The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (2 page)

And that was enough for the driver in these lean gray years that came tumbling from the Armistice. He had children of his own to feed at home, but the war had produced a bounty of parentless ragamuffins willing to trust anybody who promised a warm meal.

A field came into view behind the house. Row upon row of earthen mounds dotted it, tiny piles of black dirt not much larger than a sack of grain. Off in the distance a tall man in overalls heaped soil upon a new mound. Influenza, it was claimed, had ravaged the foundling home.

Ravens lined the eaves of every building, watching the workman,
with inky black eyes. A few settled on the ground nearby. They picked at a mound, tugging at something under the dirt, until the workman chased them off.

The wagon creaked to a halt not far from the house. The mare snorted. The driver climbed down. He lifted the children and set them on their feet as a short balding man emerged from the house. He wore a gentleman’s tweeds under the long white coat of a tradesman, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a precisely groomed mustache.

“
Herr Doktor
,” said the driver.

“
Ja
,” said the well-dressed man. He pulled a cream-colored handkerchief from a coat pocket. It turned the color of rust as he wiped his hands clean. He nodded at the children. “What have you brought me this time?”

“You’re still paying, yes?”

The doctor said nothing. He pulled the girl’s arms, testing her muscle tone and the resilience of her skin tissues. Unceremoniously and without warning he yanked up her dirt-crusted frock to cup his hand between her legs. Her brother he grabbed roughly by the jaw, pulling his mouth open to peer inside. The youngsters’ heads received the closest scrutiny. The doctor traced every contour of their skulls, muttering to himself as he did so.

Finally he looked up at the driver, still prodding and pulling at the new arrivals. “They look thin. Hungry.”

“Of course they’re hungry. But they’re healthy. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

The adults haggled. The driver saw the girl step behind the doctor to give the towheaded boy a quick shove. He stumbled in the mud. The impact unleashed another volley of coughs and spasms. He rested on all fours, spittle trailing from his lips.

The doctor broke off in midsentence, his head snapping around to watch the boy. “What is this? That boy is ill. Look! He’s weak.”

“It’s the weather,” the driver mumbled. “Makes everyone cough.”

“I’ll pay you for the other two, but not this one,” said the doctor. “I’m not wasting my time on him.” He waved the workman over from
the field. The tall man joined the adults and children with long loping strides.

“This one is too ill,” said the doctor. “Take him.”

The workman put his hand on the sickly child’s shoulder and led him away. They disappeared behind a shed.

Money changed hands. The driver checked his horse and wagon for the return trip, eager to be away, but he kept one eye on the girl.

“Come,” said the doctor, beckoning once to the siblings with a hooked finger. He turned for the house. The older boy followed. His sister stayed behind, her eyes fixed on where the workman and sick boy had disappeared.

Clang
. A sharp noise rang out from behind the shed, like the blade of a shovel hitting something hard, followed by the softer
bump-slump
as of a grain sack dropping into soft earth. A storm of black wings slapped the air as a flock of ravens took for the sky.

The gypsy girl hurried to regain her brother. The corner of her mouth twisted up in a private little smile as she took his hand.

The driver thought about that smile all the way home.

Fewer mouths meant more food to go around.

23 October 1920

St. Pancras, London, England

T
he promise of a cleansing frost extended west, across the Channel, where the ravens of Albion felt it keenly. They knew, with the craftiness of their kind, that the easiest path to food was to steal it from others. So they circled over the city, content to leave the hard work to the scavengers below, animal and human alike.

A group of children moved through the shadows and alleys with direction and purpose, led by a boy in a blue mackintosh. The ravens followed. From their high perches along the eaves of the surrounding houses, they watched the boy in blue lead his companions to the low brick wall around a winter garden. They watched the children shimmy
over the wall. And they watched the gardener watching the children through the drapes of a second-story window.

His name was John Stephenson, and as a captain in the nascent Royal Flying Corps, he had spent the first several years of the Great War flying over enemy territory with a camera mounted beneath his Bristol F2A. That ended with a burst of Austrian antiaircraft fire. He crashed in No Man’s Land. After a long, agonizing ride in a horse-drawn ambulance, he awoke in a Red Cross field hospital, mostly intact but minus his left arm.

He’d disregarded the injury and served the Crown by staying with the Corps. Analyzing photographs required eyes and brains, not arms. By war’s end, he’d been coordinating the surveillance balloons and reconnaissance flights.

He’d spent years poring over blurry photographs with a jeweler’s loupe, studying bird’s-eye views of trenches, troop movements, and gun emplacements. But now he watched from above while a half dozen hooligans uprooted the winter rye. He would have flown downstairs and knocked their skulls together, but for the boy in the blue mackintosh. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, but there he was, excoriating the others to respect Stephenson’s property even as they ransacked his garden.

Odd little duckling, that one.

This wasn’t vandalism at work. It was hunger. But the rye was little more than a ground cover for keeping out winter-hardy weeds. And the beets and carrots hadn’t been in the ground long. The scavenging turned ugly.

A girl rooting through the deepest corner of the garden discovered a tomato excluded from the autumn crop because it had fallen and bruised. She beamed at the shriveled half-white mass. The largest boy in the group, a little monster with beady pig-eyes, grabbed her arm with both hands.

“Give it,” he said, wrenching her skin as though wringing out a towel.

She cried out, but didn’t let go of her treasure. The other children watched, transfixed in the midst of looting.

“Give it,” repeated the bully. The girl whimpered.

The boy in blue stepped forward. “Sod off,” he said. “Let her go.”

“Make me.”

