Sometimes I was able to leave Bedella there until the morning. If not, I waited at Lissel’s, stretched out on a bench in her kitchen with Ousel on top of me like a partial blanket, or sitting up sometimes, my arms a pillow on her table while at the other end Bedella sucked and grunted and settled, or Lissel took her upstairs to bed and caught a little more sleep as she fed.
‘Here you go, Mister Ramstrong.’ She would wake me and hand the bab, all tight-wrapped and peaceable, back to me. ‘She’s full as a well-fit boot now.’ And off we would go into the night town, which was quite a different place from the day, cooler and more restful, with the stars and running clouds, and no people to bother us and be solicitous towards us, only Ousel stumbling and rubbing his eyes at my side.
‘Leave her with the girl,’ says my brother. ‘It will cost ye no more and you will rest better.’
‘Oh, ’tis not so, Aran,’ I say to him. ‘I cannot do without the littlun in my house. She is my last hold on Todda, and so much the image of her.’
But, to be true, the bab was the seat of more confusion than that, and it was as much rage as missing that made me keep her. ’Twas a terrible switch-potch of feelings sometimes I got, looking into her sleeping face or her woken one, bleary, frowning and grimacing at the world. For it was her being here that killed my wife, there was no getting around that. Yet she was so much what we wanted. It was as if that were too much happiness for one man to deserve, too neat a family. No, said the fates, this is Davit Ramstrong we’re speaking of; he is only allowed the one good woman in his life at a time, a mam or a Todda or a daughter. Should he gain a second of these, another must go.
So it seemed to me in my grief, these thoughts working to enrage me sufficiently to wake me from my first uselessness I fell into when my darling died. You can see how nature works, and how practically, even as you are lost, lost to yourself in the swilling and buffeting of all of the emotions. Let us get this man up out of his madness, says nature, make him walk and work, for there are three littluns needing his care, no? He cannot be allowed to languish too long. Here, I will put into his head Jannes Mazer, who has his mam and his wife’s mam in the house with him, as well as his wife, that cheerful soul, and those two daughters, along with the four sons. All set about with women, the man is, and always complaining, but complaining the way a rich man complains how heavy are his sacks of gold, gratified to bear the weight. Yes, look at Mazer, Ramstrong, and feel how meanly I have doled out the women to your life. There, see Ramstrong now, shaking as he puts the bab in the cradle, walking away to keep from harming her. He’s awake now, isn’t he? He’s alive. That is the main thing, to keep the man alive, tending the babs so that they may grow old enough to submit to the miseries I have in store for them.
It was not even true, and I could see this when the day arrived and my little misters clambered into the bed with me for the morning stories and chat we had used to have with them, me and Todda. Still their same sweet faces, bemused by dreamings, turned up at my bedside, and their little arms not caring yet about manliness went around me, and I thought, Just as Aran said, there is a dozen women in this town is free for my choosing and would love to take these on, these three fine children, and give me more besides. There were men who with their very condolences mentioned their cousins or daughters—Not now, I realise, Ramstrong, but when time comes for you to look about again. And maybe that time would come; maybe it would. But for now I was in the cesspit, and it took all my work just to keep my own head above the cess and my little men from sinking, and the babby girl Bedella milk-full and tidy and breathing on.
After Todda’s burial came a terrible time, where life kept going and kept going and the dead woman still was dead, and all Annie’s household felt it, though they tried not to dwell upon it—only bend to their work, which was, as seemed only appropriate, a strange mix of bride and funeral dress, with costumes for the harvest festival soon to come. Straight after Midsummer the daylight had changed, softening and goldening towards autumn. Now the air cooled slowly and then began to chill, mornings and evenings, and Liga, Branza, and Urdda had to save the simpler stitching and assembly for the poorer light of evening and only do their finework in the middle of the day, and close by the window at that.
‘It is something to do with Mister Cotting, isn’t it?’ thought Urdda aloud one of those middays, into a quiet stretch of stitchery.
