The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  I know it’s not Papa, not really. The words are meaningless. My broken head. Like a record, stuck. I know all this. But here, alone in the cold, I’m glad of his voice.

  I go quickly across the dark land.

  • • •

  The mist is heavy. A woman is calling, somewhere. “Please,” she says, and then, “I am sorry.” I go through the white blank, toward her voice. When I come upon her, it is sudden, but expected. I am meant to find her here. She lies turned and twisted on the broken ground. The cambric of her dress is a wet sheen. Mud is thick along the hem; it reaches slick fingers up her skirt. Ribbons of cold cloud move through the uncertain light, touch her cheek, wet with tears, which mix with the blood on her face. Her hair lies down her back, gold.

  I see the child beside her then. He’s small and dark and serious. He pulls with small hands, trying to raise her. He looks at me with brown, deep eyes.

  Think you’ve broken something, I try to say, and she turns and sees me. She cries out. It’s a shuddering, ragged sound, so full of fear. Don’t move, I say, but she’s already crawling, pulling herself along the ground away from me. One of her arms scrabbles on the turf. The other drags behind, wasted and limp. She turns, her small face distorted. As I make toward her, she opens her mouth and moans. Cracked, high. It pulls at my guts. The child begins to cry. She pulls him to her with her good arm. Alonso, come. She shields him, her lip curling in contempt. My papa was afraid of mist too, I say as I approach. And his name was… Their mouths widen into round O’s, and mother and child begin to scream. And just like that, they’re gone. Hidden in the shifting white.

  I cast about, calling for her. Here and there, the mist is pierced by late afternoon light. Sometimes, ahead, I hear her breath, heavy in the wet air.

  Stop, I call. Y—

  I’m awake, cold and sudden. The sting of winter air on my cheek.

  The wind is high in the vast sky. Around me, the moor is white, scalded under the moon. No mist, no afternoon, no wet cambric. A scent of rot and phlegm. When I look down, I see I’m at the very, very edge. Not in it, but nearly. Gummy, dark bog squeezes up around the tips of my boots. The sound of a cleaver, rapidly striking the block. It’s the sound of my heart.

  I stand very still. The bog sighs gently underfoot. I wait as the chopping grows slowly fainter. And then I shuffle back, inch by inch. The soles of my boots shiver and slip on patches of sphagnum, glossy and cold. Beneath the moss, there is a frozen crust of peat. Beneath that is the slow liquid, sucking dark.

  When the grit of the path is well underfoot, I stop. Slip a hand beneath my jacket, beneath the mess of bloody wool. I feel my way across the shoulder to the bitter, pulsing edges of the wound. I shove my thumb hard in. The air sings sharp. I do it again, harder, and now it all goes black and thick and sweet. I don’t know how long for. Red stars collide. I’ve gone too far, I think, vaguely, through the din.

  The pain washes away in small tides. It leaves behind a broken hole. The hole runs through my core and up to the insides of my eyelids. I won’t sleep again. The moon blazes on the path ahead.

  The dreams are coming thick and fast. She’s impatient for me now. There are no words to express it—the terrible freedom, the malice and rage. To look through her eyes is to know the dark center of the world. I dread it, and it is thrilling.

  Hard brushy land gives way to straw scent and dung. When the first outbuildings are in sight, I move among them for cover, making my way sideways, crossways. The heat of beasts in the sheds, their quiet exhales like tiny waterfalls in the fields beyond. Beneath my feet, the seamless frost becomes corrugated. Hard ridges. Cart tracks, wheel tracks, a bicycle, an automobile, fossilized into the surface of the earth. Close now.

  My toe catches in the hard edge of a hoofprint, and I fall. My face meets the iron-hard earth. Slender licks of hot blood course freely from my nose to my chin. They trickle down inside my collar. Damn, and all that. I blow a hard breath out, heave myself up, and move on. When I look back across the white land, black blood spatter and footsteps trace my progress in the moonlight. So much for stealth.

  A building, low and irregular. An unrisen loaf, flush against the land. Little black trees are twisted around it. The mirrored gaze of windows, the unlit dark interior. Well, why would it be lit at this hour? The walls move gently, undulating.

