“Go and get us a cup o’ tea, why don’t you. There’s barley crusts still lying in the ashes in a pan; fetch that, too. I like to eat outside when it’s fair.”
“All right.” But she hung back. “What are your … sculptures made of?” she asked. The one Meraud was working on now, which was shaped vaguely like a horse, had a substructure of twisted wire, she saw, causing her to wonder if the new chicken still had its cage. There was a tub of something thick and brownish at Meraud’s feet, and she was dabbing careful handfuls of it onto the wire shape. “It looks like mud and clay and straw. And feathers,” she saw on closer inspection.
Meraud smiled again, pleased. “That’s just what it be,” she confirmed. “Oh, and a bit o’ chicken shit. Wonderfully binding.”
Lily’s jaw dropped. She retrieved it when Meraud glanced up at her quizzically from a crouch beside her new horse. “I’ll get the tea,” Lily muttered, red-faced, and hastened away. Halfway to the cottage, she started to giggle.
Lily’s primary job, she learned after they had eaten their breakfast and rested for a while on a blanket in the chilly sunlight, was to mix and haul Meraud’s heavy tubs of ingredients for her statuary. The old woman wasn’t strong enough to do it herself nowadays, she admitted, at least not in the vast quantities she needed. She was a prolific worker; if the weather was clear, she could complete a medium-sized sculpture in three or four days. She hated it when it rained—which, on the moor, it did more often than not—and had begun her mirror-wall out of desperation during a particularly long wet spell last winter. She spent the rest of the afternoon explaining proportions and mixing times to Lily, who learned that the process was far more complicated than merely stirring up a batch of mud.
Her other duties were domestic—keeping the cottage neat and clean, cooking their small meals, washing and mending their meager supply of clothing. The object was to free Meraud from the mundane so that she could spend as much time as possible on her “work,” her true calling, about which she was completely and intensely serious.
The arrangement was agreeable to Lily, who welcomed the quiet routine their days subtly slipped into. More than anything she craved peace, for herself and for the baby. The only way she could find and maintain it was to extinguish thoughts of Devon. She went at the task with a vengeance, and found that it was not, after all, hard to do. Avoidance of pain was an instinct, as natural as yanking her hand out of a fire. Once, she had been distraught because Devon thought she’d stolen money from him. His belief that she would hurt Clay was much, much worse, and it had finally killed something in her—the core of her innocence, the wellspring of her hope and her optimism. How canny his punishment was; how clever of him to understand that having her arrested, even killing her himself, would almost have been a kindness. But to force her to live out her life alone, always remembering what he had done and how he hated her—that was the ultimate retribution.
The two women spoke little to each other during the day. If her chores were over and the day was fair, Lily would sit outside and watch the older woman’s slow, rapt artistry. Gabriel would sit beside her, large and serious and steady. “Gabe don’t take to everyone,” Meraud said once approvingly, and Lily had felt absurdly flattered. She loved his powerful body, beautifully muscled, and his long, graceful tail—which he kept pointed straight back at a neutral, dignified angle, neither happy nor sad. She found his state of mind hard to decipher. Sometimes his huge brow would furrow as if in ferocious thought; at other times his long tongue lolled out of his mouth and he appeared to be a very foolish, leering sort of dog. He had a way of looking her in the eye, odd for a dog, until she looked away. Occasionally he would stare beyond her so intently that she would glance over her shoulder, expecting to see something unique. The fact that she couldn’t see it never completely convinced her it wasn’t there.
At night in the cottage, with no other light but the fire, Meraud sat in the only chair, a rough, handmade affair of splintery wood; Lily would crouch at her feet on the floor, a piece of burlap folded twice the only thing between her and the bare earth. It was November now, damp and already cold. One night Lily was bent over her wedding gown, letting the seams out of the waist for the second time. Her pregnancy was progressing—as near as she could reckon, she was in her fourth month—and yet she wasn’t gaining weight the way she imagined she was supposed to. She worried sometimes that she wasn’t eating enough. Meraud would touch no meat—‘”Twould be like butchering a friend!”—and so their diet consisted of oatcakes and potatoes, apples, barley gruel, and an occasional egg if the chicken—whom they’d named Unreliable—was in the mood to give them one.
