The Bride's Farewell Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand to save paying the miller. But no matter how they picked and pickled, preserved and bottled and saved, there never was enough to feed them all through the long cold winters, so that each new child was born into hunger, a hunger that barely deserved a second thought.
    “Look what I have for you,” Frannie cried one fine spring day, tumbling in through the doorway clutching a basket bigger than herself filled with wool.
    Sally limped over to see the raw fleeces, prodding them with a disdainful finger. “I’ll have them when they’re clean,” she said frowning, and turned her back on the younger girl.
    “I’m to catch and shear and wash them, too?” Frannie snorted. “I’ll have your job instead.”
    “All right then, it’s yours,” declared Sally, hurling a half-knitted stocking at her.
    Frannie picked up the work and examined it: perfect, without a single false stitch. To her credit, she surrendered at once. “My stockings would make us all lame,” she declared, giggling, and raced out the door without a backward glance.
    And so Sally was left with the grease wool. She hauled the heavy basket up with a sigh and dragged it to the lean-to barn, where she found Lou and Ellen churning milk. Lou peered over into the basket. “What are we expected to do with that ?” She poked a finger at the filthy wool.
    “Frannie ought to clean it.”
    “Yes, and I suppose she will—once the lambs and foals are born and fed and weaned and old enough to fend for themselves, and if we’re all still alive and haven’t forgotten the job altogether. Then, perhaps.”
    “She says she fancies my job because it’s easier,” said Sally, her face sulky, and Lou kissed her.
    “Never mind, sweet. She fancies herself a boy as well, and that’s no nearer true.”
    Ellen looked on with interest. Older only than Bean, she made a feature of not attracting attention. In the scrabbling scrum of siblings, Ellen was the most reluctant to claim ground for herself, to instigate a row or take sides in a complaint. She was soft where Frannie was angular, slow where Sally was brisk; Lou loved her for her dreamy eyes and kept her close.
    In the absence of a serviceable parent, Lou fussed over the little ones, soothed their feelings, and taught them all the manners and skills she knew. Thanks mainly to her efforts, there were times—with ponies in the garden, plums on the table, sun on the front wall, and Pa with the boys, a day’s or a week’s walk away—when happiness nudged at the cottage walls. All the joy that any of them could remember was lit by the low slow dwindling light of long June evenings with work finished and nothing urgent to do but knit and talk or race back and forth across the heath on horseback.
    On winter nights when he wasn’t drunk, and sometimes when he was, Pa schooled George, James, Edward, and John in reading and Bible and history and how to add up numbers and preach to an empty church. Of the boys, only Edward paid attention to book learning. But it was Pell who sat with her back to Pa, plaiting straw for hats and going over each lesson in her head, while George and John made faces and pinched each other and James prayed to God to be somewhere else.
    Mam didn’t hold by schooling. “Turns out boys too clever to be useful,” she said. “And girls no good to marry.” Well, and wasn’t she just the perfect example? Ignorant as a thistle, married to a drunk, and pushing out baby after baby, each of which had to be clothed and fed until it grew up and left, or died.
    No one in the parish was what you might call well-off, and by the time Pell turned ten she and Lou had an expertise in stretching ends past straining point in an ever-hopeful and ever-futile attempt to make them meet. It was a skill practiced by every child in Nomansland, and each learned it from its mam who had, of course, learned the same way.
    The only thing of which there was no shortage was ponies. As commoners, Birdie’s family had