The Victory Garden(67)

“Yes? Can I help you?” she asked, while the thought crossed her mind that she was a long way from any assistance. They would never hear her in the houses across the lane if she shouted for help.

“I’ve got a sore thumb.” The man held it out to her. Emily looked. It was more than a sore thumb. It had a great, yellow blister on it, and the skin around it was angry, swollen and red.

“That looks awful. You should see a doctor,” she said.

He frowned. “My sort don’t deal with doctors.” He paused. “That requires money. Besides, you’re her, aren’t you?”

“Her?”

“The wise woman. The herb wife. It says so on the gatepost.”

Emily stared at him as if he were talking a foreign language. “On the gatepost?”

“That’s right. We tramps have signs of our own—signs that other folks can’t read, telling us where we’ll be welcome. And your gatepost says that the wise woman lives here.”

It was so improbable that Emily had to laugh. “I’m no wise woman,” she said, “but that is certainly a nasty-looking thumb. Come inside, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

He wiped his feet carefully before coming in. Emily made him sit by the fire, and she put the kettle on the stove. Then she went to find her nail set—a pretty little kit from Paris in a morocco leather box that had been one of her twenty-first presents. She poured boiling water over the scissors and tweezers. Then she cut off part of the clean tea towel Mrs Trelawney had given her. There would be hell to pay about that, she thought, but she had to clean up the man’s hand or he’d die from infection.

Seen up close, the thumb looked even worse, and her insides heaved as she cleaned it with the boiled water.

“I think we had better open up this blister,” she said.

He nodded.

She took a tentative little snip with the scissors and pus streamed out. She snipped more away until all the pus was gone. Then she held his hand close to the lamp, retrieved the tweezers and carefully lifted something out from the wound. “There,” she said. “You had some kind of big splinter in your thumb.”

“That’s right. I did. I were climbing over a fence and this ruddy, great splinter went right in. I tried to pull it out and it broke off.”

“Well, it’s out now,” she said. “I’m going to wash it again with the hot water, and then I’ll bandage it up with this clean cloth. That’s the best I can do. I don’t have any disinfectant, I’m afraid. I’ve just moved in.”

“You’ve done a grand job, little lady,” he said. “I reckon you are the wise woman after all. Are you going to bring the place back to what it was? My fellows will be pleased to know that.”

This suggestion alarmed Emily. She imagined a procession of tramps at her front door. Instead of answering, she asked, “Would you like a cup of tea? The water has just boiled.”

“I’d prefer a swig of whisky,” he replied.

She smiled. “I’m afraid I don’t keep any alcohol here. But if you go down to the Red Lion, tell Mrs Lacey to give you a drink and that I’ll pay for it.”

He shook his head. “Respectable folk don’t want no dirty tramps in their establishments. There are a few farmers that let us stay in their barns on raw nights in return for some wood chopping, but on the whole they’d just as soon set the dogs on us.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

“You wouldn’t understand, nice refined young girl like you,” he said. He glanced down at his cleanly bandaged thumb. “But I thank you for your trouble, and I wish you all the best.”

He got up and went towards the door. As she watched him walk away, Emily realized that they were two of a kind. She was an outcast, too.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The encounter with the tramp had left Emily quite shaken. She made herself a cup of tea and sat holding the mug of steaming liquid in her hands, feeling the warmth flow through her chilled body. The wise woman, he had said. Was that the same as the witch? But the wise woman had obviously been a healer, not a curser. And yet others had hinted that the women who had lived in the cottage were cursed. Her thoughts went to that journal. Did it contain the writings of the wise woman? But that was from long ago, from the eighteen fifties. Had there been other wise women since? Emily had to know more. She went through to the bedroom and brought the leather-bound volume back into the lamplight. The ink had faded to a pale brown, and she held up the page as she reread what she had only briefly scanned before.

From the Journal of Susan Olgilvy, July 10, 1858

In the Village of Bucksley Cross, Devonshire

I have done it. I am officially the schoolmistress of the village of Bucksley Cross, Devonshire, installed in my own little cottage at the edge of Dartmoor. There are thatched cottages on the other side of the green, a church with a tall, square tower and a public house that looks quite inviting (although I am sure that ladies do not venture into a public house, especially not spinster schoolmistresses).

Emily read on, skimming over the woman’s description of the cottage (which hadn’t changed at all since the eighteen fifties), until she came to words that made her heart jolt.

I try not to think that the whole cottage would fit nicely inside our drawing room at Highcroft. Nor of my claw-foot tub that Maggie, my maid, would have filled for me with steaming water. I must accept this new position in life, grateful at least that I shall be kept busy and that I won’t starve. Mother would be horrified if she saw me now, but then I must not think of her either. She did not try to intervene when Father told me I would no longer be his child if I ran off to London to marry Finlay.