Tess quit the house, her family, and her entire life before lunch.
It would be exactly like Papa to arrive early, so Tess eschewed the front drive. She cut across broad lawns, through a yew hedge and a garden of old, twisted rosebushes (not even leafed out yet), across a field of sheep bleating anxiously to their lambs, and over a stile in a stone wall. The field beyond the wall was full of scrub and bramble, and Tess had hopes that this marked the edge of the Queen’s summer estate. You never could be sure with the Queen, though; anything not explicitly owned by someone else was hers by default.
The stile was an A-shaped wooden ladder over the wall, and Tess paused at the top, the whole of Ducana province spread at her booted feet. Farmsteads and village churches dotted the rolling hills, while hedgerows and stone walls divided them into a chessboard of fields, the yellow-green of new shoots alternating with black, sodden earth. The sky glowed warmly blue, as if it were determined to make the day not merely fine but over-the-top, ridiculously beautiful.
Even Tess’s self-pitying heart found itself a little bit moved.
The cathedral spires of Trowebridge, the biggest town in Ducana province, rose to the southwest. That had struck Tess as the logical place to go first; she might buy supplies there, and then take the main road south. As soon as she descended this hilltop, the town would disappear from view. The direct route passed by Cragmarog Castle (which she could make out, coiled like a snake in the midst of trees), and that was no good. Her parents—or, more humiliatingly, Jeanne’s in-laws—might be encountered upon that road at any time.
Tess, having studied the map, knew the other landmark to look for in this landscape. Directly south was a hilltop ruin, Pentrach’s Dun, which she could reach via footpaths, ancient right-of-ways leading straight through farmers’ fields. From that hilltop, she should be able to see another road, running westerly to Trowebridge.
She had to go the long way, two sides of the triangle, because the hypotenuse was forbidden her. This struck her as perfectly symbolic of her entire life.
The sun shone; she put on her gardening hat against it. Her satchel straps dug into her shoulders, and the hedgerows snatched at her skirts as she passed. A great cloud of blackbirds ascended, screaming, and scared her. The wind slapped her cheeks, damp soil clogged her boot soles, and the hem of her kirtle grew steadily dirtier.
In spite of all this—in spite of herself, really—her heart began to lift as she walked, or maybe a weight began to fall away. She’d done it. She’d gotten free of her family (for now, a voice at the back of her mind nagged). Dirt and discomfort and uncertainty were nothing to her.
She was almost smiling to herself as she passed a gang of peasants, red-handed men in smocks and clogs. They were in the next pasture over, shouting and whipping the cows with willow switches, driving them away from their hapless calves. Two men would then grab a lone calf by its knobby legs, bucking and kicking, upside down in their arms, and haul it into another enclosure. The cows mooed, low and despairing, their udders heavy with milk for their babies, and the babies cried for their mothers—an inhuman cry, but unmistakable to Tess.
Tess didn’t understand what mysterious agricultural purpose required tearing bovine families apart. She watched with one hand to her heart and the other to her lips, and she was struck by both the cruelty of the men and the realization that she was a woman, walking alone.
She started walking faster, hoping none of them would look her way.
As if they could read her thoughts, one of the men began to sing:
A little pretty bonny lass
Went forth upon the dewy grass
I followed her down to the dell
She snubbed me with a fare-ye-well
Whereupon the rest of the farmhands took up the chorus:
Upon the heath, the holt, the hill,
My girl, I’ll do whate’er I will.
Tess’s face puckered at these lyrics and fell at the next verse (which was too bawdy for general consumption). She hunched her shoulders and kept walking. She thought she heard someone whistle after her, but maybe it was merely the call of the hedge shrike.
No, that was a whistle. Tess didn’t look back.
The world was full of men. She’d been so desperate to get gone that she hadn’t given that consideration the weight it deserved. All unbidden, Mama’s voice spoke in her head: Men are scoundrels, and they only ever want one thing. They will try every trick in the book to seduce you, and if you won’t go willingly, they’ll find a way to take you anyway.
