Chapter Six Lessons
Chapter Six
Lessons
Her own room. It was small and narrow, furnished with a simple chest of drawers, a nightstand and a bed.
She would not share it. She did not need to share it.
Here, Kensa would not wake with her sister’s elbow in her back or blonde hair in her mouth.
It was dusty, although everything was dusty.
The crocheted blanket coughed its ire when she slumped on it and a dozen moths scattered when she opened the window.
A laugh burst out as the air swept in, right off the sea, from the cliff and the treetops, straight to her lungs.
Kensa’s room was the only one upstairs and was held fast by the sloping ceiling.
Isolde’s room was downstairs. She was not allowed in there.
This was a bigger property than the one Kensa had grown up in and looked as though various additions had been crafted onto it over the years.
Nothing fit properly, yet it seemed to work.
The interior walls were lime-washed, although yellowed with dust and blackened with cooking smoke and fine wax candles, while the exterior structure seemed to be held together with moss, threats and spite, which, having met Isolde, seemed likely.
From below stairs came a question: ‘Knife?’
Kensa found the wise woman in the kitchen, palm outstretched.
‘Isn’t it mine to keep?’
‘Not yet.’ Isolde took the bone-handled knife back, where it disappeared into the tattered shawl about her shoulders. With that, she busied herself above the fire, mashing dried herbs into grainy submission and tipping in hot water.
Kensa cleared her throat. ‘When do we start?’
Isolde sucked on her teeth.
‘Learning to do what you do,’ said Kensa. ‘When do my lessons begin?’
Two steaming mugs were set upon the precariously full kitchen table, whose stained and grained wooden top was hardly visible.
Tea was not rare to their ilk, a contraband exchanged for silence.
Even the upright Mr Skewes brought a regular supply home.
He claimed it was taken from smugglers he intercepted along the coast, yet common talk was he took bribes.
This tea at the wise woman’s cottage, however, tasted different: earthy and sweet.
Isolde raised her chin. ‘How do you treat a boil?’
Kensa took a seat and clasped her tea to her chest. She knew this; well, she had seen Isolde do this in the village. ‘You make a poultice with flax – I mean the linseed from flax – and apply it while it’s still hot.’
‘Tell me a use for blackthorn?’
‘It’ll loosen your bowels.’
Isolde nodded. ‘What else?’
Kensa shook her head.
‘Gin.’
‘That isn’t a healing tonic,’ said Kensa.
‘It will be when you’re my age,’ chuckled Isolde, eyes glittering, teeth on show. ‘Should a new mother not produce enough milk for her babe, what needs to happen?’
Questions were snapped at with an answer, words bouncing back and forth until Kensa demanded to know, ‘Are you testing me?’
‘No, I am showing that you’ve already begun your training; years ago, in fact. You know more than I did at your age.’
By the time the questions had finished, Kensa’s tea had grown cold. She had not taken a single mouthful. ‘Anyone can bind an unsteady bone.’ Her thoughts strayed to the day in the orchard, on the wind and the air bending to a coven’s will. ‘When can I learn the Old Ways?’
Isolde’s steel eyebrows angled higher, almost folding in on themselves.
‘The Bucka told me I would learn them,’ she added hastily, as though his name would give legitimacy to her request.
It was uncomfortable – his name, spoken here.
As though the cottage recognised it. Bristled back against his presence.
Kensa reached for her tea and chugged it, in an effort to stop herself talking further. Her teeth clicked on the clay edge, her eyes open and wide as she avoided Isolde’s unrelenting stare.
Silence, the kitchen did not have room for all the silence that filled its corners.
‘I shall hear no more talk of the Bucka,’ said Isolde, after a time. ‘Nothing good can come from what he tells you. As for the rest, you will know the Old Ways when you are ready for them.’
Kensa slammed down her mug. ‘How much longer do I have to wait?’
‘Until I say—’
‘Why did the bone-handled knife return to me if not for this?’
Another silence followed, though it was not the same silence as before.
This one had a presence to it, a tang in the air, a gravity that began to pulsate.
