“Stop yer whinin’! Ya want Bella out here with the snips?”
The keening increased, broken finally by a series of hiccoughing sobs.
“Get yer skinny arse outta there, the fun’s over.”
A moment later a woman’s head pushed its way out of the murky interior: first a tangle of red curls, then a pale face.
“Outta there, ya little hooer,” Hislop barked. He reached down to grasp the girl-for she was only that-by one thin wrist and heaved her up and out into the nearest drift. She landed on both buttocks, her equally thin legs splayed and one oversized boot ripped off. She was clothed only in a flannel nightgown and a man’s sweater that she had not succeeded in getting over her head in time.
“I want my shillin’,” she said with a perfunctory whine.
“You almost cost me twenty dollars-if I’d’ve missed that soldier, out here with the likes of you.”
“I’ll holler my head off-”
But she didn’t. Hislop kicked her in the stomach, knocking the wind and any resistance out of her. She let out a gasp, curled up into a ball of bent limbs, and started to whimper.
Marc was just about to spur his horse forward when the girl leapt up and turned to flee. Hislop whirled around and snatched at her nightgown, and as she wrenched herself away from him, the entire gown with the sweater came off in his hand. Hislop’s chin dropped in amazement. The girl saw her chance and sprinted towards the sideroad, stark naked but for one blackened boot that thumped into the snow like a club foot.
Marc realized immediately that she would come out onto the sideroad only a few yards from where the path he had taken met it, so he headed at full gallop back through the bush. As he charged out onto the road, the girl was just coming through the trees. Unexpectedly she turned north and, still bounding like a spooked doe, oblivious of her nakedness or the freezing air around her, she sped towards the end of the road. Marc caught up with her just as she veered back into the bush. Leaning down, holding the reins slack in one hand and guiding the horse with his knees, Marc grasped the girl under her arms at the apex of one of her leaps and swept her up in front of him onto the horse’s withers. She let out a surprisingly loud shriek and tried to strike him.
“I’m not Hislop!” he cried. “I’ve come to help you.” The horse kept on going along a faint trail through the bush. The girl’s struggles eased-in relief or exhaustion. Marc brought the horse to a halt and dismounted.
“I’m going to take you down from here and wrap you up before you freeze to death,” he said. “Please don’t scream. There’s no need. I’m not going to hurt you.” She said nothing. Her body went limp in his arms.
He drew her gently down and, holding her under the arms-his gloved hand crushing one of her small, stiff-nippled breasts-he tugged a blanket out of his saddle-roll and pulled it about her, twice. Tiny shudders racked her wasted body, no more than a hundred pounds in all. Her lips had turned a ghastly purple, her teeth chattered, and her eyelids blinked frantically. She’s dying, Marc thought. He’d seen death like this up close, not on any battlefield, but in the alleys of central London where, every morning as he walked from his rooms to the offices of Jardin and Musgrove, he passed the casualties of lust and other hungers: prostitutes with the rags of their trade falling off their ruined flesh, their emaciated faces peering up at anyone foolish enough to bend down to them and venting a final curse or death’s-head plea as their eyelids fluttered and closed.
He opened his greatcoat and crushed her body in against his own warmth, cocooning her, willing her to survive. Foolishly he kissed the top of her head, pushing his nose into the thick, reddish curls, as if the least gesture of affection might astonish and resuscitate. Gradually the shuddering diminished, her cheeks went suddenly rosy, her eyes swelled with tears, and a pink sliver of tongue slipped out to lick her upper lip. Then she snuggled farther into the hug that held her.
The girl sighed, closed her eyes, opened them again, and said in a low, sweet, Sunday-school voice: “You gonna poke me?”
Her name was Agnes Pringle, and they were on a woodsy trail that, as long as she directed Marc, would lead them to her home. With the blanket and greatcoat still wrapped around her and Marc’s extra mitts on her feet, she insisted she was well enough to ride up behind him, holding tight with both arms around his chest. The horse moved at a sedate pace.
“You don’t mean to say your mother’s Annie Pringle?” Marc said.
“That’s right, Mad Annie,” Agnes said cheerfully.
Erastus Hatch, as promised, had explained to Marc who Mad Annie was, and had sternly warned him to steer clear of her squattery out on the marshland north of the surveyed concessions. The only route into it lay in a maze of trails, the miller had said (not without some admiration), most of which were booby-trapped and life-threatening to the unescorted. What lay at the heart of this mischievously mined moat was the subject of much public speculation and sustained moral outrage. “Just Mad Annie, a still, and her brood of ne’er-do-wells,” Hatch had suggested, “but you could get maimed trying to prove it!”
“You can just let me off at the end of this here path,” Agnes said. “I know my way up to the house.”
“I could make a lot of trouble for Hislop,” Marc said.
“And he’ll only make more for us.”
“But he assaulted you.”
Agnes giggled. “He did a lot more’n that to me.”
“He owes you a dress,” Marc said.
“We take care of our own,” Agnes said.
Hatch had warned him also about the infamous Pringle boys, Mad Annie’s obstreperous male offspring, and Marc decided not to be nonchalant about this errand of mercy. A military uniform out here could easily be misconstrued.
“Nobody’ll hurt ya,” Agnes said, sliding off the horse. She removed the greatcoat with a slow, purring gesture, rubbed it sensuously against her cheek, then held it up to him. She watched him put it on, then said, “What about yer mitts and this here blanket?” She started to draw the edges of the cloth away from her chest in a sad parody of seduction.
“You’ll need them if you aren’t to freeze,” Marc said. “You sure you can make it home?” He was gazing dubiously through a screen of cedars at an uneven open area that was likely a swamp come spring, dotted here and there with scrub bushes, the remnants of cattails, and stunted evergreens. Several hundred yards farther, on the distant verge of the clearing, he spotted several shacks and tumbledown outbuildings. No welcoming smoke rose from any one of them.
Agnes was in the midst of nodding “yes” to Marc’s inquiry when her eyes widened and her pale cheeks went paler. “Jesus,” she hissed. Then she wailed, “It’s Ma!”
From the cover of a nearby cedar stepped the woman known throughout the district as Mad Annie. Marc’s initial instinct was to laugh, for she was at first glance not a prepossessing sight. From Hatch’s descriptions and cautions, given in detail on their ride to Buffaloville, Marc had expected her to be a female of formidable bulk. But before him now, with her feet planted apart as if she were on snowshoes, stood a tiny woman clothed in a loose sweater, a lumberjack’s tuque, woollen trousers fastened at the waist and ankle with binder-twine, and a pair of mismatched boots. Her face was misshapen, like a badly aged apple doll. But it was her eyes that caught Marc’s attention. They were large and round-intelligent, belligerent, and curiously vulnerable. At this moment, they blazed with suspicion and imminent aggression. Marc could see nothing lunatic in them.
“Put the girl down,” she commanded.
“She is down,” Marc said firmly. “I’ve brought her home-to her mother, I presume.”
“Who I am ain’t your business, mister,” she said, assessing the uniformed rider and his horse with a single cold, bright glance. Then she turned to the girl, as if Marc were now of peripheral interest at best. Agnes wrapped the grey blanket twice around her and shuffled across to her mother.