Tender Morsels (51 page)

She stood and walked around the table. She took the heavy cloth from Liga’s hands and lap and lifted it to the table. She knelt in front of her, laid her own head in place of the work, and encircled Liga’s waist with her arms. She held on tightly, pushing as if she would push through Liga’s stomach wall and back into her womb if she could.

Liga’s hands were in her curls, and stroking her face. ‘Look what came out of it all, though, out of such a dire event: my Urdda! How many good years of Urdda I would have missed, had it never happened. Think of that.’

‘How can you walk!’ Urdda whispered fiercely. ‘How can you
smile
—I have seen you—you
smile
at Widow Fox in the market! How can you stop yourself saying,
Your son—your precious son—did this to me when he were younger!’

‘Widow Fox is not to blame. And her boy himself I have seen, him and Thurrow Cleaver and—They are none of them the same lads as they were. They are never two of them together, for one. I think they do not like to remind themselves what they goaded each other on to do.’

Goaded each other on
. Urdda would be sick with loathing them so much. ‘But—’

‘And neither will you speak to any of them, while I live—or any wife, or any relative of theirs. Or to Branza, or Annie, or anyone, of this. I forbid it, Urdda, do you hear? It is
I
have been sinned against, and I say, leave the thing. It is old news and gone, and I will not have it stirred up again and chattered about by all St Olafred’s. Promise me.’

Urdda blurted some form of agreement into the cloth at Liga’s hip. By now she had all but crawled behind her mother on the chair. Should she scream or should she weep? Should she beat Mam with her fists or should she forbid her ever to move outside this
room
, outside Urdda’s own arms, for her own safety?

‘Girl, girl!’ Liga retrieved her from her crawling, hoisted her up. Urdda remembered being held so in the passionate rages of her childhood, her hot face twisting with emotion, curls straying down into her eyes, her mother’s hands cool and dry against her cheeks, her mother’s kisses solving nothing, mending nothing.

‘It is over, Urdda,’ Liga said now. ‘It was over and gone long ago, my sweet. It was dreadful when it happened, to be sure, but the years have been so many and so kind since then, they have more than made up for my hurts. And I would never choose life without my wild girl over life without what happened that day.’

‘That is . . . an
impossible
choice!’ Urdda burst out. ‘How can you
not
? How can you not want to
kill
—’

But Liga covered Urdda’s mouth and kissed her again, and shushed her, and said her name, and would not stop shushing. Urdda fell to bitter weeping, there in her mother’s skirts, while Liga murmured and stroked her.

Branza and Lady Annie brought their laden baskets up the hill, Branza laughing at some rude remark Annie had made for her entertainment. Up ahead, her sister stepped out the widow’s door into the street. ‘Urdda,’ cried Branza, ‘what is it?’ For there was something urgent and furtive about her sister’s movements. ‘Where are you off to alone?’

‘Walking,’ said Urdda, fending off their approach with her shoulder. Then she strode away.

‘But I will come with you!’ Branza thrust her basket blindly towards Lady Annie.

‘Leave her go,’ said the old lady, taking the basket and Branza’s hand with it.

‘But what can have happened?’ Branza tried to go, but the widow
held her firmly, and Branza did not want to pull the lady over by insisting. ‘She
knows
not to walk out by herself. She has told
me
often enough.’

‘If she wanted to tell you, she would of flang herself upon your neck right then, child,’ Annie said. ‘Let us take ourselves inside and see how is your mam. Open the door, now.’

‘Mam?’ called Branza as soon as they were inside, and in her worriment she left Annie to manage both baskets while she hurried to the sewing-room door.

Her mother lifted a serene face to her, although there was something hard-won about the serenity: some weariness about the eyelids, some dutifulness about the smile.

‘What has happened,’ cried Branza, ‘that Urdda is rushing out by herself, and all red-eyed from crying?’

‘We have been talking.’

Annie came to Branza’s elbow. A look passed between her and Liga, and Branza felt a flash of annoyance at her that she knew, that Mam knew she knew, that they were conspiring to keep whatever it was from Branza.

‘And both of us became upset,’ said Liga. ‘That is all.’

‘Why? What were you talking about?’

The striving of Liga’s face intensified, but she remained calm. ‘Nothing you need worry about, angel girl. I do not wish to talk about it more. How was Ramstrong today, and his little ones?’

Then Liga rose and put aside her work, and patted Branza’s arm where she stood, ready to embrace and console and evince more anxiety. ‘Annie, you will be ready for a cool drink,’ Liga said. And with studied cheerfulness, she passed into the hall, ready to admire and discuss their baskets full of purchases.

Urdda strode alone up the town. These were the quieter streets; but even had she walked downhill, straight through the market, her swift step would have kept her safe from interference, and her unreadable face, and the impression she gave of being quite
uncaring as to anyone’s disapproval or poor opinion, she was so intent on such vital business.

Uphill, though, there were sloping cobbles to pit herself against. Steep flights of steps felt even better; grimly, she hoisted her own weight from foot to foot. She came to the castle, passed into the courtyard, and started up the steps of a tower. She could have climbed a long time up the darkness, wearing herself out, forcing herself on to no particular where.

But then she burst out onto the tower-top. It was empty of courting couples. The cloudy light glared all around. There was no other place to go but to the wall, to fling herself off, maybe, or throw down a handful of these tiny gravel-stones here, or shout oaths at passersby below.

