Of Sorrow and Such (4 page)

Ina comes by a few days later, with the excuse of needing a headache cure. Gilly is making deliveries to the farms outside Edda’s Meadow. The front room feels too impersonal for my guest now that I know the secret of what she is, so I lead her to the kitchen. I make her a strong tea of dandelion root, milk thistle, and willow bark. She drinks it while I grind another batch for her to take home.

“How are you?” she asks, and sips the decoction. Makes a face.

“Swallow it all, or you’ll feel worse.”

She obeys.

“I am well,” I say, though my sleep has been broken by nightmares I’d long thought gone, of my mother and the day she went. In my dreams she does not pop a gallowberry in her mouth then disappear along the path no one else can see. No, she takes all the paces to the gallows and waits patiently, acceptingly as an animal, while the noose is slipped around her neck, as two strong men pull on the rope and haul her slight form aloft so that she asphyxiates slowly rather than having her neck quickly, mercifully, broken. The soft flesh under my eyes is tender from weeping. “How is Flora?”

“Flora is always well,” she answers and there’s a bitterness in her tone. “She still wishes to go to the old mill.”

“Gods, she’s a fool,” I say mildly and Ina does not contradict me. “She must wait, a month at least, and if there’s any sense in that thick head of hers she—
you
—will find a new place. The forest, Ina, is wide and dark; it’s a cathedral in need of parishioners. Betake yourselves out and run there beneath moon and shadow. You can even hunt if that takes your liking. Go far from Edda’s Meadow, there’s enough distance between here and the next town for Flora to gallivant to her heart’s content. What about the other women?”

“They’re not dimwits. They’ll not venture there unless I say, if ever. Flora’s spoilt, that’s the problem,” she says. “Her parents always gave her whatever she wanted and Karol does the same.”

“Why do
you
put up with her?” I give the powder one last pounding and shake it into a small calico pouch. It’ll last a week.

“I love her,” she says quite simply, and the truth comes through in that. She does love Flora, though the girl is an empty-headed egotist. Loves her as much, if not better, than Karol does. I’d puzzled about how close they might be, but had not divined the depths of their attachment. How painful for Ina. It makes me wonder all the more about the child she carried. Who put it there? Was she willing or otherwise?

“Ah.”

“Is there a way to get rid of such love?” she asks and her voice cracks. She points at the small blue bag in my hand. “Can you brew something to sunder this connection?”

“I’m sorry, Ina. One of the oddities of my craft: I can make a love potion, perhaps even one that will last beyond the first bloom of lust, but the only cure I might have in a bottle also brings death.”

She sobs. I sit beside her and place a hand over her long thin ones, feel the tremors of her weeping. “I thought . . . I thought I’d lost her that night, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I’ve loved her so long, and she’s loved me . . . but she’s self-seeking, Patience, I know this. She takes what she desires and gives only what she doesn’t want. So, so selfish. I would I could walk away from her.”

“Oh, Ina.”

“I would she would walk away from Karol.”

I could tell her that it will never happen. That Flora likes her fine life just as it is: Karol’s money and protection, his hard cock when she allows, and Ina’s soft tongue and gentle touch in between. That Flora is the centre of Flora’s universe and all things must circle around her. That she lives on the sight of her own reflection in the eyes of others. That her love seems like the sun, but is really a shadow that creeps in and leaves no room for anything else.

“I would Karol
were
dead,” she says with a vitriol I’d never thought to hear from her. All her mentions of her brother have been studiedly neutral. Her words hang there like a question, waiting in a silence that I may choose to fill.

“Think carefully of what you wish, Ina. If the desire will not leave you some days hence, then return here. But trust me when I say that such an act undertaken in haste risks too much.”

“But you could do it?” she says, eyes burning into me, hands pulling away from mine, gesturing at the mortar and pestle on the table, the jars of dried herbs on the shelves around the kitchen. “There’s what? Belladonna? Monkshood?”

“When you are less heated by hatred, Ina,” I say, and stand to signal our meeting at an end. All the fire leaves her and she sags before rising and straightening her spine. At the front door I hug her and she remains stiff for drawn-out seconds before she relaxes against me.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers in my ear. “I’m sorry. I owe you so much, I should be more grateful. Forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.” I stand back. “Just keep an eye on Flora. Remind her there’s more than her own life at stake if she goes back to the old mill. And your houseguest . . .”

