“I’m not sure.”
“Stop to ask yourself next time. You might not get the answer you thought you would.”
“I’m not sure I know what I want to draw anymore.”
“Then perhaps try to think about why as well. Or, in other words, who. Think about who you’re drawing it for. That might help,” she suggested.
“Why did you run out on me the other day?” he asked, surprising himself. Hannah handed Zach’s sketchbook back to him with a cautious smile.
“I didn’t run out.”
“Come on. Yes, you did. It was when I asked about there being anybody else at The Watch.”
“No, no, I just had to get on, that was all. Really. There’s nobody else at The Watch. I know that much for a fact.”
“Have you been upstairs there?”
“Hey-I thought you wanted a tour of the farm, not to quiz me about my neighbors.” She started to turn away, but Zach put out his hand and caught her arm. He dropped it again at once, startled by the thinness of the limb beneath the fabric of her shirt. The warmth of it.
“Please,” he said. “I was so sure I’d heard somebody moving around up there.”
Hannah seemed to consider carefully before answering.
“I’ve been upstairs. And there’s nobody else living there,” she said. “Now, do you want the tour or don’t you?” She eyed him sternly for a moment, arching her brows, but somehow even her fiercest expressions brought a smile to his lips.
The winter months were a blur of aching fingers and numb, stiffened toes. Dimity had heavy boots, the leather of which was rigid with age and the damage done by winter weather. They were too big for her-they’d been left at The Watch by a visitor, one who had exited swiftly by the back door as the sound of his wife’s fist on the front door reverberated through the cottage. He never came back for them, so now the boots were Dimity’s. But her socks had worn through at toe and heel, and her repairs rarely lasted longer than a few days. She could feel the gritty innards of the boots through these holes when she walked; they caused blisters to form, then calluses. When she met Wilf Coulson in Barton’s hayloft, she would sink down into the loose hay and pull the boots off, rubbing her toes with her hands, massaging heat and movement back into them as best she could.
“I’ll do that, if you want. My hands are warmer,” Wilf offered one time, when rain was falling outside in straight rods of chilly gray. Barton kept his cattle in the barn when the weather was as wet as it had been. His fields drained badly, and were churned to an impassable quagmire otherwise. The heat from the cows rose up to infuse the hayloft, along with the sweet, shitty stink of them. Half sunk in the hay, it was possible to feel warm at a time when it seemed like the sun would stay weak and wan forever.
“It tickles when you do it,” said Dimity, snatching her feet away from his bony hands. She and Wilf were fifteen by then, and he seemed to grow even while she watched him. He was still thin, but his shoulders were wider, sharply angular; his face was longer, more serious, heavier across the brows. When he spoke, his voice wavered between a soft tenor and a hoarse, ragged squeak.
“Let me try,” he insisted. He took her feet firmly, and she was embarrassed by the dampness of her stringy socks, and the unwashed smell coming from them-imprinted there by the boots’ previous owner. Wilf clamped her chilly toes between the palms of his hands and for a blissful moment she felt the heat of him flood into them. She shut her eyes for a second, listening to the rain hammering on the tin roof, and beneath that the shifting and breathing of the cows. She and Wilf were out of sight, out of earshot. Untouchable.
When she opened her eyes, Wilf was looking at her that way. It was appearing more and more frequently, this look of his-intent and serious, mouth a little open. At once vulnerable and threatening, somehow, and in his lap the strain of trouser fabric across the bulge at his crotch. Dimity scowled and snatched her foot away again.
“And what’d your mother say, if she caught you up here with me, then?” she demanded. Wilf frowned and looked down through the barn doors, as if he half expected Ma Coulson to appear on the boggy, rutted mud of the threshold, amid puddles the color of tea and pocked by the rain, with her face every bit as grim.
“She’d box my ears and no mistake. No matter that I’m half a head taller than her already,” he said sullenly. “She gets crosser every week that passes, my ma.”
