A Light Like a Star

Anna's face bunched into a pout, as if she had suffered some grave affront. A nineteen-year-old who had never seen a potato was astonishing enough on its own, but he wisely held his tongue.

"It's a potato."

"Potatoes are this ugly?"

Anna's eyes went round as she snatched it from him.

"Every potato I've ever seen was smooth, and they smelled wonderful..."

She worried the rough skin between her fingers, then buried her nose in it and sniffed. A look of distaste climbed over her pale face.

"Ugh. It smells strange."

"It isn't strange. That's the smell of earth."

Elliot took the potato back out of her hand.

"Once it's cooked, it'll be the potato you know. Sit at the table and wait a little."

"Hmm."

But Anna gave no sign of having heard. She plastered herself to his arm instead and watched him peel, so that he had to let out a low sigh where she wouldn't notice.

Elliot, dead tired from a day of tearing out the weeds that had run wild through the garden, had meant to keep supper simple. Alone, he would have made do with a scrap of bread and been done with it, but he couldn't do that with Anna here. Starve a girl already that thin, and even his quiet conscience would erupt like a live volcano.

A frying pan went onto the fire. He peeled the potatoes and cut them into pieces easy to eat, then sliced the beef left over from a few days ago into thick cuts. That still seemed too little, so he trimmed the carrots and asparagus and cut those as well.

Anna soon lost interest in the endless work of the knife and began to hover around the stove. She stole a glance at Elliot, busy slicing carrots, and crept closer on soft feet. She stared at the cast-iron pan as it slowly heated, then suddenly shot her hand out.

"Careful!"

Elliot snatched her hand in alarm. Before she could invent an excuse, he dragged her to the table.

"Just sit here. Please, stop getting in the way."

At the raw, flinching edge in his voice, Anna shut her mouth obediently. She looked up at the broad back he had already turned on her, then quietly lowered her head. Her slender fingers carefully stroked the wrist he had just caught.

Vegetables and potatoes went into the iron pan, now burning hot. Elliot scattered a little salt over the spitting oil. Once the vegetables had wilted, the life gone out of them, he pushed them to the edge of the pan and laid in the thick beef, and the oil began to seethe.

He turned the meat once with the tongs, lowered the heat, and finished with pepper. The smell of seared meat, tangled with hot oil, soon filled the kitchen. Anna, who had already finished saying grace, waited for her plate with expectation plain in her eyes.

"Eat slowly."

Elliot spoke mildly, watching the fork travel in and out of her mouth without a pause. But Anna, cheeks bulging like a squirrel's, pretended not to hear and kept diligently cutting meat.

He felt a little sorry for her. One look at that body, thin enough to topple at a touch, and it was plain she had not eaten her fill in a long time. She looked so purely happy over one roughly cooked piece of meat that pity got the better of him, and he cut his own share in half and moved it onto her plate.

Anna, chewing as she gazed down at her plate, jerked her head up.

"Is that for me?"

"Yes."

Elliot cut what remained of his meat without appetite and murmured it almost in passing.

"Eat the carrots, too. Not just the meat."

The hand that had been happily picking up meat stopped dead. Elliot, who had only been nudging his potatoes as if he had no appetite at all, reached for his water glass.

"Keep picking the vegetables out like that, and you'll be eating vegetable stew every day."

"...g."

"What?"

"Nag."

Anna pushed out her lip and mumbled it. Elliot, briefly at a loss for words, swallowed his water with a deliberate calm.

"I would have thought you were past the age of hearing worry as nagging."

"You treat me like a child all the time, and only bring up my age when it suits you."

Anna grumbled under her breath, then set her fork down with a show of meekness.

"I've eaten vegetables until I'm sick of them. My grandfather is a vegetarian."

If he liked greens that much, he could eat them by himself. The thought still seemed to rile her; Anna's brow drew tight.

"So you've lived on nothing but vegetables until now?"

"I ate beans, too. They didn't taste like anything. Oh—but I have tried dried meat."

"Jerky?"

"Is that what it's called?"

Anna tilted her head.

"There was a girl who cleaned my room. I gave her a pearl each time, and she gave me pieces of dried meat."

"...You traded pearls for jerky."

"She threatened that she wouldn't give it to me unless it was a pearl."

Seeing the dumbfounded look on his face, Anna tipped her head from side to side.

"It's fine. She got caught giving me jerky in secret anyway, and they beat her and threw her out. I found out later that one pearl could buy a thousand pieces of jerky and still leave money over. Wicked girl. There wasn't a drop left to squeeze out of me—how could she cheat poor me?"

"...Where did you learn to talk like that?"

Elliot, who had been unable to find a word amid the bright spill of her chatter, asked it quietly. Anna blinked and gazed at him.

"Fredrick Dickens."

Elliot did not bother to hold back the sigh that broke from him. For the son of a good house, his old friend had a remarkably foul mouth.

"You know that wasn't meant kindly."

"I know. He said it to me."

He pressed his fingers hard into the space between his brows and swallowed the curse. Son of a bitch. The man had always had a rotten temper; he was nasty to anyone. Elliot was about to lay out the excuses in his friend's place when Anna, as if none of it touched her in the least, went busily back to her meal.

