I shall be out tomorrow, and may not have time to post; I'll try to remember to post one late tonight instead
Chapter 13
“No, Phebe,” said Imogen, as she caught Phebe sneaking out of the door, in Jasper’s clothes, with Moppy.
“But, my brother....”
“It’s been hours, Phebe, and you are only going to get yourself, and Moppy, in trouble. The trail is cold. Your father and Evergreen set off with a gypsy dog to track; one Bess, she’s a boar hound.”
“Oh, Bess is clever,” said Phebe. “Why aren’t they back yet?” she added, fretfully.
“Cariad, we don’t know how far they have had to go, and whether they will have to fight Crowy and half his tribe,” said Imogen, holding her tone which wanted to snap firmly in check.
“You’re afraid, mama,” said Phebe.
Imogen considered lying, and decided that she would not have appreciated being lied to at Phebe’s age.
“Yes, Phebe, I am afraid,” said Imogen. “I am afraid for your brother, and for your father, and also for Evergreen, who is a nice lad. I would be terrified for you, without adults backing you up. I am afraid we might lose Lementina, and Shuri, and Cornelius. Burns on the head and face are never good, and Lementina has such bad burns. I can do without you adding to my worries, by going off when you don’t know how far you have to go and when you have not even prepared to be camped out following Jasper for maybe days.”
Phebe gasped.
“Oh!” she said. “I see. I... I had not thought.”
“No, cariad, which is why you have adults now to think for you, not like when you had to care for yourself with that horrid old woman. Your father has taken guns, provisions, money, good wool cloaks, and if he has the sense he was born with, which he does, he could rinse out the cookpot I put a rabbit in for Bess, and use it to cook game he and Evergreen can snare in the wild. If you were Jasper’s age, I’d have woken you to go with them,” she added, mendaciously. “But your father does not need to be looking after you when you cannot add a man’s day’s work that Evergreen can.”
It was brutal, but Phebe responded to bluntness.
She hugged Imogen.
“I am sorry!” she said. “But what can I do?”
“You can help me by taking a turn to watch Lementina, Shuri, and Cornelius, all of whom have had laudanum,” said Imogen. “You’re as old as I was when I first started helping the doctors. And then Mrs. Hudson can have a sleep too.”
Phebe nodded seriously.
“I can do that,” she said.
“Yes, and I can trust you to do so, so that I may sleep,” said Imogen. Lementina had been moved in with the others on a mattress, so all those needing nursing were together, and Larkin not far away. His nurse, an old soldier, had volunteered to help as well, and Imogen had not turned his aid down. Imogen had shooed Woodlock out to take care of his tribe, and so she only had three main patients on whom to concentrate, since Woodlock was walking wounded, and likely to heal quickly enough from relatively superficial burns on his hands and arms. Phebe was capable of knowing when someone needed to be called and when just to watch.
oOoOo
Jasper, meanwhile, had discovered that where the roof met the hill, he was in a gulley which was almost invisible, save from above. He scoffed at the builders of the cottage, as the existence of the gulley made leakage more possible, though there did seem to be a wall between cliff face and cottage. Jasper’s instincts would have been to have dug down three or four feet so that the cliff face formed the highest point of the house and any rain running down the hill would continue running off down a half-roof of thatch. It tended to explain water staining on the plaster on the walls. There were probably laths attached to the chalk, maybe some wattle and daub, and then plaster over. Not a place Jasper would choose to live. The cottage was only slightly longer than the two rooms, and he guessed that the extension was a stable and a hay-loft, instead of digging into the soft chalk for better temperature control. Equally, he would have built from flint in a matrix of burned chalk to make quicklime, mixed with sand and well slaked, rather than making a wattle and daub wall. Well, he did not have to live there, so it was no skin off his nose. Some people had no imagination when handed an absolute gift of a place to build.
