Tender Morsels (35 page)

‘It is all bear-magic, Annie. And it is exactly the spot—you know that. And what’s more—’

‘Stop bludgeoning me with your reasons, girl!’

‘What’s more, you naughty woman, there is only one coffer, a quarter full, left in your cellar, of enchanted riches.’

‘What, you are saying it is time to go through and fetch more?’

‘You know I am not.’ Urdda nodded a greeting at a passing marketwoman. ‘You can afford, now, to undo what you did. That’s what I’m saying. Ramstrong and I, we have exchanged your false wealth for true, and passed it out of town bounds as far as we could. One quarter-coffer, more or less, makes little difference to your well-being, now or in years to come.’

Annie strode ahead.

Urdda caught her up without difficulty. ‘I know you are afraid.’

‘She will be so
angry
,’ said the widow under her breath. ‘I wonder, can I engineer it so as I do not actually
meet
the woman again?’

In her great generosity—or perhaps in her pity for my furred condition, and her guilt at having sent Filip to his death and Noer to worse enchantment—the Widow Bywell arranged for me to travel, in her own carriage, with her own coachman, all the way to Rockerly town, where there was a woman called Miss Prancy who to her mind could help me. She also arranged for me to be escorted there, knowing how I would dislike to show my face outside of carriage or inn.

‘Davit Ramstrong would be best,’ she told me. ‘But he cannot be spared. But his goodwife, Todda, has agreed to come and negotiate for you, and I think she will be most suitable.’

‘Will not I frighten her little ones, though, the hairy face of me?’

‘Oh, they will not be coming. Urdda and I will share them with Davit and Wife Thomas the while.’

It seemed to me a very peculiar arrangement, but Wife Ramstrong when I met her was entirely calm, both as to sharing a carriage with a monster and to leaving her bonny sons partly in the care of two witches.

The evening before we left, Filip’s family buried him, which I felt
uncomfortable either to attend or to avoid. So I lay in my bed while the bell tolled. The mourners carried Filip up the street outside, his mam and her women wailing and shrieking at the head of his procession. Every sound and thought was torture to me. Filip died in front of me again—fell to his knees, fell to his face. Over and over again he died, until the memory were burnt into my bones.

I woke, exhausted, to my mam’s coaxing and lamp, with hardly the energy to cover my face with a cloth as I passed from the house to the carriage outside.

The journey to Rockerly was long, with two laborious patches of bog, one between Olafred’s and High Oaks Cross and another deep in the forest outside of Rockerly. Wife Ramstrong did not talk overmuch, but she attended very closely to the passing landscape, having never travelled this far before either, and when we passed through the villages and I drew the curtains to cover myself, she kept me apprised of what was happening outside. She was the best sort of company, kind and thoughtful and comfortable in herself. I counted Davit Ramstrong a lucky man to have her, and those two sons lucky lads.

Rockerly was a dizzying big place, I saw from the hill approaching the town. At this time of evening, St Olafred’s would be a patch of shadow and sparkle on the side of the Mount; this town covered all of its hill and half the hill beyond, and had many more lanterns, regular disposed about its streets as well as in its windows.

It worried me to see them, thinking how many curious pairs of eyes each spark I could see represented. When we reached the gate, I hid in the carriage while Wife Ramstrong made inquiries of the guard, and it came out that there was no such person as a Miss Prancy, but only a much-respected doctress called Miss Dance, who lived at the top of the town. They gave Leddy Annie’s coachman the directions, and up we went, past lane-ends very much like the lower parts of my own town, only busier for this dark hour, and then up among houses of more substance, past an alehouse where there was a fiddle-player and a piper and dancing, past a grandish house through the curtains of which I saw a man raising a wine-cup to a table of guests, past a chapel where Rockerly citizens milled and
spilled down the steps from the candle-bright doorway.

Then the streets quietened and the houses grew even larger and straighter and better trimmed, and finally the carriage stopped. The goodwife alighted; I stayed skulking inside while she consulted with the coachman, knocked on the house door, was admitted, and disappeared inside.

