Tender Morsels (44 page)

‘And I did not think she would
attack
a man, either,’ said Mam tremorously, ‘for beating his own donkey. But she did that. She is not herself.’

Urdda tried yet again to remember Branza’s goodbye that afternoon.
I will go straight down to market
, she had said. There had been nothing special in her bearing, had there, particularly? Urdda remembered her own annoyance.
Annie and I are in the middle of a batch
, she had said,
or I could come with you. Can Mam go?
Now she could not recall whether Branza had looked secretive or sly at all—she
thought
she would be able to tell, were Branza trying to hide something, but she was less sure of this grown sister than she had been of the one she had left behind with the Teasel-Bear.

‘I failed that girl,’ Liga muttered at Urdda’s elbow. ‘I did her a great wrong, just as Miss Dance said.’

Urdda sniffed. ‘Yes, you failed her so badly, all she wants to do is go back to the world you gave her, ungrateful girl! To the time that you were failing her. How she must hate you!’

‘I should not have said it was stories, when I was telling you both about here. Only, it relieved her so to hear it, and I wanted her to be at peace.’

‘Of course you did, Mam! When she is not at peace, she’s most irritating. Such as lately. Such as tonight.’

‘Oh, do not say that—it is not night yet!’ And Liga glanced up anxiously at the first few undeniable stars.

When they reached Annie’s house, Liga had the energy to establish quickly that Branza had not returned, and then to hurry upstairs, but when Urdda had reported on their search to Annie and followed her mother up, she was sitting against her bed-edge in the dark, and her window seat was opened and its contents half emptied onto the floor.

‘She has taken the jewels,’ Liga said.

‘The jewels?’ Urdda pictured Annie’s coffer as she had last seen it, a quarter full of glitter and gleam.

‘The stones the moon-bab gave me. The red and white. I shall never see her, my golden girl, no more,’ Liga said piteously.

Urdda went and wrapped her in her arms. ‘She will come back, Mam. She knows what Miss Dance said. She knows she must come back, not stay forever as you tried.’

‘She will try, too,’ wept Liga. ‘She takes so much after me, she will stay for ever, I know. She will be perfect happy there. I should be glad for her, I suppose, but—’

‘So selfish!’ Urdda whispered angrily into Liga’s hair. ‘How dare she run away and hurt you so!’ What am I saying? Urdda thought. Who am I to talk, that ran away a full year, which multiplied to ten for my poor mam? If this is how she suffers for a night’s loss, what kind of a state did I put her in?

But Liga’s mind did not go the same way; she did not even seem to hear Urdda’s words. She must be too deep in this present distress.

‘I will go to Ramstrong’s now,’ said Urdda. ‘We will start everyone looking. Out to the cliff, out to the cottage, everywhere. Don’t you worry, Mam—’

‘No,’ said Liga, holding her tighter. ‘I cannot stand that her name be bandied about in the town so. If she is found by some gang of townsmen, even Ramstrong himself, she will be so embarrassed. Tomorrow, you and I will go out to look. We will be the ones to find her wandering, or her body, or her gone altogether.’

Branza paused and drank at Marta’s Font. When she straightened, Teasel Wurledge was in the road ahead, and the air around fairly thrummed with Branza’s aloneness, Branza’s impropriety.

‘Such free spirits, you Cotting girls,’ he said.

‘Good morning,’ she said stiffly. Should she call him ‘Mister Wurledge’? But she was so much older than him.

He stood aside, then fell into step with her. ‘What are you at, out here on your ownsome at crackerdawn?’

She did not like him so close to her elbow. Or like at all the set of him, with his hint of stooping and secrecy. She walked a little faster, but he kept pace easily, and the noise of her hurrying skirts made her slow again.

‘I remember you young and fair, Branza, as no one else here does.’

‘My mother does, and Urdda, and Ramstrong—’

‘As no man. No St Olafred’s man remembers you as marriageable as I do. I seen you just blossoming, in your perfection.’

