Story: Fellyans (part six)

Fellyans

(part six)

Things, however, were not well. Prints from a pair of clogs crossed and trampled his mints, and the frame sheltering his tiny starts of fennel, chervil, and borage, lay kicked askew.

“Don’t help, Gert,” he said to the kitchen dog.

“I’m sorry. I’m not hopeless at gardens. I’ll fix, is what I mean, whatever I’ve ruined. I have a plot of my own, well away, where…” The soft voice faltered.

“Where no one,” she seemed to decide, “can find it insupportable, if I don’t poison the worms off the cabbages, just because I like the butterflies. I do like them. Or if I let the wild things…I should say the bears, that’s what troubles him…come eat the fruits. I don’t see how they’ll get at the lambs, him sleeping in the fields to keep watch, and those fierce dogs he’s bought…”

She was hiding behind the hedge, and crawled out, or tried to, using a gap tunneled by the sprites. Her braided hair, her knitted cap and shawl, all sprang loose ends to entwine among the twigs…

Or Bede found it easy to believe so. “Be still. Let me do the work,” he was just suggesting.

The woman was saying, intending jest, “If I’d worn my suit of armor…”

Whenever magic took place, it was difficult recalling exactly how you’d been situated the instant before. Gert, good as a creature could be, had only yipped in her throat. The woman had vanished.

Bede got off his knees… But here she was, of course, encased in bronze, a skirted cuirass, spiked things at the elbows, gauntlets imprisoning her fingers, bewildered eyes blinking through a visor.

“Scoter, can that have been you?”

Scoter looked to right and left. A door of the house slammed, and Jorinda’s voice came both muffled and sharp, “Gadwall!”

“Did you slip?” Bede asked.

“Well, but… I can’t know what her armor looks like. I hope this is very fine.”

“Why, it’s excellent! What will Langham say? I wish I were…”

“No, no!” said Bede.

“Home right now?”

He raised a warning finger. “Scoter, go indoors. Whimbrel, go with your brother.”

Whimbrel had tiptoed to a spot, a particular flagstone of the walk, exactly at Scoter’s heels. Piqued, Scoter flung a dramatic aboutface, that skidded them both into Jorinda’s rosebush.

“Ow! Ow! What’s your trouble, Whim?”

“Not by the kitchen, we won’t go,” Whimbrel said, low. “Up the tower stairs. That Marshhawk, that’s who’s my trouble.”

“Will you just quit pinching at me? What do you want with him?”

Whimbrel’s answer faded: “He’s sniffing round Finch. You’ve seen how high and mighty he carries himself…?”

6

Fellyans

Fellyans (part seven)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)