Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31

by Edited by Kelly Link

  “One more!” shouted Goodma Gaitho’s shade. “The miller. Bring me the miller!”

  And though other patrons waited in the drawing room who ought to have come before the miller in order of precedence, Ferle sent them away and led the miller to the office.

  The necromancer had already peeled off the handkerchief that had covered his nose and mouth, and opened the window to let out the fumes. “I fear my page made a mistake,” he said to the miller. “The reanimation is over. The suicide can utter no more.”

  Necromancer Rahmik didn’t glance at his disobedient page, but Ferle knew from the chill in his voice that she was in for a whipping after.

  She did not much care. The miller stared agape at the corpse, his shoulders hunched up about his ears. A wig white as flour was perched on his head, its elegance altogether unsuitable. He did not resemble a toad or a cur or an ox or a boar. He looked like a bear, ponderous and bulky.

  Goodma Gaitho had ceased her muttering and sat very still; even her hands were quiet, resting on the stones in her lap.

  The necromancer covered the corpse’s face with the linen scarf, and with this eloquent gesture pronounced the suicide definitively dead again.

  “Oh no,” said the miller. He sat down and hid his face behind his enormous hands. He made some odd groaning and grating noises that Ferle eventually recognized as sobs. The necromancer busied himself with tidying his armamentarium, and let the man weep.

  “Why?” said the miller. “Why?”

  The shade of Goodma Gaitho beckoned Ferle, and Ferle went to her side, skirting the marble slab on which the corpse reposed. The goodma’s hands were moving again. She was tying up her apron strings, making a sack full of stones.

  “Tell him I didn’t mean to,” the goodma murmured, nodding toward the miller. “I mean—I did at first, and changed my mind after I jumped in. But the water tightened the knots, and I couldn’t get them undone. Will you tell him?”

  Ferle couldn’t recall that she’d ever been the subject of such a gaze as the shade turned on her now. For who really saw Ferle? Nobody. People saw an under-housemaid or a page, somebody to be ordered about or scolded. But the shade looked at Ferle—and within her. The gaze made Ferle uneasy. It was more convenient to go disregarded, so as not to be asked to do difficult favors from the goodness of her heart. No one had ever before wondered if there was goodness in Ferle’s heart.

  She felt obliged. She nodded and bobbed a nearly invisible curtsey.

  The shade released Ferle from her gaze, and looked at the miller. “I get in such a fury sometimes, I want to show them all, make them sorry. And now he’s sorry, but I’m sorrier, aren’t I?”

  Ferle thought the miller looked sorrier. He had gotten up to stand by the marble slab, and his hand was resting on the shrouded arm of the corpse. Ferle couldn’t look at him for long, his face was so naked and terrible and shining with tears. The shade of Goodma Gaitho didn’t weep. Ferle wondered if shades could weep; she’d never seen one doing it.

  “I wish they would put me in the churchyard,” the shade said, staring at the miller. “I’m not really a suicide—it was all a mistake, do you see?”

  Ferle was glad the goodma didn’t seem to expect her to do anything about the churchyard. They’d never bury Gaitho Marlem there.

  Necromancer Rahmik finished putting away all his powders and salts into their proper places, and now he locked the cabinet that held them. He approached the miller, and his hand hovered over the miller’s massive back as though he wished to pat him. “I had no idea, my dear fellow. Certainly I would have called you in sooner, if I’d only known. I hope you will accept my fervent apologies. I’ll just leave you alone, shall I? My page will see you out whenever you wish.” The necromancer left the room with such delicacy he might have been walking on tiptoes, though in fact he wasn’t.

  A page does not sit, so Ferle was left to shift from foot to foot while the miller grieved. “Aren’t you going to tell him?” Goodma Gaitho’s shade asked Ferle, when the long tapers in the candelabra had burned three quarters of the way down.

  Ferle jerked upright. She’d been daydreaming again—about how the fish had nibbled on the corpse—no one would fish in the miller’s pond[3] for some time to come—how she detested salt cod—fishing in the emerald waters of the sea cave near her mother’s house—her mother—and so forth.

  Somehow Ferle had not anticipated giving the shade’s message to the miller while the shade was watching. She had thought perhaps to tell him in the corridor, as she led him out. But even Ferle could see there never would be a better time.

  The miller was kneeling with his forehead against the arm of the corpse. Ferle stood on the other side of the marble slab and said, “The shade of Goodma Gaitho spoke.”

  The miller raised his head and looked at Ferle in amazement, as if she were herself a shade, an apparition. No doubt he had forgotten she was there.