“I haven’t always lived here,” Meraud said suddenly, ending one of their lengthy, comfortable silences. “I had a husband once, and a son. They’re gone now.”
Lily sat quietly. They had a rule, unspoken but as inviolable as dogma: they never asked each other questions.
“After they went, everything turned, everything … shifted around. Where I lived, people said I got queer. Maybe I did. But they turned even more peculiar, to my mind—passing me on my right side, trying not to catch my eye. Foolishness such as that.”
“They thought you were a witch!”
“Aye, they did. Light me a pipe, Lily.”
“But it makes you cough.” Meraud sent her a mild look. Lily sighed and reached for the pipe, tamping down tobacco in the bowl the way Meraud had shown her, lighting it, and taking a few puffs herself to get it started.
“A witch have got the means to ill-wish you.”
“I don’t believe that,” Lily scoffed.
“Don’t believe it?” She blew out a cloud of smoke, amazed. “Well, it’s true! A witch can put a spell on you, make your cow sicken or your garden wither. Or you might fall ill for a long time.”
“Is that what they thought you did?”
“Aye, it come to that in the end.”
Lily laid her sewing aside and looked up. The firelight cast long, harsh shadows across the old woman’s angular features, giving her for once a grim, almost sinister appearance. “What happened?” Lily asked softly.
She puffed stolidly, thin lips moving in and out. Finally she said, “Once you’re ill-wished, there’s just one cure: to draw blood from the witch that cursed you.” Lily went cold. Meraud said no more, but her silence only fueled the horror. A lurid image glittered and gleamed in Lily’s mind, sickening her. To comfort herself and her friend, she put her arms around Meraud’s skinny calves and rested her head on her knee. The old lady stiffened in surprise, just for a moment. Then she put one bony, quivering hand on Lily’s hair and stroked it. Lily’s eyes closed; she mentioned on a sigh, “My mother died when I was ten.” Gabriel growled in his sleep. A block of peat split in half, sending up a fierce shower of sparks.
“This man you love—” Meraud said suddenly, quietly.
Lily pulled away. “I don’t love him.” She had never spoken of Devon, not one word—and yet somehow Meraud’s knowledge didn’t surprise her.
“This man you love,” she reiterated patiently, “he might hurt you again. But you’ve got power you don’t know about yet, and you can destroy him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Be wise, lamb. Spite’s not a good cause for doing one single thing in this life. It hurts you more than it hurts your enemy.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Minutes passed.
“Did you see the moon?” Meraud asked abruptly.
“Yes, I saw it.”
“A red cloud ran right across it, red as blood. Tomorrow we’ll have to leave a gift.”
“A gift?”
“At the well.”
That’s all she would say. A little later, they undressed and got into bed.
Meraud’s gift was a doll, a figure of a woman she’d carved out of wood. She told Lily a goddess lived in the well—a dank pool of water behind two columns of piled stones, splotchy with moss and lichen and wind-browned ivy
. Lily hoped the goddess appreciated the rough offering, because she knew how many nights Meraud’s arthritic old hands had spent fashioning it. They walked back across the tussocky turf of the moor slowly, stopping to rest sometimes when Meraud’s breath gave out. Gabriel ran ahead, snuffling at fox spoor and rabbit holes. In spite of her frailty, Meraud had a graceful, loose-jointed gait that Lily loved to watch; she swung a long leg out in a high kick for each step, slow and stately, completely unique.
As they walked, she spoke of other gods and the sacred places where they lived. Sprites and faeries and the spirits of the dead were everywhere, she said, in rocks and earth hollows, trees and hilltops, under stones. Lily listened in astonishment, for she had though Meraud was a Christian. They paused beside a tall stone pillar on a slight rise of ground in the middle of nowhere. Lichen-covered, it bore no inscription, its top eaten away by the centuries. Lily gazed at it broodingly, impressed against her will by the silent, phallic power of it. “And does a god live here?” she asked, only half in jest.
“Aye, to be sure, a strong one. And another over there.” She pointed to a blasted tree beyond the rise, barkless and gnarled and twisted as if in pain.
