Blonde Roots Read online

  We were moving deep into the bowels of the earth, slowly. No one above would detect a tremor or sound. I leaned against the rusty pole. I needed to conserve my energy. During my lengthy sojourn at Bwana’s, life had become so predictable my senses had gone into a coma. Now the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, my ears were pinned back, my spine arched.

  Hours passed. I had no way of telling other than that my stomach pangs felt like the sharp kicks of an unborn child and a heaviness swept down from my crown to my toes like molten lead. But every time my head flopped over and my eyes closed, I jolted myself upright again. Adrenaline had got me thus far. My guide had told me to trust no one.

  As the train crawled through the black underground tunnel, its chugging rhythms began to lull.

  I slid down to the floor and curled my body around the pole.

  Maybe I would wake up back in Mayfah as if this night had never happened.

  I HAD LIVED WITH FEAR ever since the man from the Border Lands had grabbed me when I was playing hide-and-seek in the potato fields behind our cottage with my sisters.

  Madge. Sharon. Alice.

  Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.

  Slave or dead? Slave or dead? Dead or slave?

  Not knowing their fate put my sleep on the torture rack for years.

  ALICE WAS THE YOUNGEST and prettiest-COming two years after me, that wasn’ t funny. She didn’ t say a word until she was seven, which made her just so adorable, as did her spider eyelashes and blonde ringlets. (She was the only one of us to inherit Pa’ curls.) He once told her at dinner that she was such a pretty little thing she need never open her mouth to speak. Unfortunately she didn’t take his advice. During her mute years she learned how to get what she wanted through a branch of sign language known as lash-fluttering.

  When we were alone I’d mimic her: grunt like an imbecile, roll my eyes into the back of my head, throw myself onto the floor and dribble. She’d fling her surprisingly mighty little monkey-self onto me, sink her teeth into whichever part of my anatomy was within easy reach, then screech her head off for everyone to hear. Guess who always got it in the neck, and “should have known better,” even though I had her teeth marks as evidence?

  Because we were closest in age, we were supposed to pair up, but even when she could speak, I refused to. I played with my dolls alone, except when the older two let me partake of their friendship.

  Sharon was two years above me and was thick as thieves with Madge. You couldn’t split them up or wedge yourself in between, no matter how hard you tried: backstabbing, sucking up to one and not the other, planting stolen objects, innuendo.

  Sharon was like a mini-Mam, thinner than the rest of us, although we were all thin enough to snap in two at the waist like gingerbread men. We all had dark blue eyes, but Sharon insisted hers were azure. She imitated Mam’s elegant movements perfectly in the hope that people would comment (which they did), her arms dancing midair even when she was doing something as down-to-earth as picking apples off a tree in Percy’s orchard or combing her hair.

  Sharon hated what she called menial tasks, which was a pity because her fingernails got as crusty and jagged as mine when we had to help Pa in the fields or dig ditches up to our waists, and as raw as mine what with scrubbing the laundry on the big stone down by the stream, and bleaching the linen with a mixture of lye and stinking human urine that had been collected in a tub specially for the purpose.

  In the summer Sharon wore a garland of buttercups as a crown on her head and in winter, snowdrops. It was the princess look, apparently. One time she changed her name to Sabine but had to drop it when we refused to take it up. I guess Princess Sabine had a better ring to it than Princess Sharon. She expected her prince to arrive one day on a white stallion and star in her very own once-upon-a-time.

  She was often to be found standing in the doorway looking out for him.

  “Shall I pack your bags?” I’d say in passing, and then, once out of reach, I’d sing,

  Lavender blue, diddle daddle

  Lavender green,

  When he is king, diddle daddle

  You shan’t be queen.

  Like the nearest she’d get to royalty would be as maid-of all-work to Percy.

  Our Madge looked out for all of us, even Pa. One time at table, after he’d thrown up in the parlor after another of his “just the one pint” Friday nights out with “the lads,” she told him sharply, “You and I are going to have words-in private.”

