‘I tell you, they is not the same standard of Bears any more,’ I said to Todda, pulling our door to and taking little Anders’ hand.
‘Says you, Bear of Bears.’ She smiled at me, organising her shawl around the bundle that was Ousel.
‘Says me. Even four year ago, we had better lads. Bigger and of better mettle. All the high posts and offices of this town, Bears occupy now, and is respectable. Not one o’ those four last night was respectable. They puked and bellowed and sauced Ada Keller so, her da had to put her away and do all the bringing himself. The whole day is supposed to be about civilising men, not freeing them to paw and offend the women. It has all got bent out of its purpose.’
‘’Tis the lure of the boats. It is that Outman boy that turned a sailor, and brought back his coin, and strutted in his uniform. That glamorised them all, and off the good lads went.’
‘I know,’ I said gloomily. Anders were toddling too slow, so I picked him up and put him on my shoulders.
We walked across town to my brother Aran’s house, where his wife’s mam, Sella, had yet to see our new Ousel. We had a fine breakfast and morning there, most of the town still slumbering around us after the night’s and yesterday’s excesses. I was a touch faded myself, but I had taken care not to get in such a state as some so as I could be some use to Todda in the night, should Ousel cry and Anders forsake his bed at the same time. Which, of course, he had done. Come, little lad. I had peeled him off his mam so she could nurse the new one. I’ve a story for you. And I told it him in that voice, halfway between song and murmur, that settled the boy’s eyelashes upon his cheeks again. I cannot do that near so fast as you, says Todda. There is something about your rumblingness casts the spell, no?
No, says I, You make your stories too interesting, that is their problem.
Anyway, here we were, making our way back home, through the mess and desertion of St Olafred’s after Bear Day. Todda led Anders; I had Ousel in my arms. The pennants on the turret of the castle still snapped their reared, snarling bears in the wind, and hunters’ houses had bear-heads on their steps, or hung on their doors, that protected their women from molestation on the Day, and there was some girl’s ribbon trodden to the cobbles, and some man’s pint-mug sat with drunken precision on a windowsill, that would have to be returned to Osgood’s at some time.
I saw her as we crossed the High Street, standing like a lost lamb in the covered market, watching us but affecting not to. ‘Who is that?’ I says to my Todda, even as I felt, I know that person, from life before my marriage, from life before Todda.
‘I’ve never seen her before. Mebbe she’s been visiting for the Day.’
The way the girl stood, it was like a bee in my brain. Where do I know her? No, I have never seen her before! But—
Most uncharacteristic, I made towards her, away from Todda and Anders. Todda cleared her throat, slight but pointedly, behind me, but even then I must have known the face glowering at me, with the pin-drops of rain flying and falling across it.
Then I were in the market and there was no rain between us, and still she met my eye, in a way that would have been insolent in a town girl, but in this one—
All on a sudden, I knew the reason, and I clutched babby Ousel to me, because the first effect on me was to make me turn limp and nearly drop the boy to the slates.
‘It’s little Urdda!’
Her face cleared of some of its frowning, but still she were puzzled, I could tell.
‘But all growed up. Grown to a young lady now. How old would you be, fifteen? But in the space of four years—how is that? You were but a little sprout then.’
‘I am fourteen summers, sir,’ she said.
‘You do not know me,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. Of course not. My name, sweet child, is Davit Ramstrong. I am a woolman and a citizen of this town of St Olafred’s.’
‘Oh, so it is the same town. But I have not met you, sir?’ said Urdda.
‘Indeed you have, my slip,’ I said. ‘But I were in bear form, in the place we met. Often we have sported, you and your sister Branza and your lovely mother and I. You will remember chasing me, I think, when I run off into the sky and never returned? Off that cliff there?’
She searched my whole face carefully. ‘You? You are Bear?’ I could see her in there, the little one I knew inside this taller, less certain girl. Todda and Anders were behind me, watching, listening. I could hear my wife’s calm breathing.
