A Feast of Sorrows, Stories Read online

  “Hello, Miss Emmeline. Are you baking for my wedding yet?”

  “That’s months off, young sir, as you well know. How would it look to serve stale bread at your wedding feast?”

  “It would be appropriate, more appropriate than you know. My fox bride might even tell you that herself, if she were truthful.” He touched one of the florid roses in the bouquet and smiled. “Do you like these?”

  “They are very fine, sir. Fit for your bride.”

  “But I think you will like them best.”

  “Yes.”

  We did nothing more, that first time, than talk. Subsequent times were very different, but that first visit, I think, made us friends and stood us in good stead. He brought gifts, even though I told him not to; something for me always, sometimes things for Mother and the boys. Artor and George, hostile and suspicious at first, were won over when he brought the horses. Two of the finest creatures I’ve ever seen, with a red-gold fleck to their coats and white stars on their foreheads. Peregrine told me later that their colouring reminded him of our bright hair. The most beautiful thing he gave me was a ring, rose-gold with a square-cut emerald.

  “A dangerous stone,” I told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “An emerald will crack, if given by a lover whose heart is unfaithful,” I replied. He laughed and dragged me down.

  “Yours will be safe.”

  I had no expectation of marriage—I was friend and mistress. He would marry his fox bride, as he called Sylvia, and I knew it. I only expected constancy and for many months I had it.

  When my belly began to swell, he laughed with delight, his fingers lightly dancing over my taut skin, stroking the curls at the apex of my thighs, and gently showing me how pleased he was at what we had made together. I thought then, briefly, of the dough-child, but put it from my mind.

  One day, a fortnight before his wedding, he ceased to visit. Instead, the fox bride came one morning as I kneaded dough in the kitchen.

  She was different to the nervous girl I had met months ago. She eyed the kitchen—and me—with disdain, as if she might somehow find some uncleanness clinging to her silken skirts from the mere proximity of such a place and personage. I put my hands to my stomach. She snorted, a brief, sharp laugh that cut.

  “You will not have him anymore,” she said. “He will be my husband.”

  “You do not love him,” I replied. It had not occurred to me that the fox bride would not share.

  “But I want this marriage. I want to be away from my parents. I want to be mistress of my own house. But if he keeps running to you, keeps loving you more and more then he may decide not to marry me.” She glared. “I will not allow that to happen.”

  “Stay away from here. Stay away from me. I will tell him.”

  “He does not remember you.” She laughed, came close, and showed her sharp white teeth in a smile. “Why do you think he isn’t here? With his love, watching what he’s planted grow? You’re not the only one who can make things; potions are more powerful than bread, little Emmeline.”

  Her hand shot out and she laid her palm against my belly. I moved back, almost falling over an uneven flag. “Watch nothing goes into your food, Emmeline. You wouldn’t want to lose this last piece of Peregrine.”

  I heard her laughter even as she walked down the street. I thought only to run to Peregrine, but my nose began to bleed and my belly contracted so hard that I did fall this time, and mercifully found the dark balm of sleep.

  Their wedding day dawned grey and overcast as summer slipped into autumn. The weather kept all but the most enthusiastic of wedding goers at home—the old women who wait outside the church, knitting and yammering, commenting on all aspects of the event: how the bride looked, how well her dress suited (or not), if she was glowing and if so, why (honeymoon baby, my sainted aunt!), and how long the marriage would last.

  It was with these ancient birds that I waited on the first day I had managed to leave my bed.

  The child had come too soon, a little boy, looking not unlike the dough-child, and leaving me bereft. Mother had barely left my side, worrying that I would not speak, would not touch the still little body before she took it away. Artor and George brought me posies but they only made me cry. I missed the brief funeral that was held for my son, confined to bed by a bleeding the sad, gentle little doctor could not stop. Mother brought an old woman one night who gave me something foul to drink and applied a sweet-smelling poultice of moss between my legs. My body started to repair itself then.