  My shoulder is missing. It has simply floated off. I search the ground for stones and gather them, freezing, into my hand. I throw them in clattering handfuls at the window, then at other windows above me. Dark, shining glass. No one comes.

  I swarm up the ivy on the old stone walls. I used to climb like this, I think, over the roof… Pieces of fractured memory overlay each other uneasily. Not sure of a sudden where or rather when I am. Just climb.

  By the window, I tap lightly on the pane. I knock. I whisper his name. After that, I knock once more. My next knock breaks the glass. I call quietly through the hole. This is not sufficient, because he does not come. No one does. “Come out!” I am hissing, spitting like a kettle, shouting through the broken glass. The dark places within are silent.

  Of a sudden, I see that everyone is dead. How could I forget this? It becomes apparent how ridiculous was my thought: that this rule might not apply for some. That a person might not be dead simply because I hope that they are not dead.

  Everyone is dead. There is no longer a name to shout. He is a haze, a miasma of blood over Passchendaele. Verdun. Arras. Cambrai. La Marne. Gone. The house is dark, like other houses.

  Pieces of the day collide in my mind like driftwood. The man’s face after I struck him, pale and innocent, his closed eyes. Shards of glass. Girls and trains and vomit in the back of my throat. The vast sky and the bog beneath my feet. All shot through with moonlight and blood, always blood. Terrible place, my head.

  My hands cannot find their grip. Cold branches slip through my fingers. I fall. Wide, cold air rushes past. He’s dead. I hit the ground.

  • • •

  She sits in the chair before the fire in my room. She looks peaceful now, in silhouette against the flames. Her golden hair lies in a thick twist at the nape of her neck. She looks into the fire, one finger stroking the brocade of the chair. Can’t see her face. The light plays about the edge of her jaw. What is she thinking of? She’s in my room, but I don’t mind it. Where’s the child? Longing fills me like a cup; I can’t explain it. Where is he?

  Oh, I scared you, I say. She turns, and her eyes are white mistletoe berries. She takes the poker from the embers. “Do not you go near him,” she says. The tip is a hot orange shard. I approach her with light cat feet.

  • • •

  Clatters, flurry, voices. I come to. A beam moves across the yard like a searchlight. An engine coughs. I force my aching limbs up. I flatten myself against the wall of the farmhouse.

  Light pours across the yard from the barn. Figures move across it, intent. Someone calls to someone else. Three men, some large vehicle.

  He stands in the barn door, a straight silhouette against the light. A familiar voice, raised, taut like cord. “No,” he says. “Can’t be right,” and then something else.

  The barn. Didn’t think to look there.

  “Have a look-see, then,” says one of the men. Slow voice. Warm tones, kindness. They unload something long and heavy, carry it into the barn with oofs and thunks.

  I edge closer. The dark night quivers. The scent of lemons is everywhere. If they find me, I’ll bite them till the blood runs down like a pierced peach.

  Three, four voices slide over one another. His familiar one raised high in argument.

  Agreement is struck. A rift of sound. Wood rings against wood; an engine grinds into life. Slams, and someone calls, “All right. Ho!” They roll away into the distance.

  I don’t move for a long time. I watch the barn where it looms high in the purple air.

  A long
bar of yellow falls into the night like a path. I follow it. The cobbles are sleek underfoot. The scent of early morning fills the dark.

  The barn door stands a little ajar. A lamp hangs on a beam, throws a rough, yellow circle. The scent of straw. He sits by the long pine box. It’s stained with travel, rimed and wet. The coffin lid’s askew, hastily pushed aside. He looks into the depths. His face is strange and shining.

  He’s different. The hands are brown, quick. That’s right. But scars run across his cheek, cross his eye like the tributaries of a river. New, white seams. His hair’s the same dark mess it was when we were children. My palm remembers it. His eyes blue, white, but there are dents under them, purple shadows that I don’t remember.

  Tom Gilmore. Different, but not dead after all. I watch them: Tom, the coffin, caught as they are in the warm, rustling light.

