Tender Morsels (30 page)

‘I know. That was not very nice of us, was it?’

He shook his head, then checked his dozing brother. Then he went and sat in his mother’s chair and swung his legs awhile, listening to the voices and the footfalls of the women on the stairs. Then there was quiet for a time, and then for more of a time, and he sighed and said pointedly to the ceiling, ‘She said it would not be
long
.’

‘Oh, there will be lots to do up there to make the lady comfortable, I am sure. Dressing her in her nightgown and bed-bonnet; putting her rings into a jewel box; stirring up the fire so the room is warm. Your mam might even have to make her some draft or tisane, you know, to help her sleep.’

‘Oh,’ said Anders desolately.

‘I’m sure she would not mind us looking about this room, if we are careful not to disarrange anything. We would have to go very softly, though, and not make any fingermarks in the dust.’

And so they were engaged in a slow, whispering tour of the furnitures and ornaments when Wife Ramstrong returned to the parlour.

‘Oh, Anders, you must not touch,’ she said in the doorway.

‘We are only walking about and looking,’ said Urdda. ‘Is Leddy Annie sleeping now?’

‘Well, she is settled somewhat. She wants—’ Todda took a few steps into the parlour. ‘She would like
you
to sit by her, Urdda. “The foreign girl,” she says, because you knew Lord Dought in that other place. She says you will be a consolation.’

‘I will?’

Todda took Ousel from Urdda’s arms. ‘I think the poor thing had no friends but that dwarf-man,’ she said softly. ‘And he—well, I know he were not well-liked in this town, although his wealth brought him the kinds of friends that can be bought. But he were all this leddy had, and she says he did right by her. So her loss, you can imagine . . .’

Anders had appeared at Urdda’s elbow. She rather wished he could come and sit with her upstairs, he was so grave and curious a child. ‘How long should I stay?’ she said.

‘Midafternoon, we will call in again. She has a woman bring her evening meal; perhaps then she will be comfortable to be left alone.’

All day, then! Well, this was unexpected; Urdda had thought she would have a day with Wife Ramstrong, a day like yesterday, full of questions and surprises and the wants and games and squeakings of children.

Instead, she was ushered to a chair at the lady’s bedside, and
Todda rustled away with Anders and Ousel, and Urdda sat alone in the great cloth-swathed room, with the dust swirling through the solitary sunbeam that angled from window to floor, as Lady Annie sank away into sleep, curled like a child in the big bed.

But Urdda’s mind would not stay still for long; even sitting alone in a bedchamber was exciting for her. Here she was, in the place she had suspected of existing ever since she had seen that littlee-man dancing vivid and enraged on the stream-bank, ever since Bear—Ramstrong-Bear, not that other silly—had flown into the nothingness off the cliff. And it was just as rich and peculiar as she had hoped and wondered. The people—Todda, who explained so well all the rules she must follow; Ramstrong, who discussed her situation so gently and at such concerned length; even little Anders—everyone had such depths and flavours; everyone had histories of their own and with each other! When she heard snatches of other people’s conversations in the town, though she could recognise every word, she was rarely the wiser as to what they conversed about, their talk was so much a reference to bygone events she had not witnessed, people she had not met. This was the wildest, most curious-making thing—the size and suddenness of her own ignorance.

She sat long enough for Lady Annie’s soft breathing to infect her with sleepiness. She got up from her chair then, and added a neat-cut log from the bucket to the fire, and yawned and stretched while it took. She picked up one of the lady’s rings from the night table—one with a milky greenish stone—and held it awhile; it warmed, but did not spring to life as the robin had from the red stone in Collaby’s treasure-pile. Then she sat in the window, pushing the lace aside so that she could see more clearly down the street into the town. Several people passed, or came out onto their steps and spoke to each other. Urdda kept the lace across the window whenever someone walked near, but when the street was empty she moved it aside and strained her eyes to see the orchardwoman waving her arms down in the market square, ordering her children about, or to see the wagons crossing in the distance.

She wondered what Mam and Branza were doing now. But
then she remembered Teasel’s talk of three winters having passed since she left home, and the wondering evaporated into confusion.

‘Are you there?’ a frail voice said from the bed.