‘What is?’ said Liga.
Branza and Annie were gone out this afternoon, to market and to Ramstrong’s; there would likely be no interruptions for a while. ‘What you will not tell us. What you always send us away for, talking to Leddy Annie, or when Miss Dance were here. It’s about our father, isn’t it? Why? Are you ashamed of him? Was he a no-good?’
‘He was a no-body,’ Liga said dryly.
‘What, he had no standing? Why, what did he do? What was his work?’
Liga cast her a long look—a rather hopeless one, Urdda thought.
‘Why, should I not be curious, about my own father?’ Urdda tried to put some amusement into her voice, to charm Liga out, but her smile went unanswered.
Stitch, stitch, went Liga, and the question hung there. ‘Cotting is a story of mine,’ she said eventually. ‘Miss Dance saw through me immediately, but no one else has questioned it, so I have persisted with him. And very tired of him I am, too—it strains a mam to keep things from her daughters.’
‘Who is it, then, if not Cotting? Is it someone we know?’
Liga gave a kind of shrug and a kind of headshaking, both at once.
Urdda tried a little laughter again; again Liga did not brighten. Urdda made an exasperated sound.
‘There are nice ways for babbies to be got, and less nice,’ said Liga with a warning glance. ‘Yours and your sister’s are not such pretty tales, my love.’
Urdda rolled her eyes. ‘Pretty! Time and again you have given me pretty, Mam, when all I wanted was the truth, as straight as you knew it. Come along!’
‘Well, this truth is not straight, however much you may think you want it.’ She bit off her thread-end, and spread and examined the seam over her knee. ‘You cannot jest me into telling you, for it is not something that is pleasant for me to remember.’
‘’Tis who I am, Mam!’ said Urdda. ‘’Tis what I may become. You know how it is here. Everyone’s whole life depends on the man who sired them.’
‘Not yours, my girl. And not Branza’s. You’d not be as well off as you are, if that were so.’
‘Oh, he must be a very low sort.’ Urdda watched and waited. ‘You are moving all sharp and quick,’ she said. ‘You must hate the man terribly. Why, did he betray you? Beat you? Leave you penniless?’
Liga sagged her work to her lap, the heavy black funeral robe she was sewing for the God-man. ‘Branza is happy not knowing.’
‘Branza? Forgive me, but I am not Branza.’
‘No indeed.’ A smile crossed Liga’s face like a wisp of steam touching a windowpane. She picked up her work again and went industriously at it.
Urdda did not resume her own, a white taffeta gown for a bride’s younger sister.
She waited. Liga noticed her waiting. She went on working, and Urdda waited on pointedly.
‘Shall I tell you, then?’ Liga’s voice was so heavy with doubt, it seemed to come from somewhere behind her, about the level of her chest.
‘You shall!’ said Urdda, victorious and fearful both at once.
Liga looked about, seeming hunted. ‘Close the door, then, daughter. I should not want Mister Deeth, say, to overhear any of this.’
With alacrity and a little trepidation, Urdda shut the door. She returned to her seat. She did not take up her work again; she would not proceed with it until she had heard what she wanted to hear.
Liga’s face above her finework was complicated with age and thought; opposite her, Urdda felt smooth-skinned and innocent—
Too innocent! she told herself fiercely. She felt as if she stood, straight and unflinching, in the path
of a carriage that thundered towards her. She was brave enough for anything, she thought; brave enough for the worst that her mother might tell her.
Liga looked up one more time, clearly bracing herself for a distasteful task. Then she went at the funeral vestment, and without lifting her eyes again, she began, softly and slowly and with much thoughtfulness and gravity, to tell about the day that Urdda had been conceived.
She told it well; she had always been a good storyteller. Urdda felt herself disappearing—all but her breath, which became less steady the longer the story went on, and her heartbeat, which grew firmer and faster. She felt the weight of baby Branza in her arms, the resistance of the cottage door in her spine; she smelled the chimney ash and clung to the cold, scratchy stones.
