The Giver of Stars

20

‘Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?’

‘Yes.’

‘All like ours?’

‘I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.’

‘Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?’

‘A blighted one.’

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Word had got round by morning, and a few folk took the trouble to walk down to the library and say how crazy the whole thing was, that they didn’t believe ill of Margery and that it was a darn shame the police were treating her so. But a whole lot more didn’t, and Alice felt those whispered discussions all the way from their little cabin by Split Creek. She covered her own anxiety with activity. She sent Sven home, promising him she would look after the hens and the mule, and Sven, having enough sensitivity to know that it would not be good for them to be seen sleeping under the same roof, agreed. Though both knew he would probably be back by nightfall, unable to sit alone with his fears.

‘I know how everything runs,’ she said, shovelling an egg and four slices of bacon that would remain untouched onto his plate. ‘Been here long enough. Margery will be out in a blink. And I’ll take her over some fresh clothes to the jailhouse in the meantime.’

‘That jail’s no place for a woman,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, we’ll have her out in no time.’

She sent the librarians out on their normal routes that morning, checking the ledgers and helping load the saddlebags. Nobody questioned her authority, as if they were just grateful to have someone taking charge. Beth and Kathleen asked her to convey their good wishes. And then she locked the library, climbed onto Spirit, with the bag of Margery’s fresh clothes, and rode over to the jail under a clear, brisk sky.

‘Good morning,’ she said to the jailer, a thin man with a weary look, whose huge ring of keys threatened to bring down his trousers. ‘I’ve come to bring Margery O’Hare a change of clothes.’

He looked her up and down and sniffed, his nose wrinkling. ‘You got your slip?’

‘A slip of what?’

‘From the sheriff. Allowing you to see the prisoner.’

‘I don’t have a slip.’

‘Then you don’t get in.’ He blew his nose noisily into a handkerchief.

Alice stood for a moment, colour prickling her cheeks. Then she straightened her shoulders. ‘Sir. You are holding a woman who is heavy with child in the most unsanitary of circumstances. The very least I would expect you to do is to allow her a change of clothes. What kind of a gentleman are you?’

He had the grace to look a little discomfited.

‘What is it? You think I’m going to smuggle her in a metal file? A gun, perhaps? She’s a woman with child. Here, Officer. Let me show you what I’m planning to hand over to the poor girl. There, a fresh cotton blouse. And here, some wool stockings. You want to go through the bag? You can check, a fresh set of undergarments –’

‘All right, all right,’ said the jailer, holding up a palm. ‘Put ’em back in the bag. You get ten minutes, okay? And next time I want a slip.’

‘Of course. Thank you so much, Officer. That’s very kind of you.’

Alice tried to maintain this air of confidence as she followed him down the steps into the confines of the holding area. The jailer opened a heavy metal gate, his keys rattling, flicked through them until he found another, and opened another gate onto a small corridor, which was lined with four cells. The air was stale and foul down there, and the only light was a sliver from a narrow horizontal window at the top of each cell. As her eyes adjusted to the light she saw shadowy movement in the cells at the left.

‘Hers is the one on the right with the sheet on it,’ he said, and turned to leave, locking the gate and checking it with a rattle, so that her heart rattled with it against her ribs.

‘Well, hello, pretty girl,’ said a male voice from the shadows.

She didn’t look at him.

‘Margery?’ she whispered, walking up to the bars. There was a silence, then she saw the sheet pull back a few inches and Margery stared back from the other side. She was pale, her eyes shadowed. Behind her stood a narrow bunk with a lumpen, stained mattress, and a metal pot in the corner of the room. As Alice stood, something scuttled across the floor.

‘Are you … all right?’ She tried not to let her face reveal her shock.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I brought you some things. Thought you might like a change of clothes. I’ll bring you more tomorrow. Here.’ She began to pull the items from the bag, one by one, feeding them through the bars. ‘There’s a bar of soap, and a toothbrush, and I – well, I brought you my bottle of scent. I thought you might like to feel …’ She faltered. The idea seemed ridiculous now.

