Bella at Midnight (4 page)

M
y first memory is of war.

It was late summer, near to harvesttime, and it was hot. I was sprawled in the dust of the yard, playing with a kitten. I had a little twig and was drawing it along the ground so that the kitten would chase after it and pounce upon it. Will had showed me how to do this. “That's how they learn to catch mice,” he'd said. I thought it very droll how the kitten would follow wherever I led him.

I was much absorbed in this game when I began to hear shouting from the cottages nearby and then the startling sound of the church bell, ringing the alarm—
clang! clang! clang! clang!
I put my hands over my ears.

Around me the whole village seemed to fly into action, and there was such a lot of noise, with the bells and the screaming and the barking of dogs! I saw men sprinting away toward the upper pasture to drive in the sheep. Mama came running into the yard, telling me to stay where I was, her voice uncommonly hard. I thought she was angry with me, and so I sat there, whimpering and clutching my kitten, while Mama ran about calling for Will to come in from the garden and pulling things off the shelf and putting them into a sack. Then she got baby Margaret out of her cradle, took firm hold of my hand, and told me—in that stern voice again—to stop crying. Soldiers were coming, she said. We must make haste.

I had a little poppet that Mama had made for me out of rags, and I was very fond of her because her cross-stitched eyes were blue, like mine, and her yarn hair was like to my color, which is reddish gold. And I remember asking Mama to go get the poppet, which I had left in the cottage somewhere, but she said we had not the time to look for it.

We joined the stream of people and animals making their way toward the great entrance to the castle. A few men rode horseback; others pulled handcarts piled high with household goods—even small pieces of furniture—not to mention blankets and pots and hams and farm implements and all such things as were deemed precious.

I don't know how old I was then—four or five, I would guess. I know I was small, and all I could see were the legs of people and animals. Everyone was pushing. I grew terrified that the crowd would crush me, and so I started screaming for Mama to pick me up. She couldn't, of course—she had Margaret to carry, and the sack of food—so she just held on to me tighter. I had the kitten in my other hand, and it was trying to get away. I was very unhappy.

“I'll take her, Mama,” Will said. He grabbed me around the waist and swung me up onto his back to “ride horse” as he sometimes did at home. It was at that moment—as I grabbed Will's shoulders to keep from falling—that I dropped the kitten!

I screamed and screamed, but the crowd kept surging forward. There was no going back, and my heart just burst open with pain! I wailed with all the force in my little body until a man behind us whacked me across the backside and ordered me to “stop that noise!”

No one had ever struck me before, and I was stunned.

Just then there were shouts of “to the right, to the right,” and the crowd grew even more compressed—solid bodies, we were, and sliding sideways. Ahead I could see the cause of it: the duke's men were riding out. A long file of knights and foot soldiers streamed from the castle, ready to take on the raiding party. The villagers cheered.

Once inside the castle walls, Mama found us a place in the courtyard, crowded already with people and their animals and belongings. We would sleep that night in the great hall, but as the day was fine, we stayed outdoors till dark. Papa was busy helping with the sheep.

Prince Julian came looking for us shortly after we arrived. He was dressed splendidly in black and gold, with the royal coat of arms upon his tunic and a real sword at his belt. He was seven or eight, I suppose, and smitten with war fever. He told us breathlessly how he had strapped on his cousin's spurs and helped him don his armor. Then he saw that I had been crying.

“What's the matter with Bella?”

I hid my face in Mama's lap and would not look at him.

“She lost her kitten in the crowd,” Mama said, stroking my hair. “Poor wee thing! Then Robert Miller slapped her when she cried.”

Hearing her speak of it, I wailed even louder. I wept because the soldiers were coming. I wept because we had been forced from our home and had left my poppet behind. And I wept because the miller had hurt me. But most of all, I wept because I had lost my kitten—and it had been
my fault
! I had not understood that I had to protect it; I had not understood that it could die! And so, because I had been careless, that soft, living creature, which only moments before had been playing so charmingly in our yard, was now crushed and ruined! And no one—
no one
—had the power to bring it back! Oh, how it frightened me, that terrible first experience of guilt and death!

Julian sat down beside me and took me onto his lap. “Hush, Princess Bella,” he whispered, “and I will tell you a story about your kitten.” I nestled into his embrace and began to feel safe again.

My kitten was a twin, Julian explained, so he was known as “Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties.” His brother was always good. He never bit or scratched. He caught lots of mice but always disposed of them properly. He had no fleas and kept his whiskers clean. He was, in other words, of no interest whatsoever.

Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties was just the opposite. He was a perfect rascal and had one hair-raising adventure after another. One day, when he was still only a tiny kitten, he was accidentally dropped into a crowd of people hurrying into a castle. But he was quick on his paws, our hero! The moment he landed, he leaped nimbly onto the back of an ugly man (who was in the habit of smacking poor, innocent little girls) and dug his claws deep into the man's back so that he shrieked like a demon and flung Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties into the bushes, where he landed safely.

Then, as he was hungry and as he thought it likely that someone (being in a hurry) might have left some cream in a butter churn, he hurried off to investigate. Naturally he found one straightaway. He took a flying leap from a windowsill and knocked over the churn, making a terrible mess all over the floor. But being a perfect rascal, Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties didn't care. He just crawled inside, covering himself from head to toe in thick, delicious cream, then proceeded to lick off every bit of it.

