Lapvona(44)

‘Don’t tell anyone I’ve gone,’ Dibra said.

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t tell Villiam.’

‘No.’

‘Good girl,’ Dibra said and opened the door for Jenevere to go out. Jenevere blushed at the gesture—Dibra had never opened a door for her before.

‘God bless you,’ Jenevere said.

‘Hush.’

She walked away through the darkness. Dibra waited until she couldn’t hear Jenevere’s steps on the stairs. Then she waited some more and blew out the candle by her bed as though she were going to sleep. There was a bit of light coming through the window—Jenevere had forgotten to pull the drapes closed. Dibra pulled them. The first time in her life she had pulled her own drapes. She fingered the velvet, thin and worn like silver.



* * *




*

The acoustics of the cellar were hard—every chew and breath echoed off the walls. Nobody ever spoke beyond a whisper, but nobody spoke at all that night. They were all avoiding talking about the nun. It was obvious to all of the servants that she was Marek’s mother. The resemblance was uncanny. Petra had noticed that the woman seemed nervous when she’d left her alone in the guest chamber. The nun had refused a bath and any help undressing. She had no belongings. Not even a brush for her hair. Petra admired the woman’s prudence. She looked at Lispeth now, chewing her little piece of cabbage. Lispeth’s hands were like the sticky hands of mice, bony. Her face was small and tight and like an old lady’s already. Petra thought Lispeth was vain. It was vain to keep your skin so close to the bone. Lispeth never complained of hunger or hardship. But Petra could see the bruise on her spirit, the little cuts of sadness. She could deny her flesh, but she was still human. Petra looked forward to watching Lispeth crack one day. It would be satisfying to see her lose her composure after so many years of rigidity.

For her part, Lispeth thought Petra was lazy. When it was Petra’s turn to dust the buttery, she always drank wine and did a sloppy job. Lazy and gluttonous. She had no other opinion of the girl. She had no opinion of anyone but Marek now, the target of all her ire. Lispeth’s prayer that night in the cellar was a song for Jacob. It began slowly, evenly, two notes playing back and forth, comfortably, like easy voices in a garden. Then a third note came in and overtook the melody. Lispeth couldn’t contain the arrangement now. She stopped it. Silence. She chewed and tried to remember the first note, the second. The third note taunted her, loudly, like a bird squawking, and like that it attracted other notes that squawked, and by the end of her last bite, she couldn’t hear the first few notes at all. They had been lost to her in the flight of her many furies. She blamed Marek. He looked just like a bird. A bird whose mother had pushed it from the nest, who’d survived but could barely fly anymore, only flutter around jaggedly and enjoy the attention it got from the snakes, it was so deranged. Then why had his mother returned? She must want something.

‘I wonder if Luka will come back,’ Petra said, interrupting.

‘Shush,’ Jenevere said.

They all knew he wouldn’t.



* * *




*

Marek still couldn’t sleep. The air in the room was stagnant without Lispeth’s breath to stir it, and the darkness was eerie. It was too dark, Marek thought. Usually there was a soft glow of blue through the curtains that gave enough light to delineate the bed and nightstand and the drapes and the wardrobe. Now nothing was visible. There was no difference whether Marek’s eyes were open or closed. He could feel his sweat lick against the sheet as he moved, a moment of cool and then he was stuck to the sheet and it was hot from his skin again. He lifted his arm to look at it and he was invisible. His muscles still ached from having dug the grave for his father. Was that not the measure of one’s manliness? If you could bury your father, you were no longer a child. Was that right? Jude had said that a man is someone who has a woman. He had his mother, didn’t he? She had come back for him. He hoped it was true. Lispeth’s refusal had made him doubt it. He exhaled sharply and the sound—ha!—echoed and faded as if the bounds of the room were a canyon and he were lying at the bottom of it looking up at a starless sky. He had never seen the sky without stars at night. Such darkness was like a blindfold, like blindness. He thought of Ina, their afternoon nursing. Maybe now he would nurse from his real mother at last.

Agata couldn’t sleep either. She had recognized Marek immediately: he looked exactly like her brother. What cruel luck that the child had survived. A miracle, really. She had taken tansy tea every day and stuffed the fresh toxic flowers up her sheath to poison the thing inside like Ina had instructed. And she’d punched herself in the stomach, climbed up and jumped down from the tallest trees in the woods when Jude was busy with his babes and confident enough to leave her untied. But Marek had been a leech, indestructible. She’d thought it was her own strength that was keeping him alive. She had assumed that he’d died once she’d run off, that he was helpless without her. She’d refused to hold him, that gnarled creature that had fed off her and made her sick for nine months. She despised it. And so she despised Marek still. He really looked just like her brother, the one that did it. She was not at all surprised when the boy came into her room. She knew he would.

‘Mother?’

Agata took his hand and held it between her own, felt his skin on hers. It was not an act of tenderness, but rather a procedure, a test. The feeling of his skin on hers was the feeling of her own young hand on hers. ‘My name is Marek,’ the boy said. She threw Marek’s hand away, like she’d bit an apple and a worm had crawled out of its frothing flesh. ‘Mother,’ he said again. She nodded. He fell at her feet and kissed them. Agata restrained herself from kicking him in the face. That he had survived until now and had been adopted by the lord, she had to grant him some respect. He had done well for himself, it seemed. She went to the bed and lay down, hoping the boy would go back to his room. But Marek followed. He peered at her in the moonlight, his twisted body contorting in wonder and fright.