Crossing To Paradise (27 page)

“I know,” said Gatty in a low voice.

“But you're not…well born.”

“What am I, then?”

“I keep thinking,” said Snout, “you could be a nun.”

Gatty yelped.

“I mean, what with your singing and reading and writing.”

“Sir John thought that,” Gatty told him. “Until he found out how much it cost.”

“You see?” said Snout.

“No,” said Gatty. “I want to be in this world, not out of it.”

“And marry, you mean?”

Gatty gave Snout the ghost of a smile. “I don't know.”

“I'll tell you what,” said Snout. “You can come and live with us, girl. Hew and me. We'll rub along together until we all know what's what.”

Keeping within sight of the coast of Spain, Kit and Raven sailed their galley east into the Bay of Biscay.

“A ship full of pilgrims sank here two years ago,” Raven informed Gatty and Snout cheerfully.

Gatty looked across the heaving grey water and imagined. She thought of Simona telling her how her father had been drowned, and more than one thousand Venetians with him.

“They were on their way to Saint James of Compostela,” Raven said.

“I heard of that,” Gatty replied. “You remember, Snout? In France? We crossed the road to Compostela.”

“Yes,” said Raven, “the Bay of Biscay is the home of storms.”

Before long the little galley began to call in at a string of little and larger ports.

At Bordeaux, Kit and Raven rolled aboard casks of claret; at La Rochelle they treated Gatty and Snout to delicious little tarts flavored with cowslips and gooseberries, and beakers of sweet white wine; and at Nantes, the rogue of a harbormaster spoke reasonably good English.

“I know you come from England before you open your lips,” he told Gatty.

“How?”

“Peaches. Pale pink roses.”

“What do you mean?” asked Gatty.

“The English complexion.”

“What's complexion?”

The harbormaster smiled and rubbed his right thumb and forefinger. “
Le teint
…the color of your face.”

“Freckles and all!” said Gatty gaily.

And then, before she knew what he was doing, the harbormaster stepped forward, grasped her shoulders and boldly kissed Gatty on the cheek!

Gascony, Poitou, Anjou…At last, with a song in her sails, Kit and Raven's galley rounded Cape Finisterre in Brittany and passed Mont Saint-Michel. She headed straight for Normandy and Flanders…

Very early on the nineteenth morning of November, the galley weighed anchor for the last time and eased out of the port of Damme.

Almost all day, Gatty stood by the bowsprit, gazing ahead, as the boat bumped and bored through the iron-clad ocean. She stared at the great unhurried galleons of fleecy cloud and, beneath them, hastening, the muddy tails and tatters. She watched the diving terns, the skuas and black cormorants and all the swirling, screaming seabirds she had no names for. She
remembered how—it seemed so long before—Snout had dropped his precious flower-stone overboard, the one Hew had given him.

It was just after noon.

And it was unmistakable: the long line, low and misty-blue, darker than the falling sky, lighter than the leaping sea, growing along the western horizon.

Gatty's heart leaped too.

“Snout!” she yelled. “Snout!”

“What?” called Snout, as he trundled along the deck. “What is it, girl?”

Gatty pulled back her shoulders; she pointed. “Look!” she cried. “Our England!”

Time is such a trickster!

It actually took Kit the Trader's snub-nosed boat ninety-nine days to sail from Jaffa to the port of Lynn in England. But to Gatty, then and later, it seemed like one sea-dream, a waking dream punctuated by great wonders and small mercies, horseshoe harbors, charmed hours ashore, faces, glimpses, storms and sunsets, songs, stories, parts of stories. It seemed like a journey that took as long as it takes for a candle to burn down.

Rain-ghosts
arching their backs and long-legging it across pearly fields; sopping, green fog; pale, cool sunlight, telling it slant. No two days were the same. No two hours. The weather was more like early April than late November.

For six days Gatty and Snout made their way across the flat chest of England, and everyone they met told them the same story. The weather had been like this for month after month. Topsy-turvy. Arsy-versy. Everywhere the harvest had failed. Come January, February, famine would open his mouth and howl. Nursing mothers would be unable to feed their babies. Children would starve. The funeral bell would be busy.

As they walked west, Gatty and Snout kept asking the way to the Marches, Chester, Ewloe. But no one knew; no one had even heard of them.

