Start reading from Lavender & Hemlock by Lili Wilkinson
Read an extract from Lavender & Hemlock by Lili Wilkinson.
4
Bay: Shelter will be given to those who wear a garland of leaves.
TANSY
There was a dog in the kitchen.
It had slipped in when she opened the back door to go to the well, a scruffy creature that was not quite brown and not quite grey. Its fur was matted and filthy, but its beady eyes were bright, its black nose quivering.
It smelled terrible.
‘Shoo!’ Tansy said to it experimentally.
The dog wagged its tail and looked meaningfully at the larder
.
The cat sauntered in, expecting its usual dish of milk. Its gaze fell upon the dog, and it leaped onto the wooden bench, arching its back, its fur standing on end.
The dog seemed greatly intrigued by this development, surging forward in a blur of tangled fur and tail, standing up on its hind legs to sniff at the cat, pink tongue lolling out.
‘Control yourself,’ Tansy told it sternly. ‘You’re making a scene.’
The dog dropped obediently to all fours again and shot Tansy a reproachful look. Its eyes turned longingly back up to the cat, who glared down with undisguised contempt.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Tansy said to the dog. ‘If you get in a fight, the cat will win. Now sit down while I figure out what to do with you.’
The dog sat, politely.
Tansy considered it, hands on her hips.
She’d been out of sorts for the last few days. Her dreams were troubled, and she woke deep in the night, her heart pounding, feeling overwhelmed with a loneliness so acute it made it hard to breathe. In the mornings she felt cold, and struggled to warm up, no matter how much she stoked the fire. The house felt unsettled too. Its usual creaks and cracks seemed sharp and somehow off-key.
To make things worse, food was missing from the larder – a heel of old bread, a ham bone she’d been saving to make soup. There was milk splashed on the stone floor, and an unfamiliar, sour smell that reminded her of woodsmoke and rotting meat.
And now there was a dog. Where had it come from?
‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said to it. ‘We have no need of a dog.’
The dog’s tail thumped on the flagstones. It didn’t seem aggressive, or frightened of her. It wasn’t at all what she would have expected from a stray dog.
‘I’m not going to feed you,’ she told it firmly.
Perhaps it was the dog who had taken food from the pantry?
But how did it reach the high shelf? Surely a dog couldn’t climb the way a cat could. Not this dog, anyway.
Tansy hoped it would just go away on its own.
-
It was still there the next morning, waiting patiently in the kitchen.
‘Enough,’ she said at last. ‘You really do have to leave.’
She took up her broom and gently nudged it. She didn’t want to hurt the creature.
It scrambled backwards away from the broom and looked extremely offended, then trotted to the back door and scratched at it.
‘Yes,’ Tansy said with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s right.’
She opened the door and the dog went out into the yard, then stopped and stared at her, expectant.
‘Off you go,’ she said encouragingly.
The dog did a little dance of anticipation, shifting from one paw to the other as if waiting for her to do something.
‘Keep going,’ she urged. ‘And don’t come back.’
The dog let out a long, weary sigh, then trotted off down the garden path, not towards the gate, but down the side towards the orchard where the chickens scratched.
Could a dog that size attack a chicken?
Tansy followed the dog through the small orchard, still gripping the broom.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned it, picking up her pace.
But the dog ignored the chickens. Instead it veered right and disappeared into the old pigsty. They kept no pigs at the cottage, and so the shed was dilapidated, the door almost hanging off its hinges.
Was the dog living in there?
It couldn’t stay. She didn’t trust a dog around the chickens, and it would surely dig up her herb garden. The cat would never tolerate having it inside, and that wasn’t even taking Lady Aster into consideration.
The dog poked its nose out of the gap in the door and yapped, sharp and insistent. Tansy tilted her head, curious, and approached carefully. The scruffy creature backed into the dark shed, and she stuck her head in after it.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Stale smoke and sour sweat and rot, strong enough to overpower the rubbish-bin odour of the dog. It made her eyes water, and she shrank back, gasping for fresh air.
Then she noticed the body.
It was lying on a pile of old straw in the corner of the shed.
Tansy’s heart nearly leaped out of her throat, and she bit back a scream.
A young woman. Dressed entirely in black, with a hard leather chest plate and leather bracers. A black iron sword lay on the dirt floor, beside an ugly helmet, spiked black iron wrapped around what appeared to be the front part of a human skull, leering and vacant.
Tansy shuddered.
The dog let out a whine and did its little shuffling dance again.
Tansy didn’t move, her eyes not straying from the figure. At first she thought the girl was dead, but then she saw movement, the fluttering of eyelashes, the rise and fall of the stranger’s chest.
A pink scar ran from the stranger’s brow, over her right eye and down to her chin. She was clearly a soldier. A warrior. She was dangerous, and Tansy didn’t want to be around when she woke up.
Tansy crept out of the shed and hurried back to the cottage.
Extracted from Lavender & Hemlock by Lili Wilkinson, available November 3.
Lavender & Hemlock
by Lili Wilkinson
A housemaid's quiet life is disrupted when the arrival of a mysterious stranger makes her question everything about her peaceful existence and her charming seaside home.
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