Beyond a certain point, Liga could stitch no more as she spoke, but still she held the stuff ready for the stitch in one hand and the needle’s little shining dart in the other, and she spoke over these towards Urdda. She explained everything: she described how the thing was done, all the small acts that contributed to the larger, the differences of one act from another; she spared neither herself nor her daughter a single jeer or bruise, indignity or panic-thought of the entire business. Yet she told it all without her lip curling once, without her emotions disrupting the story at any point. She reported it as if she were a messenger bringing news of an enemy’s movements to his commander, the value of whose report consisted in its completeness and its dispassion.
Now Urdda herself could no longer watch the words issue from that calm, beloved mouth. She wanted to hear no more, but she had prompted this telling, and now that it was in train, it would only be further indignity on her mother to stop it half told. So she took up the shears, and some scraps of funeral velvet and bride-sister white that had been pushed by her mother’s work to her side of the table, and she snipped away small pieces, some of them so small that the snippings fell as little more than dust to her lap. The snipping stopped her hands from shaking. The slish-slish of the blades through the cloth was a calm, mechanical sound behind the other—her mother’s voice, building a tower, a tower of unspeakable creatures, like loathsome toads that had agreed somehow to fit together, to balance and cling to each other and become this structure, however much their instinct was to slide, to ooze, to clamber and spring away. Urdda’s face was sore from staying as expressionless as Liga’s; her throat ached with restraining the exclamations that leaped up, demanding to be uttered.
When the story was told, both women sat, the one with her cloth and needle, the other with the shears clutched closed in her lap, their faces turned from each other as if each wished most heartily that the other were not in the room.
‘Then . . .’ Urdda’s voice felt rough in her throat, sounded hollow in the air. ‘How was Branza got, if that was me?’
‘That is Branza’s business, and my own.’
‘But Branza won’t ask you!’
‘Then I will not tell her.’
‘Is hers any better a story than mine?’ said Urdda.
‘It is no better, no.’
‘Is it similar?’
‘No, it is quite another thing again from yours.’
They regarded each other across the broad table. Though Urdda’s face felt as if it were flaming, the rest of her, inside and out, felt cold, drained of blood and life by Liga’s tale. As for Liga, she had not just told the tale but endured the events in it; had had the whole thing, in all its details, enacted on her. Urdda had not known that such cruelties, such violations, could be practised on a person, yet Mam had undergone them—Mam, who sang over the bread-making, who looked so pleased smoothing a fresh-completed piece of embroidery; Mam, whom Urdda had so delighted in making to laugh, making to join in play; Mam, who had made that garden and kept that cottage and raised the two daughters. And one of them, this ungrateful daughter herself, had hauled Mam back from the place where she sang and hummed in perfect safety to this world, where these men—Urdda had seen Hogback Younger, and people talked of him all the time!—where these men moved and lived, entirely free, who had done that upon her mother, her gentle mam, while baby Branza slept silent, hidden, in the same room.
Urdda bowed her head. Before her along the table-edge lay five small figures, the largest—snipped from the funeral black—in the middle, with two of the bride-white on either side. Men, they were, all five; trousered men standing legs apart and arms wide, taking up as much space as they could. Her mind struggled like a bogged cow in all she had learnt. She took a pin from the paper lying near, and anchored the black cloth man to the table by his privates. She took another pin, and fixed a white man by his. Three more pins she took; three more figures she fastened down.
She stood and walked around the table. She took the heavy cloth from Liga’s hands and lap and lifted it to the table. She knelt in front of her, laid her own head in place of the work, and encircled Liga’s waist with her arms. She held on tightly, pushing as if she would push through Liga’s stomach wall and back into her womb if she could.
Liga’s hands were in her curls, and stroking her face. ‘Look what came out of it all, though, out of such a dire event: my Urdda! How many good years of Urdda I would have missed, had it never happened. Think of that.’
