Chapter 2 Two Hundred Gold

I went into Thornfell the next morning with the hide, a basket of eggs, a sack of turnips and the cleaver.

The hide made sense. So did the eggs and the turnips. The cleaver I couldn't have explained if you'd asked. I'd hung it back on its hook after supper the way I always do, and in the morning I loaded the cart and was halfway down the track before I turned round and went back for it. Leaving it there felt wrong, like walking off with the stove still going. So I slung it across my back on an old belt and set off again.

I pull the cart myself. We had a horse when I was small, a good-natured grey called Biscuit, but he went funny when I was about ten. Wouldn't come near the house, wouldn't come near me, and one night he kicked his way out of the paddock and turned up two days later at the Fulbrights' place, refusing to come home. Dad sold him to Tam Fulbright for a song and never bought another. Said horses were more trouble than they were worth.

So I pull the cart. It's three hours to Thornfell and it keeps me fit.

* * *

Thornfell is forty-odd houses inside a log wall that went grey before I was born. There's a mill on the creek, a chapel with a cracked bell, a smithy, a tannery, and the Black Hound, which is the only tavern and does a pie I'd walk a long way for. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody watched me come through the gate with the cart, the way they always do, and a couple of the Pryor kids ran alongside for a bit to see if I'd go faster.

I did the smithy first. Old Corrie sucked his teeth at the torn hinges, then caught sight of the boiled skull plates I'd brought and stopped sucking them. He swapped me a pair of good strap hinges and a bag of screws for the plates and didn't argue. He uses them for scrapers too.

Haddie Brennick was out the front of the tannery with her sleeves rolled up and her arms stained to the elbow. She's about sixty and has forearms like hams, and she saw the hide on the cart before I'd stopped.

"No," she said.

"Morning, Haddie."

"No. Take it away, Tobin Marsh. I'm not having it."

"It's good hide."

"It's bloody awful hide. Last one you brought me broke two knives and a whetstone, and I nearly lost a thumb." She held the thumb up as evidence. It had a scar across it. "Four years I've been telling you. I can't cut it."

"I'll cut it for you."

She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. Haddie's been haggling since before I was born and she can smell a soft offer at fifty paces.

"Into pieces I can work," she said. "Hand-sized. Square edges."

"All right."

"Four silver. And you clean up after."

"Done."

She had a long bench out the back, scarred and wet. I unrolled the first piece of hide on it, unslung the cleaver and started cutting. It's tough stuff, rat hide, like boiled leather that's been left out in the sun, but the cleaver went through it like it was linen. I cut it in straight lines, hand-sized, square edges, and stacked the squares at the end of the bench. It took about as long as cutting bread for a big family.

Haddie didn't say anything the whole time. When I looked up she was standing with her arms folded, watching the cleaver.

"Huh," she said.

"It's a good blade," I said. "It was Grandad's."

"I know whose it was. I bought my first Sunday roast off Wendel Marsh." She picked up one of the squares and ran a thumb down the cut edge. It was clean as glass. "Huh," she said again, and went to get the money.

Four silver. I put it in my purse and felt a bit better.

I sold the eggs and the turnips to Annis Tully at the reeve's back door for a few coppers, which was more than they were worth and less than she wanted to give me. Annis is like that. Then I asked if Bram was in.

* * *

Bram Tully has been reeve of Thornfell for twenty-two years. He's a big, soft-spoken man with a beard going grey at the edges and a bad knee from a horse called Pickles that kicked him in his thirties. He sat me down at his kitchen table, Annis put a bowl of stew in front of me without asking, and I gave him the notice.

He read it twice. His face didn't do much, but Bram's face never does much. He folded it and handed it back.

"You're not the only one," he said.

"Who else?"

"The three holdings past the creek line. Yours, the old Corran place and the Selby place."

"The Corran place has been empty five years. So has Selby's."

"I know." He rubbed his knee. "Nobody else in the district got one. I asked the Crown office. Clerk said it was a review of frontier holdings and that was all he knew. He didn't look like he knew much."

