Cheryl Burman

The man was talking to the river.

Hester eyed him with piqued curiosity. Talking to the river was her job.

He was tall, and hatless under a hot summer sun. The same breeze which bent the grass of the field behind Hester, wove strands of his black hair in the air above his head. He wore a long black coat which was shiny at the elbows. The coat made her suspect he was, or once was, a gentleman, because she had seen gentlemen on a rare trip to Shiphaven and they had worn long black coats. Hats too, so this gentleman must have fallen on bad times. Hester’s mother had said this about a merchant family in the town whose boat failed to return from its annual pilgrimage and, fallen on bad times, they had to move from their townhouse and sell the fancy carriage.

The man spun about, as if suddenly aware of being watched. When he clasped his hands behind him, he displayed a yellow brocade waistcoat. A fine material, so it was a shame the buttonholes were frayed. Perhaps her mother could mend them, for money, as she did more and more these days. The farm was not enough, despite the long hours Father and her brothers worked.

‘Hello.’ The man touched his fingers to his head as if he had forgotten he was hatless. His hair glistened like raven feathers in the bright sun, and gold flecks glinted warmly in his dark eyes.

Hester needed to put her thumb in her mouth, but Mother had beaten the habit out of her, declaring that at eight years old Hester should have long outgrown thumb sucking. She agreed with Mother, so she folded her arms over her pinafore before the thumb could sneak its own way between her lips.

‘You come here often, don’t you?’ the man said. ‘I’ve seen you here, talking to Sabrina.’

Who, where, was this Sabrina? Hester turned her head so quickly her untidy curls slapped her cheek.

‘Sabrina is the name of the river.’ He gestured at the placid wide stream flowing at this moment down to the sea.

‘That’s not the name of the river.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘It’s got another name …’

‘You mean the name ordinary folk call it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You and I are not ordinary folk, little mistress. We are wise. We call the river by her goddess name, Sabrina.’

‘God?’

‘No, goddess.’ He brushed strands of hair from his face. ‘Did you know you were talking to a goddess?’

Hester’s thumb twitched. She held it steady, pinned into her armpit. If she were honest, it wasn’t so much that she talked to the river, as it talked to her. When the river was low it whispered, shushing its way over the sandbanks as the silks Mother sewed shushed over Hester’s hands. When the tide came in, the waters swooshed and swirled while the swans hitched fast rides alongside shallow-bottomed trows.

The river told Hester she was a good girl, which was what Father told her when she found the eggs the hens hid or picked blackberries for Mother to make into jam.

She listened for the river’s words. Today, it was silent, hurrying to the sea in a long smooth rush to collect the big ships and bring them up with the turning of the tide.

The man came nearer, his shadow falling over Hester’s bonnetless head. ‘May I walk with you?’ He offered his hand for her to take, if she wished.

The hand was long-fingered and smooth, with pale lines across the palm. A gentleman’s hand. When it didn’t go away, Hester took it and the man led her alongside the hedgerows, away from the river, away from Sabrina. As they walked he told her the names of the flowers growing at the edge of the fields and sprouting from the hedges.

‘Here is yarrow.’ His fingers caressed the froth of fading lilac flowers. ‘Cures colds,’ he said. ‘And toothache.’

He held a feathery cluster the colour of fresh cream to Hester’s nose. Her eyes crinkled. ‘Ah! Meadowsweet. Mother says I’ll carry meadowsweet when I marry.’

‘Marry?’ The man raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Does she now?’

PART ONE

Chapter One

A boisterous wind tangles Hester’s hair and whips her back with its chilly gusts. She shouldn’t be here, on the clifftop above the river. She should be hurrying back across the fields to milking – a task with which she was entrusted on her recent fourteenth birthday.

‘Old enough to take on more,’ Mother said, bequeathing Hester the roughest of her own tasks while adding that she herself needs to keep her hands clean for sewing, given the fancy merchants’ wives of Shiphaven have no desire for streaks of pig muck on their lace collars.

