Barred

Chapter 9:

I stood there with my hand on the door frame and the bar down behind me and said, "Who was that."

Margaret didn't answer. She walked past me to the window and put two fingers against the shutter and moved it a half inch and looked out through the gap.

"Margaret."

"Mm."

"Who was out there."

She let the shutter fall back. "I don't know."

"You put a bar across your own door. You don't put a bar across your door for nobody."

"I put a bar across my door every night of my life, girl. I'm an old woman living alone at the edge of a forest." She came back past me and picked up the poker and started doing something to the fire that didn't need doing. "You want to make a mystery out of it, that's your business."

"Those tracks were a man's boots."

"They were."

"A big man. Not a kid. Not a trader with a cart."

"Big boots. Yes."

"And they came to the yard and went away again."

Margaret set the poker down. "Jane. Sit."

"I don't want to sit—"

"You're swaying." She said it flat. "You're standing there with your hand on the wall and you think I can't see it because I'm old and I'm looking at the fire. Sit down before you fall down and crack your head, and then we'll talk about the boots."

I sat down.

She put a cup in front of me and I didn't touch it. My hand was still doing the thing where it wanted to be on a wall.

"You saw tracks in the frost," she said. "You're right about all of it. Big man, came out of the trees, walked to the yard, stood there, went back. I saw them when I went out at dawn and I've been thinking about them since before you woke up."

"And you're not scared."

"I'm sixty-four years old and I've been out here nineteen years. I'm not scared of a set of prints." She pulled out her chair and sat. "What I am is careful. There's a difference and it's the only thing that's kept me alive."

"Who would stand in a yard in the dark and then leave?"

"Somebody with no business being here and the sense to leave. A hunter. A poacher. Somebody from the village who lost their way."

"Somebody from the village who lost their way would knock."

"Would they?"

"Any decent person would knock."

Margaret looked at me for a second. "Any decent person would," she agreed. "Which tells you what you need to know about who it was."

I sat with that.

The fire was going properly now, and the cottage was getting warm, and out through the shutters the day was coming up all the way whether we looked at it or not. My hands were still cold but they were mine and my legs had decided to stay with me for now.

"I don't like it," I said.

"Good."

"Good?"

"Good. You didn't like it and you looked at it and you said something about it. That's sense. That's the most sense you've shown since you fell in my yard." She took a drink of her tea. "Now. You've got a choice to make about today and I want you to make it with your head on straight."

"What choice."

"You can lie in that bed and sleep like I told you to, or you can sit in that chair and drive me out of my mind asking questions I'm not going to answer until tomorrow." She shrugged. "I've had both kinds in my life. The second kind is worse."

I almost laughed. Almost. "You're something else."

"Don't go flattering me."

The wind pushed at the shutters and the shutters held and I looked over at the second chair, pulled out from the table a little, the way a chair is when somebody sits in it every day.

"Who else lives here," I said.

Margaret's cup paused halfway to her mouth.

"I asked you that last night."

"You did."

"And you said nobody."

"And I said nobody," she said. "Nothing's changed since last night except it's brighter out."

"There's a second chair."

"There's a second chair."

"There's two pillows on that bed and two blankets folded at the foot of it and a second chair at this table pulled out like somebody's sitting in it—"

"Jane."

"—and a set of initials carved into the top of the headboard that belong to a dead woman. So either somebody lived here and doesn't anymore, or somebody was expected." I got up out of the chair. My legs held. "Which is it."

Margaret put her cup down.

She sat looking at me across the table for a long moment, and the fire was going, and the wind was going, and somewhere out in the garden a chicken was scraping at the frost.

"I was told to wait," she said.

"Told. By who."

"Not today."

"Margaret—"

"Not today, and if you push me on it I'll answer you anyway, because it's not in me to keep saying no to a girl who looks like she's going to cry." She held up one hand before I could get there. "I'll tell you what I can. I'll tell you plain, and you'll listen, and then you'll go back to bed. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Nineteen years ago somebody I trusted more than I trust the sun told me there was a girl who was going to need a place to run to, and that I was to come out here and make a place." She said it slowly, like she'd been turning it over for years and still didn't like the shape of it. "Not when. Not why. Not what she'd be running from. Just that it would happen and I was to be here when it did."

I stood very still.

"Nineteen years ago," I said.

"Nineteen years."

"I'm twenty-two."

"I know how old you are."

"Nineteen years ago I was three."

"I know that too." Margaret's mouth did something. "Believe me, I've counted it more times than you have. I've done that arithmetic in my head every year for nineteen years while I was putting up jars and mending that fence."

I sat down.

Not because I wanted to. My knees just took the decision away from me and I went down into the chair and it scraped on the floorboards.

"Somebody knew," I said. "Nineteen years ago. Somebody knew what was going to happen to me before I was old enough to know my own name."

"Yes."

"Who."

"Not today."

