The Black Sheep's Return. Elizabeth Beacon
So why did it feel as if she was on sabbatical from her duty once she’d plaited her hair a little clumsily and tried to put her foot to the floor once more? Pain shot through her as sharp and almost sickening as it had been last night when she first injured herself. Fool, she castigated herself as she tottered across the room in search of the next necessity of life and peered out of the door for a privy or conveniently secluded bush to relieve herself behind, since the problem was becoming urgent. Spotting a rustic shelter some yards upwind of the house, she blessed the fact she hadn’t tumbled into his cesspit last night and told herself Lady Freya Buckle could not afford to expect comfort in this most basic form of country life. She hopped towards the honeysuckle-covered shelter with her flapping bedcover grasped to her body with one hand, while she used the other to prop herself upright with a stout stick left leaning by the back door for her with a consideration she refused to find disarming.
It didn’t matter if he had been sensitive enough to her needs to let her get on with learning to do as much for herself as she could. Yet Lady Freya seemed to be fading into a stiff caricature of herself as she embraced being Perdita instead. She reflected on William Shakespeare’s story of a foundling princess left to be brought up by peasants. How would she have been now if she had been taken from Bowland Castle in some fanciful start of her father’s that her mother had been unfaithful and his despised daughter was not his child? A nagging suspicion she might be relieved not to be Lady Freya Buckle seemed unthinkable, considering her mother brought her up so proud of the ancient name she bore.
Luckily the privy turned out to be surprisingly clean and smelt of tarred wood and earth as much as it did of humanity. Observing the strange device her host had rigged up for his family, she shovelled what looked like dried earth into the hole after herself and hoped that would cover everything, then limped back towards the cottage feeling considerably better, if now left with one less distraction from being very hungry indeed.
‘We’re having Percy for breakfast,’ the boy popped out of the trees at the other side of the clearing to inform her mysteriously and the little girl doggedly caught up with a squeal of triumph, as if she spent most of her life following her big brother about just in time to watch him disappear again.
‘Who is Percy?’ Freya asked distractedly as the delicious cooking smells emanating from the direction he had just come from began to tease her eager nostrils.
‘One of last year’s piglets,’ he told her with a resigned shrug for the realities of cottage life that left Freya wondering if she really wanted to know the name of her food before she ate it.
‘It smells delicious,’ she managed as hunger fought her scruples for at least ten seconds as her mouth watered at the scent of breakfast and wood-smoke.
‘It is ’licious,’ Sally stated emphatically, with a frown in her direction, as if it was her fault they weren’t already eating. ‘Papa said we was to fetch you,’ she accused and Freya realised it would be no easy task to win over the female so firmly in possession of the cottage and its owner’s heart.
‘That was kind of him. I am very hungry indeed after missing my luncheon and my dinner yesterday,’ she said with unfeigned horror.
‘Not even any supper?’ the little girl asked with a slight softening towards this unwanted guest she had better not take for granted, Freya decided ruefully.
‘By then I was too tired to care,’ Freya confirmed and could almost see the child brace herself against nodding sympathetically.
‘We’re not tired and we’re very hungry indeed, since Papa had to light a fire in the woods to cook on because we weren’t supposed to disturb you,’ the boy asserted with a cool stare that accused her of causing a delay he found nigh intolerable.
‘And yet you still did so?’ she said just as coolly and met his uncannily direct blue eyes equal to equal.
‘I never saw a dead person,’ he explained as if that trumped every idea of polite consideration his long-suffering parent had tried to teach him.
‘Oddly enough you still have not done so, have you?’ she parried.
‘No, unless you feel a bit ill?’ he suggested as if she might, out of consideration for those who were kind enough to delay their breakfast for her.
‘Not in the least,’ she said airily and discovered it was true. ‘Just a bit sore and my ankle hurts,’ she admitted as she hobbled along and even little Sally had to slow down to match her pace.
‘It could be worse than you think,’ the boy suggested hopefully.
‘Why are you so eager to see a dead person?’ she asked.
‘’Cause my mama is one and I can’t really remember what she looked like no more,’ he said crossly, as if he blamed her for asking, but was still too young to lie.
‘I’m very sorry about that. My mama is dead too, and I miss her every day of my life, but at least I remember her. I hadn’t realised how lucky I was until I spoke to you, Master Whoever-you-are.’
‘That’s not my name,’ he said, reluctantly impressed she shared his motherless state.
‘He’s called Hal,’ the boy’s sister said impatiently, as if everyone ought to know that and she was a very ignorant visitor after all.
‘My name is Henry Craven, Master Henry Craven to you.’
‘Very well then, Master Henry,’ Freya said with the shadow of an elegant curtsy that was all she could manage with her staff clutched in her hand and an ankle that was sure to let her down if she bent any lower.
‘Who are you, then?’
‘Miss Perdita…’ Freya cast about for a suitable alias and found inspiration all around her. ‘Rowan,’ she finally came out with and decided she might like being Miss Rowan of nowhere in particular, if she wasn’t dressed in a bedcover and someone else’s underwear whilst hobbling along like a ninety-year-old invalid to eat a breakfast her hosts were personally acquainted with before it became a tasty meal.
‘It’s a pretty name,’ Sally approved with a smile of feminine conspiracy she must have acquired by instinct and years of manipulating her father mercilessly.
‘Thank you, and so is yours, Miss Craven.’
‘Papa, we found her,’ Sally cried as if they had been looking much of the day and Freya tried not to envy her host the confident joy in the little girl’s voice at the sight of him.
It would be easy to love the spirited and naughty little girl, Freya decided wistfully. Their father seemed to be raising his children as individuals, not patterns of childhood silence kept strictly away from the adult world her own father had expected children to be. She supposed it was easier to gently teach the realities of life when you lived in a hovel, not a mansion, and dined on what you could grow or raise, like poor Percy the pig.
‘Your breakfast, ma’am,’ Orlando said with a piratical bow as he handed her a trencher of rough bread topped with bacon, mushrooms from the forest and her share of a kind of omelette he seemed to have made with the addition of herbs and tips of various greens from the large garden he must have hacked out of the forest.
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said as she sank on to the tree stump they had saved for her with as much dignity as she could manage, which wasn’t much as she tried to ease herself down without jarring her foot. ‘It smells delicious.’
‘Your fork, ma’am,’ he added with the wicked parody of a liveried and impassive footman that made her wonder anew about his real place in the world.
‘What a delightful luxury, Mr Craven,’ she said lightly as she took the two-pronged, freshly carved wooden one he must have whittled especially for her.
‘Then eat, Miss…’ he said, trailing off as he realised she hadn’t given her surname last night.
‘She’s called Miss Rowan, Papa, had you forgot?’ his son piped between