Ursule shivered before her aunt’s hooded gaze. She whispered, too, though she didn’t know why. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, beware what you ask for.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nanette summoned him, and she has suffered his absence ever since.”
Ursule put her mug down and stared at her aunt across the table. “She has?”
“Of course she has.”
“She’s never said so.”
“Nor will she. But we have all seen her gazing down the road with her eyes full of tears.”
“I haven’t seen that!”
“She doesn’t want you to see. But you need to know.”
“Why? Why do I need to know?”
“Because you have the power. You laugh at us—” When Ursule began to protest, her aunt clicked her tongue. “We’re not stupid. We know how it is between old people and young people.”
“I … I really don’t laugh at you, Tante Fleurette.”
Fleurette lifted her shoulders in the familiar Orchiére shrug. “Remember what I tell you. The exercise of power has a price.” She pushed herself up, leaving her milk cooling in its mug, and braced herself on her spotted fists. “There is a cloud around you. I fear for Nanette.”
“What? Why?” But Fleurette was done speaking. She turned and walked stiffly out of the kitchen. The hem of her dressing gown brushed faintly against the flagstones.
Ursule said again, “Why?” but her aunt was gone, fading into the darkness, leaving her niece chewing her lip in confusion.
If she had any real talent, Ursule thought, it was the talent for patience. She depended upon it when she was assisting a nanny goat in labor, or assessing the mood of the black honeybees so she could harvest their combs. Exercising that modest and unmagical gift, she awaited the perfect moment to ask her mother for the truth.
Winter was closing in around Orchard Farm, and the moor was soggy and brown. The ocean turned a forbidding iron gray, and the silhouette of St. Michael’s Mount faded in and out of view as thunderstorms swept across the water. Ursule and Nanette had put the garden to bed and sold the last of their produce at the Thursday market. The Sabbat of Yule was approaching. A sense of restfulness settled over the farmhouse and the byre, with all inhabitants warm and dry and safe from the storms.
The aunts had begun the winter-long task of mending clothes and sheets and blankets. Louisette and Anne-Marie and Florence were seated around the kitchen table with mounds of fabric and spools of thread. Fleurette was carding wool near the stove.
In the pantry Nanette and Ursule were bundling parsley and eyebright, moneywort and rosemary, and hanging the bundles from hooks to dry. It was pleasant work, breathing the fragrance of their harvest, listening to the percussion of rain against the roof. Ursule handed her mother a piece of twine to tie around several sprigs of rosemary. “Maman,” she began.
“Oui?” Nanette’s gaze was fixed on her task, and Ursule watched her mouth twist as she concentrated on her knot.
Ursule switched to English, in case anyone came in. “I want to ask you something.”
Nanette’s eyes flicked up to her face, and when she perceived nothing was amiss, she smiled and went back to her task. “Anything, my sweet.”
“It’s something Fleurette said.”
Nanette’s eyebrows rose. “Fleurette said something to you?”
“She told me you grieve for the man who was my father.”
“Ah.” Nanette laid the bundle of rosemary to one side. She braced her elbows on the rough table and rested her chin on her twined hands. “Well, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to lie to you, but I couldn’t bear for you to pity me. No mother wants that.”
“Tell me about him. Tell me what happened. What he was like.”
Nanette picked up a loose twig of rosemary and brushed it beneath her nose to sniff its sharp scent. “His name was Michael Kilduff, and he was beautiful, Ursule. So beautiful I could hardly bear it.”
Nanette spoke for some time, telling Ursule about her father. She described him, and his wagon, and his powerful body bent over the ponies’ hooves. She told of the young Nanette slipping back to the byre when her family had gone to bed, and staying with Michael Kilduff until the stars were fading over the sea.
“I don’t understand,” Ursule said, when her mother finished her tale. “Surely you knew you might conceive.”
“Of course.”
“Then why did you … Why didn’t you send him packing?”
