The Scarecrow Farms

The first one stood by a gate.

Wren saw it from a long way off: a dark upright shape at the corner of a square of dead barley, with its arms hanging down. She thought it was a post. Then she thought it was a scarecrow, a poor one, without a hat. Then she came close enough to see its boots, and she stopped in the road.

It was a man.

He stood in the barley up to his knees, quite still, with a hoe held loosely in one hand, the way you hold a thing you have forgotten you are holding. He was grey. Not grey the way an old man’s hair goes grey, but grey all over — face and hands and smock and boots — as if the colour had not faded out of him so much as been poured out, all at once, and nothing poured back. His eyes were open. And as Wren stood there with her heart thumping, she saw his chest rise, very slowly, and fall again.

He was breathing.

In her pocket the singing-stone gave the smallest of hums, so faint that she felt it in her fingers rather than heard it, and was still.

Wren did not go any nearer. I would not have either, and I do not think you would. She went past on the far side of the road, as quickly as she could without running, and did not look back.

After that there were more of them. A woman in a shawl by a patch of split grey cabbages. A boy beside a wall, with a stone still in his two hands. An old man in an orchard whose apples hung small and hard and grey as pebbles, and did not fall. They all stood the same way: as if each of them had been called, one ordinary evening, from the middle of an ordinary job — and had stopped, and listened, and never come in.

“Scarecrows,” Wren muttered, pulling Tobin’s scarf up over her chin. “You’d have known what to do.” The lamp lay low against her ribs, and did not tell her.

The dusk came down grey on grey. And then, in a thin, cold, half-hearted way, it began to rain.

The barn was the first roof she came to. Its door hung open on one hinge. Wren did not knock at the farmhouse beside it. She had never knocked at a house in her life to ask for anything; in Soot Lane, if you knocked, you got either a clip round the ear or a bill. She slid in at the barn door and sat down in a corner with her knees up, dripping.

She had been there perhaps five minutes when the lantern came round the door.

“If you’re after the eggs,” said a voice behind it, “there aren’t any. The hen’s not laid since midsummer. You’re welcome to try her, but she bites.”

It was a quick, sharp, scraped sort of voice, like a knife on a pot. Behind the lantern was a thin woman with a sack over her head against the rain, and a face that was all bones and frown.

“I’m not after anything,” said Wren. “I’m just sat here.”

“Well, you can’t be. You’ll catch your death, and then I’ll have to dig a hole for you, and I’ve enough to do. Come in, then. Supper’s soup. It’s not much soup. Don’t expect anything.”

And she went back across the yard with the lantern, as if it were all settled; and Wren, who had been going to say something cutting, found that her legs had followed the light without asking her.

The kitchen was small and very clean and very cold, with a scrubbed table, a dresser with three plates on it, and a black pot over a handful of turf that gave off more smoke than heat. By the hearth sat a tall, stooped man, lean as a rake, who looked at Wren for a moment with mild grey-brown eyes, and then got up off the only stool and pushed it towards her with his foot. He did not say anything.

“That’s Will,” said the woman. “Will Hesketh. He doesn’t talk. I talk. I’m Mag. That’s Hal, and that’s Bess, and they can both stop staring and lay another place.” A boy of about ten and a girl a little younger, both thin as their father, stopped staring and did it. “And that’s Posy.”

She did not point. She did not need to.

In a box-bed in the corner, under a heap of blankets and an old coat, a very small girl lay on her side, looking at the fire. She had a round face that ought to have been a fat, cheerful sort of face, and a mop of curls that ought to have been some colour or other. But the curls were the colour of dust, and her face was the colour of the ash under the turf, and her eyes did not move when Wren came in. Her hand lay outside the blanket. It was grey to the wrist.

“Grey-fever,” said Mag, quite flatly, ladling out the soup. “Since back-end. You won’t catch it. Nobody catches it. It just comes.” She set a bowl down in front of Wren with a little bang. “It comes on the little ones slow. Takes their colour, then their appetite, then their talk. She’s not said a word in nine days. Then one evening they get up out of bed, and go out to the field, and stand.” Another bang. “Like Will’s dad. That’s him in the near field, with the crook. Went out to see to the sheep last winter, and never came in.” She sat down. “Eat your soup.”

Will Hesketh looked into the fire.

It was very thin soup, mostly water and grey turnip. Wren, who had grown up noticing exactly how much of everything there was and who had it, noticed that by the time Mag came to her own bowl there was nothing left in the pot but steam; and that Will broke the one crust into five pieces, not six, and kept none for himself. And she noticed that Mag took her bowl first to the box-bed and knelt there, trying to get a spoonful between Posy’s lips.

“Come on, my lamb,” Mag said, very low, in quite a different voice. “One for your mam.”

Posy did not open her mouth.

Mag got up after a while, and came back to the table, and drank her soup out of the bowl in three swallows, as if she were cross with it.

