The Tangled Forest

by Marion Grace Woolley

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I wish I had been your true love, but I’m sure she will come soon enough.”

  His lip curled and he gave no reply as he left.

  As soon as I was sure he was gone, I took another path back to town. I had no desire to see him again that night, and even less to stumble across a second boy from the town who might be thrusting his luck in the forest.

  The path I took was nought but a deer trail, overgrown with bracken and brambles. Once or twice, thorns caught my ankles until I stopped to rub at them. The little path wound to the top of a hill before falling back down to the square. Though the hill wasn’t as high as my mother’s ledge, it still provided a grand view of the town below, with its blazing bonfire and all of those flickering lamps. It was also close enough that you could still hear the music.

  As I approached the peak, I saw a shadow. Someone sat on the grass, watching the scene below. I heard a low growl and stopped.

  When I heard my name, I realised that it was my childhood friend.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, though it was plain as day.

  “I like to watch the lights,” he said.

  No longer afraid, I went to sit by his side. The air was alive with the roar of drunken men, the screeches of giddy women, and the crazed strings of a fiddle.

  “Why don’t you come down the hill?” He shook his head. “Why not? There is such food down there. Chicken so tender you could drown in its juices. Potatoes both fluffy and crisp, dripping with butter and melted cheese. Flagons of ale strong enough to topple you over. Wouldn’t you like that?” When he responded again with silence, I asked: “Wouldn’t you like to dance with me?”

  “We could dance here,” he said.

  “We could, but it would be more fun to dance down there.”

  “I don’t like townsfolk.”

  I pulled strands of long grass and began plaiting them in my lap.

  “Why don’t you like townsfolk?”

  “They don’t like me.”

  I tied a loop at the top of my stems.

  “I’ve never seen you in town. How can they dislike someone they never see?”

  He simply stared down at the scene below. I took my plaited grass and used it to tickle the side of his brow until he swotted it away.

  “Why aren’t you away chasing women through the woods?” I asked. “That’s where all the other men are.” He made no reply, so I continued. “I’ve only ever seen you with the Woman in the Woods. Don’t you have any friends?”

  He looked at me, hurt. “You are my friend.”

  “I’ve always been your friend,” I said, taking his hand and squeezing. “But don’t you have others?”

  “The wren, and the chaffinch, the otter and the stoat. Those are my friends.”

  “Mine too,” I confessed.

  I stood and pulled him up beside me. He looked large and awkward in the half-light. Taking one of his paws, I placed it about my waist, holding the other in my hand. It was clear he did not know what to do, so we simply swayed gently in time to the drums. I rested my cheek against his chest, and he rested his chin on the crown of my head.

  We were asleep long before the music stopped, curled up in the grass as we always lay. When I opened my eyes it was daybreak, a slim scorch of red across the horizon, the sun’s bannermen marching to battle. My friend’s sleeping form lay beside me, and for a moment I allowed myself to watch him. His steady breathing like the blacksmiths’ bellows, the shaggy hair across his brow which the witch never seemed to cut, the rough touch of is chin, as though coated in sand. I remembered the time he had kissed my cheek and repaid him whilst he slept.

  I left him sleeping whilst I followed the path down to town. I would buy two fresh buns from the baker and take one back to him. I had not eaten all night and my stomach called revolt.

  Part way down, the path turned through a copse. It had once been part of the main woods, until those trees retreated, leaving them cut off from their battalion. The morning light was just starting to draw their shadows from the dark. As I followed the trail on its winding way, I thought that I could hear something.

  A breath, or a sigh, perhaps.

  Curious, I followed that sound.

  There, between the trees, bent over a low branch, was my mother. Between her legs, the woodcutter thrashed like a man possessed. He held back her hair, pushing himself deeper until her sighs became muted cries of pleasure.

  I wished I had never seen what I saw. I tried to tear my eyes away, but could not make them move. Closing them, I turned myself around and ran swiftly up the hill. I tumbled and tripped, and eventually made my way back to my sleeping friend. Yet I did not stop. I continued straight past him, all the way home.

  Every step I took felt like the branch shaking beneath my mother. My stomach retched when I thought how close I had come to bedding the woodcutter’s son. How much worse it might have been to see his father with my mother then. Not that anything made this right.

  How could my mother take a married man to her breast? How long had she been doing that? How often did they meet?

  As these questions flew through my mind, I remembered those nights as a child when I had slept by myself at Grandmother’s. The nights my mother would come home at dawn, smelling strangely of other places. I realised with certainty that this was no May Feast folly, but something which had been going on most of my life.

  When I reached home, I sat in the chair by the window, looking out at the woods. This is where my mother had sat all those days of winter. Now I think I knew what she had been watching for. Only, when I looked out of the glass, all I could see was my mother emerging from the forest with a skip to her step and a song on her lips.

  Throwing clothes into a sack, I decided to head to the Woman in the Woods. I left a note for my mother, saying that I had gone to pick gillyflowers and would be back in three days. I needed time to consider what I had seen, and to know what to say when eventually we met.

