THE SCARECROW'S BRIDE (Excerpt)
EMMA GREY CAME TO ME in spring when the Earth still bore the scars of the winter storms. Early flowers--clover, milkmaids, poppies--bent beneath the wind as the old woman skirted patches of snow. Mother and I watched from the window. "You will be married in a week's time," she said.
I smiled, remembering the promise Gerard Malins made to me in the woods: to marry me despite my withered leg. I hugged the crutch to my side. "Is that why Emma comes?" I said. "Or will Ger ask me himself?"
Mother turned from me. "He will not," she said. "You are to be the scarecrow's bride." I grasped my crutch tighter. In a village of nearly four hundred, surely there was someone else. "But Tess Dunne's Mary is blind and Ginny Frye's Anne has one arm?"
Outside, footsteps shuffled to a halt on the doorstep. "Your father and I couldn't offer a dowry rich enough to please Ger Malins' parents. A man wants money, they said, or a woman who can work beside him in the fields."
Mother opened the door. A breeze preceded the old woman, a breeze that tasted of honey and rainwater. Emma tucked a lock of white hair beneath the wrap of her shawl. The strand tumbled free, curling along her plump, florid cheek. With a grunt, she clutched the doorjamb and pulled herself inside.
She blinked, peering at Mother through milky eyes. "Mollie Scarecrow died last night," Emma said. Then she turned to me.
* * * *
Dressed in white, my hair garlanded with apple blossoms and red poppies, I rode the bridal cart through town. The scarecrow rode beside me, its button eyes agleam with sunlight as its head listed to and fro. Its right arm flopped onto my good leg, its gloved fingers splayed across my thigh. I lifted its arm by the sleeve and set its hand in its own lap. The jingle of the bells that hung from the horse's bridle tolled the passing of my dreams: never a home nor children, never a man to love me. Near the village green, I saw Ger Malins with a girl of fourteen, a girl whole of limb. Ger looked away as we jangled past, the scarecrow and I; he stepped away from the girl. My eyes stung with unshed tears. When another jolt threw the scarecrow's hand across my thigh, I let it stay.
"Hurry," I whispered to the three men leading the horse, but they had their backs to me. We clattered on, leaving the village behind. At a lone cottage at the far edge of the fields, we stopped.
Squat and white, the house crouched before the field and sky, its thatched roof darker than the rich, sprouted earth. A tangle of vine clung to one wall. I twisted the folds of my white dress. This forlorn cottage was no longer Mollie Scarecrow's. It was mine.
While the other man reached for the scarecrow, Thomas Halpern helped me from the cart. A stout middle-aged man with a nimbus of white-blond hair, he gestured for me to lean forward. His hands locked around my waist and he lifted me from the seat. He stroked the small of my back with his fingertips. I trembled, imagining those hands caressing my cheek, my shoulders, my breasts. I grasped his arms. He looked down at me and the arch smile faded from his lips. Pity muted his eyes. He set me down, then reached for my crutch and handed it to me. I tucked it beneath my arm. Lifting my chin that I might appear tall and straight, I nodded to him. "Thank you," I said.
He looked away. "Not at all."
I turned and walked up the path.
Emma Grey and Thomas Halpern's wife, Nora, met me at the door. Nora bobbed her fair head, blinking her tiny eyes so that she looked like a hare. I brushed past her without a word. A table stood at the window, set with a vase of milkmaids and blue-eyed grass. At the hearth, a fire flickered red and inviting, its flames curled along the sides of an iron pot. A bed nestled against the far wall, the bedclothes folded back, dried rose petals scattered across the pillow. I pressed my hand into the pillow. The crushed petals burst with scent.
"Welcome home," Emma said.
I drew back my hand and went to the window. In the field, the men clamored around the pole, pushing and pulling the new scarecrow into place. Emma said "The pantry is well-stocked. You won't want for anything. Someone will stop in each day to see to your needs."
The men bound the scarecrow's shoulders to a crossbar so that his arms hung from the elbows as if broken. "My needs?" I said. "And will you send a young man?" The wind caught the scarecrow's head and flung it to one side. The men laughed. "To see to your material needs," Nora said. "And what would you want with a man? Someone to scold you and pull at you, to wink at the girls behind your back?"
There were nights of pain in Nora's eyes. I looked away.
"You will have many husbands, Chloe Scarecrow," Emma said. "A new one each year who requires only that you mend his clothes when the birds pluck at them or the winds tear at them."
The men stepped back from the pole. "And after this one," Emma said "each will be your own creation."
* * * *
Through the long winter nights I sewed, fashioning the scarecrow's head from a bag of cloth. With beet juice, I applied a mouth below the brown button eyes. I combed the dark wool, stitching it along the crown so that it hung in waves across the forehead. I embroidered a nose with pale thread. "A handsome man, my husband," I told myself as the needle wove in and out of the cloth.
I imagined my husband. With broad shoulders and thick, strong hands, he stood a full head taller than I. A sailor, he promised to take me away from this cottage. He promised to take me to the sea. We would build a life for ourselves far from people who saw me as a poor lame thing. And no one would call me Mrs. Scarecrow again.
His lips would burn against mine. His hands would caress the slope of my back, grasping my buttocks as he pulled me closer still. Then his fingers would glide along the backs of my thighs, stroking and kneading the whole and the useless leg. And he would not turn away.
"Chloe," he would say, and only that.
I made my husband a heart of red cotton embroidered with my name so that he would love only me.
)
Tales of Love, Loss, Laughter and yes, Lust, by a rising star of science fiction and fantasy. A Marina Fitch story is not easily categorized, and not easily forgotten. In this new collection she has gathered her favorites and also included never-before-published material. Let the author of The Seventh Heart and The Border take you from quiet evenings around a fantastical jigsaw puzzle to the tortured life of a faerie creature bound to our world by love; from the innocent longings of childhood to the hard reality of revenge and back again as she shows you her Pieces of the Sky.
