One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (5 page)

She doesn’t go far now. Doesn’t flee the yard curving around her cottage, doesn’t breach the hedge encircling the lot. She doesn’t hare, or dash, or delve anywhere near the life-sucking wet. Instead, she spends her days tending circles. Bog, briar, yard. Cottage, hearth, wooden washtub. Circles within circles within circles. She keeps them intact, protected. Keeps herself, slump-shouldered Brona, at their centre. Forever staying put.

People come to see her, never vice-versa. She won’t leave — and why should she? Her life, past and future, is here. She has all she needs. More: she has what
they
need. Herbs and remedies, blood and incantations. She never asks for payments. She will, however, accept gifts. Things left beside the hedge, close enough to the gate to accommodate her limp. Cupboards filled with food and other, useful, supplies. A log-pile always stacked. Ice chipped from the well in winter. Some gifts, though, should be greater than others. Warm-bodied thanks from grateful husbands, for instance — but this not so often now as before.
 

The men are younger than they once were. They are bashful. Reluctant. Their noses wrinkle at the threshold of her cottage, smelling something off.

The stink of years, Brona supposes. Loneliness. Desperation.

She doesn’t force matters. She will exchange favours with whoever comes knocking, and will take no more than her due — knowing that service and offering must be commensurate in value.

“
Leeches,” she’d said, earlier this evening, to the maids who’d appeared on her doorstep. Two freckle-faced women, neither cunning. Steeped in the same stench that shoos potential lovers away. “Plucked from the deepest heart of the Grumnamagh — nowhere else. Bring as many as your legs can carry.”

The pair had wanted to grumble, to negotiate — to debate! Brona had seen complaints in the slit of their gazes. But they’d taken the jars she’d forced on them, did as they were bid. A favour for a favour.

None would survive in the village, the cunning woman knows, if it wasn’t for her.

If it wasn’t for her, the bogs would be full.

Her gait assumes its usual cadence as she circumnavigates the fire. A few logs cupped in the packed-dirt floor, nestled deep. The cottage’s pulsing heart, a blackened pot bubbling above its embers. She pads her hands with old linens, unhooks the cauldron. As always, it thuds to the ground between her mangled feet, much too heavy to carry when full. Grunting, she drags it behind her, over to the washtub discreetly kept behind a hazelrood screen.

Dried muck covers everything back here. Timber, tub and skin alike are stained a rich, rusty brown. Brona crouches, groaning, knees popping, and ladles scalding water into the bath, basting the contents.

Souls too
, she thinks, fingernails tracing concentric lines onto the soaking leather. Round and round, she gouges targets for the leeches to grasp and suckle.
Souls are definitely circular. Here and gone and back again, never-ending.
 

She sings under her breath while kneading the skin, keeping it supple and loose. The ladle dips in and out of the pot, splashes, washes, but does not clean. Brona wipes a grimy forearm across her brow, looks up at the dusty handprints smacked all over the walls. Tiny markings, so tiny. Evidence of a toddler’s gumption and stubbornness.
If I can’t go outside to play in the mud
, those handprints said,
then I’ll make a sty in here
.
 

How many times had she slapped his greedy palms? Rapped his knuckles? “No,
a chuisle
. It’s raining. No, my heart. It’s too cold. No, my Cavan. You must remain with me.”
 

Cavan
, she thinks, splashing, scooping.
Cavan, my little hollow one
.
 

Maybe tomorrow he’ll help her to scrub it all away.

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Nightjars squawk above the Grumnamagh. Pestering, scolding the maids for disturbing their slumber. And for singing so off-key.

“
We’re going to have scars. Hundreds of them,” M’Amie moans, yet again, between verses. The old hag’s song sloshes in her mouth, the words nonsensical slurping. Brona had said it wouldn’t hurt a bit, but M’Amie knew she lied. Some swore the leeches of the Grum had tiny, tiny teeth. She winces at the sting of them on her legs, at her unwilling companion’s splashing and scowling. The leeches must be paining her, too.