Kensa could no longer hear the inhales she took.
Even her own thoughts were dimmed. And her tangled hair, newly dried, began to pull at her scalp, as though heavy with water once more.
‘You wish to learn the Old Ways, child?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Isolde craned a finger past Kensa’s shoulder, to a small yew bookcase pressed into the gap beneath the staircase. Every shadow in the room lingered there, as though boiled down and poured sweetly into that alcove.
‘That is where the Bad Books live.’
As with all embodiments of ill intent, the tomes had lurked beneath Kensa’s vision, sitting as leathery toads on the polished wood, biding their time. Now she noticed their presence, she could not look away. Isolde’s next words had the young woman start from her seat.
‘Go and pick one up.’
‘Fine.’
Her chair legs scraped a warning. Kensa did not heed it.
Her steps were muffled by the unswept dirt upon the flagstones, yet they took her to the Bad Books nonetheless.
She reached for one. It was heavy in her grasp, its grim contents carrying a weight not measured in ink and paper and leather and twine.
Kensa’s instincts told her to put it back, though she would not give Isolde the satisfaction.
She was ready to learn, she had been waiting for this.
And yet her collarbones grew heavy beneath her flesh, trying to divorce themselves from her body.
Her tongue kept sticking to her teeth, no longer its known form, the words sitting on it not her own.
Even her face seemed to stretch, yet when she put a hand to it, she found it unchanged.
The sensation lingered, a lengthening pull, as though her mouth was trying to fit itself to another skull behind her own, wide as the Morgawr’s.
It was then the Bad Book spoke. You do not belong here. Its voice needled through her ear. You will not belong here. Ancient, long lost and cruel. Smuggler’s daughter, neck to fit a noose.
Kensa stretched out her arm, intending to place the Bad Book onto its shelf. It would not go. She could not move her hand and her fingers would not loosen.
Do you miss him?
Do you miss your father?
Do you think he misses you?
Do you think anyone would miss you?
Do you even think at all?
‘There were those who knew the Old Ways and succumbed to them,’ explained Isolde, distant, quiet, with the same morose tilt to her eyes as when she had spoken on the Owlman.
‘Those foolish creatures wrote their madness onto paper to try to rid it from their minds and it did not work, the Old Ways – and a terrible gift of Sight – had already taken hold.’
Kensa’s whole body refused to shift its stance and her teeth ached with the effort of it. She could not speak, move her eyes, cry for help. And the Bad Book kept speaking, telling her terrible truths, the coldest thoughts she entertained in the coldest hours.
First to be born.
First to fail.
Worse, there was forbidden knowledge here.
About how to corrupt a man’s good nature, stop the blood in his heart or the air in his lungs, and how to place his soul in a box for your keeping.
In due course, Isolde took pity on her and plucked the Bad Book from her grasp, setting it back among its fellows.
‘I do not do this to frighten you, I do this to teach you.’
Tongue unstuck, Kensa blurted, ‘What if I am never ready?’
‘If you fear that, you never will be.’
And so ended Kensa’s first real lesson.
As the day turned on its heel, she was kept busy.
She was shown where the herbs were kept and what she could touch in the pantry.
There was a brief introduction to the chickens, who quickly lost interest in the apprentice when she refused to feed them, despite persistent – persistent – pecking.
Later that night, filled with boiled rabbit, woody carrots and dense pastry, Kensa settled in her new bed in her new room in the wise woman’s cottage.
She lay there on unfamiliar sheets. She listened for another breath beside her own – for Elowen’s – which had been present almost her whole life.
Instead, there was only Isolde’s distant snores, reverberating up the staircase.
Outside, the moon was bright and distant and alone, reflected across the sea.
‘Hand me the shears, would you?’ Isolde peered over her shoulder, palm extended. ‘Always cut a nettle, never pull it or you’ll ruin the threads.’ New shoots had begun to peer through the soil, bright and green and eager to sting.
Kensa sucked at a reddened thumb. ‘You’ll be weeding this garden for ever.’
