Sourdough and Other Stories

by Angela Slatter

  ***

  ‘He will return, you know.’

  Dowsabel looked tired and old. She sat back in the armchair and pulled a knitted rug over her lap. I gave her a mug of tea; scents of cinnamon and ginger rose from it. Night had fallen and my ankle was strapped tight. I curled into a seat across the fire from her, hands wrapped around my own beverage—this one steeping herbs to numb pain.

  I shook my head. ‘He has no reason to—unless you put him under a spell,’ I said archly. ‘All big eyes and wide smiles, glamouring him so.’

  ‘Is that the thanks I get?’ she laughed. ‘For saving your worthless hide, little witch?’

  ‘A familiar! As if I’m a cat or a toad an old woman carries around in her pocket!’ I took umbrage at that slight. ‘Did you know? When first I came?’ I asked, curious. I had not known her for what she was. Now here we were, our secret selves exposed.

  She shook her head. ‘Not at first, Patience. No, not at first, but when the animals began to prosper I suspected. When the apples kept coming, I knew.’

  ‘Why did you not cast those spells yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Those are not my magics,’ she explained, astonished by my ignorance. ‘What did your mother teach you?’

  I stared at my hands; they looked so harmless just holding that cup.

  ‘Revenge,’ I said and told her my life, letting it spill out, from my unconventional birth to the recent blood on those self-same hands.

  She was quiet for a while. ‘My strength lies in glamours, in making people see what I want them to see.’ She caught my look and laughed. ‘Oh, not on you! You’d peer straight through that. Our kind knows very quickly when she’s being glamoured—we do not react well to a rosy view of the world! It makes us suspicious.’

  I snorted.

  ‘And you punished the town?’

  I nodded. ‘The innocent and the guilty, it seems.’

  ‘And your mother escaped?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘She knew the roads—the other roads. Never taught me though,’ I muttered as memories of Wynne forced themselves to the surface, ‘left me behind to wander this world.’

  ‘Perhaps her time here was done. And not everyone, Patience, can walk those roads. There’s only a select few of our kind who know the ways through and the paths in between, and are strong enough for those journeys.’ She reach across the gap between our chairs and patted my hand. ‘Your mother couldn’t take you with her.’

  ‘Will she come back?’

  Dowsabel shook her head. ‘Step through the door and there is no returning. You pass by only once.’

  I nodded, unsure whether to grieve or not. The few days I’d begged of Dowsabel had stretched, as if by magic into weeks, then months. I’d grown comfortable with a life in one place. The hole Wynne left had been quickly filled by my new friend. I had, I must admit, almost forgotten that I once had another mother. A life of hardship was softened and faded by the time I spent at the manor, and happy remembrances of myself as Wynne Sykes’ daughter were few and far between. In my mind a new dam superimposed herself over the old: Dowsabel, kindly and caring, who never let me go hungry, who did not teach me to turn my skills into strange arts, who did not need me to hate and mistrust the world around me.

  I’d known my life had been hard, but it was all I’d known. I realised that it had been an existence of deprivation, but I’d had nothing else to judge it by and thus find it wanting. Soft cats, my mother used to sneer at other people and I’d agree with her. Now I slept in a feather bed. I had more than one dress (Dowsabel’s cast-offs, but better than my one gown with fabric so old that in places black had faded to green). I was warm and I was fed. I wore pliable leather boots Dowsabel said were too small for her. I no longer needed my feet filthy and bare to warn me that vibrations in the road meant a cart or carriage or horses so I should hide in the undergrowth; that damp soil might mean good crops, but I would leave a trail if I stole from an orchard.

  I had found comfort and care and I had no desire to leave it. I thought perhaps I might fit into a normal sort of life, become a normal sort of girl. I wanted, heaven help me, to be a normal sort of girl. I did not want to practise the dark things I was so used to; I did not think to use magic for harm anymore. Dowsabel taught me lessons that almost took.