‘Yes, I’m here, Lady Annie.’ Urdda crossed the dim room to her side.

The lady’s eyes shone like two little lamps. ‘What were your name again, girlie?’

‘Urdda, mum.’

‘Urdda
what
, child? What is your other name, your father’s?’

‘Well, we have determined that it is likely Longfield. But I have never had a father, mum.’

‘Longfield? I hope not, for your sake. You don’t want to be any relation to that no-good.’ She scrutinised the girl. ‘You haven’t got the look of him, I don’t think.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘I knew enough of him to know I dint want to know more. He is dead now, and nobody misses him.’

‘Well, it seems we lived in a house that matches a ruined one here, that he used to occupy.’

‘Oh, I know the place. I used to live just up from there myself, ’fore I came into my money. So tell me, foreign girl, how did you transmit yourself, there to here?’

‘I found the spot where that Teasel-Wurledge-bear came through, and I wished it strongly, and I pushed.’

The lady looked very hard at Urdda. Then she relinquished her thoughts and sat forward, out of the pillows. ‘I done a terrible thing,’ she said.

She was not at all like a lady, with her hair all wisped like that and without her teeth. She was like a beggar-woman who had fallen by accident into this scramble of fine bed-linen, with a fabulous bed-bonnet landed by chance on her head.

‘She told me not to,’ she continued, ‘but I went ahead and did it, and I made a mess I could not tidy.’

It sounded as if her mind were still quite disarranged, but she spoke clearly—if a little whuffingly from her toothlessness—and her gaze was steady and bright.

‘Who told you?’ said Urdda gently. ‘What kind of mess?’

‘That lady at High Oaks Cross,’ Lady Annie said, as if surely Urdda must remember. ‘She said,
You have powers; what are you doing with them? No harm, I hope
. And in the course of talking to her, I told her of that thing where I could make signs upon people and they would see their heart’s desire. I arksed her, could I ever send them there, could I ever move them toords it? And she says,
Mebbe, but best not to. You can never know the consequences of such transmissions.’

She sat, childlike again, and looked fearfully at those possible consequences, her face folded tiny around her toothlessness. Then she noticed her own mouth, and she reached to the night table where Wife Ramstrong had placed her teeth, and she clomped and clacked them into place.

‘But you did?’ said Urdda when the teeth were settled. ‘Against her saying?’

Lady Annie folded her ringless hands in her lap and glanced about as if someone might leap out from behind the hangings to scold her. ‘I sent Collaby there.’

‘
You
sent the littlee-man? I thought he got there by his own power.’

‘His own? Collaby had no powers.’

‘He didn’t?’ A tiny fist crushed frog-eggs to a shining pearl in Urdda’s memory.

‘No, his stumpetiness was the only thing odd about him. He wanted use of
my
powers. And once we had punchered through, he went reckless back and forth despite my warning him—because what could I warn him of?
You can never know the consequences
, said that lady, and I did not. When he described the place, it were nothing like the place I’d thought I were sending him. All them tall people? I thought. It must be someone else’s place of their heart’s desire. And I were afraid of what I’d gone and done, and I never did no more that kind of thing. Now you are here, and I’m wondering, is it yours, then?’ She looked keenly at Urdda across the crumpled linens.

‘Is what mine?’

‘That place what you come from. Is it the place of your heart’s desire?’

What could she mean? ‘I always wanted to come here,’ said Urdda blankly.

Lady Annie sagged.

‘All people do at home is smile and smile, and be kind. They have no opinions, and never want to go anywhere or do anything new. It is terribly dull.’

‘Bugger. If it
were
your place, see, now that you are here, the punches Collaby made through would all be gone. That whole world would be gone, once you’d stepped out of it. But you don’t reckon it were yours?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, “place of your heart’s desires”. And worlds “belonging” to people. Are you saying that I lived in a world that . . . a world of someone’s
mind
? That someone dreamed of?’

‘Something like that.’

‘But . . .’ Urdda held her head to keep the thought from popping it like a soap bubble. ‘Why am I real, then? Why am I not dream-stuff? Why don’t I melt to nothing now that I am not in the dream?’

Lady Annie spread her wrinkled paws helplessly. ‘I don’t know, my poppet. The state I am in, you might well be dream-stuff, sitting there and us talking so reasonable.’