“Where are you going, then?” she said. “On your own in the wet, a girl your size.”

“East,” said Wren.

Mag’s spoon stopped. “There’s nothing east but more of this, and then the Burned Country, and nothing in that but ash and the Queen’s grey soldiers riding up and down. Folk that go east don’t come back.” She looked at Wren hard. “What’ve you got to go east for?”

“Somebody told me to,” said Wren.

Mag made a noise through her nose that said exactly what she thought of that. But she asked no more; and after supper she made Wren a bed of sacks by the hearth, near the box-bed, because it was the warmest place in the house, and that wasn’t saying much.

“We let the turf go out at night,” she said. “We can’t spare it else.” She looked at the small heap in the box-bed. “Sleep, then. If you can.”

Then she blew out the lantern, and the Heskeths went up the ladder to the loft, and the kitchen was dark except for the red eye of the turf, going out.

I want to tell you about the next part carefully, because Wren never did.

She lay on the sacks with her coat on, and did not sleep. The rain ticked on the window. The turf went from red to brown to grey. And from the box-bed, a yard away, came the sound of a very small child breathing — so slow and so shallow that between each breath Wren found she was holding her own, waiting to be sure there would be another.

She knew what she ought to do. Of course she did.

She had done it for Nettle in Soot Lane, and on top of the Beacon, and for Pim in the bottom of an upturned boat only days ago. Here. It’s for you. You don’t have to do anything. She knew the words by heart.

And she did not want to say them.

That is the plain truth of it, and I will not pretend otherwise. She was tired all the way down, the way you are tired when somebody asks for just one more small thing, and any other night you would do it gladly, and tonight you simply cannot.

Everything costs, she thought. That’s what I always said. And everybody told me I was wrong. And I gave it, and gave it, and gave it — and look.

She thought of the forge-door in the mine, and the dust, and the dark coming down between, and the silence after.

He gave everything. And it didn’t save him.

The lamp was so small now, like the last coal in a grate nobody has fed. And it was all she had left of him. Not his poles; they were under the rock. Only this little flame he had put into her hands at the very end, still warm from his. If she gave it now, to a child she did not even know, and it spent itself there, and guttered, and went out —

It relights itself, said something sensible at the back of her mind.

But she did not know that any more. Ash had known things, and Ash was gone.

She turned over, with her back to the box-bed, and shut her eyes tight.

In the morning, she thought. Before I go. When I’m not so tired. I’ll just—

“Is it morning?”

It was the smallest voice Wren had ever heard — so dry and so far away that at first she thought she had dreamed it.

“Is it morning yet?” said the voice again. “I’m cold.”

Wren turned over.

Posy had not moved. But her eyes had come round, very slowly, from the dead fire, and they were looking at Wren. In the dark they were the only part of her that did not seem grey.

She’s not said a word in nine days.

And Wren thought, all at once, of a cold garret in Soot Lane, and a much smaller Wren lying awake in it, asking the dark whether it was morning yet, and nobody answering, for years and years. She thought of an old man who always divided the last of the food and then said he was not hungry.

And then she thought something else, and it went through her like cold water.

I was going to give it to her to make it bigger.

It was true. All the long way from the sea, a small sly part of her had been waiting for somebody grey enough and sad enough, so that she could hold the lamp out and watch it blaze up the way it used to, and know that Ash had not been wrong. She had been going to give it the way you put a coin in a slot. To get something back.

That was not giving. That was a bargain. Wren had known bargains all her life, and she knew one when she saw it, even in her own heart.

She sat up.

She took the lamp out of her coat. Her hands were shaking. It lay in her palms, dented, with the crack in its chimney and the little hook on top, and the flame inside was low and red, hardly more than a glow — a coal under ash.

“I don’t care,” she whispered to it. “D’you hear? I don’t care if you don’t get any bigger. I don’t care if you go out. If it’s the last of you.” Her throat had closed up. She made it open again. “It’s not for me. It’s for her.”

She got up on her knees beside the box-bed. She did not hold the lamp up high, like something wonderful. She only held it near, the way you hold a cup for somebody too weak to hold it themselves.

“Here,” she said to Posy. “It’s for you. You don’t have to do anything.”

And then, because it was true, though she had not known she was going to say it:

“It’s nearly morning. It’s coming. I promise.”

For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then the flame stood up.

It stood up the way a person stands who has been sitting a long time — slowly, and then all at once. It went gold, and brighter than gold, and the crack in the chimney shone like a thread; and it leaned out towards the small grey face, and the light came off it and filled the bed, and the corner, and the room.

Wren had forgotten what the lamp’s light was like when it was given: how it was not like a candle, or a glowstone, or anything else in the whole grey world; how it was warm, the way summer is warm on a wall, and a hand is warm on your shoulder in the dark. The cold kitchen filled up with it the way a cup fills from a jug, and it smelt of bread and summer; and on Wren’s left wrist her mother’s ribbon, which had been grey for days, went red, red, red.

