Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  What did she want of you? Urdda had asked Liga first thing that morning.

  Liga had looked patient and sad, and so much older than Urdda remembered her. Nothing important, she said.

  She wanted to rap me over the knuckles, Annie had laughed, sweeping by with one of Urdda’s white bread-loaves. And I’ve no rings to protect me no more—ooch, it stung!

  ‘I am pleased to have set this right, as well as it could be set,’ Miss Dance now said to the assembled women. Ramstrong had hied himself to his wool-merchants, so it was only Annie, and Todda and the boys, and Liga and Branza and Urdda.

  ‘I wish you would rest a day,’ said Annie. ‘Tea or no brightening tea, you will doze as you ride and fall from that beauteous mount of yours. Even spelling things improper tires a person.’

  Miss Dance smiled down and took both of Annie’s ringless hands. ‘Well, I hope you will not tire yourself that way in the future, Lady Bywell.’

  ‘Oh, I think I had already learnt my lesson, mum,’ said Annie. ‘’Tis years since I done more than brew up herb-messes and shoo the odd wife or child from death’s doorstep.’

  ‘Keep an eye on this woman, Urdda,’ said Miss Dance. ‘She has more talent than schooling, and a soft heart—and that is always a dangerous combination.’

  Urdda was still afizz with the adventure of it all, Ousel on her hip as if he weighed no more than a twitter-will. She bobbed a curtsey. ‘It has been an honour and adventure meeting you, Miss Dance.’

  ‘And you, my dear.’ Miss Dance seemed about to say something else, but Ousel waggled his hand at her. ‘Bye-bye,’ he commanded.

  The sorceress chucked his cheek. ‘Bye-bye, little man,’ she said, and turned to Liga and Branza, who stood together, somewhat faded from yesterday’s excitement and a lack of sleep. ‘Go carefully, Liga, Branza,’ she said. ‘Be kind to yourselves. Much is different here, and you must expect some shocks and confusions.’

  ‘I wish you would stay a little, as the lady says,’ said Branza impulsively. ‘And . . . instruct us.’

  ‘Instruct you in what, my dear?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know. In the ways of this world, and how to be comfortable in it.’

  ‘Comfort is not the aim, Branza,’ said Urdda with a laugh. ‘Comfort is what we had. Here we have . . . Well, Miss Dance calls this the true world. Here we have truth!’

  Branza looked chastened and fragile, and Miss Dance took her elbow. Did she do magic on her? Urdda wondered, watching Branza straighten at her touch and risk something of a smile through her uncertainties.

  ‘Rest and observe, Branza,’ the sorceress said. ‘Things will come clearer with time and thought, I’m sure you will find. Liga, you also. Take matters slowly—as you may, from your vantage point under Annie’s roof.’

  ‘I will be very careful,’ said Liga, hanging on Branza’s other arm, and Urdda jogged Ousel on her hip and made faces for him rather than look at her mother and sister, for their extra ten years were all too evident in their faces, which strove for politeness through fear.

  ‘Journey well, mum,’ said Todda to Miss Dance, and Miss Dance mounted the mare in a single efficient movement. She looked down at them, a fine-cut figure against the cloudy sky. Oh, we are so motley, Urdda thought, with all our doubts and frights—how wonderful to be this woman, and know everything!

  ‘Bye-bye,’ said Ousel. ‘Bye-bye.’ And he wagged and wagged his hand as Miss Dance brought the fine mare round.

  ‘Good day, ladies,’ said the sorceress. It was clear from her eyes that her mind had already gone from them to whatever duties awaited her in Rockerly.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ said Ousel again.

  ‘And gentlemen.’ Miss Dance flashed him a brief smile. ‘And little gentlemen.’ She released the mare into a walk and, with an arm raised in farewell, rode away from them, down the street.

  Liga and Branza slept away the morning. A cracked voice singing outside, warbling from growl to trill, woke Liga around noon, and she lay abed unmoving for awhile, listening and waiting for her situation, her surroundings, to come comprehensible to her. In her hand, under her pillow, was the cloth with the two jewels wrapped in it—or the two seeds, or whatever they were, from which the red-flowered and the white-flowered bushes had grown and perhaps the entirety of Liga’s heaven-place with them. Miss Dance had given them to Liga last night.

