Free The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff Page A

pot steady as Esther poured hot water over a handful of dried leaves.
    “I have business to the south,” Esther said, “so will accompany you no farther.”
    Pell’s heart sank, but she nodded, as Esther stirred her tea round and round, sipping it up through her front teeth with a hiss. That night Pell slept badly, dreaming of Nomansland.
    The next morning, they came to a stone marker pointing toward Southampton in one direction and Pevesy in the other. Esther nodded goodbye to Pell, her eyes already on the next stretch of road. Circumstance had postponed her business for some years and she felt impatient to get on.
    The children crowded around Dicken, sad to see Dog’s twin go his separate way.
    “You can take him with you,” Pell told Eammon, who grinned and tried to lure Dicken to follow the wagon, until Esther put an end to that plan and sent him scampering back.
    “I hope you find the boy,” Esther said to Pell, but did not turn to look at her.
    As they disappeared down the road, Esmé threw a stone over her shoulder in a final gesture of good riddance, and only Dog and Evelina looked back with any degree of longing.
    Pell gazed down the road after them, utterly dejected. Alone, poor, and shabby, on a fool’s mission, she wondered, for an instant, if even Nomansland offered more solace than this.
    Using nearly the last of her money she bought a brown loaf, broke off a piece, and spread it with rosemary and lard. Dicken’s huge soft eyes projected such a picture of loyal, careworn amity, and in so beseeching a manner, he might have been the canine incarnation of Edmund Kean. She threw him a crust, but far from snatching it and swallowing it down, he delicately sniffed and picked it up carefully as if deciding which would be nicer, to starve or eat crusts. He was a funny old thing, grazing on weeds or whatever else he might find about the place, but it was with rabbits that his true passion lay. She would see him freeze, watching, ears pitched up, body rigid with excitement. And Pell would hold her breath and wait and wait and at the last moment whisper, “ Go!” and he’d go , in a frantic chase of perfect joy. And although sometimes he won and sometimes the rabbit won, she never tired of watching.
    Staying with Esther had reduced life to a series of prescribed choices. That field there catches the morning sun. No one ever bothers with that barn. Half a mile from here we’ll stop . But Pell didn’t know the route or whose field lay fallow at what time of year, or where there was a sunny clearing in a protected wood. Being a stranger, she would always be an object of suspicion, even without the Gypsy dog at her side. She had to keep a sharp eye out for a place to sleep, and couldn’t stop worrying till she’d found it; it didn’t do for a single girl, and a flibbertigibbet with a guilty expression, to be caught without shelter as night came.
    In the evenings everyone would be out, the children playing games in the dust, hens scratching for grubs, cats prowling, women leaning over their front gates for gossip, men returning from work. When Pell passed through they fell silent and watched, six or eight or ten pairs of eyes, until after she had greeted them and passed by with excruciating slowness, smiling a little if any happened to return her greeting, but otherwise looking neither left nor right. And then before she was even out of earshot the murmuring would begin—the conjectures on her dress, her origins, the theory of who she was and why a girl like that was abroad, alone, far from home, leading such a dog, and at this time of night . Even if they remained silent, she could read their thoughts as clearly as if they had spoken out loud, for she had lived her whole life in such a place. As for Dicken, there was little for him but stones and curses, despite his good nature and his talent for friendship.
    Tonight, she stopped by one garden gate to ask a young woman if she might exchange a fat rabbit for