  10

  The way through the woods seemed harder than usual. The season brought fresh growth. Vines trailed lower and roots paved the forest floor. I put my hand out more than once as I tripped.

  When I found my way to the witch’s door, my friend was outside, soaping his hair in a pail of water. Proudfoot stood beside him, far enough from the splashes. My friend looked up when the cat mewed.

  “She’s not here,” he said, as I approached.

  It annoyed me that it was so obvious I was looking for the witch and not him. I put my bag down on the step and threw him the towel beside it, so that he might rub his hair.

  “Do you know when she will return?”

  He shrugged, and then asked what was wrong with me. “You look like you’ve swallowed a spider.”

  I thought to tell him it was nothing, buying myself time to think. Instead, I asked whether he had ever seen people in the woods.

  “There’s people in those woods all the time,” he replied.

  “No, I mean couples. People,” I paused. “People making love.”

  “Aye, all the time.”

  His bluntness upset me.

  “You watch them, these people?” He shrugged as he wiped water from his shoulder. “Have you ever seen my mother with the woodcutter?”

  “Now and then,” he replied, rubbing the back of his head more slowly. “I saw you once, an’ all.”

  “Me?”

  “With the woodcutter’s son.”

  “We never— I never—”

  “You came close enough.”

  I felt my cheeks flare. I knew I had been right when I thought we were being watched.

  “You shouldn’t watch people!” I said. “They come to the woods for privacy.”

  “As does your mother, yet you ask me about her.”

  These were the most words my friend and I had ever exchanged and they were beginning to sound like an argument.

  I took my bag into the house and stretched out on the witch’s bed.

/>   When I awoke, it was evening and her tall figure floated between the table and the cupboards, laying out plates.

  “How long do you intend to stay?” she asked, inclining her head towards my bag.

  “Only a few days.”

  “What are you running away from?”

  “I’m not running away from anything,” I lied.

  “Well, you look like you’re hiding out.” She stared at me, and I did my best to stare back. “Very well, if you don’t wish to tell me your business, you don’t have to, but you can’t take my bed. I’m old and my back is sore. You can sleep on those rugs by the fire.”

  It wasn’t until the second day that I spoke of what I had seen. I waited until my friend had gone into the woods, and there was only myself and the witch in the garden. She was plucking a pigeon and I was scrubbing my knuckles raw on laundry.

  “I saw my mother in the woods with the woodcutter,” I said.

  “That’s the reason you’re here?”

  “I needed time to think.”

  “It shocked you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “She is my mother.”

  “Your mother is not a woman? She must have been once upon a time to have you.”

  “The woodcutter is a married man.”

  “Is it that she fornicates, or who she fornicates with?” I found that an impossible question to answer, so I concentrated on scrubbing harder. “The woodcutter is a distasteful man, I’ll give you that. I’d be none too pleased at hearing any woman had sullied her reputation with that one. Yet, we want what we want. Desire is a beast. Best let her get on with it and pretend you never knew.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “You have a stubborn will,” she replied. “You found my house, though I hid it. You sought out your friend, though you were told you would never see him again. You turned down the woodcutter’s son, though the town would have rejoiced at your marriage. You can do whatever you please.”

  I rubbed that laundry until my hands ached.

  That night, after the witch had taken to her bed, I went to walk in the Western Woods. I wanted space to think. My feet led me beneath the crabapple and I sat with my back pressed against it and my eyes closed. Sound travels fastest after dark, and soon I heard my friend approach. He walked softly through the forest, and perhaps it was less the sound he made than a sense of his presence.

  When I opened my eyes, he was standing a little way off, between the trees.

  “Always spying in the woods.”

  “I’m not spying on you. I came to see you were all right.”

  “I’m always all right in these woods.”

  My friend was bare chested and cloaked in shadow. His skin was once again spiralled in clay, old patterns I had sometimes seen woven into rugs and embossed on decorative plates. I wondered how he knew of those symbols. If they had meaning, I wished to know it.

  “You have lived here all this time,” I said softly. “Yet you never once came to visit me.” When he made no reply, I asked why.

  “Why should I follow you, when you did not stay with me?”

  “I could not stay with you,” I said, my eyes hot. “My mother had me by the hand, she would have carried me home. Did you not see, though? Did you not know how much it hurt to be parted?”

  “You speak as though I do not feel.”

  “Then you felt it too?” I stood, and he drew back into darkness. “I searched for you for so long. I walked the woods every day hoping to see your face. Were you watching?” He stepped onto the path then, and once again I saw the bead about his neck. “You never once came to me, and when eventually I found you, you would not speak with me.”

  “I did not have words.”

  “The Woman in the Woods told me you felt ashamed. Is that true?” He glanced down at the earth and I saw that it was. “It is I who should be ashamed.”

  “What have you to be ashamed of?” he asked.

  “I gave my first kiss to find you. Paid it like a penny to the tollman.”

  “To find me?”

  “I didn’t know the way. Each time I tried to find the Woman in the Woods, I fell asleep and would find myself right back at my own front door. The woodcutter’s son showed me the way, but he took something in return. A first kiss is a precious gift. It is something we only get once. It should be given, not stolen.” He came a little closer, and I raised my head. “I would have given that kiss to you. Would you have taken?”

