The Pesthouse by Jim Crace Page B

he worked his knuckles against the soles, he stroked each nail. She seemed to push her legs against his hands, as if she knew what he was drawing out of her. He did not want to let her go, not even when he heard the first arrivals of the day begin to come out of the woods and make their way down Butter Hill to reach the longed-for welcome at a town just blocked from sight, as usual at that time of the day, by mist.
     
6
     
    PERHAPS SHE WOULD have gotten better anyway, but as usual nature's undramatic remedies would remain unrewarded. Margaret was bound to credit her rescue to Franklins busy hands. At first she had been startled by the pressure of his thumbs on her soles and heels and by his shocking, intimate invasion of the gaps between her toes. No one had played with Margaret's feet since she'd been a child. Certainly since she had been ten years old or so, she had been taught how precious her body would be in securing a husband but how untouchable it should remain until that man had revealed and committed himself with an exchange of labor or of goods. The phrase 'The virgin pulls the plow' did not mean that in Ferrytown the young unmarried women were put to work in the fields, but that a pure girl would be worth a pair of horses or a team of oxen in a marriage contract. You wouldn't get a brace of rabbits for a girl who'd drifted.
    When she'd been younger, Margaret had hardly dared even to touch herself for fear of losing value, but lately — as time and opportunity elapsed and it seemed less likely that any man in Ferrytown would volunteer to embrace a wife whose lovely, tempting copper hair was such an ancient omen of disaster and such a sign of waywardness — she had broken that taboo. She was, at thirty-one, she had admitted to herself, a woman who might be a daughter and a sister and an aunt but never a wife or mother. Her body would retain its value and remain unshared.
    But she'd been tempted many times by the strangers who had traveled through her town and who evidently did not share her neighbors' wariness of redheads. She'd had her rear slapped more than once. She'd had her fingers kissed. And one fine-mannered man, her father's age, had proposed a midnight meeting place beyond the palisades where they might talk and hold each other's hands. She'd often wondered what might have happened had she done what he'd suggested, where she might have ended up, if she hadn't opted, instead, for seeking Ma's advice, with the result that it was her brothers and her father who went out at midnight with their sticks to honor his proposal.
    So this caressing of the feet was something both alarming and overdue. She had been tempted to protest. To kick this stranger, even. To judge his touch as cheapening. But who doesn't like their feet caressed? Who isn't weakened and disarmed by such discrete attention? It helped that Franklin spoke to her while he was working on her feet, making less of a stranger of himself. He recounted how his mother had tipped him on his back and 'loved his feet' when he was very small — and, even, not so small, a teenager. He talked about his patient aunt and the pigeon that had cured him when he was young. If this was something that a mother and an aunt might do, then surely it was innocent.
    Except it could not feel entirely innocent. Margaret found it hard to tell if this narrow fever that encompassed her, this breathlessness, this pounding of her heart, this fresh disorder that seemed to want to shake and flex her by the spine, was something else new that could be blamed against her flux. Or was it something that she owed to Franklin's thumbs and knuckles? She drifted in and out of it. She even dreamed that he brought shame on her by venturing beyond her feet along her hairless legs to press his thumbs and knuckles where only she had pressed before.
    The first thing Margaret noticed when she woke was how quiet it was. She had to remind herself that she was no longer at home, waking in the family