Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni

Author:Anna Lawrence Pietroni
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409089285
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 11

The mermaid took the child to be her own, and taught her mermaid-manners in the slow tides where the Severn meets the Sea.

‘The Making of Mary Mayde’, Tales of Severnsea

THAT NIGHT, RUBY could not settle. She’d tried to tell them how the Blackbird had pursued her with all doubts and questions, but they hadn’t listened. Every time she sloped off towards sleep, she was pecked and flicked on one side by the Blackbird, brandishing her threat to hold her down beneath the surface of the water, and on the other side by Isa Fly, who’d scratched so fierce at the corner of her white eye when Truda read that note. She’d stared right into Ruby and inside her had seen the Blackbird’s doubts, the Blackbird’s questions; taking root in Ruby, growing, wild.

Ruby took up Isa’s angling book and propped it on the pillow next to her and let her eyes pass over it until she drifted into an uneasy, shifting sleep. And when she slept she dreamed that she was singing out to Jonah from the rocks off Sawdy Point; he was scuttling on the seashore, back and forth between the rocks, the sea, and bent up like a crab, his arms crooked round his head, and Ruby’s song fell from her mouth and took the shape of a black eel, an oiled rope of muscle writhing for the land. It pulsed and twisted at the water’s edge, and Jonah stumbled as he tried to retreat. Isa stood above him, on the cliff-top, shouting urgently into the wind, but the wind carried her words away and Ruby could not hear what she was saying.

As soon as it grew light enough to work, Ruby rubbed at her dry face and wet her mouth with cold tea from the pot and took a knife out to the garden. She hid herself among the trees, looking out for apple-scab, cutting out the cankers, easing off the softened, wasted fruit where brown rot had got the better of the tree. The leaves hung heavy with the weight of this air, hot and pressed. Above, a slate of cloud. The pigs were squealing, shifting round each other, slapping flanks. There’d be a storm today.

She worked till her hair dampened, frayed, and pushed aside the thought of summers past when, days like this, before that trip Halfway-to-France, she would have gone down to the tube-works with her friends and fished for newts and kicked her feet and felt the still, green water cool her skin. She rubbed the worm-scar on her wrist and flattened down her hair.

Nan Annie, on her way out to the Lean High Road, called out, ‘Put a clean pinny on when yo come up!’ The Barby Fair was starting up this morning, outside the priory gates, and every year Nan Annie sold their onions and their apples from a barrow.

Ruby loved the story of St Barbara, the saint the fair was named for: a girl who’d kept her faith despite her persecution.

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