“Really, we just—” Ned stammers.
“Honored, I’m sure,” the old woman shrieks, scraping the ground in an obscene parody of a curtsy. “ ‘Ere, ‘ave a seat and give us peasants a minute o’ yer precious time,” thrusting a stool at him and calling out impatiently into the darkened passageway. “Boy!”
There is a movement on the far side of the room, furtive and shy, the form of a child emerging from the low rictus of the sheeprun. A boy, four or five, his face a dim white spot in the gloom. He stands there, uncertain, hanging his head.
“Well, ye young toad, stop yer loiterin’ in the shadders and come over ‘ere to yer old Mother — or don’t ye ken the King’s English no more?” The old woman, cocked and watchful, has stationed herself in the center of the room, at the pulse of things, playing to her audience like a demented actress in her most ominous role. What next? Ned is thinking, when suddenly she spins round on him, a leer on her face, the old gums working. “ ‘Ee’s a littul pissant, that one, ain’t ‘ee? A reg’lar changeling. Why ye’d think ‘ee was afraid of ‘is own dear Mother the way ‘ee acts.”
Ned’s face is locked like a vault. There is something familiar here, something sinister, something he doesn’t want to know. And yet he looks on as if hypnotized, compelled despite himself, this grim inscrutable drama unfolding with a logic and momentum of its own. He looks on as the harridan writhes across the room and snatches the child to her breast like a greedy crow, her shriek of triumph like a razor drawn across a pane of glass. Looks on as she insinuates a withered hand under the boy’s chin and twists his face to the Light with a glittering malicious grin.
As the firelight falls across the boy’s pinched features, illuminating the greasy wisps of hair and smudged face, the open sores on the chin and the steady patient gaze of a penned animal, Ned feels a panic rising in him. Compelled, he stares at the boy as he might have stared at a bleeding statue or his own epitaph etched in a gravestone, stares as he’s never stared before, Boyles turned from the fire to gawk at him, the only sound in the room the hag’s fierce rattling insuck of breath. And then he’s up off the stool, groping like a blind man, his mouth working in shock and incomprehension. He is looking at himself. Below the stark leering challenge of the hag’s eyes, he is looking into his own, the years stripped back, suffering in ascendancy, the ragged orphan set loose on the streets. He is dreaming, dying, going mad.
The harridan’s shriek breaks the spell. “ ‘Andsome lad, wot?” she cackles. “Though ‘ee needs a bit of a cuff now and again, don’t ye, boy? Eh?” And as if to prove it, she spins him round and rakes his ear in a single practiced movement. “Now get back to yer perch, ye dirty littul beast,” she spits, and the child vanishes into the passageway like a mirage.
It couldn’t be, no, it couldn’t. Look out, the voice shouts in his head. “I—” Ned begins, but the noose is round his throat again, the hangman’s eyes like rare jewels glittering in their slits, and suddenly he has Boyles by the arm. “Get up, Billy, get up.”
Boyles has by this time turned his attention back to the jug, periodically shaking it and holding it to his ear like a watchmaker inspecting a faulty timepiece. He puts it aside momentarily and pokes the fire, happy as the day he was born. “Wot?” he gasps, an edge of genuine shock to his voice.
“Eeeeeeeeeee!” the old woman keens.
Ned jerks Boyles to his feet. “Forget the jug, Billy — we got to go now. Go now,” he shouts, as if Boyles were brain-damaged or hard of hearing.
“Awwww,” croaks the hag, picking at her ear. “So soon? But ye just got ‘ere. Mother ‘asn’t ‘ad time to get out the linen nor polish the silver, eeeeee!”
Boyles’ face is pained and confused. “I likes it here, Neddy,” he whines, but his companion is already pulling him toward the door in a desperate trembling grip that pinches his arm — even through the coat — with all the implacable urgency of a steel trap.
Ned hesitates at the door, his voice floating on a wave of adrenalin: “The Brunch farm,” he stammers, “old woman, which way is it?”
The semblance of a smile twists her lips. “Farmer Brunch? I thought you boys was friends o’ the Squire’s?” The joke catches in her throat and she begins to hack and wheeze like an overworked horse, but Ned is already out the door, white-hot with terror and rage and confusion, fighting through the brambles and jerking at Boyles’ sleeve for all he’s worth.
“Arf a mile. . up the road, peach. . peachfuzz,” the old woman shrieks at his back. “At the fork. Just climb the fence and cut across the pasture. Stone cottage with a tumbledown barn. . out back. ‘Ear?”
Ned is running, panicked, every syllable an injection of fire and brimstone and the caustic salts of perdition, conscience rasping in his ear, Boyles forsaken, legs churning, arms parting the dead stalks and lowhanging branches as if they were waves and he a breaststroker making for shore, running for the cold hard road and the sanctuary of the Brunch farm like a filicide caught in the act.
♦ A TICKET TO GOREE ♦
Half a mile up the road they come to a fork. A milestone on the right indicates the way into Hertford proper. On the left, a neck-high wall of interlocking stones, an empyrean expanse of greening pasture maculated with stubborn patches of ice, and in the distance, as the hag had indicated, the stone cottage flanked by the tumbledown barn.
Boyles stops short, puzzles over the milestone and then, scratching his head, crosses the road to the stone wall, hikes himself up on his elbows and takes a good hard squint at the distant farmhouse. After a minute or two of intense concentration, rapid lip movement and the ticking off of various sums on his fingers, he turns back to Ned. “This’ll be it, Neddy, looks like.”
Ned is only half listening. The encounter with the hag and her strange timid ward has anesthetized him, deadened him to the cold and the uncertainty alike, shut his ears to hope, calculation and the insipid chattering voice of his traveling companion. He can still see the child’s eyes, hear the hag’s squawks of triumph, feel that empty strangling sensation in his gut, the insidious cramp of a truth so unimaginable it can only be digested in the dark essential atmosphere of the bowels. When he looks up at Boyles, he can only nod.
A heave, a ho, and a thump, and they’re in the pasture, looking half a dozen startled sheep in the eye. As they muck their way across the field, the farmhouse begins to look somewhat grander and more extensive than they’d been led to expect, the barn less tumbledown. Is this a tenant’s cottage? With three chimneys and a second story?
Boyles is rubbing his hands with glee and Ned is on the verge of making the deductive leap between the unwonted sprawl of the farmhouse and the hag’s ulterior motives, when the first shotgun blast knocks them flat. The second blast flings a fistful of mud in their faces and neatly threads the odd ball or two through their breeches and into the tender uncallused flesh along the nether plane of their thighs and buttocks. An instant later a pair of wooden-faced gamekeepers are standing over them, guns smoking and boots glistening. Then there’s a voice, deep as thunder along the spine of a mountain, righteous and indignant as the voice of God, barking out a terse command: “Off the ground, shitface.”