Nanette’s lips curved, making her look young. “Ursule, is there no romance in that practical soul of yours? I wasn’t thinking about that. I was eighteen, and Michael was sweet, and charming, the loveliest man I ever saw …” She lifted one hand and let it fall. “It was the Goddess’s doing, Daughter.”
With her finger Ursule traced a line through the dust left on the counter by drying leaves. “You stayed with him. You lay with him, a stranger.”
“Yes. And next morning, he and his wagon and his gray horse were gone.”
“The clan never knew?”
At this Nanette snorted. “They knew well enough when my belly began to swell.”
“And what Fleurette said? Was that true?”
“Yes. It was, and it is.”
“All this time, Maman? Seventeen years, and you still think of him?”
Nanette looked into her daughter’s face with eyes that glowed with love. “It was the price I paid for you. And worth it a thousand times.”
Ursule entwined her fingers with her mother’s. “But by now—he could be anywhere. He could be married. Or dead. Or …”
“Do you think you won’t still love me when I’m dead?” A strange expression, half amusement, half sorrow, flickered in Nanette’s eyes. “Love is a certain kind of magic, Ursule. A specific kind of magic. I asked for it, and the Goddess provided it.”
“But surely now, after all this time …”
Nanette released Ursule’s hand and reached for another handful of rosemary. “I could have asked the Goddess to take back her magic, but I didn’t. And yes, I still think of him. Sometimes I long for him. I’m not so old that I wouldn’t like having a man by my side.”
“There are other men.”
Nanette took up the knife and cut a bit of twine. “Not for me. Pour moi, jamais.”
Nanette resumed her task, winding the twine around the twigs of rosemary, tying it neatly. Ursule couldn’t be certain, but she thought she detected a shine in her mother’s eyes, and she marveled at it. After seventeen years, could the memory of Michael Kilduff still bring tears?
Nanette sniffed and laid the bundle of rosemary aside. As she reached for more, she said, “You see why Fleurette wanted you to know.”
“I don’t, really.”
“Magic costs us.” Nanette didn’t look up from her work as she bound the fresh twigs together. “If you practice the craft, you will pay a price.”
Ursule pressed her lips together. The story of Michael Kilduff was fascinating, and she was glad to have heard it. She was sorry her mother longed for someone she hadn’t seen in so many years, someone she had known for a single day and night. She could see that eighteen-year-old Nanette had fallen helplessly into love, and had never fallen out of it.
That still didn’t make it magic. And she herself, of course, would never give in to such feelings.
5
Ursule was twenty-one when the aunts began to die. Tante Louisette was first.
It made sense, Ursule supposed, as Louisette was the eldest of the Orchiére sisters, but Louisette had always seemed eternal, looming over all of them like one of the granite towers at the crest of the tor, gray and creased, but irrevocably set into the earth. It didn’t seem possible she could topple, like some ordinary human being, her long bones crashing to the earth like a felled tree. A stroke, cerebral apoplexy, that took her in a single moment.
Nanette tried to assure her older sisters it had been a mercy, that Louisette wo
uld have loathed being an invalid, but they were inconsolable. They seemed to shrink, to desiccate in the aftermath of the death, as if the effects of age had been postponed and now swept over them all at once. Straight spines bent, clear eyes dimmed, veined hands that had remained steady for so long developed tremors. They moved around Orchard Farm like wraiths, fading more and more each day, and they followed Louisette in order, one by one, as if it were all preordained.
Anne-Marie died in her sleep one stormy winter night just a few days before the Sabbat of Yule. Florence found her, still and stiff in her bed, and shrieked as if she had never seen death before. Her cries brought the whole household to the bedroom, where the old women wept together. Ursule hovered in the doorway, wishing she knew some way to comfort them.
Though Nanette gathered the usual herbs and candles and salt for the Yule celebration, Isabelle and the twins refused to climb the tor. Ursule, seeing her mother’s distress over this lapse in tradition, offered to carry the pack Nanette had prepared. They conducted the observance alone, just the two of them. The dullness of Grand-mère’s crystal, its refusal even to reflect the candle flames, seemed to reflect the mood of grief and loss that gripped the clan.