  Such talk from a child to an adult was unheard of, as it was from a woman to a man. I couldn’ t believe her cheek and neither could he because he just nodded meekly. That was the day we realized she’d soon be an adult, a formidable one at that. As firstborn, Madge had no competition for four years, which should have turned her into a monster when baby Sharon came along, but she worshipped her little sister.

  She was known for the twinkle in her eyes, which never dulled even when she was exhausted from shearing sheep, or when I told her she’d likely end up an old spinster spending her days at a spinning wheel if she didn’ t go to the summer fayre on the estate and find herself a young fellow. Mam and Pa said they couldn’t afford a dowry, but the truth was they’d never let her go.

  I tried to get Madge’s twinkle into my own eyes, spending hours practicing in front of the looking glass, but it worked only if I slapped my cheek so hard it made me cry.

  No one had to tell Madge she’d have to take over running the house if Mam passed on. She never looked wistfully at the horizon or wore garlands in her hair, but spoke of “duty” and “responsibility” and being part of “God’s greater plan.”

  When I ranked them on a scale of one to ten for perfection, Madge was a nine and a half. I gave myself an eight. Sharon was a four and Alice got a one and three-quarters.

  Now, Mam was tall for a woman but she’d had the pox as a kid, which explained why she was often “a bit under the weather.” Her skin was pale and clung softly to her like the crepe de chine Mrs. Katharine Holme, the seamstress at Duddingley, made into gowns for the ladies “up there.” Mam wafted around slowly so that her movements flowed into each other with no beginning and no end-like a dance. I’d try to imitate her too, but my movements always ended abruptly.

  Everyone said the word for it was clumsy.

  Her hair was dead straight and hung to her waist like mine. It was what they called strawberry blonde (Strawberry? Blonde? Never did work that one out) and going prematurely gray underneath her starched linen bonnet.

  When Pa was out, we’d be sitting around embroidering a tablecloth for market and Mam’d tell us how one summer’ s evening after a day’s harvesting when she was marching impatiently toward womanhood, Lord Perceval Montague (she always used his full name) came up behind her on Lower Lane. The meadows were “bathed in summer’ golden glow” and as he drew aside she felt him rest a palm in the scoop of her back and his steamy breath whispered onto her neck that she’d become “a winsome lass” and had “a natural grace.”

  Mam said she felt “the butterflies” for the first and last time in her life, that her “spine tingled,” that she could have stayed and swum in his “come-hither eyes” forever, except that her grumpy, widowed father, Bob Woulbarowe, tugging their cow up ahead and cursing it, suddenly turned around and called her to heel, even though it could have got him into serious trouble with His Lordship.

  Granpa Woulbarowe kept her hidden inside their peat hovel in the wind-blown wilds for three months solid after that, then forced her to wear shapeless black woolens like an old maid thereafter. That’ when she began to have “the turns,” her “humors went out of balance” and she “got a hunch” her days were “numbered.” Within the year she was wed off to Pa, although she’d only met him the once before marriage.

  Mam held up a needle, squinted, pursed her thin lips to a slit and threaded it carefully, all the while saying that in this life there were “fairy-tale castles” and “peasant shit-houses,” and wasn’t it a pity not to have a
choice.

  That night in bed we girls debated the pros and cons of being Percy’s kids.

  Lady Madge. Lady Sharon. Lady Doris. Lady Alice.

  We thought there might be possibilities.

  Mam was always showing us what to do because she “wouldn’t be around forever.” She kept a tiny skull pendant in a box to remind her and said she was surprised she’d “been given such a long run by the good Lord above but it won’t last long, I expect.”

  “When I die,” she’d whisper when Pa wasn’t around, because he’d soon tell her to hush her nonsense, “make sure my ashes are scattered on the seven seas.”

  “What ashes? What seas?” we’d reply, blinking back tears, thinking of our mam going up in flames.

  “Oh, you know, the seven seas,” she’d add, knowingly. “And I want that hymn ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ sung so it’s a joyous occasion, do you hear? Not a wet eye in the house.”

  A day didn’t go by without her raising the issue of her death. It made me want to curl up in a ball on the floor and sob my heart out, but if you did that after the age of four, Mam would give you a good kick in the bum and tell you to put a stocking in it.

