The Inheritance and Other Stories Read online

  Inside the house, she found them at the table, eating meat that was scorched on the outside and bloody within. “Chimney doesn’t draw right,” Pell excused it. “And the firewood is too small. You need good chunks for coals to cook meat over, not a bunch of little sticks.”

  “You used up all my kindling,” she replied. “The pile of larger wood is over in the shelter of the spruce tree, to keep it dry.” Both of her bowls and chairs were in use. It didn’t matter. She didn’t think she could have faced eating Picky anyway. She wondered if she would still wake in the dawn tomorrow without his raucous crowing. Set it aside. Too late to fix it. She just had to go on. His gleaming knife lay on the table beside the butchered bird. He picked it up and sawed on the butchered bird. To her surprise the knife slid through the tough bird as if it were butter. It was only when he put the meat in his mouth that he had to chew and chew. She tried not to take satisfaction in how tough the meat was.

  “That must be a sharp knife, to shear through that meat so easily,” she observed, and he started as if she had jabbed him with it. He hastily returned it to his sheath, uncleaned.

  “It was a gift,” he said, and then, as if he couldn’t resist the urge to brag, “Chalcedean steel. The best money can buy.”

  She made no answer to that. He hadn’t heard the hidden mockery in her comment. The fool hadn’t even known that a grown rooster was not fit for roasting but only the stew pot. How had he managed to live in the village all his life and not know such simple things? How had he kept himself above and apart from the simple work that could have put food on the table? She forced herself to think back through the years. Rory, the carter’s boy, had fancied her once. He’d been a hard worker, but his plain face and callused hands had not charmed her. No. She had fallen to the boy with the soft hair and fine clothes. He was never dirty, she told herself, because he never worked. Did she think he was an idiot for not knowing how to work? What did that make her? How could she have taken up with a man who did no more than smile and be handsome and sing tavern songs well?

  She barely stopped him in time when he gathered what was left and began to throw it on the fire. “That will stink if you burn bones in the house. Besides, I can make a soup of the bones and what’s left on them. I have a couple of turnips and an onion . . .” and she glanced at her cupboard to see that was a lie. The turnips were gone.

  “You can’t just eat everything you see around here!” she exclaimed angrily. “I have to plan what we use and be sparing of it.”

  “Well, if you think I’m going to go hungry while there are chickens running around in the yard, think again. I’m not that helpless. Or foolish.”

  A thousand responses came to her mind. But only one clear thought formed. That handsome fool would destroy everything she had built up in the last three years before he was finished here. He would not listen to her. He would do as he pleased with her things. She was speechless. She gathered the rags she had used to clean up his butchering mess and went outside.

  She dumped the dirty water from her washtub, rinsed it, and filled it again. She was washing out her cleaning rags when he came out of the house. He was walking softly but she heard him. He came up behind her. “You work so hard,” he said gently. “Rosie, I never meant for you to live like this.”

  Simple words in a kind voice. They stabbed her. Three years ago, even two years ago and they would have won her heart.

  “It’s work and it has to be done,” she said and hated how her voice was choked with tears.

  She started when his hands settled on her shoulders. She twitched but he did not lift them. They were so warm, and he gently squeezed just where her shoulders ached most.

  “Don’t,” she said sharply and twisted away from his touch. He let her go.

  “I’m going to stay, Rosie,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it. I know you don’t want to give me another chance. You’re still angry at me, and who could blame you? I’ve thought about it. For me, it seems like something I did a long time ago, three years ago. I left you, and for me, that was the end of it. But you stayed here, and I suppose that every single day you’ve missed me. Every single night, you’ve been alone, and I suppose that’s why the hurt is so fresh for you.

  “But I’m back now. You can stop being angry, and there’s nothing to be hurt about any more. I’m here, ready to be husband to you and father to your child.”

  “You’re not my husband. You never married me. You wouldn’t. Not even when your grandfather asked you to.”

