The Snow Song

by Sally Gardner

  ‘Father,’ said Una again.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘You asked me to come to your house,’ she said.

  Only now did he realise he’d spoken the last words aloud. He pushed past Una into the yard.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ she said to Edith. ‘Put another curse on my father? You bewitched him once, but you’ll not do it again. I won’t allow it.’

  She turned and joined her father.

  Edith watched them from the verandah and wondered how long Una had been there and how much she’d heard. By her pallor, Edith thought, time enough to have heard what she’d said.

  At the gate the butcher stopped dead and only then did Una look at him and see he was still filled with fury. She went back to Edith.

  ‘My father did you the honour of asking you to be his bride,’ she said. ‘He offered to take you out of this pigsty, to live a life with… with…’ She waved her arms, searching her mind for the ultimate prize. ‘To live a life with a goose-feather eiderdown.’

  The foolishness of what she was saying made Edith laugh. Una slapped her face.

  ‘Enough,’ shouted the butcher. Feeling himself vindicated, he marched back and took hold of Una’s arm.

  The cabinet maker, who’d heard every word and was still frozen to the spot outside the henhouse, found his voice.

  ‘At least,’ he said, ‘we live in distinguished poverty.’

  The second he’d spoken he regretted it for the butcher strode towards him. Edith, quick on her feet, ran and stood between them. The butcher spat on the ground, a gobbet of saliva narrowly missing her skirt.

  ‘Not a thing, not one thing will you be allowed in this village. No shop will sell to you, no one will give you wine, and anyone who does will be punished by me.’

  ‘And who made you a little king?’ said Edith.

  The butcher stared at her white neck, her beautiful, unblemished skin, her defiant eyes, her extraordinary white hair. ‘Kill her,’ his mother whispered. ‘Kill her.’ His hand was drawn instinctively to Edith’s neck, he felt the pulse of life beat in her and, with one hand, he pressed. She didn’t resist. Butter couldn’t have been softer. She smiled at him. Una’s scream brought him back into the moment, breaking through his searing rage. He felt the blood pounding in his head and he let go. Edith crumpled to the floor.

  ‘Oh – Father!’ said Una. ‘Oh God.’

  Outside the gate a small group had gathered. The butcher dragged Una through the onlookers.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ he said, ‘you interfering bitch.’

  The cabinet maker was on his knees, begging the demon to bring Edith back to life when Misha ran into the yard.

  Edith is in a sunlit forest, amid a mosaic of bluebells and primroses. The trees, hungry for the light, reach for the dazzling blue sky. She hears Demetrius’ voice. ‘It’s not winter, Edith. Turn back. Choose to live.’

  She woke, gasping for breath. She was in bed.

  ‘Help me sit her up,’ said Vanda to her son.

  ‘Is she alive?’ asked the cabinet maker, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vanda. ‘Misha saved her. Bring some water. And some brandy.’

  ‘There’s no brandy,’ said the cabinet maker. ‘With Edith’s permission, the demon brings me one bottle every night as long as I’m good.’

  ‘Take the old man to our house,’ said Vanda to Misha, ‘and bring back the brandy.’

  When they’d gone, she said, ‘I thank the Lord you’re alive. Whatever did you say to him? No, it doesn’t matter. I should have come sooner, but my husband…’ Edith took Vanda’s hand and squeezed it. ‘You haven’t lost your voice again?’

  Edith coughed then said, ‘No. It’s a little croaky, that’s all.’

  Vanda brushed her hair from her face. Edith slept and dreamed of Demetrius.

  The butcher had left Una in the middle of the street, telling her to go home. In his house, he closed the door and pulled the parlour shutters to so that the room was dark. He poured himself a drink. He shouldn’t have done that. It was a mistake, but the girl had enraged him. How dare she look at him as if he were dirt. How dare she not apologise. ‘Sorry. Sorry, I humiliated you.’ Just one sorry would have sufficed.