The boy wasn’t small, per se, but the bully was much larger. If they tussled, the outcome was inevitable.

The others watched with silent anticipation. The girl cried. Ravens called for blood.

“Fine.” The boy rummaged in the soil along the wall behind a row of winter rye. Several moments passed. “Here,” he said, regaining his feet. One hand he kept behind his back, but with the other he offered another tomato left over from the autumn crop. It was little more than a bag of mush inside a tough papery skin. Probably a worthy find by the standards of these children. “You can have this one if you let her alone.”

The bully held out one hand, but didn’t release the sniffling girl. A reddish wheal circled her forearm where he’d twisted the flesh. He wiggled his fingers. “Give it.”

“All right,” said the smaller boy. Then he lobbed the food high overhead.

The bully pushed the girl away and craned his head back, intent on catching his prize.

The first stone caught him in the throat. The second thunked against his ear as he sprawled backwards. He was down and crying before the tomato splattered in the dirt.

The smaller boy had excellent aim. He’d ended the fight before it began.

Bloody hell.

Stephenson expected the thrower to jump the bully, to press the advantage. He’d seen it in the war, the way months of hard living could alloy hunger with fear and anger, making natural the most beastly behavior. But instead the boy turned his back on the bully to check on the girl. The matter, in his mind, was settled.

Not so for the bully. Lying in the dirt, face streaked with tears and snot, he watched the thrower with something shapeless and dark churning in his eyes.

Stephenson had seen this before, too. Rage looked the same in any soul, old or young. He left the window and ran downstairs before his garden became an exhibition hall. The bully had gained his feet when Stephenson opened the door.

One of the children yelled, “Leg it!”

The children swarmed the low brick wall where they’d entered. Some needed a boost to get over it, including the girl. The boy who had felled the bully stayed behind, pushing the stragglers atop the wall.

Seeing this reinforced Stephenson’s initial reaction. There was something special about this boy. He was shrewd, with a profound sense of honor, and a vicious fighter, too. With proper tutelage . . .

Stephenson called out. “Wait! Not so fast.”

The boy turned. He watched Stephenson approach with an air of bored disinterest. He’d been caught and didn’t pretend otherwise.

“What’s your name, lad?”

The boy’s gaze flickered between Stephenson’s eyes and the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder.

“I’m Stephenson. Captain, in point of fact.” The wind tossed Stephenson’s sleeve, waving it like a flag.

The boy considered this. He stuck his chin out, saying, “Raybould Marsh, sir.”

“You’re quite a clever lad, aren’t you, Master Marsh?”

“That’s what my mum says, sir.”

Stephenson didn’t bother to ask after the father. Another casualty of Britain’s lost generation, he gauged.

“And why aren’t you in school right now?”

Many children had abandoned school during the war, and after, to help support families bereft of fathers and older brothers. The boy wasn’t working, yet he wasn’t exactly a hooligan, either. And he had a home, by the sound of it, which was likely more than some of his cohorts had.

The boy shrugged. His body language said,
Don’t much care for school
. His mouth said, “What will you do to me?”

“Are you hungry? Getting enough to eat at home?”

The boy shook his head, then nodded.

“What’s your mum do?”

“Seamstress.”

“She works hard, I gather.”

The boy nodded again.

“To address your question: Your friends have visited extensive damage upon my plantings, so I’m pressing you into service. Know anything about gardening?”

“No.”

“Might have known not to expect much from my winter garden if you had, eh?”

The boy said nothing.

“Very well, then. Starting tomorrow, you’ll get a bob for each day spent replanting. Which you will take home to your hardworking mother.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy sounded glum, but his eyes gleamed.

“We’ll have to do something about your attitude toward education, as well.”

“That’s what my mum says, sir.”

Stephenson shooed away the ravens picking at the spilled food. They screeched to each other as they rode a cold wind, shadows upon a blackening sky.

23 October 1920

Bestwood-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, England

R
ooks, crows, jackdaws, and ravens scoured the island from south to north on their search for food. And, in the manner of their continental cousins, they were ever-present.

Except for one glade deep in the Midlands, at the heart of the ancestral holdings of the jarls of Æthelred. In some distant epoch, the skin of the world here had peeled back to reveal the great granite bones of the earth, from which spat forth a hot spring: water touched with fire and stone. No ravens had ventured there since before the Norsemen had arrived to cleave the island with their Danelaw.

Time passed. Generations of men came and went, lived and died around the spring. The jarls became earls, then dukes. The Norsemen became Normen, then Britons. They fought Saxons; they fought Saracens; they fought the Kaiser. But the land outlived them all with elemental constancy.

Throughout the centuries, blackbirds shunned the glade and its phantoms. But the great manor downstream of the spring evoked no such reservations. And so they perched on the spires of Bestwood, watching and listening.

“Hell and damnation! Where is that boy?”

Malcolm, the steward of Bestwood, hurried to catch up to the twelfth Duke of Aelred as he banged through the house. Servants fled the stomp of the duke’s boots like starlings fleeing a falcon’s cry.

The kitchen staff jumped to attention when the duke entered with his majordomo.

“Has William been here?”

Heads shook all around.

“Are you certain? My grandson hasn’t been here?”

Mrs. Toomre, Bestwood’s head cook, was a whip-thin woman with ashen hair. She stepped forward and curtsied.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

The duke’s gaze made a slow tour of the kitchen. A heavy silence fell over the room while veins throbbed at the corners of his jaw, the high-water mark of his anger. He turned on his heels and marched out. Malcolm released the breath he’d been holding. He was determined to prevent madness from claiming another Beauclerk.