A Feast of Sorrows, Stories

by Angela Slatter

  A Feast of Sorrows: Stories

  Angela Slatter

  To my beloved sister, Michelle, who still dreams.

  Copyright © 2016 by Angela Slatter.

  Cover art by Lilif Ilane.

  Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-479-9 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-474-4 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  Germantown, MD

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

  Thank you:

  To Nicole Korhner-Stace, Marianne de Pierres, Garth Nix, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nathan Ballingrud, and Jeff VanderMeer

  for their kind words.

  To Theodora Goss for the lovely introduction.

  To Sean Wallace and Paula Guran for publishing A Feast of Sorrows.

  To the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre for the time and place to complete the edits, and to the Copyright Agency for assistance with funding.

  To those who first published these tales.

  The warmest and deepest of thanks to my family—Betty, Peter, Michelle, and Matthew—who keep me grounded when I’m wandering.

  And, as always, the last and best is for David, whose heart I never doubt.

  CONTENTS

  Stories from Angelia: An Introduction by Theodora Goss

  Sourdough

  Dresses, three

  Bluebeard’s Daughter

  The Jacaranda Wife

  Light as Mist, Heavy as Hope

  The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter

  By the Weeping Gate

  St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls

  By My Voice I Shall Be Known

  Sister, Sister

  The Badger Bride

  The Tallow-Wife

  What Shines Brightest Burns Most Fiercely

  Bearskin

  Afterword: Author’s Notes

  First Publication Data

  Stories from Angelia: An Introduction

  Angela Slatter is a sorceress.

  I thought I should warn you before you start reading this book. Unless you’ve already read it and are coming back to read the introduction? In which case you already know. You’ve been through the dark, dangerous woods, where women turn into bears and the Erl-King roams. You’ve already been transformed into something different from what you were.

  If you meet Angela, maybe at your neighbourhood bookstore signing books or at a literary festival, and she looks like you or me or anyone else, that’s because sorceresses are clever. They know how to disguise themselves. But if you follow her home to what probably looks like a perfectly normal house (but isn’t) and peek through her kitchen window, you will see her standing at the stove in a robe of mist and cobwebs, which is a sorceress’ version of sweat pants. She will be brewing potions in an alembic and making conversation with her pet griffin (probably named Fluff). She will pause to look up recipes in a silver mirror, which is the sorceress’ version of checking Wikipedia on her iPhone.

  What is she making? you will ask. Stories, of course. That is how sorceresses make stories. (Revisions, however, are still done on a computer.)

  Just like the stories you will read, or have perhaps already read, here. For these stories are spells . . .

  What a funny word, “spell.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that most magical of grimoires, to spell is to “set down in order the letters of (a word or syllable),” but that’s actually the third meaning listed. The first is to “utter, declare, relate, tell,” like telling a story. The second is to “make out, understand, decipher, or comprehend,” which is what you’re doing by reading this book. So a spell is something you and the author make together: she utters the story, you decipher it, and the result is magic. Otherwise known as reading, although for some reason that definition does not appear in the OED.

  What you have here is a book that takes you to imaginary lands, including Australia, where the jacaranda trees grow. If you have not seen a jacaranda, I will tell you it is a mass of purple blossoms, like a tree in a fairy tale. Australia itself is a magical country bordering on Fairyland that seems utterly fantastical unless you have grown up there, and perhaps even then. (In Australia, griffins are marsupial.) Most of these stories do not take place in Australia, but rather a country I think of as Angelia. I made that up of course: it’s equal parts Angela and Anglia (the medieval Latin for England, because so many of these stories are inflected with an English sensibility). But in all of them, there is a touch of Australia, particularly in repeated references to ships and ports and the sea. Angelia has its displaced queens and impoverished merchants, its mad seamstresses and coffin-makers’ daughters. Its ghosts. I believe there must be an atlas of it inside Angela’s head, and wouldn’t that be an interesting map to study?

  According to her official biography, Angela is Australian and has graduate degrees in Creative Writing, but I wonder. This is of course the cleverness of the typical sorceress (to the extent sorceresses are ever typical, for to be a sorceress is by definition to be atypical, out of the ordinary). I’m quite sure she lives primarily in Angelia, in one of the neighbourhoods with tall, narrow houses close to the Cathedral, although she probably has a pied-à-terre in Brisbane when she needs to stay in our world for a while, like for bookstore signings. There must be a secret trans-dimensional passage leading from one house to the other. And I suspect her MA and PhD are actually in Sorceressing. At any rate, I’m sure she has passports from both countries. The one from Angelia is probably stamped with gilt letters and a crown.

  All author-sorceresses have their themes, the issues and concerns they explore most often. In this book you will find, above all, stories of women: in love, out of love, trying to find and make their way in the world. They will search for esoteric knowledge, turn feminine arts such as sewing and baking to magical purposes. They will leave home, find home, create homes for their families. They are, above all, different and individual. Whether students at St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls or Bluebeard’s daughter, they are each utterly themselves.