  ‘It was a mistake, Mother,’ he said. ‘A mistake. And worse still, Una saw it.’

  In the gloom of the room, his mother was sitting in her favourite chair.

  ‘You should have had your moment with Edith alone,’ she said.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘You would be nothing without me.’

  He threw his glass at the apparition.

  Sorina opened the door. ‘Did you call for me, Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the butcher. ‘Go and fetch my mother’s shawl.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Knowledge Forgotten

  By the time the sun set that day Misha had moved into the cabinet maker’s house. Vanda had insisted. It was for Edith’s safety, she said, and no matter how much Edith protested, Vanda was adamant.

  Edith had a feeling that Misha might have another motive. Her old bedroom in the attic looked directly onto Lena’s mother’s house. When they were young, and Lena’s father still alive, he’d put up a pulley system from Lena’s window to hers so they could pass messages to each other. She’d forgotten about it until she was showing Misha where he was to sleep.

  ‘It’s dusty,’ she said, looking around the small room. The gaps between the floorboards were so wide that you could see the kitchen below and hear every word spoken there. She wondered if her father had sat on the bed and listened to her grandmother telling her that the two of them were going to leave the village. There it was, glinting in the deep pool of her memory – knowledge forgotten.

  ‘Edith?’ said Misha.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Edith, ‘I was remembering something.’

  ‘Can I see if I can make the pulley work?’ said Misha.

  The afternoon became evening and the oxcarts trundled over the cobblestones into the village, a drumbeat for a sunset. The farmers returned from the fields while the women stood gossiping on their doorsteps. They stopped when they saw the priest.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, raising his hat to them.

  He knew they’d been talking about the butcher’s attack on Edith. He was on his way to have a word with him.

  In his slaughterhouse, his hand resting on his favourite knife, the butcher felt calmness return to him, his pent-up rage spent. He breathed in the cold evening air as the day was lost in darkness. It wouldn’t surprise him if there was late snow. He picked up his knife and returned to the parlour where his mother still waited in the shadows near the cuckoo clock.

  He was pouring himself a drink when he heard the double knock on the front door. The butcher opened it without bothering to see who it was; only the priest knocked that way. He turned from him and went into the parlour.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ said the priest.

  ‘A drink?’ said the butcher.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Can you see her?’ said the butcher.

  For a moment the priest thought he meant Edith. ‘You could have killed her. What you did this afternoon was witnessed by half the village. They’re out there now, whispering about it.’

  ‘She’s sitting where she always sits.’

  The priest was tripped up by an altogether more worrying thought – the butcher was becoming unhinged.

  ‘Who?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘My mother,’ said the butcher. He sat down heavily and pointed into the dark of the room. ‘She’s there.’

  The priest had worked with the butcher long enough and profitably enough to know to handle him with care when certain moods were on him.

  ‘How did she survive?’ said the butcher, his eyes fixed on the apparition. ‘No one can survive a winter on the mountain.’

  ‘Your mother?’ said the priest.

  ‘No – Edith!’ shou
ted the butcher.

  The priest took a step back when light caught the silver blade of the knife the butcher was playing with. The room felt uncomfortably hot.

  ‘You must pull yourself together,’ said the priest gently, using the voice he saved for the confessional, for gathering little items of gossip. Some with hooks enough to bring in a tidy sum. ‘We have so much at stake.’

  ‘Even you are scared of me,’ said the butcher. ‘Look at you. A frightened mouse. Edith isn’t scared. She’s the only one who’s ever stood up to me.’ He got up and moved close to the priest. ‘That soft neck – I dreamed of strangling her – she was mine by rights. I’ve never had a beautiful woman. They’ve all been pig ugly – even Sorina looks ugly when she weeps. She always weeps. Go, Priest. Get out of here before I cut off your tail.’

  Night, and all was dark apart from an occasional light in a window; the closing of shutters the only sound as the silence of the mountain settled over the village.

