Chapter Ten Finger in the Jam
Chapter Ten
Finger in the Jam
Upon first waking, Kensa feared she was back in the Weaver’s sheepcote, nested on straw and waiting for stillness.
Instead, she was on the tatty chaise longue in the parlour, clad in blankets and nothing else.
Last night’s activities made her sluggish and slow, as she scrubbed a hand across her face.
Her hair was crunchy and wavy from salt, stuck to her forehead and cheeks.
She had a headache.
There was movement in the kitchen. Low noises – too loud for her fragile temper – which lacked Isolde’s usual pitch.
After haphazardly arranging blankets over herself, Kensa approached the sound.
Pots clanged, cupboards were hefted open and slammed shut, followed by a huff, one heavy enough to demand answer.
‘Jack?’
Her pulse quickened. It had been years since Kensa had spoken to the mine overseer’s son.
He had grown. Although he had been thick-set as a boy, he had only become thicker.
His hair was longer, too, and dark as ripe damson fruit.
Come the warmer months he would have it cut short, clipped to his scalp.
Kensa would have known the seasons by its length.
‘Why are you here?’
‘It’s tidy,’ said Jack, incredulous. ‘I can’t find anything.’
She pointed to the pantry. Previously it had been filled with books, a necklace of mouse skulls and several antlers. Now it stored food. Jack snorted, displeased, and helped himself to smoked herring and hard tack with an ease that came with familiarity.
Kensa raised her eyebrows. ‘I asked you a question and I expect an answer.’
Appetite sated, Jack finally took in her blanket-only attire and turned himself, bodily, to the open door. ‘Why – ah – where’s my aunt?’
‘You’re related to Isolde?’
‘Through a fair distance,’ said Jack, clearing his throat. ‘We don’t tell no one.’
‘Ashamed?’ Kensa leaned into his vicinity to pull a mug off its perch.
Her blanket slipped off her shoulders, and, when Jack grumbled his exhale, its warmth found her skin.
Strange, how it unsettled her when she’d had every intention of unsettling him.
Kensa readjusted her blankets and stepped back, knocking her hip on the kitchen table.
She barely knew what to say. Their last conversation was branded onto her mind.
It made her hot and angry to think about – and all she did was think about it.
‘People talk when there’s talk worth having,’ said Jack, ‘and I don’t like to be talked about.’ He rammed the remaining hard tack into his mouth, chewing loudly as though to put a stopper on any further conversation.
‘You little bugger—’
In the time Jack had taken to eat his foraged meal, a fight had broken out.
From the kitchen, the pair heard Isolde swearing at the chickens in the garden who, in turn, clucked their curses back.
Jack sighed, though Kensa spied affection in it.
How he tilted his mouth at one side, the gesture almost lazy.
Unpractised. As though smiling, when he let it, came easy.
Jack’s wide steps took him towards the nettles, which were a foot lower than the day prior and relegated to a small corner.
‘I’ve been cutting them back,’ said Kensa.
This too displeased Jack. ‘Humph.’
Evening was falling and the horizon blurred in the coming rainfall. Another day had gone by with Kensa missing its better half, though the pain she felt at the Weaver’s cottage had lessened. Grief, even second-hand, was a weighty burden.
‘You know your way around,’ she added, in an attempt to make conversation.
At first she thought he had not heard her, until she spoke again and he finally answered.
‘I used to stay here as a child, while my father worked the mine,’ said Jack. ‘I slept in the room upstairs, the one that’s yours now.’
Kensa blurted, ‘In the same bed?’ She pictured his shape in the mattress where hers had been.
It was the same as drinking from the same cup, at the same place, mouths separated by a distance, a moment.
By that reasoning, they’d practically, you know – well, she didn’t know.
Kensa clenched her blankets. ‘In the same bed,’ repeated Kensa, to herself.
Jack shrugged. ‘Ye – yes.’