“I may not have done it right,” Nanette mourned, as she packed the things away.
“I don’t see how you can tell, Maman. Nothing ever happens anyway.”
Her mother turned, the little salt dish in her hand, and gazed at Ursule with a hurt look. “How can you say that?”
“Well—I don’t—” Ursule bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to remind her mother of her skepticism. She knew the craft gave her comfort.
“What is it?” Nanette demanded.
“It’s just that I never feel any different, afterward.”
Her mother sniffed. “Well, I do,” she said. “You must put your energy into it, after all.”
“Oui, Maman,” Ursule said. She understood her mother’s sorrow was real, though Nanette did her best to behave with her usual good cheer. Despite Louisette’s gruffness and Anne-Marie’s blandness, Nanette grieved for them even as she strove to fill the empty spaces created by their passing. Ursule, too, though she had so often felt the impatience of youth with old age, felt their absences as if some essential furnishing or farm implement had gone missing.
The losses continued. Isabelle was gone before Imbolc, dead of a fever. They buried her beside her sisters in the expanding graveyard on a windy slope facing the sea. As they had with the uncles, and with Louisette and Anne-Marie, they marked the graves with blank stones dug out of the tor, the largest ones they could manage to move. The evening after Isabelle’s interment, Fleurette and Florence slumped side by side at the kitchen table in mute despair. Ursule could see, looking into the twins’ disconsolate faces, that they knew they were next. She and Nanette hovered over them, pouring tea, coaxing them to eat, touching their shoulders. Ursule would have liked to hold them close to her, the same way she cradled a new, soft-skinned kid, but gestures of affection were rare at Orchard Farm. She couldn’t do it.
When Florence began to walk unevenly, bent to one side as if something pained her, Nanette begged her to send for a doctor. Florence refused. The pain grew worse until Ursule, from her attic bedroom, could hear her groaning all through the night. Fleurette concocted a simple of mint and ginger and fennel, which eased Florence somewhat, but couldn’t stop the progress of whatever was growing inside her. Like a beast, she said, when Nanette pressed her about it. Like a ravenous creature devouring her from within.
On the eve of the lesser Sabbat of Litha, Florence emitted one awful cry of misery and curled beneath her bedclothes, refusing to come out. She was, it seemed to Ursule, like a wounded animal gone to ground. She never again left her bed until her twin and her youngest sister lifted her body between them to be washed and dressed for burial.
After Florence’s passing, Fleurette ceased speaking altogether. Though she suffered no illness that Nanette or Ursule could detect, she shrank into herself, growing smaller and grayer and less substantial every day, a creature of dissipating mist. She survived her twin by only a month. Nanette found her in her bed one morning, small and cold and still.
Nanette and Ursule dug her grave and laid her in it, then stood together, gazing at the array of headstones while the wind whipped at their hair and skirts. Nanette said, “I can’t picture myself lying here.”
“You will, though,” Ursule said. “Not for a very long time, but you will.”
“I don’t think so. I have a feeling about it. I don’t know what this feeling means, but I don’t think I am meant to lie here beside my sisters.”
“Where else would you be, Maman? This is the proper place. And one day I will lie beside you.”
Nanette spun toward her, taking both her daughter’s hands in her own chilled grip. “No, Ursule! No! You should leave this place of death and loneliness and …” Her voice broke, and her eyes filled with the tears she had not shed for Fleurette.
Ursule stared at her, openmouthed. The wind dried her tongue and made her stumble as she forgot to brace herself. “Leave?” she cried. “Maman, I don’t want to leave. Orchard Farm is my home! My goats, and the ponies … the kitchen garden …”
“But when I’m gone, Ursule,” Nanette sobbed. “When I am dead and gone, you will be all alone. The work is too much. The solitude will be unbearable. I can’t bear to think of you, living out your years all by yourself on this Goddess-forgotten cliff!”
Ursule gathered her thoughts and freed her hands so she could take her mother by the shoulders. “I will marry someone, Maman,” she said. She hadn’t thought about it before, but now it seemed the perfect answer. “I will marry, and then I won’t be alone.”
