Tender Morsels Read online

  All the tight watchfulness went out of Da when he felt for her that night. He clicked his tongue, and ‘Curse you filthy things,’ he said, but she felt him ease, and when she rose early to go and wash the rags at the stream again, he gave a certain satisfied sigh in his half-sleep.

  Four more moons went by. The breasts on her, plumped up by the baby—he liked those, she could tell, but she caught him looking her up and down sometimes when she straightened from tending the fire, looking her up and down and scowling.

  She collected her bloods a sixth time. This could not go on, she knew; she had felt the baby twitching in there, at first tiny and sudden as midge-larvae in a backwater, as if with joy, as if in play—and then not so tiny, quite solid and decisive in its movements; she could feel herself swelling, not just in body but in self, in happiness, with the pleasure of having a secret from him, a secret that mattered. It could not last; nothing she wanted for herself ever lasted.

  ‘Wait,’ he said from his bed next morning, and she knew it was over.

  ‘What?’ she said too carelessly, not like herself at all.

  ‘Show me that.’

  ‘Show you what?’

  ‘The rag of you. That you’re washing out.’

  She held up the balled rag, the dark blotches on it.

  ‘Bring it here.’

  She pretended disgust. ‘No, I’m to wash it!’

  He held out his hand.

  She went and put it in, and stood back a little.

  If he had not seen from the dried, browning blood, her guilty face would have told him. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘What does it look like?’ She lifted her chin.

  ‘It looks like last month’s blood. Is it last month’s?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She saw her own hands bleeding the bird last night, the bird they had eaten for supper.

  ‘It’s none of it fresh. Show me yourself.’

  ‘I shall not.’ She clutched her skirt to her legs.

  ‘Don’t come outrage at me, you little sneaking.’

  He pounced at her out of the bed. He was so heavy, but so quick; it always surprised her. There were two or three thuds and flashes and a jerking of her head, and he had pinned her breathless to the wall and upped her skirts and was holding the fresh rag away from her.

  ‘Not a drop.’ He dug the cloth into her and looked again. ‘Dry as a fecking bone.’

  He stood straight and looked in her face, satisfied, disgusted. Then he slapped her harder than he ever had. She lay still on the floor under the spinning air, thinking he had broken her face.

  ‘They say a good beating sometimes shakes ’em loose!’ he bellowed down at her. ‘They say a few kicks to the stomach!’ He only gave her the one, but she was sure it had worked. She lay curled around her disaster while he flung himself about and shouted.

  In time, he sank to the table, and muffledly said, ‘Where am I to get the money? . . . Feckun deceiving witch! . . . What were you thinking?’

  ‘And when you’ve done all that, sew me up a new shirt with the cloth I got you.’ He stood at the door with his bag of kill that he was off to town to sell. There was a hare in it, or a good-sized coney or two, the way it swung. He had a plan now; he was not despairing as he had the last few weeks since he had discovered about the bab.

  Liga bent to her sweeping. ‘I don’t know how,’ she said coolly. She did not know why, but she wanted to make trouble, for him and for herself. It was like thinking she must put her hand into the fire, that the pains and the blisters would be gratifying somehow.

  ‘Use the other. The other that’s fallen apart. Undo it and spread out the pieces flat. Then cut around them, and sew the new cloth together like the old was.’

  ‘There’ll be more to it than that, I’m sure.’

  ‘Have I got to clout you?’ He lunged at her. ‘Tib Stoner’s daughter that’s simple can do it. What’s up with you?’

  ‘All up the top there.’ She pointed at his chest. ‘Where it’s pinched like that. How do I do that?’

  ‘You think I know?’

  ‘Aagh,’ she breathed. ‘Just go, then.’

  ‘Do I look like a sempstress?’ he shouted in her ear. ‘Do I look like your ma? Have I a skirt and a bosom and a big round arse?’