  When I got older I’d retort, “Mam, will you make sure you die after you’ve baked the rhubarb crumble?”

  We were to be wives and mothers-so we were taught how to cook: cabbage soup, cabbage pie, fried cabbage, pickled cabbage, skillet cabbage, scalloped cabbage, cabbage and turnip bake, cabbage and potato casserole, cabbage and spinach cake. How to separate milk to make butter and cheese. How to bake horse bread from dried peas when the household budget wasn’ t balancing, and when it was-scones, muffins, gingerbread. How to make milk pudding with barley, and jam from gooseberries and strawberries. How to candy fruit. Occasionally we ate salted stockfish, which could last four years but had to be beaten with a wooden hammer for a full hour and then soaked in warm water for four more hours before it was ready. The priest said we had to eat fish twice a week, but who could afford that?

  Mam taught us how to sew our dresses and blouses from material bought in bulk from the spinners and weavers at the market, which made us girls all look alike, which we hated; how to crochet blankets, knit woollies and scarves, darn socks; how to clean the house, the laundry, the yard; how to store vegetables in the outhouse, potatoes in the soil for the winter; how to distill rosewater, how to smear bread with glue and put a lighted candle in the middle to attract and kill fleas and how to use rags for our menses when the time came, egg whites for our hair, soda, lime and potash to make soap.

  Thank God we had the freshwater stream running down from Haven Banks less than a hundred yards from our cottage. Most folk drank watered-down ale.

  Pa built our furniture: chairs, tables, cabinets, beds-all of which were lopsided, not that he noticed.

  We teased him about it.

  “You know full well I can’t afford a carpenter,” he’d shout, before storming out of the house.

  Entering our cottage used to make me feel a bit wonky.

  Mam said to imagine we were on a ship, but I protested I’d never been on one.

  Some evenings one of my sisters would get at Mam’ s back with the backscratcher Pa made specially for her, a wooden hand on a stick—only it had four fingers because he’d forgotten the fifth. Two of us massaged a hand each and I’d massage her bony feet, if I could get there first. She’d sit there issuing instructions :

  “To the right, Madge! Don’t forget my fingers, Alice!”

  We’d be a flurry of skinny elbows stuck up at right angles, white moths fluttering around her as we each tried to make her love us more than she did the others.

  The most important outing of our week was to Duddingley with Mam on a Monday morning to sell our handiwork of table-cloths and bonnets. The journey took ages, and only one of us got to go along on the back of the cart as there was so much work to do at home. I cherished that time on the road, pretending I was Mam’ s only child, cuddling up to her as the cart jolted along lanes and dirt tracks strewn with fallen rocks and dangerous potholes, which could delay a journey by several hours if the wheels got trapped.

  In the market Mam indulged in gossip because rumor was the lifeblood of conversation. Gossip was our theater and our fiction.

  I’d be hanging on to her arm watching her eyes flash, her face flush and her mouth excitedly emitting Never’s and Who’d have thought it’s.

  As farming folk we generally targeted one person above all others, the only one who wouldn’t hear: Percy.

  Short, pot-bellied and with a penchant for brocaded doublets and wide-brimmed hats with feathers sticking up, Percy was a huntin’ -an’ -fishin’ man like his deceased father, Lord Peregrine, and like his father he was always entertaining important guests en route to the Border Lands. There were many grand dinners and parties up at Montague Manor. We heard he had a preference for fine white bread, boar’s skin filled with jellied meat, baked chewetts, spiced custard pies and syllabub, and that his cellar contained hundreds of barrels of sweet wines.

  Then there was the wife, Priscilla, who looked suspiciously foreign, went mad (likely connected) and was locked up in the attic.

  The son and heir, Harold, who everyone suspected was really the result of the gardener’ s dalliance with Priscilla, only no one dared tell Percy.

  The illegitimate son, Tom, who was the offspring of Percy’ s dalliance with the scullery maid Lizzie.

