The Giver of Stars(92)
She let out a long breath. ‘Does … anyone … know?’
‘Aside from Sven?’ Margery rubbed at her hair vigorously, then paused to check the dampness of her hair with her fingers. ‘Well, we haven’t exactly hollered about it. But I can’t keep it quiet for much longer. Poor old Charley will be buckling at the knees if I get much bigger.’
A baby. Alice was filled with a complex mix of emotions – shock, admiration that, yet again, Margery had decided to play life by her own rules – but shot through it all, sadness: that everything had to change, that she might not again have her friend to gallop up mountainsides, to laugh with in the snug confines of the library. Margery would surely stay home now, a mother like everyone else. She wondered what would even happen to the library with Margery gone: she was the heart and backbone of it. And then a more worrying thought occurred. How could she stay here once the baby was born? There would be no room. There was barely enough for the three of them as it was.
‘I can pretty much hear you fretting from here, Alice,’ Margery called, as she walked back through to her bedroom. ‘And I’m telling you nothing needs to change. We’ll worry about the baby when it comes. No point winding yourself into a knot until then.’
‘I’m fine,’ Alice said. ‘Just pleased for you.’ And wished desperately that it was true.
Margery rode down to Monarch Creek on Saturday, nodding greetings as she passed families busy cleaning up, sweeping wet piles of silt out of their front doors, ferrying ruined furniture into piles only good enough to dry out for firewood. The floods had devastated the lower reaches of the town, home to the poorer families who were less likely to make a noise about it. Or at least have that noise listened to. In the more affluent parts of town, life had already pretty much returned to normal.
She pulled Charley to a halt outside Sophia and William’s house, her heart sinking as she surveyed the damage. You could know something to be true, but it was something else having to look it square in the eye. The little house stood – just – but positioned at the lowest part of the road, as it was, it had borne the brunt of the flood. The posts of the neat deck were cracked and broken, while the flowerpots and the rocking chair that had stood on it had been washed away, along with the two front windows.
What had been a neat little vegetable garden was now a sea of black mud, from which random pieces of broken wood emerged in place of plants, and the stench was foul and sulphurous. A thick dark tidemark rode along the upper part of the frames and weatherboarding, and Margery didn’t need to go any further to guess what it was like inside. She shivered, recalling the water’s cold grip, and placed her palm against Charley’s soft neck, feeling a sudden visceral urge to head home to warmth and safety.
She dismounted – it took a little more effort to clear the saddle now – and hooked the reins on a nearby tree. There was nothing for the mule to graze; just dark sludge for some distance up the slopes.
‘William?’ she called, her boots squelching as she made her way towards the little cabin. ‘William? It’s Margery.’
She called a couple more times, waiting until it was clear that nobody was at home, then turned back to the mule, feeling the unfamiliar stretch and weight in her belly, as if the baby had decided she was now free to make her presence felt. She stopped by the tree, and was reaching for the reins when something caught her eye. She tilted her head, studying the tidemark several feet up from the base of the trunk. The whole way down from the library the marks left by the river had been red-brown, varying in colour but essentially mud or silt. The marks here were as black as pitch. She recalled how the water had turned dark abruptly, the chemical tang that had stung her eyes and caught the back of her throat.
Van Cleve had not been seen in town for the three days since the flood.
She squatted, running her fingers across the tree bark, then sniffed them. She stayed there, completely still, thinking. Then she wiped her hands on her jacket and, with a grunt, hoisted herself back into the saddle. ‘C’mon, Charley boy,’ she said, turning him around. ‘We’re not going home just yet.’
Margery rode high up into the narrow pass to the north-east of Baileyville, a route most considered impassable, given the steepness of the terrain and the dense undergrowth. But both she and Charley, having been raised on rough ground, could see a way through as instinctively as a boss could see a dollar sign, and she dropped the buckle of the reins onto his neck and leaned forward, trusting him to pick a path through while she lifted branches clear of her head. The air grew colder the higher they travelled. Margery wedged her hat down on her head and tucked her chin into her collar, watching her breath rise in damp clouds.
The trees grew closer the higher they went, and the ground was so steep and flinty that Charley, sure-footed as he was, began to stumble and hesitate. She climbed down finally by a rocky outcrop, hooked his reins on some saplings, and hiked the rest of the way to the top on foot, puffing a little with the extra weight of her new cargo. Every now and then she would pause, her hand in the small of her back. She had felt uncommonly tired since the flood and pushed away the knowledge of what Sven would say if he knew where she’d gone.
It took the best part of an hour to climb far enough on the ridge that she could finally see the back of Hoffman, the part of its 600-acre site not visible from the mines, and shielded from wider view by the horseshoe of steep, tree-covered slopes that surrounded it. She grabbed on to a trunk to haul herself up the last few feet and then stood a moment, allowing her breath to settle.