“
I’m sure
she
could get rid of them — who knows at what price, though. You keen on asking?” Cora sounds both sly and aggrieved,
as if what they want should be given free of charge. That’s Cora all over.
 

M’Amie curses as she slices a toe. For a minute, she concentrates on placing her feet carefully. Hard
somethings
bump against her shins, scratch her calves. Twigs, maybe. Weeds. She plunges a hand into the blackness. Withdraws it, clutching tiny, naked bones. Evidence of drowned rabbits, she hopes. Stupid, innocent rabbits.
 

Released, the sepia-stained fragments land with a
plop
.
 

Moonlight makes M’Amie and Cora’s white, white legs glow, beacons for the leeches. With her petticoats drawn up between her thighs, plump knees bobbing in and out of the bog, M’Amie clinks with each step. The empty jars in her satchel must be filled before dawn. Before she has to get back to stoke the kitchen’s fires, and Cora has to make sure she does it. One night’s gathering, Brona had said, and they’d be square. The witch happy with her worms, and their own troubles gone. One night’s gathering, but a lifetime of tiny scars…

“
Matthew will see them. He’ll
know
,” M’Amie says absently, eliciting a sound from Cora that’s half spit, half angry air. “He’ll know why.”
 

“
Keep your skirts down for once,” Cora snaps. “Don’t
present
yourself so openly. In broad daylight, even. Every time he finds you bent over the luncheon plates… Do it in the dark, for God’s sake, and milord will be none the wiser.”
 

M’Amie rolls her eyes, wanting to laugh at Cora for calling scruffy-cheeked Matthew
milord
. She snorts, pretending a midge has got up her nose when Cora’s scowl deepens. It’s only right, she supposes, that the housekeeper use his title… After all, Cora’s not close to him the way M’Amie is, and she’s a shrew besides. Nearly thirty, her stomach still flat and her chest not much better — and no chance of either changing. Cora’s too old. Too stiff and formal. Married twelve years, womb ever as clean as the manor she sweeps, but still she claims she’ll give that peat-farmer husband of hers a second pair of hands to wield spades. But if he hasn’t managed to sow that quagmire by now, well, it’s just not going to happen, is it? Most likely she wants an excuse to get out of work. To lie in with a bub, nestling and feeding, and leave all the hard slog to the younger, fitter, prettier maids. But servants, M’Amie thinks, even housekeepers, don’t
convalesce
. They drop their little parcels, clean up their own messes before getting back to milord and milady’s needs.
 

Cora’s just snippy because she knows M’Amie has plenty of time. With her wide hips, heavy tits, and regular moons, M’Amie will always be fertile as a field after flood. As if that’s such a good thing. As if that’s such a boon.

But Cora doesn’t know, does she? She has no idea. The bounty of Matthew’s seed. How quickly it germinates, given the right conditions. She hasn’t got a clue how anxious M’Amie is for what’s growing to be gone… Cora, stiff, formal Cora, can’t possibly imagine what that yearning feels like. Wanting so badly to undo something that’s well and truly done.

So it was a surprise to find her at Brona’s cottage, blushing, begging a favour. M’Amie hadn’t heard what it was, but she could certainly guess. She’d giggled, seeing Cora so mortified, so debased. And the sound had caught the hedgewitch’s attention. It had attracted her glare.

With one look, Brona had gleaned what M’Amie wanted. One look, and the old woman was laughing.

“
Look at you two,” she’d said, grasping their wrists, more firm than friendly. M’Amie and Cora didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead. “You know, if you’d had a quiet word with each other back at the house, you might’ve timed this better.” Brona had lifted an eyebrow at their silence. “I see,” she’d said, after the moment dragged long. “You must know that secrets shared are secrets no longer.” No response. “Good. That’s good.”

And as Brona told them what they were to do, what favours they could bestow, Cora and M’Amie had risked a sideways glance at one another. Knowing they would share naught.