  Misha helped Edith cook supper. The minute the meal was over the cabinet maker put on his hat and asked if he could go to the inn.

  ‘No,’ said Edith, bringing a near-empty bottle of plum brandy for him.

  The cabinet maker sighed and took the bottle to his room, barricading the door as he did every night. Neither Misha nor Edith heard him put a chair under his window and climb out.

  Misha had brought a bottle of schnapps. Edith poured them both a glass and said, ‘My grandmother would gather all the gossip, all the fears of the village, add her own ingredients and make a soup of words. She would tell a tale that felt as if it was yours alone. The room would go dark and it seemed to me that the story became a ball of light for you to catch.’

  ‘They’re powerful when you tell them aloud,’ Misha said. ‘Would they be as strong if they were written?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’

  She took out the violin and put it under her chin. In the flicker of the candle flame Misha could see an audience would be enthralled by her music, by her beauty, just as they would be by her grandmother’s stories.

  Edith put the bow to the strings and played a melody that floated out of the window and was heard in the stillness of the night by many villagers on the edge of sleep.

  After Misha had gone to bed Edith went to her room and closed the door. She sat on the floor and looked again at the circus scenes painted on her hope box and thought about Misha’s question. Her grandmother’s stories had a wildness at their heart, they glimmered with the possibilities of freedom, of another life, a life unlived. Misha was right – they weren’t meant to be written down. Could one snowflake tell the whole story of snow when each was individually made round a grain of dust? The same was true, she thought, of her grandmother’s stories. She’d told them round grains of truth and each became something different. If Edith was to write them down, all the snowflakes would be the same. They would lose their energy, lose the power to free a girl from a cage. Words, like the music of the violin, needed to be heard and she had voice enough for that.

  I will be the storyteller and my stories will be the light. They will be told again by others and not even death will blow out the candle or silence the words. She had her grandmother’s coat of fables; she had her fur hat with the antler horns; she was no longer shy, no longer silent. And with that thought, she climbed into bed and drifted off into dreams.

  The moon was lost behind a cloud as soft, late snow dusted the houses. The innkeeper collected the last of the glasses, lifted the cabinet maker to his feet and opened the door. For a moment a beer spill of golden light shone onto the cobbles.

  Stumbling into the darkness the cabinet maker shouted, ‘Good night.’

  He paused for a piss, wetting himself in the process. ‘Never mind,’ he said as the inn’s light went out, and he felt as he always did, abandoned by his one true love, the bottle. Wrapped in melancholy he comforted himself with the thought that he would be back at the inn tomorrow. And for no reason that he could think of, the tale of the heartbeats came to him. The darkness that had been above him now seemed to smother him. It flickered with snowflakes and tiny blue fishes swam before his eyes as he blindly meandered towards his bed. A stray dog passed him in the street.

  ‘Good night, dear respected creature,’ he said, and as the ground lost its solidity he felt an arm take hold of his. ‘Thank you, demon, my legs aren’t behaving themselves. We won’t tell Edith,’ he whispered.

  Misha sat on the bed. He’d put an oil lamp near the open window and carefully pegged his letter to the cord. Now, with a judder, it made its butterfly way towards Lena’s window. To Misha’s relief she opened the shutter and smiled at him. He pointed to the letter. That night for the first time he felt there was hope.

  Una’s house was bigger than her sister’s and she had a bigger bed with a goose-feather eiderdown. Her husband was more prosperous than Vanda’s. She regretted that she and Vanda didn’t speak these days. A flint of jealousy struck a flame in her. To think that Vanda’s husband still… still… and now a baby. Una’s husband hardly ever touched her.

