Tender Morsels (29 page)

‘’Tis true,’ I said even lower, ‘for what would your word be worth?’

Then I was gone from that fartsome, crumpled, ale-smelly room, before I undignified myself by landing a blow upon a poor ignorant beast.

Branza had long ago given up hope that she would find Urdda in her wanderings. She had long ago stopped expecting, cheerfully or uneasily, that second-Bear would surprise her in the near forest or on a far hill, in playful guise or terrifying. Still she wandered, though; still she strode the countryside. For a full round of the seasons, she went out alone—sometimes for only an hour, sometimes for a day and a night in the wild, and a day’s returning.

‘Do you not feel lonely out there?’ said Liga when Branza came home one evening, spilling autumn cold from her skirts and hair into the tranquil, fire-warmed air of the cottage. ‘Why do you not go up the town for a change, and visit with people, and have some conversation?’

‘People are not nearly so varied as animals,’ said Branza, pulling off her boots by the door, ‘in their habits and shapes. They are not even varied as birds, leave alone all the other kinds. The town is always the town, doing the town’s things over and over.’

‘I like that,’ said Liga. ‘I like to know what to expect. And that everyone is so friendly. Besides,’ she added, ‘I thought you had interests there.’

‘Interests?’ Branza came to sit by the fire and stretched out her bare white feet towards the flames.

‘I thought someone of the Gruen family interested you once.’

‘Oh, Mam.
Once. Years
ago.’

‘Why did nothing come of that, daughter? Or might something yet?’

Branza spread and wagged her chilled toes. ‘Do you wish it would?’

Liga made two more swift stitches in the seam she was sewing. ‘I should not like you to die unmarried.’

‘Why not? You yourself seem perfectly happy in that state.’

‘Yes, but—’

Branza turned to await the rest of the sentence, but Liga only stared into the fire, her eyes too dark to tell the black part from the coloured. Branza rubbed Liga’s shin. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mam.’

‘I should like to have some grandchildren some day,’ said Liga simply, waking from her stare and sewing again.

And now that Urdda is gone
—Liga’s unspoken words hung in the air—
it falls to you, my angel child
.

Branza shook her head as if a fly were bothering her. Rollo Gruen belonged to her childhood; to the time before she knew she could lose her sister. He belonged, in fact, to the time so close upon the day she had lost her that Branza’s curiosity about him and Urdda’s disappearing had mingled in Branza’s memory. She could not entertain the tentative sweetness of the one without calling up the pain of the other. And then there had been the second Bear, beside whom Rollo Gruen seemed so slender and simple; she had had the sense that she could move the man around like a taw in a game of bobstones, and somehow he had no longer interested her after Urdda left and after Bear. She would rather find herself a glade, or a seat by a pool, and position herself stonelike so that the forest ignored her as it did stones, included her and perched upon her as it did stones, so that the smallest and rarest and most timorous of birds came down to drink in her presence, or the wobblingest fawn took shelter against her unaccountable warmth. She would rather walk and walk until it was no longer clear whether she was shaping her stride to the landscape or whether the slopes and gravels, sheep-paths and tussocky meadows were in fact becoming, rising and declining, and giving way to one another in response to her own step.

‘Why, do
you
feel lonely, Mam?’ she said. ‘Do
you
feel left behind and old-maidish?

Liga looked to the fire again, but not so hollowly this time. ‘Perhaps just a tadge,’ she said quite comfortably. ‘But always I think, ’Tis better to be safe than sorry. And safe is what I am here, in this house, and in this life.’

The two of them looked on that safety as it enacted itself in the flames, spriting from log to log, runnelling blue and orange up to the fire’s peak.

‘I don’t know. Children?’ said Branza dreamily. ‘I don’t know very much about children.’

‘Children are delightful.’ Liga reached out and tousled Branza’s hair, which was still damp and cold. ‘You would love them.’

‘This is a new house to me,’ said Urdda when they arrived at Lady Annie Bywell’s. ‘Merchant Tenner lives
there
and the Ginnis boys live
there
—I recognise that horse-head finial—but this one, this is new-built.’

‘It has been here as long as the others,’ said Todda mildly. ‘And the Ginnises moved higher uphill many years ago, to Alder Park. They own more greenery than the late Blackman Hogback and the Eelsisters combined.’ She rapped with the iron doorknocker.

Urdda stepped back to examine the house again. All but one of the windows were shuttered, and that lace-curtained one had the same sense of eyes behind it as all windows had in this town. At home, people let themselves be seen, waved greetings to you through the windows, or pushed them open and spoke to passers-by. There was none of this lace business, none of this secretive peering. Was this Lady Bywell looking down at her now? Urdda restrained herself from waving or poking out her tongue.

Finally, a slow shuffling sounded from inside. Adjustments were made on the other side of the door, and then it opened. A woman small of stature stood there, in a neat-laced cap and a satin dress, with a sweetly embroidered slipper-toe peeping out below. Though she was dressed like a lady, her face was lined and brown, as if she had been out in the weather all her life, and the hand that held the door, for all its rings, had the same hard-worked look. She did not speak, only took in the sight of Urdda and Anders, and Todda holding Ousel, from bottom to top to bottom again, with glistening grey eyes.

‘Leddy Annie?’ said Todda. ‘My name is Todda, wife of Davit Ramstrong. These is my boys, and this is my guest, Urdda. I wonder if we might prevail on you for some o’ your time and wisdom?’

‘Wisdom?’ said the lady flatly, but she opened the door wider and stood back for them to enter. All this very slowly, though, as if she were as unsure as Urdda of the etiquettes.