  They are yours by right, she had said. And by the fact that they retain their form in the true world, I would dare to say that that other world might remain somehow accessible to you. But beware! And here the sorceress had glanced out of her thoughts and her exhaustion with a flash of feeling. Should you be inclined to return to it, come to me in Rockerly, rather than appealing to any mudwife to help you reach there. There is a good chance, with these gems in hand, of my conveying you to that place, but who knows how Annie might imperil you, imperil us all, meddling with the things?

  Liga climbed out of the comfortable bed and went to the window. Annie was at her fireplace on the paved area beyond the kitchen garden, singing as she cooked up a brew in a big black medicine pot. She did not have her teeth in—Liga could see that even from the upper window—and she wore a soft old dress, somewhere between green and brown, and a filthy apron.

  Quietly, so as not to wake Branza, who was soundly asleep in the other bed, Liga crossed the room, took her dress from the chair-back, and put it on. Quietly she let herself out of the chamber, and slowly she walked to the stairs, and down, glancing into rooms where she could. Good; Urdda was nowhere to be seen. She walked through the wafts of fume and song to which the widow had left the house open.

  My, look what she has achieved! Liga thought, eyeing Urdda’s kitchen garden. A little raw and new yet, but yes, my wild girl has laid it out almost exactly the same. Perhaps she is not so wild after all.

  She walked down the path between the rows. ‘Annie?’ she called, so as not to startle the woman.

  ‘You’re up!’ Annie said. A gust of air off the brew floated across the bean trellises and stung Liga’s nostrils.

  ‘I’ve placed you now, Annie.’ Liga crouched at the edge of the garden closest to the fire, pretending to be interested in weeding there.

  ‘Whassat, my dear?’ Annie stirred on with gusto, pausing every few strokes to lift hot mucks and lumps out and admire their blackness and variety. Her tune murmured in her throat, but did not burst forth as before.

  ‘You used to be Muddy Annie, I think. We were almost neighbours a long time ago.’

  The widow’s music died away entirely. Her face was all lips and scowl, as if she had caught sight of something unpredicted lurking in her pottage. ‘Lo-ong time,’ she said softly.

  Liga reached in among the rhubarb stalks and plucked a tiny weed—two first-leaves only, a white thread of a stem, a fine hair of a root. ‘You would remember, though, my father, Gerten Long-field.’

  Now the stirring-stick was moving very slowly in the mixture. ‘I do, at that.’

  ‘He came to you three times, for very particular things.’

  Annie gazed awhile into the mess. Then she leaned her pole on the rim of the pot, wiped her hands on her grubby apron, and stepped down from the stone slab she stood on for stirring.

  Liga searched among the cool red stalks, bending them this way and that, until she felt the breeze and breath of the old woman squatting beside her. Then she stopped pretending to weed. ‘There was a horrible tea first, and then he bought from you some herbs and powders to burn, and the third time he brought home two packets, because . . . because I was already six months on with Branza.’

  The words disappeared out of the air, as if inconsequential, as if they had never been said. The rhubarb leaned and nodded its improbably green leaves, veined with improbable pink.

  Annie leaned forward and turned Liga’s face to her gently, with both hands. ‘From him?’ she said. Her hands were cool-skinned but warm within, shiny-wrinkled, and smelled strongly of aniseed. ‘From your da?’

  ‘All three,’
said Liga.

  Annie nodded. For several moments, hers was the most beautiful face Liga had ever seen, every whisker and pouch and glisten of it. Liga’s head felt unsteady, as if a small whirlwind spun inside.

  Then the older woman put her hands to her own face, and said painfully to the paving between her knees, ‘But not Urdda. The cocky bugger were dead by then. She was of this Cotting?’

  ‘No,’ said Liga. ‘There was no Cotting. Cotting is only a name I chose, for sake of respectability. Urdda was . . .’ She tried out in her mind various ways of saying it, but all were too gross for this sunny garden, too harsh to bring out before this kind woman. Finally she said, ‘Town boys,’ and the words came out as little more than a spit, a hiss.