‘I was Bear—for one day here and for some months in your place. The time must run different in the two places. Which is why you can be so much older now. But how do you come to be here, Urdda? What brought you?’
‘I brought myself,’ she said unsteadily, glancing at Todda beyond my shoulder, and around me at my boy. ‘I followed the trail of a bear, a different bear; I pushed through the wall of a cave.’
‘Davit?’ said Todda behind me.
‘This is Urdda, wife. Remember I have told you? The day we met, that whole tale.’
‘Urdda is the younger daughter? Of . . . of . . . Liga, was her name?’
The girl’s eyes brightened further. ‘You know my mam?’ she said, and her voice was fraught.
My good wife went straight to her, bless her, and took her hand where it gripped her shawl. ‘I know of her, Urdda, that only.’
‘Do you know of where she is? Where I might find her?’
Oh, I had never heard that little sparkling girl so woeful. Todda turned to me and a glance full of doubt and pity passed between us.
‘How long have you been here, girl?’ I said, gentle as I could.
‘I arrived . . . last evening,’ she managed, on either side of a gulped breath.
‘And where have you slept? Have you slept,’ says Todda, ‘or only wandered?’
‘I went out to the cottage.’
‘The cottage? There is no cottage left!’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I made myself a kind of nest,’ she whispered. ‘Of grasses.’
‘And slept in the wildwood?’ said Todda. ‘Girl, you were lucky not to be took by bears or gypsies! Davit, I think we must have this girl to our home with us. I shudder to think what will happen to her, do we not accommodate her. You must be the only man of this town knows her provenance—and no one else will believe her, but they will take any story you give them as to her origins. Who have you spoke to already, girl?’
‘The guards at the gate. That Bear. Laundry-girls. A woman selling cakes outside the alehouse.’
Todda touched her own cheek at the horror of it. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘There’s the nook next the babbies’ room; you shall have that to sleep in. Oh, that dreadful cottage!’
‘You must have had a bad fright, seeing it for the first time,’ I said, following them out the market, ‘were you expecting it to be as you remembered.’
‘Oh, I did,’ she said, her poor mouth trembling between tears and a smile. ‘I did not know what to think—and still I don’t.’
And nor did I, as I followed the three of them, Anders now on Todda’s hip, watching the new acquaintance curiously. ‘I had begun to think I had dreamt you all,’ I said, ‘and my time as Bear among you. And now you have stepped out the dream, all tall and real. This will require some thinking.’
So that bear is gone too, Branza finally admitted. First, first-Bear goes, then Urdda, and now this second Bear. Well, was he so much of a loss? Not compared to Urdda, certainly, or to first-Bear, an altogether kinder, nobler beast. She thought, though, of lying against the second one—the bulk and warmth of him, and his willingness to accommodate her there in her doubts and wonderings, his enjoyment of the little amount she allowed him. It was indeed a less worrying world without him, but it was lesser in other ways as well.
‘I have not seen the bear with you in several days,’ said Liga. ‘In . . . in many more than several, now I think of it.’
‘No,’ said Branza calmly, as if it hardly mattered. ‘I have not met him hereabouts. He may be following some lady-friend u
p to the higher hills. Who knows? I have seen many bears about, this season. I am sure he will be back as usual.’
But she knew she would not see him again, and she did not. And Liga, whether she noticed or no, never mentioned his absence again, never referred to his former presence, so that he vanished entirely from every part of Branza’s world except for the store-chest of her memory. There he stayed, among all the objects bright and dark, and she pondered him as she pondered them, growing womanwards.
10
‘What we ought to do,’ said Goodwife Ramstrong at her loom the next morning, ‘is visit on Leddy Annie Bywell.’
‘We ought?’ Urdda was walking baby Ousel up and down, keeping him quiet while the goodwife worked. She searched the baby’s cloudy bluish eyes by the light at the window.
‘Muddy Annie, she used to be,’ said Todda.
‘A mudwife? As in a story?’