She waved them into a darkened sitting room on the right, into which they could not go far for fear of colliding with some chair or curio-case of the crowd of them there. The lady followed them in. Then she went to the window, slowly and laboriously looped back a curtain, and opened a single shutter to admit some light.
She sat herself in a velvet chair in that light, sending up from it so much dust that she and the chair both might have been afloat on a cloud.

She regarded them each in turn, uncertainly. She exchanged a look with Anders, as if she felt herself to be on the same footing as he.

‘We have come to ask your assistance,’ said Todda. ‘Urdda has arrived among us from a place very like St Olafred’s, but not exactly the same. My husband, Ramstrong, spent time in that place accidentally, one Bear Day. And there is another lad had considerable time there—near three years, while but a moment passed here—this last Day of the Bear.’

As Todda spoke, the lady’s hands locked into a cluster of knuckles and ring-stones in her lap. The littlee-man might make
that
stone out of a gold-barred finch, and
that
one out of a red-throat, Urdda thought.

The rings rearranged themselves and the fingers shook, whether from age, or the weight of the rings, or the lady’s fright at the sight of the visitors. ‘I cannot help you,’ she said huskily. ‘Collaby is away. My assistant. My helpmeet.’ With the word ‘helpmeet’ came into view her fine ivory dentures, even-edged and gleaming.

Collaby? thought Urdda. I’ve heard that name.

‘Do you know the place I speak of, though?’ said Todda. Anders stood by her, a proprietary hand on her knee, looking from face to face as each spoke.

The dust and the silence hung. ‘I do know of that place,’ the lady said reluctantly.

‘Is it a difficult place to get to?’ said Todda.

The lady reorganised one hand over the other, then the other over the one. Her skin sounded papery against itself, and the metal of her rings clicked against the stones. ‘Ah,’ she murmured, ‘it is all too easy now-a-day.’

‘It is? How should such as our Urdda get there, then, as already belongs there?’

The lady looked up at Todda through silvering frizzles of eyebrows. ‘I would ask you to wait,’ she said. ‘Until my man returns. Lord Dought, you know.’

‘Will that likely be this morning?’ said Todda.

‘I do not know when it will be.’

‘Within a week? A month? A year, even?’

‘I do not know. He comes and he goes as he pleases. He do not keep a reg’lar calendar.’

The lady lowered her grey eyes. The rings clicked and scraped some more. The dust sank in the air around her.

‘I believe I know your man Dought, Leddy Annie,’ said Wife Ramstrong. ‘He is a smaller man, is he not? With a fine head of silver hair, and a beard he mingles with it over his shoulders?’

Why, the littlee-man! Urdda thought. Collaby—of course!
Saint
Collaby, that was what he called himself! They
were
finch, then, those rings of the lady’s, and red-throat.
These stay good on a trade, where I come from
, he had said.

‘I saw him just the other day, I think,’ said Todda, ‘did I not, on the Chambers steps? He has set himself to besting Hogback Younger now, I believe. Lord Dought is a great recourser to the law,’ she added with a smile towards Urdda.

‘I . . . I am very sorry,’ said Urdda in a fright. ‘But I must inform you, my lady, that Mister Collaby, Lord Dought, is no more.’

The little old lady’s face came up, crossed by surprise; then wariness that Urdda might be tricking her somehow; then rage that she might, and fear that she might not. And behind all this, Urdda saw Lady Bywell waking, as if from a long preoccupation or misery; waking into this dust-cloaked room, into this life, into this situation.

‘Urdda-girl,’ said Todda anxiously, ‘how did you come by such news?’

‘He was killed by a bear. By that Teasel Wurledge boy as a bear. In that place, near to my home. And most of him eaten up. I saw it myself,’ said Urdda. ‘And my sister too.’

‘Your
sister
was et?’ gasped the lady.

‘No, my sister saw him eaten. She buried what was left.’

‘Buried?’ This seemed to frighten her even more. ‘Oh greshus, no. This is no good at all.’ Lady Annie brought her hands to her face. They were like claws—or twigs, with the rings like galls swollen on them.

Todda gave baby Ousel to Urdda and went and knelt before the widow, laying her hands on the woman’s arms. ‘Leddy Annie, what should we do for you in your bereavement? Do you use a God-man? Do you want a service read?’

‘I have no one,’ the lady barely said. ‘I use no one but Dought. I am all alone in this fortune, in this house, in this town. He took such joy in his riches, while I’—she opened her eyes and looked at Urdda without seeing her—‘I really could not care, when it comes to it. I never quite accustomed myself. I am only here because he told me I ought.’

Wife Ramstrong rustled to her feet. ‘We should help Leddy Annie to bed, Urdda. She needs to rest from her grief.’

‘You are from that land,’ Lady Annie now said with intensity to Urdda. ‘You saw him often there?’

‘I saw him twice.’

‘Was he a lord there?’

‘Indeed, no. He was a nuisance and a thief.’

‘Urdda!’ said Todda. ‘That is not kind, at this time.’

But Lady Annie laughed, and wept. ‘Of course he was! A nuisance, a thief. He were probably stealing from the
bear
, some trout or honeycomb, that he killed him. An Onion’s boy to the end. Oh! Life is so long, and too hard, and then it ends so cruel and sudden!’

‘I will take her upstairs, Urdda, before she is any further upset,’ said Todda. ‘Anders, you stay here with Urdda. I will not be long.’

Anders moved solemnly from beside his mother’s chair to beside Urdda’s, and stood watching as Lady Annie quavered and clung on his mother’s arm. When the two women had gone, he turned to Urdda. ‘We made the leddy cry,’ he said.