Foxlowe. Eleanor Wasserberg
that, he always said, you were only a baby. I do, I said: the strange plastic on his jacket, and the outside smell. He’d been named October; Freya said it was right. She told me that outside Foxlowe it was a name for the time when leaves turned to fire.
Sitting on the step, we picked at things. Toby peeled away a huge scab on his knee I’d given him a day or two before. I plucked at rotten wood, and we drew on the fresh wood underneath with the berry juice. I loved to sit on the middle landing. From there you had a view right down into the main house. You could see the front entrance hall, and the ballroom ceilings stretched out of sight. The hallway leading to the kitchen was below too, so you could watch as people rushed in and out, carrying tea or fruit back to the studios. If you looked up, you could follow the staircase right up to the attic, making your stomach ripple with the height. Best of all, the stained glass window had a panel of clear glass with a view over the back lawns and the moor beyond, so you could peer out, bathing your feet in the blue light. The middle landing was the heart of everything.
Toby looked up from his bleeding knee and tugged at my poultice.
—Spike Walk?
I nodded.
—Valentina won’t let Freya take me any more, Toby said.
This was a lie. From Toby or Valentina, I couldn’t tell which.
—Freya didn’t properly forgive me after, I said. —I might have to do the Walk again.
—What did you do?
—A Libby thing.
Toby nodded. The tides between Freya and Libby were always.
—Where is she then? Toby said. After a pause he said, —Maybe she’s a Leaver! and laughed.
I pulled my cardigan closer around my waist. Freya had made it for me. The daisy buttons were from a shop she told me about that had them in jars, like sweets, she said, and I didn’t understand her, sweets are in rows from the oven or from chilling in the goat shed, ready to cut into brittle pieces and suck. Freya laughed, pulled me to her and nuzzled my neck, saying Imagine it, talking about the outside for a while. Then we’d played All The Ways Home Is Better.
There had been a Leaving that year, just as the Summer Solstice was coming, a strange time to go, when the house was aglow and everyone was happy. She’d been pretty, the Leaver had, and liked to sit on the back steps sewing patchwork quilts. We were already forgetting her. After a Leaving, there was always a slump, and careful watching of each other, lots of Meetings and the reshuffle of chores, and if people were gone for longer than expected, on shop runs or disappearing over the moor, things went quiet until they came back.
I slipped the hard edge of a daisy petal under my thumbnail, and tried to think of Freya as a Leaver, outside, in one of the box-houses she told me about. Foxlowe without her, like a hungry stomach.
—Don’t be stupid, I said.
We stared each other out, until my stomach complained, a guttering sound, and we went off to find food.
In the kitchen, bread smell swelled up the room. Toby tripped down the steps and leapt onto the table, upsetting the wine. The Family cheered and slow-clapped. Pooling around my fingers, the red stream was sticky and cool.
The Foxlowe kitchen was a cave, a stone mouth with a cold floor that made an easy game of trying to jump from slab to slab, just as we did out on the moor. There was a long gutter, where blood used to run, Freya said, when they killed animals down there in Foxlowe’s old life. Windows along one wall looked out on the back lawns. A table stretched along the centre, sticky with fruit juice and oil. Everywhere paint and brushes, lumps of curdled milk, crusty teabags. Dogs huddled the huge aga stove. The Family had come from the ballroom, following the smell of fresh bread.
When the Family was together like that, grown and ungrown, we got loud, shouting over each other, calling names, throwing arms wide. Libby looped around the table, kissing cheeks, her fresh-washed hair spilling over faces. I looked around for Freya, who liked to complain about the waste and vanity of Libby using the yolks, but she wasn’t there. Once, she’d tricked Libby by leaving old eggs out, long after they floated in still water, and Libby’s hair reeked for days, Freya laughing so hard I thought she would be sick. Now, Libby looped her arms around Richard’s neck, and he breathed in her newly softened curls.
Richard wore different clothes to the rest of us. There were paintings that looked like him in the upper rooms, the same fox faces with narrow noses and narrow eyes, and some of the clothes were the same: waistcoats and long black coats, white shirts full of moth holes. He never hugged us or swept us into a dance or pulled us onto his knee, so I didn’t know the smell and feel of him like the other grown, but he was all bone, strong in Freya’s way. His beard grew patchy and he was always scratching around his jaw. Sometimes the Family called him boy as a joke, but he was, Freya said, not that much younger than she was, if you were counting, and anyway older than Libby, who had airs of a grown but could have only just bled to look at her. Richard was one of the Founders, so there was little chance of him being a Leaver. Sometimes I secretly wished he would, didn’t like his eyes following me around the house or the way they would flick away from me if I tried to catch them. He eyed the blood on Toby’s knee.
—Still fighting, October, he said.
His voice faded at the end of words, like he got bored of them.
—This is supposed to be a place of peace, he said, circling his hands, his roll up making a smoky trail. —But you two … always bring … a kind of endless nasty fight, into our midst.
Toby licked the wine from his hands and pointed to the centre of the table.
—Butter, is that the secret thing? That’s shit, he said.
—What secret? Libby said, smiling.
—Is it just cleaning? I said. —Where’s Freya?
Richard frowned, and Libby looked away, and the Family chewed and swallowed.
I crawled under the table. Libby lifted Toby down. He nudged me with a fist and I hit him away.
—Try again, Toby said. —Say her name and see what they do.
—She can’t be a Leaver, I whispered.
—Ask again, he said.
But I was too afraid to name her to the Family and have them look away. Thing was sometimes Leavers slipped away like that, quick and silent.
Libby passed some cake dipped in honey to us. —An undertable picnic! she said. I glared at her.
The shuffle of feet and laughter faded as the Family moved to the ballroom. The mulled wine steamed on the stove.
—Thought Freya would have taken you, Toby said. —You must have done something really bad. What did you do to make her a Leaver?
I lay down on the icy stone.
—What was her name, that last Leaver? I whispered.
Toby scowled at me. Getting each other into trouble was our favourite game.
—Really, I said. —I forgot. I won’t tell.
—Brida, he said.
Her Foxlowe name. When she came, it was something long, an E name, I tried to remember.
Toby dug a bogey out of his nose and wiped it on the stone. —Valentina didn’t like her, he added.
—Freya neither.
—Maybe Freya went to tell her off.
—Yes, I said.
—Let’s get some clothes and food and stuff and go after her! he said.
—Shut up! She’ll come back!
Toby pinched me hard. It was to say Sorry and There, because you shouted at me and I was trying to be nice to you, and It might be true what I said, so get ready, all in one red