  “I told you, Rosie. A scared boy ran away from you and the baby. But a man has come back. Give me a chance.”

  “No.”

  She heard him take a deep breath through his nose. “You will,” he said confidently. Then, as if he were changing the subject to indulge her, he asked her, “What are you doing?”

  “Washing out bloody rags,” she told him savagely.

  He was silent for a time and she thought he’d finally read her mood. But then he asked in a voice between dismay and disgust, “It’s your blood time?”

  “Yes.” She heard herself lie promptly, and he abruptly stepped back from her. She wondered what instinct had made her protect herself.

  He’d always expressed a disdain for touching her or even being around her during her menses. And now he retreated from her in a way that did not reassure her. Retreated because . . . why? Because he had been preparing to advance on her in some way? Tonight, after the boy was asleep? A cold dread rose in her, but something else twisted inside her along with it. She had the same hungers that any woman had, hungers that had nothing to do with food. Hungers that paid no attention to sensible thoughts, hungers that wanted his warm hands on her aching shoulders, hungers that recalled well how once they had warmed a bed together.

  But what if? Her thoughts wriggled out of her control and ran off on a sunlit path. What if Pell were sincere in his return? He’d said, more than once, now, that he wished to make his life what it should have been, to be a father to the boy and a husband to her. What if he meant it and was groping his way toward that path? Could he change? Could they find the love they’d once felt for each other and build something with it? What if she gave ground to him and tried to awaken that in him again? Would it be so terrible a thing? Could that old dream be called to life again?

  Unbidden, she recalled the passion she had once felt for Pell, the physical arousal his touch had created and their joyous unions. For one moment, heat surged through her. Then it faded. Her memories of their joinings were eroded, like a wooden carving that had weathered away, leaving only lumps where it had once had a face. She’d been wild about him, uncontrollably drawn to him. But now she could not think of him without recalling how he had humiliated and abandoned her. Those memories abraded any joy she had felt in him to expose the foolishness beneath it. No. No girlish silliness. She would force herself to see Pell only as he was, not as she had once dreamed him to be.

  He was still standing behind her. It made the skin of her back and neck prickle, and she was torn between hoping he’d touch her again so she could reject him and praying he wouldn’t touch her again because she might turn into his embrace. Her heart was beating too fast. She risked a glance over her shoulder, but he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Instead he was staring intently at the top of the hill.

  “Is someone coming?” she asked him and followed his gaze just in time to see a lantern vanish from sight.

  “No. Just someone passing by,” he said. Then he announced abruptly, “I might go into town tonight.” He turned and went back into the cottage. She welcomed his absence, but his hasty withdrawal surprised her. Obviously, he found her that disgusting. Odd, that his rejection could still sting. No. Not odd. Stupid that she could even care about him to that extent. He’d left her and their child for three years. How could she let herself crave his company, even if she only craved it for the chance to hurt him? She’d thought she’d gotten wiser than that.

  She wrung out her cleaning
rags and hung them to dry. The evening was closing in. Would he go to town or stay at the cottage? With that question, she realized that she dreaded another night confined with Pell. She could only tolerate it if she believed it would be the last one. Her mixed feelings, her emotional anger, and her physical need for a male were shredding her. She’d be better off to sleep with a wandering minstrel than to take a known traitor into her bed. Remember who he was, not what his body was like, she counseled herself. Protect herself and her child.

  Slowly she went back into his house. The dishes were on the table as he had left them, and the hearth was spattered with grease and ash. Everywhere she looked in the cottage, she could see his marks, as if he were a cat who had to spray and scratch to claim his territory. He reclined on the bed, his boots on and a gleaming smudge of grease at one corner of his mouth from the meal. Gillam was on the bed beside him, playing with a handful of the rooster’s tail feathers. The rumpled bed, the dirty dishes, the ransacked cupboard . . . slowly she recalled that after Pell had left, there was actually less work for her to do. Less clothing to wash and less careless mess to tidy. She didn’t want this life back. With or without Pell’s touch on her at night, she didn’t want to live with him, clean up after him, and take his orders. She cleared her throat and tried to speak casually as she tidied the room.

