naseby
! Don’t you remember their wedding day, both of them so happy? He said it was all his dreams, ever since he played at house with us, out above Six-Mile—”

I stopped, and we stared at each other.

“Stony Cottage,” said Mam, and we both knew it was true.

We cut across to the Crescent road, all but tumbling slantwise down the field; the cows were like islands, and we ran across the grassy sea between them, the stony. Once on the road, we put our heads down and strode, not speaking. I didn’t want to believe it, but if Mam did, how could it not be true? But Naseby, my big sweet-tempered brother? “How could he bring himself to be so cruel to Sophie, and to little Tom and Myrtle?”

She put her hand on my arm. “We don’t know yet. We don’t know
exactly
and for certain. Wait and see.”

The north road swung up over the cliff almost gaily, and we walked it up into the teeth of the wind, and it battered our hair and flapped our coat collars. The sea on our left tossed moon twinkles about, rushed and smashed at the cliffs, drummed in the road underfoot. The hill to the right was a different sea, charcoal gray; all its sproutings blew against the stones; the two hawthorns on its top leaned worried by the wind. Then the road dropped away and Crescent Corner lay like a fallen moon eating up its
own light, and beyond was the smaller, messier cove, where the caves were.

Around the top of Crescent we strode. “I used to come here as a girl,” Mam cried to me, “and walk about, and dream of running away. I thought I could make anything of myself, back then. Rollrock felt so
puny
! I was after something better and brighter.” Her teeth flashed in the moonlight. “And then I mistook Odger for that thing—he
was
better and brighter to begin with, while we courted. But he did not stay that way, and after a time I could not revive it in him, and the rest has been the same dull round-and-round that you know of so well.”

We nearly missed the little path beyond the Crescent cliffs. It looked as if it led off into nothing, that path, into a last step out into night air and then, after a gasp and half a scream, into the swill and rock-forest below. But no, it ducked in under a lip of rock there, and along and along, then down and doubling back it wove—so constricted that Mam used hardly to be able to fit down, following our tiny feet to cram herself into Stony Cottage with us and pretend to sip a cup of seawater tea and nibble the edge of a sand-and-weed cake.

“I will show that Odger,” Mam said as we followed the gray thread of path all around Cave Cove, the wind swiping at us like a cat’s paw at a mousehole, never quite hooking us out.

We crept up on the mouth of the cave we’d called Stony Cottage. I rather hoped we would find it empty, for then we could use it ourselves, to get out of the weather awhile. But just as Mam was about to poke her head around and look in, the wind dropped for a moment, and in that moment Naseby cried out, all strained and joyful, “God, woman, what are you doing to me!”

Mam stepped across to the mouth, her hand back so as I wouldn’t follow and see. “She’s doing what your wife Sophie ought to be doing, I daresay.”

A dreadful silence fell in there. A girl’s voice questioned, but the wind blew up and stopped my hearing the words.

“Come on out, laddie-boy,” Mam said. “You’ve a wife and babs after your company.”

Nase said something.

“Where else would you be?” she said. “Where else is there to hide?” I was glad she didn’t give me the credit for having guessed the place.

Then he was there, pale, naked, bending over her in the black entrance, a clump of clothes hiding his boy-bits. “Mam, Mam, you won’t tell, will you? Mam, I can put her back. Right away, right now. Her cast is just up over the meadow. No one need know. Sophie need never know.”

“Please, Naseby Winch,” said the girl, her voice all pleasant music. “Let me go home. My sisters will miss me.”

“Dress yourself,” Mam said to Nase. “And you? I suppose you’ve no more than that blanket to make you decent?”

“She can put her
skin
on, Mam! She can be gone! I shall run and fetch it.”

“You won’t,” said Mam. “It does not suit my purposes. Here, she can wear my petticoat.”

She stepped into the cave, and I moved forward and looked in. Nase was excruciated, cringing there, shivering, his back to me, his skinny backside—what was that wife feeding him? The seal-girl was seated on the blanket, watching my mam work her petticoat out from under her skirt. She looked quite unfrightened,
and very beautiful, and the smell! Like a summer sea, it was, a breeze off living salt water, a waft of warmth, while all else was echoes of the cold noising sea.

Mam held out her petticoat. “There you go. That will wrap you more than once, such a mouse you are.”

“Mam!”

“Come along now, come along.”

“Mam!”

“Too late, Naseby. Don’t waste breath begging.”

“Please, though!”

“It’s time, my lad, to face the size of what you’re doing. It’s more than a dally in this cave house, lad. It’s more than a hot moment between this lady’s legs. There’s me, you see, and Sophie, such as she is that you married her. There’s Tommy and Myrtle, hanging off your loyalty. Throwing you in, assuming you feel any shame, that’s five, at least, people in this town that will never lift their heads again, because of the ridiculous picture you’ve just painted before me.”

“All the more reason, then—”

“All the more reason to
dress
, boy!”

The seal-girl stood, tall and not trying to cover anything of herself. “If you would only give me my coat,” she said reasonably to Naseby, to Mam. She even cast me an appealing look, before Mam put the petticoat over her head.

She did not fight or protest; she watched as Mam pulled the petticoat down, maneuvered her arms free of it, then brought it up to tie under her arms. “She is like a doll,” I said. “She just lets you.”

“Oh, they’ll go where they’re pushed, these women, if there’s
no prospect of escape to animate them toward the sea. No wonder the menfolk like them. Pah, you’re swimming in this dress, girl! Well, you will just have to swim.” She tied the ties ferociously tight. “Come, then.”

“You are taking us to Sophie?” said Nase frightenedly, buttoning his pants.

“I am taking you to Dad.”

“What for?”

“You go,” Mam told him at the door. He went, and Mam ushered the maid out, the petticoat blowing up around her, giving us a fine view of her neat bottom and long legs, her tiny feet hardly showing ahead of her ankles.

“What does Dad need to know for?” Naseby bellowed back to Mam along the rock wall.

“I’ve to prove to him. I said this would be the way of it, and I’ve to show him.”

A long argument came out of his mouth. Some of it blew over his shoulder to us; the rest broke against the rocks or was swept up the cliff by the wind. “—telling—Sophie—anyway—”

“Move along, the both of you. I want my supper.”

All the way home Nase pled and complained. Mam didn’t answer him; he seemed to have taken himself beyond her caring; this time she would not come aiding him.

After a while the girl caught him up and took his hand. I thought he might have the decency to throw her off in disgust at himself, but he clutched the hand as he walked unsteadily on.

“My eldest,” Mam muttered beside me. “You think they are gems and pearls, your little ones; you pour yourself into them,
watch them grow, wait for them to make you proud. And then all of a sudden they are just as besmutched and low-motived as everyone else, and worse than some of the Potshead people you’ve always despised. The bab you carried and bore and fed tosses away your good name for a night or two’s tumbling in Stony Cottage with Miss Long-Limbs here, Miss Moves-Like-Enchantment. Look at her! She’s finer in my petticoat than I was in my wedding dress.”

I walked alongside Mam’s disgust, in a daze myself, across the town. Nobody met us; Naseby looked aside at each house, though, cringing at who might come out, or who might pull aside their curtain, hearing our steps in the street.

We came to our door. “Go on,” Mam told Naseby, when he hesitated.

“Please, Mam? I will take her back. I will find her coat and—”