“What he does not say is ‘a man disgraced and driven out of town,’” said the old merchant, having read the letter aloud to his daughters. “I suppose I must go.’’
Silence fell. Beauty went on polishing and polishing the dish in her hand; Jeweltongue stared blankly at the needle she had just threaded. Teacosy, who had been hiding under the table—her usual lair in anxious times—crept out, scuttled over to Beauty on her belly, and tried to press herself between Beauty’s feet, tucking her head and forequarters under the hem of her skirt.
Beauty reached down absently with the hand still holding the damp tea-towel, to pat the still-visible hindquarters. “Wait at least till Lionheart comes home again,” she said.
The old merchant appeared to rouse himself. “If 1 can. But I must be prepared to leave when the convoy returns.”
When Lionheart came home two days later, she hurtled through the door as she had done every week since mis wretched year had begun, scowling, ready to shout at anything that displeased her, softening only to greet the ecstatic Teacosy.
Her father’s news stopped her. Bewilderment, and dismay, replaced the scowl. “Must you go? Surely—surely you can ask Mr Lamb to dispose of the goods and—and take a commission?”
“I could. But it would not be honourable.” He lifted his shoulders. “You do not know; there may be something left at the—at the end.” His daughters, Beauty particularly, knew better than he did how many debts had been left to pay after their house had been seized and their property auctioned. There were legal papers saying these were to be forgotten, but they would be remembered again as soon as there was money to pay them. “What shall I bring you?”
Lionheart shook her head, and her scowl returned. “Yourself, home safe. Soon.”
Their father smiled a little. “Jeweltongue?”
Jeweltongue smoothed the sleeve on her lap. It was silk, with lace insets, and the lace had gold threads hi it that caught the light. It was much like one of the sleeves of a dress she had herself worn to the party when trie Baron had taken her a little aside and proposed marriage to her, telling her that he cared for nothing but her and her beauty and brilliance and that if she agreed to marry him, he would be the happiest man on earth. She was to leave all her dresses and jewels to her sisters, for once she was his bride he would buy her a new wardrobe that would make the queen herself look dowdy; her father could provide her with a dowry or not, it was a matter of greatest indifference to him. She had always been fond of that dress, and when Miss Jane True-word had spoken of silken sleeves with lace insets, she had remembered it. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. But that you come home again as quickly as you may.”
“Beauty. There must be something I can bring you.”
He looked so sad that Beauty cast her mind round for something she could suggest. He would know she did not mean it if she asked for jewels and pretty dresses. They had Teacosy and did not need another house pet, nor could they afford to feed and shelter anything beyond Lydia, her latest kid, and the chickens. Whatever it was, it needed to be something small, that would not burden him on the way. They really lacked for nothing at Rose Cottage—nothing but the sun—nothing, so long as they wished to stay here, and it seemed to her that they did wish to stay here.
Nothing but the sun. Her eyes moved to the windowsill, where an empty vase stood, and she gave a little laugh that was mostly a sob. “You could bring me a rose.”
Her father nodded gravely, acknowledging the joke. And when the convoy returned, he went with them.
The winter the old merchant spent in the city he had been born in and lived in all his life till the last three years was sadder and emptier even than he had expected. His clerk had not succeeded in keeping die impoundment proof against raids from his old creditors; there was little enough left even by the time he arrived, and he saw none of it at all. Winter frosts came early, but no snow fell; the muddy, churned ground Croze solid and into such rutted, tortured shapes that many of the roadways were impassable. He found himself stranded in the city week after week, with almost no money even to put food in his mouth; if the Lambs had not taken him in, he did not know what he would have done.
Yet he had to keep hidden even that kindness, for his clerk’s new master disliked any expression of loyalty—or even human sympathy—to his old. The old merchant rather thought that Mr Lamb’s new master had taken him on as a deliberate gesture of spite against himself, but he found he no longer cared. He lived in a tiny house called Rose Cottage, very far away from here, and as soon as the weather broke, he would return. He knew now that his daughters had been right, and he should never have come in the first place. Well, he had learnt his lesson.
But he was not able to wait for the weather. His old business rival discovered his clerk’s, as he put it, duplicity, and declared that the clerk couid choose between his job and sheltering a ruined man. Mr Lamb did not tell him this; the captain of the ship that had returned found out about it. The captain offered his own home as alternative, but the old merchant declined. He was bad luck in this city, and the sooner he left the better. Reluctantly he did accept the loan of a horse—or rather of a stout shaggy pony—from the captain, on the man’s flatly refusing to let him leave town on any other terms. “It’s winter out there, you old fool; you could die of it, and then where would your daughters be?”
My daughters would do very well without me, thought the old man, but he did not say the words aloud. Instead he admitted the pony would be useful and thanked the captain for his offer.
There was little traffic leaving the city. The old merchant found a few people to travel with; but he had to make a zigzag course from one town to the next, for no one (sensibly) was travelling very far, and some people turned back—or had to turn back—when they discovered the state of the roads. He was daily grateful for the pony, who, nose nearly at ground level and ears intently pricked, found her way carefully over and round the twisted furrows and rough channels where the frozen mud crests sometimes curled as high as her shoulder, and who seemed to have a sixth sense about which murky, polluted ice would hold her and which would not.
At long last he was within a few days of Longchancc, and of Rose Cottage, and the weather was breaking at last. Spring was here—nearly. He had been gone the entire winter.
There was no one travelling in his direction, but he thought—so near to home—he could risk it alone. The track itself was easy to find; there were so few roads this far into the back of beyond it was hard to lake a wrong one. And bandits usually stayed in the warmer, richer lands. He set out.