"Can I appeal it?"

"You can write to the Chancellor's office in Harrowgate. They'll answer in a year, if they answer." He shook his head. "Frost won't wait a year, Tobin."

I ate some stew. Annis makes a good stew, thick, with barley in it. I'd been thinking about it the whole way from the farm.

This chapter was copied from NovelPhoenix without the writer's permission; the author's publication there is the place that supports their work.

"I'm going to Harrowgate," I said. "To the Guild. They pay for killing things."

Bram looked at Annis. Annis looked at Bram. It wasn't a long look, but it was the kind that has a whole conversation folded up in it, the way married people do. I didn't know what the conversation was about.

"The Guild's not pest control, son," Bram said. "You remember the Pryor boys? Jory and Dav?"

"Jory's got one arm."

"Jory came back with one arm. Dav didn't come back." He said it gently. "They were good lads, and strong, and they thought the same as you."

"I've been doing pest control a while," I said.

"I know you have."

He was quiet a bit. Annis took my bowl and filled it again and put it back in front of me, and I let her.

"Go and see Mag," Bram said.

"Mag?"

"On your way home. Before you go anywhere. Go and see Mag."

* * *

Mag Penhallow lives half an hour down the creek road from us, in a cottage with a deep veranda and a rocking chair she hardly ever gets out of. She's seventy-something. Nobody knows exactly and nobody's game to ask. She smokes a clay pipe, keeps a fat ginger cat called Mister, and was married to Hal Penhallow for forty years until he died the winter before Dad.

She was in the rocking chair when I pulled the cart up. Mister was in her lap.

"Tobin," she said.

"Mag."

"You've had a letter."

"How'd you know that?"

"Crown rider went past here at a gallop yesterday, white as a sheet, staring back over his shoulder. Nothing up our road but you." She puffed on her pipe. "How much?"

"Two hundred gold."

She took the pipe out of her mouth. "The bastards," she said, quite calmly.

I sat on the veranda step and told her the rest. The Corran place and the Selby place, and the appeal, and Harrowgate and the Guild. She listened the whole way through without saying anything, rocking slowly, stroking the cat.

"Your father," she said when I'd done, "never left that farm for more than a day in thirty years. Did you know that?"

"He didn't like travelling."

"Not once. Not even for his own wedding. Your mum had to get the priest to come out and do it in the front paddock. Hal stood up for him." She looked at me over the pipe. "You think that was because he didn't like travelling?"

"He liked it there," I said.

"Mm," said Mag.

She looked at the cleaver on my back for a long time.

"You're taking that with you."

It wasn't a question, but I answered it anyway. "Feels wrong to leave it."

"Good. Don't let anyone take it off you. You hear me?"

"Nobody's going to want an old cleaver, Mag."

"Don't let anyone take it off you," she said again, slower, like I was simple.

"All right."

She tipped Mister off her lap, which he took personally, and went inside. I heard a chest open and things being shifted about. She came back with a long coat over her arm, oilskin, dark brown and gone soft with age.

"Hal's," she said. "It's no use to me and it'll keep the rain off. He was about your size before he got fat."

I didn't know what to say, so I said thank you, and put it on. It fitted across the shoulders. It smelled of pipe smoke and lanolin.

Then she put three gold crowns in my hand.

"Mag, I can't."

"It's a loan."

"I don't know when I can pay it back."

"When you can." She sat back down and picked up her pipe. "And interest."

"What's the interest?"

"A proper bottle. From the city. None of that piss they sell at the Hound. Something with a cork in it."

I closed my hand on the coins. "All right."

She lit the pipe again and puffed until it drew. Mister came back and sat on her feet to show he'd forgiven her.

"And Tobin."

"Yeah?"

"Don't let them tell you what you are."

I waited for the rest of it. There wasn't any.

"What am I?" I said.

"A Marsh," said Mag, and that was the end of it.

* * *

I spent the next day squaring the place away.

