Free The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw

answer,” Old Bess had told Anwara at the outset. “You may cage her but she’ll slip out through the bars—or beat herself senseless against them.”
    “Mother, what blather! Any child needs to learn to mind a house, and do the tasks.”
    “This child needs freedom. She needs the moor.”
    “The moor! Why, you know as well as I—” With an indignant cluck Anwara dismissed the matter. “Doesn’t she go daily to gather wood? That’s roaming aplenty. When the sheep shearing’s done next week, I’ll put her to washing my fleeces.”
    Saaski vigorously washed the fleeces: but she was too rough when it came to carding them, far too impatient to spin; her thread turned out full of lumps and skinny spots and could not be given to Oleg the weaver. Under Anwara’s stern eye Saaski knitted it into a rather lumpy shawl for herself.
    When that was done, the idleness set in again. It was not in her to sit still, or even to dawdle over tasks to make them last longer. Sometimes she slipped outside and ran around and around the cottage—still obediently “at home” but at least moving, skipping, leaping. Sometimes she simply jumped up and down in the middle of the room until she collapsed in a breathless heap. Once she climbed up onto the thatch—without a ladder—and spent a satisfying hour scrambling about, pulling tufts of wild grass off the reeds, until Anwara came back from the Lowfield and screechedwith fright to see where she was—then screeched at Yanno for not keeping his eyes open, whereupon Yanno bellowed that he was a smith, not a nanny, and Anwara would henceforth take that plaguey young one along to help with the weeding, and watch her herself!
    But there was a proper and time-honored way to weed the grain. One used a hooked stick to separate a weed from the grain stems, a forked stick to pin it down, and the hooked one again to uproot it as one moved step-by-step along the row, leaving a mulch as well as a path for the reaper to follow.
    Saaski was not tall enough to use the weeding sticks. She went back to the cottage.
    Meanwhile May was passing, and the moor was dressing itself in wildflowers, and Tam was far away on top of the world no doubt fluting and juggling all by himself. One day Saaski tied all the clothes and bedclothes in the house together just to be doing something. The next, she plucked the tail feathers out of Anwara’s hens and stuck them in her hair until she looked like a new and astonishing kind of bird. Forbidden such games in Yanno’s most exasperated roar, she fell at last into a silent dark dejection that began to bother her parents as much as her mischief did.
    “ Now what ails her?” Yanno demanded of Anwara one morning, grouchy with worry. “Dose her with valerian, can’t you? Or coltsfoot or cowslip or—”
    “She needs no quieting—she’s too quiet!” Anwara snapped. “Much you know about dosing young ones.”
    “Well, do something! Ask your mother, then. It may be she’ll know a cure.”
    But Anwara did not care to ask Old Bess and be told again that Saaski needed her freedom, and the moor. Instead she asked Saaski if a tooth hurt, or her stomach felt queasy, and got a blank look and an indifferent shake of the head in reply.
    Saaski scarcely heard Anwara’s edgy questions. She had finally begun to ask herself what was wrong with her, why she was so different from everybody else, and what would be the end of it. She found no answer, but the question weighed on her. For all she knew, answering it would be worse than all the rest.
    And then one day, alone in the house with her tasks done, she climbed up to swing by her knees from a rafter to see how the room looked upside down, and noticed the door to the put-away cupboard where Anwara stowed everybody’s winter cloaks and beechwood clogs when the snows were over. It was a small cupboard, tucked under the straw-fringed eaves in a dim corner of the storage loft, and easy to forget about. But Anwara had been known