“Wales, then,” said Gatty. “What about Wales?”

Some people shrugged; some reassured them they were on the right road without knowing; and some waved vaguely to the west.

On the seventh afternoon, a messenger trotted up behind them. He wouldn't have bothered to stop, but Gatty grabbed the end of his horse's tail.

“The Marches!” she demanded. “Which way for the Marches?”

The messenger winced at being asked something so painfully obvious. “These are the Marches,” he told them, waving straight ahead. “You're on the doorstep.”

“Chester?” asked Snout.

The messenger screwed up his eyes. “I certainly hope not,” he said. “This is the Middle March. The way to Shrewsbury.”

“Shrewsbury,” said Gatty. “I heard of that.”

“You'll get there tonight,” the messenger added. “Since you're on foot, it's three days north from there to Chester—one day south to Ludlow.”

“Ludlow!” cried Gatty. “God bless you! And keep you!”

The messenger peered down his nose. “And save you!” he said with a meager smile. “If He can. Now, if you don't mind…”

“Snout!” exclaimed Gatty as soon as they were alone. “Oh, Snout! We're so near to Caldicot.”

“We are?” Snout said carefully.

“We can go there on our way to Ewloe! We can, can't we?”

Snout knew he had no choice.

“We'll see everyone!” Gatty cried. “Everything! You'll be glad.”

Next morning, the two pilgrims walked through the Middle March, rejoicing in its sloping fields and secret hollows, its clothing of oakwoods and beechwoods, still ocher and copper and rust.

At noon, they had to climb a rise so steep they had no idea what they would see over the top. And then they saw! Half the colored world, and Wales blue-grey and trembling, as if it were scarcely there.

Quite late that afternoon, their track led them along a hissing stream, and through a widening valley. The hills stood back on either side.

“I don't know where we are,” Gatty told Snout, “yet I know we're almost there. I know it.”

Above the manor house, the scarlet flag was fluttering. The great copper beech was still in leaf, whispering.

Gatty felt for Snout's left forearm through his cloak; she linked both her hands around it, and squeezed it.

Snout made the sign of the cross. “Amen,” he said. “Amen, girl.”

And Gatty? She was like that strange, end-of-November weather: one moment alight, radiant; the next, shuddering, her eyes brimming with bright tears.

Gatty
gave Snout a shy smile.

“Ready?” she asked. Her voice was husky.

But they'd only taken a few steps when she grabbed Snout's forearm again. “Not so fast! I got to see everything.”

To Gatty, it all looked just the same and yet different. As if it had shrunk, or she had grown much taller.

And no, not just the same. Not entirely.

“Look!” said Gatty. “That's Grunter.”

On the other side of the sty, Grunter pricked both ears. Then he came lumbering towards them.

“No!” Gatty exclaimed. “He's lost an eye, he has.”

After this, Gatty began to notice one thing after another: an extra beehive; wooden tiles missing from Merlin's cottage or, at least, the cottage where he used to live before he disappeared; the elm fallen right across the Little Lark; the drooping, spotted leaves on the walnut tree.

“Not so fast!” Gatty instructed Snout. “I got to think.”

But how can you think clearly when each thing you see reminds you of something else?

Anyhow, the sounds of bright voices calling out to one another interrupted Gatty.

It was Sian de Caldicot with Tanwen and Joan, the village-woman, waving their shining sawtooth knives, cutting branches of spiky red-eyed holly and yellow-eyed mistletoe, pulling dusty ropes of ivy away from the trunks of oaks, severing green tendons of stubborn, gristly yew. They were so busy that they didn't see the two pilgrims in their dark cloaks and somber hats, standing under the walnut tree.

Gatty watched them. It's like they're living in another life of mine, she thought. I know them but I don't.

“Sshh!” she whispered, not that Snout had said anything or even made a sound. “Let's play Nain's Footsteps! You know, Snout. Let's creep up on them.”

Sian and Tanwen and Joan didn't notice the two pilgrims until they were only twenty paces or so away. They froze. They gripped their knives, as if Gatty and Snout were woodwoses, Welsh robbers, or even worse.

But then Gatty raised her left arm and swept off her broad-brimmed hat, and all her golden curls bubbled and boiled, and Sian yelled with excitement and ran straight at her and launched herself into Gatty's arms.