She shuddered. Mama hadn’t said such things often—preferring to focus on Tess’s own inadequacies—but of course they were the corollary to everything St. Vitt had always said. Why should women avert their eyes and dress modestly and suppress their desires, if not for the sake of men? How was the wolf to blame, if the sheep were roaming free?
Thou shalt not tempt wasn’t a commandment of any Saint she knew, but it could’ve been.
Maybe she could find a way to live alone and support herself—she still believed that—but walking across the entire Southlands, with no protector, to get there? Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a clever idea. She wasn’t going to last out here.
She paused in the shade of a hedgerow, out of sight of prying eyes, to peel a cheese and munch an oatcake. It was a filling enough lunch, but fast walking and the warm spring sunshine had made Tess powerfully thirsty. Salty cheese and dry bannock didn’t help.
All she’d brought was wine. She held the bottle up to the light; the sun shone enticingly through green glass and liquid dark as night. It wouldn’t quench her thirst particularly well. The sensible thing to do would be to go looking for water. Every little farmstead surely had a well…and a red-handed cowherd, or a lecherous shepherd, or any other sort of man with a bawdy song in his head and a gleam in his eye as he realized she was at his mercy.
Some of them were surely fine—most of them probably were—but you couldn’t tell by looking, and that was the problem. She drank about half her wine, staggered to her feet, and carried on, trying to stay out of sight now, keeping to the shadows of hedgerows.
As she sneaked, her mother’s voice came to her: You can’t tell if a man might be good or evil, but do you know what they can tell by looking at you? That you’re not where you should be, and therefore not what you should be. You aren’t at home, so you must be public property. No one’s taking care of you, therefore anyone might claim you.
A gang of men with rakes suddenly crossed the road in front of her, moving from one meadow to another. Tess pressed herself into a hedgerow to avoid them. One of the younger ones winked at her; nobody was fooled.
They know, said her mother. You’re an old shoe that might fit any foot. A sucked marrow bone. A gob of chewed honeycomb, its sweetness long gone. No wonder Will left you; he knew what you really were.
“Stop it,” Tess muttered, wiping her eyes. She pulled the bottle back out of her pack and glared at it accusingly. She’d had an agreement with wine: it would be a good friend to her and mute these kinds of voices, but it wasn’t doing the trick today. It had ceded the floor to them and stripped her naked of defenses.
She drank the rest, still hoping it would do what it was supposed to.
Her mother’s voice followed her the rest of the way to Trowebridge. Tess felt it like hot breath at the nape of her neck, smelled it in wafts of woodsmoke and manure. It wrapped around her ankles like a vine, making her stumble, and snagged the hem of her skirt as she climbed over stiles. The voice told her to hide whenever masculine farmhands came into view, called her a contemptible insect for hiding, and then flew above her like a flag to make sure everyone knew.
Tess missed the ancient beauty of Pentrach’s Dun, missed a salmon sunset and the aching curve of the river, so wholly occupied was she with wrestling the unseen.
She reached Trowebridge at dusk and stood on the eponymous stone bridge staring at the shadowy buildings, her heart in her boots. Even if she had enough money for lodgings, which she very much doubted, she didn’t have the wherewithal to knock on strange doors and ask.
Running away was the worst idea she’d ever had. She regretted everything.
An idea bubbled up from her sludgy mind—didn’t storybook trolls live under bridges? It would provide shelter enough for one night, anyway. She picked her way through the weeds and crawled under the bridge. It was humid, but more spacious than she would have guessed. Tess exhaled, finally feeling safe. Like a cockroach in a crevasse, her mother said, unable to resist one last kick while Tess was down. The wine bottle was long empty (she checked one last time, to be absolutely sure), so Tess chucked it toward the river, where it shattered on unseen rocks.
The earth under the bridge was cool against her cheek, at least.
To Tess’s immeasurable disappointment, she woke up.
She could tell without even opening her eyes that she’d made herself ill. Her throat pricked and stabbed as if she’d swallowed a prickly gorse branch. Every inch of her hurt. Her feet were blistered from the stiff new boots, her muscles sore from seventeen miles of hills. The hard ground had compounded her aches; her joints felt swollen and wrong.