  These stories are also deeply informed by the structure of fairy tales. In some you will find three dresses, in some an apple, but such objects will appear in different contexts than you might expect, take on different meanings than they had for Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. The action takes place in the moral world of fairy tales, where right conduct is situational: sometimes you must give an old woman bread, sometimes you must push her into the oven. Both old women are witches, but only one is trying to eat you. These are stories in which the characters must do the best they can with the information they are given; they must learn to trust their instincts, take what is offered when they can get it. And these are stories of metamorphosis: by the end, everything will be different, everyone will have changed, like a boy into a bear or a girl into a woman realizing what she wants for the first time, growing up before our eyes. Like fairy tales, they are often stories of revenge, which can be another word for justice. Endings may be harsh, but they are usually fair. They are also usually conditional: the end of a tale is never entirely the end. We get the sense that characters live on; more will happen after we stop reading about them. These are also stories about home: how we lose or create it, where we might find it again. They are about outcasts and misfits, some with aristocratic titles, and about the condition of homelessness. This, I think, makes them deeply Australian, no matter where they take place.

  Finally, thes
e are stories about storytelling itself, about the joy of the other kind of spelling: the making of words. They are told in language that is both beautiful and precise, that holds two things in equipoise, like the cameo described in “By the Weeping Gate”: “engraved with the head of a Medusa, lovely and serpentine.” Today we think of the Greek figure of Medusa as a monster, but she was cursed with snakes for hair precisely because she was so lovely she incurred the wrath of the gods. She is a visual contradiction, holding two things in tension and therefore balance. That sort of tension, between love and death, beauty and decay, desire and loss, homecoming and exile, is what gives these stories their strength. They would not be so beautiful if they were not also infused with darkness, if we could not see the skeletal bones beneath the lyricism. They are sad stories, and joyful stories, but most of all they are ultimately satisfying stories, like the loaves of bread baked by Emmeline into fancy shapes in “Sourdough.” Angela is also skilled at making fancy shapes. Just be careful not to get the loaf with poison at its heart, unless you’re prepared with an antidote.

  I started this introduction with a warning. If you’ve already read this book, you should be all right. After all, you made it through the dark, dangerous woods once already. You know to watch out for huntsmen, to avoid any houses made of marzipan, chocolate ganache, and caramel spun into a delicate bird’s nest. You know that you must either find your fortune or make it yourself. There are no fairy godmothers out there, or if there are, you should not trust them. This is a world you will need to navigate with intelligence and as much kindness as possible under the circumstances. If you’ve survived to return and read this introduction, so far so good.

  But if you’re about to read this book for the first time, watch out. All I can tell you is to keep your head and trust your luck. There’s magic and danger ahead . . .

  Theodora Goss

  11 April 2016

  Boston, Massachusetts, USA

  Sourdough

  My father did not know that my mother knew about his other wives, but she did.

  It didn’t seem to bother her, perhaps because, of them all, she had the greater independence and a measure of prosperity that was all her own. Perhaps that’s why he loved her best.

  Mother baked very fine bread, black and brown for the poor and shining white for the affluent. We were by no means rich, but we had more than those around us, and there was enough money spare for occasional gifts: a book for George, a toy train for Artor, and a thin silver ring for me, engraved with flowers and vines.

  The sight of other children in other squares, with Father’s uniquely gleaming red hair, did not bother Mother at all. After he died, I think she found it comforting, to be reminded of him by all those bright little heads.

  Our home was in one of the squares at the edge of the merchants’ quarter—the town was divided into “quarters” that weren’t really quarters. Seen from above, the town was a large square, made up of groups of much smaller squares (tall houses built around a common courtyard); in the centre of the town was the Cathedral, high up on a hill, then spreading around it in an orderly fashion were rows and rows of city blocks, the richest ones nearest the Cathedral, then the further out you got, the poorer the blocks. We sat just before the poorest houses, not quite good enough to be in the middle of the merchants’ rows, but still not in among the places where rats shared cradles with babies. We had several large rooms mid-way up one of the tall houses, and Mother leased out the big ground-floor kitchen for her business.

  From the time I could walk I would follow Mother around the kitchen, learning her art. For a while she was simply annoyed by my constant presence, as I got under foot, but when I learnt to sit on the bench next to the huge wooden table on which she kneaded the bread, and be quiet, she decided to share her knowledge. I was her firstborn, after all, and her only daughter.

  When I could see over the top of the table, I started to help her. Baking tiny child’s loaves at first for practice, much to Mother’s amusement, then making the dark, “poor” bread for those who could not afford refined flour. Finally, I was allowed to create white bread to grace the tables of the rich: those born to wealth and knowing nothing else, the higher merchants, the bishop and his like. I began to create complicated twists of dough to look like artworks. At first Mother laughed, but the orders kept coming for them, so she watched and imitated me.