She walked on, watching the stones before her feet. She did not understand. He was describing some other sort of woman.

‘I seen you—’

‘You should not talk to me like this.’ She hurried again—let her skirts panic as they may.

‘Why not? I am free to walk here. And you’ve no guardian, so we’ve privacy, whatever I might want to say.’

‘I do not like it.’

Several more steps passed.

‘You still have a full figure, though your face might be flagging,’ said Wurledge.

Branza had no clue how to answer this.

‘What have you been doing in the woods all alone, with the leaves in your hair?’ He reached, impertinent man, and plucked one out. She veered away from him. ‘Rolling on the ground, is it? Imadging you were a lady bear?’

There was the memory, the mounted bear and the mounting, and all the zinging strangeness that engendered. And a stab of fear—the forest flashing, him crashing behind. Her throat made an unbidden, realising sound. He heard it and knew she remembered; he saw her face, and it made him grin.

‘You know what I like,’ he hissed close behind her ear. ‘You seen me with her.’

‘No,’ she said, meaning,
No, that is not what my face meant, my surprise
. This was too dreadful—this man, this misunderstanding,
her crawling away from her night’s disappointment, from her grey drear dawn against the wall of the ruined cottage, only to find this embarrassment waiting for her, making of her something and someone she was surely not, affecting to know her but completely mistaking her, and then forcing his mistake on her, demanding that she answer to it.

You must not go out alone here
, little Urdda had said, so smoothfaced and sure of herself, the day they had arrived here.
It is not the same in this world. It isn’t safe, a woman alone. Just tell me, and I will go with you. Or Mam
. Mam, Urdda—both so unreachable now.

‘And I seen you watching, Branza. You dint run away nor blush; you looked me straight on, me and my big rod. Don’t you tell me it did not excite you.’

He walked sideways beside her. What would she do if he stopped and blocked her way? And if he showed her again—for his trousers were all malformed over himself, she could see from the corner of her averted eyes—whatever would she do?

‘You wanted of me, just like that lady-bear did. I seen it in your face.’

‘You did not,’ she said shakingly, ‘for it was not there.’ She stepped aside as if to go around him. The bend was just ahead; soon they would come in sight of the town gate, and maybe a guard.

He was terribly close. He had hold of her arm. His breath was in her eyes. ‘Oh, I seen it, all right. How long had you stood there, watching? For we had been going there a good long time, that time, I remember it. How could you watch it and not want some?’

She twisted from his grip and ran from him, and was around the bend. There were people: a cart coming out the town gate, and a woman talking over the fence of the pig farm. Branza did sob then, with gratitude, though they were too far away to hear.

Wurledge rounded the bend behind her and stopped; she heard him as she hurried on. ‘Never mind, you will have me, Branza Cotting.’ His voice diminished behind her. ‘I have had your titty out your bodice before. I will again. You will lay down with me again like you used to.’

She ran a few steps, then slowed to a hurrying walk. She trusted to glance behind her. He was making for the trees at the road-edge, in his stooping, sneaking way.

She composed herself to pass the carters, and then to walk up into the town. Such a long way, it was, up there to Lady Annie’s! She would never leave there again, not without Mam or someone. What a hideous person, that Teasel Wurledge! How could she have guessed—

But she could, she could have guessed. The bear showing himself off, the man boasting of that—that
rod
; of course they were the same. And all his playfulness as Bear, all his company and comfort, had been in order to push himself up close to her, and fumble with her skirts and clothing. And she, so stupid, stupid—Mam had known, Mam had known exactly. Mam had always been looking dark, and pressing her lips together about him. Why had she not said out-and-out, directly? Why had Mam not warned her?

She passed the end of the laundry lane. Two of those red-armed girls looked up from slapping wet laundry on a wash-rock. Sunlit water sprayed and shone in the lane behind them; steam billowed across and girls turned ghostly within it, and men pushed barrows there of sodden cloth and stacked clean. Their talk was brazen tones, with no words or feelings in it, with no meaning; a kind of garbled, harsh music.

