Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘She thought I was a bear, you know; she would swim with me, in her wet shift, clear to the eye as if she wore nothing at all. Where were a man supposed to look?’

  ‘Away!’ I said. ‘A man, a civilised man, is supposed to turn away, and walk away, not sit and slobber over the sight of a girl’s nakedness, shown him in all innocence!’

  ‘I never slobbered!’ he said; then, ‘I never did,’ more doubtfully, sulkily.

  I stood at the door with my back to him, trying to be calm. The she-bears of that world! Three years, for heaven sakes. All she would do were lie with me sometimes! You are only enraged, Ramstrong, because this accords too close with what you felt toords the mam there yourself. And you are jealous, of what you might have made of three years in that cottage, when this girt clod had that luck himself.

  ‘Well, you have not harmed them,’ I said. ‘That is the main thing. And I am not the only man of St Olafred’s has found himself to be a bear in that place, which is what I came here to establish.’

  ‘You are not.’ He still sounded sulky. He looked like what he was: a child admonished, hairy legs, broad chest, and prickly chin notwithstanding.

  ‘One more thing, though,’ said I—and he managed to cringe using just his head. ‘When I come back from there, I spent some time trying to return to it; to find that cottage again, that land. You may be tempted the same.’

  ‘As I said, I thought it a dream. Now that I know it were not, mebbe I shall be tempted, should things go bad for me here. I had a very pleasant time there.’

  ‘You will give me your word’—I turned fully to face him—‘that if you discover a way—’

  ‘I will tell you it?’ he says with a crafty grin, which falls off his face like a hallows-mask when he catches my expression.

  ‘You will give me your word,’ I says, stepping towards him, ‘that you will lay a finger on neither Branza nor her mam.’

  ‘I don’t have fingers there,’ he says, resentful. ‘I have paws. If the leddies don’t mind my pawing, I don’t see why I should not paw them.’

  ‘Content yourself with beasts when you are there,’ I say. ‘I will have your solemn promise not to ruin that girl Branza, however affectionate she treats you.’

  He shrugged, the insolent lump. ‘Should she come and sit on me, I would not be pushing her off. And you might not be there to stop me.’

  My arm were so ready to hit him, it shivered in its socket. He blinked and flinched at that, though he were eye to eye with me. ‘Your word, Teasel Wurledge,’ I says very low.

  He set his lips closed. I held his gaze, and he wavered; then he said, ‘I do not see why I should promise you anything.’

  Because I am an honest woolman and respected, and you is the dregs our Bear Day is reduced to. Because I were Bear before you and always will be. Because I am a steady citizen, married and with sons of my own, and you are a feckless drunkard what soiled the skins with your vomit. I might say all this and he would still look at me the same way.

  ‘’Tis true,’ I said even lower, ‘for what would your word be worth?’

  Then I was gone from that fartsome, crumpled, ale-smelly room, before I undignified myself by landing a blow upon a poor ignorant beast.

  Branza had long ago given up hope that she would find Urdda in her wanderings. She had long ago stopped expecting, cheerfully or uneasily, that second-Bear would surprise her in the near forest or on a far hill, in playful guise or terrifying. Still she wandered, though; still she strode the countryside. For a full round of the seasons, she went out alone—sometimes for only an hour, sometimes for a day and a night in the wild, and a day’s returning.

  ‘Do you not feel lonely out there?’ said Liga when Branza came home one evening, spilling autumn cold from her skirts and hair into the tranquil, fire-warmed air of the cottage. ‘Why do you not go up the town for a change, and visit with people, and have some conversation?’

  ‘People are not nearly so varied as animals,’ said Branza, pulling off her boots by the door, ‘in their habits and shapes. They are not even varied as birds, leave alone all the other kinds. The town is always the town, doing the town’s things over and over.’

  ‘I like that,’ said Liga. ‘I like to know what to expect. And that everyone is so friendly. Besides,’ she added, ‘I thought you had interests there.’

  ‘Interests?’ Branza came to sit by the fire and stretched out her bare white feet towards the flames.

  ‘I thought someone of the Gruen family interested you once.’

  ‘Oh, Mam. Once. Years ago.’

  ‘Why did nothing come of that, daughter? Or might something yet?’

  Branza spread and wagged her chilled toes. ‘Do you wish it would?’

  Liga made two more swift stitches in the seam she was sewing. ‘I should not like you to die unmarried.’

  ‘Why not? You yourself seem perfectly happy in that state.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Branza turned to await the rest of the sentence, but Liga only stared into the fire, her eyes too dark to tell the black part from the coloured. Branza rubbed Liga’s shin. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mam.’

  ‘I should like to have some grandchildren some day,’ said Liga simply, waking from her stare and sewing again.

