Somebody's Watching

Chapter 10:

Neither of us slept.

Margaret sat in the chair with the poker across her knees like a woman in a story. I lay in the bed under two blankets with my eyes open and the bar down on the door, and every time the wind moved the shutters my whole body went tight.

"Go to sleep," she said around midnight.

"You first."

"I'm old. I don't sleep."

"Then don't tell me to."

She made a sound that was almost a laugh and then the cottage went quiet again and we stayed like that until the dark started thinning.

Around first light I heard her get up and go to the window. She stood there a long time with the shutter cracked and then she said, "Nothing. It's gone."

"You don't know that."

"No. I don't." She came back and sat down. "But the sun's coming up and a wolf doesn't stand in a clearing in the daylight. Not that one."

"That one."

"Get up. I'll make tea."

So we got up.

The morning was the same as the one before it, which felt like an insult. Frost and woodsmoke and Doris being loud about something in the garden. I stood in the middle of the cottage in my dress from two nights ago, and it had dried stiff and it smelled like wet road, and I looked down at myself and felt something I hadn't had the room for until right then.

"What," Margaret said.

"This is the only dress I have."

"Your bag's still out there."

"I know where my bag is. I lost it in the dark about a mile from a stream that had a shape on the other side of it." I sat down at the table. "I'm not going back for it."

"Mm."

"You're going to say something about my ring."

"I'm going to say something about breakfast," she said, and put the bread down. "The ring's a ring. It's worth what it's worth and I'll find it if it's findable. You're worth more than a ring and you need to eat."

I ate.

That was the thing about her. She'd say something like that and then turn around and stir the pot like it was nothing, and I'd be sitting at the table with my throat doing something and my face hot and she'd never once look over to see the damage.

---

She asked me at midday.

I was in the chair by the fire, wrapped up in the blanket she'd put on me without asking, and she was at the table with a bowl of dried leaves and a little stone mortar, grinding them down.

"What's your full name," she said.

I looked up.

"You know my name. You've been using it for a day and a half."

"Jane's a short name. It's what a girl gets called so she can be told apart from other girls." She ground the leaves. "What's the rest of it."

"Jane Alcott."

The mortar stopped.

Margaret sat very still with her hand on the pestle and looked at the table in front of her.

"Alcott," she said.

"That was my mother's name. She never married. She didn't want to talk about it." I sat forward. "Margaret. What."

"Say it again."

"Alcott. Jane Alcott." My hands were on the arms of the chair. "Why."

Margaret put the pestle down.

She sat back and looked at me across the room with an expression I hadn't seen on her yet — not the careful one, not the flat one. Something open. Something almost afraid.

"Because I knew your name," she said. "Before I ever saw your face. Before you were born. I've had it in my head nineteen years and I've said it to myself on nights when I didn't think anyone was ever going to walk out of those trees."

I sat there.

"Say it," I said.

"Jane Alcott."

"Say it like you've said it before."

She did. She said it quiet, the way you'd say a name in a church. She said it like she'd been carrying it and putting it down and picking it up again every day for nineteen years.

I got up out of the chair.

"Who told you," I said. "Nineteen years ago. Who told you my name."

Margaret didn't answer.

"Who told you my name, Margaret."

"Your mother."

The fire cracked.

I stood in the middle of that cottage and looked at her.

"Your mother wrote to me," Margaret said. "Nineteen years ago. She wrote me a letter and I have read it so many times I could say it to you word for word, and I have never once shown it to another living soul, and I have been waiting nineteen years for the day I could hand it to the girl it was about."

"Where is it."

"Not yet."

"Where is it—"

"Jane." Margaret stood up. "You listen to me and you listen well, because I'm going to say a thing and then I'm not going to say it again."

I stood there with my fists at my sides.

"Your mother was not a weak woman and she was not a fool," Margaret said. "She knew exactly what was coming. She wrote to me when you were three years old and she told me what to expect and she told me what to do and she told me her name and she told me yours. She did that because she was not permitted to tell you." Margaret's voice was shaking. "Do you understand what I'm saying to you? Somebody forbade her. Somebody with the power to forbid your mother to speak her own name to her own daughter."

"Who."

"Not today."

"Margaret."

"Not today." She put her hand flat on the table. "Tomorrow I'll give you the letter. Tomorrow I'll tell you everything in it and everything I've kept from you and you can scream at me until the roof comes down. But not today."

"Why not today."

