Tender Morsels

by Margo Lanagan

  While I felt it, shakingly Mam darted forward and gathered up the bowl. The milk were all gone, but the sodden bread lay there. I saw her look at it; I heard her think, as clear as if she said it, Well, that’s good enough for a bear. But then she caught my horrified eye.

  ‘I will make it afresh,’ she said, and hurried away.

  I lay down again; I turned to the wall; I did not want to face this day.

  Mam brought me more breakfast, and took the soiled mat, and cleaned the floor and laid a fresh mat down. ‘There,’ she said. ‘All’s nice now. You sit up and eat, Bullock.’ But I would not turn my face and appall her further.

  When she had gone, I ate, but I resolved to stay hidden, and so all the day I lay abed. But my misadventures got out all over town, of course, and the house filled up with the mutterings of people talking about my plight, and I must indeed face the constable and also Filip’s da, who came to collect my story, though his mam was too grief-struck and frightened to look upon me.

  ‘Ah,’ said the da, peering at me and patting my furry cheek. ‘You are in the same state as our boy. And we still cannot get the costume off him, to wash and funeral him properly. He will have to be buried a Bear.’

  I hung my misshaped head. It would be easier to have taken the quarrel myself, I thought, than to sit here onlooking Filip’s da’s suffering.

  Teasel Wurledge came, and my, that were a disturbing visit. At first I did not want to see him, but then he sent in with Mam a message that something similar had happened to him when he were Bear last year, and in my hopefulness of knowing he were no longer furry-faced I allowed her to admit him.

  Well, straight away he started to laughing at me, quietly but most cruel, I thought. He tugged at my bonnet and laughed the more; he tweaked the fur of my forehead and cheek and went to swaying and soundless mirth.

  ‘So how did you begone of this, Teasel?’ says I, desperate enough to overlook the cruelty. ‘What did you do, to be back to a man?’

  ‘Oh, I were much further along with it,’ he says. ‘I had fur all over me, and claws and teeth and extra size and—Big! I overtopped the head of a standing cart horse, I would say.’

  ‘I heard nothing of this,’ I said.

  ‘I were magicked away,’ he says. ‘And in Magic Land I was this bear, three year and more, so no one saw me here; I had no such embarrassment as you. And when I magicked back, I were myself again, not stuck in my skins like you lads.’

  ‘Magic Land,’ I said. I was not inclined to believe him, but why would he come and spin me such a tale?

  ‘Aye, and Davit Ramstrong have been there too, if you think I am pulling your leg-end. Ask him next time you see him. Aah,’ he says, grinning and shaking his head over me, taking in my sorry state like some old codger under the Square Ash who thought he knew so much better than me. ‘I had me such a grand time there. King o’ the Forest, I were. And there was queens for me! Yes, ’tis true! As well as all the other, I were accoutred with a good big bear-pole, I tell you.’ He measures it out from himself with his hand, an improbable length as all such measurements are. ‘Which I put to good use, yes I did. I have to warn you, Bullock; bury yourself to your bull-sack in leddy-bear, you will never be satisfied with what you can get back here.’

  He were looking off dreamy, but now he checked to see how impressed I was—which was, to blankness, more or less. He had run away with all my sense, and I did not know what to think. I were trying very hard not to think of Noer and his lady-bear up there on St Olafred’s Mount.

  ‘With their narrow arses, you know, and only that scrap o’ fur, ha-ha-ha. ’Tis nothing like the real thing.’

  ‘So you cannot give me methods, then,’ I says, ‘to save me from this bearness? There is no trick to it?’ For I did not want him to continue in that line of talk.

  ‘No, I am surprised it is so partial. I were tekkin right away and made fully a bear. Then I come back, all man again, and here I have been since,’ he says with his hands out presenting himself, as if to say, And what a man I am, don’t you think?

  ‘Well,’ I said with difficulty through the jealousy—for the man-ness of him, not for his adventures up the queen-bears—‘I am glad to see it is undoable, Teasel, so I thank you for coming and showing me that, at least.’

  He looked me up and down, pitying. ‘Were I you, I would rather go the other way, and be the full bear awhile.’ And he makes two fists and shows his teeth.

