she admitted, “we’re a little concerned about Dunstan, Thorney and me. He’s been mooning.
That’s the only word for it. His work isn’t getting done. Thorney was saying that he needs some
settling down, that boy. If he’d but settle down, why Thorney was saying he’d settle all the
Westward Meadows on the lad.”
Mrs. Hempstock nodded slowly. “Hempstock would certainly not be averse to seeing our Daisy
happy. Certain he’d settle a flock of our sheep on the girl.” The Hempstocks’ sheep were
notoriously the finest for miles around: shaggy-coated and intelligent (for sheep), with curling
horns and sharp hooves. Mrs. Hempstock and Mrs. Thorn sipped their tea. And so it was settled.
Dunstan Thorn was married in June to Daisy Hempstock. And if the groom seemed a little
distracted, well, the bride was as glowing and lovely as ever any bride has been.
Behind them, their fathers discussed the plans for the farmhouse they would build for the
newlyweds in the western meadow. Their mothers agreed how lovely Daisy looked, and what a pity
it was that Dunstan had stopped Daisy from wearing the snowdrop he had bought for her at the
market at the end of April, in her wedding dress.
And it is there we will leave them, in a falling flurry of rose petals, scarlet and yellow and pink
and white.
Or almost.
They lived in Dunstan’s cottage, while their little farmhouse was erected, and they were
certainly happy enough; and the day-to-day business of raising sheep, and herding sheep, and
shearing them, and nursing them, slowly took the faraway look from Dunstan’s eyes.
First autumn came, then winter. It was at the end of February, in lambing season, when the
world was cold, and a bitter wind howled down the moors and through the leafless forest, when icy
rains fell from the leaden skies in continual drizzling showers, at six in the evening, after the sun
had set and the sky was dark, that a wicker basket was pushed through the space in the wall. The
guards, on each side of the gap, at first did not notice the basket. They were facing the wrong
way, after all, and it was dark and wet, and they were busy stamping the ground and staring
gloomily and longingly at the lights of the village.
And then a high, keening wail began.
It was then that they looked down, and saw the basket at their feet. There was a bundle in the
basket: a bundle of oiled silk and woolen blankets, from the top of which protruded a red, bawling
face, with screwed-up little eyes, a mouth, open and vocal, and hungry.
And there was, attached to the baby’s blanket with a silver pin, a scrap of parchment, upon
which was written in an elegant, if slightly archaic, handwriting the following words:
Tristran Thorn
Chapter
Two
In Which Tristran Thorn Grows to Manhood
and Makes a Rash Promise
Years passed.
The next Faerie Market was held on schedule on the other side of the wall. Young Tristran
Thorn, eight years old, did not attend, finding himself packed off to stay with extremely distant
relations in a village a day’s ride away.
His little sister, Louisa, six months his junior, was, however, allowed to go to the market, and
this was a source of great ranklement to the boy, as was the fact that Louisa brought back from the
market a glass globe, filled with speckles of light that glittered and flashed in the twilight, and
which cast a warm and gentle radiance into the darkness of their bedroom in the farmhouse, while
all Tristran brought back from his relatives was a nasty case of the measles.
Shortly afterward, the farm cat had three kittens: two black-and-white ones like herself, and a
tiny kitten with a dusty blue sheen to her coat, and eyes that changed color depending on her
mood, from green and gold to salmon, scarlet and vermilion.
This kitten was given to Tristran to make up for missing the market. She grew slowly, the blue
cat, and she was the sweetest cat in the world, until, one evening, she began to prowl the house
impatiently, to mrowll and to flash her eyes, which were the purple-red of foxgloves; and when
Tristran’s father came back from a day in the fields, the cat yowled, bolted through the door and
was off into the dusk.
The guards on the wall were for people, not cats; and Tristran, who was twelve by this time,
never saw the blue cat again. He was inconsolable for a while. His father came into his bedroom
one night and sat at the end of his bed, saying gruffly, “She’ll be happier, over the wall. With her
own kind. Don’t you fret now, lad.”
His mother said nothing to him about the matter, as she said little to him on any subject.
Sometimes Tristran would look up to see his mother staring at him intently, as if she were trying to
tease some secret from his face.
Louisa, his sister, would needle him about this as they walked to the village school in the
morning, as she would goad him about so many other things: the shape of his ears, for example
(the right ear was flat against his head, and almost pointed; the left one was not), and about the
foolish things he said: once he told her that the tiny clouds, fluffy and white, that clustered across
the horizon at sunset as they walked home from school, were sheep. It was no matter that he later
claimed that he had meant simply that they reminded him of sheep, or that there was something
fluffy and sheeplike about them. Louisa laughed and teased and goaded like a goblin; and what was
worse, she told the other children, and incited them to “baa” quietly whenever Tristran walked
past. Louisa was a born inciter, and danced circles around her brother.
The village school was a fine school, and under the tutelage of Mrs. Cherry the schoolmistress
Tristran Thorn learned all about fractions, and longitude and latitude; he could ask in French for
the pen of the gardener’s aunt, indeed for the pen of his own aunt; he learned the kings and
queens of England from William the Conqueror, 1066, to Victoria, 1837. He learned his reading, and
had a fair copperplate hand. Travelers to the village were rare, but occasionally a peddler would
come through the village, selling “penny dreadful” accounts of grisly murders, fateful encounters,
dire doings and remarkable escapes. Most peddlers sold song sheets, two for a penny, and families
would buy them and gather about their pianos to sing songs such as “Cherry Ripe” and “In My
Father’s Garden.”
So the days went by, and the weeks went by, and the years went by also. At age fourteen, by a
process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads, Tristran learned of sex.