“Master Cotton, out of Breakwater.” She makes a face.

“Why has he come?”

“A partnership. Karol wishes to reopen the old mill, have it working in concert with the new. Bringing more farmers to us, increasing profits, creating a monopoly. He wants to grow an empire to leave to . . . any child he and Flora might have.”

“So, Cotton is an investor? His man was looking over the property.”

“Karol cannot see how he looks at Flora.” She licks her lips. “He wants his association too ardently. My brother’s like a troll, blinded by the lure of gold.”

We laugh at the image of short, fat Karol Brautigan as a dweller beneath the bridge, then stop abruptly at the sound of the garden gate. A youngish man, not much past thirty, with mid-brown hair, light green eyes, and a sweet face presents himself nervously, pushes through and comes towards us.

“Good morrow, Sandor,” I say and am rewarded with a smile. There’s a parcel under his arm and I remember my books. “Are those for me?”

“Yes, Mistress Gideon. I thought you might have forgotten them,” he says, voice caught between high and deep. There is nothing of the dandy nor the rogue about Sandor, neither flash nor dash, nothing to tempt the eye of a silly, shallow lass, but he is gentle-tempered and clever and kind. He is solid and stable, his heart is stout and true. “Good morrow, Miss Brautigan.”

“You’re wise, my friend. Thank you. I’ll visit in a day or two to settle my account and order more books, if that is soon enough? Or perhaps I could send Gilly?” His pale skin turns pink at the suggestion, but he nods.

Oh, my
Gilly
-girl, why can’t you love
this
man?

I take the bundle of volumes from him and he and Ina bid me farewell, moving off together. Sandor holds the gate open for her and I hope again for Gilly to give him more than a dismissive glance. But I remember all too well that one cannot put an old head on young shoulders.

The next afternoon, we are in the garden. I turn over soil, replanting beds that have lain fallow for their allotted season, trimming the rose bushes and doing my best not to be caught on their thorns. Fenric is dividing his time and energy between snoring in a patch of sun and chasing his tail until he falls over. Gilly scythes grass from corners that have become overgrown, and pulls weeds away from the pickets of the fence. I could pay a lad to do this, but prefer to do it myself so I know what’s growing there, and how things are tended. In the forest there are spots where I’ve cultivated the more dangerous plants, out where they cannot be easily found, and no one might know them for mine. As we work, I quiz Gilly to see how much she’s retained of my teaching.

“Lady’s mantle?”

“Stays vomiting and bleeding and fluxes of all kind; it can help ruptures and bruises.”

“And how is it taken?”

“Both within and without, as a decoction or a wound wash.”

“What of sopewort?”

“Bruised leaves laid on cuts will aid them to heal quickly, a tincture taken internally acts as a diuretic and may help flush out stones of the kidney or gall.”

“White lily roots.”

“Give two to a woman having a difficult labour and bid her eat them. The child will come with ease.”

“And gentian?”

“As a tea it resists poison and aids digestion. It may counter putrefaction, and restore appetite as well as stamina. It may combat scabs and fretting sores, clear excess phlegm, and kill worms.”

“Brava!” I laugh and she gives a flourishing curtsey.

The sun is warm and the town is quiet in the grip of a Sunday afternoon. Edda’s folk are resting in their houses; those who didn’t nod off in church this morning are napping, and even those who did are doing much the same. Remaining alert during one of Pastor Alhgren’s sermons gets harder as I get older and less tolerant of any sort of religion, however to show it would mark me out. Thus we drag ourselves along to the enormous wooden church that was built on an oversized patch of land on the eastern border—a goodly walk from the pastor’s home in the centre of town—when the old one was deemed too small for the pious population. Rich citizens such as the Markhams and the Brautigans paid for it, buying indulgences and forgivenesses with their kind coin. While I pinch the scant fat of my upper arms to stay awake, Gilly avoids a fit of the fidgets by reading the prayer book, and trying not to guffaw. Sometimes she cannot help herself and so has developed a manner of appearing overcome with religious emotion at such times, which has graced her with an entirely unwarranted reputation for piety. It makes Pastor Alhgren give her approving, measuring glances while he waits for his sickly wife to finally surrender to his God’s will.

