Whose Bed

Chapter 8:

"Yours," Margaret said.

She was awake. Of course she was awake. She'd probably been awake since before I opened my eyes, sitting in that chair with her hands in her lap, watching me come up out of sleep.

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer you get."

I sat up.

The room went sideways and I put a hand on the mattress and held still until it came back. Margaret didn't move to help me. She just sat there and watched, and I got the idea that she was taking my measure, and I didn't like it.

I turned around and put my hand on the headboard.

"These letters," I said.

"Eat something first."

"These letters, Margaret."

The fire was out. The room was cold grey and my breath was coming out of me in a cloud, and my hand was on the carvings and my thumb was going back and forth over the top set like it had a mind of its own.

Margaret stood up.

She went to the hearth and knelt down and started building the fire back up. Kindling first. Then the bigger pieces. She took her time about it.

"I asked you a question," I said.

"You asked me whose bed you're in. I told you. It's mine."

"Then why are there two sets of initials on your headboard."

She put a match to the kindling.

The flame went up and got hold of the small wood and she stayed kneeling there watching it, and I watched the firelight come up over the side of her face and I waited.

"People carve things into furniture," she said.

"People carve their names into furniture. Not strangers' names."

"How do you know they're names."

"Because I know the top one." I swung my legs off the bed. The floor was cold enough to hurt. "Because my mother had a bracelet with those letters on it and she wore it every day until it fell apart, and she told me it was her name, from before."

Margaret didn't turn around.

"So you tell me," I said. "Right now. Whose bed am I in."

She stood up.

She was slow about it. She put her hand on the mantel and pushed herself up and then she turned around and she looked at me across her cottage, and the fire was going behind her and doing that thing firelight does to old faces, making them young and then old and then young again.

"You're in your mother's bed," she said.

The room got very quiet.

I sat on the edge of that mattress with my hands on my knees and I couldn't feel my fingers.

"Say that again."

"You're in your mother's bed, Jane. You slept in it last night and you slept in it well, considering." She picked up the kettle and hung it on the hook. "You were conceived in that bed. Far as I know."

"Don't—"

"I'm not being smart with you. I'm telling you what's true." She wiped her hands on her apron. "You asked."

I stood up.

The floor was cold and my legs were not ready and I got one hand on the footboard and held it. "My mother lived in the village. She had a house in the village. I lived in that house with her for eighteen years and I mopped that floor on Sunday—"

"I know."

"—and there was no cottage in the woods, there was no anything, she never once—" My voice did something and I stopped and got it back. "She never once said there was a cottage out here. She never said your name."

"I know."

"You keep saying I know."

"Because I do." Margaret came around the table. "Because I know a lot of things and every one of them is going to make you angry, and you've been on my floor for one night with a fever that should have killed you, and I am not going to sit you down and take you apart on an empty stomach."

"I don't want breakfast. I want—"

"You want answers and I'm going to give you some." She pulled out the second chair. The one that had been pulled out a little. "Sit down."

"Margaret—"

"Sit down."

I sat down.

She put bread in front of me. Hard bread, day-old, with a smear of something on it. I didn't touch it. She sat down across from me in the first chair and folded her hands on the table and looked at me.

"Three questions," she said. "That's what you get. Three. I'll answer them and then we're going to eat and then you're going to sleep again, because your eyes are going in and out and I can see it from here."

"Three questions."

"Three."

"Or what."

"Or nothing." She shrugged. "I'm not going to hit you, girl. I'm not going to throw you out. There's no or what. I'm asking you to be a person with some sense about this."

I sat there and thought about it. Three questions and a woman who already knew my name before I gave it.

"Fine," I said. "One. How did you know my mother?"

Margaret nodded slowly. "That's a fair first one."

"How."

"I was her teacher."

I sat back.

The chair creaked. Somewhere out in the yard a chicken said something to nobody in particular and the fire got hold of a knot and popped.

"Her teacher," I said.

"Her teacher and her friend." Margaret's mouth did something that wasn't a smile. "She was a healer, Jane. She had the gift. And she came to me when she was younger than you are now, and I taught her what I knew, and she was better than me inside of a year."

My mother. My mother with her bad left knee and her bread and her hands that always smelled of yeast. My mother who couldn't get the fire to light on the first try.

"She was a —" I stopped.

"She was a healer. Yes."

"She wasn't. I would have known. There was never—" My hands were on the table and my fingers were flat on the wood. "She was just my mother. She made bread. She sat in the second chair and she made bread and she died of a fever she caught off a patient she was sitting with—"

I stopped.

Margaret's face had changed.

Not much. Not a gasp or anything like it. But something had gone out of it. Some small thing behind her eyes had shut, like a door quietly.

"Say the rest," she said.

"That's it. That's the rest. She caught a fever off a patient and—"

"Off a patient." Margaret said the word like she was turning it over. "A patient."

"Yes."

"Four and a half years ago."

"Yes."

"In the village."

"Yes." I was leaning across the table now. "Margaret. Margaret. What did they tell me."

She didn't answer.

"Tell me what happened to my mother."

