Tender Morsels

  ‘I don’t like to. It might distress her, the telling.’

  ‘It might well,’ said Annie blandly.

  Branza looked sidelong at her. ‘Are you telling me to press her, or telling me not?’

  ‘I am telling you to do whatever you will do, my sweet. ’Tis your business and hers, between you.’

  ‘But it will distress her.’

  ‘Ah.’ The little witch wagged a crooked finger. ‘But you ain’t in her heaven now. Things are allowed to distress her here.’

  ‘But I do not like to distress her.’

  ‘Then, you silly, you have to weigh up, don’t you, which is the better: to not distress and never know, or to know and mebbe set her a-weeping.’ And she tipped to one side and then the other, under the weight of the two imaginings.

  ‘Make Mam weep! What a terrible thing!’

  ‘Oh, ’tis not so terrible, a tear dropped here and there. ’Tis all part o’ the match-and-mix of life. There are mams have told me that babs were put on earth to make mams cry! If that is true, I would say you have been failing in your function some.’ She looked up at Branza through her eyebrows.

  Branza laughed at her.

  ‘Far too good a girl, you have been. You need to kick up your skirts and kiss a boy or two, I’m thinking.’

  ‘Oh, I am too old for that, I think.’

  ‘Old! You with your golden hair and that skin, that skin! Why, I would not say no to a man’s lips if they were offered me. I would rather they were not age-withered, though, nor surrounded by grey beard.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘But then, I cannot expect much, guv the state of my own mouth.’ And she cackled ivorily.

  ‘Enough of this silliness.’ Branza smiled down at the glowing jewels in her hands. ‘Tell me, Annie: if you wanted to, could you send me back there, the way you sent Lord Dought?’

  ‘Back to your mam’s heart’s desire, my darling?’

  ‘Yes, or to my own, where everything would be just as pleasant, that being how I wanted it?’

  ‘I might be able to,’ said Annie with a shrug. ‘But very likely I would bugger things up again, and mightier than I done before. I tell you, it near split my brain athwart just remembering what I done for Dought, when Miss Dance come along and tried spooning it out of my head. All the intricacies and the work-arounds. If you have powers, you’ve got to find help in your youth; someone with stronger magic and practice have to advise you, someone who knows their ears from their onions. And I never did. I just blundered along in the dark with a few thumb-rules from that gypsy, and look what happened. I broke that thing, that time key, and Miss Dance had to practically kill herself pulling things as back to rights as she could get ’em. And your mam and you lost ten years out of my doings—or gained them, if you think of it that way.’

  She searched the weeds next to Branza’s feet for the insect that was shrilling there. ‘What’s more,’ she said, ‘I promised the woman I wouldn’t. Time was, I would of gone against that promise for convenience or silver, or copper if enough had been offered me. But nowadays I am a woman of my word.’

  Branza smiled at her glum tone. ‘That is a great pity, Annie.’

  ‘It is, int it?’ said the mudwife, and cackled again. ‘You need to find yourself a fresh-sprouted witch, just crossing from girl to woman, and have her use her more-power-than-sense on your behalf. I know an orph’nage where you might start your looking.’ She stood up in the weeds and laughed down at Branza. ‘You’ll want money, enough for the makings and to lure the girl, but I can help you wi’ that. You won’t require much—just enough for a pair of blue satin shoon for dancing, I should think, and a sugar-fig or two.’

  ‘Who knows where I would end up, Annie, with that girl’s help?’ Branza got up too, tying the jewels to her belt by their cloth.

  ‘Some wastrel’s heaven, or some murderer’s.’ Annie pushed through the weeds towards the path, throwing the words back cheerfully over her shoulder. ‘Much the same as this world, really. Hardly worth your while, sweet girl!’

  The household had retired to bed. Liga was at her window, nightgowned, drowsy, not wanting to leave the slight wafting of the breeze for the stifling comfort of bed.

  A soft knock at her chamber door gladdened her, that she need not sacrifice the one for the other just yet. Rather than calling out, she crossed to the door and opened it herself.