Hester ignores the imagined lowing of the cows. Huddled in her thick, woollen shawl, she fixes her gaze on the waters. All life is down there. Fishing boats with their sails furled; barges sunk low with wood and coal and stone; the ferry with its passengers huddled close as puppies in a box, wanting the cold journey to be over.

Busyness and purpose.

While up here is Hester with a life of milking, unearthing eggs, playing housekeeper to pigs in their sties, and waking in the night to feed motherless lambs. Cows, lambs and hens are all well and good, and Hester understands she has much to be grateful for. Her mind roams across those families in the village where too little money and too many children mean constant hunger and cold. Yet, she has her own hunger. It’s why she has sneaked from the farm to answer the call of the river nymphs, needing to feed the craving for their embrace which lives within her, the elusive memory of a dream.

She shivers, stamps her boots to get feeling into feet chilled by the wet, scrubby grass, and peers downstream. A low bore rears ahead of the tidal flow, a cavalry of white-maned grey steeds galloping away from the ocean with heads held high and steady. Small boats going down pull into the cliffs on the far bank to wait out the surging tide.

As Hester watches, she strains to hear Sabrina’s voice.

Sabrina, goddess.

When Hester was a little girl, Sabrina murmured she was a good girl. Now the river whispers that Hester must be wise, and strong. And do what she must do, which is a puzzling demand.

Stretching towards the cliff edge, she searches–

There! The nymphs rise on the bow waves of the great barges before plunging beneath fishing boats, playing tag with nets and oars. Their bodies are as supple as spring’s elvers which churn the shallows to a thrashing, black mass, but luminous, more graceful. Wrapped in mud-brown hanks of hair as thick as fishermen’s ropes, they scorn November’s cold.

‘Join us, swim with us, learn with us.’

Their high sweet voices cleave the sailors’ coarse shouts in mimicry of the wind from the fields slicing through Hester’s shawl. They cleave her heart too, filling her with a yearning to answer their summons, to ride the white horses far upstream, turning with the new tide to journey to the ocean. Hester has never seen the sea, felt only the tug of its salty call as she watches the nymphs on their downstream course.

‘Join us, swim with us, learn with us.’

Sinuous arms wave above the waters, beckoning Hester as they always do.

Sabrina sings. Be wise, be strong, do what you need to do.

Hester’s yearning is too much. Today, she resolves … today at last, she will know the sea in truth.

Along the cliff she runs, scrabbling down the path to the water, digging her heels into the black soil, grabbing at stunted branches to push herself forward. She is a spawning salmon in her urgency to reach the rocks and mudbanks which will soon be drowned in racing water. Stretching out her arms, she begs the nymphs, seeks their wet touch, needing them to take her into the flow. She will learn with them, their strength will be hers. Their wisdom too.

Her boots are drenched as she wades forward to meet the oncoming wave and its soaring, plunging riders–

‘Hey, you there, Miss!’

Hester ignores the call.

‘Stop!’

A hand on her shoulder wrenches her from the swiftly rising flow. Hester’s heart pounds. Cold, grey water swirls about her ankles. She stumbles backwards, is caught, is pulled and steered, breathless, up the path to the clifftop.

Her rescuer stands before her, breathing as hard as Hester breathes. A glimpse of faded yellow waistcoat, torn remnants of thread where a button should be, shows beneath his open greatcoat. Her memory stirs.

A frown slides across the man’s forehead, as shadowy and fleeting as a night hunting owl.

‘What were you thinking?’ His dark eyes, with their glint of gold, narrow. Something hard, wild in them makes Hester squirm.

Her heart keeps its pounding rhythm. She presses her hand to her chest. Her hand is cold. All of her is cold.

‘Sabrina called me … she wants me–’

He whips his head to the river. Strands of his too-long hair fly out from beneath his beaver hat. His hair is shrivelled at the ends, as if he has bent too close to his cottage fire.

‘Talk to Sabrina from here.’