  There was a knocking then at the front door. I stopped him speaking more, signing that I wanted to hear who it was, though truth to tell I were deep fed up with peerers and gossips at me, and only wanted him to stop that smut-talk.

  ‘I heared of some misadventure,’ croaks a voice, and a stick clacks on the doorstep.

  ‘’Tis Leddy Bywell!’ I murmured, and it was a mark of how bad Teasel Wurledge had soiled the air that I found the thought of the woman kind and wholesome by comparison. ‘I must send you away, Teasel, and discuss the night’s events with the leddy.’

  ‘For what?’ he says. ‘Is there a tea she makes, melts the hairs offer you?’ He bent around so as he could see up to the door, then shuddered at me. ‘She’s a-tappin her way down here, and that Urdda-girl with her, the foreign one that thinks so much of herself. I’ll be moving on.’ And he clapped my bear-sleeve, spared me a last snort at my costume, and were gone. ‘Mileddy,’ I heard him say, and ‘Miss Urdda,’ and the maid said ‘Mister Wurledge’ most dutifully, but I could hear the leddy’s wordless stare at him, and that made me chuckle deep inside myself. She knows a thing or two, that oul mudwife, what’s worth a greeting and what’s not.

  I was so glad to see her and be rid of that discomfiting Wurledge that in spite of my embarrassment of having her pretty maid see me, I sat up and suffered the oul witch to examine me, the state of my coat, and I told her as best I could how we had been so strong enchanted, me and my friends, that we would fall enamoured of bears if they approached us.

  ‘To kill one,’ I said, ‘I don’t see how that is possible, the glamour they cast upon our minds. I know I could not have done what you bid us, had we caught her: eat the parts of her, boil the bones. You might as well ask me to eat my own mother. Or my wife, if I had one, would be closer.’ And I pushed away the thought of Noer in the she-bear’s arms, for still I did not know how to regard that.

  The widder stood thoughtful and unhappy-looking, the foreign miss attentive beside her. ‘I am loath to meddle any further in this,’ the old woman said, ‘and make things possibly worser still.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ I begged, ‘if you can help me in any way at all—’ And pitifully I groped for her hand and held it in my awful paw-likes.

  ‘I do not mean to say I will abandon you, Mister Oxman.’ She squeezed my paws and patted them. ‘I only mean, let me consider what has happened now. Give me time. Let me think what we might resort to.’

  ‘You know what to resort to,’ said Urdda to Lady Annie as they walked up the town.

  ‘I do?’ The widow arranged her teeth belligerently.

  ‘You must summon that Miss Prancy, the sorceress from Rockerly.’

  ‘And why must I do that, Little Miss Know-all?’

  ‘Because this is all to do with that hole in the lane behind Eelsisters’ that Dought made through to my old world.’

  ‘Is it, now.’

  ‘And for which you are responsible, having put him through to that other place the first time.’

  The widow walked on, making great play with placing her walking stick at the precise centres of the cobbles. ‘Nobody has gone anywhere, in this instance,’ she eventually said. ‘Nobody has come from anywhere, as you did. I do not see that it has to be similar.’

  ‘It is all bear-magic, Annie. And it is exactly the spot—you know that. And what’s more—’

  ‘Stop bludgeoning me with your reasons, girl!’

  ‘What’s more, you naughty woman, there is only one coffer, a quarter full, left in your cellar, of enchanted riches.’
>
  ‘What, you are saying it is time to go through and fetch more?’

  ‘You know I am not.’ Urdda nodded a greeting at a passing marketwoman. ‘You can afford, now, to undo what you did. That’s what I’m saying. Ramstrong and I, we have exchanged your false wealth for true, and passed it out of town bounds as far as we could. One quarter-coffer, more or less, makes little difference to your well-being, now or in years to come.’

  Annie strode ahead.

  Urdda caught her up without difficulty. ‘I know you are afraid.’

  ‘She will be so angry,’ said the widow under her breath. ‘I wonder, can I engineer it so as I do not actually meet the woman again?’

