Free The Keeper by Marguerite Poland Page B

the floor, turned to Karel, working at an instrument at his workbench, and said, bluntly, ‘How did she die?’
    ‘She was sick.’
    ‘That’s not true.’
    ‘In her mind.’
    ‘How did she die?’
    Reluctantly Karel replied, ‘She fell down the well.’
    ‘Fell?’
    ‘It was her choice.’
    ‘Her choice?’ The words were an accusation.
    Karel looked at Fred, a darkness in the room, the lamp unlit, and said, ‘It is something we will not speak of again. It is shameful thing, especially for a Christian. Hannes must not know. He is too young.’
    There was such a threat implicit in his words that Fred was silenced. Then he said, his voice unsteady, ‘Did she leave a message?’
    ‘No.’
    Fred knew that was a lie.
    He knew because he had always helped his mother with the pigeons that carried their messages to shore for supplies, holding a bird while she undid the small phial secured to its leg and inserted the thin film of paper on which his father had written his report, or removed one from a returning bird with word from the lighthouse in town. It was something they had shared: she relied on him to hold the pigeon calm, clucking gently to it, ignoring its scrabbling claws or a sudden peck of frustration. He delighted in this time with her, without intrusion, for Hannes had been too small, too awkward, to help, inclined to squeeze the pigeons into flight. Fred had held them so they did not feel afraid. He could gently undo the cylinder on a leg without upsetting them. Together he and his mother had tended them and fed them and known their several characters.
    When Fred had gone to school she had cared for them alone. But for her, always, they were connected with her elder son, and when they winged away, she watched them, imagining that they were flying to him, to the safe haven of his hands.
    ‘They are such brave birds,’ she’d said to him once as she slid a message into the tube. ‘And they’re our lifeline to the outside world.’ She had touched a tender finger to the breast of the pigeon in his hands. ‘They don’t belong to the sea,’ she’d said. ‘They should be in the sunshine, nesting in trees where the hawks can’t get them or the wind blow them into the water.’
    ‘Do lots of them drown?’ he’d asked.
    ‘I think so, Freddie.’ She had laid her hand on his head, smoothing his hair. ‘But I think that is better than being taken by a hawk. I think perhaps that drowning is like going to sleep. I don’t know. But not as frightful as fighting for your life against another.’ Then she added, ‘Some of us are simply not born to be brave.’
    He remembered, too, her occasional furtiveness, the struggle to wind tighter and tighter a strip of paper that was just too large for the phial – and when it was secure, saying hastily, ‘Let it go now, Fred.’ He would open his hands and extend them slowly and they would watch together as the bird catapulted from his fingers in a flurry of feathers and then, steadying, gain height with stronger, swifter wingbeats.
    ‘Godspeed, little one,’ she always said and put her slim hands together briefly in a gesture of prayer.
    But then there was the day that his father had come upon them suddenly as they were preparing a pigeon for flight. ‘What are you doing?’ he had said, peremptorily. ‘I haven’t given you a message to send.’
    He put out his hand for the phial. She had frozen as if she, like the pigeon, was held captive in a claw. Then she had removed the paper from the phial and given it to him, her face averted. He had glanced at it.
    At her.
    At Fred.
    ‘Give it back,’ she had said hoarsely. ‘It is mine.’
    ‘You will not disobey me again.’ Karel had opened the note and read aloud, so that the words reached Fred in all their weight and anguish, ‘
Rescue me from those who pursue me for they are too strong for me
.’ He looked at her then. ‘God will punish you for taking the words of the Bible in vain.’
    ‘There is no