When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr. Thomas Forester’s
house: more specifically, from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester’s bedroom window. To
Tristran’s regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalizing glimpse of Victoria, who was
his sister’s age and, without any doubt, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around.
By the time Victoria was seventeen, and Tristran also, she was in all probability, he was certain,
the most beautiful girl in the British Isles. Tristran would have insisted on the most beautiful girl in
the entire British Empire, if not the world, and boxed you, or been prepared to, had you argued
with him. You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in Wall who would have argued with
him, though; she turned many heads and, in all probability, broke many hearts.
A description: She had her mother’s grey eyes and heart-shaped face, her father’s curling
chestnut hair. Her lips were red and perfectly shaped, her cheeks blushed prettily when she spoke.
She was pale, and utterly delightful. When she was sixteen she had fought vigorously with her
mother, for Victoria had taken it into her head that she would work in the Seventh Magpie as a pot-
maid. “I have spoken to Mister Brom-ios about this,” she told her mother, “and he has no objec-
tion.”
“What Mister Bromios thinks or does not think,” replied her mother, the former Bridget Comfrey
“is neither here nor there. That is a most improper occupation for a young lady.”
The village of Wall watched the battle of wills with fascination, wondering what the outcome
would be, for no one crossed Bridget Forester: she had a tongue that could, the villagers said,
blister the paint from a barn door and tear the bark from an oak. There was no one in the village
who would have wanted to get on the wrong side of Bridget Forester, and they did say that the
wall would be more likely to walk than for Bridget Forester to change her mind.
Victoria Forester, however, was used to having her own way, and, if all else failed, or even if it
did not, she would appeal to her father, and he would accede to her demands. But here even
Victoria was surprised, for her father agreed with her mother, saying that working in the bar at the
Seventh Magpie was something that a well-brought-up young lady would not do. And Thomas
Forester set his chin and there the matter ended.
Every boy in the village was in love with Victoria Forester. And many a sedate gentleman,
quietly married with grey in his beard, would stare at her as she walked down the street,
becoming, for a few moments, a boy once more, in the spring of his years with a spring in his step.
“They say that Mister Monday himself is counted amongst your admirers,” said Louisa Thorn to
Victoria Forester one afternoon in May, in the apple orchard.
Five girls sat beside, and upon the branches of, the oldest apple tree in the orchard, its huge
trunk making a fine seat and support; and whenever the May breeze blew, the pink blossoms
tumbled down like snow, coming to rest in their hair and on their skirts. The afternoon sunlight
dappled green and silver and gold through the leaves in the apple orchard.
“Mister Monday,” said Victoria Forester with disdain, “is five and forty years of age if he is a
day.” She made a face to indicate just how old five-and-forty is, when you happen to be
seventeen.
“Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not
wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having
someone else break in one’s own pony.”
“Personally I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widower,” said Amelia
Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will.
Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated,
which would free one from a number of indignities.”
A flurry of hastily suppressed giggles amid the apple blossom.
“Still,” said Lucy Pippin hesitantly, “it would be nice to live in the big house, and to have a
coach and four, and to be able to travel to London for the season, and to Bath to take the waters,
or to Brighton for the sea-bathing, even if Mister Monday is five and forty.”
The other girls shrieked, and flung handfuls of apple blossom at her, and none shrieked more
loudly, or flung more blossom, than Victoria Forester.
Tristran Thorn, at the age of seventeen, and only six months older than Victoria, was half the
way between a boy and a man, and was equally uncomfortable in either role; he seemed to be
composed chiefly of elbows and Adam’s apples. His hair was the brown of sodden straw, and it
stuck out at awkward, seventeen-year-old angles, wet and comb it howsoever much he tried.
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated
for by being too loud at the wrong times. Most days Tristran was content—or as content as a
seventeen-year-old youth with his world ahead of him can ever be—and when he daydreamed in the
fields, or at the tall desk at the back of Monday and Brown’s, the village shop, he fancied himself
riding the train all the way to London or to Liverpool, of taking a steamship across the grey Atlantic
to America, and making his fortune there among the savages in the new lands.
But there were times when the wind blew from beyond the wall, bringing with it the smell of
mint and thyme and red-currants, and at those times there were strange colors seen in the flames
in the fireplaces of the village. When that wind blew, the simplest of devices—from lucifer matches
to lantern-slides—would no longer function.
And, at those times, Tristran Thorn’s daydreams were strange, guilty fantasies, muddled and
odd, of journeys through forests to rescue princesses from palaces, dreams of knights and trolls and
mermaids. And when these moods came upon him, he would slip out of the house, and lie upon the
grass, and stare up at the stars.
Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then— our cities and towns cast too much
light into the night—but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas,
uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness
of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed, and sleep like a
dead man.
He was a gangling creature of potential, a barrel of dynamite waiting for someone or something
to light his fuse; but no one did, so on weekends and in the evenings he helped his father on the
farm, and during the day he worked for Mr. Brown, at Monday and Brown’s, as a clerk.
Monday and Brown’s was the village shop. While they kept a number of necessaries in stock,
much of their business was conducted by means of lists: villagers would give Mr. Brown a list of
what they needed, from potted meats to sheep-dip, from fish-knives to chimney-tiles; a clerk at
Monday and Brown’s would compile a master list of everything requested, and then Mr. Monday
would take the master list, and a dray pulled by two huge shire horses, and he would set off for the
nearest county town, and return in a handful of days with the dray loaded high with goods of all
description.
It was a cold, blustery day in late October, of the kind
that always seems about to rain but never actually does, and it was late in the afternoon.
Victoria Forester walked into Monday and Brown’s with a list, written in her mother’s precise
handwriting, and she rang the small bell on the counter for service.
