Tender Morsels (9 page)

Her first week in the renewed cottage was a time of such unalloyed luxury and peace that when the thought occurred to Liga that she might go into the town, she was sure her mind had been addled by her new, soft way of life. But why should she not? She frowned and went outside, and sat in the sun and tried to recall why she had stayed here in the house for so long, for she knew she had had good reason.

Mostly, she remembered when she put her mind to it, she had been afraid of meeting those young men. Any one of them would be bad enough, but what if two came along at once, or more? Might they not follow her, and pin her up against a wall, and fondle her or worse? And who would come to her aid should she have the courage to cry out?

That had been her main fear, but underpinning it were the habits of all the years since Mam died.
We don’t need anyone
, her father had often said, so often that she hardly heard the words any more.
We can look after ourselves with no aid nor interference from no one
. Year by year, he had grown less sociable and harsher to others until, during the last round of the seasons before he died, Liga had seen exactly three people besides themselves: a pretties-seller at whom he had shouted, like a madman,
I will set the dogs on ye!
although he had no dog, until the poor man had fled—Liga had only glimpsed a flash of his legs, a basket with a swatch of ribbons flapping; Lame Jans up on the road near where Liga sometimes hid on the chance that something of the world would wander by; and a hunter whom she saw, like foliage-mottle moving without benefit of wind, among the trees below Prospect Hill.

Then, when Da had died, those women had visited, and Liga had not wanted to encounter any more such as them, with their needling eyes—and no man, either, taking care to look away, that the sight of her did not taint him or make him laugh, or whatever it was they feared.

What was more, with the passing months her belly and then her baby had become very evident, and anyone who met her would have wanted an accounting of either of those. Liga had given up most conversation when her father started his fondling of her, and she no longer had a very great sense of what she could say, words she might use, to describe her own circumstances.

So she mustered all these things in her mind against the flarings of curiosity that afflicted her, against the growing conviction that the town promised interests and pleasantries she had missed in her solitary life at the cottage. She tried to feel reluctance—she tried to hear her father remonstrating in her mind’s ear—yet as she climbed the path to the road next morning, with Branza in a cloth on her back and some rushwork in a basket on her hip, her step was light, and her heart would not listen to her memory’s dark warnings. I can always turn and come back, she scolded herself. At the first sign of trouble, I can hurry right back here.

Everything was as it should be on the road, with the wheel-ruts and the hoofclefts gleaming with the night’s rainshowers, the oak with the cut branches that looked like a popeyed old scawcraw, and the scattering of wildflowers either side. Slowly, Liga walked towards the town.
If I ever see your face there
, her father had said.
If I ever hear of you turning up there
. . . He had seemed to be talking of quite another girl, someone saucy and brave. Liga had been offended that he did not recognise how meek and obedient she mostly was.

She rounded the bend, and there at Marta’s Font was stooped to drink who else but Jans’s mother. Liga was about to retreat into cover, then turn and run back home, when the woman heard her step and straightened, dashing water-drops from her chin. ‘Liga!’ she laughed. ‘What luck to meet you. How are you keeping, and your little one?’

‘Ah . . . we are well, thank you.’ Liga searched the woman’s face for unkindness, for smugness, for disapproval.

‘Is that her there? Let me see the lovely!’

‘Oh.’ Liga turned around doubtfully as the woman approached.

Jans’s mother barely touched Branza’s cloth to lift it from the baby’s face. ‘Aaah, look at that! Curled up sweet as a chick in the egg, aren’t you, little Branza? She’s the image of you, Liga; it is like you have guv birth to yourself. I remember you from a babby in Agnata’s arms, sleeping just so.’

‘How—’ But looking the woman full in the face, Liga felt the oddness of asking her,
How do you know my babby’s name?
‘How . . . is Jans?’ she asked instead, in a frayed voice.

‘Jans is well, and Stella, too, and all my grandchildren. She has another on the way at midsummer, you know, and she says to me she thinks it’s another pair, if you can believe that!’ Birds carolled in the forest as if echoing the woman’s laughter. ‘She’s drowning in children, that woman, making up for all my missings. I’m a happy old grumma, I am.’

‘It’s good to hear,’ said Liga—because it
was
good, if very puzzling. Stella? Could she mean Merchant Oliver’s Stella, that beauty? How had she married Lame Jans? And when? They had not been wed
when Da died, so how had she managed to drown in children in those few months? Liga had only just had time to bring forth the one she carried.

Jans’s mother took cheerful leave of her, and Liga, wanting to seem purposeful, set off as if she intended to continue along the road. And then, so occupied was she with going over and over their conversation and looking at all corners of its senselessness that she kept up the briskness of her walking without thinking about it, and before she knew it, she was at the outskirts of St Olafred’s.

But they were not quite the outskirts as she knew them. Farrower’s pig farm was here, but it was pin-neat, with all the fences fixed right, and it was not Farrower and his sneering daughters moving about there, but strangers, of rosy complexion, their hair a light brown. Neatly clothed they were, if poorly, with nothing unhemmed or holed. One of the girls, too far away to call out, raised an arm in greeting, and Liga nodded, and the girl turned back to her work.

And then, look at the town itself. It was like a grandmother’s teeth, half the houses missing. She took a few steps in through the gate, to look at the first one gone from its row. That was that Jinny Salter’s house; Jinny, who had said to her one time,
Don’t put yourself near me, poacher’s girl. I don’t mix with your like
. And had flounced away, and her flouncing friends with her, leaving Liga alone and hot with puzzled shame. She stood now and touched with her toe the edge of the grassy rectangle, nicely mown and with a seat there for taking the sun, that lay in place of Salters’ house.