"Second question," Margaret said.

The fire popped.

"That's not —" I stood up out of the chair. "That's not a fair question, that's just asking about my own mother—"

"The rules are the rules and I set them because I know what I'm doing." Margaret's voice was flat. "Use your second question or give it up."

I stood there with my hands in fists.

My head was doing the soft thing at the edges again and my hands were cold and my heart was going too fast, and there was a woman across the table who knew my mother when she was seventeen and had her name carved into a headboard and had been sitting in this cottage for God knew how long waiting.

"Was she really a healer," I said.

"Yes."

"And did it kill her."

Margaret looked at me for a long moment.

"I'll give you that one for free," she said. "Because it's the same question as the other one and I'm not going to let you waste it." She got up and took the kettle off the hook. "Your mother had the gift and the gift has a cost and she paid it. That's true. What you've been told about how she died — the fever, the patient — that's a story somebody made up to keep you from asking questions."

My knees went.

I got my hand on the back of the chair and my legs came back and I stayed standing.

"Who made it up," I said.

"That's three."

"Margaret—"

"That's three, Jane, and you said three." She poured the water. "You want to know who told the story, you ask me tomorrow. Today you eat and you sleep and you don't argue with me about it."

I came around the table.

I don't know what I was going to do. I don't think I had a plan. I got three steps and my knee gave and I caught myself on the table with both hands and stood there leaning on it, close to her now, close enough to see her face properly for the first time in daylight.

"You," I said.

"Me what."

"You made it up."

"No."

"You've been sitting out here for nineteen years, you said so, you've been sitting out here—"

"I've been sitting out here because I was told to," Margaret said. Her voice was very quiet. "And I want you to listen to me now, because I'm only going to say this once and I'm not going to fight with you about it. I did not lie about your mother. I did not tell you she died of a fever. I did not know you'd been told that, and now I do, and it turns out I've got more to think about than I had at sunrise."

"Then who—"

"Tomorrow."

"Margaret."

"Tomorrow." She set the cup down in front of me so hard the tea went over the rim. "Sit down and eat and then go back to bed, or I will put you back in it myself and I've already carried you once and I'd rather not do it again."

I stood there breathing.

Then I sat down.

The tea was hot and it was the bitter stuff again and I drank it because my hands were cold and because it was something to do with my mouth that wasn't screaming.

Margaret sat down across from me. She didn't eat. She just sat with her hands around her own cup and looked at the table.

"I did know," she said after a while.

I looked up.

"I knew your mother was dead," she said. "I knew before you told me. I've known four and a half years." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "What I didn't know was what they'd told you about it. I thought — I don't know what I thought. That she'd have told you herself, before. That you'd have grown up knowing what you were."

"What I was."

"What you are." Margaret looked up. "You're not a girl who can't shift, Jane. You're a girl with a hole in her where the wolf used to be, and something filled it, and it's in your hands and it's been in your hands since before you were born."

The room went very still.

"I don't know what that means," I said.

"I know you don't."

"Then tell me—"

"Tomorrow." She reached across and pushed the plate at me. "Eat. Then bed. Then tomorrow."

I picked up the bread.

I ate it because my body wanted it and because a woman who'd carried me across a floor had put it in front of me, and it was the first thing I'd eaten in a day and a half and it tasted like nothing and I ate all of it.

Then I stood up and I went to the door.

"Where do you think you're going."

"Outside."

"Jane—"

"I need to be outside, Margaret." My hand was on the latch. "I'm not running. My boots are wet and my money's gone and I can't walk four steps without my knees going. I'm not running. I just need to stand in the yard and look at the sky, and you can watch me through the window the whole time if it makes you feel better."

She looked at me for a second.

Then she went and got the blanket off the bed and brought it over and put it around my shoulders and tucked the ends in without asking.

"Two minutes," she said. "And you leave the door open."

I opened the door.

The morning came in on me — cold, clean, wet leaves and woodsmoke and something in it that was almost sweet. The yard was a mess. My basket of greens was still on its side in the grass where she'd dropped it, and the frost was going and the garden rows were showing dark and wet, and the trees were standing up all around the clearing like a wall with one gap in it where the path went through.

I stood in the doorway with the blanket around me and I looked at the sky.

It was high and grey-white and going blue at the edges and the sun was over the trees somewhere I couldn't see it and it was the most ordinary morning of my life.

"I'm still here," I said. Out loud. Under my breath, so she wouldn't hear it from inside.

Then I looked down at the path.

There were footprints in the frost. Not mine and not Margaret's — a man's boots, big, coming down out of the trees and going back up again, the same way.

They stopped at the edge of the yard.

They came that close in the dark and then they turned around and went back.

My hand went to the door frame.

"Margaret," I said.

My voice came out wrong and she was there in a second, at my shoulder, looking out where I was looking.

She saw the tracks.

She looked at them for a long moment and then she reached around me and took the door handle and pulled it shut, and I heard her drop the bar across it, and the sound of that bar going down in the quiet was the loudest thing I'd heard all morning.

Chapter (8) Ends.