And Posy’s face changed.

It came up slowly, the way colour comes into the sky before the sun: a faint warmth along her cheek, then a pinkness at her lips; and then the dusty curls on the pillow began, from the roots outward, to turn a colour. It was ginger — the bright, astonishing, impossible ginger of a marigold. Posy’s grey hand went pink to the fingertips, and curled, and uncurled.

Posy sat up.

She sat straight up with the blankets falling off her and her ginger curls on end, and looked about the gold room with great round eyes. She looked at Wren. She looked at the lamp.

“That’s a fire,” she said, very decidedly, in a hoarse little voice. “It’s a little fire.” And then, in exactly the tone of a child who has not eaten for nine days and has only just noticed: “I want some bread.”

There was a thump overhead, and Mag Hesketh came down the loft ladder so fast that she missed the last three rungs and landed on her knees; and she stayed there in her nightgown, and stared at her daughter, with both hands over her mouth.

“Mam,” said Posy crossly. “I said. Bread.”

Mag made a sound that was not a word. Then she had Posy out of the box-bed and up against her chest, blankets and all, and was rocking her and saying “Oh, my lamb, oh, my lamb,” into her ginger hair, and crying the way people cry who have not let themselves cry for a long time.

Will Hesketh stood at the foot of the ladder, with Hal and Bess peering round his legs. His long face did not change, but his eyes filled and spilled over. Then, still without a word, he took down from the back of the top shelf a heel of bread in a cloth — the last bread in the house, Wren understood, kept back for some worse day than this. He broke it in half. He gave one half to Posy, and the other to Wren.

Posy ate hers in four bites and asked for more.

“There isn’t any more, greedy,” said Mag, her voice gone back to sharp, but wobbling badly round the edges. “Nine days you won’t take a spoonful, and now you’d eat the table.” And she hugged Posy so hard that Posy squeaked.

Wren sat back on her heels with the lamp in her lap.

It had not gone back down. That was what she could not stop looking at. It was not the great roaring gold of the Beacon; but it was steady and bright and upright, and warm all through, as it had not been since the night the tunnel fell. It was brighter than it had been since Ash died.

And she had not given it to make it brighter. She had given it so that it could go out, if it had to. That was the joke of it. That was the whole entire joke.

It was never mine, said a voice she knew, very dry and very quiet, at the back of her mind. It’s never been anyone’s. Give it.

“Hm,” said Wren, under her breath, to nobody. And she did not know whether she was laughing or crying, and found it did not matter much.

In the morning the rain had stopped, and the pale sun came up over the dead fields like a coin at the bottom of a well.

Wren meant to slip away before anyone was up. But Mag was up before her, sitting at the table with Posy asleep in her lap, and she only looked at Wren over Posy’s head for a long while, with her bony, frowning, wet-eyed face, as if she were trying to learn her by heart.

The hearth was cold. Last night’s turf was a heap of grey dust, and the small pile for the morning sat beside it, damp.

Wren knelt on the hearthstone and set three bits of the damp turf together, the way Mr Pellow did with driftwood. She did not ask whether she might. She took out the lamp, and tipped it, so that the flame leaned down and touched.

The turf caught.

It did not smoulder and smoke, the way turf does. It caught gold, as clean as dry straw; and the flame in the lamp was not one bit smaller for it. Mag let out her breath. Will, coming down the ladder with his boots in his hand, stopped where he was.

“That’ll want feeding,” said Wren gruffly, getting up. “Same as any fire. But it’ll not go out on you. Not that one.” She did not know how she knew it. She knew it.

Mag got up with Posy in her arms and fetched the other half of Will’s heel of bread, which Wren had left on the table in the night.

“You’ll take that,” she said. “And don’t argue with me, because I’m not in the mood.”

Wren opened her mouth to argue. Then she shut it again, and took the bread.

“Thanks,” she said. And she said it the way she had once said it to Nettle at the Grey Gate, without stopping to wonder what it would cost.

She went out across the yard into the cold. At the gate, for no reason at all, she turned and looked back.

Out of the farmhouse chimney, for the first time in a long time, there was going up a thin blue thread of smoke. And out in the near field, in the grey barley, stood Will’s father, in his smock, with his crook in his hand.

Last night he had been standing with his face to the hills. Wren was quite sure of it. Now his grey face had come round — slowly, stiffly — towards the farmhouse, towards the thin blue smoke going up from the chimney, the way a sleeper turns towards a window when the light begins to come in.

He did not move again. He only stood there in the dead field, with his face towards the fire.

Wren held on to the top bar of the gate for a long time.

Then she turned east, and went on; and the lamp in her coat leaned east with her, warm and steady and bright, as if it had remembered something, and was glad.