Legend of the Seventh Virgin Read Online Free Page A

down to darkness in the cage; I could feel the hot air and the tremor of the rock as the men worked; I could feel the terror of suddenly coming face to face with a spirit, who had had no didjan, or a black dog and white hare whose appearance meant imminent danger in the mine.
    I said to her now: “I’m remembering.”
    “What brought you to me?” she asked.
    “Chance?”
    She shook her head. “It was a long way for little ones to come, but you didn’t doubt you’d find your Granny, did you? You knew if you went on walking far enough you’d come to her, didn’t ’ee now?”
    I nodded.
    She was smiling as though she had answered my question.
    “I’m thirsty, lovey,” she said. “Go get me a thimbleful of my sloe gin.”
    I went into the cottage. There was only one room in Granny Bee’s cottage, although a storehouse had been built on and it was in this that she brewed her concoctions and often received her clients. The room was our bedroom, and living room. There was a story about it; it had been built by Pedro Balencio, Granny Bee’s husband, who was called Pedro Bee because the Cornish people couldn’t pronounce his name and weren’t going to try. Granny told me how it had been put up in a night to fit the custom which was that if anyone could build a cottage in a night they could claim the ground on which it was built. So Pedro Bee had found his ground — a clearing in the copse — had hidden in the trees the thatch and poles, together with the clay which would make the cob walls; and one moonlit night, with his friends to help him, had built the cottage. All he had to do that first night was make the four walls and the roof; gradually he would put in the window, the door, and the chimney; but Pedro Bee had built what he could call a cottage in a night and satisfied the old custom.
    Pedro had come from Spain. Perhaps he had heard that according to legend the Cornish had a streak of the Spaniard in them because so many Spanish sailors had raided the coast and ravished the women, or having been wrecked on the rocks had been befriended and settled down. It’s true that although so many have hair the color of Mellyora Martin’s, there are as many again with the coal-black hair and flashing dark eyes — and the quick temper to go with them, which is different from the easy-going nature that seems to suit our sleepy climate.
    Pedro loved Granny who was named Kerensa — as I was; he loved her black hair and eyes which reminded him of Spain; and they married and lived in the cottage which he had made in a night and they had one daughter who was my mother.
    Into that cottage I went to get the sloe gin. I had to pass through it to reach the storehouse where her brews were kept.
    Although we had only one room we also had the talfat which was a wide shelf about halfway up the wall and which protruded over the room. It served as a bedroom — mine and Joe’s; and we reached it by means of the ladder which was kept in the corner of the room.
    Joe was up there now.
    “What are you doing?” I called.
    He didn’t answer me the first time and when I repeated the question he held up a pigeon.
    “He broke his leg,” he told me. “But twill mend in a day or so.”
    The pigeon remained still in his hands and I saw that he had constructed a sort of splint to which he had bound the leg. What surprised me so much about Joe was not that he could do these things for birds and animals, but that they remained passive while he did them. I had seen a wild cat come to him and rub her body against his leg, even before she knew he was going to feed her. He never ate all his meals but kept some back to carry about him, for he was certain to find some creature who needed it more than he did. He spent all his time in the woods. I had come upon him lying on his stomach watching insects in the grass. Besides his long, slender fingers that were amazingly clever at mending the broken limbs of birds and animals, he had an extra sense