With one last hiss at the chickens, Isolde emerged, a basket under her arm heaped with nettles and a few soil-covered worms. The healer jostled her way through the garden’s overgrown mass and nodded to her nephew, measuring him in the way relatives do, estimating weight lost or gained, complexion cleared or clouded.
‘Branok sent you?’
‘We’re due this season’s charms to guard the mine.’
A short discussion followed about cost and what to protect against, as well as Jack’s concerns about equipment going missing.
He spoke on sea-borne creatures without fear or superstition, only with acceptance and a respectful wariness.
Kensa listened to their exchange, telling herself it was her duty to understand the transactions between a miner and his wise woman.
She hated how Jack spoke: low and self-assured and so him.
‘Spring’s abating with the season’s turn,’ said Isolde, ‘and I wager you’ll meet other forces than the high tide and the creatures it dredges up.’
Jack’s hard eyebrows drew together. ‘You mean the Bucka?’
‘Pah, he wouldn’t waste his time with miners,’ she grumbled. ‘Let’s not voice his name in wet weather, lest he come with it.’
Jack would not look at Kensa. Even when she willed him to, staring two holes into the side of his head.
Instead, he treated her as he always had, as a nuisance he had to tolerate.
Coin was exchanged, the healer offered advice and the chickens worried Isolde’s sock cuffs in placation.
It was only when Jack was readying himself to leave that Kensa confronted him.
He was neck-deep in the coop, his broad frame comical in such a small space, as he collected eggs.
‘You don’t like me,’ accused Kensa. ‘Well, I don’t like you either.’
Jack’s reply was muffled through straw. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘Exactly, then why not like me?’
Jack took his time to answer, as though he was searching for the shortest way through – and out of – the conversation. ‘What do you want?’
Kensa’s hands were fists inside her blankets. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’
‘Good.’ He stepped back, raking muck from his hair, frowning.
She opened her mouth to scold him and closed it again. When had he grown up? Perhaps, he had done so at the same time she had. Quickly, suddenly, with no warning.
Kensa pulled her blankets even tighter around herself.
‘I should be off,’ he said.
Jack wrapped the eggs in bunched paper and placed them gently in his coat pockets.
For such a large man – for he was a man now – he moved with gentle purpose.
There was no doubt, in Kensa’s mind, that the shells and yolks would meet their destination uncracked and unscrambled, whole as when he first held them.
‘Wait,’ said Kensa, stepping into him, careful not to meet his eye.
As quick as she could, she retrieved a small spear of straw caught above his left ear.
At least he had not grown any taller, which pleased her for a reason she could not fathom and did not wish to dwell on.
Little else had changed, which was good, for she kept them – those changes – in a secret place she’d never admit.
‘You should leave your hair long this season,’ she said, tongue clumsy in her mouth. ‘It looks nice when it’s long.’
Jack’s stubborn frown grew more pronounced and Kensa was keenly aware of the late-afternoon air against her bare neck, wrists, legs.
Isolde called out from the kitchen with an eavesdropper’s knack for timing. ‘Do you plan to put clothes on today, Kensa?’
Jack coughed to cover his laugh, dipped his head down and turned his shoulders to the path, tucking through the bushes that bordered the witch’s cottage. Kensa listened to his rising absence and waited until his steps had fallen from earshot, imagining she heard them still.
‘Round up the chickens and lock the coop, would you?’ Isolde sniffed. ‘Your legs are younger than mine.’
‘Everyone’s legs are younger than yours,’ snapped Kensa.
Although a yawn leaned her mouth wide and her body was tired from yesterday’s excitement, Kensa’s thoughts knew no rest. Outside, the sky was overcast and cloudy.
Rain began its fall, gentle, soothing. Behind her, the cottage waited.
It would always wait and had been waiting for her.
For years, perhaps longer. There was a knowledge at the edge of her senses, leftover from whatever she’d drunk last night.
It was one she could not name and perhaps it belonged to the Old Ways.
Did those wait for her too?
Or did they wait for another?
‘The Bucka promised me,’ she told herself.
Beaks pulled at the tassels on Kensa’s many blankets, as though to remind her it was bedtime.