Todda laughed. ‘Just so. But she does no herbing or mudding since she made her fortune; just sits up in that fine house and doesn’t come out to say boo. But maybe she has heard of this land of yours. I know Ramstrong is searching out Teasel Wurledge this morning, to have his story from him. But Leddy Bywell is one you and I can approach. She might know what machinations brought you here, and how to reverse them.’
‘Reverse them? But I don’t want to go back,’ said Urdda. ‘Not yet, at least. I want to look about here—this place is full of all kinds of odd things that we do not have at home.’ She was much more reconciled to her new situation since sleeping a night in a comfortable bed.
‘Odd is not of necessity good,’ said Todda gently. ‘Odd is not always kind.’
‘But odd is always odd, the same,’ said Urdda. ‘I cannot just turn around and go back to Mam and Branza—I’ve hardly anything to tell them yet!’
‘Well,’ said Todda, ‘when you have. It’s as well to know what you might do, then, and what is closed to you. Where you stand, you know, in relation to your circumstances and your family’s in that other place. I will go up with you, when Anders wakes.’
‘This one is slipping to sleep.’ Urdda swayed, rocking Ousel. ‘I might visit her myself and not disturb your working.’
Todda raised her eyebrows. ‘You may not move quite so freely as that, here in the real world. Not alone.’
‘Why not? I ran all about the streets on my own, day-before-yesterday, after that Mister Wurledge, and I saw plenty a girl doing the same.’
‘Yes, but that were Bear Day,’ said Todda. ‘That were the one day of the year you might do that. The rest o’ the time, you must go out at least with another girl, if not a grown woman is better. That’s in part why we were so worried for you, standing out in the market on your own.’
‘That’s tiresome, though. Especially for girls who have not sisters—what do they do?’
‘They go with their mothers. Or with friends. Or they bide at home. Who would want to go out alone? What would people say to you?’
‘Well, what would they say?’
‘Why, they would shout things. Boys, you know. They would call you bold and a trollop. You might get things thrown at you, you know. A little stone, or a flick of mud on your clean dress.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly. You would be asking for that.’
‘I would not be asking.’
‘Just by going out alone, I am saying, is asking.’
‘That is terrible! We have no such strictnesses at home.’
‘Your home,’ said Todda with the thump of a treadle, ‘sounds like a very, very wonderful place.’
I found Wurledge at his home abed—’twas nearly noon!—still sleeping off the Day’s effects.
‘For saints’ sake, come in!’ His grumping reached me at the door. ‘Don’t stand there, shouting and bashing!’ I had knocked the timidest of knocks—he must still be in quite a state of sensitivity.
When he saw me at his chamber door, he came up a little politer. ‘Mister Ramstrong! Feller Bear, now!’ He elbowed himself up, swang his feet off his pallet. He had washed himself, at least, or been washed, of the state I had last seen him. He pulled his shirt into place around himself and pressed his sleep-cocked hair down. ‘What kin I do for you?’
‘Only speak,’ I said. ‘Only tell me whatever you got up to, Bear Day.’
‘I’n’t never laid a finger on Henny Jenkins, whatever Applin says. I were out cold under Keller’s table by then. Never heard a whisker about it till yestiddy.’
‘Hmm,’ says I. It did not look as if he were going to stand and come out to talk civilised to me, so I crouched in the doorway, one shoulder to the post. ‘It is not that distasteful business I am about.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. Ev’one else has their trews tied in a Franitch blood-knot over it, I cannot think why. ’Tis not like she ha’n’t had a hand up her before, and more.’
He expected me to laugh at that. This is what we have come to, the Bears we are putting up these days. ‘No, it is another matter. It is the matter of a lost girl my wife and I are accommodating.’
Out of his what-the-feck-have-that-to-do-with-me look came another, more realising. ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘I’m guessing her name is Urdda.’
I did not even like the sound of it from his mouth, but I must find out the worst, and waste no time about it. ‘She tells me you spent three years away, in the course of Bear Day.’