‘How can you walk!’ Urdda whispered fiercely. ‘How can you smile—I have seen you—you smile at Widow Fox in the market! How can you stop yourself saying, Your son—your precious son—did this to me when he were younger!’
‘Widow Fox is not to blame. And her boy himself I have seen, him and Thurrow Cleaver and—They are none of them the same lads as they were. They are never two of them together, for one. I think they do not like to remind themselves what they goaded each other on to do.’
Goaded each other on. Urdda would be sick with loathing them so much. ‘But—’
‘And neither will you speak to any of them, while I live—or any wife, or any relative of theirs. Or to Branza, or Annie, or anyone, of this. I forbid it, Urdda, do you hear? It is I have been sinned against, and I say, leave the thing. It is old news and gone, and I will not have it stirred up again and chattered about by all St Olafred’s. Promise me.’
Urdda blurted some form of agreement into the cloth at Liga’s hip. By now she had all but crawled behind her mother on the chair. Should she scream or should she weep? Should she beat Mam with her fists or should she forbid her ever to move outside this room, outside Urdda’s own arms, for her own safety?
‘Girl, girl!’ Liga retrieved her from her crawling, hoisted her up. Urdda remembered being held so in the passionate rages of her childhood, her hot face twisting with emotion, curls straying down into her eyes, her mother’s hands cool and dry against her cheeks, her mother’s kisses solving nothing, mending nothing.
‘It is over, Urdda,’ Liga said now. ‘It was over and gone long ago, my sweet. It was dreadful when it happened, to be sure, but the years have been so many and so kind since then, they have more than made up for my hurts. And I would never choose life without my wild girl over life without what happened that day.’
‘That is . . . an impossible choice!’ Urdda burst out. ‘How can you not? How can you not want to kill—’
But Liga covered Urdda’s mouth and kissed her again, and shushed her, and said her name, and would not stop shushing. Urdda fell to bitter weeping, there in her mother’s skirts, while Liga murmured and stroked her.
Branza and Lady Annie brought their laden baskets up the hill, Branza laughing at some rude remark Annie had made for her entertainment. Up ahead, her sister stepped out the widow’s door into the street. ‘Urdda,’ cried Branza, ‘what is it?’ For there was something urgent and furtive about her sister’s movements. ‘Where are you off to alone?’
‘Walking,’ said Urdda, fending off their approach with her shoulder. Then she strode away.
‘But I will come with you!’ Branza thrust her basket blindly towards Lady Annie.
‘Leave her go,’ said the old lady, taking the basket and Branza�
�s hand with it.
‘But what can have happened?’ Branza tried to go, but the widow held her firmly, and Branza did not want to pull the lady over by insisting. ‘She knows not to walk out by herself. She has told me often enough.’
‘If she wanted to tell you, she would of flang herself upon your neck right then, child,’ Annie said. ‘Let us take ourselves inside and see how is your mam. Open the door, now.’
‘Mam?’ called Branza as soon as they were inside, and in her worriment she left Annie to manage both baskets while she hurried to the sewing-room door.
Her mother lifted a serene face to her, although there was something hard-won about the serenity: some weariness about the eyelids, some dutifulness about the smile.
‘What has happened,’ cried Branza, ‘that Urdda is rushing out by herself, and all red-eyed from crying?’
‘We have been talking.’
Annie came to Branza’s elbow. A look passed between her and Liga, and Branza felt a flash of annoyance at her that she knew, that Mam knew she knew, that they were conspiring to keep whatever it was from Branza.
‘And both of us became upset,’ said Liga. ‘That is all.’
‘Why? What were you talking about?’
The striving of Liga’s face intensified, but she remained calm. ‘Nothing you need worry about, angel girl. I do not wish to talk about it more. How was Ramstrong today, and his little ones?’
Then Liga rose and put aside her work, and patted Branza’s arm where she stood, ready to embrace and console and evince more anxiety. ‘Annie, you will be ready for a cool drink,’ Liga said. And with studied cheerfulness, she passed into the hall, ready to admire and discuss their baskets full of purchases.
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