Chapter 14
Cora
She can barely contain it, the thumping in her chest. It rattles her, setting her limbs to twitching, slicking her palms with sweat. She places them flat on the drainboard. Its metallic coolness bites into her skin, reminding her to breathe. To think.
“Easy does it,”
she says, thinking about her ticker. About the way her thoughts are leaping around, like the flicker of an old black-and-white film. “Easy now.”
Cora wants to tell Howard. It’s the first thing, the only thing, she thinks as she half runs, half walks, to the front door, beating Kep. But by the time she reaches the familiarity of her kitchen, she’s not sure if she should. She’s not sure if he’ll understand. He has never liked her talking about the book, or the old stories woven through it. Howard’s world is a practical one: You care for the chickens and get eggs out of them. You work a day and get paid a wage. The only thing Howard has ever lost his head over is her. Everyone warned him not to take up with a Morgan woman, especially not the prickly one. But he didn’t listen. Didn’t want to listen.
“Thought I heard you.”
She jumps, a bolt running through her, and turns to find Howard framed by the doorway. His eyes crinkle, and she notes the slippers on his feet, the paper in his hand. He’s been waiting for her.
“Did Kep behave herself?”
he asks, bending down to pat the dog’s head, fussing her. All lean, like a small wolf, she’s got one black ear, one white. They thought she was a collie when she was a pup, but now Cora’s not so sure. Especially with the way Kep hunts on their walks, all rangy and focused, and the way she eyes the chickens like she’s ravenous. “Did you do the usual route?”
“Not today,”
Cora says carefully, moving to the kettle, her old hands falling into the pattern of routine. “Circled around Ivy’s field.”
“Did you now.”
“Don’t say it like that,”
Cora says, filling the kettle from the tap. She bangs the top back on and presses down the switch to start the boil. “I can go that way if I like.”
“Never said you couldn’t.”
She prowls around in uneasy silence, stewing in her own thoughts, her mind a tempest. And he waits, watching her cross back and forth, first for cups, then teaspoons. Then the sugar he hasn’t had in his tea for a good fifteen years. He watches her make the tea, one for her, one for him, loading up both with two teaspoons of sugar. He resigns himself to how wrong it will taste. And still he waits.
“Only . . .”
“Only?”
Cora bites her lip, indecision giving way like a dam. “I couldn’t help myself. I went up to the house and saw a discarded wildflower by the front door. Like Carrie had chucked it out. Like . . . like someone had left it there for her. It was yarrow. Only grows on the mountains in secret patches.”
“And . . .”
“She’s put wardings on the thresholds and the windowsills. She knows something’s up, like that wildflower was a warning. Like—”
“You’re worried.”
“I . . . maybe. She’s been a good girl, warded with salt and lavender. Even after ten years, she still remembers.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Cora looks at him sharply. “Are you patronizing me, Howard? Because if you are—”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Hmm.”
“Problem is, Carrie’s return was always going to spark something,”
Howard says with a shrug. “This town’s got a long memory. Mountains even longer.”
Cora snorts. “A list of grudges and mischief more like.”
She hopes Carrie isn’t already setting fire to Woodsmoke with her return. She knows it’s as dry as tinder. All those secrets, stashed away in attics, in the cupboards, in the back of everyone’s minds. Ready to light up, to burn and burn. And Carrie, with her long absence, with the ripples she’s already caused, is the one holding the match. Everyone wanted her to wear that white dress, and no one wanted her to be accepted more than Cora. Finally accepted, not on the edge of things. Not treated like every Morgan woman who came before her.
“Grudges, a long memory . . . same difference,”
Howard says, making for the door. Cora knows he’s thinking of Queenie, his layer. He wants to coax an egg from her, just one, and then he’ll know she’s all right. But Cora’s not done yet. She needs to voice all this, to untangle the snarl inside of her. And he hasn’t had his tea yet. Or the cake.
“I can’t stop thinking of that story. I forgot my mother told me first, but I found it again in the book,”
she says. She loads the tea and two slices of cake, the fruitcake she baked just yesterday, on the tea tray, and he takes the hint, following her into the lounge. She places the tray on the coffee table, and they both sink slowly into their seats, bones shifting and aching as they find some comfort in the worn-out routine.