  Ferle cleared her throat. “She said, the goodma said, that she wasn’t a suicide. She changed her mind. But the knots were so tight, she couldn’t untie them in time.”

  The miller drew his heavy black brows together. “The corpse said all this?”

  “Goodma Gaitho said it. That’s just what she said. That she changed her mind.”

  “Why didn’t the necromancer tell me?”

  “I don’t think the necromancer heard,” Ferle said.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better—that she regretted it?” the miller asked, standing up and raising his voice.

  Ferle found it harder to answer him now that he was looming. She said in a small voice, “I don’t know, Monsieur.”

  “Then why did Gaitho do it? Did she say that? Eh?”

  “She said she wanted to show them, make them sorry.”

  “Show them? Show whom? Was there someone else?”

  “Isn’t that just like him?” the shade said. “Always so jealous.”

  “Show you, I think,” Ferle said to the miller.

  “That sounds like her right enough.” The miller gripped the edge of the marble slab and stared down at the shrouded corpse.

  “She’s sorry, though,” Ferle said.

  “Is she? That’s fine, glad to hear it. She ought to be!” the miller bellowed. Ferle was afraid—no, she rather hoped—the necromancer would hear him.

  Grandma Lialel’s shade peered through the doorway. “I told you to keep your mouth shut,” she said to Ferle.

  “Just you stay out of it!” the shade of Goodma Gaitho said.

  Ferle wished with all her heart she could slink out of the room. The miller was staring hard at her, as if wondering whether murdering a page would appease his fury, since he couldn’t take it out on Goodma Gaitho herself.

  “She was angry about something,” Ferle said. “But she didn’t really want to die. Look, I’ll show you.” She uncovered the corpse’s right hand and raised it up so the miller could see the marks that had so puzzled Ferle that morning when she was washing the corpse: deep crisscrossing scores across the fingers and palms, purple and red where the apron strings had dug deep, where the goodma had, in her frenzy, tried to break the strings when she found she couldn’t undo the knots.

  The miller took the goodma’s cold hand between his and bent over the corpse, and when his fury broke it was not fury after all, but grief, and Ferle crept around the slab and out of the room, leaving miller and corpse and shade alone together.

  She did not forget her duty. She stood waiting in the corridor outside the office door, and her grandmother’s shade waited with her. It was a wake of sorts, which nearly made up for the wake that the goodma, as a suicide, had been denied.

  There was no illumination save for the candlelight licking under the office door, no window through which the moon could peek. Grandma Lialel was perfectly visible, for shades do
not reflect light nor cast shadows, but Ferle could see little more of her own self than a glimmering on the toes of her polished black shoes, and the faint luster of her white hose, her hands. The rest of her was barely there.

  Minutes passed, or hours perhaps, while Ferle’s mind wandered where it had never gone before, places she did not particularly want to visit. She had a vivid notion of hell, for she saw a gruesome depiction of it every Sunday on a wall in the largest church in Lynka, yet she had not given hell much thought until now. It was worrisome that Gaitho Marlem would have to spend eternity burning in the lake of fire, when she truly hadn’t meant to kill herself. She asked her grandma, “What happens to the shade of Goodma Gaitho now? Is she going to hell?”

  “The shade isn’t the soul, Ferle,” Grandma Lialel said.

  “It’s not? What is it then?”

  “What the soul must forget.”

  “I don’t understand.” Ferle looked at her grandmother’s shade, and the shade looked back. “You mean you, your soul, must forget me?”

  “I won’t forget you, not ever.”

  Ferle’s legs had gone weak. She sat down on the floor of the corridor and rested her head on her knees. The shade of Grandma Lialel settled beside her with rustling skirts. Ferle wished she could lean against her grandma and smell the homely scent of nutmeg on her clothes—she wished, though she had long ago learned the futility of wishing.

  Ferle said, “Is your soul in heaven? You didn’t do anything to get sent to hell, did you?”

  Grandma’s shade smiled at her fondly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happens next, only what happens here. Like you.”

  “I don’t know much,” Ferle said.

  The necromancer of Lynka came shuffling down the hallway in his slippers, with a thick felt cap on his head and a candlestick in his hand. He looked in the office and found the miller sitting in a chair with his chin resting on his stout chest, breathing like a man sound asleep. The corpse, needless to say, was utterly still. As for the shade of Gaitho Marlem, the necromancer did not believe in shades, and did not observe whether she was still sitting in the corner or not.

