The stink of years, Brona supposes. Loneliness. Desperation.
She doesn’t force matters. She will exchange favours with whoever comes knocking, and will take no more than her due — knowing that service and offering must be commensurate in value.
“Leeches,” she’d said, earlier this evening, to the maids who’d appeared on her doorstep. Two freckle-faced women, neither cunning. Steeped in the same stench that shoos potential lovers away. “Plucked from the deepest heart of the Grumnamagh — nowhere else. Bring as many as your legs can carry.”
The pair had wanted to grumble, to negotiate — to debate! Brona had seen complaints in the slit of their gazes. But they’d taken the jars she’d forced on them, did as they were bid. A favour for a favour.
None would survive in the village, the cunning woman knows, if it wasn’t for her.
If it wasn’t for her, the bogs would be full.
Her gait assumes its usual cadence as she circumnavigates the fire. A few logs cupped in the packed-dirt floor, nestled deep. The cottage’s pulsing heart, a blackened pot bubbling above its embers. She pads her hands with old linens, unhooks the cauldron. As always, it thuds to the ground between her mangled feet, much too heavy to carry when full. Grunting, she drags it behind her, over to the washtub discreetly kept behind a hazelrood screen.
Dried muck covers everything back here. Timber, tub and skin alike are stained a rich, rusty brown. Brona crouches, groaning, knees popping, and ladles scalding water into the bath, basting the contents.
Souls too, she thinks, fingernails tracing concentric lines onto the soaking leather. Round and round, she gouges targets for the leeches to grasp and suckle. Souls are definitely circular. Here and gone and back again, never-ending.
She sings under her breath while kneading the skin, keeping it supple and loose. The ladle dips in and out of the pot, splashes, washes, but does not clean. Brona wipes a grimy forearm across her brow, looks up at the dusty handprints smacked all over the walls. Tiny markings, so tiny. Evidence of a toddler’s gumption and stubbornness. If I can’t go outside to play in the mud, those handprints said, then I’ll make a sty in here.
How many times had she slapped his greedy palms? Rapped his knuckles? “No, a chuisle. It’s raining. No, my heart. It’s too cold. No, my Cavan. You must remain with me.”
Cavan, she thinks, splashing, scooping. Cavan, my little hollow one.
Maybe tomorrow he’ll help her to scrub it all away.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Nightjars squawk above the Grumnamagh. Pestering, scolding the maids for disturbing their slumber. And for singing so off-key.
“We’re going to have scars. Hundreds of them,” M’Amie moans, yet again, between verses. The old hag’s song sloshes in her mouth, the words nonsensical slurping. Brona had said it wouldn’t hurt a bit, but M’Amie knew she lied. Some swore the leeches of the Grum had tiny, tiny teeth. She winces at the sting of them on her legs, at her unwilling companion’s splashing and scowling. The leeches must be paining her, too.
“I’m sure she could get rid of them — who knows at what price, though. You keen on asking?” Cora sounds both sly and aggrieved, as if what they want should be given free of charge. That’s Cora all over.
M’Amie curses as she slices a toe. For a minute, she concentrates on placing her feet carefully. Hard somethings bump against her shins, scratch her calves. Twigs, maybe. Weeds. She plunges a hand into the blackness. Withdraws it, clutching tiny, naked bones. Evidence of drowned rabbits, she hopes. Stupid, innocent rabbits.
Released, the sepia-stained fragments land with a plop.
Moonlight makes M’Amie and Cora’s white, white legs glow, beacons for the leeches. With her petticoats drawn up between her thighs, plump knees bobbing in and out of the bog, M’Amie clinks with each step. The empty jars in her satchel must be filled before dawn. Before she has to get back to stoke the kitchen’s fires, and Cora has to make sure she does it. One night’s gathering, Brona had said, and they’d be square. The witch happy with her worms, and their own troubles gone. One night’s gathering, but a lifetime of tiny scars…
“Matthew will see them. He’ll know,” M’Amie says absently, eliciting a sound from Cora that’s half spit, half angry air. “He’ll know why.”
“Keep your skirts down for once,” Cora snaps. “Don’t present yourself so openly. In broad daylight, even. Every time he finds you bent over the luncheon plates… Do it in the dark, for God’s sake, and milord will be none the wiser.”