Hester winces at the harshness of his voice, drops her gaze to the stony ground, away from the man’s cold anger.

‘Far safer,’ he says, waving at the river.

Hester peers up, blurts her excuse. ‘The nymphs invited me.’

The man hisses a sharp breath and Hester dips her chin in embarrassment. He thinks her mad, or fey. She pulls a windswept curl across her face to hide the spring of ashamed tears.

‘I have to go home,’ she tells the ground, scuffing her soaked boot in the grass. ‘There are cows to be milked.’

‘Of course.’ His tone is as coolly polite as if he and Hester are acquaintances passing on a busy street. He offers a stiff bow, reaches up to lift his hat. His fingers are blistered. ‘Good day.’

Hester gathers her shawl around her shaking body and runs across the stubbled field, fleeing the river and the man. When she reaches the gap in the leafless hedge, she glances around. He’s staring into the streaming tide.

She wriggles through the gap, hurries home. Her whirling mind picks at the unfolding memory. He is back.

Chapter Two

A frozen February brings Hester three lambs to care for by the kitchen fire. Tonight, the wind blusters the window panes and shrieks its frustration around the chimney like the too-soon dead. The flame of the tallow candle on the table bends and straightens in a draught, wafting its fatty scent across the room. Hester wriggles the empty bottle from the lamb’s grip and squats on the cold flags of the floor to return the creature to its basket. It bleats a protest before butting the soft pink stomach of one of its bed mates and closing its eyes.

Hester should return to bed to close her eyes also, hope for sleep to find her before it’s time to rise for milking. She hefts her shawl closer about her shoulders. It isn’t worth the climb to her attic room.

The range has cooled. Opening the heavy cast iron door, she takes up the poker and attacks the coals which snap their irritation before falling in on themselves. She stokes the hissing flames, adds more coal, fills the kettle and sets porridge to cook before lighting a lantern and picking her way across the pre-dawn darkness of the farmyard to the byre.

The cow’s flank is warm, the teats warm too, taking the chill from her fingers as she pulls and squeezes. The cow stamps a hoof and lazily chews fresh hay in the manger while the rhythm of her task sends Hester into daydreams.

The man on the clifftop. That’s where her thoughts steal to more and more these days, whether scattering grain for hens, raking pig sties or milking cows. Before she falls asleep each night, too. She is unsettled, anxious; has been all the long, dark winter. It isn’t about his rescue of her from the river that blustering autumn day. If he hadn’t appeared, she would be with the nymphs playing in the green depths of the sea now.

No, it isn’t how he wrenched her from the nymphs’ welcoming arms. It was his coolness which was a disappointment. Very different from the first time. He didn’t remember her, and why should he? It’s been years since she met him by the river one summer day.

‘Anyway, why should I care?’ Hester says to the cat.

Heavy with pending birth, the cat scratches at the straw and nestles into the newly made bed. Men, she hisses. You’ll learn their casual ways. Best not to care.

Hester breathes in the earthy scents of cow and warm milk and closes her eyes. At the time, she had considered him old. Now, however, she thinks maybe he isn’t so old. Two or three years senior to her oldest brother Will, who is twenty, she guesses.

Except for his eyes. They are ancient, guarded, their gold flecks dulled as if scarred by unendurable images. Their warmth has cooled.

She empties the pail of bubbly milk into an urn and moves her stool along to the next cow. Pushing her head into its velvet softness, she summons the heady scent of meadowsweet.

‘I know this one,’ she had told the man, glad to display her learning.

‘Marry?’ The man had raised a dark eyebrow.

Hester smiles at the memory of the man’s quizzical eyebrow. She pats the rump of the last cow and lifts the pail. There is milk set aside for cream, and for her mother to churn into butter for sale in the village.

Putting aside thoughts of the man along with her stool, she lifts her skirt above her pattens to pick her way around the frozen puddles to the house. An owl flies low overhead, swooping to its roost in the barn. The wind has ceased its howling, possibly comforted by the greying of the darkness across the river. Hester stops at the kitchen door to watch dawn’s hesitant approach above the river.