“Your mother told you a lot of stories,”
Howard says, side-eyeing his wife. She’s flustered, has been since Carrie got back. Her hair has a frizz to it, no longer smooth and orderly. And she has barely looked at him. Instead, she looks right through him, or around him. She’s not really here. And this makes Howard’s bones ache even more than they do when he has to fold his joints into the old armchair he favors.
Cora waits until Howard picks up his tea, then lifts her own to her lips. Tea is like a homecoming. You know where you are with tea. There’s a steadfastness to tea, the way it roots her in a way not many things can. The few times she’s been away from Woodsmoke, when she and Howard have gone on holiday abroad or just on a day trip somewhere, she has always brought tea bags. Then hunted down milk and proper-sized mugs. Tea will always root her.
“It was the one about the frost I was thinking of.”
“The frost.”
“You know, Howard,”
she tsks. Then Cora’s voice softens. “The one about a woman who meets her love at first frost, then he vanishes as the frost thaws in springtime. Never to be seen again, leaving her heart broken and forever cursed to search for him on the mountain. I—I tried to remember the exact way my mother told it. It’s written differently in the book, all fact, no embellishments. Typical Grandma Tabitha. No heart to it.”
She sets down her cup in the saucer. Porcelain jostles against porcelain, rattling through the room. Howard watches her, knowing she’s not done.
“When I saw those wildflowers, whole bunches of them, scattered outside the cottage, I knew, I just knew—”
“Coraline—”
“The mountains didn’t welcome her home, Howard. They’re tormenting her. Punishing her for—for leaving . . .”
Cora takes a gulp of her tea, then instantly regrets it as it burns the roof of her mouth. The delicate skin creases like tissue paper, and she winces, rubbing her tongue over it. “I’m afraid the story is right. The one about the frost and the great love that will disappear. I’m afraid that—that it’s happening to my Carrie. That someone—or something—is leaving her flowers. And the unbalance, can you feel it? It’s because of her. She’ll get her heart broken. Then she won’t stay, will she? She’ll leave again. Because she’s cursed.”
Her voice quakes, and Howard reaches for her, holds her skeletal fingers in his fist. He feels more and more that he is her tether to this world. Like she’s a balloon, tugging on his hand, forever drifting. And if he makes one wrong move, utters the wrong words, she will release his hand and let go. Cora doesn’t say the obvious—that maybe it’s Tom, or an old school friend, or any one of a number of real, breathing people, who’s leaving Carrie flowers. That’s not the way her mind works.
“I’ll go and see her, love.”
“You will?”
He sips his tea, frowning at his cup. He’s always hated this tea set. The edge of the fine porcelain bites into his lip, in such contrast to the warm blandness of the drink. “Today. I’ll go there today. But Cora—pay no mind to it. The stories, the frost . . . I’m sure she’s just had people round to help her out. Maybe they brought flowers. Maybe she’s developed allergies and put them outside the house, and that single stem of yarrow didn’t make its way to the compost heap. She can’t do it all alone, can she?”
“She should have asked me,”
Cora says. “You could have been there, I could have made the lunch, come and checked on things, or—or I could have found her someone. Maybe someone she knew from school, someone she trusts, someone we know—”
“That’s the point, love. That’s the whole point. She doesn’t want us there, underfoot. She wants to do this for herself. This is her homecoming, her way of finding her place here again. We’ve got to give her the time to work it all through in her head. She’ll only bolt otherwise.”
Cora seethes quietly, sipping her tea. Her heart is a storm, raging at Carrie, at Ivy, at the people of Woodsmoke, at the tea for burning the roof of her mouth.
“I’m not wrong, Howard. You’ll see,”
she snaps, staring into the middle distance. She pictures the page in the book, the one with the frost tale written on it. She’s not sure if it was her great-grandmother who recorded it or her mother. It would have been carefully transcribed, told around the hearths of a dozen households, before the young woman, whoever she was, gave in to her grief and climbed the mountain in search of him.
But the writing is faded now, only just legible. If it wasn’t for the Morgan women, these tales would keep being brought to life—the women of Woodsmoke would continue to fall foul of the mountains and their strange ways. There would be no warnings at all. The story is pressed more firmly into Cora’s mind than it is in the pages of the Morgan Compendium, and she worries that if Carrie doesn’t see sense, there will be no one after her to pass it along to. To keep the stories alive. She sits back, features hardening, sure in her own mind of what she saw, what she knows. “I’m not wrong.”