Miggy did her best to look around, to decipher all the darker shapes. But if she turned too much she’d topple. Was that somebody up against the rock, somebody large and shadowy? The shadow stayed as still and silent as a bush. But other shadows seemed to move and deepen. Again, the snap of wood, and silence.
Miggy was as quick as she could be. She didn’t bury her waste. She had no light. The snowy earth was far too hard. She left it for the foxes and the crows. She shuffled back home. She didn’t wait to rearrange her clothes. She untied the two mongrels and let them go to chase the Devils away. The dogs went off, twisting like hunting eels into the snowy breakers of the hill, their barks abusive, their ears turned back like gills. She heard them growling in the dark, but soon they became quiet. There weren’t any cries of pain. There were no Devils, then. Or else there was a silent Devil there. He had no tongue. He was half dog.
It was too cold inside the cottage to wash. But Miggy washed herself nevertheless in water from the pot next to the grate. It was a little shy of warm, but warm enough to take the gloss off one of the bars of Aymer’s soap. She ran her fingers across the hard escutcheon of Hector Smith & Sons. She held the wet soap to her nose. Would she smell kelp from her own pits? She didn’t recognize the smell. She’d not encountered almonds, oleander or eau de Sète before. But she was drugged on them at once. She would smell sweet for her sweet Ralph. She dressed in breeches and a wrap. She tied her hair back with a ribbon. She knotted the Belle’s red-patterned ensign at her throat — ‘I need help’ — and, as soon as there was any light, woke her mother. ‘Come on, girl. Up. This in’t the Sabbath. Let’s not be idle, eh?’ These were words her mother usually used.
It took the Bowes less than two hours to walk from Dry Manston to the pilchard beach. There was a quicker, more direct route than the coastal path. It was a wagon way which, though rutted, was flat, partly hedged from wind and shielded from the deeper, drifting snow. Miggy — far from mithering at every step — set the pace. ‘Come on now, Ma. There’s gonna be no work for us unless we stretch ourselves a bit.’
‘What’s biting at you, Miggy?’
‘Nothin’s biting at me, Ma. The quicker out’s the quicker in.’
‘Is that the truth of it?’ said Rosie Bowe. She was no fool. She knew the signs. Her Miggy hadn’t washed herself that thoroughly to please the pilchards. She had her hair tied back for some young man. It wasn’t hard to guess which man that was, from amongst their new acquaintances. The windswept blond American? Or Mr Aymer Spindle-shanks, too nervous of a floating cow to get his ankles wet? To some extent she wished it was the spindleshanks. At least the man was educated, and wealthy. And soft, was that the word? She’d shouted at him at her cottage door (‘A shillin’ is a fine price to be paupered by!’) and he had blushed and stuttered and hoped that they’d be friends, when all the other men she’d shouted at (and there’d been a few) had wagged their fingers in her face or turned away or laughed at her or knocked her to the ground. Rosie Bowe thought she could cope with Aymer Smith. He wasn’t dangerous. But sailor Ralph? She saw the danger in that boy. At best he’d break her Miggy’s heart, and leave her beached. That’s what to expect from sailors. At worst, he’d win her heart and sail away with her on board the Belle. And that would be the last of Miggy Bowe.
So only Miggy ran along the path to Wherrytown. How long before she’d hold his hands again? How long before he’d run his finger down her spine, a bone, a bone, a bone, the hollow of her waist, his breath upon her neck? Her mother was less speedy in the snow, and for once in lower spirits than her daughter. She wasn’t sorry for herself. She was too toughly made for that. But as she walked and watched her daughter hurrying ahead she had to face the truth of who she was: no one would hold her hand in Wherrytown, or try to count her vertebrae, no one would try to break her heart, or take her to America. She wasn’t young or beautiful, she thought, or plump, and men and ships were not for her. She would be thirty-five at Christmas time. A modest age. Too young to feel so old and weathered. She watched her daughter on the path ahead. Miggy swung her arms as if there were no troubles in the world. Well, perhaps there weren’t if you were seventeen, and there were lips to kiss.
‘Go on, then,’ Rosie said, to Miggy’s back. ‘Be happy if you can. It don’t last for ever.’ Nothing does, she thought. You can’t rely on anything for long. Not even kelp. She smiled at that, and shook her head. But it wasn’t kelp that bothered Rosie Bowe as she walked on her own along the wagon way. She could learn to do without the kelp. She hated it. How would she manage, though, without her cussed daughter to adore? Would it be long before she lived alone?
The shore at Wherrytown when they arrived was like a winter carnival, a hundred people at the very least with Walter Howells on his big horse as showmaster, and a leaping fire close to the water’s edge to hold bad weather off. The townsmen and the fishermen and some Americans were already in the water, basketing the pilchards from the keepnets nearest shore with as much concern for their living catch as they would show for vegetables.
There were too many fish for sentiment. As each net was emptied and dragged up on the shore for gulls and boys to glean, so the outer nets were edged in by their boats until these pilchards were a gasping, thrashing multitude as well, maddened by the dipping baskets of the men and by the turmoil of air and sea and sand and snow. The tide was on the turn and so the water wasn’t deep. But still the work was wet and cold. Men hurried to the fire, between each basketful of fish, to steam their knees and coax some blood back to their faces, hands and feet. Each filled basket was tallied by the agent Howells against the family who owned the net. He had a simple principle — he made no mark for every thirteenth load of fish. It wasn’t superstition, but a sort of tithe, a fee for sitting on his horse. Less than eight per cent for him against their ninety-two. A fair division of the spoils, he thought. Walter Howells would make a lot of tithes that day, from pilchards and from ships. Who needed kelp? Who needed Hector Smith & Sons?
No one there resented Walter Howells. They cursed him, maybe. Wished he’d topple from his horse and break a leg. Wished — just for once — he’d get his trousers wet and find out how heavy a basketful of pilchards could be. But no one wished him dead. How could they manage without their agent with his peppery face and temper, and his good contacts to the east, his wagons and his warehouse home? He was worth his eight per cent. They didn’t have to like the man. They didn’t have to speak to him. They only had to concentrate on the strenuous joy of dipping baskets into, fish and swinging them onto the shore until the sea drained out, and know that Walter Howells would turn their efforts into cash.
The Americans would not get any cash from Walter Howells. He regarded them as volunteers, free labour, and not worth a fourpenny fig between the lot of them, despite their noise and swaggering. They were too clumsy with the fish and were a hindrance rather than a help. They teased each other and flirted with the working women. They splashed their skirts, or dropped a pilchard down their apron fronts, or touched the younger and prettier women unnecessarily while they helped to put the baskets on their backs. The women, happy to be flirted with, on such a high and zesty day, carried the pilchards through the snow and sand up to the salting hall, next to Walter Howells’s house. Their baskets filled the lane, the yard, the courtway to the hall. Any living fish that jumped free of the baskets didn’t stand a chance. They suffocated in the icy air. Or they were scavenged by cats and gulls and by the little girls whose job it was to grill them for breakfast on the beach fire. There wasn’t any idleness. This was a working hive.