  12

  In her great generosity—or perhaps in her pity for my furred condition, and her guilt at having sent Filip to his death and Noer to worse enchantment—the Widow Bywell arranged for me to travel, in her own carriage, with her own coachman, all the way to Rockerly town, where there was a woman called Miss Prancy who to her mind could help me. She also arranged for me to be escorted there, knowing how I would dislike to show my face outside of carriage or inn.

  ‘Davit Ramstrong would be best,’ she told me. ‘But he cannot be spared. But his goodwife, Todda, has agreed to come and negotiate for you, and I think she will be most suitable.’

  ‘Will not I frighten her little ones, though, the hairy face of me?’

  ‘Oh, they will not be coming. Urdda and I will share them with Davit and Wife Thomas the while.’

  It seemed to me a very peculiar arrangement, but Wife Ramstrong when I met her was entirely calm, both as to sharing a carriage with a monster and to leaving her bonny sons partly in the care of two witches.

  The evening before we left, Filip’s family buried him, which I felt uncomfortable either to attend or to avoid. So I lay in my bed while the bell tolled. The mourners carried Filip up the street outside, his mam and her women wailing and shrieking at the head of his procession. Every sound and thought was torture to me. Filip died in front of me again—fell to his knees, fell to his face. Over and over again he died, until the memory were burnt into my bones.

  I woke, exhausted, to my mam’s coaxing and lamp, with hardly the energy to cover my face with a cloth as I passed from the house to the carriage outside.

  The journey to Rockerly was long, with two laborious patches of bog, one between Olafred’s and High Oaks Cross and another deep in the forest outside of Rockerly. Wife Ramstrong did not talk overmuch, but she attended very closely to the passing landscape, having never travelled this far before either, and when we passed through the villages and I drew the curtains to cover myself, she kept me apprised of what was happening outside. She was the best sort of company, kind and thoughtful and comfortable in herself. I counted Davit Ramstrong a lucky man to have her, and those two sons lucky lads.

  Rockerly was a dizzying big place, I saw from the hill approaching the town. At this time of evening, St Olafred’s would be a patch of shadow and sparkle on the side of the Mount; this town covered all of its hill and half the hill beyond, and had many more lanterns, regular disposed about its streets as well as in its windows.

  It worried me to see them, thinking how many curious pairs of eyes each spark I could see represented. When we reached the gate, I hid in the carriage while Wife Ramstrong made inquiries of the guard, and it came out that there was no such person as a Miss Prancy, but only a much-respected doctress called Miss Dance, who lived at the top of the town. They gave Leddy Annie’s coachman the directions, and up we went, past lane-ends very much like the lower parts of my own town, only busier for this dark hour, and then up among houses of more substance, past an alehouse where there was a fiddle-player and a piper and dancing, past a grandish house through the curtains of which I saw a man raising a wine-cup to a table of guests, past a chapel where Rockerly citizens milled and spilled down the steps from the candle-bright doorway.

  Then the streets quietened and the houses grew even larger and straighter and better trimmed, and finally the carriage stopped. The goodwife alighted; I stayed skulking inside while she consulted with the coachman, knocked on the house door, was admitted, and disappeared inside.

  She were gone a long time; it must of taken her a while to explain our business to this Miss Dance. Now and again I drew the carriage-curtain aside to look at the fine house, at the fern-fronds carved across the lintel and the blade of lamplight angling between the red curtains in that front room. Nothing changed except, perhaps the third time I looked, I noticed a cat had come to one of the other windows, a dark one. It were not much more than a soft shadow, as still as an ornament there; but the eyes on it, catching the street light, glowed eerie-bright, glowed down at me, it seemed, though surely my twitch of the curtain had been hardly enough to catch its attention?

  I didn’t want to be looked at by cats any more than by people, so I did not peep out again. Eventually, with the quiet, and the tiredness from the long journey, and my longing for my own bed, I slipped into a doze, only to start awake, not knowing where or when I was—a whole night and day might have passed, I had been gone so utterly into sleep—when the goodwife rattled the carriage door opening it, and spoke through the crack.

  ‘She says you’re to come in, Bullock,’ she said. ‘Wait a moment, though; there’s a rider passing. But no one else to see you.’

