Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘What cruelty, Mam? What cruelty was done to you, that you wanted to go away for ever?’ She leaned close and laughed a little through her remaining tears. ‘Tell me who did it to you, Mam—I will go and bite him!’

  The three of them had to laugh at that. ‘You have got away with it the once,’ Urdda said, ‘but I do not think Whinney will stand for you biting anyone else.’

  ‘Indeed, you must promise him you will not,’ said Liga, wiping tear-traces from her cheeks with her fingers. ‘That is one of his conditions of releasing you.’

  ‘And you must promise you will never go out unaccompanied,’ said Urdda, ‘by me or Mam or Todda or some other respectable person.’

  Branza rolled her eyes. ‘He sounds just like Urdda, doesn’t he, Mam, with all his rules and warnings?’

  But Liga was off in her thoughts and did not answer. She took a hand of each daughter into her lap. ‘You must forgive me, the both of you, hiding you away in my heaven so long. I thought I was preserving all our happinesses, keeping us there.’

  ‘Of course you were!’ said Urdda.

  ‘We were so happy there,’ said Branza in consternation. ‘How can you think we might not have been?’

  ‘You shall go, Branza,’ Mam said.

  Branza blinked at her.

  ‘She shall?’ said Urdda. ‘But I thought you didn’t want—’

  ‘I shall ask Annie to lend us of her carriage,’ said Mam. ‘And you shall go to Rockerly and have Miss Dance do the necessary magics to send you to your heaven.’

  ‘Miss Dance?’ said Branza fearfully. ‘She would do that?’

  ‘She said to me, if I ever wanted to go back I should come to her.’ She sat back and smiled—smiled determinedly, and with not much natural joy.

  Branza could not muster a smile in return. She ought to feel glad, she knew, that Mam had stopped distressing, and would help her in her quest. Instead, she was bewildered. The change had been too sudden. How had it come about? Also—though she knew it was foolish to feel this way—Mam’s agreeing upset her as if it were a banishment. There was a difference between Branza achieving her heaven in secret and being sent by Mam to Rockerly to gain it.

  ‘Are we ready, then,’ said Urdda, ‘to face the constable, and Annie, and Ramstrong, and the rest of St Olafred’s? We are keeping Ramstrong from his work, I think.’

  They were both waiting for Branza’s answer: for her permission, for her readiness. How could she want to leave them, she wondered, to go to a world where they existed, if at all, as ever-pleasant facsimiles of themselves? Did she not want to know them truly, in all their tempers and moods, too, in their storms of weeping?

  But they were keeping Ramstrong. Branza stood up from the stone bed. ‘We are ready,’ she said. Urdda stood too, and they pulled Mam to standing, and all hand-held together, they left the cell.

  14

  ‘’T is a pity Ramstrong could not come,’ said Branza at the carriage window. ‘And Todda. And Anders would have loved this too. He would have been full of questions that would knot our brains.’

  ‘There are many things for Ousel to count, too,’ said Urdda. ‘But they are too busy readying the house for the new bab.’

  Branza said nothing. Would she even see that bab? Perhaps not, if this mission to Rockerly was successful.

  ‘You know,’ said Urdda confidingly, ‘Ramstrong told me he was hoping for a daughter.’

  ‘Todda says he has wanted girls all along, since meeting you and me, Urdda.’

  ‘Truly? How nice to think that! Although he could not wish for better children than Anders and Ousel.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no doubt he loves them dear, too. As we all do.’

  The light flitted and fluttered on Branza’s face as the carriage passed among trees. The tearful goodbyes were long behind them, but Urdda remembered them all, particularly how sweetly Ousel and Anders had put their faces up to Branza to be kissed.

  ‘You should have children of your own, Branza!’

  Branza looked at her in surprise. ‘I am nearing thirty, Urdda!’

  ‘A score and five years is not near thirty! And plenty of women older than thirty have babies. And you are still beautiful! All you need do is show an interest, and I should think you would have your choice of suitors.’

  Branza’s face was grave and closed, holding back some thought.

