Chapter 10 #14
“Are we to listen to this?” the other gentleman cuts across her, addressing the viscount’s son, and his voice is different, more drawling, the words blending into each other, the way cream turns to butter, “or is there some other use we might put her to?”
Now the landowner’s son lets out a laugh but there’s no mirth in it.
He reaches out, still with the crop in his hand, and takes hold of Rose’s wrist, his fingers closing around it.
It is a leisured movement: he is in no hurry, it says, there is no urgency here.
He will take his time. The other gentleman who, she now sees, carries a gun in the crook of his arm, is not so gentle. His hand seizes the lobe of her ear.
“I had no idea,” he murmurs, “that you had such pretty tenants. Why did you never say? You might have—”
The sentence is never finished. Rose kicks out, her boot meeting his shin, and she tears herself from the grasp of the other.
Then she is running, as fast as she can, still with the puppy in her arms, she is heading back to the brae, at the end of which will be the widow’s fields, and the village, if she can only make it that far, and surely she has an advantage for she knows this path and they never come this way, she could walk it in the dead of night, she only needs to get clear of the dunes, up the bluff and then—
They catch her effortlessly, of course. This time there is no hint of gentleness.
One of them seizes her by the hair; the other kicks out the legs from under her so that she lands with a sickening thud that drives the breath from her.
For a moment, all she can think is that she might have injured the pup in her fall but she hears it skitter away, yelping.
Her mouth is filled with grit and sand; one of the gentlemen has his full weight on her shoulders so that she can barely breathe, barely scream; the other is at her skirts, yanking them up, forcing apart her legs.
She hears them laugh and say something about how she, too, needs to be taught a lesson.
Then Rose hears something else. A barking, a snarling, and she knows that Bran has come.
He would have gone down to the strand ahead of her and then wondered where she’d got to and returned to find her.
She hears one of the men curse, then let out an effeminate shriek, and she knows that Bran will have lunged at him, going for the throat, aiming to sink his teeth into his windpipe.
She feels the men’s hands and legs and bodies vanish from her so that she is free to stagger upright, stumbling on the soft sand, grabbing at the marram grass for balance, and behind her is a terrible growling sound and the panicked cries of the men, and she wants to say, Run, Bran, run away, but before she can turn around, a single shot rings out, followed by an awful silence, and she knows that they have killed her dog, they have put a bullet through his fierce and loyal heart, that he will never again run circles on the strand, that he tried his best, that he would have done anything for her, that he cannot save her now.
She stumbles away, as fast as she can, up the dune, blindly, her hands snatching at the darkness, but of course they catch her again, and this time they are furious and determined.
They don’t speak a word: they strike her so hard across the head that she thinks her ears will burst, and she is felled there, among the spiked grass.
One of them kneels on her wrists and the other tears the fabric of her skirts from hem to waist, and he raises himself up to unfasten his britches, and Rose thinks it is the viscount’s son and she finds herself wondering if that is how it works with these people, that he gets to go first because it is his land, his tenant, whether this is an unspoken agreement between gentlemen like this, and how strange that is, and she tells herself that when it happens, and it will happen very soon, any moment now, as soon as the landowner’s son has unfastened all those buttons, she will close her eyes, she will shut them tight, because she will not give them that, she will not let them take that as well, she will not look at them while they do this, she will not allow them inside her head.
But Rose never does close her eyes, and the viscount’s son never gets to the final button on his britches, never gets to take what he believes is rightfully his.
Because, as Rose steals a last look at the sky, where clouds race across an expanse of indigo and the brittle piercings of stars are showing themselves, the outline of her brother, Eugene, appears above her, above them all, between land and sky, and he has a spade over his shoulder and he brings it down, first on the head of the viscount’s son and then on the upturned face of the other.
The widow has used the day to card and spin her wool, feeding its delicate fronds into the machinery of the wheel, and watching with satisfaction as it resolves into smooth yarn. She is just considering what colour she may dye it, when both halves of the door burst open and Eugene steps in.
She looks at him, from behind her wheel.
She holds herself as still as the plaster icon of a saint, taking in every detail.
Eugene is breathing hard, as if he’s run a long way.
There is mud on his boots and his hands.
Across his face and in the V of his shirt are fine sprays of what looks like blood.
Under his arm, he cradles a small dog that resembles Bran; the animal looks back at her with a sorrowful expression.
Stiffly, because her joints don’t give as easily as they used to, she stands, she goes to Eugene, she takes one of his filthy hands.
“What is it?” she says, with more calm than she feels.
Eugene tugs at her, indicating that she should come with him.
So she does. She takes her shawl from the hook, the lantern from the hearth; she pulls on her clogs, and off they go.
Darkness hasn’t yet fallen fully and it is possible to see the shapes of things, to find a difference between shadow and night.
Around the byre, through the field, along the path, over the dune, where Eugene takes the lantern from her and holds it up high.
Three shapes lie before her in the marram grass.
Two gentlemen in tweed suits, with horsewhips and a gun, both their heads staved in; one is the landowner’s son and his forehead is slashed in an ugly, jagged line, black wings of blood around his temples.
The third shape is harder to make out. She takes the lantern from Eugene, moves towards it, and it resolves into the body of Bran, stretched out at an awkward angle, lips drawn back over his teeth, a dark hole in his chest, and curled around him, her face next to his, is Rose.
For a moment, the widow believes that the girl is dead too, that Eugene and the puppy are the sole survivors of this grisly scene, but then she sees the shuddering rise of Rose’s ribcage, her hand moving to smooth the fur between Bran’s ears.
The widow looks from Bran to Rose to the bodies of the gentlemen.
She crosses herself; she utters a quick and automatic prayer.
What happened? she says. What— She stops herself.
Get up now, Rose. Up you get. Come on, we’ve our work cut out for us and we only have until dawn.
Get up off the ground, I tell you, Rose. Do you want to live or die?
She instructs Eugene to run back to the byre and bring the slipe.
Quick as you can. She takes Rose’s hand and together they wait on the dunes above the strand.
By the light of the lantern—a glowing circle of yellow—she examines Rose’s face: the lip split and bleeding, the left eye swollen closed.
She sees the ripped skirt, the petals of bruising around her wrists.
It’ll heal, she whispers, it’ll all heal.
Then she thinks about how to put it, how to ask, what words to use, and she does not know if she can bear the answer, before saying, in a low voice: Did they get their way, those devils, did they?
Rose seems to consider this, then shakes her head.
Good girl, the widow says, passing an arm about her shoulders, good girl.
And they watch as Eugene comes towards them, hauling the slipe behind him.
The widow tells them both that they must load the two gentlemen onto the back of it. Rose turns aside. I cannot, she whispers.
You must, says the widow. You need to push them off the cliff, make it look as if they lost their way and fell to their deaths. It’s the only way, the only hope we have, and a slender one at that.
Eugene slides his hands under the shoulders of the viscount’s son and heaves.
The head—what is left of it—lolls back on its stem of a neck, pieces of bone and gristle falling to the sand, onto Eugene’s boots.
He sets his teeth together, straining, face reddening with effort, trying to shift the body, which is rigid now, stony, and Rose sees that she must, indeed, help, so she bends and takes the legs, clad in woollen stockings, and together they heave him onto the slipe, then return for the other.