Lily (41 page)

“Then I’ll get more,” Lily smiled fiercely, gently removing her clutching hand. She got up and went to the fire, poked at the smoldering turf, and added two more blocks of peat from the dwindling stack beside the grate. They caught immediately and she closed her eyes to savor the sudden lovely heat on her cold cheeks and the chilled tip of her nose. After a few seconds she moved aside so the warmth could reach Meraud. She was already asleep. Lily sat down in the chair and listened to the mad howl of the wind.

“Lily? Lily?”

She awakened with a jolt. She’d fallen asleep in an awkward posture, and her neck hurt. “How do you feel?”

“You’ve got to go and get Pater, child.”

“Yes, all right. Do you mean—bring him in? The house?”

“Aye, you’ll have to. He’ll die out in this wind.”

“I’ll fetch him, then. Don’t worry. Do you need anything?”

Meraud shook her head and fell back into a restless doze.

Gabriel got up from his mat beside the hearth and stalked to the door, stiff-legged. “You’re coming too, are you?” Lily took Meraud’s coat down from the hook in the wall and wrapped her shawl around her head. She dragged away the heavy sack of barley meal that kept the door from blowing open, said, “Come on, then,” to the dog, dipped her head, and stepped out into the gale.

A blast of frigid wind struck full-force, slapping sharp snow in her face. She hunched over, grimacing, clutching her clothes, and followed Gabriel through the maze of rimy sculptures—lonely ghosts in the barren twilight, snow-whitened, still and beseeching. Weaving among them, she fancied they felt the cold as much as she, as much as Pater, but they had no voices, no way to complain or ask for comfort. She stopped, as she always did, when she came to Meraud’s last statue, the one she’d finished on that last day. Snow covered one side, limning the soft curves palely and gentling the shape of the mother—Lily—and her arm-cradled baby. Would she have seen anything of herself in the crude shape if she hadn’t known it was meant to represent her? Probably not. And yet there was something—a quality of stoicism, perhaps?—that she thought she recognized, or at least sympathized with. No matter; the sculpture moved her to tears each time she looked at it, bitter tears full of fear and loss. She reached out and touched frozen fingers to the hard shoulder of the woman, herself, and then to the tiny head of the baby. Gabriel barked, startling her. She turned away, hugging herself, and followed him toward Pater’s lean-to behind the cottage.

At first she had a wild idea that somehow, sometime, Meraud had made another statue, one meant to look like Pater. She crept closer with awful reluctance as the truth dawned on her. The donkey stood on his four legs, long neck bent and head to the ground, as if to nibble at the snow with his velvet lips. Hoarfrost on his shaggy hide made a sparkling fleece. His long, elegant eyelashes, ice-encrusted, were downcast; he looked sleepy and peaceful. But no steamy breath blew from his big, soft nostrils; his scrawny ribs were still. He had frozen to death.

In the cottage, Meraud still slept. Lily stirred the fire, then went to kneel beside her. The old woman’s face was gaunt and nearly fleshless, the bones like sharp sticks under the flaccid skin. But it was the corpselike pallor that frightened Lily the most. She took Meraud’s hand and rubbed the bony fingers to warm them. The old woman opened her eyes and stared at her, just for a moment, as if she’d never seen her before. Lily felt the cutting edge of panic in a swift and terrifying premonition of her absolute aloneness. “Pater s dead,” she blurted out. The words shocked her: she’d intended to lie. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and started to cry. “It’s all my fault.”

Meraud didn’t cry. “You think everything’s your fault,” she chided gently. “Don’t you know Pater’s all right now?” She patted Lily’s wrist and then put her skinny, long-fingered hand on Lily’s stomach. “I wish I could’ve seen him.”

“Who?”

“This baby.” She moved her hand from side to side softly. “This sweet child.” She sent her an unusually clear-eyed look. “This child’s a gift. He makes a circle. A
circle,
Lily.”

Lily shook her head in confusion. “Will he live, Meraud? Will he be all right?” Another shock: she’d never asked anything about the future, even though a superstitious part of her was positive that Meraud could foresee it. She regretted the question instantly, for the wrong answer would surely kill her.

But Meraud only said, “That’s up to you, lamb,” and closed her eyes tiredly. Her hand dropped away and she slept again.