‘Someone have been a-wandering in the forest,’ fluted one of these closest girls to the other.

‘Such luxury, to amble about and lose one’s senses.’ These words came, quite clear, like small, evil people, across the cobbles to Branza’s ankles, where they stood and smirked up at her.

She made herself walk on. ‘. . . and then to lie back on my pillows, no? And call for a glass of Franitch wine . . .’

‘Watch the visions sporting in my bed-curtains . . .’

‘Oh, visions, is it? Well, that would make a change.’ More slapping sounded, and laughter.

Branza picked two curled dead leaves from her hair and dropped them on the damp cobbles. In my town, she thought, your lane was
dry and empty. My sister and I thought those stones were there for us to climb on. Mam must not have liked you either, to have wiped you so cleanly from the world. It cannot only be me, then, who feels this fear and out-of-placeness.

Someone hawked above her, and a white spit hit the cobble just before her skirt passed over it. It is that Tallow boy at his window, she thought. I will not look up and encourage him.

‘Here she is, the donkey’s saviour.’

Young men—six of them, or seven—crowded in the mouth of a lane, all ready to laugh at her. Branza’s twig-teased hair wisped across her eyes. She tried not to falter in her walking.

‘I hear she did not manage to save the poor old beast.’

‘Bone-arse Bobby? Oh, no, he is dogmeat now. Whipped into slices, neat as a cleaver done it.’

As if a single mind moved them, they made of themselves a curved wall of chests, an arm’s length around Branza. She turned and tried to walk around the end of their line, but the curve of them moved with her, cupping her, and her progress became a horrible dance, with Branza leading and all the more ridiculous for doing so.

‘Ooh, do not beat him, Mister Strap!’ one cooed. ‘I pray you!’

‘Leave his poor, lazy bone-arse be!’ said another.

‘Or I will take the ribbon from my hair and stripe your own flanks with it, so I will!’

‘How could you be so cruel?’

‘Oh, Mister Strap!’

‘Mister Strap, how
could
you?’

They moved rapidly with her up the street. They had a smell, collectively, so strong it stopped her thinking. Their feet sounded harder than her shoe-soles on the cobbles. When she tried to see her way, the rows of their teeth and eyes bobbed below the rooves and the window-shutters.

She stopped, and closed her eyes. Maybe she was still asleep, still adream on the cottage doorstep. Maybe she’d only to pass through this nightmare and there she would be, with the garden-rows spreading out at her feet, with Wolf trotting up the path to say his good-mornings.

She breathed the boys’ smell. Their noises swarmed in her head: bumpings of bodies and cooing voices and slapping feet. If only Wolf were beside her now! His growl bubbled in her throat.

‘I shall whip and whip you, Mister Strap!’ sang a boy.

‘I shall whip you and worse, I shall!’

Branza bared her teeth.

‘I shall bring the law down on you!’

She barked, sudden and deep. She bit at the air, right close to the ones in front of her.

‘What the buggery!’

Surprise knocked one of them to the ground, and others, more agile, leaped back.

‘We have druv her mad! We have broke her brain!’

One of them crouched up the hill, in her path. ‘Come, doggydoggy-dog!’ he crooned.

She walked to him. She was full of wolf-teeth, wolf-love of herself, wolf-rage on her behalf. She took the boy’s head in her two hands and bent to him among the others’ hoots and whistles, and she bit his cheek hard—which was salt, which gave, meat under her teeth, the scratch of his reddish beard on her lower lip.

It did not matter what happened thereafter. They encircled her, but none touched her. She tasted the boy’s blood on her teeth. They held the bitten boy back from her, and none would come near her. With conviction that felt like magic, she reached for another boy’s head. He shrank before her, and she walked through their circle and up the hill, past a stunned matron here, a wide-eyed child there, doors opening, and windows, past the end of the lane where the donkey had been whipped to death, and on upward.