That night and on succeeding nights, Meraud explained the spirit world. Creatures existed everywhere, cannily hidden in the simplest things—water, earthen barrows, rocks. They were as real to Meraud as their stolid hiding places were to Lily. Most of them were friendly or at least neutral, but some were actively hostile—and a few were evil. Placating them was a complex, worrisome, all-involving life’s work, with subtleties and obscure nuances Lily didn’t try to understand. But without thinking about it, she half believed in them when Meraud described them. In Lily’s passive state of mind, Meraud’s explanations of reality seemed as reasonable as any other.
As time went by, the moorings of Lily’s rational, “civilized” mind loosened further, and gradually the grays, browns, and drab greens of the dismal moor began to play on her imagination. There was life in the twisted branches of some blighted half-tree the winter winds hadn’t ravaged to death yet, or in the still, heavy stones set in a mute circle on the hill three hundred paces north of Meraud’s cottage. Even the clouds had life, though it was a heavy, loutish, brutal kind of life as they lumbered across a leaden sky in the bitter-cold, silver-gray brightness of a moorland noon. Animation was everywhere once she began to look for it. For Meraud this transubstantial vitality was natural, unremarkable. For Lily it contained a subtle, brooding horror.
One night as they lay on the rush mat watching the dying firelight dance on the flickering glass wall, Meraud told Lily how she wanted to be buried. “‘Neath the stone circle on the rise, with the magic stones from the well over me at head and foot. Do you remember ‘em, the two at the top o’ the columns? You’ll need the cart to fetch ‘em.”
Lily lay still, stiff and cold with sudden dread. “Please don’t talk like this,” she whispered. “It frightens me.”
Meraud reached for her hand under the covers. “Why, lamb?” she whispered back. “Don’t be scared. Dying’s naught but the center of a long, long life.”
December came, bringing bitter cold. Meraud’s cough worsened; she could only work outside for part of the day, and then only when the feeble sun shone. She was laboring on a special sculpture these days, more detailed than the others; it was inexplicably important to her, and there was a different kind of urgency in her that disturbed Lily. One afternoon she worked late, with feverish haste in a freezing wind, long after the light had faded from the sullen sky. Lily called to her repeatedly—Meraud would not let her near this sculpture, for it was to be a surprise—until at last the old woman flung her muddy gloves on the ground and shuffled toward the cottage.
Lily met her in the yard. “I’ll go and get the basin,” she muttered, and started to walk past her.
“Nay, leave that, let it freeze. It’s done. It’s all finished now. Help me inside, Lily, I’m worn to a nub.”
Alarmed, Lily put her arm around her thin waist and walked with her toward the door. That night, the old woman’s coughing brought up blood, and in the morning she could not get out of bed.
Twenty-three
THE WIND BLEW FOR three weeks. Snow flew in flurries before the gale; drifts lay against the cottage, though the windswept ground was bare. Icicles hung from the roof over the door, and the water in the pail outside froze. Livid clouds writhed in a low sky, from which hail began to fall one dark afternoon, blowing sideways. The tallow candle smoked and started to gutter. Lily trimmed it again and listened to the wind roar like a beast, shaking the rafters and blowing thatch-dust around the cottage like chaff in a wheatfield. She pulled Meraud’s ancient gray shawl around her shoulders more closely and knelt down again beside the rush mat.
“Thirsty?” she murmured. The old woman’s eyes were closed; if she was truly sleeping, Lily didn’t want to wake her.
But she shook her head, smiling dreamily, and opened her eyes a crack. “Wind’s picking up.”
“Are you cold?”
“I’m always cold.” Lily stirred; Meraud reached for her wrist and held her still, “Don’t,” she said with surprising firmness. “It’s too low. I told you.”
“Then I’ll get more,” Lily smiled fiercely, gently removing her clutching hand. She got up and went to the fire, poked at the smoldering turf, and added two more blocks of peat from the dwindling stack beside the grate. They caught immediately and she closed her eyes to savor the sudden lovely heat on her cold cheeks and the chilled tip of her nose. After a few seconds she moved aside so the warmth could reach Meraud. She was already asleep. Lily sat down in the chair and listened to the mad howl of the wind.
“Lily? Lily?”
She awakened with a jolt. She’d fallen asleep in an awkward posture, and her neck hurt. “How do you feel?”
“You’ve got to go and get Pater, child.”