  This year, she hoped, Sorina would be married. Una had her eye on the mayor’s son as a potential husband for her. She firmly believed girls shouldn’t choose their husbands; it should be left to the elders of the village, wise men like her father. Of course, she’d mentioned the mayor’s son to him. But it wasn’t a match for her daughter that kept her awake. No, what gnawed at her was what she’d heard pass between her father and Edith; what Edith had said about Grandma’s shawl. Una shuddered at the memory of the old woman with her mean eyes and hard hands. She’d remained frightened of the shawl long after Grandma had died. But why?

  Una woke in the dawn of a cold spring day. Her husband rolled away from her. She sat up and tried to rid herself of a nightmare. She was in her father’s house and she couldn’t find Vanda. It’s hard to know your age in dreams, she thought. There was a sound coming from her father’s bedroom. She pushed open the door, and there was Vanda, the shawl round her shoulders, blood on her nightdress.

  It was only a nightmare, Una said to herself as she dressed. But by the time she was lighting the stove, the dream had transported itself into a memory, held in place by time. She must have been twelve. The memory became sharper, and the harder she pushed at its blade, the deeper it cut. She gazed out at the yard with its light dusting of snow and knew with absolute clarity who she’d last seen wearing Grandma’s shawl: her daughter Sorina.

  One small crack appeared in the walls of righteousness that she had meticulously built over the years, lie upon lie until the past became acceptable. Now the walls crumbled to dust. Why hadn’t she listened to her sister, to Misha? They had both tried to warn her, to protect her, and she had given her daughter to that monster. She rocked back and forth as one memory overlaid another.

  I did that. Pig stupid. I did that. Pig ugly. And the tears that threatened to demolish her suddenly froze. She saw exactly what she was going to do.

  Later, she remembered everything except the walk to her father’s house. No one was awake. She’d gone straight to the cupboard where he kept his hunting gun and the bullets. She had loaded the gun the way he had taught her. A memory itched her mind. She was a child, she’d asked the butcher if he loved her.

  ‘You and your sister – both of you are disappointments,’ he’d said. ‘Your mother didn’t even have the strength to give me a son.’

  He never answered my question, she thought. The butcher’s bedroom was on the ground floor. She’d opened the bedroom door just as she had in her dream.

  Now she stood at the foot of her father’s bed.

  ‘What do you want?’ said the butcher, waking. He saw the gun and sat up with a start. ‘Put it down, Una.’

  For once, she didn’t do what her father told her. She pointed the gun at his chest and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Best China

  The second Sorina heard the gunshot, she was wide awake
, every part of her alert, her heart pounding.

  She went silently down the stairs and stopped in the hall. She could see the outline of her mother, framed in the doorway of the butcher’s bedroom.

  ‘Mother?’ Sorina said into the darkness.

  Una didn’t turn to her. ‘I’ve killed you,’ she said as if to herself. Sorina crept closer. ‘I meant to hit your chest.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Sorina again.

  Still Una didn’t appear to know she was there. ‘The gun threw me back.’

  Now Sorina could see beyond her to where the butcher sat bolt upright in bed, the top of his head blown off, a halo of red splattered on the bedroom wall.

  Sorina stared in wonder at the sight. Was he really dead? She felt her whole being fill with excitement. He was dead.

  ‘The shawl,’ said Una, and Sorina jumped. ‘I saw you wearing that terrible shawl. I should have known – I should have killed him then.’

  ‘Come away, Mother.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  Sorina couldn’t take her eyes off the gruesome sight. The butcher’s eyes were wide open, his mouth too, his face a carnival mask.

  ‘Good,’ said Una. ‘That’s good.’

  Sorina tried to coax her mother into the kitchen.

  ‘No. I must stay here in case he comes back, one of the bloodless like his mother.’

  That thought frightened Sorina. She had often heard the butcher talking to his mother. Sorina had to think. She wished her mind wasn’t so slow. She was so used to taking orders from the butcher that now she had no will of her own.

  Then the image of Edith in her fur hat with the antlers came to her. Yes, she thought, the only person in the whole village to have disobeyed the butcher. The wild woman would know what to do.