Chapter Four
I’d known of Henry’s family since I can remember.
Growing up, the Tremaines were recognized in our township for their pack of boys—large—and their hunting lodge—larger—and above all else, their fortune (largest).
Merchants made wealthy across generations, they spent most of their time in their primary manor hall, in the central part of the kingdom.
But during the hunting season, they traveled to the territory I called home to pursue the waterfowl and game birds that proliferated on our lakes and moorlands.
The Tremaines’ arrival—with a litany of carriages and horses and livestock, servants and staff, maids and cooks and luggage and barrels of wine and ale—was met with fascination, watched from fenceposts and through windows, and gossiped about at the market and in kitchens.
The people in my hamlet were not accustomed to fanfare. Most were thin and hungry. Meager crops had to be coaxed from windswept patches of dirt. Our land was pine filled and hilly and rock strewn. The Tremaines traveled with a decorative tent used for roadside lunches.
Besides the tent, and other whispered details of opulence—that their buttons were made from jewels, that their caravan traveled carrying glass windows with them because the old lodge was only fitted with parchment—they were also known for their birds.
Each family member had a falcon. The raptors came in travel cases and compartments, and in a special carriage designed for their transport, covered in nets and screens.
Hawking demands equipment, money, time, and land. It wasn’t familiar to most of the people in our township. But when the falcons were flying high, we all knew: The Tremaines were home.
The first time Henry and I spoke, I was twelve and out gathering berries. I was wandering through the briars when a voice came from up high: “There’s more on the other side!”
Startled, I looked up, into the sky, and then at the branches of the tree.
I could barely see through the sunlight, but there he was, sleeves rolled up, shinnying down along the trunk: a young boy, skinny and sandy-haired and brown-eyed, with a scraped elbow that indicated he had climbed plenty of trees before this, to varying degrees of success.
I recognized him right away as one of the Tremaine brothers. Henry—the tall one. A year older than I and the third of seven sons. Less lucky in his birth order but lucky in birth, for he had been born feet first and both he and his mother survived to tell it.
“I’ll show you,” he said, dropping the last several feet to the ground. “This way.”
I was not supposed to be alone with boys, but I followed behind him.
“Another few weeks and the bushes will be filled.” He held a branch back for me. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
I considered the question and then considered not answering.
I said instead: “Only when I have something good to say,” which felt like a violation of the statement.
I realized I was a little nervous—we were not only unchaperoned, but he was from an elevated social tier.
“Or bad,” I added, confusing even myself.
He grinned indulgently. “What about everything that’s in between?”
I thought carefully. “There’s no point.”
He looked back over his shoulder as we continued onward. “Well, what’s your name?”
“Etheldreda Verity Isolde—”
“Etheldreda,” he repeated. “Is that good or bad?”
I took the question to mean: Did I like my name? No one had ever asked me that before. “Both,” I decided. “I was named for my mother.”
“Is she the good part or the bad part?”
“She’s dead,” I said simply, as if death trumped character evaluation. But in truth, I hadn’t known her well enough to determine. I was old enough to know that death wasn’t always bad, and mothers weren’t always good.
He waited for me to explain further and, when I didn’t, said: “I’ll call you Ethel. You can call me Henry.”
“Thank you,” I said, mildly surprised. “Your family has the big hall. My father knows yours—he’s the brewer.”
I studied him as he walked in front of me—looking at his undershirt sticking out of his collar, the way his hair curled a bit at the nape of his neck, and his gangling, energetic stride.
He showed me a trove of berries, thicker and bigger and riper, growing much closer to the water’s edge.
I marveled at the size of them, hurrying to fill my basket, pausing only to push the bursting fruit into my mouth.
The encounter might have been forgettable, except that as we stood there, me purple-fingered and purple-mouthed, he had shushed me, stilled me, reaching out a hand to stop my movement. He pointed up.
Above us, in the sky, there were two wild hawks, both with wings spread.
They flew together, in a dance, their bodies alternately fat and thick or like a blade.
The air, solid, then liquid, did their bidding.