  She turned and pushed him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Push me?’ He pushed her back—he was much bigger and stronger—and again, and again, until she was up against the chimneypiece, rolling her eyes, carefully not showing that her shoulder was smacked to bruises against the stone.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Your ale is waiting. Osgood has peed in it special.’

  He hit her hard, the back of his hand to the back of her head. She dreamed some shouting as she fell.

  She swam up from blackness into the noise of her blood pulsing, into the tight feeling of a bump to her forehead from the bench or the floor. He had gone; he was striding away, a small figure between the table- and bench-legs, in a doorway full of trees beginning to colour with autumn, and lowering sky.

  ‘Oh,’ said Muddy Annie. ‘It’s him again.’

  He stood in her doorway, all knotted up with emotions and posings. ‘I want to do business.’ He was trying to sound scornful of her, but he was afraid, not so much of her mudwifery, she knew, as of his having to resort to it.

  ‘By the look of you,’ she said, ‘you have already done the business.’

  He shifted his feet and peered in. It was too dark and smoky in here for him to see her; it would be like the darkness speaking, not a person.

  ‘On whoever-that-poor-girl-is-give-me-three-guesses.’

  ‘That’s none of your affair.’

  ‘No, thank the Leddy. Look at the mix of you, all proud and afraid of yourself. All swaggering, and yet—’

  ‘I have silver.’ He knew her well, this one. Knew how to stop her gabbing if he wanted.

  She snorted, allowed herself one last little jibe: ‘Silver won’t stop my mouth. Int no one else you can go to, is there? I can say what I please.’

  ‘Say what you please,’ he said. ‘Just give me my preparation.’

  She got up off the stump she used for a seat. ‘What will it be, a smoke or a decoction?’

  ‘Make it both.’

  ‘Ooh. He knows what he wants, this one. How much silver?’

  He showed her, in his palm. He moved his hand so that the sunlight beamed off the coin and dazzled her, dazzled away all her rudeness.

  She went to work, and did not speak for a while. He stood and watched until she told him, ‘Sit aside of my light, on the bench out there. There’s no need to watch me. Have I ever disappointed you?’

  ‘I had to wait a good while for that tea to take, that you guv me.’ But he moved away.

  She went to the doorway. He was just planting his arse in the sunniest spot. ‘And how long, pray, did you leave it, to come to me?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t think it would come out at all. I was readying to visit here again by the time she started.’

  ‘This—this—is what you told me.’ She made the exact belly shape with her hands. He looked away. And so he should; and so he should. ‘Would that be about how far?’

  ‘About.’ He tried for carelessness again. Go inside, he’d be thinking, and get on with it, so’s I can pay you and leave. She could read him like a charcoal-man’s palm.

  ‘Then shut your whining. That’s a lot of flesh to shift.’

  ‘Don’t I know. You would of thought she was dying.’

  The mudwife cleared her throat, spat on the ground. ‘Silver,’ she reminded herself, and went inside.

  When she was done, she tied up the burnings and the drinkings in two rags and took them to the door. There he was, sunning himself, smug as fat Goodwife Twyke that sat in the town square, cutting maids to pieces with her tongue under the ash tree there. Muddy Annie felt her own face screw up with dislike.

  ‘This one is for the smoke,’ she said, ‘and this for the tea. Don’t confuse them, or
you’ll kill her.’ And then what will you do with yourself, she wondered. Come to me? She chuckled. Or go at donkeys and goats? ‘You know my price,’ she said, collecting herself. ‘For the two.’

  He brought the money out and they exchanged, bags with one hand, coin with the other, so that they each had what they wanted.

  ‘Silly girl,’ he said. For a moment Annie thought he meant herself, and was astonished, but then she saw the bitterness at his mouth as he watched her fold the coin away into her hand. Yes, there was a good weight of it. You could buy plenty with that, if you were not filling up your daughter with unwanted kin—two pair of good boots for the winter, maybe, or a month’s ale at Keller’s Whistle, or three at Osgood’s if you could stomach his stuff.