  I could go in. I could sit beside him. I could place my hands on his. I could slide my hand into the open neck of his shirt, feel his warm thudding heart under my palm, turn his face to mine, and ask him, Who’s in the coffin? Who’re you crying over? Whatever his answer, I would put an arm around his shoulders, feel the warmth of him along my side. We’ll go, I’d say. Let’s leave it. Go and live by the sea, where there aren’t people, only gulls and the sun.

  A warm hairy head brushes my palm. I leap in shock. A tail waves in the dark like a sword. The dog smiles at me, white teeth framing the pink tongue. Hot breath, the rough drag as it licks my hand. The dog makes a friendly, high-pitched greeting.

  Tom is looking at me. Our eyes meet through the dark. He recoils and then shouts. He scrambles up in the hay. Hostile, blank gaze. He doesn’t know me.

  I stumble across the frozen farmyard, bloody, shaking. I run for the dark, southwest hills, for home. I was wrong to come. I don’t know what I thought would happen. He meant what he said in the letter. It was good-bye after all. He has let go.

  Behind, I think I hear his voice. Iris. But I don’t stop, don’t turn. I run.

  • • •

  In the dawn, I crest the final hill, see it to the southwest. I am climbing the steep incline, mindless, reckless, almost parallel to the ground. I am filled with singing, a joyful rage. I’m coming, I tell her. You’ve taunted me enough. Come and get me. My blood is high. One hand anchors me, clutching at icy tussocks. I haul myself up, arm over arm. My breath is good and hot in my throat. And the little stubborn thought surfaces: that perhaps, just perhaps, she won’t get me… Earlswood did not kill me, Goodman did not kill me… Maybe I’ll get her. Doesn’t matter, really. Either way, it will end.

  I pitch forward, aching fingers desperate, as if gravity has been recalibrated. Actually, I have reached the top.

  The valley laid out like a pewter plate. The branches of the cedar of Lebanon below, stretched wide. Shards of grass retreat brilliant into the distance like reverberations.

  Rawblood reaches fantastic shapes against the sky. Chimneys are raised like signals in the coming light. A roof wide and white-lit under the dawn. The windows of the hall ascend, disorderly, in gleaming leaded panes. The great studded door is half in curving shadow. Something moves between me and the house, a tensing of ligaments and memory, a scent, desire. It is futile, redundant to describe a homecoming.

  MEG VILLARCA

  1899

  Rawblood

  I come into the kitchen, and he’s there, cleaning the knives. Pink ointment and the long cloth flickering to and fro, the gray light touching his face, making it solemn and beautiful. The red velvet box with its serried ranks; gleaming metal, ivory handles the color of butter. The shape of his legs in the rough, stained apron, the grime caught under the nail of his forefinger, a swag of chestnut hair fallen across one lowered lid.

  “Robert,” I say, and he turns. The knife flashes bright and flies to earth like a diving fish. The ring of it on the stone floor.

  “Ma’am,” he says, cool, swooping low. “How may I be of service to you?” He pincers the knife between two disdainful fingers. He is but a few years younger than me.

  “I would like some treacle,” I say.

  He nods and goes to the larder. I eat it with a spoon from the tin, standing at the scrubbed table. He turns his back once more, and the cloth flicks, the knives chink gently against one another. We say nothing for a time. I watch his hair where it lies on his bent neck, where it curls over his collar. The treacle turns, warm and slow, on the spoon. It smooths itself sweetly across my tongue.

  “Once, when I was young,” I say, “I ate a piece of shoe leather. I chewed at it for hours, until it stained my mouth brown. It was not a good thing to do. I had pains and saw stars for days after. It was the dye, or something used in the curing—I was quite ill. I did not regret it but only wished for more. Also, I would sometimes lick the wool of the sheep—for the grease, you see. I would do anything, I was so hungry. There was never enough to eat.”

  His back is upright, but I feel him soften, feel the warmth come into him. I ache. The air is full of the waxy scent of knife polish.

  “It is all I can remember,” I say. “Hunger, pain. I felt nothing else until I came here. Where are they, Robert? The others?”

  He half turns to me, and I see him bite his lip for a moment, just a moment. “Picking,” he says. “I daresay.”

  “Gooseberries,” I say. “In late summer, they would be picking gooseberries, I expect.”

