There was a brief silence, and Cuthbert’s father looked down stiffly, out of respect. He gave his whiskers a scratch.
Despite their age difference, in their blue-striped T-shirts and matching khaki camp shorts, the boys might nearly have been mistaken for twins that day. Cuthbert was very tall for his age. Unlike other Handleys, their hair was as dark brown as cloves. They both had high pale foreheads, long mahogany eyes, and small, delicate O mouths. The younger boy was only a little shorter than his brother, though he still possessed the round face and short jaw of a child.
“I’m not afraid of any Welsh forest,” said Drystan. Of the two, he exuded a particularly languid self-assurance and sweet inattention, with longer hair and a slightly more prominent chin. He’d been walking around since breakfast with untied shoes. His father’s quick violence toward him and lack of warmth had wrought something darker and angrier in Drystan, combined with an intense but underfed intelligence. “I promise that I’ll never go mad.”
Their mother, who had fairer hair but the same black-brown eyes, said, “If you don’t stop your mithering, we’ll all be mad! And it’s not Wales. It’s the Marches.”
Winefride put down her tea and sniffed at Mary. She said, whispering loudly enough for Cuthbert to hear, “Don’t be such a cruel munch. They’re just lambs.”
“Gran?” said Drystan. “I don’t want to be any lamb. I want to be something clever—and brutal.” He grabbed his little brother and scrobbled his hair, then started tickling him under his arms. Cuthbert squealed with laughter. “Someone needs to herd this little lamb.”
“Dryst!” barked their father, in a severe tone that embarrassed everyone present. No one said a word for a few moments. Cuthbert’s brother glared at their father with open contempt, shaking his head.
Since arriving from the city, the Handley parents had planted themselves in the murky sitting room of the great-aunties’ home, a room that smelled of burned oats and damp flagstone in an eighteenth-century cottage with tiny casement windows. Their old uncle George Milburn slept in a chair.
Winefride, on the other hand, who often wore a sad expression of declined pride, was as vivified by the trip to her “owd Wyre” as her daughter Mary seemed querulous. She looked nearly as anxious to get outside as her grandsons, and she kept tapping her foot and looking out the casement window. Her ongoing descriptions of the forest could not have been more potent to Cuthbert’s ears. They seemed like the breathtaking words of some grizzled space mercenary in his Dan Dare comics, not of a rheumy old woman living in her son-in-law and daughter’s cramped terrace house in West Brom.
“Madness!” Cuthbert said, with great delight, though he had no idea what the word meant.
“That’s right,” said Winefride. “And it won’t go away ’til the sun shines on both sides of the hedge.”
Drystan asked his brother, quite earnestly, “What hedge? How’s that?”
Cuthbert said, “Saft head! Whisten, will you?”
The boys sidled up to their gran and cuddled in for stories.
of fairy kitchens and pet hares
“NO, YO’DUNNA GO TOO KEERFUL INTO THE Wyre,” their gran was saying. “But ye go, just the same. ’Tis almost time, too.”
She looked at her daughter, raising her eyebrows, and continued: “When I was a little badger-lass, we once found an owd broken baker’s peel in there. We took it home to our dada to have it fixed. I remember him marveling, ‘Why’s thar a baker’s peel in the middle of the forest?’ Well, babbies, my granddaddy, who had the Wonderments, as thee well know, well, ’a said there were fairy kitchens in Wyre, where fairies and their pet hares—hares that talked, yo’know—where thay ran their coal ovens.” She smiled more easily, her mouth softening, the wrinkles around her lips folding into milky pink ripples. “So once the peel was put right, we left it back in the forest, and the next day, we found in its spot the most perfect little cake we’d ever tasted, flavored with violets and juniper-berry glaze.”
The boys were rapt now, kneeling beside their gran, one of their little hands on each of her chunky thighs, sitting perfectly still. Since their earliest childhood, their gran had told them various tales, notions, and advices she referred to collectively as the Wonderments. All along Welsh Marches, where Offa’s Dyke once bullied the Welsh with Mercian royal might, a dwindling number of families bound “neither by rank nor nation,” as their gran put it, had for centuries quietly bequeathed the Wonderments, from granddad to granddaughter, then grandmother to grandson, and so on.
“And the fairy bakers make all kinds of little cakes so tasty and noice—well, thee dunna forget it if thee ’av one.”