  “The cow will drop her calf soon. I’d best take her to Ben’s tomorrow.”

  He turned his head and squinted at her. “Take the cow to Ben’s? Why?”

  “When I bought her, he warned me that sometimes a cow’s first drop is difficult. He knows how to turn a calf if it needs doing. He said he’d help me when the time came, if I brought the cow to him.” More lies. He’d never said any such thing. She wouldn’t take the cow to Ben’s. She’d take the cow to Hilia. She and her husband were not wealthy, but they were solid. They’d give her what they could for the cow and the calf inside her.

  “Best do it, then.” There was no suspicion in his voice. Plainly he cared nothing for the cow or the calf to come. “But leave the boy here with me. It’s time Will got to know his papa. Time I taught him a thing or two about being a man.” He poked the boy and Gillam giggled.

  No. Never. She had been right. It was her son he was after; that was why he’d come back. Her beautiful, clever Gillam; that was what Pell would take and twist him into someone she didn’t know. Her fledgling plan sprouted wings. “I’ll go very early so I can be back in time to do my regular chores,” she said. And she’d take Gillam with her when she went. Pell had always been a heavy sleeper. Tomorrow, before dawn, she’d slip away. She’d have to go the long way; the tide would be in, and the heavy cow couldn’t go down the cliff-side path. By the time Pell woke and then eventually wondered where they were, she and Gillam would have left Hilia’s and be on their way. If he thought to look for them, he’d go to Ben’s first. She doubted that he’d make much real effort to find them and bring them back. He’d wait here and expect her to come cowering home. She wouldn’t. She’d leave it all behind and run.

  She tried not to care about what would happen next. He’d kill her chickens, of course, one at a time and eat them. That couldn’t be helped. The garden, she knew, would go to weeds and vanish. There was only one other creature to worry about . . . Anxiety clutched at her heart as she realized that Marmalade hadn’t come to greet her when she returned. She hadn’t seen the cat at all.

  “Odd. I haven’t seen the cat,” she said. Her heart was thudding sickly against her stomach.

  Pell gave her a sideways glance. “Neither have I. But when I do, I’ll kill him.”

  “Kill him,” Gillam repeated with no concept of the meaning. He jogged the end of the rooster feather against his own chin and giggled.

  “That’s right, Willy,” his father said and leaned across the bed to tickle him. Gillam wriggled and shrieked with delight. It was all Rosemary could do to keep from leaping across the room, seizing her child, and fleeing with him. For a fleeting instant, the two of them looked so alike, the man grinning hard and the child flinging himself about and shrieking with laughter as he sought to escape his father’s touch. For a heart-stopping instant, she couldn’t love her son, not when he looked so like Pell. She turned away from both of them unable to abide that.

  Tomorrow, she would run. Before things could become any worse.

  Some things, you can’t run from. You have to deal with them and be done with them.

  She wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but something not a sound made her glance up into the dimness under the rafters. A cat’s eyes glowed at her from the shadows. Don’t come down! she mentally begged him. She made a pretense of gathering garbage from around the cottage, added a handful of bones from around the chicken carcass, and carried them outside. She walked to the edge of the farmyard near the trash heap and set them down. In a heartbeat, Marmalade was there. He wound twice around her ankles, purring like a storm and then settled down to crunching the bones. She crouched down beside the cat in the gathering darkness. “I have to go away, Marmy. So do you. I wish I could tell you to run to Hilia’s house and live there. She’d take you in.”

  He stopped his crunching and looked up at her, his eyes boring into hers. I live here, his gaze seemed to say.