  Mother told me that the boys had tried to speak to Peregrine; he had simply looked at them in bewilderment, saying he did not know who they were. They had hidden the horses he had given them in a stable at the outer edges of town, in case someone accused them of theft. Mother had presented herself at the big house, ostensibly to discuss the wedding bread, and Peregrine simply looked through her. She felt that she must be a ghost, so empty was his face. The old woman who had tended to me told her there were things that could bewitch a man’s mind and make him forget his dearest desire.

  The fox bride was more than she seemed.

  I watched her as she left the Cathedral on her husband’s arm. I would have let her have this; it had never been my intent to take it from her, but she had stolen my lover and my child was dead. She stepped into a puddle of mud as she headed toward the carriage, and shrieked her distaste as her silk shoes and white lace hem turned the colour of dirty chocolate. I smiled in spite of myself and slid the hood from my head, my bright hair shining out in the dimness of the day. Peregrine looked up from his wife’s distress and saw me. His face twisted, distracted and uncertain, but he did not know me. His attention turned back to his bride and I slipped away before she could see me and triumph.

  In my kitchen, I found the remnants of the wedding bread dough and began to sculpt another dough-child. I fashioned it as cunningly as the first but this time with intent and not a little malice. Such magic requires only intent and ill-will but no great skill.

  I drew from my finger the ring Peregrine had given me. The emerald gleamed at me, intact, unbroken; his heart was never unfaithful, only his memory. The ring was pushed into the dough-child’s belly. I made a bellybutton to cover its ingress.

  When it came from the oven, it had a fine golden crust and looked like a cherub. I delivered it to the cook at the house the newlyweds were to share; she was a friend of Mother’s and took the dough-child gladly.

  “Tell them it’s for fertility, to bless them with a child.”

  She nodded. “They shall have it for supper this very eve, Emmeline.”

  He told me later how the dough-child had been served to them on a silver tray, with butter and a selection of jams. Sylvia had ooh-ed and aah-ed over the silly little thing and happily cut herself a thick slice, slathering it with sugary conserve. Peregrine ate the bread dry and unadorned. When the sourdough touched his tongue his memory returned.

  The fox bride continued to eat as he railed at her. She greedily chewed and swallowed great bites of bread, laughing at his rage and talking around her food, telling him she would do it again, too. Then she began to choke. Her face went red, then blue around the lips as she struggled to draw in air. She pointed at her throat, threw things at him as he stood, staring in horror. When she was finally still, he called for a doctor.

  The little doctor, the one who had attended me so unsuccessfully, found the emerald ring lodged in her throat. He, I’m sure, recognised it and placed it in Peregrine’s hand, closing the young widower’s fingers around the piece of jewellery. “Someone will be looking for that, young man.”

  I no longer wear it very often, knowing what I did with it, although I do bring it out now and then to remind myself of his constant heart. We live in another house, as far away from his parents as he could get, but still in one of the nicer squares. My mother runs her business out of a real shop not far from us, and has two young girls apprenticed to her.

  “They don’t have
your touch, Emmeline,” she sometimes says but she knows why I will no longer bake, why my hands will never again knead dough. She is happy, for she knows her grandchild comes. I am content to visit the small grave where my first child lies. I speak with him often and tell him about his father and sister, who comes to us soon. I tell him I am sorry I could not protect him and that I will never forget him. My memory is true.

  Dresses, three

  I live, now, in one room.

  The rest of the huge house is quiet around me; nothing runs along its artery-like corridors, no life. Perhaps that is why it seems to be dying. There is only me and I have taken up residence in the library, napping on the once-resplendent but now lumpen couch when sleep will no longer be denied. I bathe once a week, just before the woman from the village, who comes to “do” for me, arrives. I, myself, don’t find the smell of an aging man offensive, but Mrs Morgan made it clear she did, so for her sake I weekly wake the plumbing, and the pipes screech their protest. The water runs pale russet into the claw-footed bathtub; I lower my carcass down, and splash about in the lukewarm fluid for a time, like an ancient bird.

