Chapter Four #2
“The starlings eat the crops and there are thousands more of them than there should be. And Miriam will eat them later besides.” He held up his glove, lifting his bird a few inches. “This is Miriam. Would you like to hold her?”
I hesitated, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wanted to so badly, I thought the moment deserved ceremony.
“Come on, then,” Henry said. He cast his merlin upward, and she flew onto a low branch of a nearby tree. When she had settled, he removed the glove.
Wordlessly, I went over and accepted the gauntlet.
The weight and stiffness of it surprised me, but I slid my hand in, small in the large mouth.
Unlike the jeweled buttons and embroidered tents, the glove was simple and crudely crafted: a string in place of laces, and the fingers, reinforced with extra padding, were bulky and unsightly.
The thick leather extended past my elbow.
Henry nodded his encouragement. “Now hold out your arm. She will fly down and perch on it. No sudden movements; stay steady and calm.”
He moved us to the center of the clearing and showed me the angle to hold my arm and how to position my fingers, my thumb making a platform.
Then, he let out a shrill three-note whistle—low–high–low—and with a few flaps, Miriam thrust herself off her branch.
Wings wide, she swooped down, inches from the ground, before rising once more to come up onto my fist. I was surprised by the strength of her grip, the heft of her body.
“Hello, Miriam,” I whispered. She had opaque obsidian eyes and a yellow beak that faded to gray at the tip.
She was not human at all. I was amazed that this ancient thing perched on my fist—an alien knot of sinew and feather and lethal tendons and claws, furred and pulsing with restrained strength—was the same graceful creature that could float on air.
“Why doesn’t she fly away?” I kept my voice quiet. My fist might have been a tree. Her magnificence had turned me into scenery.
Henry reached out and stroked her chest with the back of his finger. “She’s trained.”
“As one does with a hound?”
Henry shook his head. “When you train a falcon, they imprint—they come to view a falconer as a provider. Or a parent. There’s a sense of trust and dependence. I—we, the falconers—are a source of food. But if the bird gets too high, it might fly away.”
I looked up into the sky, which, though above us, felt bottomless. “How high?”
“High means heavy.” Henry paused and helped me cast Miriam off once more. She flew back to the branch—the same movements as before, in reverse. “Fat. If a bird is overfed, then it doesn’t have a need to come back.”
“So, you starve them?” Already I was Miriam’s advocate.
He laughed. “There is nothing more pampered than a captive hawk. A starving bird doesn’t have any energy to fly.
We weigh them every day to ensure they’re keen.
It’s the repeated promise of food, and our follow-through on that promise, that keeps them coming back.
” He cocked his head and looked at me. “You’re very curious. ”
If only in my mind, Agatha inserted herself just then, to tell me that being curious was not a virtue. So, instead of asking another question, I nodded toward Miriam and just said, “She’s lovely.”
“That she is,” Henry agreed, looking at her on the branch.
“So very lovely,” I burst out with more feeling.
He glanced at my face, then to the bird, and back again. “You’re interested in the falcons.”
I nodded, pressing my lips together.
“You see those little leather anklets, there, on her legs? They always stay on. They are used to connect to her jesses—which are those leather straps hanging from her feet. Those connect her to the glove, which is called a gauntlet, or to her perch, back in her mews.”
I tried to memorize each word.
Watching my face, he continued: “There’s a brass bell on her, attached with a bewit, which is another kind of leather strap, so she can be found easily when we’re hunting.”
I settled back, leaning against a tree, waiting for more.
And Henry indulged me: Eyases were young birds and passagers were older ones.
Hoods were the small helmets that covered the bird’s eyes.
Hawks did not defecate, they muted. A stoop was a headlong dive in pursuit of prey.
I said nothing, consuming every detail in greedy silence.
Such was my first lesson in falconry.
In secret, Henry continued to teach me about the raptors.
Because the best times for bringing out a falcon were early in the morning and late in the afternoon, I was able to complete my midday lessons with Agatha—never be alone in the company of a man without a chaperone, never introduce yourself first, never, never, never—and then blatantly disregard them in a field with a boy and a bird without rousing any suspicion.
My family would not have wanted me to be around Henry unchaperoned.
And his would not have wanted him spending time with the brewer’s daughter.
He had just had his seventeenth birthday and they had started treating him like a man, assigning a new set of duties and expectations, pulling him into long council sessions that he sat through in a stiff-backed chair.
But he, still savoring the vestigial taste of freedom, wanted to pass his mornings in misty inlets and his afternoons with a bird on his arm.
If anyone knew we were spending so much time together, our lessons would have come to a swift end.
(Here, an echo of all the stories of unwed women—the various brutalities and shames.) But I did not feel I was doing anything wrong with Henry.
I was accustomed to spending time around men.
I revealed to him the best places for collecting nettles and elderberries and mullein.
I took him to the largest rock with footholds that had been worn into it centuries before.
I demonstrated how to spy on his own family members and explained where I had hidden to observe their mews.
It was this last revelation that piqued his interest, and one day, later in the season, he asked me to show him.
I took him the back way up to his own property, along the boulder-strewn creek, past the penned sheep, through a copse of hazel trees, to the exact spot where I had furtively watched the falconers in their daily ministrations and careful attentiveness to the birds.
“Here?” Henry gestured to a large shrub that provided some cover.
I nodded. “Yes, right here, or over there”—I pointed to a thicket of gorse—“where you have a better view of the yard.”
“And it wasn’t boring?”
I pursed my lips. “No more boring than sewing even stitches in a hall.”
He looked amused. “Did you ever watch me here?”
“No,” I lied. “But—”
“Shhh,” he shushed me. Then, in a murmur: “They’re coming!”
“Who?”
“Darius and Stephen.” He pointed over toward the mews. “Our falconers.”
“They’re your falconers; you don’t have to hide.”
But I did. Henry joined me in the gorse, putting a finger to his lips and raising his eyebrows.
It was easy for him to make a game of these things; it was not his honor that might be called into question.
Crouching in the dirt next to me, he whispered: “Perchance we’ll apprehend them relieving themselves. ”
Fear of being caught aside, it was a delight to talk in such a way. I laughed. “Or picking their noses.”
We quieted, waiting.
Kneeling next to Henry, I grew ever so aware of my body. Hip to hip, we were closer than we had ever been, our heads leaning toward one another. He smelled of mint, which he had a habit of chewing. My stomach twisted in a way entirely unfamiliar.
“Look,” he whispered, because the two men had paused in the center of the mews, right in front of us, thirty feet away.
I was sure that, if they glanced over, they would see us, heads bobbing above the waxy gorse leaf.
The men were talking, quietly, and we could not hear the words.
“They’re arguing,” I said, feeling, intrinsically, that we shouldn’t be there. That they would see us.
“No, I think—”
But he stopped talking. One of the falconers had reached out and cupped the other man’s cheek in the palm of his hand, a tenderhearted gesture, recognizable and familiar in its sentiment.
It echoed what those who denuded daisies wished for, what I imagined my parents had had, a frisson of what I felt crouched in the mud beside Henry; it echoed love.
We both stilled and stopped breathing. Quietly, quietly, we crawled backward, on our hands, like two crabs, until we were far enough away to stand, and Henry took my hand and pulled me up, and then we were running, crashing through the pine needles, pebbles flying, shocked and breathless.
When we finally stopped, we were both panting.
We locked eyes and said nothing. It was implicit: We agreed to tell no one, not for what it might mean for Darius and Stephen, not for the trill of power and control it might have provided, not now, not ever.
We realized we were still holding hands and let go, abruptly.
I wish I had understood it better then: The whole world was filled with people keeping secrets.