Branza flew at him and hauled at his arm, trying to take the switch from him; it took all Urdda’s strength to detach her and move her along, with Strap fouling the echoing lane with his language after them, and calling them spinsters and witches and busy-biddies.
‘How could he treat an animal so?’ wept Branza.
‘Do not speak, Branza. Do not utter until we are back home safe!’ Urdda spoke so savagely that Branza’s tears stopped in surprise. Urdda propelled her on up the hill, forcing a smile at a goodwife whom she half knew, who had paused and would have asked for explanation had the two women not swept past her so determinedly.
‘You are not the sister you were, Urdda,’ Branza said tremblingly as they entered Widow Bywell’s street, which thankfully was empty of people, with only Larra Kitchener’s canary pouring its caged heart out in the window there.
‘Well, you, you, are exactly the sister you were.’ Urdda released her ‘And you cannot be, Branza; it will bring you nothing but trouble. Everything is different, and you must learn a different behaviour to match it.’
‘That little animal, that starven. Did you see how miserably it stood? And is standing now, no doubt,’ insisted Branza, ‘as he beats it, with not the energy to obey him, so poorly has he fed the creature.’
Urdda opened the door of Annie’s house. ‘He’s thrashing it twice as bad because of your interference. Did you think of that? You did not succeed in stopping him—you only made it worse for the beast.’
‘But I could not just walk by!’ Branza passed her sister in the doorway.
Urdda shut the door behind them. ‘Why not? He told you true: it is his beast and he has rights over it, to treat or mistreat as he will.’
‘Who gave them to him?’ wept Branza. ‘Who gave him rights to injure something so? They are as great criminals as himself!’
‘Oh, shush-shush! There is nothing you can do.’ Exasperated, Urdda embraced her sister, who was taller than her, and so much older, and so intent, it seemed, on not seeing things as they were. ‘You must watch and wait, Branza, to see what powers you have and don’t have. It is not like home. We ruled there. Everything fell into place around what we wanted. Here, we are not the only ones wanting, and we must make room for other people’s desires.’
‘But other people’s desires are so wrong and so cruel, Urdda!’
‘Not always, sister. And when they are, one girl, or even two, can often do nothing more than take their own displeasure and walk by. You cannot set everything aright as you used to, keeping secrets, burying littlee-men—’
‘What ails her?’ Liga had come to the workroom door at the noise. ‘Urdda, what has happened?’
‘Go in with Mam, Branza—give me your basket. I will put these in the pantry and bring us a dandwin-and-water to steady us.’
And she ushered Branza into Liga’s arms, where she would find consolation telling her unfortunate story to another recent outcast of heaven.
Beside the cottage step, Branza attacked the ground with a stick. Liga had dug holes for the two jewels using only her hands, but this weed-field had been garden then; now it was wasteland, the ground hard as stone.
‘Aach!’ She stabbed with her stick, and a mean lump of earth cracked upward. ‘Cruel stuff,’ she muttered. ‘Have you been magicked against me?’ She was hot from walking, and clumsy from the excitement she had carried here, from the secret, from the goodbyes-that-must-not-seem-like-goodbyes with which she had left the house.
Alone? Urdda had said. That is not wise.
I will go straight down to market, she said. There are plenty of women there. I need to stretch my legs and walk straight, and look at something more distant than my needlework. My very eyeballs are cramped. With those words she had cleared the suspicion from Urdda’s face.
More small, hard chunks of earth broke away. ‘You are the same earth,’ Branza said. ‘How can you be so stubborn?’ She fought some more loose with the stick. ‘Mam dug you in her sleep, almost.’ She tried again with her fingertips, and loosened a stone the size of a pea, and a few grains of earth with it.
How deep, Mam? Did the moon-bab say? Branza had asked the other day. As in the stories, you know: ‘Dig you an arm’s length; there will the treasure lie.’ Or ‘A hole the size of your own head, and lay the charm-stone in it.’
No particular depth, Mam had said. Just to cover them.
Foolish girl, Branza told herself. You should not have asked and drawn Mam’s attention. Now she has only to remember that conversation and she will know exactly where to look for you.