At the cottage’s rear was the small pen where the chickens slept.
In that lumped, grassy area was a washing line, dormant cherry trees and raspberry bushes.
She could picture Jack’s form, his broad back bent inside the small wooden structure.
His rough hands, their gentle movements.
As soon as Kensa ushered one hen inside, the others followed without much resistance – and then all at once as the trees shivered behind them.
A second’s movement in the branches. Kensa thought she saw a face set deep within them.
Yet there was no one. No man, at least. Instead, a streak of burnt October pressed through the undergrowth and its gaze flashed in the gloom.
‘Fox,’ said Kensa, letting out a slow breath.
The vixen’s pelt was rich with new rain.
Her head was bowed and ears pinned back in pleading, as she padded tentatively across the cool grass.
Her nose, low and wet, twitched towards the chicken coop.
Kensa, never fearing tooth or claw, reached out a hand.
There was a pause, a considerable and languid one, before the fox eased back on her hind quarters and inclined her head.
Permission. The vixen was silky to the touch, though shivery, her spine ridged as a cockle shell and her cheeks curled in hunger.
Nothing supper would not fix. A rabbit stew thickened on the stove, seasoned with fern fronds and gorse flowers.
Surely no one would miss a few bites? As stealthily as possible when draped in innumerable blankets, Kensa heaped a bowl and took it out into the garden.
Its top steamed with warmth and she blew on it several times before she placed it on the ground.
The young fox did not hesitate, ravenous as only a wild creature can be.
‘There now, is that better?’
Again, a rustle from the trees – hawthorn – at the garden’s edge. Kensa squinted into the hedges as the tin bowl clattered on the step and the fox took her fill.
‘Jack?’
Inside went the fox, darting past Kensa’s feet and into the kitchen.
She reached for it. Missed. Its burnished tail tucked low and far from her fingers.
No sooner had the creature found its way indoors than it curled up in one corner where an old sack cloth had been left.
As though it had lain there many a night.
Slipped inside, perhaps, when Isolde’s back was turned or her heart had softened to sentiment.
Kensa draped one of her spare blankets over its small body.
‘One night,’ she whispered. ‘That’s it.’
Later, the women shared a slightly smaller meal than planned and prepared.
If Isolde noticed their slimmer portions or the snoring fox, she made no mention.
Only after the fire had dimmed, did they separate for the evening.
Kensa was tired suddenly. More tired than she had ever been.
The new moon’s earlier thrill had left and worry had taken its place, though she refused to speak on it.
‘You’ll learn the movement for a fisherman’s charm on the morrow,’ said Isolde at their parting.
She seemed distracted, anxious even, as though a mirror to Kensa’s own mood.
Her hands smelled of onions. She had used their browned bulbs for her divinations.
Clearly she had seen nothing good. Strung at the window were their stinking orbs, thick runes carved into each one.
Kensa’s own skin itched when she looked at their silver casings and she wondered which onion, if any, represented her.
The wise woman heaped old parchment, an odd shoe and a dirty cup onto the unused third chair in the parlour.
‘Jack should not have spoken his name,’ she sighed.
‘I’m always put in a foul mood when I think on the damned Bucka. ’
Kensa paused, fingers gripping the banister. ‘Why?’
‘He was a man once,’ she said, as though that was enough. ‘He’s a slave now.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A long time ago he tried to force a wise woman to use the Old Ways to grant him immortality – and he did terrible things in his attempts to, ah, persuade her.’ Isolde’s features seemed worn, tired.
‘Eventually, she gave in, yet not in the way he wanted. She chained him to the sea, to live for ever in its swell, and bound the Old Ways into balance, diminishing them, trapping them both, essentially.’
‘And she became the Morgawr?’
‘Yes, the one you met on the Towan.’ Isolde eased towards her bedroom, slippers shuffling across the newly swept floor. ‘It is why you cannot ever trust the Bucka. At times I fear he’s half-mad, locked in the waves, regretting his eternal life.’