He was in a forest. That was plain. The hill rose on a slight slope away from the scar of the cliff, and fell away below the cottage. It was not a high hill as hills went, but rolled in the gentle way chalk uplands roll, currently filled with bluebells and their strong scent was heady. Old, dry fronds of bracken stood between the bluebells, new curled leaves pushing out. Jasper knew he could vanish into the vegetation here, and likely not get too damp, as the chalk tended to be porous. What had brought the hill down to make a cliff he did not know, but suspected flint mining. He soon found a good flint, so now at least he had flint and steel to make a fire. Without the fear of avoiding Crowy, he could live in these woods indefinitely with a good knife. He could make twine for snares from the clothes he had stuffed in his makeshift bag, and there would be springs somewhere, at the base of the chalk hill if nowhere else. Jasper wanted to scout further, but he had no idea where there were windows or doors downstairs, out of which Crowy might be looking. If there was only the one door centrally, it would be worth while trying to collapse the chimney to block it and set fire to the thatch. If Crowy was trapped, he could go down to release the pony or mule which had drawn the cart; but there might be a door into the stable. If this had been a mine for flint, there might be passages and galleries accessible from the house out of which Crowy could flee. Jasper could not conceive of having a hideout which had easily-dug out cliffs behind it without mining deep enough to make bolt-holes out of it, there being enough trees to cut to act as props. Of course, that would mean hard work, both cutting and trimming trees, and digging. It was said that work caused Crowy Heron more distress than nettle rash, so Jasper sneered, and wondered if there were bolt holes built by someone else, or if Crowy had failed to realise the marvellous resource he had to hand. A well in any dugout would be good as well. Jasper could see a pump beside what he thought was the stable, and a horse trough, and wondered why anyone would leave such outside, if considering the place to be any kind of hideout. He would have designed it differently to enclose the spring which fed the pump, at least.
Jasper shook himself mentally. Planning to make this impregnable was not his business. They would likely have noticed that he had gone missing by now, and someone was probably following. Woodlock and Papa most likely, with Bess. Not Moppy, she would not stir without Phebe, and they would not risk bringing Phebe. All he had to do, in many ways, was to remain at large. This seemed a little tame, but Jasper reasoned that if he tried to do anything risky, it could bring danger on his father, supposing that he was out looking.
“Diw!” said Jasper to himself. “But for that Ach-y-fi villain, Crowy Heron, it would be a fine adventure and a pleasant spring camp.”
He reflected that he was hungry, and would soon be thirsty; but there was not a lot he dared do with Crowy around. He hoped Crowy would soon come to check on his captive.
It was not long before his wish was fulfilled.
The thatch muffled a lot, but the exclamation when the door failed to open after it was unlocked carried through. The shaking of the door shook the whole house, and Crowy’s unbridled bad language was enough to drift out through the thatch. Jasper’s eyebrows went up. The man had the foulest mouth he had ever known, not excluding the boy’s grandsire, Fowk. Crowy’s violent assault upon the door, which culminated in kicking it in against the direction of the hinges, eventually led to the gypsy leader breaking in, howling that Shuri would be sorry for causing him so much trouble.
The sudden silence marked when he saw the hanging figure, and there was a deep, visceral, wordless howl. Jasper shivered. Much now depended on whether Crowy stumbled away, or charged in to cut down the body and enact retribution on the dead where he could not do so on the living. A reasonable person would check if a hanged figure was extinct of life, but Jasper rightly concluded that Crowy was not reasonable, but was likely to act in pure emotion, either horror or rage.
It was rage. Crowy roared, and might be presumed to be advancing on the hanging figure, shouting Shuri’s name.
Another silence suggested that he had discovered that the hanged figure was no such thing.
And then a scream of pure, feral rage.
On looking around he would see the fallen thatch. Jasper had kicked it under the bed, but eventually Crowy would find the creephole to the next room. Jasper had kicked the window mostly shut, but he would find that, too. It was, however, reasonable to suppose that anyone attempting to escape would climb down, and run.
So it appeared Crowy reasoned, as there were sounds of him thundering down the stairs, and out of the door.