  She took me inside. The hall was cold, and empty except for the cloak-hooks and their burdens, and some dark wood chests either side with red cushioning upon them, where people might wait to be attended by the witch, I supposed.

  We did not sit there, though. Wife Ramstrong calmly led me into a firelit room that was parlour and library both, with a table scattered with papers and packages, chairs of varying degrees of comfort before and behind it, at the fireside and nearer the curtained window, and only a few items of decoration about, and none of them ladylike: a dark painting of what looked like an assemblage of dead dogs; some kind of scarred battle-helmet on a stand; a mounted stag’s head gazing across an imagined moor; and a vase of what looked like funeral flowers, which, when I looked closer, were made of silk only, and quite dusty.

  ‘Miss Dance is very busy,’ whispered the goodwife. ‘She is cooking up some medicine in the kitchen and bossing a maid about papers. Sit here, Bullock, and we’ll wait.’

  Miss Dance, when she came, was a tall spike of a woman, dressed darkly, fierce of face—though handsome with it—and swift of movement. The cat came with her, and was no less unsettling and attentive in this parlour than it had been at the upstairs window.

  Miss Dance took one look at me and said, ‘I see. It is exactly as you told me, Wife Ramstrong. I could not credit it until I saw it. Forgive me.’

  ‘It is an improbable tale,’ said the goodwife.

  Miss Dance came unnerving close and examined me, my furred parts and my skinned, and particularly the joins of bear- to man-skin. She tutted and sighed, and her face grew ever more fierce. Finally she straightened, and walked away to the table, where a writing-desk lay open, the cat beside it being an ornament again. Miss Dance sat down there and tapped her fingers, frowning at me. Then she said, ‘Tell me, Mister Oxman, what you can recall of how you came to be in this condition.’

  This I did. I had never spoke to a woman like this before, who had no apologies for herself yet were not laundress nor night-girl nor gypsy. It felt very like talking to a man, except with a man there is always them little jousts going on and those little assessments, yourself against him. There were none of that with this person; now that she had the sense of my predicament, she were bent only on the matter of what I said.

  She wrote it all down, very fast and scratchy, holding up her hand to pause me whenever she took more ink. At certain points of my tale she nodded, as if, yes, a shoe-hammer to the brain were only to be expected, or to see your friend carried off like a bab, like a cub, by a she-bear. Nothing in my tale seemed to surprise the woman. The cat, on the other hand, seemed not to find a word of it credibl
e.

  When I had finished, she set to thinking, and I waited, feeling offended in some way but not knowing how, with Wife Ramstrong beside me, hopeful in the silence. The papers-maid appeared at the door and was waved away. The kitchen-woman came, and was told, ‘Take it off the heat for now, Marchpane.’ And after some more thinking, Miss Dance came and seated herself in the big winged armchair opposite us.

  ‘I am not at all happy at this,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Wife Ramstrong. ‘It is terrible events, one on another, for these Bears this year.’

  ‘And they smell, all these events,’ said Miss Dance, ‘of someone practising outside their abilities.’

  Oh? I was all ready to be further annoyed, that she did not think me worthy to be Bear—which truth be told, I had to agree, for recent Bears is not of the quality the old ones maintained, anyone in St Olafred’s will tell you. But then I realised she did not mean our practising—neither mine nor Noer’s nor poor Filip’s. Do not speak, I warned myself, and show how tired you are, or how dim-witted.

  ‘They do?’ said the goodwife.

  ‘Indeed. It could be this Widow Bywell you have told me of. As I said, she is not known to me. There are several practitioners in that part of the country; it could be some wild-worker in the hills there. Someone who has not been instructed properly and is working against the natural interests, to gratify or advance herself. This is how it looks to me—though I see it only secondhand, and at some distance. I must look closer, to be sure, and speak to these others you have mentioned, goodwife: Misters Ramstrong and Wurledge, and the Bywell woman and her girl. And I must act quickly, before that boy—Noer?—meets with misadventure in the forest. And before you lose yourself entirely in bearness, Mister Oxman.’ Her face cleared. ‘St Olafred’s—I can ride there in a night.’ And abruptly she stood.

  ‘Tonight, you are thinking of going?’ I said, surprised, for it were night already.