‘I should perhaps find this lady, the one you met, that told you not to do . . . what you did. She might be able to explain what has happened.’

‘Oh, I am sure she would. And be very cross with me too, she would.’ Lady Annie eyed the bed-linen next to her as if she would like to crawl under it and lie very still and hidden there.

‘What was her name?’

‘I think it were Miss Prance.’ Lady Annie bit her lip. ‘It were so long ago, and I got to calling her Miss Fancy-pants for a long time, I were so cross with her for spoiling what might have been my fun and profit. But Prance, or something very like.’

‘And she was at High Oaks Cross?’

‘Yebbut she had come from farther, all the way from Rockerly, on some business, terribly important, oh-so-important. I were just a midge in her ear, an accidental dung-bundle she stepped in, that she must get off her shoe. She done that and left me by the roadside in
my smell. Well, thank you, Miss Fancy, Miss Prancy. Off she goes down the road, in a hat that is like some foreign bird come alighted on her head and froze mid-flap. And would of cost a fortune to me, them days. Now I have so much treasure, courtesy of Dought, I could wear a new hat every day if I wanted, the rest of my years, with whatever bird, or a marmot or a satin rose or a gentleman’s
boot
on it. And no one would laugh at me, were I to walk out to market in it, I am that rich,’ finished Lady Annie.

But then she looked out from her memories to Urdda’s listening face, and all the puff and outrage left her. ‘Open the curtains wider, girl—Urdda. Urdda was your name. I can hardly see your face in here.’

She watched from the bed as Urdda went to the window and returned. ‘So, you is fetched up with Davit Ramstrong, have you? That is lucky, that you fell in their arms.’

‘They’re very kind.’

‘Did she say that her man had been there, that goodwife, to where you come from?’

‘Yes. For several months, when I was little. But he went through on Bear Day, so he was in the form of a bear.’

‘But a
different
bear et Dought?’

‘That’s right. Teasel Wurledge.’

‘Oh my Gawd. So many to-ings and fro-ings. None of it is good.’ Lady Annie sucked on her lips awhile, and then some impulse made her fling back the bedcovers and lower her feet to the bed-box. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Bring me that house-gown and them slippers. Let us go and see if I am ruined.’

She took a lit candle and handed one to Urdda. Then she led her down to the cellar, through a house that echoed around them as if all the rooms behind all the doors were empty. The kitchen alone was finely equipped, although the tarnish on the pans suggested that they had not been used in some time.

Three strongboxes big as coffins squatted in the cellar. Lady Annie set her candle on one of them, took a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked another. ‘Help me open the lid,’ she said. ‘All that metal strapping weighs it down fearsome.’

Urdda put down her candle and helped lift it open. Inside was just
such treasure as the littlee-man had died protecting: bright coins, silver and gold; pearls such as he made from frog-eggs; and here and there a bird-stone, veined or mottled or a clear single colour.

‘Good,’ said Lady Annie. ‘That much is established, then: it were not your heaven. But what were you doing in someone else’s heaven-place? When did
you
sneak in?’

‘I always lived there.’

The lady perched on the rim of the chest, picked up a smooth chunk of turquoise, and tossed it from hand to hand as she thought. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she said. ‘What a horrible mess I have made.’

‘Mister Dought must have travelled there many times, to gather this much treasure.’ Urdda turned to the other two strongboxes. ‘Are they full of treasure too?’

‘To the brim,’ said the lady glumly. ‘He were very naughty. And of course he fetched as much or more for himself.’ She let the turquoise fall with a
chink
into the treasure-chest, then brightened and sprang up. ‘Anyway, what I was about to say—help me lower this without losing my fingers—is, I were on the point of offering you a position, for I cannot have you burdening the Ramstrong purse when it were me—or Collaby empowered by me—that made it possible for you to travel here.’

She stooped to lock the box, then straightened and took up her candle again. ‘Can you cook?’

‘I can cook.’

‘Do you know about ladies, and how they comport theirselves?’

‘Not really. Only a little, from stories. But I can discover. Goodwife Ramstrong knows a great deal, and she also knows some women who work for that man Hogback, and other merchants.’