“Aunt Patience, your mother . . .” begins Gilly and stops at my warning glance; we both look around to see who might be listening. But all is still and we are the only people out in the sun. I nod, knowing she’ll keep her voice low. She moves closer. Having told her my tale, given her a piece of my history, has opened a gate. I’m unsure whether to regret it or not.

“Aunt Patience, your mother, she must have been very great to do . . . what she did. Can you do it?”

I shake my head. “She never taught me how to travel to the unseen spaces.”

“Just like you won’t teach me magic?” In her tone is a hint of injury.

“Gilly,” I say. “My dear Gilly, as I’ve told you before, it’s not that I don’t want to, but that you’ve no magic. You’ll be a gifted herbalist, but to do what Wynne did, to do what I once did, you need more than a sharp and willing mind. It’s in the blood.”

“If I were your true child, would I be able to do it?” She sounds resentful as if there’s some betrayal in my not giving birth to her. She’s unwilling to accept that the lack in her is anything but a withholding, a refusal on my part.

“Perhaps, but I cannot say for certain. Wynne came from a long line of cunning women, each of them with a different talent. I’ve met some, though, more powerful than you could imagine, and their daughters have no ability at all. Yet some of those enchanters come from mothers untainted by talent.” I sigh. “We are all balanced at some point on the witches’ scale, my Gilly-girl, but where we stand can’t be controlled or predicted. Your own mother might have been the most puissant sorceress ever to exist and still you be born untouched.”

“I don’t remember my mother at all. You’re lucky, Aunt Patience, to have memories of yours.”

“I know,” I say and the years have not dulled my shame at how quickly I sought a replacement for mine. At how quickly I saw in Dowsabel the mother I
wanted.
Wynne, I think, tried to do her best by me but was not entirely sure what needed to be done. “I hope, Gilly, that I have gone some way to making up that absence.”

I do not say I took her out of guilt, out of remorse at having left Dowsabel’s daughter Olwen alone in that hut in the woods, praying the couple I saw burying a child that very day would take her into their hearts. Whether she survived or met her end another way I cannot know, and forever it seems I ignored the ache that lived where the infant had once been. I’d never had a child of my own, as much through luck as design: I did not want to drag one around behind me as Wynne had. Yet when I’d seen Gilly by the roadside, weeping and abandoned, I could not walk past her. I could not leave her alone and unloved. I tell myself no lies: whatever good I did for her that day I did for myself, too. In caring for and nurturing her, I have salved my own wrongdoing. But she does not need to know that.

She nods. “Yes, Aunt Patience, and I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me.”

But there’s a hollowness to her words; she’s too young to be truly grateful, too young to recognise that the ache of not being as she wishes to be is something impermanent, something that will recede with time and a life lived. She’s too young to see beyond what she does not have to that which she does. Even knowing this, it hurts me.

“The sun is gone,” I say and it has, and the heat with it. Nights are always cool in Edda’s Meadow. “Time to go in.”

Charity Alhgren appears to be a harmless hapless woman, precisely the sort whose husband should have been able to do away with her long ago. Yet she has a strange obstinacy which manifests itself in a will to survive that Pastor Alhgren seems to neither understand nor indeed to suspect. Perhaps if he did he’d resort to a hammer instead of the attempts at slow medical murder he’s employed thus far. She brought him no great dowry, whatever looks she once had are gone, and she’s borne him no children, yet still she endures.

On his monthly visits, Doctor Herbeau calls at the manse to hear the pastor’s concerns for his wife’s state, and gives Charity a medicine which she tells me looks and smells like tar. There is only one bitter dose, which he makes sure is swallowed; no excess is left behind that I might investigate. After he leaves, she struggles from her sickbed if she can and comes to see me, or I send Gilly to visit with a basket of fresh flowers from our garden and a bottle of herbal cure hidden beneath. Charity’s health picks up considerably afterwards, and the corners of her husband’s mouth turn down.

I’ve asked why she stays and she always gives the same answer, which is to laugh and say
Oh, Mistress Gideon, what a question!
Yet I know she stays because she feels she has no choice; she has no family, no trade, no wealth behind her, and no place to go. I suspect it also gives her bitter amusement, beneath her sweet silly facade, to defy her husband so, a man who preaches fire and brimstone at adulterers and fornicators, drinkers and usurers, gamblers and gluttons, yet is determined to be the cause of his wife’s demise.

