Chapter 11: Glimpsed

Nothing moved faster through Angeau than a thing nobody was supposed to repeat. It left one kitchen by the back door and was in the next before the kettle boiled, and by the end of the lane it had usually picked up a detail or two from the last person to carry it.

The town did not think of this as unkind. It thought of it as looking after its own, and nobody in it was looked after more closely than the healer. She walked down to the fence that morning in the best mood of her whole summer, with no idea how far a good mood can be seen from a fence.

The seventh supper was behind us by then. I had made it the evening after the springs, a stew with no yarrow anywhere in it, and Crispin ate two bowls and neither of us said the bet was over. I kept turning up at the fire at suppertime, and he kept having a bowl ready.

We had got easier. He handed me things before I asked, the knife, the cloth, and when I laughed he no longer put his hands over his face first. He sat close enough that our knees touched, and he checked every time that I didn’t mind. I didn’t. I made a point of not minding where he could see it.

I knew about the wardens now, and I carried that around all day. He had said they were south and going slowly, and whenever my hands were empty I took the thought out and looked at it. It never changed, so I put it back. I hadn’t counted a single night toward the moon. I told myself that was trust, and it was mostly that I didn’t want to see the number.

One morning we were down among the beeches, cutting willow bark, when his ears came up.

“Someone’s calling,” he said. “A woman. She isn’t... shouting. She keeps stopping to listen.”

“What’s she saying?”

“Healer. And your name, sort of. Like she’d rather the trees didn’t hear.”

I was most of the way to the fence before I knew the voice.

At the thick trunk he stopped, and I pulled off my cloak and put it in his arms without thinking, because the morning was hot. He held it against his chest as if I had asked him to keep it alive.

“I’ll... be here,” he said.

“You always are.” I took the small jar from my pocket, the one for Nana’s hip, with the seal broken now, and went out across the stumps.

Béatrice, who has never missed anything on any lane in Angeau, was standing with one shoulder behind a fence post, as though it were a door she might need to shut. She had her shawl pulled up and her right hand wrapped in a wet cloth against her chest, and she looked everywhere before she looked at me.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. “And you look so well. Rested. Isn’t that nice.”

Since I came home, Angeau had told me I looked tired, which meant useful, so I should have worried when she said I looked well. I was already reaching for her wrist.

The scald ran across the back of her hand to the wrist, with two blisters broken and weeping and the skin around them tight and hot. A pink line had started up the inside of her wrist. That line was why she had come, whatever she was going to say about it.

“How long?”

“The kettle. Day before yesterday. I thought it would go off on its own.”

“It’s going off on its own in the wrong direction.” I rinsed it from the water skin on my belt and trimmed the loose edges with my little knife, and she hissed and held very still. Nana’s salve smelled of resin and beeswax, and I spread it thin and wrapped her hand in the clean cloth from my pocket. My hands did all of it by themselves. It was good to have a task, and I disliked how good. “Keep it dry. Don’t pick at it. Show me in a day or two. If that line gets past your elbow, you come and shout.”

“You’re a treasure, sweetheart.” She patted my hand with her good one. “Everyone’s being so understanding about your Nana.”

“Her hip is complicated.”

“Of course it is.” She smiled at me and did not leave. I told her I had to get back and walked away, and I felt her watch my back the whole way. I decided it was the sun.

I stopped halfway back across the stumps to wipe my knife, thinking about blisters, and forgot that I was standing in the open.

“Noëlle.”

Crispin had come out from the trunk into the sun to fetch me, with the red cloak held in both hands. “You forgot... it. Your cloak.” His ears were up and clear of his hair, and his tail was out behind him and swinging, because he had forgotten about it.

I put my head back and laughed with my whole face, loud enough to carry. I took the cloak with one hand, and with the other I touched his ear, because it was right there and warm and it flicked into my palm on its own. He made a small helpless noise, and I laughed harder.

A sound from the fence brought my head around.

Béatrice had taken a step back, and her shoulders were against the post. The bandaged hand was up at her mouth. She looked at him, and at my hand on his ear, and then she looked at me, and it was my face she read. I had seen that look before on people who were carrying somebody in on a door.

“Béatrice,” I said. “It’s all right.”

It is what everyone in Angeau says right before it isn’t, and I heard myself say it. My mouth did the rest, because it always does. “Keep that hand dry!”

She nodded twice and went down the field very fast, not running, with the bandage held against her shawl. In my whole life I had never seen Béatrice leave anywhere without looking back, and this time she didn’t.

Standing there, I could already hear what she would say with her hand on her chest, and how kind she would sound saying it. And for one whole second, I’ll admit, I didn’t care. My palm was warm, and he was ridiculous and lovely in the sun with his ears out, and somebody who had known me since I was small had finally seen us. A silly bright part of me was glad.

My hand came down off his ear.

He was already back behind the trunk with his arms around his ribs. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so... I thought I could just hand it to you and, and be gone.”

“I laughed at you. In the sun. That one is mine.”

“She saw. She’s going to tell them.”