From behind the weeds came several low clucks. The chickens were conspiring again. Kensa shook her skirts to re-cover her bruised ankles.
‘It’s not a garden, it’s a nettle farm,’ Isolde snorted.
‘O’course, I should’ve known.’
‘Put your wit on the boil with the kettle, will you?’
And with no ceremony, fuss or rite, the women’s partnership truly began.
‘Are you listening? Go with the leaves, not against, and you won’t be stung.’
‘I am!’
‘If you were, you wouldn’t have that sulking face.’
A retort was quick to come. Kensa uncharacteristically swallowed it back down.
Each one of their disputes usually ended with laughter, until she forgot the welts upon her fingers or had, perhaps, learned – without realising – how to pull a nettle from its stem.
Later, she would find her other lessons from the healer came in such a manner.
‘Out, you bloody vixen, out!’ Isolde barked, throwing the shears at the back door’s frame, where they rang with a heavy thwung.
On the kitchen table was a young fox, her snout deep in sweetmeats and her whiskers suspiciously powdered. She leapt off the surface with a graceful pounce and avoided Isolde’s temper, enforced with a boot’s end.
‘This better be the last time I find you in here or so help me, I’ll—’
Off went the fox, springing with smugness across the wet grass, sending one hungry glare towards the bushes where the chickens gathered. For once, the weeds were silent. Even a chicken knows to be quiet when a hunter is near.
Kensa’s movements were uneasy in her new surroundings.
Nothing sat in its logical place. In fact, there was nothing logical about the cottage and its interior.
Isolde routinely bid her to fulfil endless menial tasks until she was rushed off her feet.
Yet, as the days fell behind her, she learned where the mortar and pestle was, which spices refused to sit beside one another on their shelves and which candles were left for Best, should he ever arrive.
Whenever she had the opportunity, Kensa tidied.
Isolde bustled about unaware of any changes, and half-unaware of her new housemate.
Until she spoke to ask a question, whereupon Isolde became mischievous, cryptic and prone to dry wit, as though thrilled to have a companion to show herself off to.
In all Kensa’s tidying, there was one chair – the third chair in the parlour – that Isolde warned her must always be kept full.
It did not matter what filled it, be it papers or linen or half-finished blankets with their wool unspooling, the third chair could never be empty.
She gave this instruction with such gravity that Kensa obeyed.
Whoever that chair was for, it was certainly not for either woman and no prodding would draw further explanation from Isolde.
Wednesdays were the busiest mornings of the week and it seemed to Kensa as though the whole village came knocking.
First was Mrs Hughes with a question about her ailing husband, second was Pearce, the forge master, who had problems with his feet.
Kensa hovered in the background, doing as she was bid – fetch this, bring that – and studied how Isolde worked.
Boils were lanced, poultices applied, teeth pulled and conversations had.
One or two house visits were arranged by individuals whose relatives were too frail to make the journey to Bohortha, meaning the coming few days would be busy ones.
There was talk about a fever in the surrounding villages too, caught by visiting relatives in Truro.
Kensa’s mind went straight to Elowen, a sense of foreboding reaching into a cavity near her gut. She dismissed it as hunger.
Dinner was a simple affair, as it often was on busy days. Tonight’s supper – fish stew – was heated on the stove. Beyond the pot-warmed kitchen, the springtime evening settled in early and the night was sharp company: a cold yellow fading to a colder blue.
In her room, Kensa listened to the house settling now the day’s heat had dwindled, as though releasing one big sigh.
She liked her room, had placed her shells about it, while her hagstone was set upon the bedside table.
She had got used to her own sole breathing in the night, had got used to solitude in sleep.
Kensa’s nightdress was cool against her legs, as were the covers she slid into.
There was a burden of future upon her, a knowledge that she would spend many a night in this bed, would find the lengths her bones could reach and learn how her features were meant to look, once she’d finished growing into them.
Still, doubt came, rising from the yew shelves where the Bad Books waited. Kensa did her best not to listen.
And if she propped a lumpy pillow beside her, as though to mimic her sister’s form, the house promised not to tell anyone else.