Perhaps she should have wetted the ground—brought some bowl or bucket and filled it from the stream, and soaked and softened and made the earth diggable that way. Perhaps there was a bowl in the wreckage of the house, for surely Mam would have used such? Branza sat back on her heels and eyed the grey thatch rotting in the doorway, glued flat there by the years’ many weathers, the weathers of all Branza’s life span—well, the shrunken version of it that had passed in this world. No, she would not even begin to lift that roof-edge. Surely town people or gypsies would have come by and taken anything useful long before the roof fell in.
Just to cover them. That was not so deep. She returned to her task, and after some dogged work had a hole big enough, she thought. She took the cloth from her belt and untied the red jewel. Ought she to say something, to beg those powers-that-be that Annie spoke of? No, Mam had been too tired to beg, she was sure; Mam had only dug and buried.
She had been there herself, baby Branza! ‘Why did you not look?’ she told her infant self across the years. ‘Why did you not lift your babby head from your wrappings and take note for me what she did?’
She held the heavy jewel and banished frivolous thoughts from her mind. She ought to be solemn at least, about this. Part of the success of this came from single-minded wanting—or wanting not; wanting escape. She thought of the town in her mother’s heaven: of the peaceful streets, of the green squares that brought sunshine in among the house-rows; she held Wolf in her mind, the feeling of his fur, his cold lick on her hands, on her cheek; she cast imaginary bread onto the path, and the birds came flocking, and she named them, aloud, while Mam wove rushes by the window.
Please, she thought as she reached down into the warm, dry earth and placed the ruby there. ‘Please let me go there,’ she said aloud, in case the moon-bab was listening just outside the skin of this world, as Mam had said, waiting for a woman’s distress to activate it, or a falling Bear’s, or a stamping littlee-man’s.
Now she filled the hole, businesslike, and crossed to the other end of the step, and began again. She should be doing this at night, maybe at midnight; that was always a propitious time, Annie said. Not in the glare of afternoon, when things were emphatically not magical, but bald, and hard, and too clear-lit, with no mystery about them, no power. But she could not have got away in the night. There was her inquisitive sister; her anxious mam; and Annie, who noticed everything, though she did not always say; then there was the town guard, who might in that other place permit her to pass, with only a reminder to be home before dawn so that Mam would not worry—and not even that, these last years; only a nod these last years. But here they would step up smartly and require her to state her business, and were she to say, ‘I am walking to my mam’s old house, whence I hope to convey myself magically to the land of her heart’s desire,’ would take her in hand, she was sure, and smiling to each other would lead her kindly home, perhaps calling for a physic along the way.
So it must be done now. She brought her dig-stick down on the hard dirt at the southern end of the doorstep. The blow jarred her knuckles, her elbows, her shoulders, and made her teeth clack together. Oh, it was hopeless.
But hopeless or not, she must persist. For she might discover it to be quite easy, once this part was done. Why, Mam had slept away the passage there—Branza herself had slept her bab-sleep, and woken in that other place. Coming the other way, Ramstrong had simply run up into the air and fl
own. Urdda had pushed her way through with the force of her wanting. And that Teasel boy, from what Urdda said, had fallen through, in the excitement of fleeing—fleeing from Branza, that lucky Branza who had not known how lucky she was. That happy Branza, whom nobody disapproved of or stared at, who never had to concern herself with town opinion.
So Branza dug, and with what felt like appropriate words laid the clear jewel in the bottom of the cavity, and filled it in.
Then sleep, child, the moon-babby had said to Mam.
And that is all you did? Branza had asked her, affecting to be only curious, sewing, sewing—she could see the very flower, a fanciful crimson and rose-pink thing, on which she had been working as she spoke.
I was capable of no more, Mam had said, and laughed. I slept the way a stone sleeps, or a fallen log on the forest floor. And when I woke, I was there.
And Branza had watched her, all ordinary there, diligently hemming, and Mam had raised her head from the hemming and given Branza a distracted smile.