  “Don’t talk of such things,” he said, turning away.

  I bent to pick up a stone, throwing it between his shoulders.

  “I tell you everything, and you walk away—”

  He was before me, anger in those dark eyes. My hands were pinned above my head and his hot breath scalded my face. I felt his chest heave against mine as his breath slowed, lowering his forehead against mine. His grip loosened, and I freed one hand, trailing it down his neck to the jewel at his throat.

  “You have known me all my life,” I whispered. “Yet I know nothing of you.”

  As he straightened, my hand slid from his throat to his heart. I could feel it beating, strong and assured.

  “I am not meant for this world,” he said. “Better you had never found me.”

  “Is that what you want? That I should leave and never return?”

  In the silence of that moment, I felt afraid. His anger did not scare me, for I believed he would never harm my flesh. Yet the quiet sliced like a knife. He meant to sever our bond. To cast me adrift without him.

  “Fine. I’ve done with you!” I cried, pushing him away. “I wish I had never seen your face at our window. I wish the lightning had struck you down. I wish you’d drowned out there beneath that tree. You’re nothing to me anymore.”

  I marched through the woods without looking back. Tears cut my cheeks and the hidden creatures of the forest ran for their holes. My mother, the woodcutter’s son, and now my friend had all betrayed me. I could rely on no one but myself.

  As the lights of the witch’s cottage came into view, one last surprise awaited me.

  *

  I thought I recognised her voice, but was not certain until I crept up to the cottage door. Careful not to be seen, I peered in. The Woman in the Woods sat with her back to me, and her guest at an angle that kept me from view.

  “The same as before,” the woodcutter’s wife said. “It did the job well enough. Another vial of that is all I need.”

  “Who is it this time?” the witch asked.

  “Another of my husband’s little whores. Does it matter?” I heard the chink of silver as the stepmother threw a velvet purse to the floor. The witch bent in her chair to collect it. “You know I always pay well.”

  “You always pay well, but you ask a lot,” the witch replied.

  “Will you do it, yea or nay?”

  “Yea, I’ll do it.” I drew back further against the wall as the witch got to her feet and fetched a black bottle from the shelf. “Here you are. Pennyroyal potion.”

  “If only it truly cost a penny. My husband will ruin us at this rate.”

  “Why do you never ask me for a potion to dampen his ardour?”

  “And have him lay about the house all day like a fat old gib? No, thank you very much. Besides, I still have use for his passion from time to time.” The witch shrugged and tipped the coins into her lap to count them. “What about the other matter? That’s payment enough for both.”

  “What had you in mind?”

  “Whatever will keep her away from my son. She’s trouble, just like her mother. She’ll be spreading her legs for another as soon as he turns his head. I shan’t have my house sullied by that sort. We may not be rich, but we have wealth enough, and I’m damned before I see her grubby hands on my hard-earned money.”

  “What makes you think she intends to marry him?”

  “I can’t be certain, but I shall not risk it. How about an apple? The Wicked Queen had the right id
ea. Or perhaps she could walk over the ledge one night, with the moon behind a cloud.”

  “You are asking me to take her life?”

  “Take her life, take her youth, take her beauty. Take one of those and be done with it.”

  As the woodcutter’s wife rose from her chair, I ran to the back of the house to hide in the garden. I knew that I should not have heard what I did. That spiteful woman had come to place a curse on me. As soon as I heard her retreat, I went to make my own way home. I didn’t care about my belongings, I would leave them there in that house and never return.

  As I went towards the path, the witch appeared before me.

  “You were listening,” she said.

  “I heard nothing.”

  “Do not lie to me, girl. You know exactly what was said. You have made a vicious enemy.”

  “I have done nothing to her, yet she would take everything from me.”

  “That is the nature of enemies, their hate blinds them to reason.”

  “And you would help her.”

  “Did I say as much?”

  “You took her money.”

  “She gave me money, and she gave me orders. I gave her a bottle in return.”

  “A ridding potion.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should I trust a woman who steals the breath from babes?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Be careful how you speak to me.”

  “Whilst I wait to see which you will take, my beauty, my youth or my life?”

  “Enough,” she said. I felt as though the air had punched me from within. All of my words left me. “You may choose to trust me or not, and I may choose to change my mind. You should go from here.”

  *

  Three moons passed and my world could not have been lonelier.

  Each morning I woke and looked at my reflection in the mirror to check that my skin had not aged, or that I was buck-toothed and pimple-ridden. The Woman in the Woods had not cursed me yet.

  I stayed away from town for fear of passing the woodcutter’s wife. I did not want her to see my rosy glow of health, lest she return to the witch to demand satisfaction.

  I no longer felt my friend’s presence when I walked in the woods. My heart was fractured by the thought of his cold rejection. I did not know what I had said to turn him against me, but I knew my parting words had wounded him. Many nights I lay awake, wishing we were children again. All of this because I had offered a kiss. When we were children, we could lie naked together and it would not have occurred to me to kiss him.