After his lips had worked soundlessly for a while, he took half the carrots from her plate without a word. Anna stopped cutting her meat, and her lips parted slightly.

"Too much meat isn't good for you. I know you don't like them, but still."

"I know. Sometimes you have to do things even when you hate them."

Anna gazed at her plate, then speared a carrot with her fork.

"I've always lived that way."

The carrot disappeared into her mouth. Watching her chew it thoroughly with a blank face, Elliot smiled faintly.

"Eat all the asparagus yourself."

At that, a crack ran for the first time through the face that had been expressionless until now.

That day was about ten days after the two of them had arrived in Winsmore.

Elliot had come down to the village as usual, to buy food and the other small necessities of living, and at a street stall he found the record he had been hunting for so long.

He knew at a glance that it was that song. His hand trembled as he picked the record up. A water stain stood clear on the cover, as if someone had spilled juice across it, but not enough to hide the singer's name or the title of the album.

It had already been half a year since he left the front on indefinite leave. Shut up in a little rented room in Castleleigh, killing time to no purpose, the only thing he had done was hunt for this record.

After Fredrick pushed him down to Winsmore, he had given up looking. Who could have guessed he would find, in a country village like this, a record he had not been able to find even in a great city like Castleleigh?

"You buying that?"

The potbellied stallkeeper, who had been idly bantering with the owner of the shop next door, came over to the stand. It was expensive for a secondhand record, but Elliot paid more gladly than he ever had.

"Funny thing. Not a singer a young fellow would know."

The man counted the bills and spoke as if it were a marvel.

"A fine singer, mind you, but even among people my age, only folks from the western provinces barely know her. You from out west, by any chance?"

"No. I'm from here."

"Doesn't look it. First time I've seen your face."

Under that curious gaze, Elliot only smiled and said nothing. Reading in that face a depth of years that had not come easily, the stallkeeper put on a loose, hearty laugh.

"Don't have to say, if you'd rather not. I only thought it was strange, a green young man knowing Bessie Wallace."

She was not a famous singer, true enough. If it had not been for Major Keaton, who used to sing Bessie Wallace's songs at the drop of a hat, Elliot himself might have gone his whole life without ever knowing she existed.

"...Someone I knew used to sing it often."

A bitter smile caught at the corner of his mouth. The face, steeped in a regret far too deep for his years, looked somehow heavy and dull.

"You got a phonograph, though?"

At the man's ahem, he came sharply back to himself.

"What?"

"You'll need a phonograph if you mean to listen to a record."

At that perfectly obvious remark, his expression turned a little strange. As if he had expected as much, the stallkeeper let the words drift out, angling.

"Works out nicely. I just happened to get a phonograph in the day before yesterday..."

A large box settled onto the floor with a thud. Anna, who had been staring at the phonograph inside it, lifted her head.

"Where's the cake?"

"...Ah."

Last night's words came back to him, and his lips parted a fraction. Reading the stricken look on his face, Anna turned sulky and away.

"Liar."

Elliot, who had been standing blankly, spun around and flung the front door open. But over the open hill a reddish evening glow was already falling. The bakery would be shut by now. He let out a long sigh and dragged a helpless hand down his face.

That evening, not a word passed over the table. Anna was expressionless, as usual, but something about her was downcast, and Elliot rubbed his tired eyes and picked his way through his plate.

Tired. Yes, he was tired. For a former soldier who had spent the last half year shut in a small rented room in Castleleigh, floundering in a swamp of solitude, these past few days had been too much.

Living with a strange girl he could not grow used to. The landscape of a hometown he had never wanted to come back to. This quiet that squeezed the breath out of him.

Perhaps the vicious sleepless nights were gnawing at his body.

He thought it while he washed the dishes in a daze. His insomnia was an old thing, but the days he endured on brief, shallow dozes sometimes grew past bearing.

On days like that, he had to drive his body until he dropped, exhausted, into sleep. A half-measure of fatigue only made a night spent with open eyes more painful.

Tonight, too, instead of going to his room to rest, he decided to finish the work left undone in the garden.

Night laid a pitch-black dark over the hill where a single house stood alone. In that jet darkness, as if anything at all might come leaping out. Sometimes, when he turned off the lights in the sitting room and stood quietly looking out the window, he would remember the sentry posts of a distant battlefield, where the enemy used to come running without warning.

Not a good memory.

He rubbed his gritty eyes and climbed the ladder. He meant to hang a night lamp from the blue eaves that came down low outside the sitting-room window. Even if it could not drive off all the darkness that fell on the hill, it might chase a little of it away. And, if it were possible, these vicious sleepless nights as well.

Light flickered into a bulb no bigger than a fist.

Facing it, Elliot smiled faintly. It was foolish, but he thought he would not mind going blind in this small light.

It was a gentle night.

The tail end of March, when even the night wind blowing in off the open sea had grown soft as silk. Over the hill where darkness had settled like a curtain, a bright light budded like a star. It was a light that drove far off the night that had occupied the hill, and drew close again the garden that had receded beyond the far edge of sight.