Sleeping longer might have helped, but rumbling wagons and tramping feet rudely imposed consciousness upon her. She lay on her side, curled in her blanket with the gardening hat for a scratchy pillow, listening and resenting and wondering if she could avoid getting up. She curled tighter. Surely she never had to move again if she didn’t want to.
And she might not have, either, had the man not grabbed her from behind.
Panic lifted her to her feet before she could even think, and she stared at the ragged, twig-thin man who’d crept up in the night to sleep next to her. He was old, with barely a tooth in his head, and he yawned grotesquely, his mouth a dark hole in his white furze-bush beard. His right hand, clutching a corner of her blanket to his chest, was missing two fingers. He was disgusting.
Tess’s head pounded from the sudden movement, and her fear condensed into rage.
“Give me that,” she growled, grabbing at her blanket. It was trapped under his body.
He croaked, incongruously, “Annie?”
Tess shoved him off, rolled him over, but the fellow had an iron grip on the corner of the blanket. She tried prying his knobby fist open, which only made him shriek and flail about. His forearm smacked Tess’s aching head so hard her ear started ringing, and the next thing she knew she was kicking him once, twice, thrice in the ribs. His thorax made a hollow sound.
Tess backed away, panting, horrified at herself. She’d never…she’d been so angry…she could have broken his rib cage as easily as crushing a wicker basket.
“Oh, Annie,” said the vagrant mournfully. He’d curled into a bony ball, his cheek pressed into the dirt. “I know I deserve that.”
Tess snatched up her blanket and whipped it furiously, shaking the dust out.
“What is this place?” he said. He sounded like a child. The dust made him cough.
Fold blanket. Into satchel with both hands. She had to get out of here.
The old man ran his three-fingered hand through his wild white hair. “Did the dragon chase you here? I saw it and came running. I thought I could save you this time.”
The more he talked, the worse her conscience stabbed. She’d kicked a delusional geezer who didn’t know where or when he was. She was a terrible person. Tess swung her pack onto her back and scuttled out from under the bridge. The old man called after her—“Annie!”—but she pretended not to hear.
Tess hauled herself out of the shadows, desperate to leave bridge and beggar behind, up the rocky embankment onto the road. It was so bright up here, she couldn’t open her eyes all the way. She staggered onto the bridge, into horse and pedestrian traffic. Food carts lined the roadway, and the smell of cooking twisted her stomach painfully; she couldn’t tell if she was hungry or nauseated.
Tess hurried like one pursued, pushing past the broad buttocks of horses and the shopping baskets of young wives, toward the market square. Around her, children laughed; the sun shone on the market tents; bright flags flapped in the spring breeze; swallows swooped and sang overhead. Every beautiful thing felt like a fist clamped around Tess’s heart, squeezing.
She stuck her face in the market fountain, not caring how uncouth she looked, and gulped water frantically, like she was trying to drown.
She’d kicked an old man. He’d been no danger to her, and she’d viciously attacked him, and she’d done it (if she was being honest) in part because he was so feeble. Of all the men she might have liked to kick, she’d kicked the one who couldn’t fight back.
Tess raised her face from the fountain, gasping, and wiped it on her arm. Women with water jars stared at her; she hurried away, ashamed. She didn’t make it ten steps before she had to pause and lean against a market stall, shaking and sweating and unable to catch her breath.
She was despicable. How could she go on?
At that very moment, Tess chanced to raise her eyes and look across the crowded square. There, shining like Heaven’s own messenger, sat that most eminently kickable of men, her father, upon a borrowed horse. Relief coursed through her, and an unaccustomed tenderness.
He’d come to find her and save her from herself. He’d been worried; he loved her.
Her lungs unclenched and she took an enormous, restorative breath. This had to be a sign from the Saints. She’d made her point—and made a mess of everything, as usual—and now it was time to concede defeat. She was too tired to keep fighting.
