One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (6 page)

The women tap twice at the entrance, quiet as a heartbeat. Brona forces herself to wait until they knock again, then twists the knob too hard. “Quickly,” she says, ushering her supplicants in. “Close the door.” With shaking hands, she nudges them towards the rickety table. Her ears drink in the sound of full bottles clacking in the satchel M’Amie still carries.

“
Put them here,” Brona says, pulling two jars from the girl’s grasp. Brona places them carefully down, as far from the table’s edge as possible. One jar, two, three — she reaches out, but there are no more.

Rather, she is given no more.

Cora and M’Amie stand, united for however brief a time, but united nonetheless. They hug the vessels to their chests, mouths set in identical determined lines.

“
Give us what we came for, hedgewitch,” says M’Amie.

“
Give us what we’re owed,” says Cora through gritted teeth.

“
Gifts,” Brona reminds them. “Favours. Let there be no talk of
owing
.”
 

Her brain is fuddled and fuzzy with exhaustion. Through the glass, in the jars’ swirling myriad contents, she thinks she can see … can see … slinking, slithering forms, yes. But more, something more. A shape. A boy? So small, so small. Wispy, spinning. She catches strange glimpses, shadows spiralling around ghostly, slow-forming limbs. She blinks and the vision is gone.

Hallucinations
, Brona thinks.
Exhaustion.
 

She shakes her head.

“
I’ve never broken a bargain,” she says. She points to a tidy shelf across the room where she laid the gifts out carefully, hours earlier. Piles of feverfue, baaras, cures for water elf disease. Two miniature clay tokens shaped like curled babes. A puddle of colourful silk ribbons.

At last, M’Amie hands over the satchel. Cora relinquishes the remaining bottles, and the two of them retreat to collect their due.

For a moment, Brona loses herself in arranging, lining up, assessing the trove.
This will have to do
, she thinks.
It must be enough. It must.
Behind her, the room has gone quiet.
 

“
What now?” she asks, feeling the weight of two gazes. “You think I have nothing better to do than fuss about the roundness or flatness of your bellies? Wear the charms and the ribbons, steep the herbs in boiled water then drink it all down, every drop.” She recites an enchantment they must speak before and after the drinking, then gets them to repeat it. Brona thinks she gets it right — doesn’t care much if she hasn’t. No sooner does the spell leave her lips than it is gone from her mind. She does not watch them leave.

∞
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Come dawn, poisonous eels churn inside M’Amie’s gut. Stoats gnaw at her innards. Wasps sting her tender parts, burning and shredding.
That’s some flushing Brona’s worked
, she thinks, breath seething through clenched teeth. She balls up on her cot, hipbone scything into the thin mattress. A huge round softness prevents her from properly folding. Sweat-soaked, she unfurls, gritting through pain. She
fumbles for candle and match. Eyes gummy and heavy-lidded, M’Amie squints against spark and flame. Squints and squints but cannot seem to focus, to clear away the big white blob that’s blocking all view of her thighs.
 

Bloody witch!
M’Amie’s belly hasn’t gone down; it has bloated even further! She coughs and coughs, and coughs become sobs. Quiet, stifled whimpers. Inhuman snuffling. There are talons inside her. There are knives. Rocking back and forth, she wipes drips from her nose. Gapes, mouth pried but not moaning. Heaving silently at the sight.
I look five months gone now, not two
.
 

She feels the taut flesh, the stretched bulb of her middle, feels it chafing against her shift.
Things
move within her. Eels? Stoats? Wasps? No, no. Nightmares. An angry babe. Pangs lance through her, and now she moans. Loud and long. Like a poisoned cat, she’s filled with noxious gas, bile, putrescence. No matter how she farts, how she writhes, the sensation does not ease. And the stench! Mud and decay. Loam and wild garlic. Fungus. Things buried, unearthed.
 

M’Amie moves slowly, gingerly down the servants’ staircase and comes into the empty kitchen. Tonight, for the first time, she has avoided Matthew. Heavens forbid he see her — smell her! — like this. The hearth is cold, but the girl can’t make it to the fireplace, much less dig kindling from the bottom of the chip-box, or cast about for flint and steel. She stumbles, falls to her knees on Cora’s perfectly-swept tiles.