  And now that Urdda is gone—Liga’s unspoken words hung in the air—it falls to you, my angel child.

  Branza shook her head as if a fly were bothering her. Rollo Gruen belonged to her childhood; to the time before she knew she could lose her sister. He belonged, in fact, to the time so close upon the day she had lost her that Branza’s curiosity about him and Urdda’s disappearing had mingled in Branza’s memory. She could not entertain the tentative sweetness of the one without calling up the pain of the other. And then there had been the second Bear, beside whom Rollo Gruen seemed so slender and simple; she had had the sense that she could move the man around like a taw in a game of bobstones, and somehow he had no longer interested her after Urdda left and after Bear. She would rather find herself a glade, or a seat by a pool, and position herself stonelike so that the forest ignored her as it did stones, included her and perched upon her as it did stones, so that the smallest and rarest and most timorous of birds came down to drink in her presence, or the wobblingest fawn took shelter against her unaccountable warmth. She would rather walk and walk until it was no longer clear whether she was shaping her stride to the landscape or whether the slopes and gravels, sheep-paths and tussocky meadows were in fact becoming, rising and declining, and giving way to one another in response to her own step.

  ‘Why, do you feel lonely, Mam?’ she said. ‘Do you feel left behind and old-maidish?

  Liga looked to the fire again, but not so hollowly this time. ‘Perhaps just a tadge,’ she said quite comfortably. ‘But always I think, ’Tis better to be safe than sorry. And safe is what I am here, in this house, and in this life.’

  The two of them looked on that safety as it enacted itself in the flames, spriting from log to log, runnelling blue and orange up to the fire’s peak.

  ‘I don’t know. Children?’ said Branza dreamily. ‘I don’t know very much about children.’

  ‘Children are delightful.’ Liga reached out and tousled Branza’s hair, which was still damp and cold. ‘You would love them.’

  ‘This is a new house to me,’ said Urdda when they arrived at Lady Annie Bywell’s. ‘Merchant Tenner lives there and the Ginnis boys live there—I recognise that horse-head finial—but this one, this is new-built.’

  ‘It has been here as long as the others,’ said Todda mildly. ‘And the Ginnises moved higher uphill many years ago, to Alder Park. They own more greenery than the late Blackman Hogback and the Eelsisters combined.’ She rapped with the iron doorknocker.

  Urdda stepped back to examine the house again. All but one of the windows were shuttered, and that lace-curtained one had the same sense of eyes behind it as all windows had in this town. At home, people let themselves be seen, waved greetings to yo
u through the windows, or pushed them open and spoke to passers-by. There was none of this lace business, none of this secretive peering. Was this Lady Bywell looking down at her now? Urdda restrained herself from waving or poking out her tongue.

  Finally, a slow shuffling sounded from inside. Adjustments were made on the other side of the door, and then it opened. A woman small of stature stood there, in a neat-laced cap and a satin dress, with a sweetly embroidered slipper-toe peeping out below. Though she was dressed like a lady, her face was lined and brown, as if she had been out in the weather all her life, and the hand that held the door, for all its rings, had the same hard-worked look. She did not speak, only took in the sight of Urdda and Anders, and Todda holding Ousel, from bottom to top to bottom again, with glistening grey eyes.

  ‘Leddy Annie?’ said Todda. ‘My name is Todda, wife of Davit Ramstrong. These is my boys, and this is my guest, Urdda. I wonder if we might prevail on you for some o’ your time and wisdom?’

  ‘Wisdom?’ said the lady flatly, but she opened the door wider and stood back for them to enter. All this very slowly, though, as if she were as unsure as Urdda of the etiquettes.

  She waved them into a darkened sitting room on the right, into which they could not go far for fear of colliding with some chair or curio-case of the crowd of them there. The lady followed them in. Then she went to the window, slowly and laboriously looped back a curtain, and opened a single shutter to admit some light. She sat herself in a velvet chair in that light, sending up from it so much dust that she and the chair both might have been afloat on a cloud.

  She regarded them each in turn, uncertainly. She exchanged a look with Anders, as if she felt herself to be on the same footing as he.

  ‘We have come to ask your assistance,’ said Todda. ‘Urdda has arrived among us from a place very like St Olafred’s, but not exactly the same. My husband, Ramstrong, spent time in that place accidentally, one Bear Day. And there is another lad had considerable time there—near three years, while but a moment passed here—this last Day of the Bear.’

  As Todda spoke, the lady’s hands locked into a cluster of knuckles and ring-stones in her lap. The littlee-man might make that stone out of a gold-barred finch, and that one out of a red-throat, Urdda thought.

