Tender Morsels (39 page)

When finally they realised the dampness and inconvenience of their location, they waded out, laughing, and walked up the bank to grassier ground, and Urdda presented Liga and Branza to the
Ramstrongs and Annie. Liga held on to Urdda’s arm, clearly disliking to meet so many strangers at once—and not her usual strangers, all similar-faced and inclined to smile and avert their eyes.

‘These are all friends, Mam,’ Urdda said. ‘And friends who know our circumstance and where we came from.’

‘Where
did
we come from?’ Branza said. ‘And if we are no longer there, where indeed are we, with you and . . . these friends?’

Miss Dance stood in the shallows, where she had been moving from crouch to crouch, examining things beyond anyone else’s seeing and making careful smoothing motions with her hands. She eyed Branza, clearly assessing how the bringing was to be explained.

‘May I say, mum?’ almost-whispered Liga.

‘Why, of course, Liga, if you can see a way.’

‘This lady has . . . has woken us, Branza, from something like a dream, that was our life before. And now we are in the waking life. I once lived here, a long time ago, but you were only a bab here, and will not remember. It is shaped much as our dream-life was, but there are more . . . it is more . . .’

‘Populous,’ suggested Ramstrong. ‘And varied.’

‘And there is commerce,’ said Urdda. ‘And alehouses have ale in them, which men get drunk on. There are a lot more men altogether here, and . . .’ She tried to remember back to her early days here, and what had bemused her most.

‘But there are no bears?’ said Branza. ‘Or . . . or wolves?’ She glanced around at the new acquaintances, not sure if they would know of wolves.

‘Oh, yes, there are all kinds of wild creatures here,’ said Liga.

‘Good,’ said Branza, and nodded. She seemed very tall and tentative, even gentler than Urdda remembered her.

‘The animals are not quite so tame here, though,’ she warned her sister, ‘and nor are the people.’

‘Are there many littlee-people?’ Branza said nervously.

‘I have not seen a one, not here nor in Broadharbour,’ Urdda said.

‘You have been to Broadharbour, daughter!’

‘I have! Oh, Mam, I have so much to tell you! A year and more’s adventures!’

‘A year and more?’ said Branza. ‘Much more than that.’

‘Let us sit in the sunshine.’ Miss Dance bent to squeeze water from her hems onto the shore. ‘There are many things I need to explain, and to have explained to me.’ She straightened. Her face was entirely without colour, except for the stains of exhaustion about her eyes.

‘Miss Dance, are you injured with what you have done?’ said Todda.

‘Only very tired. I did not expect my resources to be taxed so far.’ She sat where a stone formed a step in the streambank, and spread out her skirts to dry. ‘Very well,’ she said, watching the rest of the company settle on the sunny grass. ‘This is what I have seen and done.’

This lady, Miss Dance, intimidated Liga. She hardly smiled, and she was frighteningly clever; much of what she said, Liga could not grasp or follow. All that business about time, and keys, and joints, and right process—it fragmented as it passed into Liga’s ears. It flew off in pieces, connecting with nothing, telling her nothing. The most she could gather was what Miss Dance had first said: that the times had slipped out of place and no longer matched between this real world and what Miss Dance called the ‘false’ one; that the ten years that had passed since Urdda left were but one year in the real world; and that Liga and Branza were that decade older than they ought to be, and nothing could be done about it.

The sun grew strong and their hems dried, and still the talking went on. Liga’s spirits sank yet lower. They had taken a great shock when the cat had appeared—she was somehow to believe that Miss Dance was that cat, and that the man Ramstrong had been the first Bear, and some absent man, a no-good, name of Teasel, the second. Then she had been terrified by the movement from that world to this—the darkness, the rushing, the sense of strain; the fact that the dreadful cat was leading them. And then the joy of seeing Urdda had been almost spoiled by the other strong emotions—My daughter! My daughters! As if she had not realised before that she had daughters—the significance of that, the intensity.

