The two aunties giggled, with bell-like happy notes, and the smaller, more vocal of the two, Bettina, said, “Er’s good as gold, your gran—you two tiddlings, you listen. But don’t let her wind you up. We’ve got good’n noice cakes here, too.”
“Oh, a little winding’s in my binding,” said Winefride. “But your aunties’ cooking is better than any fairy’s.” She very lightly touched her grandson’s nose with her fingertip. “Do your shoes, Drystan.” He slowly knelt down and tied his laces with long, sluggish movements. “Thee cosn’t be foresting like that. And if thee fall down in Wyre, thee dars’na stop to get up. Thar’re one or two ethers in that forest.”
“Snakes,” said Mary Handley, frowning. “Mum means snakes. Adders.” Cuthbert looked at Drystan with a big, gap-toothed grin.
“Can’t believe our luck,” said Drystan, marveling, shaking his head. “Adders!”
Apart from Cuthbert’s mother, the women were desperately pleased to be together—“like chicks in wool,” as Bettina commented, despite an awareness of Henry and Mary’s vague air of censure. When they met, which was rare, their speech silvered and gilded into the singsong, jingly bells-and-bracelets dialects of the Marches.
“More tea?” asked Bettina, standing to walk back into the kitchen. “Here goes ding-dong for a dumpling then.”
Winefride chuckled. “Oh, Jack’s alive,” she exclaimed. “We’re having fun, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, Gran,” said Cuthbert. “And we’ll be awfully good in the wood—awfully.” The brothers grinned at each other, and Cuthbert gave Drystan a little punch on the arm.
“Yeah twice,” said Drystan.
“Whatever you do,” said their gran, “and there’s no iffing or offing in this, thee’shot stay hitched by an invisible yoke.” She grabbed Drystan and sat him onto her lap, but he squirmed to get off, pedaling his legs. “Thee, little wildcat, bist sure thee’st listen and bist canny in thar, too. Thee oot hear voices, if thee’st lucky.” She kissed his ear and released him.
“What?” asked Cuthbert, quite emphatically. “What did you say, Gran?”
She nodded. “Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes, in Wyre, animals talk.” She tried not to look at Henry, who hated this sort of banter, and often let her know it. To him, it was an embarrassment, a sign of the peasant mentality. And he’d never had “a farthing rushlight worth of help from any Wonderment,” he would say to her.
“Wike people?” Cuthbert asked. “They talk wike people?”
“No, not quite.” She glanced at Henry, who was shaking his head at her sullenly. “It . . . rises inside thee.”
“Oh, it rises all right, does it?” mocked Henry, unable to contain himself. “Why do you fill these boys’ noggins with this—blether?”
Winefride looked at her daughter with an expression verging on tears.
At the age of seventy-six, Winefride Wenlock wanted nothing more than to complete a task she felt assigned; like the green drake-flies who hover for a few hours in May on the Severn then drop dead, she felt she possessed just one sparkling last moment of life to finish telling, for the boys’ sakes, a set of tales as old as the river. The Wonderments, as she instructed the boys, were more than a family legacy; they flowed robustly, through the ages, sneaking beneath the Normans’ noses, bursting forth from the clashing lost kingdoms and secret saints of Mercia and Arwystli and the coming of Christ to Britain. At least, that’s what her grandfather had told her as he lay dying in the snowy winter of 1901. And he’d also told her something that nearly trampled her with a sense of duty, so much so that she effectively decided her sweet grandfather must have been a little mad himself: he claimed that she, Winefride Wenlock, was the very last carrier of the Wonderments, “as far as ’e knew.”
Winefride once related the whole conversation to the boys.