"Margaret."

"Not today, Jane, and you said deal." Her eyes were steady on mine. "I've given you more today than I've given anybody in nineteen years. You've had your three questions, you've had the tracks, you've had the truth about your mother, and now you've had why I came out here. That's a full day's worth and the sun's not up all the way yet."

I put my face in my hands.

I could feel her looking at me.

The fire snapped and the wind pushed at the shutters and my hands smelled like woodsmoke and I sat in that chair and breathed into my own palms and did the arithmetic myself, over and over, and every time it came out the same.

Somebody knew.

Nineteen years ago, somebody looked at a three-year-old and knew she was going to be thrown away.

"Jane."

"Don't."

"There's bread on that plate and there's a bed you know now was your mother's bed, and I want you to eat half of that bread and lie down in it, because you're not going to do anything with what I've told you today except lie awake and grind your teeth, and that won't help you and it won't help me and it certainly won't help your mother."

"She's dead."

"She is."

"She's dead and somebody lied about how."

"Yes."

"And I sat in her house for four and a half years and I ate at her table and I never—" My voice gave and I stopped.

And then a hand landed on the back of my head.

Margaret. She'd come around the table and she put her hand flat on the top of my head, just like that, and held it there, the way you'd steady a thing that might fall.

I sat there and let her.

"Your mother," she said quietly, "was the best of a bad generation and she knew things I never could make her say out loud. Whatever they told you, whatever they put on you, that's not what she was. I want you to remember that this morning, because tomorrow morning I'm going to tell you a whole lot of things that are going to make you forget it."

The hand lifted off my head.

"Do you hear me?" she said. "It's important."

I lifted my face out of my hands and looked up at her and she was standing over me with the fire behind her again and her mouth set hard and her eyes wet.

"I hear you," I said.

"Good. Now eat."

I ate.

She sat with me and told me about the garden. Which rows were which and what was finished and what would come in before the hard frost. She told me where the well was and how the pump had to be worked if you wanted water before the pipes came up in the morning. She told me the name of the chicken, which was Doris, and I looked at her and she said "I didn't name her" like that settled it.

I listened to all of it.

I was listening and I was eating and I was very tired, and some part of me had gone quiet and still and was standing in the middle of a room that used to have something in it.

"Bed," Margaret said, at the point where my eyes were doing what they'd been doing all morning. "Go on. I'll wake you at midday and you'll eat again and then you can be useless in the chair instead of useless in the bed."

I got up.

I got to the bed and got my boots off and got under the blanket and it was warm in there, warm from my own body heat from the morning, and it smelled of lavender, and I put my head on my mother's pillow.

Margaret had gone to the window.

She had the shutter open a crack and she was standing there with two fingers against it, looking out the way she'd done before.

"Margaret," I said.

"Go to sleep."

"Are you going to sit in that chair again?"

A pause.

"Maybe."

"Don't. You didn't sleep."

"I'll sleep when I'm dead," she said, and then, "Sorry. Old joke. My mother's." She let the shutter fall. "Sleep, Jane."

I closed my eyes.

I don't remember going under. It was the soft kind, the way a heavy blanket comes down, and the last thing I saw through my own lashes was the fire and the firelight and Margaret's back in front of the window.

---

Something woke me.

I don't know what. Not a noise. Nothing I could point to. My eyes were just open and the room was grey-gold with late light and the fire was down and my heart was going hard and I didn't know why.

I turned my head.

Margaret was standing at the window with both hands on the shutter.

Not looking through a crack. She had it wide open. The shutter was swung all the way and the cold air was coming in and she was standing there in it with her shoulders squared and her chin up, looking out at the trees.

I got up.

"Margaret."

"Don't."

I came up behind her. My feet were bare on the boards and the cold was biting at my ankles and I got to the window.

There was a wolf at the treeline.

I stopped.

It stood at the gap in the trees where the path went through, at the edge of the clearing, in the last of the light. Big. Grey-dark. Standing still the way the shape had stood at the top of the slope in the dark, the way a thing stands when it has decided not to come closer and also not to leave.

It was looking at the cottage.

Margaret reached over without turning her head and took my wrist and held it.

"Don't move," she said. "Don't you move."

The wolf lifted its head.

It stood there in the gap with the trees coming up behind it and the light going out of the sky, and it looked at the window, and it looked at us, and then it turned, slow, unhurried, and went back into the trees.

I stood at the window with Margaret's hand on my wrist and watched the gap where it had been.

"The tracks," I said.

"Not tonight," Margaret said. "Tonight you sleep in the middle of that bed and I sleep in the chair and we put the bar down and we don't open the door for anything that isn't the sun."

She swung the shutter shut and put the bar across and I stood there in the middle of the cottage with my bare feet on the cold floor.

"Not tonight is not an answer," I said.

Margaret turned around.

"No," she said. "It isn't."

Chapter (9) Ends.