“I’ll catch you, Shuri!” he yelled. “You have no shoes, and you’re used to them, you won’t get far!” He paused, and made up his mind, following a light track by which, presumably, he had arrived. Jasper moved like lightning.
He climbed down the cliff face, and slipped in the front door. Here he found himself in a kitchen and a door back into the cliff. There was a door into the other front room, and presumably the stairs were there, as they were not in the kitchen. There was no door on the end to the stable, and no well. He investigated the door into the cliff face.
It was a larder, and disappointingly shallow. He found a flour sack and threw into it several bottles of beer, a ham hock, a loaf of bread, and the better part of a wheel of cheese. There were herbs enough to add to this diet in the forest, and Jasper had no intention of waiting around to look too far. He grabbed a kettle as well, and slid round the side of the house in the opposite direction to the track, to climb back to his coign of vantage, and having circumnavigated the cottage could ascertain that there was only one door in, the door to the stable being separate. He saw a window on each side of the door, echoed above, and a small window over the door. A window on the end wall into the parlour was below the one from which he had climbed. This much he assimilated with quick glances as he regained his eyrie. Here he let his heartrate slow, and took a long drink of abysmally bad beer, whose only advantage was in being wet. He cut some cheese and bread and ham and enjoyed a mouthful of each in turn, until his belly stopped growling. The bread was a little stale, but it was food. He scraped some marrow out of the ham bone to soften the bread, which made it much more palatable.
It was time to move on, and upwards before Crowy got back and started thinking more carefully. Jasper went through the bracken like an eel, his instincts still taking him up. He was gypsy enough to have left no real sign when he had climbed down, nor as he moved through the undergrowth; and he revelled in this, not spoiled by either time at school or being the son of the marquis.
At the top of the ridge, he found a fallen beech tree, perhaps undermined by the disturbances of mining, perhaps merely blown over in a heavy gale. A shelter against the broadly-spreading roots would make one wall, but Jasper wanted to be unobserved. To this end he used the glass he had brought from the bedroom as a makeshift shovel to dig out beneath the broadest part of the trunk of the tree, until he had dug out a comfortable nest beneath it. He dug from the far side of the trunk. His groundsheet went down in it, and his bags of provisions, and then he worked to cut stakes which he drove into the ground on the side towards Crowy’s cottage, using the empty beer bottle as a hammer, muffled by wrapping it in cloth, as sound would travel far; this would make a wall of sorts, against which he piled leaves and bracken, as though debris had piled against the tree trunk. He left a peep hole, and kept a watch for Crowy coming back. He managed to complete this wall before the gypsy returned, and slipped round to the back of the trunk to watch what Crowy did next.
What Crowy did next was to go to get himself a beer and a meal, and his howl of outrage carried all the way up the hill. Jasper shuddered.
Crowy erupted from the house again, and plunged into the wood calling Shuri’s name and calling her a thief and less savoury names.
Again, he did not think of going up. And Jasper had a revelation.
Crowy was still convinced that it was Shuri who had escaped him, and because he had no good opinion of the abilities of women, it would not occur to him that Shuri could, or would even try to climb up, because he would see it as beyond her capabilities.
oOoOo
“Evergreen,” said Evelyn, “When there’s a serious dispute between gypsies, especially tribe chiefs, what happens?”
“A fight, usually. Bad chiefs drag their tribes into it. Good chiefs fight with fists or knives.”
“And do they fight to the death?”
“Not usually, it’s usually a matter of intimidation. It can end in death, of course, but as I told you, we have few enough of us, it’s to be avoided.”
“And what about disputes with Giorgios?”
“There are those who will kill them if they can get away with it.”
“Do you suppose Crowy would be sufficiently intimidated by me to leave my family alone?”
“No,” said Evergreen. “If you’re trying to break it to me gently that you plan to kill him, I already figured that out.”
Evelyn gave a wry laugh.
“So much for me trying not to upset you.”
“He is a mad dog, and you shoot mad dogs,” said Evergreen.
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