Chapter Seven Chicken Shit
Chapter Seven
Chicken Shit
It was an eggless day. Not a single chicken would lay, for the fox had come to call.
Her predatory teeth and claws marked the coop’s exterior and soil around it.
Although the chickens remained unmolested, their night-time terrors had altered their behaviour.
The birds refused to leave Kensa’s side; they either hunched at her ankles or brooded softly beneath the kitchen table if ever a door or window was left open enough to allow their entry.
By mid-morning there was no surface, no sleeve, no skin without chicken shit to stain it.
‘I won’t be long,’ said Isolde, ‘a day or two at most.’
The wise woman had chosen this particular morning, wet and winkle-grey, to reveal her upcoming trip to Bodmin.
From across the South West, the cunning folk – pellars – were gathering, Isolde among them.
Her carpet bag stood at her feet, bulging with suspect items, which the chickens thoroughly inspected.
‘Is anything wrong? Why is the coven—’
‘You can handle everything while I’m gone,’ said Isolde, cutting off the questions she had no mind to answer, ‘can’t you?’
Kensa lifted her chin as though to prevent her own mouth from opening.
No, she wanted to say. Yet she could not admit weakness.
Worse, she knew Isolde had guessed as much.
The two women eyed one another across the parlour, their unspoken arguments and counter-arguments straining on too-tight leashes.
Eventually, after several long moments, Kensa ground out a reply. ‘Have a nice time.’
‘If ever you don’t know what to do, simply pretend you do. Our work is about feigning confidence.’
‘You mean lying?’
‘S’pose.’ Isolde hooked her bag into her palm, adjusted her cap and smiled a little too broadly for Kensa’s liking. ‘And if you get stuck, Jack’ll give you a hand.’
Kensa wrinkled her nose at the thought.
Outside, in spitting rain, a stouter figure waited: Hawise, the wise woman from the Lizard. She beamed towards Kensa when she spied her in the doorway. ‘Hasn’t she grown? Oh, you must be excited to be—’
‘Leaving,’ interrupted Isolde, hooking her arm into her travelling companion’s elbow and dragging her down the lane from Bohortha.
‘We should take her with us! Be sure the others will want to see how well—’
‘She’ll go when I say she’ll go.’
Their shapes – one reedy and wooden, the other plump and warm – were taken by the hedgerows and quickly snatched from sight.
Kensa was alone.
Cluck.
Well, almost.
It was not long before a thunderous fist bashed the door.
Behind the noise was Farmer Hayle. His cabbages had been ravaged, his turnips had turned-down and his swede had sunk in on themselves.
‘A curse as sure as I’ve ever seen one,’ he said, with an expression as gnarled and tubered as the roots he cultivated. ‘I need a wise woman to put it right.’
He demanded that Isolde fix it, specifically she and no one else.
‘I can do it,’ blurted Kensa. ‘I will come by at noon tomorrow.’
It did not matter that she did not know how to tackle a curse. She could learn, she thought. Besides, she had deliveries to make in the village, which she could do on the way.
There were three items in her basket. She took them to Portscatho the following day, which was cloudy and wet, though warmer than the last. She made the first delivery to Young Robert: ointment for his sore stump, where it rubbed on the socket to his wooden leg.
The second was jam for the joiner’s wife: this late in her pregnancy, preserves were the only food she would eat.
The last one was a familiar tonic and she knew its recipient without checking the label: Elowen’s medicine.
Its liquid was clear, as always. Strange, as no other healing potion appeared as such.
What’s more, this was the only tonic Isolde had not taught Kensa how to make.
For the others, she was forced to read instructions and boil down rosehip and mush powders into fats.
This concoction was kept from her – and yet Elowen was bid to drink it often enough.
Kensa thumbed at the stopper, a waxed leather seal which came free easily.
There was hardly a scent, though what there was seemed familiar.
She tipped the vial to her lips and instantly spat the contents from her mouth – seawater?
This would make even a steel-stomached pig unwell, yet Elowen drank it with no qualms. And it did, invariably, return the colour to her cheeks and bring an ease to her movements, which she often lost.
Kensa rapped on her old front door. An odd gesture for a place she once considered home.
She couldn’t simply walk inside any more, could she?
A fine drizzle rolled in, barely falling, yet coating everything with a misty sheen.
Small raindrops beaded on the tonic’s glass vial, its stopper returned.
