Free A Half Forgotten Song by Katherine Webb Page B

first things Dimity remembered—the piercing reek of household bleach, filling the whole house. Valentina did it in a tin tub of water on the kitchen table, with rags all around to soak up spills. Dimity sometimes hovered in the doorway to watch, fascinated but trying to keep out of sight, because if her mother caught her, opened one screwed-up eye and saw her, she would be made to help.
    “Hand me that towel—no, the other one! Get it off my neck!” Barking like a terrier. Dimity would have to stand on a chair, wobbling, to mop the thick, vicious stuff from her mother’s skin. She hated it, and cried if she got any on her fingers, even before it started to burn.
    When it was done, it did look magnificent, for a while. Like a mermaid’s hair, as bright as gold coins. Valentina usually sat outside to dry it, with her face tipped to the sky and the breeze running by. Skirt rucked up across her sturdy knees so the sun could warm her legs while she smoked a cigarette.
    “Tha’ll pull ships onto the rocks sitting there like that, Val Hatcher,” said Marty Coulson one time, walking down the track with his bandy legs and his tweed cap right down to his ears. Dimity didn’t like the way he grinned. Marty Coulson always grinned when he came to The Watch. Yet when Dimity saw him in the village, he looked the other way, as if he couldn’t see her. No grinning then.
    “You’re early,” said Valentina, sounding annoyed. Marty stopped by the front door and gave a lopsided shrug. Stubbing out her cigarette, Valentina got to her feet, brushed the grass from her backside. “Mitzy—go on into the village. Buy a cake for tea from Mrs. Boyle.” She fixed Marty Coulson with a flat, unfriendly eye until he reached into his pocket, found a shilling, and gave it to Dimity. She was always happy to run an errand into Blacknowle. To get away from The Watch, even for a while, and see people other than her mother.
    Almost as soon as she was big enough to walk she had been sent out alone; certainly by the age of five or six. On simple missions: to buy tea or deliver something mysterious, wrapped up in paper. A charm, or a spell. A new-made besom to build into a door lintel, for luck; shriveled bits of rabbit pelt to be rubbed on warts and then buried, to remove them. People didn’t like to see her at their door, didn’t want it known that they had bought something from Valentina. They took what she brought them and shooed her quickly away, casting their eyes up and down the street. But they couldn’t help themselves. If they needed luck, or a baby, or to get rid of a baby, if they needed a miracle or a catastrophe, then they tried Valentina as well as prayer. Belt and braces, Valentina sneered, when they’d been and gone from the cottage or, as was more usual, had dropped a written request through the door and fled. I hope the sweat makes their backsides itch when they simper at the vicar come Sunday. Dimity learned all the routes around the lanes, paths, and fields by trial and error. She learned where everybody lived, and all of their names; who might give her a halfpenny for her trouble, and who would slam the door on her.
    While she was still small, Valentina went with her on more specialized missions, foraging, picking, and finding. Which stream for watercress, good for strength and digestive tonics; never to pick it from a stream that ran through livestock pasture, since the plants picked up their parasites and would pass them on. How to tell wild parsnip from water hemlock, the latter to be dug up with gloves on, the roots grated carefully and rolled into sticky balls with suet and treacle, to make rat bait that sold all year round. Bucketloads, when someone had a plague of them. Like Mr. Brock, at Southern Farm, one time. He bought two buckets full—almost their whole supply. Dimity carried one and Valentina the other, sliding down the hill from The Watch with the handles cutting into their skin and the pails bumping their