  She had stopped speaking but, involved in my own thoughts, I did not realise it until she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Come. Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘It’s late and you’re tired and my ankle hurts,’ I complained.

  ‘And yet this must be done by moonlight. Come along, little liar, little witch.’

  I pouted but complied. She linked her arm with mine as we walked through the overgrown garden and across the fields beneath an autumn moon. I exaggerated my limp and she laughed. The smell of apples was strong on the breeze.

  ‘That man,’ she said once again, ‘will come back. I saw the look on his face and I saw the look on your face. He will come a-courting.’

  ‘Who is Gideon Cotton when he’s at home?’ I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.

  ‘His father,’ she said pointedly, ‘was a judge and on the town council—as you well know. Gideon has been studying law, although I think now he will take his father’s position if he has not already done so. Bitterwood does love its lawgivers.’

  ‘I killed his parents,’ I repeated so we might both hear it aloud and remember.

  ‘And his younger brother,’ she reminded.

  ‘I’m a murderess,’ I said.

  ‘He doesn’t know that.’

  ‘One day, he will see it in my face.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how much you can hide from a man, Patience, and for how long.’ We stopped at a tightly clustered copse, just before the hedgerows began. ‘What do you see?’

  I glanced around and up. ‘Sky, moon, trees.’

  ‘Look down. What there?’

  I stared at the ground. Beneath the thick grass I could see the earth had been churned and dug over, not recently, but its disarray was evident to my night-eyes. I peered deep and found the rotting corpse, a man by the look of the clothes, worms still playing in his flesh.

  Dowsabel breathed: ‘Do you see him?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I thought as much,’ she said with satisfaction.

  ‘Is he your husband? Did you do it?’

  ‘No and yes. It was many years before my parents would let me marry, would let me leave them—you can see I am not in the first flush of youth! On my way to my wedding I was . . . stolen by the man who lived here. Something in him made him proof against my power. Somehow he saw through and I could not change him.’ She shook her head. ‘By the time my family found me I was thoroughly ruined. I could have gone home but to what purpose? What place? I was his whore whether I willed it or no. I stayed here because I thought I deserved nothing better.’

  ‘What happened? Is he the baby’s father?’

  She nodded. ‘I stayed. I stayed for five years and never fell pregnant. He drank. One night not so long ago he hit me once too often. I grabbed a candlestick—one of those silver ones you polish so assiduously—and hit him back. I almost panicked, almost ran, but I remembered what I could do, how most people do not look beyond the glamours I put in front of them. I thought on how few visitors came, how badly they regarded this house. Only Gideon’s father asked me where my husband was and no one questioned me after I’d said he’d gone away. I thought then perhaps I could go home but . . .’

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘Would your family not take you back?

  ‘Before I was simply ruined, but to bring them a child—proof of my whoring? No, I would not do that, to either them or myself. Or the child.’

  We turned away and walked back to the warmth of the manor. I wondered that she could continue living there after what had happened to her. Perhaps sensing the direction of my thoughts, she said, ‘I earned this house. No matter what happened to me here—or per
haps because of it. It’s the one place I have that is mine.’

  ***

  The days turned in upon themselves, the nights lengthened and winter threatened to oust autumn without making good. Dowsabel said I must stay (as if I ever looked like leaving!) for it was not safe to take to the roads with such weather coming on. There would be snow and I would be lost. I did not tell her I had lived through worse, that Wynne and I had tramped through snow drifts that sometimes rose above our heads. We had come so close to freezing that I knew death did not have a chill breath, but a hot one that made you feel consumed.

  I thanked her and agreed to stay, telling her she was right.

  She was right, too, with much smugness, about Gideon.

  He returned many times, always with gifts: flowers, jewellery, ribbons. He paid me attention and listened when I spoke. I had known men before, when starvation threatened and survival left no other courses. They had meant nothing, but a heart unused to kindness is an easy victim for love.

