Read Online Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library by Sarah Waters - Free Book Online Page B

clipped horn fell to the ground like crescent moons.
    A dozen seagulls had joined the polka-dot sheep, skimming low, strutting their stuff on the green baize, searching for food. Perhaps there was a storm out at sea. Wasn’t that what they said? That seagulls inland meant bad weather at sea?
    Her parents had inhabited polarised worlds. All air and water, she thought. Not a scrap of solid ground between them. Even their languages were not translatable from one to the other. It was a simple question of semantics. Neither of them had any vocabulary for taking responsibility. So, she’d had to find her own piece of solid ground, her own shoes to walk away in.
    ‘I’ll put new shoes on the front,’ he said. ‘The hind ones can go back on this time.’
    The small furnace roared in the back of the van. The red-hot shoes would hiss with seeming fury when they were plunged in water. A cloud of steam would rise and disperse. This much she knew.
    She and her parents had stopped speaking. It was for the best. Her new language had words with meanings that simply could not exist in theirs, like love and solid and rock. She had her own clichés now. The man she loved was as solid as a rock. He had once wondered, out loud, who would look after her if something happened to him. “Who would look after you if something happened to me?” he had said. She had supposed she would look after herself.
    Again, he drew the pony’s leg between his thighs and placed the shoe. He held the nails between his lips, taking each one as he needed it. They had flat, rectangular heads, and the shaft tapered to a fine point.
    ‘Do you know the story,’ she said, ‘of the Black Bull of Norroway?’
    He hammered a nail into place and glanced up at her, sideways, with two nails still held softly between his lips. He paused before answering her, pinching the nails between the thumb and index finger of his left hand and holding them away from his mouth so he could speak.
    ‘I don’t know that I do,’ he said. ‘But if you tell me what it’s about, perhaps I’ll recognise it, all the same.’
    ‘It’s about a young woman who, by her own small error, finds herself abandoned in the Valley of Glass. The floor and walls of the valley are all made of glass, and the more she tries to scramble up the sides, the more she slides back. In the end, she can do nothing but crawl on her hands and knees around the edge of the valley, looking for a way out.
    ‘Just as she is about to give up, to curl up and wait for death to come to her, she finds a blacksmith’s forge tucked deep into the side of the valley. The blacksmith – he can be young and handsome or old and gnarled, whichever you wish – listens to her story and takes pity on her. He promises to make her a pair of iron shoes to help her climb out of the valley, but first she must work for him for seven years without complaining.
    ‘And so the young woman – she can be any age you please, really – pumps the bellows and holds the tongs and passes the blacksmith his tools for seven long years without once complaining, though it is hard and heavy work, and the heat from the furnace scalds her skin red and raw.
    ‘Finally, at the end of the seven years, the blacksmith thanks her for her work and makes her a pair of iron shoes whose soles are set with spikes. But he knows no way of fastening them other than to nail them to her feet, which is what he does.
    ‘Of course, the young woman is in agony, and every step she takes sends pain shivering through her body. But, as we already know, she is a stalwart soul and she clambers up the smooth side of the Valley of Glass until she reaches its rim and is free. The End.’
    ‘You mean that after all that she doesn’t even get to marry a prince?’
    ‘Well, of course she does, but it’s a long story and I’ve told you the interesting bit.’
    ‘I see,’ he said. ‘But I’d like to hear the ending, nonetheless.’
    He drew the pony’s leg forwards and