Free Black Spring by Alison Croggon Page B

anything special, do we, Damek? We just go racing in the wind by the river. You know you don’t like running much. You’d just get puffed and spoil it all and we’d have to come home.”
    “I won’t spoil anything!” I said heatedly.
    Lina exchanged a glance with Damek that I couldn’t read, but its intimacy fanned my jealousy. Damek shrugged. “Come if you want,” he said. “But you’ll only get into trouble.”
    I was already regretting my importunity, but it was too late now to withdraw. Lina cast me a dark look, but she tolerated my tagging behind. As we reached the meadows that led to the river, she broke into a run. Damek cast a glance over his shoulder that was not without sympathy and then raced to follow her.
    I plodded stubbornly behind them in the distance, sweaty and uncomfortable. I finally caught up with them by the river. Lina was swinging from a willow branch with her back to me as Damek sat on the ground looking up at her. With a pang of envy, I saw that for once his face was unguarded. He was staring at Lina with the same intense expression of worship I had sometimes seen on old women praying before the Madonna in church. Even as this incongruous thought crossed my mind, he sensed my gaze and turned his face away, and I saw a flush spread across the back of his neck. I already knew that I was pushing myself where I was not wanted, but suddenly I felt a new discomfort; it was as if I had glimpsed something that shouldn’t be witnessed. I hadn’t seen them doing wrong — don’t misunderstand me; what I saw was completely innocent. I felt clumsy and embarrassed, as if I had stumbled without permission into a hushed church in the middle of an important ceremony.
    Lina dropped down from the tree and turned toward me.
    “See,” she said. “I said you wouldn’t enjoy it!”
    “But I am!” I said stoutly, and sat down to catch my breath. “Maybe we could make a house now. You could be the mistress.” Even in my confusion, I wasn’t going to admit that Lina was right and I wanted to return to the world of our ordinary relationships, undisturbed by the strange depths that had briefly opened before me.
    “Sometimes you’re so dreary, Anna,” said Lina. “What do we want with houses here? Look at the mountains!” She pointed into the distance, where the Black Mountains stood, clear of haze, on the horizon, their flanks shading to deep purple. “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re just like Damek.”
    “You mean he’s purple?” I said, bewildered by her fancy, as Damek cast her an angry look. I think she must have broken a confidence between them, because she colored a little.
    “No, stupid. If you can’t see it, I’m not going to explain.”
    Before long, Lina announced that she was bored and we went home. We were gone so briefly that nobody had missed us, and the next time Lina and Damek disappeared, they took good care to avoid me. I was cured of wanting to join them, and I told myself that I didn’t care, but of course that wasn’t true.
    Shortly after Lina’s rapprochement with Damek, the master came home again. Had he returned while Lina was still tormenting Damek, the consequences would have been unthinkable, and all of us — with the exception of Lina herself — felt the relief of disaster averted. In all my life, I have never met anyone with such a talent for ensuring her own unhappiness as Lina; despite his partiality, her father could not have countenanced her cruelty, and even his mildest disapproval had the power to cast her into the depths of despair. And Lina in despair, in the midst of the extremity she had already so gratuitously created, was a vision none of us wished to contemplate. I knew even then that my mother feared for Lina’s health, perhaps even for her sanity; for all the trouble she caused her, she cared for Lina as if she were her own child.
    Thus we all covered for her. On his first day home, the master noticed the fading bruises on Damek’s arm and