  There stood Branza, still dressed, and looking a strange combination of secretive, embarrassed, and amused. ‘Here, Mam,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve something of yours I must return.’

  She put into Liga’s hands the cloth bag Liga had sewn during their first days here, of green linen embroidered with an approximation of the red flowers and the white, and the foliage of the bushes that bore them on either side of the cottage door in the place of Liga’s heart’s desire. Inside that familiar cloth, the shapes of the two jewels were softened by the wrappings that kept them from clinking together and damaging each other.

  Liga held them and examined her own embroidery. ‘I never could quite capture those blooms,’ she said.

  ‘No? I do not think they could be any other kind of flower.’

  ‘Oh, no. I did not quite catch the . . . the force of them, though you can see me trying and trying.’ She turned the bag over and laughed softly at her efforts on the other side.

  Then she covered the bag with her hand; she could not talk about nothing for ever. ‘I am glad you are giving these back, Branza. Does it mean that you no longer are trying, or yearning so much, to go home? I had thought you seemed happier since you went to Rockerly, although Miss Dance disappointed you.’

  ‘I know—it is unexpected, no? I’m surprised myself, how much happier I feel, how much more sensible things seem. And, you know, I don’t think I could tell you what Miss Dance said that changed everything, the words she used, but I do know that they were exactly the right words. I could feel her setting things to rights inside me. Perhaps it was magic, but I don’t think so. I think that she is just such a clever, kind woman, if she says I am to stay, it must be true and I am happy to take her word for it.’

  ‘She is kind,’ said Liga, surprised, ‘although she seems so fierce at first. She is careful with people’s feelings. But she will stand no nonsense, no falsehood. She wants everyone to look at things very straightly, very clearly lit.’

  ‘Yes, and there are not many people who want to do that,’ said Branza eagerly, but quietly, in the dark hallway with its chamber doors like watchmen in a row. ‘I suppose because it is not comfortable.’

  ‘Oh, it is not.’ Liga had spent long hours the night she arrived here from that place, telling Miss Dance the whole truth of her meeting the moon-bab and the events that preceded that, all the way back to her own mam’s death. She remembered it well; she had shed barely a tear in the telling, Miss Dance had sat so upright and alert to listen. The things that had been done to her by Da, by the town boys, while they had seemed just as great injustices as they did next day when she wept floods onto Annie—to Miss Dance they were elements in a calculation more significant than Liga felt she could comprehend; she felt as if, with her own information, as full as she could make it, and Miss Dance’s experience and intelligence, the two of them were piecing together some part of creation Miss Dance had never managed to delineate before, as if the story of her small self were a lens through which Miss Dance was able to see the movements of some much larger mechanism, some tidal, or volcanic, or planetary movement from which her considerable powers derived, and to which they were also destined to contribute.

  ‘But,’ Branza went on, ‘as Urdda said, though I did not really understand it at the time, comfort is not what we are here for, or not necessarily.’

  Hearing her daughter say so, so bravely, and seeing Branza’s face so full of thought and the effort to understand and make things right, and feeling the weight of the jewels in her hands, the jewels that had bought them so many peaceable, comfortable years away from here, Liga felt like a piece of shot silk,
shining proudly one way, regretful when a different light struck her. ‘That only makes me want to comfort you,’ she said rather desolately, stepping into the hallway and taking Branza in her arms.

  ‘Of course it does,’ said Branza, laughing softly at her ear. ‘You’re my mam. That is what mams are for, to comfort us when other things disappoint us.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Liga, eyes tightly shut, holding Branza close. ‘That is what daughters are for, angel child.’

  15

  A few days after Midsummer, Todda was brought to bed, and very easily, of the daughter she and Ramstrong had hoped for.

  He brought the news up to Annie’s house, where the two boys had been lodged while Todda laboured.

  ‘I am the happiest man alive,’ he said, ‘the happiest father.’ And he looked it, tired but unable to keep the smile from his face. He clinked cider-cups with Lady Annie and smiled upon the world as represented by that lady’s garden, Liga and Branza under the arbour with them, and Urdda being chased in and out the house by his two wild sons, Ousel having to stop sometimes to get breath for more laughing.