  She did not snort at him, though she could afford to now. She folded her arms and made a mouth and watched him go. Smoke and tea. He had left it even longer this time. That girl would have a fine wringing-out of it.

  She remembered the wife, Aggie—she remembered her big with child, too, of the fecund old bugger. She could not recall the daughter, though, as more than a floss-headed, knee-high thing that she might easily be confusing with some other girl-child of the town.

  A curse stirred deep in the mudwife, almost as if she were with child herself. She must be careful; she had a gift, and she must not allow anything to affect her too strongly, remember. That was why she lived out here, in this burrow, instead of in St Olafred’s town—so that people would not bother her so much, knocking and demanding and bringing her irritations on themselves.

  He was gone now, that . . . Longfield, his name was, and Aggie Prentice his wife. Aggie had had him on the right road for a while there, in the town. Helping out in stables, he was, and she was housemaiding for someone. Who was that, now?

  The mudwife went back into her burrow, which smelt of all the poisons she had mixed, and the spices that made them drinkable and breathable. Carefully she tied up her grains and fragments, and every time that little floss-child walked into her mind, she said, ‘No. Off with you, now,’ and got out Longfield’s silver, and rubbed the coins together.

  Liga finished sweeping. She chopped kindling, scrubbed out the porridge-pot, attended to the cheese-barrel and the bread-starter, milked the goat. Whenever she neared the end of one task, he was in her head, telling her the next, and sharply.

  She applied herself to the shirt. She thought as she sewed that she was managing it quite well, but first, with the bunching, she sewed it too tightly and ran out of the lower cloth, and then she unthreaded it and sewed it so loosely that there was a good half-a-hand hanging over, and when she had undone that, the pieces were all holed and unclean along the edges from her efforts, and she sighed and walked away from them, and occupied herself with small tidyings and polishings and thoughtfulnesses that might please him should the shirt not be ready when he came back. She could hear him commenting all along, on the poor job she did of this and the clumsy way she accomplished that; sometimes she looked up almost in surprise that he was not here, he was so strong inside her, directing her.

  She sat to sewing again, but made no better progress. At the end, she laid the shirt aside, frightened of the oncoming evening and the sight of the poor work, so much like the snarl that would be on his face when he saw it.

  She heard a rumbling up on the road. She would not see the carriage pass from here, but she went to the door to listen, to the coachman’s cries and the drumming of the horses’ hooves and the expensive squeaking of the carriage’s underpinnings and the soft crashes and scrapes of leaves and twigs against the body of the thing on that narrow part of the road. She followed these noises with her eyes. Where might it be going? Away, away, that was all she knew; with people in it who never had to sew a shirt but only to wear one; who wore, day and night, clothing of such smooth stuff, made by such fine tailors, that Liga would never be allowed even to pick up the snippings from their workroom floor.

  Now evening had come, just while she watched there. She hurried back into the house and built up the fire and began yet again on the shirtfront. She laboured into the night, and achieved one side of the bunching, at least.

  She yawned, cracked her knuckles, stood and stretched, and went to the door. ‘When is the old bugger coming, then?’ she said to the goat that lifted its head from its folded forelimbs out there. Look, the moon was up and all, the trees scrambling black across the stars, empty of half their leaves but still concealing bird and road, and Da in his silent striding. Everything felt unlatched, and swung. Was he still in the village, or nearly home, in the trees there? Everything was waiting for him to appear and tell her what she had done wrong, and what she would be doing to make up for the shirt, and the bread not rising so well, and above all, the baby.

  She could take the lamp up to the road, maybe, to see if he were coming. But wouldn’t that enrage him too, that she had left the house? If he had drunk enough at Osgood’s, he would be angry whatever she did: leave or stay, sew the shirt well or poorly. He would be enraged by Liga’s very existing, and by her condition, and by his own stupidity for drinking all the mudwife money he had gained with that hare or whatever.