  The rings rearranged themselves and the fingers shook, whether from age, or the weight of the rings, or the lady’s fright at the sight of the visitors. ‘I cannot help you,’ she said huskily. ‘Collaby is away. My assistant. My helpmeet.’ With the word ‘helpmeet’ came into view her fine ivory dentures, even-edged and gleaming.

  Collaby? thought Urdda. I’ve heard that name.

  ‘Do you know the place I speak of, though?’ said Todda. Anders stood by her, a proprietary hand on her knee, looking from face to face as each spoke.

  The dust and the silence hung. ‘I do know of that place,’ the lady said reluctantly.

  ‘Is it a difficult place to get to?’ said Todda.

  The lady reorganised one hand over the other, then the other over the one. Her skin sounded papery against itself, and the metal of her rings clicked against the stones. ‘Ah,’ she murmured, ‘it is all too easy now-a-day.’

  ‘It is? How should such as our Urdda get there, then, as already belongs there?’

  The lady looked up at Todda through silvering frizzles of eyebrows. ‘I would ask you to wait,’ she said. ‘Until my man returns. Lord Dought, you know.’

  ‘Will that likely be this morning?’ said Todda.

  ‘I do not know when it will be.’

  ‘Within a week? A month? A year, even?’

  ‘I do not know. He comes and he goes as he pleases. He do not keep a reg’lar calendar.’

  The lady lowered her grey eyes. The rings clicked and scraped some more. The dust sank in the air around her.

  ‘I believe I know your man Dought, Leddy Annie,’ said Wife Ramstrong. ‘He is a smaller man, is he not? With a fine head of silver hair, and a beard he mingles with it over his shoulders?’

  Why, the littlee-man! Urdda thought. Collaby—of course! Saint Collaby, that was what he called himself! They were finch, then, those rings of the lady’s, and red-throat. These stay good on a trade, where I come from, he had said.

  ‘I saw him just the other day, I think,’ said Todda, ‘did I not, on the Chambers steps? He has set himself to besting Hogback Younger now, I believe. Lord Dought is a great recourser to the law,’ she added with a smile towards Urdda.

  ‘I . . . I am very sorry,’ said Urdda in a fright. ‘But I must inform you, my lady, that Mister Collaby, Lord Dought, is no more.’

  The little old lady’s face came up, crossed by surprise; then wariness that Urdda might be tricking her somehow; then rage that she might, and fear that she might not. And behind all this, Urdda saw Lady Bywell waking, as if from a long preoccupation or misery; waking into this dust-cloaked room, into this life, into this situation.

  ‘Urdda-girl,’ said Todda anxiously, ‘how did you come by such news?’

  ‘He was killed by a bear. By that Teasel Wurledge boy as a bear. In that place, near to my home. And most of him eaten up. I saw it myself,’ said Urdda. ‘And my sister too.’

  ‘Your sister was et?’ gasped the lady.

  ‘No, my sister saw him eaten. She buried what was left.’

  ‘Buried?’ This seemed to frighten her even more. ‘Oh greshus, no. This is no good at all.’ Lady Annie brought her hands to her face. They were like claws—or twigs, with the rings like galls swollen on them.

  Todda gave baby Ousel to Urdda and went and knelt before the widow, laying her hands on the woman’s arms. ‘Leddy Annie, what should we do for you in your bereavement? Do you use a God-man? Do you want a service read?’

  ‘I have no one,’ the lady barely said. ‘I use no one but Dought. I am all alone in this fortune, in this house, in this town. He took such joy in his riches, while I’—she opened her eyes and looked at Urdda without seeing her—‘I really could not care, when it comes to it. I never quite accustomed myself. I am only here because he told me I ought.’

  Wife Ramstrong rustled to her feet. ‘We should help Leddy Annie to bed, Urdda. She needs to rest from her grief.’

  ‘You are from that land,’ Lady Annie now said with intensity to Urdda. ‘You saw him often there?’

  ‘I saw him twice.’

  ‘Was he a lord there?’

  ‘Indeed, no. He was a nuisance and a thief.’

  ‘Urdda!’ said Todda. ‘That is not kind, at this time.’

  But Lady Annie laughed, and wept. ‘Of course he was! A nuisance, a thief. He were probably stealing from the bear, some trout or honeycomb, that he killed him. An Onion’s boy to the end. Oh! Life is so long, and too hard, and then it ends so cruel and sudden!’

  ‘I will take her upstairs, Urdda, before she is any further upset,’ said Todda. ‘Anders, you stay here with Urdda. I will not be long.’

  Anders moved solemnly from beside his mother’s chair to beside Urdda’s, and stood watching as Lady Annie quavered and clung on his mother’s arm. When the two women had gone, he turned to Urdda. ‘We made the leddy cry,’ he said.

  ‘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.