  The legitimate daughter, Phoebe, who died in mysterious circumstances on a boat on Larksong Lake with her lady’ companion, Elinor, who was really her secret sister (raised by an elderly aunt of Percv’ s) because she was the daughter of Percy’ s dalliance with the governess, Miss Felliplace, who ended up dying of asphyxiation caused by her scarf getting caught in the wheels of Percy’s carriage, and who was suspiciously buried in Mad Bess Woods the very next day.

  The Montagues gave our lives drama by association, glamour by proximity, status through acquaintance. Without them we would have been your wretched run-of-the-mill peasant family eking out a living on the land. Instead, we were part of an estate. We were of the Montagues.

  One icy morning Percy trotted by on his mare as we were walking through Coppice Forest. He doffed his cap and almost smiled.

  Well, Pa jumped up and punched the air silently as if he’d just won himself a chest full of doubloons.

  Another stormy morning Pa acted like a spurned lover when Percy nearly ran into us, shouting, “Get out of my way!” when we were sloshing down the donkey track in waterlogged clogs after mass at St. Michael’s.

  Once out of earshot Pa spat out that “One day the working man will be Percy’s comeuppance.”

  For all the talk of the “common man having his day,” no one seriously wanted Percy gone. He represented stability, he was the devil we knew, and in any case, if there really was an attempted “revolution” by Pa and the lads, Percy and his ilk would have all the perpetrators hung, drawn and quartered to a man.

  It was at the market that we heard that slave raiders had entered our country from the faraway sea, although none had been sighted in our neighbourhood, as yet. The story went that the Border Landers were involved and so were men called Aphrikans, who were colored blak.

  The slave raiders, it seemed, were in cahoots with aristocrats like Percy and the middlemen who supplied them with slaves for shipment overseas. Criminals and prisoners of war were hot favorites, but when they weren’ t available it was any one who could be captured, so long as they weren’t too old or, in Percy’ s case, his own serfs. Children were taken too.

  Some said that the guns the greedy aristocrats received in exchange for slaves encouraged them to start more wars just to meet the demand of the slave traders who wanted a yearly increase in exports.

  The Aphrikans built heavily fortified castles to hold their cargo until ships arrived to collect them. It was rumored that there was one on the coast that could accommodate a thousand slaves at a time.

  But al
l that was happening somewhere far away. None of us knew what happened when the prisoners got on those boats, but it was rumored to be a bit crowded belowdecks, and sea-sickness was rife.

  To be honest, it felt so distant from us that we didn’t give it much thought. Our world was made up of our immediate neighbors and foreign meant the people of the midlands or fenlands.

  We were just simple country folk, who tried our best to live with ourselves and understand one another.

  OUR NIGHTS WERE SPENT singing songs. What else was there to do after work was done and food eaten and we were exhausted but not quite ready for bed? Pa’ s snoring provided a sonorous bass. We’d be inside in front of the fire in winter with the tallow rushlights flickering, woolen blankets wrapped around us for extra warmth. Or outside in summer, sitting on stools under a sky bigger than our brains could ever imagine (we could just about manage acres, not planets), surrounded by the silence of the countryside, which was really quite noisy what with crickets and owls, small scurrying beasts in the undergrowth, the close buzzing of mosquitoes, the pig snortling, the fowl doing their nighttime chicken-pen shuffle, and the stream running nearby.

  We’d stamp our feet, bang clay pots, rub sticks up and down a washboard, click wooden cutlery, clap our hands and slip into familiar harmonies. We’d raise a cheer after a song if it was rendered perfectly, or point the finger when someone’ harmony didn’ t slide smoothly into place.

  When my mind does a back flip into my BS days, at some point it goes on past what I remember myself and into what I’d been told. There it goes, legs, hands, the supple spine of a child, flicking back the years to when my mother was in labor and Old Sarah, the local midwife, saved my life.

  Mam went into the throes with me early one evening a month before I was due to arrive while Pa, as luck would have it, was at work. She lay in a puddle of broken waters and just knew I was going to come out all twisted. I was her seventh child—four had already died. She kept rattling some stones in the cup of her hand, which was supposed to prevent a miscarriage.