To sleep on the doorstep, with her head to the east—that would be the most magical thing to do, Branza thought. But the sun was strong there; she would not be able to sleep in that heat. So she lay among the weeds along the wall, and a fine soft bed they made, and a consistent, if thin, shadow, and she pillowed her head on her earthy-smelling hands, and she quelled her racing thoughts—of Mam, of Urdda, of their realising she was gone—and convinced herself that the warm wall behind her was the bulk of Wolf, lain down with a whine behind her, and guarding her as she slept.
Urdda and Liga strode about St Olafred’s. The light was almost gone, but still they peered into every alley and doorway they came to that might conceal Branza, every chink and corner.
‘She will not be in the water,’ said Urdda, turning back to find Liga still on the bridge she herself had just crossed.
But Liga searched the stream below, and eyed the culvert into which it was rushing. Then, slowly, she walked down the bridge, seeming to age further with every step.
‘We must go back to Ramstrong’s,’ said Urdda. ‘We will tell them we have had no luck. He will organise a search. He will have her found in no time.’
Liga took the arm she offered, but would not adopt the stride Urdda wanted. All her briskness and purpose, all the anxiety that had driven her out of the house and around the town, seemed now to have flown.
They reached the corner and Urdda would have had them go Ramstrong’s way, but Liga stopped, silent, her head down.
‘What is it?’ said Urdda. ‘Come, Mother. While there is this last bit of light.’
‘I must go home and see if something . . .’ She raised her face to Urdda almost pleadingly. ‘Before we tell anyone.’
‘See what?’
‘Well, see if she has come home, even. While we searched for her, no? And then . . .’
‘Then what?’ Urdda tried to set a stronger pace in the direction Liga wanted, but although Liga moved, she seemed still reluctant.
Urdda felt a flare of impatience, but she adjusted herself to Liga’s creeping, and bent to where Liga almost cowered under the press of her thoughts. ‘What is it, Mam? What are you thinking that’s worrying you so?’
‘She was asking me about the—about how I came to be in that heart’s desire of mine, that place . . .’
‘Ah,’ said Urdda. ‘So she’s gone hunting that moon-bab, you think?’
‘I think maybe that. I have a terrible feeling.’
‘To the cliff-top, then?’
‘Yes, and what if she casts herself off it, and the bab does not save her, and she dies falling? Or, just as bad, what if the bab saves her and takes her utterly away from us?’
Even in the dusk, Urdda could see Liga’s eyes brimming. ‘And what if she only walks back and forth, begging into the night? I have done that often enough myself. Or what if she finds the little moss-patch we found before, and sleeps there, and wakes saner in the morning? Always your mind goes to the worst, Mam, and the worst very seldom happens. She will not throw herself off that cliff, don’t you worry. She would not do that to us. Only I would, when I was younger and sillier.’
‘And I did not think she would attack a man, either,’ said Mam tremorously, ‘for beating his own donkey. But she did that. She is not herself.’
Urdda tried yet again to remember Branza’s goodbye that afternoon. I will go straight down to market, she had said. There had been nothing special in her bearing, had there, particularly? Urdda remembered her own annoyance. Annie and I are in the middle of a batch, she had said, or I could come with you. Can Mam go? Now she could not recall whether Branza had looked secretive or sly at all—she thought she would be able to tell, were Branza trying to hide something, but she was less sure of this grown sister than she had been of the one she had left behind with the Teasel-Bear.
‘I failed that girl,’ Liga muttered at Urdda’s elbow. ‘I did her a great wrong, just as Miss Dance said.’
Urdda sniffed. ‘Yes, you failed her so badly, all she wants to do is go back to the world you gave her, ungrateful girl! To the time that you were failing her. How she must hate you!’
‘I should not have said it was stories, when I was telling you both about here. Only, it relieved her so to hear it, and I wanted her to be at peace.’
‘Of course you did, Mam! When she is not at peace, she’s most irritating. Such as lately. Such as tonight.’
‘Oh, do not say that—it is not night yet!’ And Liga glanced up anxiously at the first few undeniable stars.
When they reached Annie’s house, Liga had the energy to establish quickly that Branza had not returned, and then to hurry upstairs, but when Urdda had reported on their search to Annie and followed her mother up, she was sitting against her bed-edge in the dark, and her window seat was opened and its contents half emptied onto the floor.