Tess made a beeline toward her father, ready to place herself in his gentle and capable hands, but herds of milling shoppers stood in her way. “Papa!” she shouted, waving, but he neither heard nor saw. He turned his horse up a side street. She was losing him; even a liberal application of elbows couldn’t clear a path through the crowd quickly enough. She noted where his hat plume disappeared, and the spot became her pole star, guiding her.
He was long gone by the time Tess broke free of the square. Praying he’d kept to this road and hadn’t turned up any side streets, she ran past mercers, tailors, leatherworkers, her boots thunking on the hard-packed dirt of the road, her head thumping painfully. About a mile along, it curved south, dead-ending at a wide wooden building with a statue at the apex of the roof. Papa was nowhere in sight, but the horse he’d been riding was tied up out front alongside a tiny donkey.
Tess’s feet slowed at the sight of the Saint on the roof, recognizing her big green apple even before reading the plaque: ST. LOOLA’S HOSPICE FOR THE INDIGENT AND INCAPACITATED.
Papa wasn’t looking for Tess; he did not yet realize she’d run away. He’d come for Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s. Of course the nuns had to be fetched from town. They wouldn’t have been wandering the fields near Cragmarog, grazing and mooing.
Tess wasn’t sure what to do. He wouldn’t be relieved to see her, as she’d…Her lungs tightened again. She should have known better than to hope. He might not even take her back home, not when this was where he ultimately wanted to leave her.
The door opened, and Tess darted behind the horse. She pulled her blanket out of her satchel and wrapped it over her head like a widow’s shawl.
A widow’s shawl with a light plaid weave. This would fool no one.
Papa approached the steed to untie it, but he was on the other side, engrossed in conversation with an elderly nun, Mother Philomela of St. Loola’s, as per yesterday’s letter. “We’re at our wits’ end,” Tess heard Papa saying, his voice strained. “My wife insists this daughter was simply born bad—”
“No one is born bad,” snapped the nun. Tess peeked at her over the horse’s back; she was at least sixty and built like a grain stack, an impression enhanced by her yellow habit. She was looking at Papa shrewdly. “Anyway, you don’t agree with your wife. What’s your theory?”
Papa hesitated; contradicting Anne-Marie always made him anxious. “I suppose…I assumed our Tess misbehaves for the pure, anarchic joy of disobedience.”
He thought she was bad on purpose? He might as well have reached across the horse and slapped Tess. She’d never heard what he really thought of her before.
“So you have no idea, either,” said Mother Philomela flatly. “Tell me more about her. I suppose she’s out drinking till all hours, entertaining young men, dressing like a slattern?”
“Erm,” said Papa, removing his hat and scratching his balding head.
He didn’t know, Tess realized, her ears growing hot. He had no idea how she dressed or what she did all day, or why. Mama was bitter and mean, but at least she paid attention.
“She punched a priest,” Papa finally said weakly.
“Feh. Who hasn’t?” Mother Philomela had untied her donkey and was stroking its nose. “Well, never mind. The parents never know. I’ll get to the bottom of it. Our order is salubrious for wild and selfish young ladies. Nothing like a hospice full of graypox victims to give you some perspective. Life is short, by Heaven’s mercy, and we are distressingly fragile.”
The nun leaped onto her donkey like a woman half her age and began to sing in an unexpectedly clear soprano:
The flesh is but
A sack of goo,
A feast for worms
To delve into.
Remember, mortal,
As you strive,
That you, ambitious goo,
Must also die.
Papa mounted his horse, his lips pinched as if the song disturbed him. Tess had been standing frozen, listening to them talk, and had forgotten to pull the shawl across her face. Papa looked right at her as he turned his steed.
He looked her in the eye.
Maybe he thought she looked familiar; his frown deepened, and his gaze lingered. Maybe he thought, That woman could be Tessie’s twin, almost, or the question arose in his mind halfway to Ranleigh Cottage, Wait, did I see…? No, it couldn’t have been.
He didn’t recognize his own daughter out of context. He rode on, unseeing, unknowing. Tess gaped after him, her voice caught in her throat, insubstantial as a ghost.