13. Keeper of Secrets
Keeper of Secrets
I’d seen it all.
For six years my eyes were spared nothing. No raw or tender or ugly scene. Things hidden were not hidden from me.
This was my curse. To live forever a witness. Never a participant. A wanderer drifting in and out of the lives of others.
I saw too much.
Heard too much.
Knew too much.
And yet I couldn’t look away.
In the beginning, I’d felt a flash of guilt at witnessing things intended to be private.
Secrets never meant for the light. Over time, though, I rationalized those qualms away.
I didn’t have much in life. I would not beat myself up for beholding all that was withheld from me, from the things I would never be allowed to experience for myself.
If I would only ever have vicarious thrills, then so be it.
I would have them and not allow myself guilt for the rightness or wrongness of my actions.
I spied to my heart’s content, observed any and all with the gluttony of a drunk guzzling the bottle.
I watched my friends and family and neighbors in every state imaginable (and unimaginable).
I witnessed it all, full of envy and resentment and hopelessness.
Ugliness twisted in me, a terrible tangle.
Hate for what I was—for the thing, the creature that had done this to me, sentenced me to a wretched existence.
A life that wasn’t a life no matter that I went on breathing.
No matter that I spent most of my days lying to myself, pretending that I was still someone and not a shadow.
I was there when the children I grew up with had their first kisses, when they married and surrendered to the give and push of flesh.
I heard the foulest utterances—things said and done in private or select company that no one would dare reveal in public.
I knew which husbands slapped their wives.
The wives who slipped the finely crushed roots of belladonna into cups of ale, poisoning the men who would use fists on them. This happened with surprising regularity. Husbands expiring peacefully in sleep . . . their deaths, in truth, not so peaceful at all.
I’d seen the baker’s assistant surreptitiously spitting into the dough she vigorously kneaded.
Little boys wiping their snot on walls and under tables when no one was looking.
Wives waving farewell to their husbands whilst a lover slipped in through the back window.
I could tell which villagers were deep in their cups before midday.
I’d seen where villagers buried their valuables to hide from the bursars sent north by the lord regent. I could point to the graves of coin, jewelry, and silver buried in the cold soil.
I watched street urchins lifting the pockets of busy patrons on market day . . . no one the wiser.
No one except me.
Old widows carrying on one-sided conversations in the silence of their houses, dishing soup into solitary bowls as they chronicled their lonely day into the void.
And yet every one of these secrets was safe with me because I was the keeper of secrets.
I knew everything everyone had to hide—and I wasn’t talking.
At twenty-one, I felt a hundred years old. An old young woman.
Time crawled when you were invisible, when your days were spent talking to yourself and watching others live their best and worst lives.
When I uttered a word it vanished into the ether, never to find the ears of anyone. The only time I ever felt heard was when I walked the woods at night.
I still felt her watching me, listening to my pleas volleying through the forest—that witch who took glee in my misery, in the spell she cast on me.
Not a day passed without sensing her shadow over me, without feeling a buzzing energy around me, but I felt her most keenly in the winter, on those cold, cold nights when the moon was at its zenith high overhead, like the night she first cursed me, and I suspected she had some affinity for that time of year.
In the short-lived days of summer, like now, I felt her less.
My steps crunched over the road, rutted by horses and carriage wheels alike. Linnea lived on the opposite side of the village. The quickest route was the most direct way through town.
The sun was out. Clouds absent from a sky so blue it almost hurt the eyes. For once, fog didn’t choke the atmosphere.
Passing down High Street, I lifted a plum off a vendor’s wagon—not even glancing to verify that another one, identical, the same in every way, color, and structure, remained, still sitting among the bounty of fruit. I knew it would be there.
The chatter of villagers surrounded me as I walked, biting into the fruit, plum juice running down my chin unchecked.
Fresh produce like this would be impossible to enjoy a month from now.
Soon we would only have pickled vegetables and potted fruit and copious amounts of brined cabbage and turnips to eat alongside our salted fish and meats.
I strolled with a clear destination in mind. Visiting Linnea gave me something to fill the chasm that was my life. It took the edge off the ache . . . and helped me pass the time when time was all I had.
