by Robin Hobb
And now he had come back. She found herself gripping her old anger, telling herself that she felt no attraction to him at all. She reminded herself of all the nights of weeping over how he had left her, heavy with child, to chase after lovely Meddalee Morrany and her father’s wealth. All those nights of anguish and longing for his presence in her bed, for a man to protect her and help her. She recalled all the doubts that had plagued her; she’d been too homely to hold him, too fat with her pregnancy, too undesirable. And now she looked at him, her long-strayed lover, and felt not one jot of desire for him. Beautiful Pell meant only sorrow to her. She would not be a fool for him again.
“Aren’t you going to say anything to me?” he asked her. He tilted his head, his soft brown hair dancing in the evening wind and aimed his smile at her. Once that smile had been deadly to her willpower. Had it changed, or was it weakened by the brown beard that masked it? Had she changed that much?
“Can’t think of anything to say.” She stooped and carefully plucked at a cabbage seedling to coax it upright again. She gently patted earth back around it. When she looked up, he was still smiling down on her. Fondly. She gritted her teeth. “What do you want?”
“I’m home,” he said simply, as if that explained everything, excused everything. “I’ve come back to you, Rosemary.” He sighed and softened the smile a bit. “I know what you’re thinking, girl. But it was a boy who ran away and left you. It’s a man who has come back to you, and a wiser man, now. I’ve been out in the world and seen how things are.” His voice seemed to firm. “I know what I’ve got to do now to set my life right. I’m ready to do it, no matter how hard.”
That was all he offered, she noticed. That he was wiser. That coming back to her and her son was hard. No apology for what he’d done to her, how he’d humiliated her before the whole village. No thought for what she’d been through, how she’d managed the birth of his child and the raising of the boy since then. No questions on how she had survived while he was “out in the world.” Nothing like that. Only that he was wiser for the experience.
“I think I’m wiser, too,” she said. She dusted her hands on her skirts as she rose. Dirt clung to the rough skin of her palm and had packed under her nails. Why did she notice that now? Was it only because he was back? She circled wide of him and then was annoyed that she had to wait for him to leave the garden patch before she could shut the gate behind him. If she didn’t gate it shut, the chickens would be up at dawn to scratch and peck every seed and seedling from the earth. Even with the fence, she had to keep an eye on them. Often it was only Marmalade sleeping on the warm dry earth of the garden that kept the birds out.
“We were too young, Rosemary. We made a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes trapped me. I got scared. I should have been stronger. I wasn’t. But I don’t think they should shape the rest of my life. I’m going to face up to my tasks and make things right. I’m ready to build the life I was meant to live.” He looked so earnest. He never looked away from her. Once she would have fallen into that dark gaze. Once she had believed she could read his heart in that gaze. She shook her head and looked away from it.
“I’ve built my life, Pell. And there’s no room in it for you. Gillam fills it up completely.”
He stiffened at that. “Gillam?” He sounded puzzled.
It took her a moment to realize the cause. “Your son,” she replied crisply. “I named him Gillam.”
“Gillam? But I said we’d name him Will, if the baby was a boy. After my friend, Will the tailor. Remember?”
“I remember.” She dragged the stubborn gate into place. “I changed my mind when he was born. I changed my mind about a lot of things in those days.” She looped the tie around the gate. “Gillam is a name from my family line. My mother’s father was named Gillam. I decided I’d give Gillam my family’s heritage.”
She stood still, staring at him. The day was growing cooler. She gathered her shawl around her. She wanted to go back to the cottage, to poke up the banked embers and warm the soup and toast some bread for supper. Gillam would wake soon. He was a good little fellow, but she didn’t like to leave him alone when he was awake. Yet as much as she wanted to do those things, she didn’t move. If she went back to the cottage, she was certain he would follow her. And she didn’t want to see him go inside, didn’t want to see him look at her son. She didn’t want his praise for all she’d done, or his disdain that it was, still, a little run-down cottage on the farthest outskirts of the village. He’d never liked the place, not since the first day his grandfather had given it to him. He’d never wanted to live in it, with its smoky chimney and leaky roof. Yet now she feared that he would want it, if he saw it tidy and cozy.
Worse, she feared he would want his son. And Gillam was all she had. He belonged to her, every bit of him. It was why she had named him to anchor him to her lineage, not Pell’s. There would be no sharing of Gillam. Pell had missed his chance for that.
“Let’s go inside and talk,” he said quietly. “You have to listen to what I have to say to you.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” she replied.
“Well, perhaps I have things to say to you. And it’s getting cold. I’m going inside. Follow me.”
And he turned and walked away from her, toward the cottage, knowing that she must follow him. It galled her. It reminded her too sharply of the last time she’d had to obey him.
It had been winter, with the rain coming down in sheets as it always did along the Buck coast. They’d gone to town, to spend most of the few coins they had on a sack of potatoes and three pieces of salt cod. She’d been carrying the cod, wrapped in a piece of greased paper, and he’d had the sack of potatoes on his shoulder. A sudden rain squall had caught them just at the edge of town. Her head had been bent to the wind, and the rain had been running down into her eyes. When he spoke sharply to her, she knew that he must have said her name before. “Rosemary! Take the potatoes, I said!”
