Page 6 of Roses in Amber
Flint took up his place at Beauty's head, and we moved along. Barely an hour later, for the first time, we saw a boar on the road: a massive thick-shouldered beast with small eyes and long tusks. Beauty stopped dead and lowered her head, steam puffing from her nostrils as Flint slowly backed up to the wagon's bench. The boar snorted and glared at us while my heart pounded increasingly hard. Surely even a boar understood that Beauty herself was twice his height and ten times his weight, and that without the wagon's cover rising up behind her to treble her apparent size.
But then I remembered that boar hunting was done by groups of men on horseback, often with dogs, and that the boar did not always lose, despite those odds, and I reconsidered what a boar might or might not understand.
Beauty took one solid step forward, leaning her weight into her leading leg, and the boar, with another snort, turned and trotted away into the woods. Glover, at my side on the wagon bench, let go a sharp sigh of relief, and Flint's voice skirrled high with excitement. "Did you see it, Amber? Did youseeit? It was bigger than I am! Do you think it would have stomped us all? Oh, but if we could have killed it we would have had boar for supper! Wouldn't that have been delicious?"
Glover chuckled and ruffled Flint's hair, a vastly more familiar gesture than he would have allowed himself a week ago. "Yes, lad, but we lack every single weapon we would need to slay such a beast. Had we tried, we would have beenitssupper, not the other way around."
"Boars don't eat people," Flint said stoutly, but he climbed onto the bench with Glover and myself anyway, and kept a wary eye out on the road until darkness fell.
I didn't need to have traveled regularly to know how fortunate we were in the weather. It remained clear the entirety of our journey, the roads staying frozen and easily passed. Clouds followed us on the retreating horizon, thick and grey and threatening snow, but they never caught us. I imagined they might have caught anyone who might pursue us, though, even as I wondered if anyonehad. None of us spoke of the possibility; what conversation we had centered around Maman's health, which remained fragile, and how we might barter for food or drink at the next village. We scavenged more than one of our dresses, but left the boys' clothes alone, as they had fewer to begin with. We drove past farms and through villages, but mostly we were alone in the forest, until it began to seem the world was nothingbutforest.
Each morning Father had a low discussion with Glover, who then drove us onward as if he knew the way well. The trees grew thicker and the road narrower, until on the eighth afternoon we passed through a village almost too small for the name, and up an ill-kept track that might once have been a road, and finally through low stone gates to a stone building two stories tall, with a peaked slate roof and windows whose sliding shutters remained tightly sealed. Beauty thudded to a halt and dropped her head to nose at ankle-deep snow. The family slowly climbed out of the wagon to stare at the building, myself with a numb disbelief that seemed reflected in the others. It was not dismay at the small size or condition of the lodge—after weeks in the hotel and then nine days in the wagon, two stories seemed absurdly luxurious to me, who had only a month ago had a room and a library of her own—but rather an inability to fully believe we had arrived.
"The door," Opal finally said. "Is there a key to the door? Maman?"
As if her question had shaken us of a stupor, we began to move again: the boys let go unearthly shrieks and ran through the snow, shouting as they explored. Here were outbuildings; there, a stable with three boxes and room for the wagon. A barn with still-standing fences around it lay some distance off from the main building, and at the back of the lodge, a patch of smooth land that Jasper declared a garden.
Before they were done looking around, Maman had produced a key, which was the most participatory action she had taken in over a week. Glover opened the door onto a single large room dominated by ghostly, sheet-covered furniture and, at one end, a fireplace broad enough for Jasper to lie down in.
A door stood on one side of the fireplace, and on the other, a staircase spiraled upward. The main room was floored with boards as wide across as Jet was tall, and oak beams, aged with time and smoke, stretched heavily across the ceiling, supporting the upper floor. Father opened the inner shutters, then worked stiff iron casings to open the outer ones, and suddenly, despite the late hour of a winter afternoon, the lodge seemed flooded with light. Opal gave a gasp that I thought represented all of our sentiments well, and we turned smiles of real joy and relief upon one another for the first time in weeks.
"Our first business will be making sure that chimney is clear enough for a fire," Glover said briskly. "Where's our lad Flint? He should be of a size to go up it."
Flint, when presented with this prospect, paled enough to turn his umber skin yellow, but Jasper would have been halfway up the flue before anyone blinked, had Glover not collared him with a warning about his clothes. Jasper looked in dismay at himself, then at the manservant. "But I haven't got any others!"
