long minutes I clung to the tree, feeling, but not aware of, the reassuring sun-warmed bark under my fingers, and the familiar, safe smell of dry leaves. The silence seemed as if the world that had been cracked apart by Ralph’s shriek was quietly rebuilding itself.
Somewhere, a blackbird started to sing.
Then I ceased to take comfort from Ralph’s long quietness and was filled with a horrid senseless fear. What was happening only yards away from me, hidden in the bushes? My legs moved as stiff as a cripple. As I left the beech tree I staggered and nearly fell, but I had to see him.
I parted the bushes and gave a whimper of horror as I saw my lover caught like a rat in the trap I had baited with love. He was slumped over the upright jaws. He had fainted from the pain of his crushed knee bones, and the teeth of the trap held his legs as stiff as a marionette’s, while the top half of his body slumped like a doll’s. One of the sharpened teeth of the trap seemed to have severed a vein and the steady flow of blood darkened his breeches and soaked down his leg into the black earth.
Faced with the wreck of my lover, my knees buckled again and I put out my hands to save myself as I collapsed before him. My hands clenched on the dark peaty earth as if I was hanging to a rope to pull me from a crevasse of horror. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet again, and then, as quietly and as carefully as I had come, as if I feared to wake a beloved, weary husband, I walked backwards, one stiff, courtly step at a time, with my eyes never moving from his crumpled body while his lifeblood drained into the earth; left to die like vermin.
I crept home like a criminal and slipped in by the open kitchen door. Then, remembering, I went back to the little store room and fetched the owl, Canny, and carried him up the back stairs to the landing outside my room. I met no one. I glanced out of my window at the rising moon, a sad thin sickle of a waning moon with a little rejected teardrop of a star beside it. Ten lifetimes ago I had sat at the window and felt Ralph’s eyes shining on me, laughing at me. Now I could not face starlight. I wondered with one sharp corner of my mind if he was dead yet, or if he was lingering, like a rat in a gintrap, in unrelieved pain. If he had recovered consciousness and was crying my name, hoping I would come and help him, or if he guessed it was my trap and was facing his death, staring grim-faced into the darkness.
Canny was perched, wide-eyed, alert on the top of the wardrobe. He was fully fledged, nearly ready to fly. Ralph had promised to hack him back to a wild life in the woods, to feed him little by little until he had learned to hunt. Now he would have to fend for himself. In this new harsh world lit by the sickly yellow moon, we all had to learn how to survive, and there was no help. Trust I had felt for my papa in the golden summer of my childhood, or Ralph had in my smiles, for my lying direct eyes, trust and keeping faith had gone. So I lifted him down, his talons gentle and feathery on my bare hand, and untied the jesses on his bony legs. His foot, which had been up inside his fluffed-out feathers, was endearingly hot. I opened the window and held him out. The night breeze ruffled his feathers.
‘Go then, Canny,’ I said. ‘For I do not know love and wisdom any more.’
His grip tightened as the wind rocked him, and his head bobbed as his body moved, but he stayed quiet, looking around him.
‘Go!’ I said, and I cruelly tossed him, aiming him direct at the moon as if he could fly away and take all the pain and sorrow with him. Instead he fell, tumbling like a feather duster over and over down from my second-floor window and I gasped to see him fall. But even as I gripped the sill I hardened myself. I had learned one thing in this painful struggle into adulthood: that everything you do, and everything you say, everything has a consequence. That if I threw a newly fledged bird into the night he might fall and break his neck. If I nodded to a killer then bloody murder would follow. If I called my lover into a trap he would be caught by his legs and bleed and bleed.
The owl tumbled over and over but spread his wings before he hit the ground. He glided down towards the kitchen garden and clattered into a currant bush. His feathers were pale in the moonlight and I watched him as he sat still, perhaps surprised to find himself free. Slowly I relaxed the hand that was gripping on to my window sill. But my other hand held something. I could not think what it was. The cramped fingers unfolded and showed me a handful of earth and leaves. I had clenched my hand on it when I had gripped the forest floor in my mindless vigil waiting for a second cry from Ralph. Now I still held tight to it as Canny spread his wings and flew low over the kitchen garden towards the waiting wood like a message of my loss of wisdom, of my loss of love.
I slept with that handful of leaves and earth under my pillow, still gripped in my cold hand, soiling the clean Irish linen Ralph had coveted so. I slept easily, like a good child, and dreamed no dreams. In the morning, I wrapped it in curl-paper and put it in my jewel box. An odd thing to do. But that morning I felt odd: light-headed and unreal as if the previous night and all the days of the summer had been a strange dream I was still dreaming. At first it seemed to me like a talisman, to ward off the fear that followed me home like a black dog. It is all I have left of Ralph; the only thing I have from him now his owl has flown. A handful of earth from the place of his death. A handful of our land, Wideacre.
The next day I waited for the news of Ralph’s death. I was certain it would be brought to the Hall by some gossip from the village and waited for my mother or for Harry to repeat the story of the dreadful accident at breakfast. I waited for the story at dinner. I waited for the story at tea. I waited for the story as we sat in Mama’s parlour in the evening … Nothing.
‘You’ve not eaten a thing all day, Beatrice,’ my mother said gently. ‘You must try, my dear. And you seem so overwrought.’
Harry looked up, his attention now drawn to my evident paleness and strain.
‘She is grieving, Mama,’ he said. He got up from his chair on the other side of the parlour fire to cross to me and sit beside me on the sofa. He took my hand gently in his own. ‘Poor Beatrice, you must try not to be so sad. Papa would not wish it.’
I smiled, but my heart was cold. Then the thought flashed through my head that Harry knew Ralph was dead, and was keeping the news from me, to protect me.
‘I just have this feeling that something awful is going to happen,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. I think I should feel better if an accident did happen, and then I could believe the bad luck had passed.’
‘Like happenings in threes.’ My mother spoke foolishly, but her eyes were sharp. ‘But nothing has happened, has it, Harry?’
Harry patted my hand; his sympathy and gentleness could not reach my cold isolation. ‘No, Mama. No, Beatrice. What could happen? Beatrice is just overtired, and you, Mama, are full of fairy tales. We shall all feel better in the morning.’
I did not feel better in the morning. Nor the next morning, nor the morning after. Surely someone had found him by now? His mother, Meg, must have come home and found the cottage empty, the front door banging. She would call his name and then follow the track along and then back. Surely she would call someone to help her search for her boy, and surely they would find him soon, doubled up over his trapped legs. Dead? I sat in the window seat of my room looking out over the garden unconsciously kneading my hands until my wrists showed red marks. What could they be doing, so slow and so lazy that they had not found him now? How could Meg pretend to be a loving mother with her fey fears for her son if she had not yet sensed that something was wrong and found him?
Over and over my mind pictured the scene: the message to the village, and the village carpenter making the coffin. The gossip brought to the Hall by a friend or relation of one of the servants. Told to my brother, or even my mother, or perhaps whispered to me by Lucy, my maid. Surely the story even now was the talk of the kitchen and one of the servants would tell one of us soon. I had