The long night wore on. To Lily’s distress, Meraud had stopped taking solid food two days ago and would only swallow spoonfuls of potato and barley gruel when Lily insisted. Lily wanted to kill Unreliable and make a nutritious broth, but she knew well enough what Meraud would say to that. So she was helpless. There was no doctor, not even a neighbor to go to. “Don’t you know any—potions, any concoctions?” she’d wondered desperately, almost angrily, yesterday morning. Meraud had laughed at her. “So you think I’m a witch, too,” she’d accused. “Nay, Lily, I know naught o’ concoctions and magical potions. Leave me be, child, I don’t need anything.”

The wind blew and battered at the cottage all night. Lily began to think of the wind as an enemy, something mindful of her that meant ill will toward her and those under her protection. She spoke soothingly to Gabriel when an especially violent blast shook the house and jolted him out of his sleep, but it was herself she was trying to console. The cold was bitter and could not be kept out. When the last of the peat beside the hearth was gone, she put on Meraud’s old coat and went outside to get more. Meraud stored it next to the house under a slanting, makeshift roof that kept rain and moisture from soaking the absorbent turf. For the first time, Lily took full, panicky note of how low the pile had grown. Meraud had cautioned her to burn it slowly, but she hadn’t obeyed—
couldn’t
obey, because the cold was killing and brutal and she refused to let her friend suffer from that as well as everything else. Swallowing a dark fear, she filled the fire basket with as many of the heavy blocks as she could carry and hurried back inside.

Toward morning, the wind dropped. Because her body ached, Lily had abandoned the hard chair and stretched out next to Meraud on the floor. The novel silence woke her. She lay quietly for a moment, pondering what had changed. Suddenly she sat upright, aghast, and hovered over the silent, utterly still figure under the blankets beside her. As she watched, fists pressed to her teeth to drive back a moan of despair, Meraud abruptly drew in a deep, choking breath and released it. Lily’s whole body went limp; her shoulders shook and tears of relief poured down her cheeks onto Meraud’s clasped hands. She wanted to sob and sob for hours, forever. Instead she got up and rebuilt the fire.

Despite the new calm, the cold grew worse. She spent the day massaging Meraud’s arms and legs and feet and hands, trying to warm them. Once, turning her, she noticed that the underside of her body was slightly darker in color, as if her blood were settling. What did it mean? She didn’t know.

When she wasn’t sleeping, Meraud drowsed peacefully in a dreamy half-world, murmuring of long-ago memories and reminiscences. Lily thanked God that she was not in pain. Sometimes she was perfectly clearheaded—precious times to Lily, who was fighting her terror of abandonment as hard as she was fighting her grief.

“Lamb,” Meraud said in the afternoon, stilling the hand that was bathing her face with a damp cloth, “you can’t stay here after I’m gone. Take Gabriel with you and go.”

Lily felt as if an ice-cold hand was sliding down her back, caressing her bare skin. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered.

“I’ll never leave you.” She smiled, so sweetly that Lily’s heart clenched. “Forgive the one who hurt you so badly.” Lily leaned closer, certain she’d misheard. “Soften your heart and be patient. Wait for him to see who you are.”

“What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. I’ll never see him—”

“Be gentle, Lily, even though he’s a fool. What good is being right if you’re alone? Let go o’ your pride, child, and you’ll be happy.”

Gabriel got up from his corner by the hearth, stretched, and padded over to them. Sitting on his haunches, he blinked down at his mistress, who wrapped her hand around one of his powerful forelegs and smiled at him.

“You’ll watch out for ‘er, won’t you, Gabe?” Gabriel yawned. “Stay with him, Lily, or you’ll get lost. Hear me? You’ll get lost.”

“I won’t get lost.”

“Good-bye, I won’t be able to talk to you again. But I’ll always be with you.”

“Meraud.
Meraud.”

She’d fallen asleep.