  The page (whose name he had quite forgotten) was curled up on the cold tiles of the corridor, having fallen asleep on watch outside the door. Perhaps the girl was not as daft as she seemed. How had she known to fetch the miller, if not from listening to gossips? He nudged the page with the sharp toe of his slipper, and she sat up and gaped at him in fear, no doubt expecting the beating she had earned for disobedience.

  “Never mind,” said Necromancer Rahmik, in as kindly a tone as he could manage. “I’ll see the miller out—run along to bed now.”

  Ferle went to bed, only to rise in an hour or so to take up her duties as under-housemaid.

  What became of Ferle? What becomes of us all eventually, the inevitable conclusion to every biography. If you want to know what happens after that, you will have to seek elsewhere. Perhaps, if you visit Lynka, you will be lucky enough to stumble upon a necromancer still practicing the ancient art, and willing for a reasonable price to pose such questions to the dead. But you are advised not to be too trusting of the answers.

  [1] In those days it was a la mode on Abigomas for burghers to adopt French airs and address each other as Monsieur This and Monsieur That. Such pretensions fell out of fashion after Napoleon invaded the island, but that is another story altogether, one collected in Trivial Tales of the Isle of Abigomas.

  [2] These apron strings—I suppose you may not know what they are, for the style of the Goodma’s apron was one that lasted for a millennia or two in Abigomas (according to the archeologist Nell Odo), but is no longer to be found: a rectangle of cloth tied about the waist with a sash, and edged by a colorful fringe of stout strings. In a trice a woman could, by tying some strings, turn her apron into a sack for carrying leeks or skeins of wool. Or stones.

  [3] There are no sources of fresh water on Abigomas save what comes from the sky. The miller’s pond was in fact a clay-lined cistern designed to catch and store rainwater. He had stocked it at some expense with freshwater fish, a true delicacy on the island, and he sold the privilege of fishing there.

  About these Authors

  Goldie Goldbloom is the author of The Paperpark Shoe, which won the AWP Novel Award and the Novel of the Year from the Independent Publishers Association, as well as a collection of short stories, You Lose These. Her story “The Chevra” won Hunger Mountain’s 2013 Non Fiction award. In 2014, she received both a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Brown Foundation Fellowship at Dora Maar House in France. Goldbloom teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and is a well-known speaker at international writing conferences. She is also an LGBT activist and the mother of eight children.

  Or: Goldie Goldbloom likes to read, write, knit, sew, cook, mosaic, play Bananagrams and Scrabble, deliver babies (her own or other people’s), build houses, garden, travel to Italy, work with her students, sleep in, ride horses, defend the defenseless, walk barefoot in mud, swim in the ocean, make puns and play with her eight kids. This is not a definitive list. Things come up all the time. Occasionally she remembers to send out some of her stuff to try and get it published. She is fortunate in being able to say that it usually does.

  Or: Goldie Goldbloom is Australian. She is old, fat and exceedingly forgetful. You will trip over all the books piled up everywhere if you ever visit her house, which she hopes you will. She’s very hospitable, in an Australian sort of way.

  Kathleen Jennings is a writer and illustrator from Brisbane, Australia. The fairytale of the Seven Ravens, which casts a shadow over this story, has long been one of her favourites. Her comic, “A Small Wild Magic” was published in Monstrous Affections, and her short stories have been published by Fablecroft Publishing, Peggy Bright Books and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and been selected to appear in the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2012.

  Over the past 30 years, Nicole Kimberling has become an expert at disassembling plants of all kinds only to turn around and reassemble them into a item called “dinner.” She lives and works and in Bellingham, Washington.

  Owen King is the author of the novel, Double Feature. He is married to the novelist Kelly Braffet.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet loves to receive change of address cards at 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027. Notices can also be sent by electronic mail to info@smallbeerpress.com and are always appreciated.

  Miss Mandible is the Creative Director at the newly launched Living Dead Magazine. missmandible.net

  Sarah Micklem is the author of two novels about a camp follower, Firethorn and Wildfire (Scribner, 2004 and 2009). “The Necromancer of Lynka” is from a series of tales set on the imaginary Isle of Abigomas. They were inspired by a small book called Realms of Fantasy: Folk Tales from Gozo by George Camilleri (Gozo Press, 1981). Many of Gozo’s real folk tales had unsatisfactory plots, which Micklem took as permission to write anti-climactic stories too.

  Jessy Randall’s stories, poems, and other things have appeared in Asimov’s, Flurb, McSweeney’s, Theaker’s, and LCRW. Her latest book is Injecting Dreams into Cows.

  Lesley Wheeler’s third poetry collection, The Receptionist and Other Tales is a Tiptree Award Honor Book; previous books include Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, and Heathen. Her poems have been published in Slate, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

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