The View From the Cart Read Online Free Page B

well they keep the house you made, Mam. They honour you for it. They told me so.’
    I remembered, then, the thing that had rushed by me, whirring so quickly I couldn’t see it, when I first took the house outside. A great fear gripped me. Since the holy church had come, talk of faeries was altogether forbidden. My grandmother had told me she saw some once, dancing on a sunny hillside, but that they were disappearing - going away to places where the humans still understood their powers and the new Church had not yet come. My mother would never speak of them. When I told her one day that I believed there was a tiny faery swinging in the foxgloves beside our house, she slapped me hard on my cheek.
    â€˜How can you speak with someone so tiny?’ I asked Wynn, resolved to be a kinder mother than my own had been.
    â€˜They can grow bigger when they talk to us,’ she told me, with absolute seriousness.
    Cuthie rattled his stick again, and shouted ‘Out! Out!’ I tried to peer into the house, but it was in shadow, the stick filling most of the doorway.
    â€˜Cuthie takes God’s part,’ Wynn explained sadly. ‘God speaks to him, and tells him to destroy the faeries. But the house will never break.’
    â€˜But you have been baptised, Wynnie. You’re God’s child, too.’
    She shrugged. ‘Not like Cuthie,’ she said.
    I took the stick away from the little lad, then, and told him the faeries had all gone away, as he wanted. He only partly believed me, but it was time for the meal, so he let me lead him into the hut.
    Cuthie’s third winter was a harsh one. Snow drifted against the hut, seeping through the walls, so that we were always cold and damp. We ate salt meat and oatmeal, with a carrot or two, poorly roasted in the fitful fire. The snow-laden air made the fire smoke and fail to draw, and it seemed to me that we sat for weeks in the near darkness, shivering and sick. Edd took it hardest, struggling to keep the grain dry in the linhay, where starving rats and mice braved his rage and stole or spoiled much of it. He brought it in, but the warmth of the hut, feeble though it was, set a mildew on it. We had beets, well covered with sods and sacking, which were meant more for the sheep than for us, but we ate some of them. They took most of a day to cook, so we chewed the fibrous slices raw, suffering the gut ache that followed.
    The children were miserable, penned in with nowhere to run and play. Edd and I cuffed them many times each day, banging them down to sit still and stay quiet. I thought of Spenna, along the valley, with her five brats in a hut the size of mine, and trembled for her. I craved her company and laughter, her stories of our young days when she ran free on the moors and cast charms to catch a good man. She claimed to remember it better than I did, saying that I had gone with her many a time, but I knew otherwise. She had gone with other village girls, never me. I had never taken part in such pranks. My memories were of lying with her under the apple trees, chewing the long grass and telling secrets together. It was Spenna who heard me tell of my mean-hearted mother and my wish to live beyond the borders of the village.
    Spenna knew charms for everything, and she passed them on to her own daughters, which I had never dared nor wished to do with Wynn.
    Edd began to cough that winter. Something settled on his chest which he never truly shook off again, and after that any cold wet weather would start him off. He learned to breathe more shallow, afraid of the pain I could often see if he took in air right to the depths. His hair thinned and turned grey, though he was not an old man. He let his beard grow, straggling and parti-coloured, which gave him a wild look. We all grew thinner that winter, but Edd became gaunt, his hands and wrists bony and stretched-seeming.
    My own proclaimed cure on the day of Cuthman’s baptism was not as complete or