That night, dozing in her chair, Lily came fully awake all at once. Instantly her eyes found Meraud’s in the smoky dimness; she was leaning toward her on one elbow, her arm stretched out. Lily scrambled up. Falling on her knees beside the old woman, she took her hand. The icy fingers were tense in hers, communicating a vital message. Neither spoke. Lily’s swollen heart was bursting, but she didn’t cry. The shining tenderness in her friend’s gentle eyes dimmed as she watched, so slowly, and she was retreating, moving back and away. Lily squeezed her hand tighter, tighter, desperate to hold her. But a milky film blinded the old eyes, and the thin, transparent barrier was impenetrable. Meraud slipped away.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Lily pressed her palms to the moist earth and wept. “I couldn’t lift the magic stones. I tried but I couldn’t, I was afraid for the baby. Oh, Meraud, I’m so sorry.” Sobs shook her, the first she’d allowed herself since she’d been alone. It had taken all day yesterday to dig this shallow trough of a grave inside the stone circle; she’d sat up with her friend last night, and buried her this morning, dressed in her good dress and wrapped in blankets. At first Lily had been afraid that, because of the baby, she couldn’t bury her in the stone circle at all. But then she’d discovered how pitifully light the old woman was, and in the end she had managed it with heartbreaking ease. But the special stones were too heavy; Pater was dead, and Lily couldn’t lift them. The fact that she didn’t understand Meraud’s wish to have them was irrelevant: she’d made a promise and she had failed.

She sat back on her heels, wiping her cheeks with the back of a dirty hand. What prayer should she say? None she knew seemed quite right. So she sang one of Meraud’s hymns—weeping, then almost laughing, poignantly aware that her voice was easily an octave lower than her friend’s. In the middle of the song, Gabriel came and leaned against her. She put her arm around his shoulders, thankful for his sturdy company. When she finished the hymn, they sat together a little longer. “Good-bye, I love you,” Lily whispered. The cold, which had relented in the last two days, had returned on a sleety wind, and it was growing dark. She climbed to her feet slowly. “Good-bye,” she said again. She hated to go, to leave Meraud here all alone. But she was freezing. She took a step back, another, then turned and walked blind-eyed down the hill.

The cold worsened in the coming days and the grim moorland seemed to take on a new reality, one that did not wish Lily well. She stayed close to the cottage, occasionally conscious of her own oddness but not alarmed by it. Nothing was the same. What had been real was gone, and what was left had a sinister reality which she knew, in a deep, fatalistic sense, she could not escape. Perhaps Devon’s true punishment was to drive her mad. The idea appalled even as it intrigued her. Sometimes, behind the wall of numbness she’d erected between herself and memories of him, she could feel the fiery heat of a blinding, spitting fury. But numbness was better.

She stopped sleeping at night, but kept the fire up, fearful that otherwise she really might go mad. Sometimes she could sleep in the day, in a slant of sunlight if the sky was clear, huddled in a tight ball on the rush mat if it was not. Her thoughts were wild and dangerous; they frightened her. She wondered how Meraud had found peace and friendliness in the same heavy, earthen objects that seemed to her to warn of anguish and disaster. She felt as if she were under the spell of something unwelcome and unkind. She could no longer control her mind, and it had become a struggle to see the mundane in everyday objects—furze, peat, wood, stone. Everything had a second self and it was hiding, whispering—malevolent. Gabriel became her last link to normalcy. He followed her, stayed with her, watched her—and sometimes she fancied it was Meraud who looked at her out of his dark, placid eyes.

But his quiet presence was not enough to calm her. As near as she could tell, it was the middle of January now. If that was true, she was about six months pregnant. She had enough food to last until spring, but not enough fuel. Meraud had told her to leave, but she was afraid. Then one day, after waking from a dream that left her panting and terrified, she went outside and saw wickedness and danger in the sculptures around the cottage. Meraud’s beautiful sculptures. That night she made up her mind to go.

The next day she packed all the food she could carry and put on all the clothes she could wear. “Come on, Gabriel,” she called when he hung back in the doorway. “Come!” The dog didn’t move. She went back and squatted in front of him. “We have to go now,” she said softly, patting the knobby bone on top of his huge head. “It’s all right, we’re not really leaving her. She’ll still be with us. Come on, boy.” She straightened and walked away, but when she looked back he was still there. “Gabriel, come!” She started walking backwards. “You come!” she called, trying to sound angry. She set her bag of food down and clapped her hands. He just stared at her, looking patient and wise.

She put her hands on her hips and spoke to him firmly and at length. When he still wouldn’t move, she heard herself threatening him. “I’m going to beat you if you don’t come this instant!” she shouted, then wondered if that sounded as absurd to him as it did to her. She gave a groan of frustration and walked back to him.

“Please come, Gabe,” she pleaded, bending over to look in his eyes. “We have to go or we’ll freeze. I need you. Won’t you come?” She moved back a little. “Please,” she coaxed, holding out her hands. He turned his head to his right, and she imagined for a second that he looked disgusted. A plaintive moment passed, and then he raised his sunken hindquarters, shook his head, ears flapping noisily, and trotted after her.