Cursed witch
.
Sped the child along instead of slowing… Instead of stopping it altogether
! Between her thighs, there is wetness. Stickiness.
It’s coming
, she guesses, too afraid to check.
No, please no
. The liquid is warm and carries a tang of iron. Rats nibble on her intestines. A clot of maggots presses, pushes, roils to get out.
 

M’Amie can’t bear to look, can’t bear to see the baby’s crowning.

She crawls away from the hearth, towards the comfort of the large pantry.
A good place for a scullery maid to hide,
she thinks. Dry and dark and safe. She makes a nest of apple sacks and bags of flour. Curls like a bitch on the hard floor to whelp her pup in secret.
 

She imagines the look on Matthew’s face when he realises what’s happened. What she’s done. Not the pregnancy. The trying to get rid of it.

With her face buried, cheeks grating against rough hemp, M’Amie howls.

∞
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Cora had gone from Brona’s hovel straight to her quarters. Straight to her own small corner of milord’s great manor, and into her husband’s bed. Convinced, at last, they’d conceive a child who would stay. Who would cling to her, and hold fast.

At first Cole is surprised by her enthusiasm. Then fervent. Eager. Delighted as Cora slides up and down on him. She isn’t dry tonight; her nethers don’t rasp against his. For once, this isn’t a brief, grunted rutting. Cora is liquid on top of him. She slurps and sloshes. Cole groans and moans with each glide of her. And he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts and hollers. Growls. Slaps.

“
What is this, woman?” he shouts, punching her off of him. She splays on the bed while he scrambles away, scrubbing at his red-soaked cock, yanking up his red-soaked trousers. The feather bed, a wedding gift from Cora’s mother, is awash with crimson.

There should be no blood until a baby is born
, she thinks, smearing the scarlet on her bloomers, staring at it blankly. Her husband retreats, head moving from side to side like a confused hound. Seeing the bewilderment on Cora’s face, Cole hesitates, and hope rises in her that he might, just this once, offer some sympathy. Some care. What he gives is his broad back. The door closing behind him as expressive as Cole is ever likely to be.
 

Cora inhales deeply, gathers herself. She has felt this before. Has no doubt she’ll experience it again. Down the hall, she grabs thick rags and a worn calico belt from the linen cupboard, into which she struggles, refusing to cry.

In the pantry, there is dried nettle and yarrow to staunch the flow.

Her feet are leaden on the stairs.

She doesn’t give M’Amie a second thought until she reaches the kitchen. Sees the carmine trail dragging from the fireplace to the closed pantry door. It takes all her strength to push it open. To step aside and let a sliver of morning light splash across the girl’s shivering, huddled form. Her twisted, desperate face. The bloat in her nightdress. The blood.

Little bitch
, she thinks again, but half-heartedly.
Little bitch, little bitch, that baby should’ve been mine
.
 

Might be it still can…

Cora grabs the herbs she needs, enough for herself and for the ailing maid. “Come. Now,” she says. She’ll make a quick poultice for each of them, jam it between M’Amie’s legs herself if she has to — the girl can’t lose the baby. A tisane, too, to slow things down, to keep the child within. The baby
must
be saved. Her grip on M’Amie’s arm — her young, plump arm — is harder than it needs to be. The maid squirms, but Cora’s hold tightens.
 

“
Get up,” she says, adding a boot to her command. “We’re going back.”

∞
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When tipped, the jars’ contents glide into the tub, graceful and playful as otters. The cunning woman stirs once or twice with a long wooden spoon, then abandons it in favour of flesh upon flesh. Water froths with the flickering slickering of overfed leeches. Brona’s lips twitch with a twickering smile. Once they’ve all latched, round mouths to round tracings, she hooks them in place with careful, precise whispers. Fixes them to Cavan’s skin.

