Chapter Seven Chicken Shit #2
A receding trudge told her Farmer Hayle had left.
Her relief came in a long, slow whistle through her teeth.
She began to walk. Small circles, then larger ones, counter to the turgid swirl in the earth.
After taking a spade from a nearby shed, Kensa dug a little hole beside the hedgerow.
In it she laid the chough to rest and spoke a word or two – ‘Kosk yn kres’ – for its passing.
Farmer Hayle observed her from the threshold of his house, despite her instructions not to.
Kensa made herself seem busier. Stepped widely and waved her arms and chanted sing-song words.
Only when she stopped her work did she find, to her surprise, new sounds: sparrow song and a shrew’s skitter.
‘By next growing season there’ll be no rot to ruin the crop,’ called Kensa.
And if there was, Isolde could fix it. Regardless, her pretence had worked, exactly as the wise woman had claimed it would.
Of course, she could not take payment. Farmer Hayle would never have offered. Instead, he gave her a gift.
‘Now, don’t tell no one where you got this,’ he said, handing her a bottle filled with untaxed rum.
‘It’s from a run your father did, years ago.
’ It was an open secret that many locals helped the smugglers hide their contraband, prior to its distribution in the neighbouring counties and their cities, as far as Bath.
No one shared names, as the least known, the safer it was for those who operated beneath the Coast Guard’s watch.
At her slack features, he continued, ‘Yes, I worked with him and hid what he wanted hiding.’ He fingered a long, white scar on his cheek.
‘And I learned better than to question a Rowe, I did.’
‘You questioned me,’ said Kensa quietly, clutching the brown bottle, which seemed to grow heavier and heavier the longer she stared at it.
‘That was afore I knew how closely you resembled your father – in nature, I mean, as God knows you have his looks.’
Kensa studied the farmer’s ugly scar, which ran from eye to lip.
It did not sit well in her mind that anyone could do that, let alone a man she was related to.
Even the act, dragging a blade deep enough to leave such a lasting mark, tightened her chest. It couldn’t be him, he couldn’t have done it.
Not the same man who called her poppet and made coins appear from behind her ears.
Who had promised to take her to sea one day, to journey as far as France and dress her in the finest silks.
‘Did you like him – my father – did you like him?’
‘I feared him,’ said Farmer Hayle, as though that was the same.
It was late and sunless by the time she returned to the cottage.
There was nothing about Elowen’s tonic in the usual tomes Isolde consulted.
Kensa took each one from their shelf and scanned the pages, seeking answers and finding none.
From the mantel above the fire in the parlour, her father’s rum watched her.
Its brown contents appeared black in the evening light.
Around her were the chickens, clucking incessantly.
That damned fox was on the prowl again. It slumped through the spring growth, thinner than before, until even Kensa hesitated venturing into the garden.
She had never seen a beast as hungry as the vixen.
In the larder was a pie Isolde had left for her, which Kensa pulled apart, freeing meat from pastry.
Afterwards, she placed the scraps in a small dish and left it on the doorstep that led to the garden.
By morning, the dish was empty. She did not see the vixen the next day and neither did the chickens.
Although the poultry had peace, Kensa did not.
Her eyes strayed, continuously to that Bad Book she had opened on her first day at Bohortha.
Its presence was a gaping hole in the yew bookcase and if she looked at it, she feared she would fall in.
It had gilded edges and script as brown as old strawberries.
Of course, she could only tell the latter by opening it.
Which she did.
Truly, she had not known she’d opened it.
Not until it lay restless across her palms. If it had the answer to Elowen’s problem, Kensa would risk its hold upon her.
She flicked through the pages, looking, seeking, wanting to know.
Immediately, Kensa sensed wrongness. Voiceless laughter, mad and maddening. In her head and outside it.
Kenny.
Kenny.
Kenny.
The corners of the room split wide in teeth and terror.
Cushions unthreaded and gaped into open mouths and laughed then too.
From the garden, the fox laughed a throaty, wild lowing and the chickens in their coop laughed and Kensa began to laugh, hideously.
Neck bending back and lips spread to cracking, until—
Those wicked sounds were cut from the world with a slam as she closed the book. As though they had never happened. The cottage was quiet and Kensa, trembling, vowed to keep it that way.
Late into the night and worn with travel, Isolde returned.
‘You’ll find the Bad Books are much the same as bad people,’ she said, noticing the disturbance to her tomes.
‘There are those who like to be noticed, who’ll bully their way to attention, who’ll dominate and readily dismiss.
It’s them who want to be held without being held accountable.
’ She flexed her fingers into a cradle. ‘Do not hold them for long or they shall take a hold on you.’
Kensa squeezed her thumbs in her fists, needing the pressure to calm her shaking. ‘Who wrote them?’ And why create them at all? It was evil, it was insanity.
‘I was an apprentice once,’ said Isolde, ‘to a man I loved.’ She did not imbue this confession with any grand intonation or emotion, yet there was importance here.
One neither woman could fully confront. ‘He was cursed with the Sight more strongly than I’ve ever known, far worse than— Ah, well, it drove him to madness.
It was a cruel madness, driven by righteousness to address wrongs prior to their becoming.
To keep the impulses at bay, he poured them onto these pages.
’ Her aged fingers caressed a spine and it shivered at her familiar touch.
‘And when a civil war came, it reached us here, most uncivilly.’ In her eyes were flames and kings and sparking flint.
‘He had a cell for the Bad Books, a place where his worst qualities were kept, until they were set aflame – released back to him – and he was not the man I knew any more.’ Isolde bundled up the last Bad Books, scooping them from the unswept floor and carrying them as children.
‘These were the ones I rescued from the burning, though it was not enough to rescue him.’
‘You miss him,’ said Kensa.
‘Yes,’ said the wise woman, ‘though I do not miss what he became.’ A queer smile reached her and she put her free hand onto Kensa’s head. ‘He warned me about you.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Only monstrous things,’ she rasped, though no humour was in her voice. ‘Only what becomes of us all.’
Kensa carried the strange words to her bed. What sleep she took was fitful and sweaty. And when she dreamed, it was on her sister and on her father and on a cruciform shape against her window, blotting out the glass with outstretched wings and jewel-blue eyes.