Sabrina, goddess. She talks to a goddess.

In the days that follow, Hester takes the cat’s advice and breezily convinces herself she doesn’t care. There are times, however, when she’s sewing, or scrubbing her big brothers’ shirts, or scraping carrots – and not noting what she does, she could do these things in her sleep – she will relive the conversation on the cliffs. Tossing swill into the pig trough, peeling parsnips or carrying baskets of kindling, Hester will recall the man’s narrowed eyes as he scolds her: ‘Talk to Sabrina from here.’

He was angry about the nymphs, too. Remembering his hissed intake of breath, she grows hot with embarrassment. There is no-one Hester can talk to about the white-maned horses which carry the bore, about the horses’ lissom riders.

When she told Father, he chuckled. ‘A wild, beautiful mind, daughter.’

Mother arched her brows and muttered how her daughter’s head was in the clouds and had she locked the hens up tight?

Washing dishes, Hester’s worries carp in her mind. Was the man angry because he assumed she is lying, or does he think the nymphs belong to him? And to Sabrina.

The question grows with the cat’s belly, reaching its niggling fingers into corners of her mind where it has no business being. When the cold abates, she will go to the clifftop and find him, risk his irritation and ask about the nymphs. She throws coals on the kitchen fire and draws on their heat to fuel her courage.

*

The weather defers Hester’s need to be brave. A deeper freeze falls across the countryside. Father brings ewes and lambs into the sheds, cows too. Hester’s brothers give up their attempts to dig the soil in the vegetable garden, the duck pond ices over and the sheets on the washing line are stiff as planks.

‘River’s frozen,’ Father says over supper. ‘No boats up or down. Quiet as the grave.’

Hester wriggles in her chair, anxious for the nymphs. How can they ride the white horses if Sabrina is frozen? Are they buried under the ice? She twists a strand of hair with her finger. No. They would have swum with the tide down to the sea to frolic through winter, splashing in the waves, combing the sandy floor for pretty shells. They won’t return until the river warms.

Sim, the middle brother, waves his knife. ‘It’d better thaw soon and get to proper spring, else there’ll be no crops sown in time.’ He glowers at Hester as if she has commanded the icy soil. She squints at him, defiant.

Silence follows. The farm is doing no better than it ever has. It’s why Mother is taking in more sewing and Hester is expected to help with that as well as do farm chores. Her appetite for her bread and cheese slides away.

Mother clicks her tongue and gathers dishes, knives and forks. ‘Come, Hester, help me clear up.’

It’s a signal for movement. Will pushes back from the table, shrugs on his coat and empties the remains of the kindling onto the hearth stones. ‘I’ll fetch more coal and kindling for the morning,’ he says. ‘Then I’m off into the village. Coming Sim?’

‘No.’ Sim curls his lips in contempt of the humble village. ‘I’m into Shiphaven for real company.’ He tosses Hester a sneer. ‘After I’ve checked Hester locked the chickens up good ’n tight. Foxes are famished in this cold.’

Hester scowls. All is well with the hens. If Sim wishes extra work it’s no worry to her.

‘Our lass will have done right by the hens, Sim.’ Father smiles at Hester and moves to the cushioned chair by the fire where he tends his pipe and puffs smoke into the air for the time it takes Hester and her mother to wash the plates and cutlery.

Reuben, the youngest brother and at sixteen the closest in age to Hester, takes up the butter churn lying by the door waiting for its handle to be mended. Mother places the kettle on the range, rakes the coals, and picks up her sewing. Hester perches on a stool beside the cat’s basket.

‘Her kittens will come soon,’ she says. ‘We have to make sure she stays warm.’

Mother gives a soft snort. ‘Cats fend well enough for themselves, you needn’t worry about her. Instead’–she hands Hester a worn brocade waistcoat with newly mended buttonholes and a paper packet of mother-of-pearl buttons–‘you can sew these on, though why the young gentleman considers this garment worth pearl buttons I have no idea.’