Margaret looked at me.

"Because you've been here two days," she said. "Because your mother's been dead four and a half years and you found out this morning you were lied to about how. Because there's a wolf standing in my trees and big boots in my frost and your hands are shaking right now and you don't even know it." She picked up her cup. "Because there's a limit to what a person can take in one day, and I've been watching you for two days and I know where yours is, and I'm not going to push you past it."

I looked down at my hands.

They were shaking.

I hadn't noticed. I'd been standing there with my fists at my sides and my hands going like leaves and I hadn't noticed at all.

I sat down.

Margaret came over and put a cup in front of me and I picked it up with both hands and drank it and the shaking didn't stop but it got quieter.

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow."

"You promise me."

"I promise you." She sat down across from me. "On the bones of my mother and the grave of yours. Tomorrow, the letter."

---

I went out at dusk.

She didn't stop me. She opened the door for me and I put the blanket around myself and stepped out into the yard, and the cold came at me through the wool and I stood in the grass and looked at the trees.

The sky was going pink and grey and the frost was coming down on the garden rows. My breath made clouds. Out past the fence the treeline was a dark wall with that one gap in it where the path came through.

"Jane," Margaret said from the doorway. "Not far."

"I know."

"Jane."

"I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stand here and look at it."

I walked out to the fence.

The grass was frozen and it crunched under my boots and Doris had put herself to bed somewhere and there wasn't a sound in the world except me. I got to the fence and put my hands on the top rail and stood there breathing and looking at the gap.

And then I saw it.

Sitting on the ground at the mouth of the path. Not ten feet into the trees, right where the wolf had been standing.

A bag.

I stood there with my hands on the fence and my heart going wrong.

"Jane." Margaret's voice behind me, sharp now. "Come back."

I didn't come back. I went through the gate.

I walked across the frost to the edge of the trees and my boots were loud on it and I could hear Margaret's boots behind me on the path and I could hear her saying my name and I didn't stop. I got to the gap and I put my hand on a trunk and I looked down.

My bag was on the ground.

Canvas. Straps. Sitting up against the trunk like somebody had set it down careful, not dropped it, not thrown it. Like somebody was putting something back.

I went down on one knee.

"Jane, get back from there—"

My hands were shaking again. I got the buckle open and I pulled the flap and the good dress was there and the other dress was there and the boots were there and the tin was there.

The tin was there and it was still heavy.

I got the lid off.

The money was in it. Every coin. Counted out by me at the kitchen table in the village a hundred years ago, and I counted it now with my thumb and it was all there.

And the scrap of cloth was in there too.

I picked it up and unfolded it and my mother's ring lay in the palm of my hand.

"Jane."

I closed my fingers around it.

"Jane. Look at me."

I looked up.

Margaret was standing five feet from me on the path with her face grey and her hands out. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking past me, into the trees, over my shoulder, and her whole body had gone stiff the way a dog goes stiff.

"It's giving my things back," I said.

"Get up."

"Margaret. It found my bag. It found my bag in the dark and it brought it back."

"Get up and get behind me."

I stood up.

I stood there in the gap of the trees with my bag in one hand and my mother's ring in the other and the frost coming down around me, and I turned my head and looked into the dark where the path went.

Two eyes.

Set back in the trees, low, watching, and this time they were close. Closer than the treeline. Closer than the wolf had been. Close enough that I could see them blink.

Margaret grabbed my arm and hauled me.

She hauled me the whole way back across that frost with her grip like a clamp and my bag banging against my legs and the gate slamming shut behind us, and she got me to the door and shoved me through it and came in behind me and pulled the door and put the bar down with both hands and leaned on it.

The shutter was still open a crack.

Through the gap I could see the gate at the end of the yard. The path. The gap in the trees.

Nothing in it.

Nothing standing there at all, the way a thing can be gone between one blink and the next.

Margaret stood with her back against the door and her chest going and looked at me.

"He didn't take anything," I said.

Margaret wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"No," she said. "And he stood in my yard at dawn and didn't knock." She reached over and pulled the shutter shut and put the bar on it, one, and then the other, and the wood came down with a sound like a crack. "Jane. Tomorrow morning, before the sun, you and I are going to have that conversation. All of it. The letter and the name and every last thing I've kept."

"Why so early."

Margaret looked at me with the firelight on the side of her face.

"Because," she said, "I don't know how many more mornings we get."

Chapter (10) Ends.