She were gone a long time; it must of taken her a while to explain our business to this Miss Dance. Now and again I drew the carriage-curtain aside to look at the fine house, at the fern-fronds carved across the lintel and the blade of lamplight angling between the red curtains in that front room. Nothing changed except, perhaps the third time I looked, I noticed a cat had come to one of the other windows, a dark one. It were not much more than a soft shadow, as still as an ornament there; but the eyes on it, catching the street light, glowed eerie-bright, glowed down at me, it seemed, though surely my twitch of the curtain had been hardly enough to catch its attention?

I didn’t want to be looked at by cats any more than by people, so I did not peep out again. Eventually, with the quiet, and the tiredness from the long journey, and my longing for my own bed, I slipped into a doze, only to start awake, not knowing where or when I was—a whole night and day might have passed, I had been gone so utterly into sleep—when the goodwife rattled the carriage door opening it, and spoke through the crack.

‘She says you’re to come in, Bullock,’ she said. ‘Wait a moment, though; there’s a rider passing. But no one else to see you.’

She took me inside. The hall was cold, and empty except for the cloak-hooks and their burdens, and some dark wood chests either side with red cushioning upon them, where people might wait to be attended by the witch, I supposed.

We did not sit there, though. Wife Ramstrong calmly led me into a firelit room that was parlour and library both, with a table scattered with papers and packages, chairs of varying degrees of comfort before and behind it, at the fireside and nearer the curtained window, and only a few items of decoration about, and none of them ladylike: a dark painting of what looked like an assemblage of dead dogs;
some kind of scarred battle-helmet on a stand; a mounted stag’s head gazing across an imagined moor; and a vase of what looked like funeral flowers, which, when I looked closer, were made of silk only, and quite dusty.

‘Miss Dance is very busy,’ whispered the goodwife. ‘She is cooking up some medicine in the kitchen and bossing a maid about papers. Sit here, Bullock, and we’ll wait.’

Miss Dance, when she came, was a tall spike of a woman, dressed darkly, fierce of face—though handsome with it—and swift of movement. The cat came with her, and was no less unsettling and attentive in this parlour than it had been at the upstairs window.

Miss Dance took one look at me and said, ‘I see. It is exactly as you told me, Wife Ramstrong. I could not credit it until I saw it. Forgive me.’

‘It is an improbable tale,’ said the goodwife.

Miss Dance came unnerving close and examined me, my furred parts and my skinned, and particularly the joins of bear- to man-skin. She tutted and sighed, and her face grew ever more fierce. Finally she straightened, and walked away to the table, where a writing-desk lay open, the cat beside it being an ornament again. Miss Dance sat down there and tapped her fingers, frowning at me. Then she said, ‘Tell me, Mister Oxman, what you can recall of how you came to be in this condition.’

This I did. I had never spoke to a woman like this before, who had no apologies for herself yet were not laundress nor night-girl nor gypsy. It felt very like talking to a man, except with a man there is always them little jousts going on and those little assessments, yourself against him. There were none of that with this person; now that she had the sense of my predicament, she were bent only on the matter of what I said.

She wrote it all down, very fast and scratchy, holding up her hand to pause me whenever she took more ink. At certain points of my tale she nodded, as if, yes, a shoe-hammer to the brain were only to be expected, or to see your friend carried off like a bab, like a cub, by a she-bear. Nothing in my tale seemed to surprise the woman. The cat, on the other hand, seemed not to find a word of it credible.

When I had finished, she set to thinking, and I waited, feeling offended in some way but not knowing how, with Wife Ramstrong beside me, hopeful in the silence. The papers-maid appeared at the door and was waved away. The kitchen-woman came, and was told, ‘Take it off the heat for now, Marchpane.’ And after some more thinking, Miss Dance came and seated herself in the big winged armchair opposite us.