She took a little courage from this and walked on, still fearing to meet those lads.
Bring that little purse to me
, they crowed in her memory, and
Look, she loves it. She can bare keep her cries in, of lust and loving it
. She moved Branza around to her front—for the baby’s protection or for her own, she did not know which.

But the town was much quieter than she remembered from coming here on market days with Mam, and later with Da before he turned bad. There were more of those pink-faced, brown-haired people that had been at Farrower’s. They shook their rugs out their windows or stepped out of their doors and greeted her, and she thought, Who used to live there? Did I ever know? And it came
clear to her gradually that these families, these pleasant strangers, had come to replace all the people of the town who were unfamiliar, or whom she had not liked.

She came to what had used to be Blackman Hogback’s house, and it was now a broad parkland, grassed and flowered, with arbours and fountains and people strolling, and an Eelsister conversing over the convent hedge with one of the rosy ladies. Timorously, Liga went across the lawn—which should be walled, should be Hogback’s mansion, guarded by Hogback’s servants. A climbing rose clung to a lattice, bursting with pink and white blossoms, and she sniffed a flower and she felt the smooth petals between her fingers and she watched a bee fill its pannier-baskets with pollen, and everything was real, scented and textured as it ought to be—thorned, too; she might easily prick her finger to bleeding with that thorn if she wanted to prove how real.

She walked on, up to the market square. There she exchanged some of her rush-matting for a length of lawny cloth just the right softness, she thought, for the making of some garment for Branza. She traded more for a little smoke-meat, and two figs in syrup, and a tiny package of violet-sugar, for the colour and scent as much as for the usefulness. Market stalls she had once been afraid to approach for their bluff or noisy sellers were now fronted by these calm, kind-faced, brown-haired people, who were ready to explain their wares to her if she asked, but refrained from pressing her too insistently to buy.

She walked about some more, and when Branza grew fretful she sat in the sunshine in the grassy place where the Fox family’s house had once stood, and fed her. Sukie Taylor, whom Liga remembered playing with once or twice in their childhoods, came up then, and sat by Liga and cooed and admired Branza’s health and beauty.

‘That is a fine piece of broidery about your cuffs there, Sukie,’ ventured Liga, when Sukie’s chatter ran out.

‘You like it? It is my mother’s work,’ said Sukie carelessly. ‘I can sew a seam all right, but for finework I always have Mam take it over. She tries to teach me, but I can never settle to the finicky parts.’

‘I should love to sew such stuff,’ murmured Liga, touching the tiny flowers’ knotted centres.

‘You should ask my mam—she despairs of ever teaching Nettie and me!’ laughed Sukie.

‘In return for . . . some rushwork, maybe? Maybe she would think to teach me?’ This felt most audacious, emerging from Liga, but no stranger than most of what had already happened that day.

‘I would think she would pay
you
, almost, to have someone to teach! I would think she would walk out past Marta’s Font and find your house and sit upon your doorstep, needle at the ready, for you to show your face! You should come up now—she is marketing today—and offer your interest.’

‘I saw her there, but I have never really spoken to her, so—’

‘I shall take you—when Branza has had her sup. Look at her, little Miss Sleepy-cheeks. She is surely the prettiest bab I have ever seen, you lucky girl.’

Lucky indeed Liga felt, walking home that day with figs and sugar and good smoke-meat in her basket, and her first lesson with Mistress Taylor set for next afternoon. It was all very different from the noise and bustle and nastiness she had expected to weather in the town; it was very odd to have conjured a headful of terrors and carried them into St Olafred’s, only to discover them all to be unfounded.

She held her baby close against her breast as she walked along. ‘How lovely, Branza! Such a different place! How long can it last, do you think? Is it to be ours for ever?’

Several weeks later, Liga woke, went out in the early dawn while Branza slept, and admitted, as she stood in the first sun, with the dew chilling her feet, that this feeling low in her belly, these washes of illness she had been putting down to the shocks of the changed world, this distaste for smoky air and for pan-fats—she had had them often enough, and she knew what came of them: babies. She was carrying another baby.

She had woken in this place feeling so well, and had been so intent on exploring and adjusting; she had assumed—it had not occurred to her to think otherwise—that the moon-baby’s bringing her here had erased not only the boys who had insulted her so, and their houses and their families with them, but also the insult itself, the very event. She had certainly put it out of her mind, and if she did think of it, it seemed distant, and unattached to emotions of any particular strength, as if it had happened to some other girl she barely knew and did not care greatly about.

But no, it had happened to her, and here was the consequence, growing inside her: a child of one of those boys—she might never know which—or perhaps some monstrous amalgamation of them all, some terrible mongrel. It might come out and look at her and laugh; it might speak straight away in one of their rough voices, and say the things that they had said. She stood in a slant of weak sunshine and rubbed her arms hard against the cold.

From the cottage, from the lovely cradle, came Branza’s tiny whimpering and shifting. Liga stepped across the cold grass to the house, sick at heart. But Branza, after all, was no monster; why, she was the prettiest bab that ever Sukie Taylor had seen, and plenty other people besides! The monstrousness of her begetting did not show in her. Certainly, it was never referred to in St Olafred’s—it was as if Liga’s father had been scrubbed from people’s memories, just as all her other enemies had been banished from the town. Perhaps it would be the same for this second child, seeing as all the fathers, all their houses, were gone? What was there for people to remember?

She looked from the red-leafed bush by the doorstep to the green. Both had thickened and flourished in the short time since she had planted them, and now several buds were swelling, of red blooms on the red bush, of white ones on the green. She inspected these now, as she did every day, impatient for them to burst into some bloom she could recognise.