The waistcoat is a sleeping pale yellow cat lying in Hester’s lap. ‘Who brought this?’

‘Who? A gentleman, as I’ve just said.’

‘What kind of gentleman?’

‘What kind? Why, one with an ancient waistcoat and a fancy taste in buttons. What does it matter?’

‘I–’ The words stop themselves. ‘Never mind.’ Hester strokes the brocade as if it truly is a cat. She will sew the pearl buttons so tightly they will never come loose, whatever lengths of good thread she has to use.

Father taps his pipe on the grate. ‘This freeze,’ he says, ‘reminds me of Grandmother’s tales when I were a little one – how she kept ice from the pond and made the pump flow with her clever ways.’

‘Silly nonsense.’ Mother squints at the thread and needle she holds to the candlelight. ‘If that woman had been alive two hundred years ago, she would’ve been burned for a witch.’

Hester giggles, shares a sly grin with Father. Mother makes this pronouncement each time Grandmother is mentioned.

‘Lydia!’ Father blows out a fragrant cloud of white smoke which momentarily disguises the greasy smell of the candles. ‘Grandmother were no witch. She were a wise woman, good with animals and learned in the ways of the countryside.’

Reuben nods, concentrating on prodding the churn’s handle with a tiny screwdriver.

Father settles in the chair. ‘The animals were quiet and docile as lambs under her hand.’

Hester laughs. ‘Lambs aren’t always docile.’

‘No more they are,’ Father says. ‘Except they were under Grandmother’s care. The cows, the horses, the pigs – they all loved her.’

‘Because she fed them and cleaned out their muck.’ Mother sniffs. She pushes her needle and thread under Hester’s nose. ‘Thread this for me, please. The light in here is terrible.’ She humphs. ‘We need proper lamps, not these smelly candles.’

The daughter of a prosperous shopkeeper in the town, Mother grew up with lamps and a servant. Pretty and outgoing, wooed by the sons of rich merchants with tall houses and taller ships, she married the farmer’s son, Stanley Williams, for love.

‘I could have been a wealthy woman with a carriage,’ Mother will say, with a small, resigned smile.

Father never has anything to say on the topic of his wife’s provenance. His soft, proud eyes tell their story, however.

‘No, it were more than cleaning out muck.’ Father returns the conversation to Grandmother. ‘The labourers and the cottagers would come for potions and herbs and go home happy.’

‘Superstitious and uneducated.’ Mother bends closer to her sewing.

‘You’d never say so if you saw the time she cured the little girl of a deathly fever which had the child shaking hard as wheat in a wind, and the same colour too.’

Hester has heard the story many times.

‘I would love to do the same as Grandma,’ she says. ‘To heal children with my cures.’ Where did the thought come from? Expressed so vividly too, like a long-harboured wish abruptly set free. She strokes the waistcoat and her breath catches.

Of course. When she first met the man he told her about meadow flowers and how they heal fevers and colds. Asking him to teach her about flowers will surely make his hard eyes kinder. Better than asking about river nymphs. He can’t tell her flowers come from her wild imagination.

Father nods, opens his mouth to speak, and is cut short by Mother.

‘Your future is as a good wife and mother,’ she says. ‘What you need to learn are the skills and manners you need to marry well.’ She glances up to ensure she has Hester’s attention. ‘There’s enough to do here, Daughter, without you wasting time brewing futile potions.’

Hester hauls her thoughts back to the kitchen and nods, obedient to the oft-stated idea she will be wooed by those merchant sons her mother spurned. Yet, the notion of following in Grandmother’s steps, lingers, warming her stomach as the fire warms her feet. Picking up a pearl button, she positions it on the yellow brocade. There is a sadness to touching the stiff material. The man will wear it and be none the wiser Hester sewed the buttons. If he knew, he would understand she isn’t fey, or mad. She is ordinary and does ordinary things like sewing buttons.

*