“Yes, all right. Do you mean—bring him in? The house?”
“Aye, you’ll have to. He’ll die out in this wind.”
“I’ll fetch him, then. Don’t worry. Do you need anything?”
Meraud shook her head and fell back into a restless doze.
Gabriel got up from his mat beside the hearth and stalked to the door, stiff-legged. “You’re coming too, are you?” Lily took Meraud’s coat down from the hook in the wall and wrapped her shawl around her head. She dragged away the heavy sack of barley meal that kept the door from blowing open, said, “Come on, then,” to the dog, dipped her head, and stepped out into the gale.
A blast of frigid wind struck full-force, slapping sharp snow in her face. She hunched over, grimacing, clutching her clothes, and followed Gabriel through the maze of rimy sculptures—lonely ghosts in the barren twilight, snow-whitened, still and beseeching. Weaving among them, she fancied they felt the cold as much as she, as much as Pater, but they had no voices, no way to complain or ask for comfort. She stopped, as she always did, when she came to Meraud’s last statue, the one she’d finished on that last day. Snow covered one side, limning the soft curves palely and gentling the shape of the mother—Lily—and her arm-cradled baby. Would she have seen anything of herself in the crude shape if she hadn’t known it was meant to represent her? Probably not. And yet there was something—a quality of stoicism, perhaps?—that she thought she recognized, or at least sympathized with. No matter; the sculpture moved her to tears each time she looked at it, bitter tears full of fear and loss. She reached out and touched frozen fingers to the hard shoulder of the woman, herself, and then to the tiny head of the baby. Gabriel barked, startling her. She turned away, hugging herself, and followed him toward Pater’s lean-to behind the cottage.
At first she had a wild idea that somehow, sometime, Meraud had made another statue, one meant to look like Pater. She crept closer with awful reluctance as the truth dawned on her. The donkey stood on his four legs, long neck bent and head to the ground, as if to nibble at the snow with his velvet lips. Hoarfrost on his shaggy hide
made a sparkling fleece. His long, elegant eyelashes, ice-encrusted, were downcast; he looked sleepy and peaceful. But no steamy breath blew from his big, soft nostrils; his scrawny ribs were still. He had frozen to death.
In the cottage, Meraud still slept. Lily stirred the fire, then went to kneel beside her. The old woman’s face was gaunt and nearly fleshless, the bones like sharp sticks under the flaccid skin. But it was the corpselike pallor that frightened Lily the most. She took Meraud’s hand and rubbed the bony fingers to warm them. The old woman opened her eyes and stared at her, just for a moment, as if she’d never seen her before. Lily felt the cutting edge of panic in a swift and terrifying premonition of her absolute aloneness. “Pater s dead,” she blurted out. The words shocked her: she’d intended to lie. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and started to cry. “It’s all my fault.”
Meraud didn’t cry. “You think everything’s your fault,” she chided gently. “Don’t you know Pater’s all right now?” She patted Lily’s wrist and then put her skinny, long-fingered hand on Lily’s stomach. “I wish I could’ve seen him.”
“Who?”
“This baby.” She moved her hand from side to side softly. “This sweet child.” She sent her an unusually clear-eyed look. “This child’s a gift. He makes a circle. A circle, Lily.”
Lily shook her head in confusion. “Will he live, Meraud? Will he be all right?” Another shock: she’d never asked anything about the future, even though a superstitious part of her was positive that Meraud could foresee it. She regretted the question instantly, for the wrong answer would surely kill her.
But Meraud only said, “That’s up to you, lamb,” and closed her eyes tiredly. Her hand dropped away and she slept again.
The long night wore on. To Lily’s distress, Meraud had stopped taking solid food two days ago and would only swallow spoonfuls of potato and barley gruel when Lily insisted. Lily wanted to kill Unreliable and make a nutritious broth, but she knew well enough what Meraud would say to that. So she was helpless. There was no doctor, not even a neighbor to go to. “Don’t you know any—potions, any concoctions?” she’d wondered desperately, almost angrily, yesterday morning. Meraud had laughed at her. “So you think I’m a witch, too,” she’d accused. “Nay, Lily, I know naught o’ concoctions and magical potions. Leave me be, child, I don’t need anything.”