Terroir by Graham Mort Read Free Book Online Page A

it to him plainly. You come quietly now, Seddon. Think of your children. You’ll take no more game if I send you to hell, and that’s where you belong, you thieving gypsy bastard. Her father cursed him as a craven arse - licker, but had gone quietly in the end. Billy heard all this from a weaver who’d shared a cell with her father for a few days before being released. He spent his first day of freedom playing his fiddle for the soldiers and whores who plagued Richmond town and getting shit - faced drunk. Billy got the whole story for the price of a pint. Her father was no gypsy, but he’d learned their ways. Night skills, a gentle stealth.
    A woman stooped into a plaid shawl went past the window. Susan Darrent, toothless, sick with age and consumption. She’d not last the winter. After days of rain the village was sodden and dark - stoned. Hillsides across the valley were streaked with white water where streams had boiled to the surface. Ellen went to the window nudging the fire with her clog as she went. There was hardly any coal left. She stood looking out, hands across her belly, feeling the warmth of the child inside her, remembering Michael’s body heat, the little sigh as he came into her and then released himself. She hadn’t known what was happening at first. But after that she enjoyed the power she had over him, the way a grown man would set his pleading eyes on her, bring her food and drink. He never forced her. He was never rough like the other men, not Michael. He had his eye on her ever since she took up as a maid at the King’s Head and began stopping by after work. As soon as the landlord found out she was pregnant he felt her belly, gave her a sovereign, grinned wisely and sent her home. Sour breath, white bristles, black teeth. She’d never seen so much money. He couldn’t have her moping around the place with a full belly when there were guests to tend to.
    Earlier that summer they got away from the village, racing each other down the lanes together to make love in the hayfields amongst the meadowsweet and clover where the river made a loop of silver against the land. That’s how she got pregnant. Lying down to take him instead of being had against a wall. Or maybe because she told Michael she loved him. He’d not known what to say. Not being good with words. That last time she lay down for him a moth had blundered against her breast. When she brushed it away it left a faint powder on her skin. She ran her hands over his arms, marked with scars, where the hairs grew thick and blond and he watched her with a kind of wonder. As if he’d never been touched like that. When they made love it was tender and slow. He let his lips graze against her neck and ear lobes as he came deeper in. The lids sagged over his green eyes and the lock of straw - coloured hair flopped over his face. Three days later he was dead. It’d crushed her as sure as if she’d been felled by that same landslide of stone and darkness. Then her monthlies had stopped and the sickness began as if sin had curdled in her. Except she never believed that. How could love be sin when they lived under the love of God?
    Her father had shown her how to take the gun apart and clean it. It was a small - bore rifle, specially made so that the barrel unscrewed and could be easily hidden. Seddon got it from a gun - maker in Knaresborough. He showed her how to clean the barrel with the pull - through, how to oil the hammer and trigger, then how to load it, tamping down the powder and ball with wadding and priming the pan. A time or two he took her up in the moor for target practice. She was a good shot, he said. She loved the feeling of the rifle in her hands, the way it was warm from her father’s hands, the way it cracked and jumped against her shoulder and a bottle flew into pieces. They lay next to each other in the heather in his smell of sweat and gunpowder and oil. Her father had been a