Seeing his stricken face, she softened her tone. “I don’t suppose you can mend it, then.” He shook his head, and fearing he would begin to cry, she asked, “Have you ever seen the down of a wolf?” She pulled the tuft of fur out from under her apron and showed it to him. He looked at her wonderingly as he stroked it gently with one finger.
“Will Thomas kill it, then?” he asked. His childish wriggling and shifting about had given way to a sudden, doubtful silence.
“He will try,” she answered, nodding what she hoped would be taken for a certainty.
“And what if he cannot?” he whispered. His face had begun to crumple into fear, his brows crouching low over his eyes.
“Then,” she said solemnly, smoothing her hand once across the runnels of his hair, “we shall have to run very fast indeed.” Her lips, which had been downturned, arched up into a teasing smile, and the boy whooped away, loosening his fear into the cascading piles of leaves.
Watching his exuberant dash across the yard, she was suddenly very tired, the last of her anger extinguished, smothered within the press of punishing labor. She sat on the chair and brought the bit of wolf down to her nose. She breathed in the wolf’s scent, a scent brought from ceaseless roaming over darkened fields and haunted fens, through gates of slanting twilight. The odor, both sharp and intimate, offered up the violent submission of the kill, and a no less forceful submission into coupling. Thoughts of an obdurate Thomas slipped unwanted into her mind, and she opened her fingers, letting the wind blow the clump of fur across the yard, where it mixed with the leaves and was gone.
THE BOUNTY FOR the wolves was raised to seventy shillings apiece and Patience agreed to sell to Thomas the smallest of her four lambs for the pen. Martha took the hen, still ruffled and peevish from spending the night in the open, and put her back into her roost. Thus was it ever with men considering women, she mused, watching the bird settling herself deeper into the straw; plain and pecking creatures, such as herself, were passed over for those more meek and tempting.
A heavy rain had fallen the night before, bringing with it a chill wind that blew and cracked at the roof with empty branches. With morning, the wind had stopped, leaving pollen-green ponds in each rut in the yard. Early buds, torn loose by the storm, floated like rafts on miniature oceans, making intricate swirls and arcs in their wake.
From the open common room window Martha watched Thomas as he stood in the yard, looking for rain to fall from the clouds dispersing darkly over the rooftop. She knew he was ruminating over his plans to bait the pen with the lamb. From a reeking pail he spread new entrails in a line to the pen, wiping the trap door with the oozing guts to hide his own scent.
He led the lamb struggling and bawling against the tether, wild-eyed at the coppery smell of blood, and tied her to a stake inside the pen. The creature was still piebald from having the wool eaten off her back by her brothers, hungry and near to freezing from the desperate winter. Still, she was clamorous and lively and would bring the wolves to trap, if they hadn’t already tracked onto another’s field.
Patience came to stand in the yard as well, watching Thomas carefully, her every gesture a testament to her worries over the possible loss of a valuable lamb. She called tersely to Will, who had followed Thomas inside the pen, laughing and excited to a fever by the thought of wolves coming to their very door. Jabbing at the lamb with a stick, the boy cried desperately, “Can’t I help kill th’ wolves too, Thomas?”
Thomas shook his head and, leading the disappointed boy out of the pen, set the trip rope to the swing door carefully. When he was satisfied, he started for the house, to gather up his gun and some quilts for the long night in the barn, Martha thought. She could hear John rustling about in the hayloft, excited over the prospect of the kill, singing a fragment of some bawdy tavern song, the lyrics sly and unseemly.
Thomas whistled a warning to John to lower his voice, and glanced at the open house window. He startled to see Martha’s face peering out at him, motionless and staring. She quickly closed the casing, but she continued her vigil through the small leaded panes. Outside, beyond the window, she could see the dark, rippling shape of a crow settling itself on the last small island of snow in the yard, picking at the still-red spatters of blood from the bait.
A rushing, half-formed thought of silent beasts with snapping jaws made her head jerk up and she grasped suddenly at the casing. Thomas, sensing her alarm, even through the barrier of glass, wheeled about to find only the wet and glimmering yard, reflecting the last of the day’s curdling light.
MARTHA COULD FEEL Thomas watching her during the supper hour as she ladled soup mindlessly into bowls. Her usual precise movements, economical and sure, became, as the hour passed, disjointed and awkward. Even as Joanna knocked over her bowl, a thing that would normally have set her to scolding, it only served to further dispirit her, and she sopped up the mess without a word.
They had no sooner finished scraping the last of the soup from their bowls when Martha stood abruptly from her chair and walked to the shuttered windows, opening them to peer out into the blackened spaces of the yard. The lamb had ceased its crying and there was no sound beyond the caustic settling of the hearth.
Patience, anxious and fretful, took Will and Joanna by the hand and retired to bed, the men leaving soon after for the barn. Martha quickly cleared the table and, pinching out the candles, placed herself at the open window to keep watch.
She followed the scattered rays of candlelight from the tin lantern in the hayloft, and then, as the men settled themselves, that light, too, was extinguished. Martha raised herself up on her toes, elbows braced against the windowsill, and arched her neck to follow the clouds lifting ever higher into the ceiling of the sky. Through the scrim of vapors the light from a slivered moon glowed dully, like a flame through smoky glass. The evening breeze blew in chilling gusts from the west, where the forest bracken grew, and she knew the wolves, when they came, would not be able to smell her scent from the open casing. She heard a rustling behind her and turned to see William creeping along the wall towards the door, his fingers outstretched as though he would open it. Her glance startled him and he pulled back his hand, but he stood his ground for a moment, looking defiantly at her. Shaking her head, she gave him a cautious eye and pointed him back to bed.
For hours, a fragment of song she had learned long ago worked ceaselessly through her head. She had heard it from an ancient virgin aunt who had come to be nursed through her decrepit ravings, finally to die in her father’s house. In truth, the old woman was her mother’s great-aunt, and was hardly a corporeal being as she lay shivering beneath piles of quilts, her bones loose and untethered beneath her skin, like sticks inside a bleached linen bag. She had been laid on a cot close to the hearth, and through every meal, through every task done within the house, the Allens listened to the old woman mumbling in fear or to her shallow, whispery singing:
What comes at night, with scalding breath,
With teeth that bite and claws that tear,
With cunning eyes and fur doth wear;
It is not wolf, but man, and brings a maiden’s death.
And as the old woman died, she had caught hold of Martha’s wrist and, motioning her closer, said through laboring, gaping lips, “Young woman… be ye ’ware of untrue prophets that come in the cloth of the lamb… for they be wolves… and wolves be footmen to the Beast….” When Martha raised her head again, the aunt had passed beyond, her eyes still open and fixed on the lintel above the door.