  ‘What is it? You have a secret! Had you someone in mind? Oh, tell me! Who? Who was he? Who would you have?’ And she bounded up out of her seat and plumped down next to Branza.

  ‘No, no.’ The sunlight slanting in on Branza’s hands, which were clasped in her lap, showed the texture of the skin: tiny pleats, like the finest, supplest leather. ‘When you went,’ said Branza. A shaft of guilt passed through Urdda, and closed her mouth, and made her cease bouncing in her seat. ‘When you went, Urdda,’ said Branza very measuredly. ‘I thought I was being punished, for turning my gaze from our childhood together to Rollo Gruen.’

  ‘Oh, Branza, how could you be anything of the sort!’ Urdda took Branza’s hand in both of hers. ‘When I went, it was my own whim and adventure alone! How could I know time would run on there without me as it did? It was an accident, Miss Dance said, caused by Lord Dought’s incursions. It had nothing to do with you or me or anything we decided.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I told myself, If I have done this, perhaps I can undo it. If I lost her for a boy, I can perhaps bring her back for lack of one. And if it can bring Urdda back, I will not so much as glance at a boy. And so I ceased to glance, or to think of Rollo or any other boy there.’

  ‘Oh, Branza!’ Urdda swayed, horrified. ‘But now you know it was no such punishment, don’t you? And—and you have me back, and you need not think that any more. You can glance again, and consider—’

  ‘And I have not looked at a man these many long years, and now men are more foreign a creature than toads or eels to me. If my wolf could walk out of our old place as a man, as Mam’s bear did, I might consider him, but these men men here—they are so rough with each other—and the way they speak to women, or about us when they think we cannot hear! They despise us so, Urdda!’ She retrieved her hand.

  ‘Not all of them.’ Urdda eyed the hand, but did not reach for it again. ‘And not all of us, Branza. Look at Ramstrong! All his family—none of those men despise us. Mister Deeth, he is always perfect charming and gentle with us. That is one reason I had Annie hire him. And Bakester and his sons, down the market—’

  But Branza only looked out at the fields: at the darkening late-spring leafage tumbling past the window, the flying dust.

  ‘Please, Branza.’ Urdda hardly knew what she was begging for. ‘I would hate to think of you in a lonely old age.’

  ‘I had a lonely youth,’ said her sister. ‘This feels quite natural to me.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Stung, Urdda leaped from her side to the seat opposite and sat staring.

  ‘Why not? It is true. And you are the one of us that prefers things true.’

  Urdda stared more, then slumped against the seat-back. ‘You hate me,’ she said. ‘You hate me for being happy here, and for taking you away from those boring kind people and your birds and rabbits and your precious wolf!’ she finished in something like triumph. With pleasure, she saw the tears rise in her sister’s eyes.

  But Branza blinked them back, and turned to the window again.

  ‘You used to fight me!’ Urdda cried in frustration. ‘Now it is like kicking a sack of . . . of wet sand! You used to have so much more spirit than this!’

  Branza took several deep breaths, her eyes flickering with the view. ‘I do not hate you, Urdda,’ she finally said. ‘Only, we want different things, you and I. Quite different. We always have. I can marvel at what you do, and how fearless you are, and how you throw yourself into life just like those two little ones of Ramstrong’s, but what I want is peace, and safety, and nothing unexpected to happen. I am not one for adventuring like you.’

  The carriage ru
mbled on awhile, and it seemed there was nothing left to say—the two of them looking out at the landscape, Urdda stonily, Branza resigned.

  Then Urdda picked herself up and sat next to Branza again, close again but less insistent this time. ‘You say it was me who left,’ she said low.

  ‘But it was!’

  ‘But you left me just as badly, Branza.’

  Branza turned her clear eyes, her fine-featured face, to Urdda.

  ‘Look how tall you are!’ said Urdda up at her. ‘Look how old!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You became twenty-five, Branza, from fifteen, while I turned barely a year! You it was, left me behind! I know you did not mean it—even as I did not mean it, to put ten years between us. But it has happened, and they are there, those years. And it is hard to speak across them, with you a woman and me still a girl, when we might have grown up together, finding out things in their same order, and at much the same time.’