After a while he decided it might be well to escape before his crime was detected, so he went trundling out of the house—though not very gracefully, since his tummy had grown so fat and round by then, from eating all that cream, that he could barely walk. Alas, this particular house was at the top of a rise, and Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties lost his balance. Before he could say “meow!” he had rolled tummy over tail all the way to the bottom of the hill!

That seemed as good a place as any to curl up and take a nap. So that's exactly what he did.

“What will he do when he wakes up?” I asked, calmer now.

“He will go help my uncle's knights fight the bad soldiers from Brutanna!”

“How will he do that?”

“Well—I must think. Wait, I know! He will jump down at them from a tree, and he will land on top of their helmets and peer in through the visors—upside down, you see, like this—and hiss at them!” He demonstrated and made me laugh. “And the soldiers will be so astonished, they will scream and fall off their horses.”

“And run away!”

“Yes.”

“And will they make him a knight—Kitty-Pair-of-Kitties?”

“Yes, of course they will.”

“Good,” I said.

That night the sky glowed red, and we smelled smoke in the air. One of the duke's men, who had been standing watch on the ramparts, told us the raiders had torched the village of Seddington, some miles away to the east. “But the duke'll send 'em packing soon enough,” the man said.

“That may be,” grumbled Thomas, one of our neighbors. “But while the duke is busy fighting over yonder, who's to stop some
more
of 'em from coming over here? They're not addlebrained, you know! They'd like nothing better than to set fire to our fields and burn our village, just to deprive the duke of the income.”

Thomas was a sour man, always arguing and stirring up trouble, and so he was called “Thomas the Quarreler,” to distinguish him from Thomas Baker.

“Then may God protect us,” Papa said.

“As He protected the good folk of Seddington?” Thomas snapped. “Truly, Martin, I do not think God has taken any notice of us these last hundred years and more.”

“For shame, Tom!” Mama said. “God
always
watches over us!”

“Perhaps you are right, Beatrice,” he said. “Only, would you not think, as He looks down from heaven, that God would begin to grow
weary
of so much death and destruction? Raise a hand to help us down here? Might this not be a good time for that great miracle of His we've been hearing so much about these last few years—the Worthy Knight, who will appear on the field of battle all aglow with heavenly fire, and bring an end to the war? Where
is
he, Beatrice? He is long overdue, don't you think?”

“He may come this very night, Tom, or the next. He will come when God sends him.”

“Nonsense,” he grumbled. “God is asleep!”

“Thomas!” Papa said. “Mind your tongue! It is a sin to speak thus, and you will bring God's punishment upon us.”

“God has
already
punished us,” Thomas said. Then he turned away and said no more.

It was late and had been full dark for some time. The duke's servants had lit the torches several hours before. Now, as I lay upon my bed of rushes on the floor, nestled close to Mama, I gazed up at the cavernous space of the great hall, with its giant beams touched by the warm glow of the torchlight. I turned to look at the marvelous tapestry that hung above us, with pictures of hunters and animals and trees upon it, only I could no longer see them in the dim light. And then my eyelids grew heavy and my body softened, and I no longer listened to the conversation of the grown-ups. I was young and I was tired, and so I slept.

I woke while it was still dark. All about me people were moaning and weeping, and I heard angry voices saying “all gone” and “everything” and “may the devil take them.” Over and over I heard the word
Brutanna
, spoken like a curse, like a bad taste you spit out of your mouth.

The air reeked of smoke and other foul smells I could not name. I began to cough and wipe my eyes.

“Mama?” I said. But she just patted my hair and said to go back to sleep. Her voice was husky and strange, as though she had been crying.

And then it was morning, and the duke's men had returned. There was not so much smoke anymore, but the smell was still in the air—it would not entirely go away for many months.

I remember little after that—only a few terrible images. But each of them is clear and vivid and distinct in my memory, like the scenes I saw depicted on the great tapestries up at the castle.

I see the smoldering ruins of our village: the network of roads and lanes still there, but where cottages had once stood, only piles of charred beams.

I remember the stinking, blackened fields and poor Mad Walter, all coated with ash, combing the stubble in search of something to eat.

I remember a man, lying in one of the lanes, still as a stone and covered in blood. Mama pulled me away from the sight, but I heard others say it was old Henry Carpenter, who had lost his wife and three children to the pox so many years before, and had never married again but only lived alone with his sorrow.

I remember asking where my poppet was, and Papa saying I ought not to think of such things now, for we had lost everything. But children are not sensible creatures. Will stormed about, threatening to go to Brutanna and kill everybody there, and I wept for my poppet, and for my kitten, and for Henry Carpenter, and for all that had once been comfortable and familiar and was now destroyed.

I know not how we rebuilt our houses and the mill and the bridge and all the rest, nor how we survived that winter with our harvest gone. I know we stayed on at the duke's castle for many months, and most likely it was he who fed us. Such things are the business of grown people, who look ahead and plan and build. I only felt the terrible loss, and the nightly fear that they would come back again—those bad men, those cruel strangers.

I could not understand what had made them travel so far to burn our little village, when they did not even know us and we had never done them any harm. It was a big question for such a small girl. I never did find the answer.

W
hen Bella was six, her interest turned to fairies. She claimed to have seen them in the twilight out upon the meadow. Will told her that they were only glowworms, but Bella said no, she had watched them from up close, and they were beautiful and had golden hair and wings like dragonflies and wore silver robes, and many other particulars. I know not where she got such ideas. Not from her family, of that I am quite sure. I think she just made things up as she went along—and yet she seemed truly to believe them.