“Mum and Da would want you to do as I say! Now you find yourself a husband, and then you can—”
“Do whathesays instead?” Loneliness had turned my thoughts to itmanya time. But any man who would marry me would likely be a miner, too, and he might not want me at The Magpie any more than Jack did. It wasn’t as if I’d been turning down offers, anyway. There were plenty of girls in the parish with dark hair, or flaxen, and faces not covered in freckles. With easy smiles, soft eyes, and blunter tongues.
“I’m tired, Mina,” Jack said, hard and flat. “And I want my supper. I’ll say no more about it.”
We were home too late for me to do more than cobble together a meal. I made pasties every morning for the tearoom and for Jack to take to work, but I always held one out for when I returned from work. Tonight I halved my pasty and served it with slices of apple from the tree out back and cheese from the market, along with the last of the hevva cake from the night before.
As we ate, I thought of a new argument to try. It occurred to me that Jack might need reminding that we were probably the only mining family in the parish no longer cooking over a hearth fire, thanks to Mrs. Moyle. She’d given me the cookstove she’d replaced after opening the tearoom.
But Jack finished quick and went straight to his bed—the one that had belonged to our mother and father, behind a folding screen downstairs. I left the washing for the morning and went up to the loft and my own bed.
Tucked under the covers, I prayed for sleep. Instead, I felt tears gather under my eyelids and squeeze onto my cheeks. I kept seeing Mr. Roscoe’s face in my mind—in the shop with his newspaper and tea, then on the heath with his staring eyes and blood-smeared cheek. The way his head had been turned, and with the twist of collar and coat at his neck, I hadn’t seen the wound. I was grateful for that now, though my imagination was doing plenty on its own.
Had it truly been an animal? What animal was big enough to take down a full-grown man like that? As far as I knew, the only wolves to be found in Cornwall were the ones in stories, and no fox could ever manage such a thing. I supposed it must have been a large dog.
Shuddering, I turned my thoughts to The Magpie, and Jack’s decision. In a way, I dreaded going back there. I wished to see no more auguries. I could always empty the teapots without looking into them, of course, but would I really be able to? What if I missed something that could help someone? Yet what help had I been to Mr. Roscoe? I recalled Mum and her tea guests and wondered—had she been able to helpthem?
Weariness gradually slowed my thoughts, unraveling them until they no longer made any kind of sense. Still, as I was dropping off, there was a moment when a final clear thought did come to me: Though I had failed to make Jack understand about The Magpie—in losing our parents, we’d also lost the sympathy of feeling we’d shared all our lives—it was impossible for me to do what he wanted.
I fell asleep wondering what the consequences would be.
Chorus
Like any other day, I woke to the peal of morning church bells and rose to make the pasties, boiling the onions, potatoes, swedes, and beef before filling the shortcrust, crimping the edges, and popping the pasties into the oven.
Jack always rose as the aroma began to fill the cottage. He dressed, washed his face, and broke his fast with tea and bread with milk. It was my habit to wrap a pasty from the first batch and hand it to him as he walked out the door. I thought he might ask about the number of them I was making this morning, now that he expected me to give up my job. But Jack was usually too tired from work and foggy from the previous night’s drink to pay much attention to what I did—so long as meals appeared at the expected times—and today was no different.
He never said much in the mornings, and today he kept silent, avoiding my gaze until I was putting the still-warm pasty into his hand.
“You’ll be all right today?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, lifting my chin.
A tiny, tired smile tugged at his lips. “There’s my girl,” he said, and this glimpse of the old Jack wrenched my heart. Never mind that the whites of his eyes were veined with red, and he looked like he’d hardly slept. “Nothing’s going to bother you if you stay close to the cottage,” he cautioned gently.
I gave him a short nod, though my face grew hot.
“I’m sorry things can’t be different.”
He might have been referring to a hundred things, but I knew what he meant:Sorry about The Magpie. His words seemed to make plain what I had already feared—that he had no idea of letting me go back, even once the dog, or whatever it was, had been caught.
Truth was, the attack on Mr. Roscoe had given him a reason for doing something he’d wanted to for a long time. I always figured Jack grumbled about The Magpie because it made me happier, andhecouldn’t be happy. Maybe also because of how it had changed me. I felt like I understood the world a little better from being around people who were different. And certainly from reading Mrs. Moyle’s books.
Jack couldn’t escape the life he’d been born to. I guessed he didn’t want me to, either.
He turned and started for Wheal Enys, kicking a lone dandelion stalk that sprouted from the hardpacked road and setting the feathery seeds adrift like souls of the dead.
Recalling that he’d likely be walking home alone from the tavern, as usual, despite his cautioningme, I shouted after him, “You be careful, Jack! Be home before dark!”
He raised a hand without turning and then faded into the morning mist.
Sighing, I closed the door against the chill and went back to finish the baking. I tried not to think about what would happen when Jack learned I’d defied him. If I took care to get home before he did, he might not discover it right away. And if I could stave that off until the danger had passed, he wouldn’t be able to use the same argument against me.
I pulled a pan from the oven and slid the last one in. Mrs. Moyle always said our customers came as much for the pasties as they did for her scones. “Oggies,” Da had called them, and I made them the way Mum had taught me, though sometimes I changed up the fillings. In the spring I put in leeks and a few crumbles of yarg cheese, and those were a particular favorite at the shop. But the truth was Mrs. Moyle’s scones and jams were known all over the parish.
She’d added pasties to the menu as the ladies who were regulars began bringing their husbands and children with them. My employer couldn’t do all the baking herself, so besides giving me the old stove, she paid me enough to cover the ingredients and my extra efforts. This had allowed me to put better food on our own table, too—a fact that seemed to have escaped Jack’s notice.
Once the pasties had cooled enough, I packed them into a basket and covered them with a cloth. But as I was leaving the cottage, I hesitated, then went back for my paring knife and slipped it in with the pasties. Maybe it wasn’t much of a weapon, but I kept it sharp, which would count for something in a desperate moment.