  Annie covered her eyes and crouched lower. ‘Reg’lar?’ she said in a muffled voice.

  ‘Only once,’ said Liga. ‘But there were five of them.’

  ‘Five? Greshus. Greshus the feckin Leddy,’ said Annie through her hands to the paving. Then she waddled sideways until she reached Liga, and she put her arm, hardly longer than that little lad Anders’, around Liga’s waist and, with her eyes still covered, held on to her with the full force of her tiny wizened sympathy.

  ‘Oh.’ Annie wiped her eyes on her apron; she looked around as if trying to see just a garden before her; she coughed some, from a passing ribbon of pottage-fume. ‘But Urdda come from it,’ she said when she recovered. ‘And Branza from the other. That don’t turn it around, but at least there is them. At least there is them.’ She took a ragged breath and scrubbed at her nose with the apron again.

  Liga nodded. ‘There is,’ she said brokenly, again overtaken by those emotions she had discovered on the streambank at the first sight of Urdda. How could Branza sleep, she wondered, how could Urdda run her errands in the town, and not be aware how their mam was being attacked, beaten, crushed, by her own loving fear for them? She hardly knew what to do, it had been so long since such strong feelings had borne down on her. It was like carrying another creature inside her, and nothing so benign and natural as a baby. Undamped, untamed, the pain and exultation of her attachment to them blew through Liga like a storm-wind carrying sharp leaves and struggling birds. How long she had known her daughters, and how well, and in what extraordinary vividness and detail! How blithely she had done the work of rearing them—it seemed to her now that she had had cause for towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. And the joys she had had of them, too, their embraces and laughter—it was all too intense to be endured, this connection with them, which was a miniature of the connection with the forces that drove planet and season—the relentlessness of them, the randomness, the susceptibility to glory, to accident, to disaster. How soft had been her life in that other place, how safe and mild! And here she was, back where terrors could immobilise her, and wonders too; where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.

  She cleared the tears from her eyes and tried to collect herself. ‘I only thought I should tell you,’ she said, ‘what kind of people you were sheltering. For though I intend to keep quiet myself about it, I saw the brother of one of the men as we walked up the town yesterday, and I thought, what if it should come out? And I thought you ought get it from me first.’

  With a mop of her face and a hoot of laughter, Annie sat to the paving, and waggled Liga’s knee that she should do the same. ‘Well, you ought know what manner of lumpling is your landleddy, too, girl,’ she said ruefully, clasping her ringless hands in her lap, little worn yellow-brown instruments that they were. ‘I cannot entirely be sure, but I think I may have killed him.’

  ‘Killed . . .’

  ‘Your da that day,’ said the mudwife. ‘I think I may have ill-willed him under them carriage wheels.’

  ‘You may?’ Liga was astonished. ‘But what did he do to you?’

  ‘Them were my thoughts exactly, on that day, after he come and seen me for the makings of moving that bab out of you. Good silver, he guv me, and there likely would be more—why should he ever stop? A tidy one of these purchases every several moons, I thought, and I could be quite comfortable. I tried to think that, Liga Longfield. I would have you know, I did try. For I were not wealthy then, and that is the way the poor must think, no?—looking all the time to their next meal, and perhaps to another wool blanket to see them alive to winter’s end.’

  ‘Oh, I understand it, Annie. I remember that.’

  ‘But then I thunk, Every several moons? And—well, I am orphanage rubbish, as you know, and quite oft acquainted with men tekkin what they will from me without my say-so. But the thing with orphans, you see, is: mams and das is great mysterious things; they is everything we’ve missed out on and that lucky people have. That your mam should leave you in his care, and you be lucky enough to still have a da, and then for that da to—to use you that way! That is the horriblest insult, Liga-girl, worse than having no da at all; oh, so much worse. How is you supposed to know what you are and what’s natural?—’