‘I am not at all happy at this,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Wife Ramstrong. ‘It is terrible events, one on another, for these Bears this year.’

‘And they smell, all these events,’ said Miss Dance, ‘of someone practising outside their abilities.’

Oh? I was all ready to be further annoyed, that she did not think me worthy to be Bear—which truth be told, I had to agree, for recent Bears is not of the quality the old ones maintained, anyone in St Olafred’s will tell you. But then I realised she did not mean
our
practising—neither mine nor Noer’s nor poor Filip’s. Do not speak, I warned myself, and show how tired you are, or how dim-witted.

‘They do?’ said the goodwife.

‘Indeed. It could be this Widow Bywell you have told me of. As I said, she is not known to me. There are several practitioners in that part of the country; it could be some wild-worker in the hills there. Someone who has not been instructed properly and is working against the natural interests, to gratify or advance herself. This is how it looks to me—though I see it only secondhand, and at some distance. I must look closer, to be sure, and speak to these others you have mentioned, goodwife: Misters Ramstrong and Wurledge, and the Bywell woman and her girl. And I must act quickly, before that boy—Noer?—meets with misadventure in the forest. And before you lose yourself entirely in bearness, Mister Oxman.’ Her face cleared. ‘St Olafred’s—I can ride there in a night.’ And abruptly she stood.

‘Tonight, you are thinking of going?’ I said, surprised, for it were night already.

‘I will set out directly. You must rest here from your travels, under my roof. But do not show your face abroad in the town—my servants
will tend to you, and to the widow’s coach and drivers. And, again, when you take your carriage back to St Olafred’s tomorrow, Mister Oxman, allow no one to see you, if you please.’

‘Very well,’ I said.

But she was already gone. ‘Wife Marchpane?’ she called in the hall. ‘Hilda? Have Gadbolt saddled up for me. Marchpane, we must leave our preparations for the moment.’ And her voice died away as she strode through the house, still issuing commands. The cat jumped down from the table, and with a last look behind and a meow of scorn, followed her out.

‘Now, there is a woman,’ Wife Ramstrong said, patting my hand and laughing with the surprise, ‘who knows, and
exactly
, what is what.’

In the autumn of her twenty-fifth year, Branza and Wolf walked up to Hallow Top, where the stones lay every which way in the heather. The wind was cold, but the walking warmed her, and she stretched her fingers and swung her arms to uncramp them after her morning’s work embroidering under the window. Liga was still there, sewing; she never seemed to tire of it, never seemed to hunger for air and movement.

When she reached the Top, Branza climbed up to sit on one of the stones. The wolf leaped up too, and settled beside her, his head raised like a lion’s on a crest, blinking into the wind.

With her heels kicking the stone’s side high above the ground, Branza was a girl again, though she was full-grown long ago; though the years had accumulated behind her in their great pointless pile.

The wind was fitful, like an irritated hand scratching and slapping her. It hissed in the tall, dry grasses and hummed on and off in Branza’s ears. It moved the grass unpredictably, tugging Branza’s glance to here and to there with the illusion of things arriving, or darting about. She expected at any moment for that little crotchety girl with the basket, her dark sister, to round a rock before her and stamp into sight, her eyes full of thoughts and rebellion. She
would be muttering,
Of all the daft things! When we could be in town by now. Always dallying and dreaming
. And then she would look up, and push her hair out of her eyes, and call,
What are you up there for, goose-girl? Let us go!

Urdda.
Urdda
. How long it had been since the name had sounded in Branza’s mouth! How sorely she still missed her: the underlying fact of all her days was that she was absent a sister; that her three-corner family was broken, one of its corners lost, cracked off like the edges of just such stones as these by the ices of many winters.
How
many winters had Urdda been gone? Would it be ten this year, or eleven? ’Twas a hopelessly long time, whichever. And Branza was no wiser as to why than she had been that day, when Urdda had risen early and walked out of the house, and not returned for breakfast, or for the evening meal, or to sleep.