Chapter 15
Elsebeth
It’s too late to go elsewhere, and so Ursula and I must sleep inside the cottage with the woman.
We eat a watery soup Ursula has cooked for us out of some weeds from the garden; we daren’t give the woman anything stronger for fear it will kill her outright, and daren’t let her know we have any other food on us for fear she will kill us.
She may look half dead, but even someone as weak as she can kill another if given the chance.
When we are done eating, Ursula helps the Aufhocker’s mother back into bed, then prays together with her. The woman falls asleep soon. Her breathing is labored. Once you grow as thin and hungry as she, even drawing in air is weary work.
I sneak a bit of food from my pack then, for I am mighty hungry still.
I think then that I am not much better than that Aufhocker’s mother; had I been in her shoes, I might have taken a few bites out of my dead husband, too.
In this, she and I are not alone, only I know not whether that’s a comfort.
A woman from a village near where I lived ate her dead husband and then dug up two bodies and ate those, too.
I also heard that a woman from a different village ate five of her children.
It had kept me up at night, that story had. Did the mother kill them to eat them, or had they been dead already? Surely they were dead, for what mother would kill her child to eat them, even if she were a reluctant mother?
(Such as I would have been, had that soldier saddled me with a babe.)
I suppose all the horror deep inside of me is rising to the surface again, because next I think about a story I heard from a neighbor, of yet another woman who ground bones from the dead to dust and used that dust to bake bread.
It must have been a beautifully white loaf of bread if she used only bones, though probably not a good one, probably very crumbly and tasting only of ash and grit.
But when you are hungry enough, you will eat anything and think it sweet, if only because it stops the horrible pain in your belly.
I know, because I have eaten all manner of strange things so as not to become like one of those poor wretches at the edge of the road, some of them very unclean and unwholesome, like rats and grass and my father’s leather belt and sheets of paper and bark from a tree and once a pebble, though that was an accident.
I only meant to suck on it. Margarethe had told me that sucking on a pebble would help with the hunger.
Only it was not true.
Nothing helps with the hunger, only eating, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes, that just makes the hunger worse. It grows and grows and grows until it has pushed everything else inside you to the side, even the thought of God, until you’re no better than the beasts in the field.
No, until you are worse than the beasts in the field, for everyone knows animals are free from sin; they have no souls that can be tainted.
As I sit thinking about all of this, Ursula takes the skull out of her glass box to check her hair for vermin.
When she is done, she kisses the skull’s brow, and I can’t help but wish she would kiss me, too.
That might stop all these horrible stories from swirling around my head, at least for a little while.
We undress for bed, but neither of us can sleep, even though we are weary to our very bones. Too much has happened.
“Can you check my head for lice?” I ask, for when I was a child, nothing could make me fall asleep faster than my mother or sister touching my head.
I sit in front of the hearth as Ursula combs out sections of my hair, her face close to my head so she can see the little insects and their eggs better.
Every breath ghosts deliciously over my scalp.
For a while, we don’t talk, but I am selfish and can never be close to her and not wish to draw her attention to me, and so I say in a soft voice so as not to wake the Aufhocker’s mother, “I used to delouse my brothers after my mother and grandmother were taken by the plague. They’d never sit still, and I’d grow vexed with them.
I wish I hadn’t. They couldn’t help it. They were only little. ”
“Soon, you’ll be able to make amends,” Ursula promises.
She pulls a little scab from my scalp and tosses it into the fire.
It smells strange as it burns. I am reminded then of those three witches, how the air was thick with the smell of burning flesh, hair, and cloth, and I shudder, tear my eyes away from the flames, and look at the skull instead.
With her eternal grin, she seems satisfied, almost merry.
Then again, she has much to be pleased about, all snug on her purple pillow, which Ursula has plumped for her.
I can hardly believe that this bit of bone with her glass eyes and dusty hair will return my family to me, and yet I can’t stop hoping that it will, either.
Ursula gently tilts my head so she can check behind my left ear for nits. Some hair slithers across my forehead, making my brow tickle. I rub at it. Margarethe’s clog left a scar, and that gladdens me, for it’s only right that those we love mark us as their own.
“Do you remember you asked me what I’d wish for, if I had a second wish to waste on something silly? I think I finally have an answer for you,” I say.
She plucks an insect from my hair, and into the fire it goes. “What would you wish for?”
“I would like to mark my skin in some way with little pictures of everyone I love. That way, I could carry them wherever I go, and it would not matter how far away they are from me, because I could still look at them.”
“That is a sweet idea,” she says as she combs my hair back into place. “Where would you want them?”
“My arms and hands, I think, so I can easily look at them. Though maybe my grandmother should be on my cheek so she can whisper more stories in my ear.” I stand and roll my head from left to right to get a crick out of my neck.
When I turn around, Ursula is fiddling with the comb, rubbing the teeth with her thumb.
Her cheeks are flushed, though mayhap that’s just because of the heat of the fire.
“And I? Would you have a little picture of me, too?” she asks, looking up at me with a boldness in her eyes that instantly makes my belly squirm.
“Of course,” I breathe.
“Where would you have me? Here?” she asks as she places her fingertips on the back of my hand. “Or here?” She moves her hand up, to the inside of my wrist, and I shiver in delight.
“Here,” I whisper, and I take her hand and press it against my chest, over the place where my heart beats. It is racing now, the blood rushing through me.
Ursula’s face lights up with a smile. It makes her eyes crinkle, and she looks so sweet that I want nothing more but to shed every stitch of clothing still on my body and press myself against her so she touches as much of me as she possibly can.
I love you, I think.
I open my mouth to say it thrice, for three is the Lord’s number and will make it true, and speaking such things out loud gives words their own power also, but I’ve not the chance.
Satan has found us.