M’Amie rolls her eyes, wanting to laugh at Cora for calling scruffy-cheeked Matthew milord. She snorts, pretending a midge has got up her nose when Cora’s scowl deepens. It’s only right, she supposes, that the housekeeper use his title… After all, Cora’s not close to him the way M’Amie is, and she’s a shrew besides. Nearly thirty, her stomach still flat and her chest not much better — and no chance of either changing. Cora’s too old. Too stiff and formal. Married twelve years, womb ever as clean as the manor she sweeps, but still she claims she’ll give that peat-farmer husband of hers a second pair of hands to wield spades. But if he hasn’t managed to sow that quagmire by now, well, it’s just not going to happen, is it? Most likely she wants an excuse to get out of work. To lie in with a bub, nestling and feeding, and leave all the hard slog to the younger, fitter, prettier maids. But servants, M’Amie thinks, even housekeepers, don’t convalesce. They drop their little parcels, clean up their own messes before getting back to milord and milady’s needs.
Cora’s just snippy because she knows M’Amie has plenty of time. With her wide hips, heavy tits, and regular moons, M’Amie will always be fertile as a field after flood. As if that’s such a good thing. As if that’s such a boon.
But Cora doesn’t know, does she? She has no idea. The bounty of Matthew’s seed. How quickly it germinates, given the right conditions. She hasn’t got a clue how anxious M’Amie is for what’s growing to be gone… Cora, stiff, formal Cora, can’t possibly imagine what that yearning feels like. Wanting so badly to undo something that’s well and truly done.
So it was a surprise to find her at Brona’s cottage, blushing, begging a favour. M’Amie hadn’t heard what it was, but she could certainly guess. She’d giggled, seeing Cora so mortified, so debased. And the sound had caught the hedgewitch’s attention. It had attracted her glare.
With one look, Brona had gleaned what M’Amie wanted. One look, and the old woman was laughing.
“Look at you two,” she’d said, grasping their wrists, more firm than friendly. M’Amie and Cora didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead. “You know, if you’d had a quiet word with each other back at the house, you might’ve timed this better.” Brona had lifted an eyebrow at their silence. “I see,” she’d said, after the moment dragged long. “You must know that secrets shared are secrets no longer.” No response. “Good. That’s good.”
And as Brona told them what they were to do, what favours they could bestow, Cora and M’Amie had risked a sideways glance at one another. Knowing they would share naught.
Now, slopping through the Grum, her legs squirming black, M’Amie wonders if Cora thinks she visited the witch to advance herself. Or to buy a love potion? A ravishment spell? She grins, swallowing another snort. As if she’s not got natural charms enough to keep Matthew where she wants him. As if she’s the kind of girl who needs to resort to such tactics. She resumes her low chant, garbling, warbling. If she was that kind of girl she’d not be enlisting Brona to get rid of this babe. Maybe she’d be buying sweet-tasting poisons, treats for Matthew’s goodwife and his bright-haired son. If she was that type of girl. Maybe she’d be slipping bespelled drops into his eyes after he comes, when he’s soft and susceptible. To help him see her more clearly, to want her to be something more than a tumble taken whenever he fancies. If M’Amie was that kind of girl, she’d be doing much, much more than gathering poxy leeches beneath a witch’s moon.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Little bitch, l
ittle bitch, thinks Cora. In her head it’s a tune to rival the incantation she’s mouthing at the witch’s behest. Little bitch, little bitch, echo the nightjars.
Smarmy and smug, M’Amie is. Cora feels a bite, rips the bloodsucker from her hamstring before it gets too set in its suckling. Firm and healthy and brimming with — what? She tears another wyrm away, flicks it into a lidless jar. With time, answers a whisper, nagging from the back of her mind. Young, elastic, fresh-bellied time.
Cora stops singing. Drops a curse and a thumb-sized writher into silver-edged ripples.
“Start over,” M’Amie says, wading over to squint into Cora’s jar.
The housekeeper glares. “What?”
“The tune,” the maid explains, so smug, so smarmy. The moon casts weird shadows across M’Amie’s face, complicates it, but Cora can hear the girl’s expression. “If you mess it up—” M’Amie widens her mulish eyes, shakes her head derisively “—you have to start over. The whole thing, three times through — unbroken — for each friggin’ leech. If I have to do it proper, so do you.”