Now, slopping through the Grum, her legs squirming black, M’Amie wonders if Cora thinks she visited the witch to advance herself. Or to buy a love potion? A ravishment spell? She grins, swallowing another snort. As if she’s not got
natural
charms enough to keep Matthew where she wants him. As if she’s the kind of girl who needs to resort to such
tactics
. She resumes her low chant, garbling, warbling. If she
was
that kind of girl she’d not be enlisting Brona to get rid of this babe. Maybe she’d be buying sweet-tasting poisons, treats for Matthew’s goodwife and his bright-haired son. If she was that type of girl. Maybe she’d be slipping bespelled drops into his eyes after he comes, when he’s soft and susceptible. To help him see her more clearly, to want her to be something more than a tumble taken whenever he fancies. If M’Amie was that kind of girl, she’d be doing much, much more than gathering poxy leeches beneath a witch’s moon.
 

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Little bitch, little bitch
, thinks Cora. In her head it’s a tune to rival the incantation she’s mouthing at the witch’s behest.
Little bitch, little bitch
, echo the nightjars.
 

Smarmy and smug, M’Amie is
. Cora feels a bite, rips the bloodsucker from her hamstring before it gets too set in its suckling.
Firm and healthy and brimming with — what?
She tears another wyrm away, flicks it into a lidless jar.
With time
, answers a whisper, nagging from the back of her mind.
Young, elastic, fresh-bellied time
.
 

Cora stops singing. Drops a curse and a thumb-sized writher into silver-edged ripples.

“
Start over,” M’Amie says, wading over to squint into Cora’s jar.

The housekeeper glares. “What?”

“
The tune,” the maid explains, so smug, so smarmy. The moon casts weird shadows across M’Amie’s face, complicates it, but Cora can hear the girl’s expression. “If you mess it up—” M’Amie widens her mulish eyes, shakes her head derisively “—you have to start over. The whole thing, three times through —
unbroken
— for each friggin’ leech. If I have to do it proper, so do you.”
 

Little bitch
. Won’t be so clever when that smooth chin turns to suet. When those cheeks sprout gin blossoms. When those tits start to droop no matter what she’s about, and she can’t stop it, and she finds she pisses her britches with every sneeze. When she’s no longer the ripe apple everyone wants to pluck. When her man starts looking elsewhere, just as Cora’s did and does.
 

Cole’s taken to calling her ‘The Burren’ when she comes abed late, late at night. That is, when he bothers calling her much at all. Woman. Wife. Burren. Never Cora, never
a chuisle
. Thinks a bit of wordplay makes him smart. As if his own name wasn’t perfectly apt.
 

Barren as the burren…
Oh, the housekeeper knows what he’s getting at — but he’s wrong, of course. Cora’s not
barren
. She has it in her to bear life — she’s fallen pregnant more than a dozen times — she just can’t keep the babe inside long enough for it to thrive.
 

M’Amie, though, the self-centred thing, doesn’t have the faintest idea. She can’t fathom what it was like — surviving all those sad, wet, painful fiascos. Erasing their presence. Moving on. Ever-hoping. Silly bint, hasn’t been at the manor anywhere near long enough to know the years Cora swelled and failed. M’Amie hasn’t yet seen a winter in this county, four months she’s spent here more or less, and a lazier scullery maid Cora’s never seen, though she moved herself fast enough into his lordship’s good graces.

Little bitch, little bitch, let me come in.
Oh, yes, while she’s pert and willing, milord will ever be at her door, finding her in the corridor, the cupboard, the kitchen. Tossing the skirts over her head as and when he pleases. And she, stupid slut that she is, somehow has the sense to keep letting him in.
 

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Brona has watched for their return, feigning patience. A blurred path skirts through the dust, the floor foot-polished. She has waited, shuffling between the window, its glass obscured by cobwebs and marsh-spatter, and the hazelrood screen. When the maids appear, trying and failing to step carefully from sturdy tussock to tussock, trying and failing to stay out of the oily water, dawn is still some hours away. The cunning woman has had no sleep. She stands vigil, ever awake.