I entered Linnea’s house just as her husband was readying to leave. The blast of screeching children was a welcome sound after the silence of my house.
“Morning, Isak,” I greeted as I strolled past him.
He stared fixedly ahead, his whiskery jaw working as he swallowed the last bit of his breakfast.
His tannery shop sat strategically downwind of the house, but that didn’t spare Linnea or the children from its noxious fumes. Isak himself bore the stink of his profession, wearing it like a second skin even though he bathed each night (winter months, too).
I much admired him for the consideration. Many men did not perform such a courtesy for their wives, and it spoke to his thoughtful nature. Even so, the aroma of decaying animal flesh, dung, and urine clung to him. I held my breath until he was clear of me and down the path.
Only a year older than Linnea, he possessed wavy dark hair and craggy features that only grew more handsome with age, the hard lines and edges giving his face more structure and angles. The round-faced lad who once chased us around the village was long gone.
Still, good looks or not, it was difficult to abide his odor. Linnea, evidently, did not mind. She married him and continued to share a bed with him.
Of course, the village did not boast a plethora of eligible prospects—then and now. Allowances had to be made if a girl wished to marry. Isak had certainly been at the top of the list. Good looks. A dependable livelihood. I wondered if I had not fallen prey to my fate . . . would I have chosen him?
Would he have chosen me?
After my disappearance, he chased only Linnea around the schoolyard, when once it had been the both of us.
Well, to be fair, Linnea did not spend a great deal of time frolicking and running through the schoolyard after the night of my presumed death.
A part of her vanished, too, alongside me, the vestiges of childhood ending that night for the both of us.
She quietly sank into her sorrow, subdued, no one aware (save me) that she cried herself to sleep routinely.
I would drift into her room many a night and slide into bed beside her, rolling onto my back so that we rested shoulder to shoulder, grateful that she loved and missed me even as I tried to impart what comfort I could with my phantomlike presence.
Time has a way of dimming the pain though.
Eventually, she turned from her sorrow.
Turned to Isak. Embraced him instead of tears, and I was happy for her . . . even as I was jealous.
Jealous that her grief found relief.
Jealous that she still had a life—that she lived while I was an empty husk.
That was when I learned that two different things could exist inside the same space. It was possible to feel two conflicting things.
Life was like that. A conflicted, complicated, tangled jumble where hot and cold, hard and soft, love and hate could thrive hand in hand.
Linnea and Isak grew from friends into .
. . more. Into a couple that would slip behind the schoolhouse for stolen kisses and then, eventually, groping hands under clothes and panting breaths and Linnea moaning as Isak spent himself against her skirts, cursing, “I’ll die if I can’t properly fuck you soon. ”
All the things I could not have.
Perhaps I could never have.
I told myself it was natural, healthy, and good for Linnea—even if it stung to see her moving on without me. Just another way I was left out . . . and behind.
Their desperate groping behind the schoolhouse resulted in a clandestine coupling in an ice shack on a nearby frozen pond.
It seemed Linnea, like Isak, was impatient for a proper fuck.
Although I’m not sure how proper Isak’s three gasping shoves beneath her skirts were whilst Linnea peered wide-eyed and bewildered and faintly dissatisfied over his shoulder.
Such was the anticlimactic nature of carnality.
At least from what I had observed. Few women ever achieved a release equal to men.
A vastly unfair balance. Those who did were often not in bed with the men they ought to be—not their husbands, but illicit lovers.
That made me, in my bounty of time, ponder the nature of desire.
Was one’s desire heightened when it was wrong? When forbidden? Certainly, Linnea had been more satiated from the forbidden gropings behind the schoolhouse. Once they were married, a certain tedium developed in their conjugal trysts.
Linnea bounced a squalling baby on her hip today—like on most days. Her unkempt hair poked out from her headscarf while her two toddlers banged their dishes against the table, more food on their faces and between them than what made it into their mouths.
“Good thing you two are cute,” I murmured, twirling a finger at the twins.
Stefan flaunted his chronically snotty nose, and I wasn’t certain if all the mess on him was strictly his meal of stewed apples and oats.
They squawked loudly, their eyes almost seeming to fix on me.