“And mine. Last week she belted me one for leaving shit on the eggs when I brought them into the house-never mind that there was hail coming down outside fit to smash them all before I could wipe them.”
“Shame they can’t be friends. Or at least meet up and box each other’s ears instead of ours.”
“Who do you think would win?” Dimity asked, rolling onto her side and smiling.
“My ma’s not afraid to use a stick, if she has to. You should’ve seen the state of our Brian’s behind when she caught him stealing from her purse!”
“Valentina would use whatever she could set her hands on,” Dimity said, falling serious, no longer liking the image of the two women fighting. “I do think she would kill a person, if they caught her at the wrong moment.” Wilf laughed and threw a handful of hay at her, which Dimity swatted aside crossly. “I mean it! She would as well.”
“If she laid a hand on you, I would have words with her. No-I would!” Now it was Wilf’s turn to insist, when Dimity laughed.
“You would not, for she does lay hands on me, regular as the tide, as you well know. But I don’t blame you for it, Wilf Coulson. If I could steer a course right around her, good and wide, I would. When I’m old enough, I will.” She rolled onto her back and held a stalk of hay up in front of her eyes, knotting it as carefully as she could without breaking it.
“Would you marry, then, Mitzy? To be away from her? You could soon enough. If you wanted to. Then you’d never have to go back there again, if you didn’t want.” Wilf’s voice was so laden with casual curiosity that it shook with the strain.
“Marry? Maybe.” Dimity pulled the knot tighter with a sudden jerk; snapped the stem and threw it to one side. Suddenly, the future rolled out in front of her like a long, unsettling thunderclap. A future that seemed to suffocate her. Her stomach twisted beneath her ribs, and she realized she was afraid. Horribly afraid. She swallowed, determined not to let it show. “Depends if I meet anybody worthy of marrying, I suppose, don’t it?” she said lightly. There was a long pause. Wilf fiddled with the waistband of his trousers, and his shirt beneath his sweater, which had come untucked.
“I’d marry you,” he muttered. Words pitched so low that the sound of the rain almost swallowed them.
“What?”
“I said, I’d marry you. If you wanted to. Ma’d come around once she got to know you. Once you weren’t living down at The Watch no more.”
“Shut up, Wilf-don’t talk like an idiot,” said Dimity, to hide her confusion. Better to laugh, better not to take it seriously, in case it proved to be mockery of some kind. A trick, which she did not think Wilf would play, but still could not be sure. Her heart was banging so loudly she was glad of the roaring overhead to hide it.
“I wasn’t. I wasn’t talking like an idiot,” Wilf mumbled, still examining his clothes, his hands, then gazing across the barn as if the far flint wall, smeared with manure, held some vast and crucial wisdom. Neither of them spoke for some time, and neither could have guessed the other’s thoughts. Eventually the warmth and the steady racket lulled Dimity into a doze, and when she woke a while later, Wilf’s head was on her shoulder, one hand resting lightly on her stomach. His eyes were shut but she could sense, somehow, that he was not asleep.
That winter was long, with late snows driving in on bitter north winds, killing off the first green shoots that had dared to show themselves. Dimity’s chilblains got so bad that she could hardly stand it; she was forced to sit, shuddering in disgust, with her feet in a basin of piss to cure them. She had a stabbing pain in her ears where the frigid air had seeped into them. There were hardly any visitors, except the two men that Valentina called her bread and butter, and so fewer gifts of food or coins; no sitter’s fees earned by Dimity, and far less for her to find, out foraging. They ate the eggs fried in old dripping that tasted bitter and burned from reuse, on slices of bread that Valentina made herself-she had a rare skill with dough. Dimity thought it was the anger with which she kneaded it. They were both tired, and their skin grew sallow and chapped. Dimity came home from delivering cold remedies to the people of Blacknowle with her lips cracked by the wind, and her fingers curled into reddened claws.