Free The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff Page B

fruit from her orchard, and the result was an apron full of sweet hard pears, a thick slice of cheese, and another of bread and butter.
    Pell reached down to thank Dicken, and he took the opportunity to pluck a pear gently from her pocket and retire to the side of the road, out of reach, to gnaw on it.
    She tossed a pebble at him, and he looked up at her, af fronted, before returning to his pear.
    They walked on.

Eighteen

    A t the edge of the New Forest, Moses shifted his weight off one huge hoof and sighed contentedly. How many times had Esther guided him back across Salisbury Plain, plying whatever trade she had chosen that week in order to feed her children? Such joy to stop here on a cool autumn evening, standing ankle deep in grass while the world around him slowly filled up with dark. The wild shouts and giggles of Esther’s children rose and fell in fierce cadence across the meadow, until night came, and one by one they clambered into the wagon, settled, and fell quiet. Anyone passing would have imagined the world silent, except for the har rumph of a drowsy horse or a restless child.
    For those few hours, the children were alone. Esther had unfinished business a few miles away in Nomansland with regard to two grievous crimes. For nearly a decade she had been unable to revenge herself of these crimes, and satisfaction might have continued to evade her had she not recognized a long-lost relation at Salisbury Fair.
    She set out to renew her acquaintance.
    The inn she sought occupied an uncomfortable position on the edge of Nomansland, neither here nor there but split in half, with its front door in Hampshire and its rear in Wiltshire. It was not at all usual for a woman to enter the place, and even less usual for a woman such as Esther, and so she stood outside and waited, and waited, and at last had enough of waiting. A handful of men at the bar looked up as she entered, their faces hostile, wondering at her business there. He did not recognize her at first.
    “Am I so changed?” asked she, with her hard crooked smile. “You are not.”
    “Time alters us all,” the man mumbled, rising uneasily from his place by the fire.
    She held him with her gaze. “Some more than others. A babe, for instance. So that his own mother might barely recognize him.”
    The man’s eyes flew open, and he staggered a little, then fled the bar with the woman close behind. He stopped in a place where they might not be overheard, straightened himself, and mustered the voice calculated to overawe his parishioners. “Would you have had me abandon my son to a life devoid of Christian virtue?”
    Esther shrugged. “He was conceived well enough without it.”
    “But a Christian child,” the preacher stammered, “surely you understand . . . required a Christian family to raise him....”
    The appeal met no sympathy. “You pledged a sum of money for that privilege.”
    “I did, yes, but times were difficult. . . .”
    “Difficult?” Esther’s impassive eyes flared. “Did I ask for a sixth child? You were welcome to the bastard, on the terms we agreed . But I received no such terms. And in the meanwhile my own five have near starved, year after year, rejected by the father that conceived them . He believed the fiction you told, that your child was conceived in desire. That I was willing .”
    Ridley cast about, like a hare for a thicket. “What do you want? I have no money, and the child is gone.” And then he began to mutter something about God and His ways, but she stepped closer and spat in his face, her mouth twisted with a terrible intensity of loathing.
    “ No religion I have is as godless as yours .”
    The preacher reeled as if from a physical blow, then beat an unsteady retreat—unsteady from an excess of shock or alcohol, or perhaps both. Esther let him go, but followed at a distance and watched him enter his house, then sat for some time, invisible in a stand of trees, watching and smoking her pipe. She had waited