He straightens, his colour suddenly high. “None of it is true. None of it. I’m surprised that you would attend to such idle gabble.”
“I’m sorry,” Eliza cries, crestfallen. “I’m merely—”
“It is all falsehoods,” he continues, as if she hasn’t spoken, “spread by her stepmother. She is so jealous of her it twists her like a snake and—”
“—frightened for you!”
He regards her, taken aback. “For me? Why?”
“Because…” Eliza tries to order her thoughts, to sift through all she has heard, “…because our father will never agree to this. You must know that. We are in debt to that family. Father will never even speak their name. And because of what is said of her. I don’t believe it,” she adds hastily, “of course I don’t. But, still, it is troubling. People are saying that no good can come of this attachment of yours.”
He slumps back to the wool bales, as if defeated, shutting his eyes. His whole body is quivering, with anger or something else. Eliza doesn’t know. There is a long silence. Eliza folds the fabric of her smock into tiny tight pleats. Then she remembers something else she wanted to ask him, and leans forward.
“Does she really have a hawk?” she whispers, in a new voice.
He opens his eyes, lifts his head. Brother and sister regard each other for a moment.
“She does,” he says.
“Really? I had heard that but did not know if it was—”
“It’s a kestrel, not a hawk,” he says, in a rush. “She trained it herself. A priest taught her. She has a gauntlet and the bird takes off, like an arrow, up through the trees. You have never seen anything like it. It is so different when it flies—it is almost, you might think, two creatures. One on the ground and another in the air. When she calls, it returns to her, circling in these great wheels in the sky, and it lands with such force upon the glove, such determination.”
“She has let you do this? Wear her glove and catch the hawk?”
“Kestrel,” he corrects, then nods, and the pride of it makes him almost glow. “She has.”
“I should love,” Eliza breathes, “to see that.”
He looks at her, rubs his chin with his stained fingertips. “Maybe,” he says, almost to himself, “I’ll take you with me one day.”
Eliza lets go of her dress, the pleats falling from the fabric. She is thrilled and terrified, all at once. “You will?”
“Of course.”
“And you think she will let me fly the hawk? The kestrel?”
“I see no reason why not.” He considers his sister for a moment. “You will like her, I think. You and she are not dissimilar, in some ways.”
Eliza is shocked by this revelation. She is not dissimilar to the woman of whom people say such terrible things? Only the other day, at church, she had an opportunity to observe the complexion of the mistress of Hewlands—those boils and blotches and wens—and the idea that a person might be able to do that to another is deeply disturbing to her. She doesn’t say this to her brother, though, and, in truth, there is a part of her that longs to see the girl up close, to look into her eyes. So Eliza says nothing. Her brother does not appreciate being pressed or rushed. He is someone who must be approached sideways, with caution, as with a restive horse. She must gently probe him and, in that way, she will likely find out more.
“What manner of person is she, then?” Eliza asks.
Her brother thinks before he answers. “She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.” He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. “She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.” He glances at Eliza. “Those are rare qualities, are they not?”
Eliza feels her head nodding and nodding. She is amazed at the detail in this speech, honoured at being its recipient. “She sounds…” she gropes for the right word, recalling one he taught her himself, a few weeks ago, “…peerless.”
He smiles and she knows he remembers teaching it to her. “That’s exactly what she is, Eliza. Peerless.”
“It also sounds,” she begins carefully, ever so carefully, so as not to alarm him, not to make him retreat into silence again—she cannot believe he has already said as much as he has, “as though you are…decided. That you are fixed. On her.”
He doesn’t say anything, just stretches out to tap his palm against the wool bale next to him. For a moment, she believes she has gone too far, that he will refuse to be drawn any further, that he will get up and leave, with no more confidences.
“Have you spoken to her family?” she ventures.
He shakes his head and shrugs.
“Are you going to speak to them?”
“I would,” he mutters, head lowered, “but I am in no doubt that my case would be refused. They would not view me as a good prospect for her.”
“Perhaps if you—waited,” Eliza says, faltering, laying a hand on his sleeve, “a year or so. Then you’d be of age. And more established in your position. Maybe Father’s business will have seen some improvement and he might regain some of his standing in the town, and perhaps he could be persuaded to stop this wool—”
He jerks his arm away, pulling himself upright. “And when,” he demands, “have you ever known him to listen to persuasion, to sense? When has he ever changed his mind, even when he was wrong?”
Eliza stands up from the bale. “I just think—”
“When,” continues her brother, “has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?”
Eliza clears her throat. “Perhaps if you waited, then—”
“The problem is,” her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, “that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.”
He turns, steps on to the ladder and disappears from view. She watches the two points of the ladder judder with his every step, then fall still.
—
The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves. Each apple is centred in a special groove, carved into the wooden racks that run around the walls of this small storeroom.
Rock, rock, jolt, jolt.
The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.
The children of the house were given this duty: to pluck the apples from the twisted branches of the trees, to stack them together in baskets, then bring them here, to the apple store, and line them up on these racks, spaced evenly and carefully, to air, to preserve, to last the winter and spring, until the trees bring forth fruit again.
Except that something is moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting, nudging, insistent motion.
The kestrel, on her perch, is hooded but alert, always alert. Her head rotates within its ruff of flecked feathers, to ascertain the source of this repetitive, distracting noise. Her ears, tuned so acutely that they can, if required, discern the heartbeat of a mouse a hundred feet away, a stoat’s footfall across the forest, the wingbeat of a wren over a field, pick up on the following: twenty score apples being nudged, jostled, bothered in their cradles. The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of her appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction.