“I expected ye an hour ago,” Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn’t sound it: “I was worried.”
“Aye?” Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie to her own ears—it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life—but this hadn’t been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like this.
She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.
Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn’t changed since Susan had set out for the Coos; she had still been able to feel her aunt’s eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.
“What took ye so long?” Aunt Cord had asked. “Was there trouble?”
“No trouble,” Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered asking Rhea if their business was done.
Mayhap there’s one more little thing, the old woman had said … or so Susan thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn’t remember.
And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to rise with Thorin’s child . . . and if there could be no baby-making until Reap-Night, she’d not be returning to the Coos until late winter at the soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle . . .
“I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That’s all.”
“Then why look ye so?” Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the vertical line which creased her brow.
“How so?” Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.
“Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow.”
She’d almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly
how she felt. “Only the night air, I suppose,” she had said. “I saw a meteor, Aunt.
And heard the thinny. The sound’s strong tonight.”
“Aye?” her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did interest her. “Did it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Did ye cry?”
Susan shook her head.
“Good. Better not. Always better. She likes it when they cry, I’ve heard. Now, Sue—did she give you something? Did the old pussy give you something?”
“Aye.” She reached into her pocket and brought out the paper with written upon it. She held it out and her aunt snatched it away with a greedy look.
Cordelia had been quite the sugarplum over the last month or so, but now that she had what she wanted (and now that Susan had come too far and promised too much to have a change of heart), she’d reverted to the sour, supercilious, often suspicious woman Susan had grown up with; the one who’d been driven into almost weekly bouts of rage by her phlegmatic, life-goes-as-’twill brother. In a way, it was a relief. It had been nervewracking to have Aunt Cord playing Cybilla Good-Sprite day after day.
“Aye, aye, there’s her mark, all right,” her aunt had said, tracing her fingers over the bottom of the sheet. “A devil’s hoof’s what it means, some say, but what do we care, eh. Sue? Nasty, horrid creature that she is, she’s still made it possible for two women to get on in the world a little longer. And ye’ll only have to see her once more, probably around Year’s End, when ye’ve caught proper.”
“It will be later than that,” Susan had told her. “I’m not to lie with him until the full of the Demon Moon. After the Reaping Fair and the bonfire.”
Aunt Cord had stared, eyes wide, mouth open. “Said she so?”
Are you calling me a liar. Auntie? she had thought with a sharpness that wasn’t much like her; usually her nature was more like her father’s.
“Aye.”
“But why? Why so long?” Aunt Cord was obviously upset, obviously disappointed. There had so far been eight pieces of silver and four of gold out of this; they were tucked up wherever it was that Aunt Cord squirreled her money away (and Susan suspected there was a fair amount of it, although Cordelia liked to plead poverty at every opportunity), and twice that much was still owed … or would be, once the bloodstained sheet went to the Mayor’s House laundress. That same amount would be paid yet again when Rhea had confirmed the baby, and the baby’s honesty. A lot of money, all told. A great lot, for a little place like this and little folk like them. And now, to have the paying of it put back so far . . .
Then came a sin Susan had prayed over (although without much enthusiasm) before getting into her bed: she had rather enjoyed the cheated, frustrated look on Aunt Cord’s face—the look of the thwarted miser.
“Why so long?” she repeated.
“I suppose you could go up the Coos and ask her.”
Cordelia Delgado’s lips, thin to begin with, had pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. “Are you pert, missy? Are you pert with me?”
“No. I’m much too tired to be pert with anyone. I want to wash—I can still feel her hands on me, so I can—and go to bed.”
“Then do so. Perhaps in the morning we can discuss this in more ladylike fashion.
And we must go and see Hart, of course.” She folded the paper Rhea had given Susan, looking pleased at the prospect of visiting Hart Thorin, and moved her hand toward her dress pocket.
“No,” Susan said, and her voice had been unusually sharp—enough so to freeze her aunt’s hand in midair. Cordelia had looked at her, frankly startled. Susan had felt a little embarrassed by that look, but she hadn’t dropped her eyes, and when she held out her own hand, it had been steady enough.
“I’m to have the keeping of that. Aunt.”
“Who tells ye to speak so?” Aunt Cord had asked, her voice almost whining with outrage—it was close to blasphemy, Susan supposed, but for a moment Aunt Cord’s voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. “Who tells ye to speak so to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl’s poor dead father?”
“You know who,” Susan said. She still held her hand out. “I’m to keep it, and I’m to give it to Mayor Thorin. She said she didn’t care what happened to it then, he
could wipe his bum with it for all of her,” (the flush which suffused her aunt’s face at that had been very enjoyable) “but until then, it was to be in my keeping.”
“I never heard of such a thing,” Aunt Cordelia had huffed . . . but she had handed the grimy scrap of paper back. “Giving the keep of such an important document to a mere scrap of a girl.”
Yet not too mere a scrap to be his gilly, am I? To lie under him and listen to his bones creak and take his seed and mayhap bear his child.
She’d dropped her eyes to her pocket as she put the paper away again, not wanting Aunt Cord to see the resentment in them.
“Go up,” Aunt Cord had said, brushing the froth of lace off her lap and into her workbasket, where it lay in an unaccustomed tangle. “And when you wash, do your mouth with especial care. Cleanse it of its impudence and disrespect toward those who have given up much for love of its owner.”
Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.
And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing cards—and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For herself, she knew so.
I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.
Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?