  ‘Oh, there is nothing like daughters,’ said Liga. A man wants sons, a man wants sons, said Da in her memory, but look, it was not true. Ramstrong wanted daughters, and the fathers at the Midsummer bonfire, dancing with their girls—none of their faces held the scorn and impatience Da had shown at the sight of her.

  ‘Daughters and sons is both grand,’ asserted Lady Annie. ‘But a mix makes a nice rounded family, ’tis true.’ And she sipped her cider so satisfied, she might well have forgotten her own orphanhood, and the absence of any family at all, her whole life.

  But they did not drink sufficiently to the health of mother and child that day. The baby stayed well, but something went amiss for Todda Ramstrong. Two nights and a day she lay abed, sleeping only when she exhausted herself with the delirium of her fever. She could not nurse her daughter after the first night, and by the second she could no longer recognise her husband, nor anyone who came to her aid, whether it be cousins or sisters with fever-food, or Annie with her herbs and mutter-spells. Just before dawn, she came clear and it seemed the fever had broken and the worst was over, but all the woman had strength for was to instruct Davit Ramstrong to tell the children, when they were old enough to understand, that she was sorry to leave them, that she loved them more than anything in the world, that her heart was breaking of it. And then she was gone.

  People could scarcely believe that a woman of such goodness and diligence would be taken. Liga could not believe it; she reeled at the news, and then fell into something of a stupor. ‘Once and for all it is proved to me,’ she said to Annie as they sat in the dark kitchen, trying to bestir themselves sufficiently to make a breakfast, ‘that no one gets what they deserve. People walk around St Olafred’s today, unpunished for evils they did, yet Todda Ramstrong, blameless wife and faultless mother and kind, kind heart—’ Here her voice began to fail her. ‘And the daughter, babby Bedella, who will never know her, not even the little I knew my mam!’

  ‘’Tis cruel,’ admitted Annie, house-gowned, bed-bonneted, and toothless. She looked a hundred years old, a shadowy crone in the cold predawn light from the window.

  Ramstrong was a strong man, but he did break a little, he did break for a time. He was a wise man, but for a time after Todda died he did not know how to care for himself or his sons and daughter, or of any worldly matter.

  Liga felt she knew nothing useful for this time and situation; she could help Ramstrong in no way—bring him all the meals she and her daughters might, distract the boys for however many hours, befriend little Bedella’s nurse however closely. She could do all these things and yet know that she was not addressing the central part of the problem, and never could. It was within no one’s power to remove the cause of the grief that afflicted them all, but Ramstrong and his sons the worst.

  Through this wretchedness occasionally intruded memories of Midsummer, and Ramstrong dancing with her in the bonfire light. You and I know, Liga, he had said, and she had often repeated the words to herself, to evoke again the pleasure she had felt. Now she repeated them and was horrified by the thought that she had somehow, with the repetition, precipitated Todda’s going. I did not mean that, she told herself. I did not mean to claim him, or to take him from her.

  But seeing how he mourned, how he must be taken in hand by his brothers if he was even, in those first days, to wash and to change out of the clothing he had worn when Todda died—as well as fellow-suffering, Liga felt a certain enchantment. I wish Todda could see this, how he is useless without her! The strength of the attachment that, broken, produced this wreckage of a man—she had felt something like it, perhaps, with regard to her daughters, but to feel it for a man! To have a man feel it for you! She had not known it was possible before; now she watched it in wonder. Could she ever dare, she thought, to want it for herself?

  I remember when Anders were born, how all on a sudden I was joined to everything. When, as a bear, I flew across the country and I saw the pattern we all belong to, well, that was a momentary thing, and the sight faded behind my later adventures; but when my first son were handed me—I remember, I thought I had never held linen so clean, nor been in a morning so absolutely new—the pattern came clear again, but this time, rather than flying above it and seeing it whole, I fit into it and was right down here on the hearth and against the beat of it, my face in the warmth. I felt the house of it all around me.