‘You got something for me there, pretty girl? I’m real lonesome over here.’

She turned her back, away from him. ‘Anyway.’ She lowered her voice. ‘There’s some cornbread and an apple in the leg of your drawers. I wasn’t sure whether they’d feed you. Everything is fine at home. I’ve fed Charley and the hens and you’re not to worry about anything. It will all be just as you like when you get home.’

‘Where’s Sven?’

‘He had to go to work. But he’s coming by later.’

‘He okay?’

‘He’s a little shaken up, actually. Everybody is.’

‘Hey! Hey, come over here! I wanna show you something!’

Alice leaned forward, so that her forehead touched the bars of the cell door. ‘He told us what happened. With the McCullough man.’

Margery closed her eyes for a minute. Her fingers looped around a bar and tightened briefly. ‘I never set out to hurt no one, Alice.’ Margery’s voice cracked.

‘Of course you didn’t. You did what anyone would have done.’ Alice was firm. ‘Anyone with half a brain. It’s called self-defence.’

‘Hey! Hey! Stop your yammering and come over here, girl. You got something for me, huh? Cos I got something for you.’

Alice turned, her face a fury, and placed her hands on her hips. ‘Oh, do shut up! I’m trying to talk to my friend! For goodness’ sake!’

There was a brief silence, and then, from the other cell, a whinny of laughter. ‘Yeah, do shut up! She’s tryin’ to talk to her friend!’

The two men immediately began arguing among themselves, their voices lifting as the air turned blue.

‘I can’t stay in here,’ Margery said quietly.

Alice was shaken by how Margery looked after only one night in this place, as if all the fight had seeped out of her. ‘Well, we’re going to work this out. You are not on your own, and we are not going to let anything happen to you.’

Margery looked at her with weary eyes. She set her mouth in a thin line, as if she were stopping herself from speaking.

Alice placed her fingers over Margery’s, trying to grip her hand. ‘It will all sort itself out. You just try to rest, and eat something, and I’ll be back tomorrow.’

It seemed to take Margery a minute to register what she was saying. She nodded, shifted her gaze to Alice, and then, with a hand on her belly, she moved back to the floor, where she slid slowly down the wall and sat down.

Alice rapped on the metal lock until she had the guard’s attention. He rose heavily from his chair and let her out, closing the gate and eyeing the sheet behind her, from which Margery’s shoulder was just visible.

‘Now,’ said Alice. ‘I will be back tomorrow. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to get a slip, but I’m sure there will be no objections to a woman providing basic hygiene and assistance to a mother in waiting. That’s just decency. And I may not have been here very long but I do know that Kentucky people are the most decent of people.’

The guard looked at her, as if unsure how to respond.

‘Anyway,’ she said, before he could think too hard about it. ‘I brought you a piece of cornbread to say thank you for being so … flexible. It’s a rotten situation, which will hopefully be sorted out very soon, and in the meantime I am much obliged for your kindness, Mr …?’

The guard blinked heavily. ‘Dulles.’

‘Officer Dulles. There you go.’

‘Deputy.’

‘Deputy Dulles. I do beg your pardon.’ She handed him the cornbread, wrapped in a napkin. ‘Oh,’ she said, as he opened it. ‘And I’ll want that napkin back. If you could just give it to me tomorrow when I bring the next lot, that would be lovely. Just fold it up. Thank you so much.’ Before he could respond, she turned and walked briskly out of the jailhouse.

Sven hired a lawyer from Louisville, selling his grandfather’s silver fob watch to raise the money. The man attempted to demand a more reasonable setting of the bail money, but was refused in the baldest of terms. The girl was a murderer, the answer came, from a known family of murderers, and the state would not be satisfied with knowing she was out and free to do the same again. Even when a small crowd gathered outside the sheriff’s office to protest, he was unbending, stating that they could shout all they liked, but it was his job to uphold the law and that was what he was going to do, and if it was their father who had been murdered while going about his lawful business, they might think again.

