Mr Peacock's Possessions by Lydia Syson

Author:Lydia Syson [Lydia Syson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 2018-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

BEFORE

Albert’s triumphant return with the milk goat was tempered by an accident on the way back down the cliffs. They almost lost her. The rope had jerked from his hand, he told the girls later, looking at Pa. I wouldn’t have let go, thought Lizzie. Ada pressed him further. Well, then he’d fallen against a rock, hadn’t he, and landed so awkwardly he’d gashed and bruised his leg. It had swollen quickly, despite Ma’s bathing of it, and for days Albert kept stumbling, and crying out in pain when he walked on it. Ada found him a stout stick to lean on and did as many of his chores as she could.

No time to rest, for Albert was now goatherd, finding new shady spots each day to tether the nanny where the foraging would be sweetest. The male kid they ate, the female they kept. He gentled the goats by degrees, with infinite patience. Quietly scratching the kid under her chin, when he thought nobody was looking, his jaw softened and his eyes cleared and Albert was calm and beautiful again, his pains forgotten.

‘Shhhhh … shhhhhhh,’ he soothed and tried to teach Queenie how to work the same magic.

‘Have you milked her yet?’ asked Pa after less than a week.

‘Not yet. In time,’ said Albert. ‘I don’t think she’s ready.’

‘We’ve not got time,’ replied Pa. ‘Queenie can be our milkmaid. I need you delving.’ He mumbled something else under his breath. Something like ‘not shirking’.

Albert knew it would take even longer, left to the little ones. They would try to rush things – it had been hard enough to keep them calm when he was patiently training young Spy – and the work he had already done would be undone. A few days later, while he was dragging cat’s claw to make a thorny, goat-proof fence for the new vegetable garden, still wincing as he walked, he heard a scream and then a wail. A lightning kick from Nan’s back leg had caught Queenie in the side of her head. Milk soaked into the ground. But that wasn’t the worst of the waste in those early months.

*

Robson was right about the growing of things. The first shoots of sweetcorn appeared within days. Beans really did behave like fairy-tale vines. Every day they pushed back the wilderness of Clapperton Bay a little further, and the island felt more inhabited. Every morning Mr Peacock surveyed the garden with satisfaction. Billy had found some sweet potatoes in the undergrowth, and Ada joyfully uncovered a patch of purple-stemmed taro plants, which had been quietly growing and reproducing themselves for years; tubers vast and hairy, the size of a baby’s head, flesh speckled violet. Soon it was taro cakes and taro stew and taro porridge. That filled you up, for a while. And then the hunger returned.

At mealtimes Ma noticed a dullness in their eyes.

‘Surely Robson must have planted sugar cane – didn’t he say we’d find everything we needed?’ Mrs Peacock said, with a moan in her voice.

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