run, hair out.
Still. Winters were best.
And they were hard ones in Thorneyburnbank. A duck froze on the burn – it squawked until a fox came, and left its webbed feet in the ice. There were icicles we sucked, Cora and I. The millpond could be walked on, and once, a tree broke from all its snow and buried a cow – they had to dig for it with spades and hands. All night they dug, and the cow lowed so crossly that they did not hear the Mossmen taking horses from the forge. Also, one winter, there was a wooden box – put beneath the yew tree, and not buried, for the ground was too dark, iron-hard. The box was broken by dogs and crows who knew meat when they neared it. Poor Widow Finton. But she was dead and never felt it. All things must eat.
I saw the crows again in Hexham square.
That was the day they hung the Mossmen by the neck.
Five of them. I was maybe twelve years old when Cora came to me, her eyes on fire, and said this is bad, very bad…She meant for us – but not so bad that we stayed away from it. She knotted my cloak, and we trod through the snow to the town. And the sound! There were more folk in the square than when the judge came, or when the Christmas market did. All jeering and jabbering. I climbed on a barrel to see what they saw, which was the word scaffold. Five ropes in neat circles. It chilled me in a way no snow had done. And the crowd laughed at the men who stood by their ropes with their hands trussed up behind. These I thought are Mossmen. Just men with scars, and sad eyes. The yellow-bearded one was there. He saw the crows, like I did – perched on the scaffold, cleaning their wings. I felt so sorry for him. I thought I could hear his thumping heart, his quick breath, and the crowd cheered when the ropes were put over the Mossmen’s heads. Bang went the door, and bang went the next, and bang and bang and the last man was crying for mercy. Sorry for my sins, he pleaded, and shook. And maybe the door was bolted still or the cold had frozen it, I don’t know, but it didn’t open – so they took him to a rope that had a Mossman hanging from it, and they cut the dead man down and strung the live one up and used that rope again.
Folk need a foe.
Cora muttered this. She also said, I should have known…For did you see the bats? Did you, Corrag? All gone…They’d flown away the day before. They’d streamed out from beneath the bridge with their leathered wings, and not come back – and Cora said that creatures do this, before a death. Like weather, they feel it coming. They sense trouble in their wings, their paws, their hooves – and flee.
Foe…she said. She scattered bones by the hearth that evening, tore herbs so our cottage smelt green. I knew what troubled her. All my life, she had sung let them raid! But they did not raid as they hung with the frost on them, and crows pecking by.
Later, Cora fell on the floor and arched her back up. She had the second sight this way – the sight I didn’t have. I knew to stay by her, and stroke her hair until it passed.
When she sat up, she whispered, Do I have a gallows neck?
It was late. I was sleep-heavy, and she looked strange to me – fear, I think it was. She held up her thick, black hair, said do I? Say the truth.
I always did. So with the hearth being the only sound, for the burn was frozen and the owl was silent that night, I said the truth to her. She knew it, too.
A pretty neck, but yes – it was gallows-made.
Spring came in. Water sounds all over – the burn roared with snowmelt. Up came the clover in the marshy parts which made milk-sweet, and cattle fat. This is when I took the knife to the pig and killed it – a terrible thing. I think I was taken with some spring madness, or it was the Mossmen’s deaths in me. I don’t know. But Cora was cross. She said why kill it in spring when we had made it through the winter, and was I a simpleton? The meat did not sit well in my mouth, or my stomach. Poor pig.
Full of shame, I ran away. I hid in the elm wood all day, crouching by a log, and when I rose up in the dusky half-light I did not see the log, and fell. Pop! A neat sound by my shoulder. Then, a pain – a huge, hot pain, so that I stumbled back to Cora with my right arm very mangled, and my shoulder pushed high up. I wailed, as I ran. The pig’s revenge said Cora dryly, and she pressed my bone back in its proper place. Pop again. And marjoram was laid upon it, which can help.
And things grew. The crops grew well, that year. That made Cora’s purse clink, for women were making babies with all that corn in them. Mostly it was feverfew, for the easy birth. Comfrey dried up old milk. She sent me out for fern, also, and told me how to cut it – with a single slice, and thinking kind thoughts. Fern has its dark powers – for the secret cleansing of a woman, shall we say.
And creatures made babies too – calves, and chicks that went peep. There was a striped cat too whose teats were like thumbs, who purred when I stroked her. She was good. But one day, with dandelions blowing, I saw her lying on the ground. There was a bucket by her, and Mr Fothers in his hat. He was staring at the bucket, and then he marched away – and I thought why is the striped cat so still? The lovely striped cat? I straightened my back. So very still…And then I thought run! I had such a fear in me that I threw my dandelion away and ran, and in the bucket I found water, and five dark newborn kittens mewling for their lives. Their paws scraped the metal. Their eyes were closed, so I pushed the bucket over, said wake up! Don’t die! They rolled into their mother, who was dead and not purring now.
Cora, when I carried them home, said what happened to them? So tiny…And in a lower voice she hissed who did this? For she had a proper hatred of people drowning things.
We fed them. We laid them by the fire and dropped cow’s milk on their tongues. I sang ancient songs to them like they were my own, and Cora said how dare that man? How dare he? A life is a life – each life…She narrowed her eyes at his name. She kicked the kettle and it bounced outside. But she softened when she stroked the kittens, and felt their grainy tongues against her hand. Mr Fothers hated creatures, but we never did.
They lived – all five. They were meant to drown on a dandelion day but they did not. Instead, they grew into quick, ash-coloured cats with eyes as green as mint is, and they rubbed against our shins, tails up. I liked how their gentle heads would butt against my own. In time, they sniffed out the fish in the thatch. I remember them that way – high up in the rafters, crunching the bones of the stranded fish, their noses silvery with scales.
Maybe I should not have saved them – those cats. They brought more than dead mice to the doorstep, in the end.
Mr Fothers started it. Maybe he didn’t like how I saved those five. Cats? he said. Green-eyed? And he spoke bad words about me, like how I squatted in bogs. Like how, one twilight, I’d shifted into a half-bird and screamed my way home from the elm wood. Her right arm was a wing…This is true.
So it went. Small things which once meant reivers – no moon, or worms in the miller’s flour – no longer meant reivers, for the reivers were dead. Who, then, caused this? Where was the blame? People were quiet, at first. People bit on their tongues.
It was king that made it worse. The proper trouble started then – in the year that King James fled away to France, and in his place came the Orange, Protestant one with his very black wig. He sat on the throne still warm from James, and England called this glorious. What a revolution! They said. But Cora didn’t think so. She sucked her bottom lip. She looked at stars for a long, long time. One night, I tugged her sleeve. I asked what does this mean? And she shook her head, said trouble, I reckon – that’s what it means. Kings always do. And it did. For king makes blood boil over. It makes the air feel thick, and strange, and so just as the wind spun the weathervane, so eyes turned to look at the cottage by the burn with its holly and bog-water.
Slowly, there was more.
Small doings. A calf was born with a white star on its head – neat, and clear. Very pretty. But curious, too, so it was talked of – a marked calf…said the men. How uncommon. And then Mr Dobbs,