Her fingers, though soak-shrivelled and thick at the knuckles, are nimble. Submerged in the tub, they squeeze and stroke. Careful of the wyrms’ tender flesh, so delicate when engorged. They frisk gently, rubbing and tugging. Quick, confident motions. Ones she’s practised many times before, when accepting and returning favours. Giving and taking comforts. She milks the leeches, resisting the urge to clench, to rush. Rushing doesn’t return any favours. Rushing takes more than it gives. Time. Effort. Joys. Boys.

Her fingers work and work, massaging. Coaxing spurts of her son’s soul from wriggling fat bodies, grey-white gouts of the spirit the leeches have feasted on in the Grumnamagh all these years. She lifts a flaccid thigh from the preserving fluids, pinning a leech with her thumb. Has the boyish hide stretched? Has her son grown while she wasn’t looking? Cavan, dear hollow one, always in such a hurry. Always rushing.

She strokes and strokes and strokes.

He’s filling out
, she thinks, the slurry in her veins slurping and sloshing through a heart that hasn’t beat so quickly since the child rushed his life short. Barely three, and he hadn’t quite learned to run, hadn’t toughened his muscles. But he could plod, stomp,
hurry
from place to place. He could sneak though the smallest gaps: in the cottage’s siding, the sapling briars, blades of grass on the soggy shores. Cavan hadn’t been a runner, not quite, but he’d sure had a stride on him. An inexorable, unforgettable stride.
 

One small step into the Grum and Cavan’s foot caught on a dented brass arm-ring. Or a sword bowed by time. A thief’s crooked ribcage. Brona had imagined it thousands of times. She could picture it perfectly. The twist of her son’s ankle, shackled to muck. Nightjars taking up his screech, sending it back, beak-shrill. Surprise turned panic, just for a second, before his precious face was swallowed. Gone beneath the surface with the other treasures and bones, gone gone until Brona had woken from her untimely doze. Until she’d splashed and scooped and sobbed and searched, having slept just a minute — just a few minutes — drowsing in the afternoon heat… Until she’d liberated his limp shell from the drowning-shallows.

Until now, at last, when she’d harvested every last skerrick of his soul from the wet.

It’s working.

Soon there is meat to him, not just wrinkled skin, not just leather.
Finally
. Certain of it now, her hands are a blur.
Finally, it’s working.
 

Another moment and Cavan’s torso begins to lift on its own. His limbs flail, contorting into grotesque positions. Brona slips her hands under his legs, feels sinew and cord. Not toddler’s legs, pudgy even as they stretched into boyhood. The knees, once pink and dimpled, are wizened and black, bending backwards like a nag’s. They press into her palms, sharp and knobbly. Covered in a pelt of slimy hair.

Not to worry
, she tells herself, a bit too quickly.
It’s just a bit of sludge,
a bit of soul-scum. We’ll scrub you up nicely, my boy, once the spirit’s settled. Not to worry.
 

Webbing gums the spaces between Cavan’s fingers and toes. Now his cheeks and chin lengthen, equine. Once-bright irises are muddied; orbs of gold and rust bulge from the sockets, wide-set and rolling with a wild horse’s glare.

The thing whinnies, shakes its weedy mane, claps its scaled hands against the walls.
Splat splat splat
, erasing the five-fingered prints with its own. The leeches, spent, fall off the swollen skin.
Splat splat splat
into the filthy water, too exhausted to flee as the púca flips onto its belly and plunges face-first into the tub.
 

Púca
.
 

Brona doesn’t gasp — she doesn’t believe it.
Will not
.
 

She grabs a cake of lye and lard, and starts to grind it across her son’s spine, shoulder blades, ribs.
We’ll scrub you up nicely… Not to worry…
But Cavan’s ears point and droop. Bristles sprout from his neck and spike all the way down to his long-tailed rump. And the smell — oh, the smell! — sweat and rot and meat. Mouthfuls at a time, he crunches and slurps and snorts all the leeches until the bath is depleted. There are none left to restore him, none to rescue. Left too long in the Grum, the boy’s spirit has diluted, decayed, mingled with unsavoury wights. Mischief-makers with a mind to drown their riders, not carry them safely across bog and fens. Letting loose a loud burp, the beast rolls over and smiles. His teeth are wood-tinged and covered in moss.