  The atmosphere, the mood of a place, is different between a little cot and a house like Annie Bywell’s or Hogback’s, knowing how far the rooms, the grounds, the outbuildings extend. This house I now occupied went on and on, out and out, farther than any other house I had ever been in. And in each room a family lived, and in each family a da had held his first bab, son or daughter of his blood, of his wife’s line and his own, and had shaken with the echoes of this house that we were all in, extending forever out in space, forever back and forth across the ages. I remember how, exhausted and frightened, I marvelled at the enormousness, and at the same time how it spun in like the pattern on a snail-house or a seashell, all towards this little face, red, near-blind, and mystified, these two soft flowers of hands not knowing what to do with themselves, to crumple closed or spread wide and waver on their stalks.

  And I thought that was all, you know? I was blissful and ignorant and I thought that was the whole pattern—even I thought I could see how my mam’s dying and my da’s fit in there, although I wished too that they could be here to enjoy the sight of Anders and to meet what a grand wife I had got myself in Todda Threadgould.

  But when she died—that wife, that grand wife, who had done nothing but grow in grandness and constancy, who had become that entire other person as well, the mother to our sons—I saw there was this other wing to the house I had not sensed before, even though ’twere true I had been bereaved. Da had lived there; Uncle lived there now; and I was wandering its halls for the first time and hearing the rooms echo beyond their swung-open doors, and the shuffle of the listless feet and footling activities of the left-behinds. I did remember shrugging off people’s embraces and pities when Mam died; I had been at the age where I wanted to think myself a man who had no need of others’ pity. But now that I was a father and a family man and joined that closely into the pattern, other men seemed to feel they could come to me, other widowers, and there was a look in their eyes—those first days I only had to meet it and my tears would flow and they would take me in their embrace, and I began to recognise that there were some bereaved who knew that part of the pattern, and others who had lost and lost—several wives sometimes; both parents, several children—who still did not know, or see, or understand that it was there.

  The most surprising of the former men were those two lads who had been so misfortunate last Bear Day. Who would have thought? For they both of them came from families quite intact, and neither was married, although I knew the boy Noer were courting the sister of Filip Dear
born, that died by accidental shot of Jem Archer at that time, mistaken for a true bear.

  Anyway, they both came, together, to the burial and back to the house afterwards, where the Cotting women, the Widow Bywell and my cousins and cousins-by-marriage had prepared a fine board, busy women, while I sat in my stupor or wept upon any who came near.

  And when I had drunk a little and fuzzed and furred the edges of that hard blood-black pain dragging through me like I had swallowed a spiked boulder, they came and sat with me awhile, those two unexpecteds, so young beside all the widowers condoling me. They did not try to talk or understand or assert their fellow feeling. They sat either side of me, and Bullock chatted to Noer about his brother, almost as if I were not there, and Ousel came crying from something and climbed into my lap, and then Noer—Noer, who was almost a stranger to me, about whom I only knew that he had been caught up in that mysteriousness of the skins on Bear Day that Miss Dance said Widow Bywell were accountable for, along with so much else—he started up to singing, the exact right song—‘The Seven Swans’, which had neither loss nor woman in it nor tried to counter the grief with unwanted jollity, but instead brought some mood, beautiful and healing, to the room. You could see with what relief people joined in, reaching for the familiar words. Many times in the days afterwards I would sing that song when it were just Anders and Ousel and me and the darkness threatened, so that we all would recapture the relief that prevailed for that short time in the room, that little warmth, that little lifting of us—not quite as high as a flying bear, so that all the world was visible and made sense, but high enough so that we could breathe, and see a little beyond our sorrows, before we had to sink again and continue our enduring.

  They said to put the little one with the nurse: ‘Make it easy on yourself, Davit, and then she may sup whenever is required.’ But I could not endure to put her there permanent, I had lost so much already. So back and forth I went, all hours of night and day, with Bedella wrapped up, a little warm scrap of bleating treasure in my arms, between Lissel’s house and mine. Sometimes Ousel would wake up and come with me in the night—and that was pleasant, to have a companion—and Lissel would often meet us at her door: ‘I heared the littlun ordering my milk to start,’ she would laugh.