  “So did I,” she said, and sudden tears choked her. “But I can’t stay here any longer. He’s going to change too many things. He’s going to kill my chickens. And make Gillam into someone named Will, someone like him. And make me into . . . something.” She didn’t have a word for what she would become. Something he ordered about, something that cleaned up after him and gave her body over for his use, and never spoke about the things that had used to belong to her, never spoke of the ways he had hurt her and wronged her. “I can’t become that. So I can’t stay here.”

  Marmalade rumbled a growl.

  “I can’t defend my territory like you do. Not without risking that he’d hurt me. And if he hurt me badly enough, or killed me, then who would protect Gillam from him? Even if I stay here and battle him every day, he will change Gillam in ways I don’t want him to change. I have no choice, cat. I have to run.”

  “Rosie! Rosie, where are you?” Pell sounded more annoyed than concerned at her absence. She hissed at the cat, startling him so that he dashed off into the darkness. She wiped her face on her apron and walked around the end of the byre.

  “I was checking the cow,” she lied. “Truly, I’d best take her to Ben’s tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I know, you told me.” He was impatient. “Come back to the house. I can’t find the money.”

  Her heart lurched. The money? What did he mean by that? Then she knew. Her money. When he’d left, they’d already spent the last of his on the fish and potatoes. Every copper pence in the small cloth bag behind the kindling box was hers, earned by hard work, a shard at a time. Not that there was much. But he’d take it all. She knew it. She thought of the silver bit she’d earned today. That at least was still tied in her apron pocket. He had no way to know about it. She walked slowly back to the cottage, debating with herself. He would know she had at least some money. And once she’d shown him any of it, he’d take it all. Which was worth more, the silver in her pocket or the coppers in the pot?

  “Rosemary!” His shout was angry, and she suddenly heard Gillam wail.

  “No, no, no! You bweak it!” She broke into a run and burst through the door.

  “What? What is it?”

  Gillam sprawled in the corner, sobbing. He clutched the broken pieces of his three-legged stool to his chest. The bedding was in a heap on the floor. An angry Pell spun to face her. “Where have you hidden the money? It’s not in the pot on the rafter.”

  “What did you do to him?” she demanded. Gillam was gasping as if he could not get his breath.

  He gave his son a disdainful glance. “Nothing. I tried to use the stool to look for the money and it collapsed under me. Then he burst into tears about it.” He shook his head. “The boy wants toughening.”
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br />   “No.” Gillam wailed indignantly. “No, you bweak it and you push me down! You pushed me down! Pushing is wude! You bweak my stool.”

  “It was badly built. It’s not my fault. And you are too big to cry about every little thing. None of this would have happened if the money pot were where it is supposed to be. Rosemary, what did you do with the money?”

  She was shocked at how swiftly he descended to the level of a two-year-old, trying to shift blame for his idiocy onto someone else. A cold deadly calm suddenly flowed through her, as chilling as if her blood had turned to seawater as she realized what he had been about. The pot on the rafter. He’d stood on Gillam’s little stool to reach for the rafter.

  “That’s where you used to keep the money. Out of my reach. Remember? So I couldn’t be ‘foolish’ with it.” She crossed the room and picked up Gillam. He clung to her tightly, bundling the pieces of his beloved stool between them, and she found herself returning that grip. “Don’t you cry, son. We’ll build another stool.”

  Gillam took a shuddering breath and emboldened by his mother’s embrace, he peered around her neck and cried out, “I don’t wike you! You bweak my stool!”

  “Oh, shut up. Rosie. I’m asking you something important. Ignore that brat for a moment. Where did you move the money? I need to go to town, and I can’t go without a penny to my name.”

  A sudden vivid memory flooded her. She’d stood here and with a long stick had poked the money pot out of the rafters. Heavy with pregnancy, she’d not trusted the chair she’d stacked on the table to take her weight. And when the small pot fell and shattered, it had confirmed what she’d already known. Not even a copper shard was left in it. He’d left her penniless. She’d been hungry that night.