When Gatty had extricated herself, she embraced Tanwen and Joan too, and then Snout locked hands with all three of them. To begin with, they all just looked at one another, smiling but speechless; then they all tried to talk at the same time.

“God's gift!” exclaimed Tanwen in her sing-song voice. “On this first day of Advent!”

“I know!” Gatty cried, opening her arms to the pile of holly and ivy and mistletoe and yew. “I mean, I didn't, but I do now.”

“You're talking different,” Joan said tartly.

“I'm not!” protested Gatty.

“Gatty!” yelped Sian. “I thought you'd never come back.”

“Who are you, then?” Joan asked Snout.

“Snout,” said Snout.

“Aha!” said Joan, and she sucked her cheeks. “Snout. You're not Gatty's…”

“No, no!” said Gatty, grinning. “Snout's my friend, and he's the bravest man in the world. Aren't you, Snout!”

“Why?” asked Sian. And then, without waiting for an answer, “What are you wearing? What's this red cross? Look at your boots! You're so muddy!” She kept poking and stroking Gatty as if she needed to make absolutely sure that she was real.

“You heard about the harvest failing?” Tanwen asked.

“Two more mouths!” said Joan. “Sir John won't thank you.”

“You look like scarecrows,” Sian told them. “Christian scarecrows. And you stink!”

“Where have you come from?” Tanwen asked.

“Shrewsbury,” said Snout.

“Shrewsbury!” exclaimed Sian. “You walked all that way?”

“Sian!” said Gatty, smiling and sighing at the same time. “If only you knew.” But even as she said it, she realized no one is really quite as interested in us as we are in ourselves.

“If only you knew,” Joan repeated, mimicking Gatty's voice. “Oh! Ooh!”

“Stop it, Joan!” said Gatty.

“You're not the same, you're not.”

“I am, though,” said Gatty.

Sian grabbed Gatty again. “Gatty! You're best! You're best, after Arthur.”

Gatty's heart somersaulted in her breast. She swallowed noisily. “He got back then,” she said.

“Yes,” said Tanwen. “You went away and he came back.”

“Here?”

“No…no. He went to Verdon first.”

“When?”

“At Easter. Thereabouts.”

“Sir Arthur! Sir Arthur!” grumbled Joan. “Whoever he is, he'll always be plain Arthur to me.”

“I got a thousand questions!” Gatty said eagerly. “What and who and how and why and where and when.”

“When!” cried Sian. “When! Gatty, I wish you'd come home before last Thursday.”

“Why then?” asked Gatty.

“It was the wedding day!”

Gatty felt as if she had been stabbed in the heart. Her legs buckled.

“You should have seen Winnie,” Sian told her. “All her white silk and
pearls, and her flame hair in loops and ringlets. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole world.”

“We only rode back from Verdon the day before yesterday,” Tanwen went on.

“There was feasting and music and dancing for a whole week,” Sian added.

Gatty felt sick. Her head ached. Her eyes ached. Her bones ached.

“And Sir John says next year we can talk about my betrothal,” Sian said excitedly.

Neither Tanwen nor Sian understood all that Arthur meant to Gatty, or knew how often her thoughts about him and her feelings for him had given her strength during her long pilgrimage. They were both so caught up in their account of the wedding that they didn't notice Gatty's demeanor. So sober; so downcast; even defeated. But Joan thought she understood; she narrowed her eyes. And Snout knew. He put a firm arm around Gatty's waist.

“You all right?” he asked.

Gatty screwed her right foot into the ground.

I knew they were betrothed, she thought. I knew they were going to marry. But why now? Why this soon?

How can we ever be friends?

Gatty was weeping silently. She wanted to crumple up and die. She wanted to go away. To Ewloe. Back to Sir Faramond and Lady Saffiya. Anywhere. She wanted to be anywhere but Caldicot.

“You all right, girl?” Snout asked again.

“What is it?” Tanwen asked gently. “Gatty?”

Gatty mumbled something, and then she sighed. “Tired,” she said in a faraway voice.

“They came back here with us,” Sian went on, “so everyone could see them and wish them joy. They've gone to Catmole now.”

Snout nodded kindly. “Later, girl,” he said. “We're done in. Both of us.”

Tanwen put her left arm lightly round Gatty's shoulders. “You're so tired,” she said. “Come to the hall.”