‘Well, the good news is,’ the lawyer said, as he climbed back into his car, ‘state of Kentucky hasn’t executed a woman since 1868. Let alone a pregnant one.’ This fact didn’t seem to make Sven feel much better.

‘What are we going to do now?’ he said, as he and Alice walked back from the jailhouse.

‘We keep going,’ said Alice. ‘We keep everything going as normal and wait for somebody to see sense.’

But six weeks passed, and nobody did see sense. Margery remained in the jailhouse even as various other miscreants came and went (and were, in some cases, returned). Attempts to transfer her to a women’s prison were rebuffed, and in truth Alice felt that if Margery had to stay locked up it was probably better for her to be where they could stop by and see her than to be somewhere in the city where nobody would know her and where she would be surrounded by the noise and fumes of a world completely alien to her.

So Alice rode to the jailhouse every day with a tin of still-warm cornbread (she had pulled the recipe from one of the library books and could now bake it without even looking) or pie or whatever else she had to hand, and had become something of a favourite with the guards. Now nobody ever mentioned slips but merely handed back the previous day’s napkin and motioned her through with barely a word. With Sven, they were a little stickier, because his size tended to make other men nervous. Along with food she would bring a change of undergarments, woollen sweaters, if needed, and a book, although the jail was so dark in the basement that there were only a few hours a day in which Margery could see to read. And nearly every evening when Alice finished up at the library she would head home to the cabin in the woods, sit at the table with Sven, and they would tell each other that this thing would be sorted out eventually, no doubt, and Margery would resemble herself once she was out in the fresh air again, and neither of them would believe a word the other was saying, until he left, and she would go to bed to lie awake staring at the ceiling until dawn.

That year, it was as if they had missed spring completely. One minute it was frozen, and then it was as if the rains had washed away a whole couple of months because Lee County slammed abruptly into a full-on heatwave. The monarch butterflies returned, the weeds rose on the verges, waist high under blossoming dogwoods, and Alice borrowed one of Margery’s wide-brimmed leather hats and wore a handkerchief around her neck to stop herself burning, and slapped at the biting creatures on her horse’s neck with the buckle of her reins.

Alice and Fred spent as much time together as they could, but they didn’t talk too much about Margery. Once they had done their best to meet her practical needs, nobody knew what to say.

The coroner’s inquest had found that Clem McCullough had died from a catastrophic injury to the back of his skull, probably caused by a blow to the back of his head or by falling onto a rock. Unfortunately the decomposition of the body did not allow for a more accurate conclusion. Margery had been due to testify at the coroner’s court, but an angry crowd had built up outside it and, given her condition, it was decreed that it would not be wise for her to enter.

The closer she drew to her due date, the more frustrated Sven had become, railing at the jailhouse deputy until he had been barred from visiting for a week – it would have been longer, but Sven was liked in town, and everyone knew nerves were getting to him. Margery had grown milk-pale, and her hair hung down in a dirty plait; she ate the food Alice proffered with a kind of detached observance, as if she would really rather not but she understood that she was obliged to do so. There was not a time that Alice visited her when it didn’t seem that having Margery stuck in a cell was a crime against nature: a flat-out reversal of how everything should be. Everything felt wrong while she was locked away, the mountains empty, the library missing some vital piece. Even Charley was listless, pacing backwards and forwards along the rail, or just standing, his huge ears at half mast, his pale muzzle lowered halfway to the ground.

Sometimes Alice waited until she was alone on the long ride back to the cabin and, shielded by the trees and the silence, cried huge sobs of fear and frustration. Tears she knew Margery would not cry for herself. Nobody spoke of what would happen when the baby came. Nobody spoke of what would happen to Margery afterwards. The whole situation was so surreal and the child was still an abstraction, a thing that few of them could imagine into existence.

