She should not be angry with the Boses. Margaret knew that, despite her spinning emotions. They had a right to suspect and fear her shaven head, even though her hair was now a few days old and visible, an orange fuzz that felt like the nap of some fine cloth when she ran her palm across her skull. She almost had eyebrows, spiky and stiff. But still she could not expect them to risk exposing a child of Bella’s age to a disease, even if that disease was clearly in retreat. Nor could she expect them to show much sympathy to her for the loss of her “half-brother.” How could that compare to their loss of a full son and their granddaughter’s loss of a full father? Nor could she expect them to stay quiet during the night, when their grief, their shock, and their terror were so burdensome. Yet she was angry with the Boses. She was angry at the way they had turned hostile and despairing so quickly, creating more conflict instead of staying calm. She was angry that only a short time after sharing a fire and their life stories with her, and at a time when the four of them should be unified and thinking of ways to help or rescue their men, they were threatening her with a strip of metal. Not that such a threat was frightening. The Boses didn’t have the pluck or strength to do her any harm. They didn’t have the character.
Margaret’s anger made the time pass more quickly. It kept her warm and busy. Keep your distance or else? The threat was so infuriating and unkind that Margaret succeeded in persuading herself that it would be easy, a pleasure even, to take the metal out of Melody’s hands and give her graying braids some sharp, painful tugs. Or else she would happily find a strip of metal of her own and put an end to all that “Son. Son. Son…” Melody, the crowd of emigrants who had stoned them on the shingle beach at Ferrytown, the short horseman who had stolen Franklin’s coat, anyone ahead of her who’d dare to block her path, they all became one body, dropping to its knees under the thrashing weight of Margaret’s metal strip.
As soon as there was some light, Margaret wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and clambered up a high rampart of rubble to make sure that the junkle was deserted. She could not trust her eyes entirely, but she listened carefully, turning into and against the wind. No whinnying. No brays. No dogs. No men. Not even birds. For the time being they were safe. Safe enough to run away.
The Boses watched her from their hiding place. They seemed so weary and so old suddenly, so frail and defeated, that Margaret, against her instincts to tell them nothing, called out to inform them that she was moving on, and that if they wanted to — and if they had any sense at all in their old heads — they could join her. “At a distance, if you prefer,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll have to manage on your own. Make up your minds.” She sounded like her mother for a moment, impatient and practical, when what she truly felt was desolate and hollow.
“Where will we go? How will we get there?” Andrew Bose asked eventually, after a whispered conversation with the ill-named Melody.
“We walk. How else?” They might be in possession of a carriage and a boat barrow, she reminded them, but without any horses to pull the former or anyone strong enough to push the latter, they had no choice but to leave behind anything they could not carry easily and go ahead by foot.
“But where?”
“I don’t know where. Don’t ask me where. We go. We carry on. That’s what we have to do.” Again she recognized this tone of voice, not her natural, more respectful way of speaking, and not her mother’s. It was the voice her brothers had often used to bully her. It was the voice she’d heard from Franklin just the day before, when he had made her take the highway despite her worries. It “will speed us to the coast,” he’d said. Well, he’d been wrong. Horribly so. And she’d been right. I’ll never take the advice of a pigeon again, she told herself — and it almost made her smile, just to imagine for a moment that she was truly saying it to him, that he was still there with her to be teased.
Well, now she had the chance to take her own advice, to leave the old wide track and all the hard lands thereabouts and follow country routes, ones too narrow, preferably, for horses or groups of men. But Franklin needed her. She was not free to take her own advice. There was no one who’d look for him if she didn’t. So what she’d have to do was try to find where he’d been taken, no matter where it was, even if it meant continuing along the highway.
“Okay, it’s true, I don’t know what we ought to do,” she called out to the Boses. “And nor do you. All I know is that I want my Franklin back.” She fought her sobs. “And you must want your Acton back, too. Her pa. So what’s the choice? There isn’t any choice. We find the horse scuffs and we follow them. What happens then will happen then. We can’t stay here. So let’s pack up our bags and go. Before those men come back for us. Or something worse.”
The Boses were persuaded by those last two words.
They dragged their remaining possessions and the few things left by the Joeys out into full view from the darkness of the rubble cave and made their choices. Any food they had to keep. And water bags. But otherwise the hard decisions were their own. Margaret kept her fishing net, one of Franklin’s knives, his spark stone, a thin blanket, one tarp, the comb, the hairbrush, the green-and-orange woven top that had been rescued from her room in Ferrytown, a spare undershirt, and her blue scarf. She forced them into Franklin’s back sack, leaving enough space on top for what was left of their salted meat, the honey, and her remaining taffies, as well as some damp tack from the potman’s stores. The cattle skins would have to be abandoned. They were too bulky, as were her father’s wading boots, which Franklin had for some reason rescued from the house, and — she hesitated — the coil of thick rope, which might prove useful but was heavy. She hesitated, too, about the bow and arrows. Franklin would want to keep them, she knew. But she could not use them herself. Women were never trained to hunt, so taking them would be an empty gesture — as, possibly, would be the inclusion of Franklin’s change of clothes. She did not want to challenge fate by adding them to her load. If she and Franklin ever met again — which, candidly and with bitter resignation, she doubted that they would — then a change of clothes would not matter one way or the other. But if she took his clothes with her, it was guaranteed — they were so capacious — that they would weigh her down and use up space and energy. Throwing them out was shamefully distressing. A murder of a sort. Again she had to swallow tears.
The fruit-juice flagons were also too heavy to carry, even the empty one, but she filled a water bag with juice and hung it on its lanyard around her waist, together with the larger bag still nearly full of now stale water from the river at Ferrytown. Then she filled her stomach with the remaining juice. She offered it across the clearing to the Boses, but they shook their heads and wiped their lips defensively, as if the mere mention of sharing a spout with her were enough to smear them with contagion.
The little clay pot over which she’d cooked their breakfast birds while she and Franklin had been resting in the forest was not worth keeping, she thought, and then she thought again and remembered a chilling moment from the night before. Those metal scavengers, those people rustlers, whatever they were, had thrown out her mint plant, the one intimate thing that she had shared with her family remaining in her possession. Margaret stepped into the cave with the clay pot and felt around with her foot until she located the earth and the plant. The mint was damaged, both by the assault of the previous evening and by the season. Few leaves were left. Soon there would be none. The mint would draw back to its roots until the spring. But still she scooped the earth and the plant into the pot and nestled it among her clothes at the top of her bag. This was not sensible, she knew. Why bother with a plant that grew wild anyway? But Margaret was determined to defy the scavengers, in some small way at least. The mint would live.