She went to the wall, breathing hard and shaking. She stood with her fists on the battlement, all her muscles tight as fiddle-strings. Her teeth ached from clenching. She watched smoke trail up from Gypsy Siding. Treetops moved, thick and dark green and oblivious, around her riveted sight, and the town—though it seemed motionless under its grey, under its damp slate and its lichens and behind its stones—seethed like one of Annie’s terrible brews: opaque, acrid of fume, abubble with lumpish and stringish ingredients, vegetable, animal, unidentifiable. If this crime against Mam had gone unpunished, who knew what else had been done? If no one spoke of this, from guilt among the men themselves, from distaste and fear on Mam’s part, who knew what other secrets bubbled here? The whole town, the whole
world
, was fouled by this, was made unclean, to Urdda’s mind.

Bastard daughter of Hogback Younger. Her iron gaze lowered to fix on his roof—purple-grey slate like the roofs of other houses of substance, but pointed and pinnacled and cupola’d like no other structure, so that Hogback might stand and enjoy his own elevation in the town. But from now on, Urdda hoped, he would feel, as he admired his elaborate gardens, the hatred of his daughter-by-force, beating down on the back of his neck from the castle wall. She hated him to the point of shaking there, braced against the battlement by her digging, paining fists.

Yet look at the colour of her fist on the stone. He was in her
skin; he was in her very blood. At the thought, her blood thickened, crawling and choking in her veins, requiring hard, painful heart-thumps to drive it along. To hate him was to hate herself, for she was half Hogback.

And why him, particularly? It might have been any one of those boys; as Mam said, Hogback had treated her no worse or better than the others. Lycett Fox, Thurrow Cleaver, Joseph Woodman, Ivo Strap—she might have been half sister to that whole crowd of Strap children that ran about town like wind-gusts, like bird-flocks!

Cotting—ah, why couldn’t there have been a Cotting truly? And some small tale of betrayal or bad luck for which Urdda could have consoled Mam. This was too great a pain, too monstrous a series of injuries. It lumped in the past like . . . like a bear on a hearthrug, impossible to ignore. But the lump was not as big as a bear; it was only as big as an Urdda. Had she not existed, Mam might have had a chance of forgetting, of putting the injuries behind her; of pretending, if she wished to, that they had not happened. Instead, the very face of one of the men, the very
skin
, had been before her every day of her life. The ten years they had had in Mam’s heaven without Urdda—perhaps they had not been such a trial after all, if Mam had been free at last of the sight of the ghost of her attackers, had been able to rest awhile from being reminded.

Urdda’s face flushed hot in the wind across the tower-top; she blinked her wind-stung eyes. She was a fool; she was a fool. Why had she badgered Mam to tell her? Could she not see how unwilling Mam had been? Had she no heart? Why had she been unable to endure admitting that sometimes grown women
did know better
than ungrown? They already knew what anguish they were sparing those younger ones, because they carried it with them everywhere, pushing away its memories every waking hour, every living moment, to make space where they might sew, or prepare meals, or enjoy the small flowers and birds in the hedgerows, or pass the time of day with the Widow Foxes of the world in the marketplace? How was Urdda ever going to put what she had learnt out of her mind? How had Mam managed to go on, who had hidden her bab there
in the cottage, and hauled the door closed, and clambered up the chimney and been
dragged down again—

Urdda was in the dark stairway again, running, falling against the walls. She could not go home to Annie’s; she could not face Mam again; she could not go back to that blissful, blessed state of not knowing. It was insufferable, the knowledge she must live with now, and yet she was only the daughter of it! The whole business of Mam’s going to her heaven, and the boredom and the tedious, unadventurous, unrelenting
safety
of the place, all of a sudden was cruelly clear to her. Of course, what a kindness, how absolute a necessity that other place had been! Yet she, Urdda—ignorant, frivolous, disrespectful, interfering
fool
that she was—had forced her way out of that place, and worse, had nagged Annie to bring Miss Dance, to have her undo the protection Mam had been granted.
I want my Mam here
, she had as good as stamped her foot and demanded.
I want my sister!
And look how unhappy Branza had been! And look what Mam must now endure, every day—the passing of Hogback’s carriage, the greetings of Widow Fox, the shrieks and smudges of ragged Strap children.

Back out into the town Urdda walked, with an air of purpose that quite belied her horrid confusion. She walked through almost every avenue and laneway of St Olafred’s. She would have walked out the gate, too—she wished she could walk out and disappear into nothingness, as Mam must have seemed to do all those years ago. But she also—practical, true-worldly Urdda—knew how late it was. She did not want the town gate closed on her, to come back in the chill of night and have to explain to the watch where she had been, and have people talking about why she might walk out alone, about whom she might be hoping to meet in her wanderings.

She returned to Annie’s tired in body and numbed in mind, just after lamp-lighting time.

‘Where have you been, Urdda! We were worried,’ said Branza in the door.

‘Walking, only walking. I met no one and did nothing untoward.’ Urdda submitted to Branza’s embrace and looks of concern. ‘Is there supper?’ she said, to put an end to them.

‘There is. Give me your cloak and go through.’

Liga and Lady Annie were there in the kitchen’s warmth. The three women examined each other, and each thought the other two looked very tired and lost.

‘You of been up to something,’ said Lady Annie. ‘Were I not so slumped, I would scrutinise you proper, for that glitter in your eye, and your general air.’