And then she gathered that she herself had been at fault, all those years, all her girls’ lives.
I can understand, to a point
, Miss
Dance had said,
that you were allowed to take two tiny children there. But how you managed to keep them there for so long, as they grew, is more of a mystery, for they did not belong there. Urdda did the natural thing and returned to life in search of her true future; Branza ought to have done the same. It is a great misshapement of things that she stayed so long—until the age of twenty-five! She has not had enough of a true life to even conceive of her own heart’s desire. To spend her whole life within yours—tut! That is no kind of existence
.

So Liga was to understand, just on the point where the full import of their existing at all had come home to her, that she had failed her daughters. For all her work, she had given them
no kind of existence
. Miss Dance seemed to think she should at least have visited the real world now and again—Liga had not known this was possible!—so that the heart’s-desire world adjusted itself to meet her later wants, her woman’s wants beyond the girl’s. But worse than holding her heaven in the mould she had made at fifteen (but
had
she made it? What of that moon-babby’s part?), by doing the only thing she had known for certain was right, holding her daughters to her and caring for them in that safe world, instead of relinquishing them to this ‘true’ one of alehouses and gossips and jeering town boys, Liga had done very wrong by them, Miss Dance was saying.

Did Miss Dance have children? Liga could not imagine it. Would she know what was right or wrong for them? But she spoke with such certainty; she spoke as if she knew. Liga had never heard a woman speak so.

And then Liga’s own daughters, both of them, and for years!—and this pained Liga deeper than anything, and seemed proof of Miss Dance’s accusation—had not
betrayed
her, exactly, but they had kept things from her; they had had secrets! This business of the man, Mister Collaby, Mister Dought—Liga could see, clear as day, that he had been the source of Branza’s nightmares. It was not the ghost of Da that had haunted her—how could it be?—but this little quarrelsome beastie, who had made what Miss Dance called ‘incurgeons’ into the place of Liga’s heart’s desire. The woman with the rings-that-had-turned-into-birds had sent him there, repeatedly—or at least made it possible for him to return and return again—and
it was his being there, and his dying there and remaining there as bones, that had somehow pushed the times so badly out of alignment. Liga did not even pretend to understand how this had happened. She was only glad to see the woman looking appropriately ashamed as Miss Dance described what she had done. She was only glad that Liga Longfield was not the only person here who had done wrong.

Now they were talking about what should be done with Liga and Branza, where they were to live in the real world. There was no cottage any more, Urdda had said; it was all fallen to ruin; they would have to live in the town. In the town! A shudder ran up Liga’s spine.

On top of which-all, in this amiable scene, as the grey-faced Miss Dance laid matters out—the woman had them so clear in her own mind, and was explaining and repeating things, with more patience than her fierce looks would have led Liga to expect—in this scene sat the family with the two little sons. Anders was the older boy, Ousel the bab; the mam with the reassuring smile was Todda; the da was Davit Ramstrong, and Davit Ramstrong had been Bear, the Bear Liga had known in her young womanhood, when she had had girl-children; the Bear she had leaned against and scratched the head of and addressed so freely—how much of it had he understood? Her face grew warm at the thought. How much had he told that wife?

Liga snapped off grass-stalks at her side. She would rather he had been a part of that other world and disappeared, as Miss Dance had said their cottage, and Branza’s Wolf, and the St Olafred’s with the missing houses, had disappeared when Liga passed back into the real world. To have him here without his guise of speechless Bear, without his animal lumbering that she could laugh at, but instead unmistakably a man, and fine-looking, and respected as her da had never been . . . Liga could not sort one emotion from the other about him; it was all a muddle of discomforts.

‘Are you happy with all this, Mam?’ Urdda now said, and all of them—man and wife and daughters and cat-woman and the little ringless one they called ‘the Widow’, or ‘Annie’—all of them were turned to her with their different degrees of smiling and concern, all with their different minds behind their faces.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired. What last you said—’

‘That we stay with Annie for the moment, until we establish some customers for our sewing?’