Alice rose at 4.30 a.m. every day, slung herself across Spirit and disappeared into the densely forested mountainside laden with saddlebags so that she’d done the first mile before she’d had a chance to wake fully. She greeted everyone she passed by name, usually with some piece of information that might be pertinent to them – ‘Did you get that tractor repair book, Jim? And did your wife like the short stories?’ – and would place her horse in front of Van Cleve’s car whenever she saw it, so that he was forced to stop, engine idling in the road, while she stared him down. ‘Sleep well at night, do you?’ she would call, her voice piercing the still air. ‘Feeling pleased with yourself?’ His cheeks blown out and purple, he would wrench his car around her.

She was not afraid to be in the cabin alone, but Fred had helped her set more traps to alert her should anyone come close. She was reading one night when she heard the jingle of the bell string they had strung between the trees. With lightning reflexes, she reached back to the fireplace and pulled down the rifle, standing and cocking it on her shoulder in one fluid movement, placing the two barrels against the narrow gap in the door.

She squinted, trying to make out whether there was any movement outside and remained preternaturally still, scanning the darkness a moment or two longer, before she let her shoulders drop.

‘Just deer,’ she muttered to herself and lowered the rifle.

It was only as she left the next morning that she found the note that had been slipped under the door overnight with its heavy black scrawl.

You do not belong here. Go home.

It wasn’t the first, and she bit down hard on the feelings the notes provoked. Margery would have laughed at them, so that was what she did. She screwed the paper into a ball, threw it into the fire, and cursed under her breath. And tried not to think about where home might be, these days.

Fred stood beside the barn in the dimming light chopping wood – one of the few tasks that still defeated Alice. She found the weight and heft of the old axe unnerving, and rarely managed to split the logs along the grain, usually leaving the blade wedged at an awkward angle, stuck fast, until Fred returned. He, in contrast, hit each piece with a clean, rhythmic motion, his arms circling in a great sweep, the axe slicing each into halves and then quarters, pausing each three strikes, to hold it loosely in one hand while with the other he tossed the new logs onto the pile. She watched him for a moment, waiting until he stopped again, drew a forearm across his brow, and looked up at where she stood in the doorway, glass in hand.

‘That for me?’

She took a few steps forward and handed it to him.

‘Thank you. There’s more here than I thought.’

‘Good of you to do it.’

He took a long swig of the water and let out a breath before he handed back the glass. ‘Well. Can’t have you getting cold in winter. And they dry out quicker if you cut them smaller. Sure you don’t want to have another go?’

Something in her expression seemed to stop him.

‘You okay, Alice?’

She smiled and nodded but even as she did so she barely convinced herself. So she told him the thing she had put off telling for a full week. ‘My parents have written. To say I can come home.’

Fred’s smile evaporated.

‘They’re not happy, but they say I can’t stay here alone and they’re prepared to chalk the marriage up to youthful error. My aunt Jean has invited me to stay with her in Lowestoft. She needs help with her children and everyone agrees that this would be a good way of … well … getting me back to England without making too much of a scene. Apparently we can address all the legal matters from a suitable distance.’

‘What’s Lowestoft?’

‘A little town on the North Sea coast. Not exactly my first choice, but … Well, I suppose I’d have some independence at least.’ And be away from my parents, she added silently. She swallowed. ‘They’re forwarding money for my passage. I told them I needed to stay for the end of Margery’s trial.’ She let out a dry laugh. ‘I’m not sure if my being friends with an accused murderer improved their opinion of me any.’

There was a long silence.

‘So you’re really leaving.’