Little bitch. Won’t be so clever when that smooth chin turns to suet. When those cheeks sprout gin blossoms. When those tits start to droop no matter what she’s about, and she can’t stop it, and she finds she pisses her britches with every sneeze. When she’s no longer the ripe apple everyone wants to pluck. When her man starts looking elsewhere, just as Cora’s did and does.
Cole’s taken to calling her ‘The Burren’ when she comes abed late, late at night. That is, when he bothers calling her much at all. Woman. Wife. Burren. Never Cora, never a chuisle. Thinks a bit of wordplay makes him smart. As if his own name wasn’t perfectly apt.
Barren as the burren… Oh, the housekeeper knows what he’s getting at — but he’s wrong, of course. Cora’s not barren. She has it in her to bear life — she’s fallen pregnant more than a dozen times — she just can’t keep the babe inside long enough for it to thrive.
M’Amie, though, the self-centred thing, doesn’t have the faintest idea. She can’t fathom what it was like — surviving all those sad, wet, painful fiascos. Erasing their presence. Moving on. Ever-hoping. Silly bint, hasn’t been at the manor anywhere near long enough to know the years Cora swelled and failed. M’Amie hasn’t yet seen a winter in this county, four months she’s spent here more or less, and a lazier scullery maid Cora’s never seen, though she moved herself fast enough into his lordship’s good graces.
Little bitch, little bitch, let me come in. Oh, yes, while she’s pert and willing, milord will ever be at her door, finding her in the corridor, the cupboard, the kitchen. Tossing the skirts over her head as and when he pleases. And she, stupid slut that she is, somehow has the sense to keep letting him in.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Brona has watched for their return, feigning patience. A blurred path skirts through the dust, the floor foot-polished. She has waited, shuffling between the window, its glass obscured by cobwebs and marsh-spatter, and the hazelrood screen. When the maids appear, trying and failing to step carefully from sturdy tussock to tussock, trying and failing to stay out of the oily water, dawn is still some hours away. The cunning woman has had no sleep. She stands vigil, ever awake.
The women tap twice at the entrance, quiet as a heartbeat. Brona forces herself to wait until they knock again, then twists the knob too hard. “Quickly,” she says, ushering her supplicants in. “Close the door.” With shaking hands, she nudges them towards the rickety table. Her ears drink in the sound of full bottles clacking in the satchel M’Amie still carries.
“Put them here,” Brona says, pulling two jars from the girl’s grasp. Brona places them carefully down, as far from the table’s edge as possible. One jar, two, three — she reaches out, but there are no more.
Rather, she is given no more.
Cora and M’Amie stand, united for however brief a time, but united nonetheless. They hug the vessels to their chests, mouths set in identical determined lines.
“Give us what we came for, hedgewitch,” says M’Amie.
“Give us what we’re owed,” says Cora through gritted teeth.
“Gifts,” Brona reminds them. “Favours. Let there be no talk of owing.”
Her brain is fuddled and fuzzy with exhaustion. Through the glass, in the jars’ swirling myriad contents, she thinks she can see … can see … slinking, slithering forms, yes. But more, something more. A shape. A boy? So small, so small. Wispy, spinning. She catches strange glimpses, shadows spiralling around ghostly, slow-forming limbs. She blinks and the vision is gone.
Hallucinations, Brona thinks. Exhaustion.
She shakes her head.
“I’ve never broken a bargain,” she says. She points to a tidy shelf across the room where she laid the gifts out carefully, hours earlier. Piles of feverfue, baaras, cures for water elf disease. Two miniature clay tokens shaped like curled babes. A puddle of colourful silk ribbons.
At last, M’Amie hands over the satchel. Cora relinquishes the remaining bottles, and the two of them retreat to collect their due.
For a moment, Brona loses herself in arranging, lining up, assessing the trove. This will have to do, she thinks. It must be enough. It must. Behind her, the room has gone quiet.