  She took herself off to bed. Footfalls and rustlings filled the night outside, and imagined shouts of him coming drunk through the wood, calling out to her from high along the road, or from the path, or, like an owl, from the nearer trees. He walked around and around the house all night, never quite reaching it but always threatening to. In the course of one dream, she decided she would get up and go out and sleep in a forest place where he could not find her, but she did not wake widely enough to follow this good plan.

  Morning came, sweet as new milk spilling up the sky, all dew and birdsong and bee-buzz. Up came the sun and beamed through the open window and woke Liga in her truckle bed. Had he come and she not woken? No, the big bed above was flat and untroubled. Had he fallen the other side of it, in his drunken state? She climbed over and no, the floor was empty there. She sat on the bed and stared at the strangeness of it. Maybe some woman? she thought hopefully. That would set things to rights; it would have to. Maybe he would distract himself enough, and drink enough with that woman, to forget about Liga and allow the baby to happen?

  At any rate, she would dress so as not to be too available to him when he came. She washed and clothed herself, and then went out into the sun. The day’s hugeness lay before her. Something was wrong that he had left her alone so free, for so long.

  She milked, attended the cheeses, ate a little milked-bread, and tidied after that. She sat to the shirt out in the sun and completed the gather on the second front-piece with such dispatch and neatness, she could not believe she had had so much grief from it yesterday. And then she went gathering greens near the marsh; she would check his snares as well, and maybe find something soup-worthy to please him for his dinner, or roast whatever was roastable, before he had a chance to sell and drink it. He would slap her, but she would eat meat.

  But when she came back near sundown, he was still not returned. She was at a loss. She ought to go up to the village and find him, dig him out of Osgood’s before he made a trouble of himself. For her own sake, she ought to locate him, see if he had broken himself somehow, or got himself put in the roundhouse. Before someone came by, smirking and gossiping all the way, to tell her; to say, You are all he has, then, by way of family? And to draw their own conclusions.

  But instead, she propped the greens in water to keep them from wilting, and cleaned the snared rabbit kit and hung it, and neatened the shirt still further, and dreamed at the fireside.

  She went to bed, and slept better that night than she had the previous. She woke to steady rain, though, and her cold duty. He would be so angry with her, that she had not fetched him sooner, before he spent all the coney-money. Or that she had not come and pleaded with whoever held him to release him, because he was all that kept her from starvation.

  She put a sack across her shoulders to keep the worst of the rain off, and wen
t up the path towards the world. Two nights without his shouting, two days; she was flying apart, without him to pack her into her corner and keep her there.

  She found him in the ditch by the road, face down. The water all around him was thick with floating autumn leaves, and several were scattered on him, as if the forest were moving as quick as it could to conceal him. He had not drowned—his head was all caved in on one side, and when she turned him over she found an unmistakable hoofmark on his soft front.

  She stood and she stared at him. What was she to do? She had not the strength to carry him. And where would she carry him to? What was the point of taking him anywhere? She must dig a grave for him. Right next to the ditch there—she could roll him into that. But to leave him, to fetch the spade—now that she had found him, could she walk away from him again, she wondered? Was that permitted? And so she stood undecided, taking in again and again the signs of the violence that had killed him, unable to trust her eyes.

  Clack-hoik. Clack-hoik. Here came Lame Jans, who was a bit simple too. ‘What have you there, Liga Longfield?’

  ‘It’s my dad,’ she said. ‘Someone has run him down and left him.’

  ‘He don’t look too good.’

  ‘Oh, he’s gone.’ Da lay there, embarrassing with his head spilling along the drain-water, his face as if asleep where it was not smashed, one eye the littlest bit open, leaves in his hair like a girl dressed for a festival, a red leaf adhered to his head wound.

  ‘Looks like he have been stompled by a horse.’

  ‘I would reckon.’ Something threatened to rise from Liga’s insides. She squashed it down. What, you would cry for the old bugger? You would mourn?

  But another part of her was all confusion. Without his voice and body to shape her, did she even exist? She had not the vaguest notion how to live on, alone. No, not alone—with this baby, this baby!