‘That is what I was thinking, when I talked to her. Now I am beginning to realise it were likely some kind of . . . of vision I had, or fever-dream, brought on by overexcitement, and thirst, and that costume, which—you know what it’s like, Ramstrong, man: you’re stewing in the thing! It boiled my brain, I’m thinking.’
‘Where did this Urdda girl come from, then?’ says I, as patiently as I could. ‘You know her name; you called her by it on sight, yet you had never set eyes on the girl in this world, because she had never been here. By process of reasoning, she and I have pinned you down to a Bear that got there and immediately ate up some little nuisance of a man that were bothering the girls.’
‘Feck me! It did happen, then? But how could it, all that time and yet I pops back into the twitten there the same moment I jumped out? Only the maid was there before me. I don’t understand how that works.’
‘Three years. So you’re a man of twenty now.’
‘So it seems!’ He rubbed his raspy chin in high amusement. ‘Though everyone still treats me as a Bear-age lad.’
I had to work to keep my voice polite. ‘So how did you occupy yourself, those three years?’ I said it so softly, it were sinister.
He heard all that. He looked like a lad that a landlord had told: I saw the whole thing from my upper window, you and your gang-boys emptying my best tree of apples. The guilt and the effort to look innocent were painted on his face, bright as pox-spots. ‘What you mean?’ he said. ‘What have she told you? She were not even there!’
‘Except when you ate that dwarfish man.’
‘Except then.’
‘Which were hardly nothing, are you telling me?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Which makes me wonder: how did you fill the rest o’ the time? Did you eat anyone else?’ What a question to have to ask a person!
‘No, I did not! I only et him because I had been asleep all winter and were half mad with hunger. After that I were calmer, and found barks, you know, and honeys, and all what a bear should eat.’
I was dizzy a moment with the memory of it, the jealousy I felt of him—three years in that place when I’d only had a matter of months. I’d a whiff of that bark, with a bear-appetite behind my nose, the forest my playground, and the cottage awaiting me, end of every day.
‘But you associated with them—the girl’s sister, Branza, and the mother?’ I said, keeping the wretchedness out of my voice as far as I could at the thought.
He glanced at wall and floor. Across his face—I realised I must stay calm, feeling how intently I watched, how ready I was to leap up and lam the lad,
any excuse he gave me—amusement passed again, then something shady and sly, then careful concealment.
‘Yes, I “associated”. Am I to believe you of been to this place too, Mister Ramstrong?’ he says smoothly.
‘I have visited,’ says I.
‘You will know what temptations they have set up for us, then, them two fine women unguarded by any man, and friendly toords beasts as you please. You is a married man now, but you was not when you were Bear; you surely cannot have not noticed that they was fine and shapely women.’
‘They were but bits of girls,’ I said sharp, ‘when I was there.’
His eyebrows rose, and he chewed like a sheep on cud for a while. ‘Oh, then,’ he said softly, almost to himself. ‘Did you have of that mam, then? I did not think she liked bears.’
‘ “Have of’”?’ I was on him with a fistful of his nightshirt. ‘What is this “having of ”? What have you gone and done?’
‘Nothing, nothing! I never touched her! She come to me, that Branza, she did! Always flinging herself on me and rubbing up. She wanted it more than I did!’
I threw him away, like the piece of rubbish he was. He gave a bab-whimper and rearranged his shirt to cover his man-parts again, should I take it into my head to tear the things off with my bare hands.
‘Tell me true,’ I says, each word like a quarrystone falling out the wall on his head. ‘Did you despoil that girl?’
Guilts twitched his eyes. I hung over him very much like a bear, and he cowered very much like bear-prey.
‘Did you?’ I pushed his chest, and the air whooshed out his lungs.
He shook his head and held his shirtfront, all terror now, gasping. ‘I did not. I tell you true, Ramstrong, I would of liked to; you know how she smells! But she were a modest girl; all she would do were lie with me sometimes, without no touch-and-pokery. Three year I were there; if I had not expended myself on the she-bears of that world, I would of gone mad at the sight o’ the girl.’
I turned from him to stop myself doing worse to him. The she-bears of that world. Oh my gracious!
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