“What now?” she asks, feeling the weight of two gazes. “You think I have nothing better to do than fuss about the roundness or flatness of your bellies? Wear the charms and the ribbons, steep the herbs in boiled water then drink it all down, every drop.” She recites an enchantment they must speak before and after the drinking, then gets them to repeat it. Brona thinks she gets it right — doesn’t care much if she hasn’t. No sooner does the spell leave her lips than it is gone from her mind. She does not watch them leave.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Come dawn, poisonous eels churn inside M’Amie’s gut. Stoats gnaw at her innards. Wasps sting her tender parts, burning and shredding. That’s some flushing Brona’s worked, she thinks, breath seething through clenched teeth. She balls up on her cot, hipbone scything into the thin mattress. A huge round softness prevents her from properly folding. Sweat-soaked, she unfurls, gritting through pain. She fumbles for candle and match. Eyes gummy and heavy-lidded, M’Amie squints against spark and flame. Squints and squints but cannot seem to focus, to clear away the big white blob that’s blocking all view of her thighs.
Bloody witch! M’Amie’s belly hasn’t gone down; it has bloated even further! She coughs and coughs, and coughs become sobs. Quiet, stifled whimpers. Inhuman snuffling. There are talons inside her. There are knives. Rocking back and forth, she wipes drips from her nose. Gapes, mouth pried but not moaning. Heaving silently at the sight. I look five months gone now, not two.
She feels the taut flesh, the stretched bulb of her middle, feels it chafing against her shift. Things move within her. Eels? Stoats? Wasps? No, no. Nightmares. An angry babe. Pangs lance through her, and now she moans. Loud and long. Like a poisoned cat, she’s filled with noxious gas, bile, putrescence. No matter how she farts, how she writhes, the sensation does not ease. And the stench! Mud and decay. Loam and wild garlic. Fungus. Things buried, unearthed.
M’Amie moves slowly, gingerly down the servants’ staircase and comes into the empty kitchen. Tonight, for the first time, she has avoided Matthew. Heavens forbid he see her — smell her! — like this. The hearth is cold, but the girl can’t make it to the fireplace, much less dig kindling from the bottom of the chip-box, or cast about for flint and steel. She stumbles, falls to her knees on Cora’s perfectly-swept tiles.
Cursed witch. Sped the child along instead of slowing… Instead of stopping it altogether! Between her thighs, there is wetness. Stickiness. It’s coming, she guesses, too afraid to check. No, please no. The liquid is warm and carries a tang of iron. Rats nibble on her intestines. A clot of maggots presses, pushes, roils to get out.
M’Amie can’t bear to look, can’t bear to see the baby’s crowning.
She crawls away from the hearth, towards the comfo
rt of the large pantry. A good place for a scullery maid to hide, she thinks. Dry and dark and safe. She makes a nest of apple sacks and bags of flour. Curls like a bitch on the hard floor to whelp her pup in secret.
She imagines the look on Matthew’s face when he realises what’s happened. What she’s done. Not the pregnancy. The trying to get rid of it.
With her face buried, cheeks grating against rough hemp, M’Amie howls.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Cora had gone from Brona’s hovel straight to her quarters. Straight to her own small corner of milord’s great manor, and into her husband’s bed. Convinced, at last, they’d conceive a child who would stay. Who would cling to her, and hold fast.
At first Cole is surprised by her enthusiasm. Then fervent. Eager. Delighted as Cora slides up and down on him. She isn’t dry tonight; her nethers don’t rasp against his. For once, this isn’t a brief, grunted rutting. Cora is liquid on top of him. She slurps and sloshes. Cole groans and moans with each glide of her. And he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts and hollers. Growls. Slaps.
“What is this, woman?” he shouts, punching her off of him. She splays on the bed while he scrambles away, scrubbing at his red-soaked cock, yanking up his red-soaked trousers. The feather bed, a wedding gift from Cora’s mother, is awash with crimson.
There should be no blood until a baby is born, she thinks, smearing the scarlet on her bloomers, staring at it blankly. Her husband retreats, head moving from side to side like a confused hound. Seeing the bewilderment on Cora’s face, Cole hesitates, and hope rises in her that he might, just this once, offer some sympathy. Some care. What he gives is his broad back. The door closing behind him as expressive as Cole is ever likely to be.
Cora inhales deeply, gathers herself. She has felt this before. Has no doubt she’ll experience it again. Down the hall, she grabs thick rags and a worn calico belt from the linen cupboard, into which she struggles, refusing to cry.
One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Page 4