“But who? Who will you find to marry?”
“Eh bien, I don’t know yet, but someone. Someone with a strong back and a steady hand. Someone to help me with the work, and to keep me company.”
“We never meet anyone! You could never fall in love with one of the Marazion yokels.”
“I don’t need to fall in love,” Ursule said. “It’s Orchard Farm I love.” Nanette shook her head, but Ursule squeezed her shoulders and smiled at her. “You know this about me, surely?”
“I suppose I do,” Nanette said doubtfully.
“Come now,” Ursule said, encircling her mother’s slender shoulders with her young, strong arm. She turned her toward the farmhouse and urged her forward. “Let’s have a cup of tea, Maman, and then we’ll turn out Fleurette’s room before it’s time for milking.”
Her mother gave her a darkling glance before she dropped her eyelids as if to hide some thought that had occurred to her. Ursule said, “What is it?” but Nanette shook her head. Ursule pressed her further over the pot of tea, but her mother only shrugged and said nothing.
They spent an hour going through Fleurette’s paltry belongings. Her dresses and stockings were so threadbare there was nothing to be saved. Nanette wrapped them into a bundle and said she would cut everything into cleaning rags. Ursule took two of Fleurette’s books to her room, and made her mother take a woolen scarf for her own use. There was little else. Fleurette had left no keepsakes. It was strange, Ursule thought, that a person could be present one day and absent the next, and leave so little behind she might have never existed.
They spent a dismal evening, Ursule and Nanette. Shadows flickered like ghosts in the empty chairs around the kitchen table, and Ursule found herself turning to them again and again, her nerves crawling. She and her mother did their best to eat their soup as usual. It was dispiriting to see how much was left in the pot when they were done.
“You should move your things downstairs,” Nanette said abruptly.
“Why?”
“There’s no need for you to sleep in that little attic room anymore. There are four big bedrooms sitting empty. You could take your pick.”
“I’ll think about it, Maman.” Ursule kissed her mother and climbed the stairs to the room where she had spent all he
r life.
She stood in the doorway and surveyed it. It was true, it was an awkward sort of room. The roof slanted very low over the window, and since she had grown so tall, she had to bend at the waist to reach her bed. It made sense to move down to one of the other bedrooms, but they had always belonged to her aunts and her uncles. She couldn’t imagine feeling comfortable in one of them, sleeping in a wide bed with four carved posts and a sagging canopy, storing her clothes in a real wardrobe instead of hanging them on pegs. The windows might be nice, though. Two of the rooms faced the moor, and the other two looked out beyond the cliff to the sea.
She yawned as she buttoned up her nightdress and folded herself into bed. Her quilt had gone soft and cozy from years of use. As she pulled it up to her chin, she smiled into the darkness. She had to admit she was set in her ways, like one of her beloved goats. Goats liked everything to happen in the same way every day, every month, every year. Ursule thought, yawning into the darkness, that she was just like that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to share Orchard Farm with anyone, even if it meant having only ghosts for company around her table.
She slept deeply, as she always did, lulled by the whisper of the ocean from the south and the answering hush of the wind from the north. She’d expected to sleep until dawn, when the cock’s crow would tell her it was time to rise and set about her chores.
A sound startled her awake, and it wasn’t from the henhouse or the byre. A shaft of moonlight slanted through her window to illumine the wooden floor, but morning, she felt certain, was still far off. She sat up, sharpening her ears, wondering.
It came again, the click of a door, the sound of footsteps crossing the kitchen below. Ursule threw back her quilt and hurried out to the head of the staircase.
She reached it just in time to see her mother tiptoe across the cramped hall that ran between the bedrooms. She was wrapped in a heavy coat, with Fleurette’s scarf tied around her head. She carried something in her arms, a box or a book. The gray cat minced at her heels, its skinny tail high and straight. Ursule hadn’t seen the cat in weeks, and she thought it must surely have died. The creature must be more than twenty years old!
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