What if she threw it away? Or lied about dropping it? It didn’t make sense—
‘Aye, you’re soaked through,’ said Derwa, appearing in the doorway and pulling Kensa into a soft embrace.
‘Let’s dry you off.’ It was nice, how her mother smelled, how she knew her mother’s smell.
And how much smaller she seemed than Kensa remembered, as though the distance between them – only three weeks – had given her a different insight.
‘I can’t stay.’ Kensa leaned around her mother’s shoulder, wanting to see the cottage interior.
It was the same as it had always been, with her mother’s embroidery spread across the kitchen table.
She could see the back of Mr Skewes’s head on his usual chair by the hearth and frowned.
‘I only came to drop off Elowen’s tonic. Where is she?’
‘Why, she’s with you, isn’t she?’ Derwa quickly unloaded Kensa’s basket and placed the medicine – if it could be called that – in its usual place.
‘I didn’t expect her to go visiting you quite as often as she has.
I hope she’s not been getting in the way?
I told her it was serious work and she wasn’t to distract you. ’
Kensa’s mouth grew slack. ‘She hasn’t … ’
‘Would you tell her we’re eating late tonight? Her father’s got a meeting with the magistrate and she’ll need somethin’ to tide herself over with.’
‘Yes,’ said Kensa, nothing else.
Because wherever Elowen was and had been, it was certainly not with her.
Were it not for Mr Skewes sitting on the chair, within earshot, she might have told her mother.
As much as Elowen was his daughter, she was Kensa’s sister first. And more than that, a small concern grew in her gut, not that she’d name it as anything other than yesterday’s undigested beef.
She gave her mother one last squeeze and carried on, towards Farmer Hayle’s property.
This was not the first time Elowen had lied about her whereabouts.
Occasionally, she had told their mother she’d be teaching with Miss Latham on a morning, then had been elsewhere.
Kensa had not questioned it, assumed Elowen had wanted to shirk her duties now and then, the same as everyone else.
She’d even been relieved to find her sibling wasn’t quite as perfect as everyone assumed. Only, this seemed different.
Her mind rustled up no answers as she strode up the track to the largest farmstead for miles.
There she found Farmer Hayle, whose tone was as sour as his soil.
‘You’ll find the trouble round back.’ He accompanied her to the furthest hedgerow, where the earth had turned black and salted, the vegetables wilted around it.
Even the nearby field boundary had begun to lean away and there was silence where there should not be silence: no birdsong, no insect buzz, no rustle among the nearby brambles.
Kensa cleared her throat. She looked to Farmer Hayle. He looked back expectantly. She cleared her throat again. Kensa did not know the next step. Her teacher had left and now livelihoods – an entire village and at least four parsnips – depended on her.
‘Ain’t you going to look at it?’
Kensa nodded. She hesitantly inched forwards.
Farmer Hayle stayed back. Root vegetables, already worn through frosts, sponged below her feet.
She sidestepped sprouts and ragged leeks, pushing onwards past the winter cabbages to where the land sagged down.
There, spiralled within the centre of rot, was a lifeless bird.
It had black feathers and a bright orange beak, with talons as bold to match: a simple chough.
‘That wasn’t there earlier,’ said Farmer Hayle defensively.
‘Seems to be there now,’ said Kensa.
To kill a chough was at best unlucky and at worst, well, it was worse. Silence again, that peculiar silence. Even the nearby sea could scarce be heard, as though the waves held their tumble, straining to see what Kensa decided.
She waited. It was not her place to speak. She waited.
Farmer Hayle drew his chins upwards. ‘I mistook it for a crow and knocked it out the sky,’ he admitted.
He would not look at the dead bird, as though by ignoring it, he could remove it from existence.
‘I didn’t think much of it until, well—’ His confession was bitten off, pride warring with his desire to make amends. Kensa understood that.
‘I’ll burn herbs and bury it after,’ she said, trying to muster as much authority as she could, ‘and you best not kill another, else there’ll be no saving your farm then.’ A pause, then, a barked, ‘All right?’
Farmer Hayle agreed without seeming to, turning away to chew on his cheek.
Kensa began to cleanse the farm. At least, she made it seem as though she did. What was she meant to do? How did a person calm soil? And did she have to be calm to do it?
‘No one must watch me,’ she shouted over her shoulder.