“Yes,” I said.

I should have stayed away. I went back to the fence the next afternoon with a bundle of willow bark tied up in string for Josette, whose cough would need more, and I told Crispin that was the reason. The real reason is that I wanted to see their faces.

He came as far as he could. This time he stayed well back from the last trunk, off to the left among the beeches, because I had asked him to. I did not look to see where. I could tell, and I would have bet my boots his shoulders were up near his ears, and I could not decide if that was a comfort or a worry.

The field was empty, which was wrong. The field below that fence was never empty. I laid the bundle on the top of the post where Béatrice had stood and turned to go, and a voice behind me said, “Noëlle. Wait up.”

Gaspard was coming up the cut grass with Godwin a little behind him and Astien behind Godwin, sweating, and a few more beyond them who I could have named and would rather not. They stopped at the fence. Gaspard put one hand on the top rail and went over it, and a bramble caught his sleeve on the far side, and he tore it free without looking at it.

“I only want a word,” he said.

“You can have one from there.”

I went on walking, away from the beeches, and he kept coming. He crossed the stumps and came in under the first big trees with his chin up, looking around at the trunks. Nobody from Angeau came in under those trees, and until I watched him do it I hadn’t known how much I liked that. In the hollow where the willows stand he stopped, ankle deep in old leaf, and I saw him make up his mind not to look scared. He raised his voice a little, for the people at the fence.

“I came to tell you what people are saying. Better from me than from the lane.”

“Say it, then.”

“Béatrice saw something yesterday.” He touched the top of his own head with two fingers and did not say what. “She was in a state. With her hand, and the pain, she hardly knew what she’d seen. I told them that. I said Noëlle would never. I stood up for you in the lane, and I want you to know it.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he heard it as a yes.

“But I know it’s true.” His voice dropped, warm and sorry. “Something has got hold of you. You’ve been up here alone, you’re not eating right, and you’re not yourself. Béatrice says you were laughing like you didn’t know yourself. I’m not angry. I want you to hear that I am not angry.”

“Nobody’s told me to do anything.”

“The town needs you home, Noëlle.”

“The town’s got the bark. It’s on the post.”

Somebody at the fence laughed and stopped. Gaspard smiled with all his teeth.

“You come home now, today, and I’ll clear the rest of it up. It’s a wolf. You don’t have to say a word about it. You don’t have to be afraid of it, either.” He took a step toward me. “There are proper ways to deal with a thing like that. There are people whose business it is. I’ll see to it, and it will be as if none of it happened, and nobody in Angeau will say another word to you.”

I knew who those people were now, and my hands closed. To my left, among the beeches, I caught Crispin leaning forward, and I let my left hand drop to my hip with the palm toward the ground and the fingers open, which is what I would do to a frightened dog, and he stopped. “Gaspard,” I said. “I’m going to say this in front of everybody, so I only have to say it once.”

At the fence, Godwin stopped grinning.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to marry you. I never have and I never will. I don’t want you to walk me home or see to anything. I don’t like you, Gaspard. Please go back to the fence.”

I have never heard that field so quiet. A bird went on singing somewhere. Astien was looking at his own boots with his hand in its rag pressed to his chest.

Gaspard’s smile stayed where it was, long past where a smile ought to have stopped, and then it went away all at once. He looked past my shoulder at the beeches on my left and kept looking, and I cannot say what he could see. I told myself he could see only trunks.

“That’s not Noëlle talking,” he said to the fence, loud and steady. “You all heard that. That isn’t her.”

“It is exactly me.”

“It’s all right.” He said it to me, gently. “It’s not your fault. I know what did that.” He looked at the trees a moment longer. When he spoke again it was low, and meant only for me. “I’ll see to him myself.”

He was not angry. He sounded like a man who had found the cause of a leak.

He turned and went back out through the willows and across the stumps without hurrying, over the rail with one hand, and he said a few words to Godwin that I could not hear, and Godwin nodded hard. They went down the field in a group. At the bottom, Astien looked back at me over his shoulder, and I think he was sorry.

I stood there with my left hand still held low. I will confess that for as long as it took me to reach the beeches, I enjoyed having said it in front of them, in plain words, with Gaspard standing there in the leaves. I had wanted to say it for a long time. I felt taller.

Crispin was waiting where I had left him, with his back against a beech and both ears pinned. His hands were shaking and he was holding them against his sides. I took one of them and it was cold.

“He said he’d see to me,” he said. “He... looked right at me. I don’t think he saw me.”

“He says that about everything.”

“It isn’t the same.”

“No,” I said, because it wasn’t. His ears had turned toward the town again, away from me. He was listening to the field and the lane, and I couldn’t hear any of it. “Stop that. Come on, we’re going home.”

He stopped, and a few steps later he started again.

I thought I had won. I had told the best-looking man in Angeau no in front of half his friends, and not one hair of my head was out of place, and I walked back through the beeches holding a cold hand and feeling very much like someone who had won. I should have asked Crispin what he was listening to.