  The brown eyes appealed to the blue, and the blue considered the brown. Urdda leaned against her sister, as she had always done when they sat together ever since they were tinies, Urdda always the tinier.

  Finally Branza reached the end of her thoughts. She picked up Urdda’s hand and held it firmly in her own lap. ‘Let us not speak, then, for a little while, if it hurts us,’ she said.

  And Urdda leaned in deeper, and laid her head on Branza’s shoulder, and the carriage thundered on towards Rockerly town.

  ‘Branza, wake up!’

  Urdda tapped her sister’s arm and they both straightened in Miss Dance’s parlour chairs. Branza glanced at the clock—it had ticked away nearly to midnight!

  But now Miss Dance was home. ‘You cannot be serious,’ she said sharply from out in the hall. ‘At this hour?’

  Miss Dance herself opened the parlour door as the housekeeper’s softer voice explained. A large black cat circled both women’s ankles.

  Urdda sprang up and curtseyed. ‘Good evening, Miss Dance!’ Branza rose more slowly.

  ‘Evening? It is dead of night, girl! What has happened?’ The sorceress took two steps into the room and the cat followed and then preceded her, eyeing Urdda and slowly waving its tail. ‘What has that naughty drudge done now? The Bywell woman?’

  ‘Why, nothing, mum,’ said Urdda. ‘Only, my sister has a request of you.’

  Miss Dance stripped off her gloves. She turned her fierce, exhausted face upon Branza.

  ‘Perhaps it can wait until morning,’ said Branza. ‘I had not realised the hour. I dozed—’

  ‘I will be busy tomorrow. There are fevers in Rockerly lanes that are taking all my attentions lately. Tell me now. What is it that you want?’

  ‘My—I—’ Still shaking sleep out of her mind, Branza cast Urdda a confused look, then fixed her gaze on the carpet. From the corner of her eye, she saw Miss Dance look from sister to sister, keen as a hawk.

  ‘Come to my study, girl. It will be cold, but it will be private.’ She took up one of the lamps.

  Urdda’s face was a picture of disappointment as Branza went after Miss Dance. Branza had told her, though: I will speak to her alone, she had said.

  But I want to hear what she has to say!

  I will tell you, when it is done.

  But you won’t remember everything! I just know.

  Then you will have to do with a partial story. I cannot have you there, Urdda. This is my business and no one else’s. I’m embarrassed about the whole matter.

  Up the cold stairs Branza followed Miss Dance. The very swish of the woman’s skirt was frightening—how was Branza to state her wish without sounding like a selfish child, to this woman who had been out doctoring folk all night instead of sleeping?

  She hurried along the hall and caught up with Miss Dance at the study door.

  The sorceress unlocked it and opened it onto a room such as Branza had never seen, where bookshelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling, higgledy-piggledy with books and papers and scrolls and canisters, and an ebony bust or two, and bones here and there, they looked like. A large desk filled half the room, and it was piled with more books, and papers too, and writing equipment, and two candlesticks so thick with wax drippings that Branza could not see if they were silver or brass. The cat pressed warm against her skirt hems, then insinuated itself past her into the room.

  Miss Dance set the lamp on the desk, returned to the door, and closed it. ‘What seems to be troubling you, then? To have brought you all the way from St Olafred’s, I am assuming it is not some frivolous problem of romance.’

  ‘It may well seem frivolous, mum.’

  ‘Sit.’ Miss Dance indicated which chair. ‘You look as tired as I feel. It is Branza, is it not?’

  ‘Yes, you brought me and my mother back—’

  ‘I know you. ’Twas only the name escaped me, for a moment.’ And she sat too, with her soft gloves over one knee and her fine hands like pale spiders glowing in her lap, and waited for whatever words would fall from Branza’s lips.

  ‘I was hoping you would help me to return there.’

  ‘Return there. Return to the place of your mother’s heart’s desire, do you mean?’

  Branza nodded, all hope knocked out of her heart by the blows of this woman’s sharp voice.