  ‘The witch,’ I said to him tentatively. Our bodies were still slick with each other’s sweat and I could taste him on my lips. I ran my fingers across the broad bas-relief of his chest, then down the tight stomach muscles until his hand stopped mine and I grinned.

  ‘I swear, Patience, you are insatiable.’

  ‘I did not hear you complaining before,’ I said pertly.

  ‘Not a complaint, my darling, merely an observation and a plea for respite so I may gather my strength.’ The fingers of his other caressed my shoulder and his lips moved against my hair. I could feel him breathing deeply, taking in the scent of me. Even though I was without the magic of glamour, the art of seduction served me equally well.

  I kissed his chest and angled my head to look at him, slanting my eyes.

  ‘The witch,’ I repeated unable to let the subject go. ‘What was her crime? Had she harmed anyone?’

  ‘She was found cutting a hand from a gallowscrow.’

  ‘And?’ I asked, all innocence as if I had not been trained to do the very same thing. ‘She’d not actually done anything?’

  ‘She hardly needed to, her intent was very clear.’ His tone became impatient. ‘They take the limbs and make foul things—hands of glory. A candle is placed on each finger and once lit, it will put all those who slumber into the deepest of sleep. Not a one of them can wake while the witch enters the house and does what she will, murdering people in their beds. She’d have used it herself or sold it to some blackguard.’

  My mother would have used the hand to steal, certainly, never to kill though, not without provocation at any rate.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, lamely.

  ‘Her kind are a blight on this earth.’ He was warming to his theme; I felt anger coursing through him. He could not realise how all women are, in one way or another, ‘her kind’, even his dear departed mother. ‘Three members of my family are dead by her hand and they had done nothing.’

  Mother and brother blameless, perhaps, but Father had reaped his just reward.

  I kept my own ire in check, felt it balanced by sadness that this would always be between us. ‘I know, my heart, I know. You are right.’

  I tasted my own lies and found them rich and rotten. I rose up over him and put my mouth to his, distracting him the best way I knew how, thinking it was love.

  ***

  I wondered where he told his remaining family (two sisters, one other brother, I was advised by Dowsabel) he went when he came to me. He would not have been honest. I knew enough of men to divine there was never marriage in his plans; I was not fool enough to think that.

  Dowsabel informed me of the milk-pale girl his father had chosen for him, the priest’s niece (some whispered his daughter, but not too loudly), and a very suitable match. When Dowsabel went into the town for the things we could not make or grow ourselves, people talked around her if not to her. She gleaned her knowledge thus, picking through the chatter and taking what interested her as if selecting the best grains from the chaff. She told me, too, when their wedding date had been set.

  I would tease Gideon about it. Ask him how he would give me up when he’d wed his betrothed. He did not like to speak of it and did not like to be tormented, but I did not stop. Deep inside I wanted to be a chosen girl. Deep inside it made me angry that he assumed I would always be waiting for him. That the manor was a house of patient whores and I would be another woman as compliant as Dowsabel seemed. So my teasing had an edge and a heat and the longer he and I were together, the sharper I became in my pricking of him. More and more often he left in anger.

  One morning I made one of my infrequent trips in to the town. Dowsabel was unwell, coming so close to her time, and it appeared the effort of carrying the child had eaten all of her reserves. My friend looked like a ghost, a shadow, all of her vital force turned inward and sucked up by the parasite inside. She was craving honey cakes from the market. She was very pale when she sent me off.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I worried. She laughed, but the sound was weak.

  ‘Of course, little witch. I’ve not lived this long to shuffle off now. Go! I’ve a mind for those cakes.’

  A quick foray, I thought, straight to the stall and Mrs Hensley the baker’s wife, who didn’t look unkindly upon us. She often wore marks on her face, where Mr Hensley had written his displeasure. I handed her the bundle of herbs sewn into a small pillow no bigger than my hand (to take down swelling and suck the darkness out of bruises). She stuffed it quickly into the pocket of her apron and gave me a box of pastries in exchange.

  I turned to go and saw them across the square.