  Mrs Morgan does the laundry, tidies the house, and dusts the furniture with such enthusiasm that some days I fear she will dust me if I stay in one place too long. She admires the many, many pieces of fancywork, embroidery, doilies, runners, littering the house. She makes enough meals for a week. I feed most of it to the stray, once-scrawny cat who is now very fine indeed, fat, shiny, contented. It’s not that I don’t like her cooking, but why feed a body that has no desire to go on?

  Over the past months, I have moved methodically through the house, gathering all the bits-and-bobs pertaining to my life: reacquainting myself with them, reminiscing and, finally, systematically destroying them in the library fireplace.

  I found, this morning, the last of the oddments to which my memories cling. From the upended envelope floated a peacock feather; a pair of butterfly wings; and a piece of paper, a list of words embedded into its onion-skin fineness with a calligraphy pen, traced in a very fine hand.

  Three things, three things upon which once hung life, freedom, and quite possibly a soul.

  Finn watches his mother, her head bent over a piece of fabric; a paper-thin woman, and not quite right. Cerridwen has white fluff-hair that belies her youth, and pale blue eyes; she barely strings two words together, but sings in a sweet, sad voice that doesn’t seem to belong to her. Her sole skill, her only resource, is her talent as seamstress. Cerridwen can spin a dress from air and spider silk if need be, and this is how she keeps them fed, clothed, and housed. They do not travel by her volition, but are passed from hand to hand by rich women, wives of mighty men who can afford their helpmeets’ expensive tastes for exotic frocks. The women offer each other ridiculous bribes for use of Cerridwen; she is, essentially, purchased. The boy wonders, some days, if she wishes for freedom, either for herself or for him, for a chance to not be passed from hand to hand like a strange pet.

  He remembers no other kind of life, having been born into the erratic flow of his mother’s travels. They have always been in “big houses,” she sewing and he wandering through halls and wings, attics, and cellars. An old governess in the big house before last, freed of nursery duties and with time on her hands, taught him to read, and so he added libraries to his stock of places to haunt.

  Cerridwen is eighteen when they come to the De Freitas townhouse in Russell Square; the boy, Finn, is nudging seven. They are installed in an attic room that is better than it should be for an itinerant seamstress and her fatherless son: the room is wide and high with tall windows through which pours pure white light. There are two feather beds, three trunks for clothes (they need only one), a place to wash up, and a large multicoloured Turkish rug, like a fallen stained-glass window, on the floor to keep the cold out of the bare boards.

  Finn and Cerridwen come when Aurora De Freitas turns seventeen. One of her great-aunts hands them on—Aurora had demanded three special dresses for her Season and no one but the little Welsh seamstress could create them. Cerridwen makes sure she and Finn stay out of sight, sticking to their rooms as much as possible. Sometimes Finn slips away to explore when his mother is caught up in her work, her mind elsewhere.

  Aurora De Freitas is different from other women. In fact, she simply strikes Finn as being not quite like anyone else, female or male. She has long black hair, straight and sleek as an Oriental, and heavy-lidded, slanted, pale green eyes. She does not walk, glide, prance, dance, or float; Aurora stalks. She has the gait of a hunting animal and a habit of flicking her eyes side to side, so she never misses a thing. It will be many years before it occurs to Finn that this was a survival mechanism. She is tall and straight-backed, but fine-boned and pale.

  Aurora lives with her guardian, Master Justin De Freitas, a paternal uncle. They are in the Russell Square house for the Season; for the rest of the year, they reside in a grey stone manor down in Kent. Master Justin is obsessed with his niece. A portrait of Aurora’s mother, Celeste, hangs in the library; Aurora looks very like her and one wonders if the obsession has merely been transferred from mother to daughter. Finn hears the whispers of the scullery maids that, although Master Justin has kept her to himself in the grey stone house, he has held himself in check. But she is seventeen now and has demanded a Season. They mutter darkly as they conjecture how she convinced him, what she promised him, how he will be rewarded after her time in London. He would never, everyone knew, let her leave him and marry.