Annie twinkled across the grass at Liga and gave her an encouraging nod. Liga did not remember her quite so aged, or nearly so smiling. She was finely dressed, though; where had that lace at her collar come from?

‘I am very happy for that,’ Liga ventured, ‘if you all think it is for the best.’ The sewing—of course! She had her trade now, and her two daughters as assistants. She was not the poacher’s girl any more. But what if people should recognise her? What if true-world people—a stab of sick horror shook her—should recognise in Branza and Urdda not only their mam but their different fathers? Liga might be unworldly, but she knew, by Da’s anxiety for concealment all that time ago as well as by the wrongness written deep in her body, that a bab got by one’s da was not a thing the true world would forgive. As for Urdda, if any of those five men recalled Liga and their deeds upon her, and then noticed what to Liga were the Hogback boy’s unmistakable lineaments and colouring in Urdda’s face—well, just the thought of them
thinking
made Liga’s heart run fast with fear, let alone what they might begin to
say
, to each other, to the town. But perhaps—it dawned on her as Miss Dance went on to explain, again, to that Mister Ramstrong’s wife Todda, how the times between the two worlds had gone mismatched—perhaps that very mismatchment would afford Liga’s little family some concealment. For while Urdda was roughly the age she ought to be here, Liga and Branza, being a good decade older, were likely to throw off the calculations of any town person musing on their pasts. And if she only had a credible tale to distract that person—

‘But one thing,’ she said.

The faces had all been turning away to Urdda and Miss Dance, but now Liga had them again. She felt as if she had no breath, might laugh or faint or weep or any wild thing, so her voice, when she found it, came out very low and controlled. ‘I was married,’ she said.

None of the faces winced or changed at the lie.

‘None knew of it,’ she went on, ‘and it was not for long. I was
widowed by the man before Urdda was born. Name of Cotting.’

Todda and Annie and Davit Ramstrong searched their memories for the name; Branza looked astonished, and Urdda delighted.

‘And you were Longfield before!’ Urdda said. ‘Ramstrong and I have found that much out.’

The name, unheard for so many years, hit Liga’s chest hard enough to dizzy her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But the less said of that, the better. We will go by the name of Cotting.’

‘Urdda Cotting,’ said Urdda enchantedly. Liga suppressed a pang of guilt as the false name took hold of the girl’s imagination. ‘Branza Cotting—I like that, Branza!’

‘I did wonder,’ said Davit Ramstrong, looking relieved, ‘that I never saw nor heard mention of a man.’

‘I never heard of a Cotting,’ said Annie, and Todda stopped frowning and shook her head in agreement.

‘He was from the Millets,’ said Liga.

‘Ah,’ said Annie, as if that explained everything.

‘He had fallen out with his family—I never went there. I never met them.’

‘And it was on your widowing that you left this world for the other?’ said Miss Dance.

‘It was,’ said Liga quickly. Then her eyes met Miss Dance’s intelligent ones, and a fierce heat rushed up her face.

Miss Dance watched it thoughtfully. ‘We are all very weary,’ she said. ‘I am thinking we should rest, us twixt-world travellers, before we talk further.’

‘We have rooms ready,’ said Annie, springing up. ‘And fine linens all purchased of heaven-money, thanks to your canny daughter, Widow Cotting.’

‘I should not take such pride in that, Bywell,’ Miss Dance said, rising.

Bywell! Liga felt another jolt in her chest. Annie Bywell! Muddy Annie!

‘Oh, you must sleep in them before you make your judgment, mum,’ Annie said cheekily.

That muddy old hag
, Liga’s da had said, and the sound of his voice,
and the sight of the mudwife all transformed, and the look that had been in Miss Dance’s eye just then—the look that said,
Cotting, eh? I will have the truth out of you soon enough
—all these combined to make Liga tremble as she rose from the grass with the others, and prepared to face the real St Olafred’s for the first time since Branza was born, nigh on a score and five years ago.