  He shrugs a little. “Not that you would know it for summer.” He pauses and says, “Rain’ll be coming. They will be in presently.” Chink goes a knife, slotting into its velvet prison.

  “Not just yet,” I say.

  I go to him then and touch the nape of his neck with the tip of my finger. For a moment, he bends like a willow, as if I might push him over with only this touch. Then he turns and looks and—well, there we are.

  His mouth is sweet and clings to me like the treacle. Time goes sideways in a curve. It is like sunlight, like clutching fistfuls of mud, like a ball of string dropped from a high cliff, bouncing, unrolling. His fingers stroke across the swell of my belly. I lock my fingers about his neck. I take a sprig of his copper hair between my fingers and pluck. He grunts with the pain. I slip the bright pinch of hair into the pocket of my dress.

  When it is over, he kisses me and kisses the taut barrel I carry beforehand. “You are like a plum,” he says. “We belong together.” He warms her with his palm; his hand lingers. “I wish it was mine,” he says. “I wish you were both mine. Not his.” He casts an amber eye toward the kitchen ceiling.

  I say, “Oh, me too, my darling.” Robert likes to be romantic after.

  “Tonight,” he says. “You’ll come.” His collar is torn loose; his neck is cream. I nod. Outside, the rain begins to pelt the ground.

  I wash in the gray light of the scullery. The cold gushes of the pump, icy water. My mind is clean. My shrill heart is silent as it is silent only in the wake, in the lee of the act.

  My skirts have that moment brushed the floor when Chloe bustles in loudly. She holds her apron carefully before her. The folds of starchy linen are filled with green globes, pale and luminous. They nestle and bounce with her step. I give her a nod, and she stares around the quiet kitchen, at Robert and at me. I hold her large blue eyes. I hold her there like a snake until she shudders all through her frame. She drops her gaze and bobs; the gooseberries quiver in the apron. She says, “Ma’am.”

  “Mind yourself, Chloe,” I say. I sweep past her, nearly colliding with Shakes, who does not lift his blinded eyes. His movements are as soft and careful as a cat’s paws. His stick taps. From within the kitchen comes the sawing of the bread knife. His gums mumble.

  I say nothing. I give him a wide berth; my face twists into a silent snarl as I pass, lips pulled back from my teeth. He half turns his head, as if to catch an elusive perfume. He does not need his cankered eyes; he knows things about me.

 
In the passage, I lean against the wall, cool and clayey under my hands, against my back. I tip my face skyward. I am miserable.

  The cold breath when it comes is a bare touch on my throat. A freezing graze, then gone. In the corner of my eye is something white and monstrous, sliding, sliding. I whirl around. My wet skirts slap the wall.

  All is quiet. I am alone save for my breath. But my flesh remembers where she has been. It burns with the familiar cold kiss.

  “Come,” I wheedle. “You know I am not afraid.” But she’s gone, or I imagined it.

  In the quiet bedroom, I take from my pocket the hair I plucked from Robert’s head. Bold red it is, very like my own. I chose well. I unlock the drawer with the little key about my neck. I put the necessary things in the necessary order on the marble dressing table. I touch them each with the word of power.

  The red strands are bright in the black dish, which is really a black stone with a hollow place in it. I add blood from my thumb and earth from the graveyard. I add a raven’s feather and a scrap of cloth that is stained with older blood. Mine. The saddest blood. Birth-blood, with no child. That last one, I bled a great deal.

  It all goes up with a quick sizzle, leaving a touch of gummy ash in the saucer.

  I say the words I need to say and then lick the stone dish clean. The blood and ash are cold in my mouth. I am tired and full of doubt.

  I go to find my bear.

  I open the study door very quietly. My sad bear, my looming beast. He sits at the desk like a monument, his face bent to the page. A silver paper knife catches the light, gleams like a stiletto. His leather pouch lies on the desk, close to hand as always. The pen is a lovely sound, mice scratching in the skirting boards. It’s a fierce feeling, to watch him so—to catch the moment when he starts and turns, when his eyes fill with the sight of me, two pitchers filling with wine. I go to him, and he touches us. The sleeper within rouses herself and touches him back through the wall of flesh. She has been much petted today. I feel her darting pleasure.