  Master Justin is not an ugly man. On the contrary, he shares Aurora’s intense beauty, the raven-black hair and pale skin, but his eyes are darkest blue. His niece is the same height as him, and perhaps this has contributed to his patience, his caution: the fact that she is not a tiny girl who can be easily overcome. Perhaps it is important to him that she surrender.

  They whisper that she does not lock her doors at night, but sometimes, when sleep does not come, Finn wanders the shadowed corridors and finds Justin at her door, whispering at the heavy wood, trying to convince her to let him in, let him in, only for a moment, only for a hug, a sweet avuncular kiss, only to smell the lavender of her hair, to feel its silk against his palm, only for a moment and then he will leave her in peace.

  She does not open the door, at least not on the nights when Finn watches from the darkness, tucked behind a suit of armour, an old chair or chest, the long velvet curtains. She does not answer her uncle, merely lets him chew on her silence until he leaves, empty-handed, empty-hearted.

  “You worked for my mother, didn’t you?” Aurora’s voice, if a voice could be said to do so, stalks the listener. Cerridwen dips her head but does not answer. Aurora continues, “Seven years ago, was it not?” Her eyes flick to Finn, sitting on the edge of his bed, legs swinging, shadowy blue eyes fixed on her; she takes in his tousled black hair.

  Cerridwen says nothing except, “What kind of dresses would you like, miss?”

  “The first dress—and understand this, I must have precisely the dresses I ask for or my bargain will not be fulfilled.” She waits until Cerridwen nods her slight bobbing nod. “And so, I will make a bargain with you. If you give me exactly what I ask for, I will give you your freedom. A house, money, everything to live, and you will never need to sew again.”

  Cerridwen’s eyes are wide and she forgets to hide behind her dullard’s stare. Finn ponders his mother, knowing she’s not as fey or as stupid as people think. He wonders how she can bear to be thought of this way.

  Aurora smiles and nods. “So.”

  The first dress she demands is to be made of peacock feathers. Aurora cares not at all for the design, only that it be made of the specified feathers. Cerridwen, who never sketches anything, never uses a pattern, sees the dress in her mind, finds it fully formed. She does not take Aurora’s measurements; she has seen the girl and that will be sufficient.

  The dress lies like a second skin. The eyes of the peacock feathers are everywhere; they bow and sway, viewing
everything around them, seeming to move even when Aurora is still. Above her head soars a great spray of feathers, the fan of a peacock’s tail, stitched just above the curve of her buttocks and just below the small of her back, on a band of whalebone to hold it firm. When she moves, it sways in time with her steps, dips as if nodding. The green in the feathers picks out the green in her eyes and makes them glow. She is fantastical, exotic, bizarre, unique, bewitching. She regards herself in the mirror, almost grudging in her approval.

  “It’s perfect, Cerridwen. Utterly perfect. Thank you.”

  She sweeps out of the room, down to join the sounds of the ball, swathed in her outrageous dress that will briefly stop all movement, talk, and time when she appears. She will create a scandal. Her uncle will burn with desire, jealousy, but he must not reveal himself. It’s bad enough the servants whisper about him; it would not do for people of his own class to know the truth.

  He does, however, take his niece’s arm for the first dance, holding her close, mesmerized by the feathered eyes of her dress that seem to watch him constantly.

  Finn, sitting at one of the library windows, a book open but unattended to in his lap, watches Aurora through the thick glass. At her insistence, three targets are lined up behind the house, in a space too small, really, for archery practice. She has been besting three of her suitors for the past hour and they still seem to find it charming—she is beautiful and rich, after all, and a man can briefly forgive many things when these two virtues are so in evidence.

  A hard hand clamps down on Finn’s shoulder. He starts, the book falls from his lap and onto the foot of Master Justin, who does not let the boy go. He glares, his mouth set in a hard line, Finn’s in a trembling one. In the ghostly mirror of the window, they look rather alike.

  “You. You belong to that little Welsh bitch?” Justin spits, turning the boy this way and that, examining him like something to be held up to the light.