  One morning, after we’d finished baking for the day, I began to play with the leftover dough on the board in front of me. Soon a child formed, a baby perfectly copied to the life, with tiny hands and feet, an angel’s smile and a sculpted lick of hair on its forehead.

  Mother came up behind me and stared. She reached past me and squashed her fists down on the dough-child, pushing and kneading until it was once again a featureless lump.

  “Never do that. Never make an image of a person or a child. They bring bad luck, Emmeline, or things you don’t want. We don’t need any of that.”

  I should have remembered the dough-child, but memory is a traitor to good sense.

  There was to be a wedding, arranged, a fine society “do,” and we were to supply the bread.

  The parents of the groom—or rather, his mother—insisted on being involved in every decision pertaining to the wedding, so there was a power struggle in train between her and the bride’s mother (two titans in boned bodices). Things were getting tense, apparently—this information we had from Madame Fifine (about as French as Yorkshire pudding), the confectioner who was to supply the bonbons for the wedding feast. We were to appear at the groom’s parents’ house, goods in tow, to show our wares.

  Mother and I tidied ourselves as well as we could, pulling flour-free dresses from chests and piling our hair high. Artor and George were press-ganged into carrying the wooden trays of our finest white breads to the big house near the Cathedral. We were shown into a drawing room almost as big as our ground-floor kitchen.

  As soon as the boys gingerly laid the trays on the big table, Mother shooed them out. I knew they’d be in the stableyard, bumming cigarillos from the stable and kitchen lads, eyeing the horses longingly, waiting for the day when Mother could afford a horse and carriage (that day was a long way off, but they hoped the proceeds from the wedding would speed up the process).

  The drawing room was awash with boredom. The parents sat stiffly across from each other on heavily embroidered chairs whose legs were so finely carved it seemed that they should not be able to support the weight of anyone, let alone these four who almost dripped with the fat of their prosperity. The bride, conversely, was thin as a twig, nervous and sallow, but pretty, with darting dark eyes and tightly pulled hair sitting in a thick, dark red bun at the base of her neck. The groom did not face the room: he had removed himself to the large French window and was staring at the courtyard below (probably watching my brothers watching his horses). He had dark hair, curly, that kissed the collar of his jacket, and he was tall but that was all I could tell. Madame Fifine had said he was called Peregrine.

  Mother nodded to me and I took the first loaf from one of the trays, showed it to the clients so they could observe its clever shape (a church bell with bows), then placed it on a platter and cut six slices for them to taste. The two mothers, the two fathers, the bride all took their slices and the room was silent but for their well-bred chewing. I crossed the room and offered the groom the last slice. He didn’t turn, merely raised his hand in a “no” and shook his head. I noticed his hand bore the stain of a port-wine birthmark.

  “It would be a shame, sir, to waste something so fine.”

  Perhaps struck by the fact that I spoke to him, he looked at me and broke into a smile.

  “Yes. You’re right. It would be a shame.” He took the bread, green eyes bright. “What hair you have, miss.”

  I blushed.

  “Emmeline.” Mother called me and I began my task over again: now the loaf shaped like a flower, now the one like an angel, now all the animal shapes (rabbits, doves, kittens, a
horse), the one like a church. Each time I saved his slice until last and we spoke in low voices, he asked me about my life and laughed at my pert answers. When the tasting was finished, the mothers began to argue; the design to choose was the cause of combat. Finally, they turned to the girl, Sylvia, and made her decide. She had the look of a trapped animal and I felt sorry for her.

  “Perhaps . . . ” I began and all eyes turned to me, the mothers’ brimming with affront, the fathers’ with boredom, the groom’s with amusement, my own mother’s with something like dread, and the bride’s with hope of rescue. “Perhaps Miss Sylvia has a favourite animal or flower. We could make the bread to her choice if she does not like what we have brought today.’

  “A fox!” she cried, clapping her hands to her mouth as if she had said something a’wrong or too bold. I smiled and she said more firmly, “Yes, a fox. That would please me.”

  “As you wish, Miss Sylvia.” Mother’s voice was a relieved breeze. “My Emmeline can make anything with her hands; she has great skill.”

  So it was settled. The bride had spoken, and defied both her mother and future mother-in-law. Mother and I hefted the wooden trays scattered with the remains of butchered loaves and made for the door. The groom was there before the footman and ushered us through. He smiled and I felt as warm as bread fresh from the oven.

  In the months before the wedding he came to me many times.

  The first time I was alone in the kitchen—Mother was ill, spending half her time sleeping the other half shouting delirious orders (which I ignored) from her bed. Artor and George took turns delivering the bread and sitting by her side, while I kept the kitchen running.

  I dropped the tray when I saw him at the door. I was covered in flour, my hair covered by a scarf, and barefoot because I loved the feel of the kitchen flags cool and covered with a light dusting of flour. He laughed and held out the largest bunch of flowers I had ever seen. I examined it as he picked up the fallen tray and placed it on one of the benches. This was no posy picked from the fields outside the town, these were exotic blooms, blossoms grown in hothouses and afforded only by the rich.