xxvi. In which Charlotte discusses grief, even though she’d rather not #2
She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could picture them, an army of trees with branches like human limbs and knots like faces.
“Do you think,” she croaked, “the tree where we found Arthur’s shovel—what if—”
Elspeth shook her head. “You’d know it, if that tree’d been a person. Trust me.”
Elspeth would know; she’d seen people-become-trees. But the images persisted. Charlotte breathed in and out slowly, in counts
of four, the way she’d taught Arthur long ago to help him through bouts of anxiety.
“Lottie?”
Charlotte finished her breathing exercise. “I’m all right.”
She glanced at the forest, half expecting another horse—or something nastier—to come tearing out and run them all over the
cliffside. Elspeth examined the horse for injuries.
“Bit scratched up. Awful thin. No sign of the sickness, thank the Lord for that. One of us is enough.”
She murmured in the horse’s ear and kissed his nose. He nuzzled into her with a whicker. Elspeth scratched behind his ears,
did the same to the mule, and resumed her seat by the fire.
“How did you do that?” Charlotte asked. “Calm him down like that?”
Elspeth yanked one of her bags toward her and went digging through it for nothing. To Charlotte’s astonishment, she seemed
almost embarrassed.
Clearing her throat, Elspeth said, “It’s the horseman’s word. So Gran says. She comes from travelling folk, though she never
saw much of her kin after settling down since Granddad ain’t a traveller. Don’t know if you ever seen any travelling folk.
I never heard of any campsites out this way, and no wonder, Seacliff being how it is. Reckon the villagers’d run ’em right
off.”
“The horseman’s word?”
Elspeth reddened. “Aye. Always had an affinity for the beasts, even when I was little. Horses, mules, donkeys, anything equine, I’ve got a way with ’em.
Gran says it’s one of the travellers’ gifts.
Granddad says he’s met plenty other travellers and didn’t none of ’em have gifts except their skill as craftsmen, but Gran insists it’s so.
She gets a feeling about things, herself, and usually it turns out her feeling was right.
Oh, Maggie used to get so jealous, she did, asking why she didn’t have a gift .
. . ’Course, that was afore she grew up and we all saw what a green thumb she had, but she always says it’s nothing but time spent with green things, learning the way of ’em.
Not the way I took to horses like a fish takin’ to water. ”
“It sounds wonderful.”
“Never did me much good. We never had so much as a donkey, and outside the family folks thought I was a freak. Gran, too,
they used to say she was a witch, what with her intuition. She says she heard worse growing up, but—well, it wears on you,
you hear it often enough.”
“Is it magic, then?”
Elspeth shrugged. She fiddled with a spare shirt she’d pulled from her bag, shoulders hunched like she was remembering names
that had been hurled at her long ago. Charlotte softened, wanting to make her feel better. She hadn’t imagined Elspeth caring
what people thought of her.
“My brother used to get plenty of that, too. He’s . . . Well, he’s Arthur. He’s . . . he’s so . . .” Charlotte hardly knew
how to describe him, especially to someone not from Seacliff. “He’s soft, I suppose. Not like the other village men at all.
They’ve always disliked him. They used to say such awful things about him.”
Elspeth stuffed her shirt back in the bag. “They don’t anymore?”
Charlotte thought of the whispers the day Arthur had left, the words about him that hadn’t been freak but might as well have been.
“Not as much. Not to his face.”
Elspeth scowled. “Might as well be to his face, if they’re going to say it. Can’t deck a man if he’s only insulting you behind
your back. Then folks think he’s right, because what’d you get so upset about?”
“I admit it’s difficult to imagine Arthur ‘decking’ anyone.”
“What about you?”
“I should think it obvious that I’ve never ‘decked’ anyone, either.”
“Not that. The villagers never talked about you that way?”
Her dark eyes were curious. Charlotte resisted the urge to look away.
“I made sure they didn’t.”
Elspeth nodded. “Explains a lot.”
“About what?”
“You. How proper you are. That’s it, ain’t it? You think folks won’t talk if you play by their rules.”
Charlotte flushed, mortified. Bad enough, Arthur knowing it saddened her to talk about the family’s losses, but he’d known
Charlotte all her life. Elspeth clocking the reasons for her strict adherence to propriety barely a week after meeting was
worse.
She opened her mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say.
Elspeth grinned. “Speechless, are you? Never thought I’d see the day.”
Charlotte glared at her, propriety be damned. “You—you absolute—”
“C’mon, Lottie. I’m sure there’s a nasty name in there somewhere.”
Nothing rude enough to satisfy Charlotte’s annoyance would agree to come out of her mouth.
“Numpty’d do,” Elspeth suggested.
Charlotte expelled a breath, angry to need a suggestion, but she took it. “You numpty.”
It did make her feel better.
“Bravo,” Elspeth said with a smile. “Maybe next time you can reach for the big guns, if’n you know any worse words than that.”
She was quite the most annoying person Charlotte had ever met.