She nodded. She couldn’t say any more. It was as if with that letter she had suddenly been reminded that her whole life here up to this point had been a fever dream. She pictured herself back in Mortlake, or in the fake-Tudor house in Lowestoft, her aunt’s polite enquiries as to her sleep, whether she was ready for a little breakfast, whether she might like to take a walk to the municipal park that afternoon. She looked down at her chapped hands, at her broken nails, at the sweater she had worn for fourteen days straight over the other layers, with its tiny fragments of hay and grass seed embedded in the yarn. She looked at her boots, with the scuffs that told of remote mountain trails, of splashing through creek beds or dismounting to make her way up narrow passes in mud, fierce sunshine or endless, endless rain. What would it be like to be that other girl again? The one with polished shoes, stockings and a tame, orderly existence? With nails that had been carefully filed, and a shampoo-and-set twice a week? No longer dismounting to relieve herself behind trees, picking apples to eat as she worked, her nostrils full of wood smoke and damp earth, but instead exchanging a few polite words with the bus conductor about whether he was sure the 238 stopped outside the railway station.

Fred was watching her. There was something so pained and raw in his expression that she felt hollowed out by it. He hid it, reaching for the axe. ‘Well, I guess I might as well do the rest of these while I’m here.’

‘Margery will need them. When she comes home.’

He nodded, his eyes on the blade. ‘Yup.’

Alice waited a moment. ‘I’ll fix you something to eat … If you’re still happy to stay.’

He nodded, his eyes still downcast. ‘That would be good.’

She waited a moment longer, then turned and walked back into Margery’s cabin with the empty glass, and the sound of each whack of the blade splintering the wood behind her made her flinch, as if it were not just the wood being rent in two.

The food was terrible, as food cooked without heart often is, but Fred was too kind to comment on it, and Alice had little to say, so the meal passed in an unusual silence, accompanied only by the rhythmic croaks of the crickets and frogs outside. He thanked her for her efforts and lied that it had been delicious, and she took the dirty plates and watched as he stood, straightening stiffly as if the wood chopping had taken more out of him than he’d let on. He hesitated, then walked out onto the stoop, where she could see his shadow through the mesh of the screen door, looking out at the mountainside.

I’m so sorry, Fred, she told him silently. I don’t want to leave you.

She turned back to the plates and began scrubbing furiously, biting back tears.

‘Alice?’ Fred appeared at the door.

‘Mm?’

‘Come outside,’ he said.

‘I have to do the pl –’

‘Come. I want to show you something.’

The night was possessed of the thick darkness that comes when clouds swallow the moon and stars whole, and she could only just make him out as he motioned to the swing seat on the porch. They sat a few inches apart, not touching but linked by their thoughts, which, underneath, wound around each other’s like ivy.

‘What are we looking at?’ she said, trying surreptitiously to wipe her eyes.

‘Just wait,’ came Fred’s voice, from beside her.

Alice sat in the dark, the seat creaking under their combined weight, her thoughts tumbling as she considered her future. What could she do if she didn’t go home? She had little money, certainly not enough to find a house. She was not even sure she would have a job – who was to say that the library would continue without Margery’s fierce steerage? More importantly, she could hardly stay for ever in this small town, with the looming cloud of Van Cleve, his rage and her ill-fated marriage hanging over her. He had got to Margery, and he would surely get to her too, one way or another.

And yet.

And yet the thought of leaving this place – of no longer riding these mountains, accompanied only by the sound of Spirit’s hoofs and the glinting, dappled light of the forest, the thought of no longer laughing with the other librarians, stitching quietly beside Sophia or tapping her foot as Izzy’s voice soared into the rafters filled her with a grief that was visceral. She loved it here. She loved the mountains and the people and the never-ending sky. She loved feeling as if she was doing a job that meant something, testing herself each day, changing people’s lives word by word. She had earned every one of her bruises and blisters, had built a new Alice over the frame of one with whom she had never felt entirely comfortable. She would simply shrink back if she returned, and she could already taste how easily it would happen. Baileyville would become a little interlude, fade into another episode that her parents, tight-lipped, would prefer not to refer to. She would pine for Kentucky for a while, and pull herself together. Then, after a year or two perhaps, she would be allowed to divorce and she would eventually meet a tolerable man who didn’t begrudge her complicated past, and settle down. In some tolerable part of Lowestoft.