She turned back to him, wondering why he wanted her to carry them. They were not a large load, but her belly was big with the baby, and the mud sucking at her old shoes made her so tired she already wanted to cry. “Why?” she asked, blinking rain away as he put the mesh bag into her arms.
“Can’t you see I’ve got to help her? She’s trapped, poor thing!”
She had not had a hand free to wipe her eyes. She blinked her lashes quickly and saw that a child in a yellow dress was standing under a tree at the side of the road. Her arms were wrapped around her, her shoulders hunched to the rain. Her flimsy cloak of lace was no protection against the sudden storm.
Rosemary had blinked again as Pell broke into a run toward the girl. No, it wasn’t a child. It was a young woman, as slender as a child, with rippling waves of black hair blowing in the wind with the edges of her silly little cloak. Her garments made her look younger than she probably was. And more foolish. Who would go out dressed so lightly on a day at the end of autumn? Rosemary shook rain from her eyelashes and recognized her. Meddalee Morrany. The sea trader’s daughter. She lived across the bay, but sometimes came to visit her cousins. Always well dressed was she; even as a child, she had flaunted embroidery on her skirts and ribbons in her hair. Well, she wasn’t a child anymore, but her father’s wealth still wrapped her.
“She just needs to stay there until the squall passes,” she called after him. She hefted the sack in her arms. Damp had penetrated her shoes, and her toes were icy.
He’d already greeted the shivering girl. They were speaking, the girl smiling, but the rising wind swept their words away from her. He turned to call to her, “I’m going to help her get to town. You take the potatoes home. I’ll be along in a bit.”
She’d stood in the rain in shocked disbelief as he opened his black cloak as if it were a raven’s wing, smiling and gesturing to Meddalee to take shelter under it. And the girl laughed and did.
“What about her?” Meddalee Morrany’s question had blown to her on the wind. She was smiling as she pointed a
t Rosemary.
“Oh, she’ll be fine. She can deal with the rain. I’ll see you later, Rosie!”
She’d had no choice then. She’d been cold and wet, weighted with the potatoes and fish and her unborn child and the hurt he’d loaded onto her. He hadn’t offered to put his cloak around her when the storm had blown up. No. He’d saved that for a stranger. For a pretty girl in a pretty dress, with a slender waist and rings on her fingers. Not for the girl who was pregnant with his bastard. She’d watched them walk away from her and could not think what to do. Then the wind blew stronger, pushing her toward home, and she’d gone.
She’d staggered home, arrived soaked to the bone and made their supper and waited for him. And waited. Waited for all that night, and the next day and night, and through the weeks and then months that followed. She’d wept and hoped and waited past the birth of the boy, waited for him to come back to his senses and come home to his new family, waited for the girl’s family to see how worthless he was and drive him off, waited even after his grandfather had come, shamefaced, to see his great-grandson.
By then, the gossip was known to all. Pell had followed Meddalee that day, right onto the boat that was to take her back across the bay to her father’s big house in Dorytown. The gossips of the village had taken great pains to see that she knew all the details. Her father had taken a liking to Pell. Everyone always took a liking to Pell, with his handsome face, his wide smile, and his easy ways. He’d given Pell a job in one of his warehouses. For a short time, she tried to believe he had done it for both of them. She pretended that he’d gone off to make a fortune for them. Soon he’d come home, his pockets full of his wages, to make things right for them. Perhaps he’d carry her and Gillam off to a cozy little house in Dorytown. Perhaps he’d stride into the cottage one night, his arms laden with toys and warm clothing for his son. Then wouldn’t the villagers have to swallow their mocking words! Then wouldn’t they see that he had loved her all along.
But Pell never came. The days passed, she struggled on, and her boy grew, day by hard day. Her foolish dreams had turned to bitterness. She’d mourned and wept and cursed her fate. She’d hated him and longed for revenge. She’d blamed Pell, and then Meddalee, and then herself and Meddalee and finally Pell again. She had, as Hilia told her bluntly, been a bit mad. Impossible to reason with. And then, sometime in the last year or so, she’d stopped feeling anything about Pell, except to hope that he’d never come back and disturb the peace that she’d finally found.
“I’ll see you later,” he’d said all those years ago. She bit back the impulse to ask him if this was “later.” She watched him as he walked toward her door. His hair was as glossy and well kept as ever, his boots were new, and the coat he wore must have been tailored to display his broad shoulders so well. Had Meddalee chosen it for him? She glanced down at her mended skirt, soiled where she had knelt to inspect her plants. Her shoes were worn and stuffed inside with dry grass, not stockings. She brushed her rough hands against her skirt again and felt grubby and angry. She’d been a pretty girl once, if a poor one. Now she was only a poor woman in worn clothing with a growing child.
That was another thing he’d taken from her. There would never be a suitor knocking at her door, never be a man courting her. There would never be a partner for her, only her son sharing her life.