  It was too much, Annie’s witchy face, its concavities and its glittering eyes. The sight confused Liga. Had she not always wanted someone else, some woman, to know and understand and join her in her anger? Yet here was Annie growling and distorted with it, and all Liga felt was dread at the widow’s—at anyone’s—having turned and seen what no one had ever been supposed to see. Sickened, frightened, she knew she had disobeyed her father in the worst way possible. From across the years, his eyes widened, his words assembled themselves for the roaring, and the air pressed in, unbreathable, all around her—

  ‘He always called me by her name, in those nights,’ Liga burst out over Annie’s spitting. ‘He was almost asleep often, when he—Or he would come home drunk—’ And then the wretchedness and the dirt of it all stopped her, and she sat over the tear-dotted lap of her skirt, with memories fondling her and hissing in her ear.

  Annie’s wrinkled hand touched Liga’s chin, lifted her face. ‘He might o’ been drunk, Liga Cotting-that-was-Longfield, but he were not that addled. He never mistook the two of you. He knew what he were doing, from first fumble to last thrust and drizzle. Don’t you mistake me.’

  ‘I asked for it,’ Liga said, almost soundless. ‘He told me I did. By my ways of moving, of standing. By my shape. Sometimes I think I did ask for it.’

  ‘No girl asks for that, to be poked by her da—no girl. Let me tell you.’

  ‘I was stupid—’

  Annie took Liga’s head in her hands with some urgency. ‘Oh, we are all stupid, girl. That is none of the man’s excuse.’

  And then Liga could not think of any further let-outs or mitigations for him, and the bald, cruel truth of what he had done to her and repeated on her, time after time, bab after bab—the two of them stupid in the night together—fell in on her like the roof of a cottage whose pinnings have slumped just a little too far. She crouched there, small and tight as she could possibly hold herself, and while the wormy rafters and the rotted thatch crushed her and threw up their dust and vermin around her, she sobbed rage and grief in the little old lady’s arms.

  So Liga and Branza joined Urdda at the Widow Bywell’s house. Lady Annie provided them a sum of money—she would have given it freely, but Liga insisted that they would repay it when their profits allowed—to equip a room downstairs that might have been a dining room, had the household ever had guests to dine. This they made a workroom, and at its broad table the three Cotting women plied their shears and needles. They began modestly, with table linens and children’s garments that they sold at market, and then they progressed to dressing the grown women of the town, beginning with Todda and Lady Annie, who were pleased to become the first and best advertisements for their work.

  ‘Wherever did you learn this style of st
itchery?’ said none other than Sukie Taylor, frowningly fingering the leafwork edging a fine linen tablecloth.

  ‘Why, inland,’ said Liga, with the smiling heavenly version of Sukie’s mother in her mind.

  ‘It’s so pretty, but quite unusual. How much did you say it was?’

  And because the Cotting women were fair of face and figure, and diligent about their work, and guests of a wealthy household, and visited regularly by the Ramstrong family, the women of St Olafred’s allowed themselves to purchase the goods they offered at market, and even to be drawn into conversation with them at the market stall, or up at the house, did they happen by there for one of Annie’s cures.

  In Annie the three women had found the best companion they could have wished for in their adjustment or readjustment to the true world. And she, in them, had the means and motivation to step out into a town she had found unapproachable despite and because of her wealth, and without the assistance of Lord Dought. Together they could begin to accomplish what none of them were able to do alone, consoling each other for their worldly ignorance and devising ways to overcome it that were not too terrifying to enact.

  When they worked thus, affairs generally went well. And Urdda, having been in the true world for a year, seldom made such errors of judgment or impulsive decisions as would redound on her unpleasantly. But Liga had been away a long time, and Branza sometimes forgot that she was not at home any more, and there were times when they conducted themselves quite strangely according to the customs of the true town. Branza would greet any person she saw, and be upset if they tut-tutted, stared at her, or ignored her. She did not understand the purpose of guard dogs, and several times was badly frightened, and once nearly bitten, by the savage things.

  The worst misunderstanding began when Urdda and Branza, returning from the market one afternoon, happened on Vivius Strap flogging one of those near-broken-down donkeys of his outside the fetid stables he kept in the alley off the ash-tree square.