And then there was Fred. The thought of being parted from him made her stomach cramp. How was she supposed to bear the prospect of never seeing him again? Never seeing his face light up simply because she had walked into the room? Never catching his eye in a crowd, feeling the subtle heat that came with standing alongside a man she knew wanted her more than any other? She felt that every day they were together now, even when no words were spoken – the unspoken conversation that ran, like an undercurrent, under everything they did. She had never felt so connected, so sure of somebody, had never wanted somebody else’s happiness so keenly. How was she supposed to give that up?

‘Alice.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Look up.’

Alice’s breath stopped in her throat. The mountainside opposite was alive with light, a wall of glinting fairy lights, three-dimensional among the trees, winking and twinkling as they shifted, illuminating the shadows of the inky dark. She blinked at it, disbelieving, her mouth open.

‘Fireflies,’ he said.

‘Fireflies?’

‘Lightning bugs. Whatever you want to call them. They come every year.’

Alice couldn’t quite take in what she was seeing. The clouds parted and the fireflies glinted, mingled, traversed upwards from the illuminated shadows of the trees, and their million luminous white bodies melded seamlessly with the starry night sky above, so that it seemed for that moment that the whole world was carpeted with tiny golden lights. It was such a ridiculous, unlikely, insanely beautiful sight that Alice found herself laughing out loud, both hands pressed to her face.

‘Do they do this often?’ she said. She could just make out his smile.

‘Nope. A week, maybe, every year. Two at most. Never seen them quite this beautiful, though.’

A huge sob rose from Alice’s chest, something to do with overwhelming emotion and, perhaps, impending loss. The absence at the heart of the cabin, and the man beside her whom she couldn’t have. Before she could think what she was doing, she reached across in the dark and found Fred’s hand. His fingers closed around hers, warm, strong, entwining, as if they were moulded to each other. They sat like that for some time, gazing at the glittering spectacle.

‘I … I know why you need to go.’ Fred’s voice broke into the silence, halting, his words careful. ‘I just need you to know that it will be awful hard when you do.’

‘I’m in a bit of a bind, Fred.’

‘I know that.’

She took a deep, shaking breath. ‘It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

There was a long pause. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. Fred squeezed her hand and they sat for a while, feeling the soft night breezes around them.

‘You know what’s really wonderful about those fireflies?’ he said, finally, as if they had been having a whole other conversation. ‘Sure, they live for just a few weeks. Not much at all in the grand scheme of things. But while they’re there, the beauty of them, well, it takes your breath away.’ He ran a thumb over the ridge of her knuckles. ‘You get to see the world in a whole new way. And then you have that beautiful picture burned onto the inside of your head. To carry it wherever you go. And never forget it.’

Before he had even said the next words Alice felt the tear begin to slide down her cheek.

‘I worked it out sitting here. Maybe that’s the thing we need to understand, Alice. That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.’

There was a silence before he spoke again.

‘Maybe just to know that something this beautiful exists is all we can really ask for.’

She wrote to her parents confirming her return to England, and Fred drove the letter to the post office, on the way to delivering a young colt to Booneville. She saw the stiffening of his jaw as he registered the address and hated herself for it. She stood, arms folded in her white linen shirtsleeves, as he climbed into the back of his dusty pick-up truck, the rattling trailer attached to the back and the horse kicking impatiently to be gone. She watched them head the whole way up Split Creek until the truck was out of view.

Alice squinted at the empty road for a while, at the mountains that rose on each side of it, disappearing into the haze of summer, at the buzzards that wheeled lazily and impossibly high above them, her hand shielding her brow. She let out a long, shaky breath. Finally she dusted her hands on her breeches and turned to walk back into the library.