‘She has taken the jewels,’ Liga said.
‘The jewels?’ Urdda pictured Annie’s coffer as she had last seen it, a quarter full of glitter and gleam.
‘The stones the moon-bab gave me. The red and white. I shall never see her, my golden girl, no more,’ Liga said piteously.
Urdda went and wrapped her in her arms. ‘She will come back, Mam. She knows what Miss Dance said. She knows she must come back, not stay forever as you tried.’
‘She will try, too,’ wept Liga. ‘She takes so much after me, she will stay for ever, I know. She will be perfect happy there. I should be glad for her, I suppose, but—’
‘So selfish!’ Urdda whispered angrily into Liga’s hair. ‘How dare she run away and hurt you so!’ What am I saying? Urdda thought. Who am I to talk, that ran away a full year, which multiplied to ten for my poor mam? If this is how she suffers for a night’s loss, what kind of a state did I put her in?
But Liga’s mind did not go the same way; she did not even seem to hear Urdda’s words. She must be too deep in this present distress.
‘I will go to Ramstrong’s now,’ said Urdda. ‘We will start everyone looking. Out to the cliff, out to the cottage, everywhere. Don’t you worry, Mam—’
‘No,’ said Liga, holding her tighter. ‘I cannot stand that her name be bandied about in the town so. If she is found by some gang of townsmen, even Ramstrong himself, she will be so embarrassed. Tomorrow, you and I will go out to look. We will be the ones to find her wandering, or her body, or her gone altogether.’
Branza paused and drank at Marta’s Font. When she straightened, Teasel Wurledge was in the road ahead, and the air around fairly thrummed with Branza’s aloneness, Branza’s impropriety.
‘Such free spirits, you Cotting girls,’ he said.
‘Good morning,’ she said stiffly. Should she call him ‘Mister Wurledge’? But she was so much older than him.
He stood aside, then fell into step with her. ‘What are you at, out here on your ownsome at crackerdawn?’
She did not like him so close to her elbow. Or like at all the set of him, with his hint of stooping and secrecy. She
walked a little faster, but he kept pace easily, and the noise of her hurrying skirts made her slow again.
‘I remember you young and fair, Branza, as no one else here does.’
‘My mother does, and Urdda, and Ramstrong—’
‘As no man. No St Olafred’s man remembers you as marriageable as I do. I seen you just blossoming, in your perfection.’
She walked on, watching the stones before her feet. She did not understand. He was describing some other sort of woman.
‘I seen you—’
‘You should not talk to me like this.’ She hurried again—let her skirts panic as they may.
‘Why not? I am free to walk here. And you’ve no guardian, so we’ve privacy, whatever I might want to say.’
‘I do not like it.’
Several more steps passed.
‘You still have a full figure, though your face might be flagging,’ said Wurledge.
Branza had no clue how to answer this.
‘What have you been doing in the woods all alone, with the leaves in your hair?’ He reached, impertinent man, and plucked one out. She veered away from him. ‘Rolling on the ground, is it? Imadging you were a lady bear?’
There was the memory, the mounted bear and the mounting, and all the zinging strangeness that engendered. And a stab of fear—the forest flashing, him crashing behind. Her throat made an unbidden, realising sound. He heard it and knew she remembered; he saw her face, and it made him grin.
‘You know what I like,’ he hissed close behind her ear. ‘You seen me with her.’
‘No,’ she said, meaning, No, that is not what my face meant, my surprise. This was too dreadful—this man, this misunderstanding, her crawling away from her night’s disappointment, from her grey drear dawn against the wall of the ruined cottage, only to find this embarrassment waiting for her, making of her something and someone she was surely not, affecting to know her but completely mistaking her, and then forcing his mistake on her, demanding that she answer to it.
You must not go out alone here, little Urdda had said, so smoothfaced and sure of herself, the day they had arrived here. It is not the same in this world. It isn’t safe, a woman alone. Just tell me, and I will go with you. Or Mam. Mam, Urdda—both so unreachable now.