Stone Cradle by Louise Doughty Page A

hungry looks off elsewhere and it was us women dealt with young Miss Rose. She wasn’t so young, in fact. She must have been past twenty and should have been long wed, in my opinion. She wore white blouses with lots of pleats in them that blossomed round her. Her skirts were wide too. The ribbons in her hair were always smart looking but she had great big open boots, farm girl’s boots, fit for striding round a gipsy camp.
    I have always had dainty little feet myself and whenever I couldI made a show of them in pointy lace-ups, even if the weather was not quite fit for it.
    *
    My Lijah was gifted at many things but fruit picking was not one of them. He was magical with the horses, mind, and made a tidy living out of the buying and fixing and selling of them when he was older. And he could fashion anything out of wood or metal. He had not been with Adolphus and myself for the first part of the summer as he had been down at Stow. Then he joined us back up at the Fens and set to making pegs and cutting boards. He had an idea to carve patterns around the edges of the boards as he said it was a thing a gorjer housewife used several times a day in her kitchen and a nice-looking one would fly out of a hawker’s basket. I said to him it was no use if he was going to be a pack-man that summer as they would be too heavy to carry in any number. And he said how he was a planning on getting hold of a knife-grinding barrow and would build a special basket on the side to keep the boards in and would sell the boards when he’d sharpened the knives. I could tell he was pleased with the poetry in this.
    Anyroad, it was because of his plans to sell the cutting boards that he was by the vardo that evening. He had come back with some blocks of wood a little earlier and set them down by the step. I had taken the horse from him and said I would rub it down. We had a nice little bay at that time, quiet and cobbish, with a fine amount of feather. I was fond of it. We called him Kit.
    I had taken Kit over to the shade beneath the trees for tethering, watered him and stroked his nose. I liked to feel the bone beneath. I was walking back towards the vardo with the bucket, when I heard voices.
    As I came around the front, they fell silent. She was standing in front of him, looking down. The sun was behind her. He was looking up, and he had a look on his face that I had never seen before. He was holding a knife in one hand and a block of wood in the other.
    I waited for them both to start at the sight of me, but instead, the farmer’s daughter looked at me calmly, gave a half-smile, then reached into her leather bag and got out her pencil and notebook.
    Lijah went back to his carving.
    I gave her the money and finished with the bucket and did a few other things and then I came and tended the fire. Miss Rose moved on to the next vardo. Lijah was intent on his cutting board.
    I took an iron and turned the logs. ‘You might’ve turned this before,’ I said. ‘We’ll need it high if we’re to eat before nightfall.’
    He did not look at me, just carried on, which was a thing he commonly did as a boy and young man and it always made me mad as anything.
    ‘That’s if you can bring yourself to think of anything as ordinary as supper.’ I said, rising.
    *
    After we’d ate that evening, Adolphus said how he was going to lie down a bit. He’d been doing that a lot lately, feeling slow and poorly of an evening. His bigness had turned to fatness and he often looked bad around the stomach, as if the insides of him was bursting to get out and his skin was tight with it. I was a little worried about him, for to my mind he was not yet old enough to be getting slow and pained in that way.
    Lijah rose as well and said, ‘I’m off to take Kit into town, Dei.’
    Well, that was like a red rag to a bull. I knew’d what he was up to. All the young lads had taken to it recently, visiting the public houses in the town a few miles off where they weren’t known