  ‘That is impossible,’ said Miss Dance.

  Branza sat there in the silence of the books, in the hiss of the lamp, in the dull shock of the brutal words.

  ‘You know it is impossible, I think. You know that when your mother came back to the true world, the false one ceased to exist.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Why did you come, then?’ Then the sharpness and the disbelief left her voice, and were replaced by real curiosity. ‘All this way, to ask the impossible?’ She picked up the gloves and put them on a corner of the desk. ‘What were you thinking?’ she asked, almost gently.

  Branza tried to remember back to when she had set out on this foolish journey. ‘Well, Mam said you had told her, if she ever wanted to return, she should come to you.’

  ‘That is true. And you thought that I could engineer you there too? That is a fair supposition.’

  Branza looked up. Ought she to feel hope, then?

  ‘I cannot,’ said Miss Dance, ‘but I can see how it would seem I might, from your point of view, from your mother’s.’

  ‘And then, I thought . . .’ But Branza was suddenly too tired to continue. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘It is impossible, as you say. I will not waste any more of your time.’ And she pushed herself up from her seat.

  ‘No, no—sit down, girl! Tell me all!’

  ‘But you say—But it is all—’ She turned away from the lamp so that this strong, fearsome woman would not see her first tears fall.

  The expensive swish of Miss Dance’s skirts rose behind her, and the sorceress’s hands were firm on her upper arms. ‘Come,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Sit down over here, more comfortably. I will build us a fire, and you will tell me what you thought, and I will explain what I can explain.’

  By the time the fire had been lit, and begun to crackle and converse like a third and more cheerful person among them, Branza was somewhat recovered. The cat came from wherever it had been hiding and leaped up to sit on the arm of Miss Dance’s chair.

  ‘When you first brought us back, me and Mam,’ she said, ‘I remember, on the bank of that stream’—Miss Dance nodded from the hearth where she knelt—‘I remember you said that ten years was as close as you could come to pulling the two times back together.’

  ‘I did. I was working at the very limits of my powers to achieve that much, too.’

  ‘Well, that made me think. It sounded to me as if, before you had got it back to ten years, the times between the two places had run on very much further than ten years.’

  Miss Dance nodded, and leaned forward to give the burgeoning fire a good shaking-up with the poker.

  When she had sat back, Branza ventured, ‘And so it seemed to me that what you had t
o do, to bring the times as close as you did, was to undo quite a number of years. The way a person unpicks a seam, so as to let out a dress.’

  Miss Dance raised her firelit eyebrows, but nodded again.

  ‘So that you had to un-happen I-don’t-know-how-long of Mam’s and my lives that had already happened. Which, I thought, we did happen that other way—we did stay, and you did not come through from this world and fetch us until much later in our lives, if you had not managed to pull the differences back, back to ten years.’ She covered her face, leaving only her mouth clear. ‘Am I talking nonsense? I am so tired!’

  ‘You are making perfect sense, my dear. Let me see, and you were hoping that I could lift you from this world, where your life is running one way, and place you back on that seam that I unpicked, there to live out your life with your mother.’

  Branza nodded.

  ‘And without your sister.’

  Branza swallowed. ‘If that was the price, yes.’

  Miss Dance looked to the fire again, but it was burning most spiritedly now, and did not require her attention. She hung the poker on its nail and rose, weariness evident along her every limb, and sat in the armchair opposite Branza.

  ‘I only thought,’ said Branza hopelessly, ‘that if you had so much powers over time, and over people moving between worlds, you might be able to do all sorts of things that seem impossible when I first look at them.’

  Miss Dance laughed low, her teeth glinting in the firelight, and nodded.

  ‘Perhaps to send me there,’ Branza went on, ‘or even, only, to bring my friend Wolf into this world. I would not mind that he was of dream-matter. He was real enough for me.’

  ‘Either of those is, strictly speaking, within my powers,’ Miss Dance said to the fire. ‘But what one can do and what one ought—those are often two different things. Annie Bywell will be able to tell you that. In all one’s movements and transformations, one should be working with the directions of nature, not against them.’