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‘You’ll last. Let me have a look at the wound.’
She turned her back to me and I examined it in the light of the fire. It had ripped deep into her flesh. The wound would heal but it might get infected. I wondered if it needed stitching. It was too dark for me to make a poultice but I knew where there were some soothing herbs and I’d fix her a remedy in the morning. She was shivering. I gave her the shirt off my back. One of Hindley’s hand-me-downs.
‘Here, put this on.’
She took hold of it as though it were something dead and festering.
‘It fucking stinks.’
‘Put it on.’
She did. It drowned her but I figured it would keep her warm. Her chest was as flat as an oatcake. I thought about your chest at her age, already budding with womanhood. I put my rough surtout on, itching from the coarse stitching. I felt it scratch at my shoulders.
‘You could show some gratitude,’ I said.
‘Eh?’
‘You know, such as, thanks, William.’
‘What for? A stinking shirt?’
‘I saved you from a braying back there. Perhaps worse.’
I waited for a response but there was none. I watched the flaights glow in the fire, giving off hardly any flame.
‘We’ll be safe here for now, but we’ll have to be on our way first thing. Get your head down. You need to sleep.’
‘Do you think that man will die?’ she said.
‘Which man?’
I don’t know why I asked because I knew full well which man she was talking about.
‘The man whose hand you cut off. The farmer’s son. Dick.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘I hope he bleeds to death. My only regret is that I won’t be there to watch.’
I hoped so too, Cathy. I took the blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders.
‘Go to sleep.’
‘Where you heading?’
‘I told you: west.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘I’ve never been west. Been east lots of times. York mostly. And south. Went to London with my dad. They had a big fire there, you know, a hundred years ago. Burned most of it down. My dad told me all about it. Said it was started when a baker forgot to put out his oven. Took them forty years to build it back again.’
She chattered away for some time. She reminded me of you at that age. Full of mischief and as nosey as the devil.
‘What did you say to Dick to make him snap?’
‘He’s heard rumours, that’s all.’
‘I meant in the field, when you were cutting hay.’
‘I can’t recollect exactly. He was having a dig. Fucking cunt.’
‘Who taught you to curse?’ I said.
‘No one taught me nothing. I’ll say what I fucking well like.’
I was surprised to hear such flaysome speech from one so young, but not at all offended. In fact, it amused me. It had always been me with the filthy tongue. I remembered Nelly saying she’d never heard such blaspheming and Joseph saying that he’d scrub my mouth with lye. Now I had some competition.
Eventually she lay back and closed her eyes. I watched the light from the fire flicker across her face. Less than a minute later I could hear her breathing deepen with sleep. How innocent she looked in slumber. I remembered watching your sleeping face, for hours, mesmerised. How innocent your face had looked as well, a long time before Edgar changed you for the worse. The fire was nearly out and I stared into the red embers. As I did I saw the girl’s blood. I saw the glinting bit of the axe spotted with gouts of red. I felt the bite of the axe through Dick’s thick wrist. Clean steel. Wet red blood. I saw Dick’s arm without its hand. I saw the blood pump from the wound. Had I killed a man? I wondered. It was only what he deserved. I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it. I took the remaining blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I lay back and listened to Emily snore. Whether I’d killed the man or not, the act of violence had felt pure, and in the moment of it something had released itself within me, the way the wind blows the stones clean.
Throttling a Dog (#ulink_ad1dd108-26b4-5e01-8ca0-65f0fdb4b614)
I woke twice in the night, the first time from a dream in which I was being chased by the villagers. The second time I was being flogged by Hindley. I felt the sting of the whip and turned to see his malignant glare. I was shivering. The wind had picked up and was blowing rain into the cave. I looked over to the girl but she was sleeping soundly. I wrapped the blanket tightly around me. The cloth was damp. I hugged the damp blanket but sleep would not come. Emily tossed and turned. She cried out, ‘No, no, fuck off.’ But she didn’t wake up. I must have drifted off because the next thing it was almost morning. It seems she woke first because when I opened my eyes she was standing over me. It gave me a shock. The sun was behind her, peeking over the horizon.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Wondering when you’d wake up,’ she said.
I stood up, stiff all over. It felt as if the rain had crept into my joints. I walked around in an effort to cast off the stiffness. Last night’s fire was a pile of ash. I heard a lark high above our heads. I looked up, but the sky was still dim and even with my head stretched fully back, it was too high in the heavens to observe. How easy it is for birds to escape. How effortlessly they find freedom. While we remain manacled to the earth.
‘We’d better make a move,’ I said. ‘Let me have a look at your wound first.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Let me look.’
I pulled the shirt up so that I could examine the cut. It had healed some overnight and didn’t look as though it would need any further treatment. I’d seen Mr Earnshaw stitch up one of the hogs when it had cut itself on a jagged piece of metal, but I’d never done it myself, so I was glad it didn’t need stitches. I collected together my few possessions, but I left the bible where it was. I’d got what I wanted from it and was not interested in its moral lessons. I made sure I had the flask, the axe, the knife and the bag of coins. I rolled up the blankets and tied them separately with some string.
‘Come on. We need to get moving.’
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘If you want to eat, you’ll have to wait till we get to the next town.’
‘How far is that?’
‘I don’t know. I know one thing: we can’t go back to the village. There will be a witch-hunt for you and when word gets round there will be a manhunt for me.’
‘Obviously.’ She looked at me with contempt.
‘Here, carry one of these,’ I said.
I handed her the smaller of the two blankets.
‘Let’s get moving.’