Elsie Fulbright came up in the morning to learn the milking. She's Tam's girl, fourteen, sensible, and her dad had agreed she'd mind Duchess and the chooks while I was gone, in exchange for the eggs and half the milk. Duchess took one look at her and stepped on her foot. Elsie said a word her dad wouldn't have liked, then moved her foot and tried again from the other side, and by the third go Duchess had given up and was letting down like a lamb.

"She does that," I said. "She's testing you."

"She's a cow," said Elsie. "She's not that clever."

Duchess looked round at her with great dignity, and I didn't say anything.

I hung the left door on the new hinges, and the right one too while I was at it. I sanded the floor where the drool had eaten in and oiled the boards so they wouldn't rot. I cut the ruined hay out of the stack and burned it. I nailed a good plank of red gum across the widest part of the drain, two nails at each end, so Elsie wouldn't put a foot down it in the dark.

A pedlar came up the track in the afternoon, an old fellow with a handcart full of pots and ribbons who gets lost out our way about once a year. He saw the chook-shed door with the glowing sack holding it open and asked what they were.

"Pretty rocks," I said. "Kids like them. They glow a bit."

He bought six for eleven copper. I'd have given them to him for nothing, but he insisted on paying, and I wasn't in a position to turn money down. He packed them in straw very carefully and went off down the track whistling.

That night I counted it all out on the kitchen table. Eleven gold from the tin, four silver from Haddie, a few coppers from Annis and eleven from the pedlar, and Mag's three gold on top.

About fourteen gold.

A hundred and eighty-six to go.

* * *

I left at first light on the fourth day.

I'd packed light. Two shirts, the good trousers, socks, a blanket, the cookpot and tin cup, a knife and fork, and the last of the rat tail, smoked and wrapped in a cloth. Hal's coat on my back, and the cleaver over it in a sling I'd sewn out of an old harness, with the blade wrapped in sacking so I wouldn't frighten anyone.

Before I went I walked down to the barn. The doors swung easy on the new hinges. The plank lay across the crack where I'd nailed it. Warm air came up round the edges.

I stamped twice on the boards, the way Dad did.

Duchess watched me go from the home paddock, chewing, like she'd seen it all before and wasn't impressed. The chooks didn't notice at all.

I got to the bottom of the track and turned onto the Thornfell road, and about an hour after that my back started to itch. Right between the shoulder blades, under the cleaver. Not a bad itch. Just there, like a tag in a new shirt.

I rolled my shoulders and kept walking. New sling, I thought. It'd wear in.

* * *

Mag Penhallow walked up to Marsh Hold the next evening with her pipe in her teeth and Hal's old storm lantern in her hand.

It had rained all afternoon, and the track was running like a creek. Elsie Fulbright had done the milking and gone home, and the farmhouse windows were dark. It was strange seeing them dark. Mag couldn't remember the last time she'd come up this track and not seen a light in the kitchen.

She went to the barn. She'd promised Aldous she would, on the last afternoon he could still sit up. Promised him on Hal's grave, which hadn't pleased Aldous much, since Hal had only been dead a year and he'd liked him. Keep an eye on it, he'd said. If he ever leaves. You'll know.

She'd told him not to be so bloody dramatic. Then she'd promised.

The barn smelled of new oil and sawdust. She held the lantern up. The plank lay across the crack in the floor, nailed tidy. The boy did good work. He always had.

She stood there with her pipe gone cold and listened.

Rain on the roof. Duchess shifting in her stall, uneasy. The far-off tick of the creek.

Then, from under the floor, from somewhere a long way under it, three knocks.

Slow. Even. Patient. The way you'd knock on a door when you knew somebody was home and you had all the time in the world.

Mag didn't move for a long moment. The lantern shook a little in her hand, and she steadied it.

"Bugger," she said.

She walked back down the track a good deal faster than she'd come up it. At home she put the cat out, harnessed the pony, and lit the side lamps on the trap. Bram Tully had paper and ink, and the post rider came through Thornfell on Fridays.

It was a long drive in the dark. She spent it thinking about the letter. She had been dreading writing it for twenty-six years.