They’d float side by side and then one would tilt, the flourish of a wrist, and slide beneath the other.
A feathered roll and a swift follow and both soared once more.
They moved like water on the surface of a stream, like a trill of music, like the sensation of your stomach dropping to your groin.
Thus, my first memory of Henry: the taste of berries, his hand tight on my wrist, both of us looking upward, with reverence.
The next few years, when Henry saw me in the village or at the market, he would say hello, and call me Ethel.
Hello, Ethel: Once when I was picking up extra cheese from the stall.
I’d hardly turned around in time to say hello back.
Hello, Ethel: A year later, and him a bit taller, when we passed one another at a harvest celebration, the food heaped in piles and the fires smoking.
And then, another year passed, and a Hello, Ethel, when I stumbled upon him alone with his bird.
Stumbled upon is perhaps not accurate. Alongside all of Henry’s Hello, Ethels—each instance remembered and held close—I had spied and catalogued the comings and goings of his family. More specifically, I had observed what they did with their birds.
From the inside of a broom shrub, surrounded by yellow flowers, I watched the mews at the edge of the Tremaine property.
Each bird had its own compartment, with a perch on a raised platform and a large screened window.
The falconers cleaned these compartments along with the equipment they housed, exercised the hawks in the yard, and took copious notes in various books and ledgers.
Before feeding the birds, they weighed them on a brass scale unlike any I’d seen.
They trained the birds with bait on lines and I watched from the scratchy confines of the shrub as the raptors flew away and returned again, their bodies alternating between a forceful clumsiness—the flap and cluster of wings, the abrupt grip of the talons, the mash of meat in a tendoned fist—and an incredible, weightless grace.
And from behind rocks and trees at the edges of various fields and forest clearings, I watched the Tremaines themselves: exercising the birds, walking them—the falcons like soft gargoyles hulking on gloved fists—feeding them, talking to them, discussing them.
I heard a new vocabulary—wingover, imping, cadge, trounce—words I would not define until later but remembered all the same.
I heard words I knew—weathering, haggard, rouse, bate—used in ways I didn’t recognize.
The foreign language both excluded and beckoned to me.
Falconry, at its core, is taking a creature that is primordial, instinctive, beautifully primitive, and fundamentally selfish and teaching it obedience, order, and fidelity.
Watching the birds and their handlers, fresh out of daily lessons for comportment and fan signals and feminine restraint, is it any wonder I was enthralled?
It was not enough to listen to and observe the falconers in their weathered mews yard, to spy on the Tremaines from a distance; I wanted to be closer to the birds, as close as they’d let me.
I wanted to know what it would feel like to have a falcon land on my outstretched arm, to look into its eyes and understand its wisdom.
I couldn’t do that hiding in a bush.
I might have revealed myself. Or it might have been an accident. Either way, one day, Henry caught me.
He was manning his bird—I would learn later that it was a merlin, small and agile—and I was watching from behind a large slab of granite.
Instead of flushing the prey, Henry stood waiting for murmurations of smaller birds.
When these unnatural clouds appeared, undulating to rhythms of some unseen force, he would release his merlin from the glove, both of us witnessing its aerial pursuit.
Each time a small bird was caught, there was a flurry of activity: the hawk morphing into a fearsome creature, an explosion of feathers, Henry procuring a piece of meat to urge his bird to release its quarry.
But the minutes between these pursuits were long.
I grew tired of watching the real clouds form and dissipate and form again in the sky above.
So much of falconry is patience. Sitting behind the rock that day, I did not have any. I kicked some pebbles.
Without turning to face my hiding spot, Henry called: “Hello, Ethel.”
I stepped out from behind the rock, too eager to feel embarrassed. “How does it know to come back to you?”
“It’s nice to see you out here.”
“And why does it give you the little birds and not eat them?”
He looked at me, amused. “The food I give her is much easier than eating a bird. She’s happy to swap.”
I frowned. “She’s killing them for no reason?” We both looked down at the bag at Henry’s feet, inside of which were two dead birds.