We headed west with the sun still a golden line behind us. As we walked it rose but was obscured by clouds. The ground was damp with dew and last night’s rain, and a lingering mist carpeted the moor. The view opened up to a green-and-grey patchwork quilt. Below us, field after field, fence after fence, wall after wall, hedge after hedge, land that was once open and free, according to Sticks. A few years ago this had been common land. Now it was all sectioned and marked like a slab of mutton ready to be butchered. Sticks had told me how it had been stolen from its people. How they’d been kicked off the land of their birth, evicted from their cottages, which were razed to the ground. The wind was strong and blowing against us, and the cold crept under our skin.
‘Walk quicker.’
We traipsed along rabbit paths and beside becks. Through fields of mud. The sky was clearing but there were still lots of grey dark clouds and the grass was sodden from the rain. But the wind was blowing eastwards and the clouds were moving away and things were brightening. The rooks and crows above us called out across the moor. In the distance, on a bare branch, a raven preened its glossy wings.
We trekked for some time, walking on paths made by farmers, labourers, dogs and cattle, all churned up by boot and hoof. Sometimes paths made by rabbit and hare. Sometimes no path at all. We did not choose the easy route; instead we walked as the crow flew, keeping to the tops so that we had a vantage point.
‘Can we stop now?’ Emily said, after a while.
‘No, we’ve only just got going.’
‘We’ve been walking for hours.’
In fact, I didn’t think it was more than an hour, but without a timepiece it was hard to say.
‘We’ll stop at the next town.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We should nick a couple of horses,’ she said.
‘One lot of trouble is enough.’
‘What difference does it make? Trouble is trouble. And the quicker we get away from it the better. That’s what I say. If my dad was here now, he would have found a stable, nicked a couple of decent nags and had them saddled. You wouldn’t see us for dust.’
‘He’s not here. And we’re doing things my way, not your dad’s.’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘Smart fellow, my dad. Knew a thing or two. Not a bit like you.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m not saying anything.’
‘I know what you’re getting at, so button it.’
‘We rode from London to Leeds in three days one time. You need to keep your strength up when you’re on the run. No sense in wasting energy. My dad used to say that there are two ways of doing things: the easy way and the right way. No sense in doing it the right way when there’s the easy way.’
‘When we get to the next town we can stop for something to eat and drink. We can sit down and rest for an hour.’
In fact, my plan was to ditch her once we got there. I was responsible for me and no one else, and that was the way I wanted it. No hangers-on and no freeloaders. We dropped down off the moor and followed a stream until we approached a hamlet. We walked through a small graveyard. Even in a remote spot like this, the dead linger. It was good to see the rabbits making burrows beneath the graves. Flowers sprouted from between the stones. Harebells, lupins, foxtail and forget-me-nots. Daisies, milkweed and love-in-the-mist. A dog rose clung to the wings of an angel. The stones were marked as they always had been, but now I could read their inscriptions: ‘here lyeth a good Christian’, ‘sacred to the memory of’, ‘a good wife’, ‘a dear husband’, ‘a cherished son’. But I had no one. No one to love and no one to mourn me when I was gone. I was no one’s son or brother, and no one’s husband. And it suited me fine.
We passed the backs of people’s houses, washing pegged and drying on the line, heaps of sticks and wood ready for chopping. I thought maybe we could stop here, but aside from a few houses and outbuildings, there was nothing. Our path narrowed, the clouds thickened. I could hear the braying of cows in the distance. As we got closer I could see the farmer with a stick counting them in ready for milking. The lowing of cattle was soothing. Hooves, bracken, cow parsley, the verdant hawthorn, twisted and prickly. Thick peat smoke billowed from the chimney of a farmhouse. Tentacles of ivy grasped the trunk of a wych elm. A dead grouse in a draining ditch. And still the flaysome wind blew in our faces. I felt a wet drop on my cheek. I looked up at the clouds that were darkening again. Another wet drop on the back of my hand. On the nape of my neck. Then the rain poured down.
‘I’m getting wet,’ Emily said.
‘Keep walking. When the sun comes out you’ll dry soon enough.’
‘This farm stinks of shit,’ Emily said.
There were heaps of horse manure and swine ordure. The air was thick with the rich stench.
‘How do you think farmers go on all the time when it stinks of shit?’
‘You get used to it.’
‘I wouldn’t want to get used to it. Shit should stink of shit, it shouldn’t ever stop stinking of shit just ’cause you get used to it. It stinks of shit for a reason. You’re meant to stay away from it.’
‘Put a peg over your nose.’
‘I haven’t got a peg. Why would I have a peg? You don’t half talk bollocks sometimes.’
Fences, walls, hedges. We climbed over a stile and across another mud-clad field.
‘My knee’s giving me gyp,’ Emily said.
‘What do you mean, your knee’s giving you gyp? How old are you – ten, or ten and sixty?’
‘It keeps locking.’
‘It will be fine.’
‘Then why does it keep fucking clicking?’
I shrugged.
‘Why don’t we stick to the roads? It will be easier on our feet. This isn’t even a proper path. I don’t know what you’d call it, but not a path in any case.’
‘The roads aren’t safe. They’ll be on horseback. This is the only way we can be sure they won’t find us.’
‘Horses can travel across country, you know. We used to do it all the time, me and my dad.’
‘But not by choice,’ I said. ‘They won’t want to risk laming them.’
‘They could take it steady. They won’t lame them if they take it steady, not even on this route. I’m telling you, me and my dad travelled loads of miles over worse than this without laming the horses. You’ve just got to be careful how you go.’