  Gideon, all swarthy-handsome, beside him a girl with the whitest hair I’d ever seen and a face untouched by any kind of hardship—it rendered her blank as a doll. She smiled at him and my heart twisted when he smiled back. Behind trailed his family.

  The oldest girl, Anna, in her early thirties, eyed everything and everyone unpleasantly, picking things up from trestle tables and putting them down again, finding them wanting as a matter of course. She was pretty but dissatisfaction had made thin roads on her face and piety had rendered her features hard as if to ruin their attraction. The younger one, Elise, not quite flowering, followed her sister’s lead and showed every sign of becoming another such a one. And the boy, Balthazar, not yet a man, still sullen; his eyes followed not just other women, but also his sisters and his brother’s betrothed.

  But I took that in quickly and all my attention returned to Gideon. The hardest thing you will ever see is your lover with the ones who possess him. The worst thing you will ever feel is the knowledge that you do not own him, that he will never be yours and that you have only ever been loaned a tiny part of him. That he is too much a coward to love you fully and openly; that you will always be hidden like a dark secret; and that as long as you let him, he will continue this way because he has everything and he cares not a jot that you have nothing but that which he deigns to give. And if you are lucky, oh so lucky, you will realise this and, though it breaks your heart, you will choose to walk away. You will leave him to a pallid existence and he will live forever with your contempt painted on his soul. That is the only power you ever have.

  He felt my eyes upon him and I watched as he looked about for me; found me; blinked; looked away. There is always a point where lovers fail each other, one or the other or both. Funny how it feels like a broken heart will kill you, and it will if you let it; the milk-bride would have curled up and died, but I was not that sort of girl.

  ***

  The manor was deathly quiet when I stepped inside.

  I found Dowsabel upstairs in her room. She was sitting in a pool of blood, leaning against the bed she had failed to reach when the pains began.

  I lifted her with difficulty and helped her lie upon the coverlet. Terror settled in my chest as I followed her gasped instructions. She was too old to be carrying this child. There was not enough life for both of them and in that moment as she lay gazing up at me, we both knew it.


  ‘Look after her,’ she begged, even though the babe had not yet shown itself to be girl or boy. She grasped my arm and held on with surprising strength. I nodded.

  ‘Promise me,’ she insisted and her desperation was awful. Her nails broke through my skin. ‘Say it. Say you will look after her and she will come to no harm. Promise it.’

  I nodded again. ‘I promise. I swear. But you will get well, Dowsabel, you will. Some moments of pain and then you will sleep and all will be well.’ Lies from my lips once more. She gave me a sad smile.

  She bled a lot during the birth. I knew only small things my mother had taught me, how to stem the blood, which herbs and mosses would stop the flow and reduce fever. But I didn’t know enough to save her, only enough to slow her death.

  The child came, a pale wight of a daughter, who mewled for her mother’s milk even as Dowsabel bled out. She held the baby weakly to her breast and the tiny girl latched on, sucking determinedly as if she knew time was short.

  Weeping, I stretched out on the bed beside my friend and stroked her hair. She gave me a frail, beautiful smile and named her daughter, ‘Olwen.’

  I slid one arm under Dowsabel’s head and curled the other over her to help hold the infant. We fell asleep that way.

  In the morning Dowsabel was as cold as the tears on my cheeks. Olwen wailed. I picked her up and held her close; she was hungry but I knew enough not to put her to her mother’s breast to see what she might drain from there. No child should drink from its mother’s death. I milked one of the cows and dripped the warm liquid into the baby’s eager mouth. She screwed up her face at the taste but drank nonetheless. Sated, Olwen slept.

  I washed my foster-mother’s body and laid her out, dressing her in her finest gown and then taking a long linen sheet and wrapping her around, but I did not cover her face. I did not want her to feel alone in that final darkness. I had not been able to perform this service for my own mother, but I was able to do it for Dowsabel and I felt in some way that I honoured them both. The simple rhythm of the offices of death gave me something to do, a way to distract myself.