“Take this before the doctor next comes. Two spoonfuls on an empty stomach. It should help expel whatever he’s putting into you.” Gods know I’d offer her poison for the pastor’s food, but she’s too timid for that, too afraid of striking back; the very suggestion might send her into a fit of hysteria. Her continued existence is the full extent of her rebellion. “And visit me again afterwards so I can see how well this has worked.”

“Thank you, Mistress Gideon,” she says meekly.

“Though I’d rather you left your husband.” I tell her this every time, now without hope.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, Mistress Gideon, you know,” she says and smiles, though she can barely keep her lips from trembling. She gathers her things. “I must go, the pastor will be looking for his luncheon.”

But she’ll not be the one to cook it, for the pastor’s mother manages the household—a raisin of a woman, small and withered, but without her son’s murderous tendencies. Charity is sent to the markets like a kitchen maid. Without children—I have tried to help her, but her womb is beyond even my powers to heal—to secure her position, to give her a title beyond the empty one of “wife,” she has no true hold. Perhaps that’s why she does not leave: if she were to flee the one place where she has the illusion of a position, then what might she find? What might she be? She might simply fragment and all the pieces drift away. It does not occur to her that she might discover herself better off anywhere other than the tidy rectory.

“And we have guests,” she continues as she fusses with her string bags of fruit and celery. “Important men from the Lodellan diocese.”

“A long way from home,” I say lightly. “Some special honour for your husband?”

She laughs without rancour. “Oh no. A criminal they’re seeking. A runaway. The archbishop has sent his hounds to find her. See?”

She drops her bags and reaches into her pocket, pulling forth a piece of heavy paper, illmade. She unrolls it and shows me the black-and-white drawing: Selke’s waves of curling hair and large eyes, full mouth, and stubborn chin. It lists her name, says that the aforementioned eyes are green, the hair red, that she’s a thief and a murderess, an ungodly witch and to be feared, that she has committed crimes against Archbishop Narcissus Marsh of Lodellan and God. I suspect the deity would be put out to find himself listed second. I do not reach out to take it for fear my hands would tremble. I nod at the rough-sketched face.

“A dangerous creature it seems,” I say with a steady voice. I pray that Selke is far away.

“Oh yes,” Charity breathes and her tone is worshipful.

“Well, take care of yourself, my dear. You know where I am if you need me.”

Despite the promises I made to myself to not interfere, I sent Gilly off to pay my book bill in the hope that putting her in proximity with Sandor might help things along. Though I might feel tempted I would never use a love potion, for such love is never
true.
I wonder sometimes why I push her to this, to being a wife, and the sole answer I can find is because it’s the only chance I can see for her to have a safe life when I am gone. And at some point I will be gone, whether it be through death natural or otherwise, or a need to run. I
will
be gone and she will be alone.

I’ve spent the afternoon in the cellar reading my mother’s book of
Magica
,
adding in the notes I took from Selke’s instruction, the things I learnt about her use of herbs and the waterweed in particular, of the living clay and all the things it might do. She said it was harder and harder to find nowadays, fewer and fewer suppliers, fewer folk willing to be caught digging in the saturated, sacred earth of a graveyard to harvest it, few willing to risk being found by either the church authorities or the corpse-wights that wait for unwitting souls. Hours passed without my noticing, so that by the time I put the tome securely away and came back upstairs, night had already fallen.

When there is a battering on the front door I think how tired I am of that sound, how it seems to have become so regular in such short order. I curse the night Flora Brautigan came to me, I curse Ina Brautigan for sending her here, and I curse myself for offering help as it seems the demands for it will never end. I suffer no surprise to find Ina on the doorstep, her face whiter than usual so she looks like a ghost against the black of the evening, a hooded sable cloak held close about her. I suppress a sigh as I draw her into the house.

“What has Flora done now?” I ask, and my tone is brisk and bitter.

“Gone to the old mill. Or I think so. I can’t find her.”

I shrug though I feel ill. “Why, for gods’ sake?”

“You know why. That’s not the worst of it.” She gulps back her fear. “Cotton was meant to leave today, indeed he set off on his horse after lunch, but I just saw him return, then he and Karol left again, three men with them. They were heading to the old mill.”

“Flora will talk. Flora is weak,” I say.

“Gilly is with her.”

It seems, in that moment, that the world splits open beneath my feet.