He didn’t even hesitate as he opened her door. Did he notice that she’d repaired the leather hinges, that it no longer scraped against the ground or gapped at the top and let the wind in? If he did, he made no comment. He paused only an instant on the threshold, and then stepped inside. She found herself hurrying after him. She didn’t want him to wake Gillam, didn’t want the boy’s first sight of his father to be as a frightening stranger looming over him.
She found Pell gazing around the room and felt a hot pulse of satisfaction at how surprised he looked. It wasn’t the cobwebby hovel that his grandfather had first given them, nor the shoddy cottage it had been during the few months they’d lived here together. Her gaze followed his and she found herself almost as surprised as he must have been. Not at the changes she’d made; she’d become accustomed to the blue curtains at the window, the moss and clay chinking in the walls and the neatly swept hearth and kindling box and Gillam’s little three-legged stool beside it. No, what surprised her was to realize that when Pell had lived there, she had accepted the hovel as it had been, thinking that surely if it could be made better, he would know how and would do it. It was only after he had left her, only after she had roused herself from the torpor of despair and become angry that she had decided that whatever she could fix, she would. She’d decided then that whatever she did to the place didn’t have to be perfect, only better than it had been. And it was.
“He’s big!”
Pell’s words brought her back to the present with a jolt. He was looking at Gillam in shock. Emotions struggled on his face—pride, guilt, and something else perhaps. Dismay?
“He’s nearly three,” she pointed out briskly. “He’s not a baby anymore.”
“Three,” he breathed, as if the number were astonishing. He continued to stare.
“You were gone three years,” she enumerated for him. “Children grow.”
“He’s a little boy. It didn’t seem that long,” he said, and then, as if he realized that perhaps that was a tactless thing to say, “I never meant for it to happen that way, Rosie. It was just, well, you were pregnant, and we were huddled in this place with next to nothing and my parents were furious with me. I felt so trapped. I was a young man and there was no fun left in my life. The idea of having a wife and a baby both, and I hadn’t intended to have either, not for a long time. I couldn’t stand it.”
“And she was pretty and her family was wealthy and for whatever reason, they let you move in on them like a tick on a hound. And then she threw you off and here you are, back here because you can’t think of any other place to go.”
She spoke flatly, in a low voice, but without anger. It surprised her. She didn’t feel angry, just impatient for him to leave. Let him look around and see how humbly they lived and then be gone. She had to wake Gillam soon and give him some supper, or he’d not want to go to sleep until late. And she had planned to work on a quilt tonight, fine meticulous work after Gillam had gone to sleep. The last quilt she’d made carefully, she’d traded for a ham. This one, if she were fortunate, might get her a piglet. She wanted to sit by the fire tonight, hunched over her work, sewing carefully, and think about how she would build a pen for the pig and feed him garden waste and take him to the beach to scavenge. She wanted Pell to be gone. Once he’d been a future full of golden dreams and promises. Now he was a past that stung whenever she thought of him. She didn’t want to look at him and wonder how it might have gone if he’d truly been the man she’d thought he was. She wanted to be alone and dreaming about her own plans, the plans that she could make real.
“All I wanted was a chance to do what I wanted to do, to do things I enjoyed doing. To make a try for the life I should have had before it was all ruined. Is that so much to ask?” He stopped talking abruptly, taking a sharp breath. Then he said, as if promising something to himself, “Things are going to be different.” He clipped his words off as if she were the one who had hurt him. He added firmly, “And now, we’re done talking about it.”
His words struck her dumb. He spoke as if he had authority over her. A wave of dread rose up in her, followed by a pitiful hope that sickened her. She suddenly knew that he intended to stay. Right now. From now on.
Why?
Gillam stirred on the bed and opened his eyes. For a moment, his big dark eyes, so like his father’s, were full of dreams still. Then he blinked and focused his gaze on the stranger. “Mama?” he asked with some trepidation.
“It’s all right, Gillam. I’m right here.”
He crawled quickly across the bed to her, and she scooped him up in her arms. He hugged her tight around her neck, tucking his face into her shoulder.
“And I’m here, too, boy.” Pell spoke with a heartiness that did not ring true to her. “Your papa. Come here and let me look at you.”
In response, the boy tightened his grip on her neck. He didn’t look up at Pell. The man’s face darkened. “Give him time. He’s never seen you before. He doesn’t know you,” she pointed out.
“I said we were done talking about that,” he replied abruptly. He came toward her. “Let me see the boy.”
She didn’t think about it but backed away toward the door. “Give him some time to get used to your being here,” she countered. It wasn’t a direct refusal. Once she had adored Pell’s assertiveness and how he made decisions for them. It had seemed manly and sheltering. Now she found herself remembering how quickly he’d move to anger when his will was thwarted. Hilia’s advice to her suddenly came to mind. Run. Run to Hilia’s house. She shook her head to the stray thought. Gillam was heavy. If she tried to run, she’d be out of breath before she got to the top of the hill. And she didn’t want to give Pell any reason to run after her. She feared where that sort of confrontation might lead.
“Let me see him.” He insisted as he advanced on her. His voice became contemptuous. “You’ve made him into a timid little mouse. When I was his age, I wasn’t afraid to stand and face a man and offer my hand. What sort of sniveling whelp are you raising under my name? What sort of a mama’s little titmouse is he?”