"There may well be something about that we can use," Glover said. "The house was well-sealed up and perhaps they left some necessities of that nature. Go on, upstairs with you to see if there's anything packed away." He gave the order naturally, but I saw it was followed by a certain way of carefullynotlooking at my father, who perhaps ought to have been the one making such suggestions.
Father, though, appeared not to notice. His attention was for the lodge, and I thought he looked better in the minutes since we'd arrived at the lodge than he had in weeks. He guided Maman to a chair without uncovering it, and held her hand as she looked around the lodge. "I haven't been here since I was a child," she finally said. "It looks smaller."
"You're taller," Father said with a smile. Jasper, upstairs, gave a yell of delight, and with eyebrows arched in amusement, I followed him.
To myowndelight, the stairs spiraled downward as well. "There's a cellar! Maman, this is magnificent!" A few steps upward, I realized the stairs went much higher than the first floor accounted for, and echoed Jasper's shout. "Maman, a loft! Father, there's a floor and two-thirds up here! The roof space isn't wasted!"
"Excellent," Pearl said from below. "You may sleep in the loft, and warn us of fires."
I shot her a sour look equal to one of her own, and finished climbing to the first floor. Jasper had already opened the window shutters and was nursing a pinched thumb for his efforts, but the upstairs rooms were light enough to see a large, well-made bedframe tucked beneath the loft and chests snugged against the opposite wall. I climbed into the loft, which had two small garretted windows of its own, and which was just tall enough at its peak for me to stand up in. Pearl and Father would knock their heads on the oak beams, but the boys would have plenty of room, once something was done about beds. My heart beat faster than the climb accounted for: excitement, even joy, ran through me. This was so much better than I had anticipated that even its isolation couldn't deflate my mood.
"What about these, Amber?" Jasper waved a pair of trousers and a shirt obviously too large for him at me hopefully. I came back down to the first floor and tried them against him, then nodded.
"With a kerchief to cover your hair and face, because I don't know when we'll be able to have a bath and we must keep you as clean as we can. You're a brave boy, Jasper."
He said, "Hnh," dismissively. "It's just a chimney. I'd rather climb that than try to charm Beauty!" He changed clothes, dancing in the chill, then ran downstairs to display himself to Glover and get instructions for cleaning a chimney. Opal, having gone to explore the door beside the fireplace, returned with a broom, and Glover suggested that despite the cold we should go outside while the chimney was cleaned, to prevent soot getting all over us. He stayed to supervise Jasper, and with Flint's help I got both Beauty and the wagon into the stables before unhitching the nag and getting her some of our dwindling grain supplies.
Like the house, the stables had been exceptionally well constructed, and despite their long period of disuse, were in excellent condition. There were cracks to fill and a corner of roof to repair, but nothing that wouldn't keep a while. "I hope the barn is this well kept."
"Jasper and I couldn't get the door open," Flint admitted. "The bar and lock were too tight. But there's wood in the shed and most of it looked dry."
I hugged my little brother. "I think we've landed on our feet, Flint. How lucky we are."
"Have we?" he asked with more wisdom than I would have shown at ten. "Do any of us know how to make bread? Or raise chickens? Or what to trade for chickens, since we haven't any money left?" His brown eyes suddenly filled with tears. "All we have that's worth anything is Beauty, and I don't want to trade her."
"Neither do I." I hugged him again, then set him back with my hands on his shoulders. "We'll learn to bake bread and do all those things we need to do, Flint. We'll make it work somehow."
A sooty apparition arrived at the stables door, smiling broadly. "I did it!" The smile collapsed. "Maman says I have to wash in snow because I'm too filthy to be let in the house. Opal is cleaning up the mess I made. She borrowed one of the dresses in the chests because nothing she has is practical enough. She looks funny."
"Shelooks funny? Come on, cinder-boy. A snow bath will find my brother under all that soot."
I didn't envy Jasper his bath:myhands were red and chapped before we'd finished snow-scrubbing him, and far more of his tender body had to be administered to in order to proclaim him something like clean. By the time we were finished, though, Opal had swept and wiped down the lodge's main room, and Glover had a small fire building in the hearth. We came in shivering to find the sheets had been removed from the furniture, and I stopped just inside the door, staring at ivory and fur lining the chairs and sofas, and the now-revealed mounted heads of animals on the walls. "I didn't know it was possible to use antlers in all of one's decorating."
