The Music Box: Chapter Twenty

For the rest of that spring and part way into summer, the pair travelled the countryside, living rough, eating what they could find growing wild; putting into practice everything Isabelle had learned from her time in the woods. Once more she was keen to skirt the towns and villages they came across, knowing from afar that they were all wrong, that they had no future there.

For the first week they travelled in near-silence, each coming slowly to terms with the maddening jumble of thoughts and emotions wreaking havoc with their young hearts and minds. There was an unspoken understanding between them that until their own troubled waters were stilled, nothing should occur between them that could unsettle the slowly returning calm.

All around them nature was awakening, pre-empting their own imminent discoveries. The skeletal twigs and branches of elms and oaks soon budded and broke into full bloom, the leaves lending shadow and texture to what had become a single endless plane of muted grey light across which they traipsed, beneath their feet like a think sheen of ice on a winter’s lake. Their own silence had been mirrored by that of the sleeping countryside; the nascent awakening of their loosened tongues in conversation and shared secrets now echoed the rising crescendo of hungry starling chicks, roosting robins and twittering blue-jays in dizzying pursuit.

With the thaw around them and within came a new sense of purpose, a belief in them both that their ceaseless wandering had reached a turning point, that the feeling of ‘leaving’ and escape had imperceptibly shifted and tipped the scales to one of imminent arrival.

One bright and sun-soaked day, the golden glow of buttercups tickling their chins and the lightest of breezes playfully tussling their hair, they stopped in their tracks at the peak of a gentle hill. Percival had been talking to Isabelle of his life-long dream to learn his letters and to be able to write his name, when he saw her eyes transform into a deep cerulean blue such that he had never in his life seen.

Finally breaking free from their watery depths he slowly turned and followed her gaze down the hill, where it sloped all the way down to a sparkling sea, an unbroken sweep down to a crooked finger of land jutting out into its fathomless depths. Tucked in the nook of this finger was a village whose jumble of wind-battered buildings stumbled back up the hill towards them, leaning back away from the harbour whose mouth opened to taste the sea as she passed in and out. They shared the sensation that the harbour was breathing the heaving swell in as though its very life depended upon it; the village’s gills feeding so hungrily on the sea that the fresh air of the hillside seemed a superfluous afterthought.

Percival felt Isabelle squeeze his arm with uncommon strength, pinching just above the elbow.

“Home,” his love whispered.

***

Home it had been ever since, the pair settling into their new life in Seaforth as though nothing more natural could ever have been imagined. They married as soon as they could and Percival was not long looking before he found some work in the local inn by day – by night, with Isabelle’s encouragement, staying up by candlelight and learning his letters from old Mr Livingston who lived next door. A rapid learner, it wasn’t long before Percival could mark not only his name but Isabelle’s too. He took great pride in how grand the P looked standing there at the front, how much authority was in his rounded B when he wrote out Button. From there he took to learning more about numbers and addition and before two winters had passed he had become the book-keeper for Mr Livingstone’s tanning business. The very night he learned of his new job, Isabelle broke the news to Percival that she was with child.