Chapter Sixteen Oh, Sweet One, Come Homeward #2
‘Don’t,’ said Kensa. She was dizzy with the notion, with the realisation that Elowen was failing. She brushed her sister’s pale hair back from her paler face, ran a warm cloth over her skin, kissed her, quickly, on the temple.
‘I should have told you,’ said Elowen, lids heavy.
‘Hush,’ said Kensa, mouth clumsy.
The sheets were wet. It wasn’t Elowen’s doing. Kensa did not know when she had started crying. Her cheeks were sore, indifferent to the salt tracks running down them.
‘It was my fault, not yours,’ said Kensa.
‘If I’d have been better, you’d have been able to talk to me about this, about everything.
’ No, it would be fine. She had decided.
‘You’ll get well and come visit me,’ continued Kensa.
‘You can meet the chickens and there’s a fox and on Sundays we make currant buns.
’ She told Elowen she loved her. There was no reply.
She said it again. Kensa held the girl’s hand harder.
It did not hold hers back. Slowly, the fire lost what heat it had given.
Kensa’s whole body slumped, as though a weight had pushed her spine down and she could not push against it.
‘Elowen,’ said Kensa, hiccupping. ‘Elowen.’
Had her breathing stopped? No, it was faint, growing fainter.
Kensa must have spoken or shouted or shrieked in those moments, for her ears rang afterwards.
She could not recall it now and would not later.
Whatever was said, it woke the other occupants within the house and Kensa was bid to drop her sister’s hand.
She rose on stiff legs and stepped back.
Mr Skewes collapsed on his knees beside his daughter and mumbled inaudible words.
Derwa was quiet, stoic, smiling for ever at her little girl, stroking her forehead and humming, singing under her breath.
Isolde kept to her chair and turned away, as though to escape the room’s tragedy.
Then this was what it was like? Those days administering to others, easing them into grief as a babe into a washbasin.
Here was Kensa’s turn. She did not want it.
In those fractured moments – no time at all and endless time, when mourning begins to gather itself as a cloak upon its wearers – Elowen’s eyes stayed fixed on Kensa’s, until they closed.
‘No.’ Kensa repeated the word until it was shapeless in her mouth.
She meant it. ‘No.’ This would not happen.
‘No.’ Because she knew a way to stop it.
The apprentice spun her body round to where the wise woman sat on a narrow chair.
Anger, such as she had never known, had her snatch at her mentor’s clothes.
Behind her, Derwa and Mr Skewes continued their gentle talk, soothing Elowen though she was too far gone to hear it.
Kensa spoke low enough to avoid their ears. ‘You can save her.’
Isolde’s jaw was set and firm.
‘There has to be a way.’ Kensa was hoarse, as though her voice had been pulled from its box, boiled and burned, then tipped back into her throat.
‘I can do nought.’
‘That’s a lie, it has to be a lie.’
‘This is a mortal sickness and Elowen, being what she is, is affected differently.’
Kensa squeezed her fingers around the older woman’s hood. ‘What does that mean?’
‘You need not rush back to Bohortha.’ Isolde eased onto her legs and readied herself to go. ‘Take what time is needed—’
‘No!’ She quietened her voice at Mr Skewes’s hiss and repeated, ‘No, please, help me, fix her. There has to be … ’ Kensa trailed off, swiping a hand at her face. It came away hot and wet. ‘I will do anything, I cannot lose her or I will lose myself.’
Isolde’s hand was in her pocket, clenched around that blackened onion.
Was it Elowen’s future foretold in its shrunken skins?
It couldn’t be. Kensa’s mind reeled. She thought back to the Bad Books on the yew shelf and the dire warnings held within them.
At the pages which had eased open, wanting to be seen, as if they had known she would one day need them.
‘I’ve read about it, I’ve read about ways to cheat death,’ said Kensa. ‘It can be done, don’t you dare tell me it can’t be done.’
‘There will be a cost.’
‘Then I will pay it!’
‘And what about balance? One cannot give a life without taking—’
A sharp knock rattled the door. Their heads turned, aghast at the pervasive sound.
Kensa was already on her feet. She lurched round, strode to the small entrance and yanked the door open.
Morning had already come and gone without her notice and it had brought a man.
He stood on the threshold, dressed in black.
Tall, he was, taller than Kensa. Wiry, too, with a wide-brimmed hat and the King James Bible in his hands.
Set between his high cheekbones was an expression of rehearsed sympathy. ‘I—’
‘You’re the new curate,’ said Kensa dully. ‘Why are you here?’
He took in a long breath. Spoke carefully and with a churchly intonation. ‘I came to offer my services at this truly sad and—’
BANG.
Kensa slammed the door and turned back to the room. It was that or strangle him, this stranger, the replacement clergyman who had seen fit to believe local talk and take Elowen into the next life.
‘It’s all right,’ said Derwa, though it was not and could never be. ‘It’s all right.’ Only then did Kensa understand that within those unassuming words was a request:
Come say goodbye. Oh, sweet one, come homeward.
The cob walls pressed in around Kensa until she could taste their mottled structure: hay, clay, piss and earth.
No, she could not say goodbye. No, she could not let this happen.
No, she would not lose Elowen. She wanted to curse and scream and cry.
Perhaps she was and that was why Isolde placed a hand to her arm.
Kensa shrugged it off, violently, movements wild and exaggerated. She would rage and snarl and fight. Someone had to, if Elowen was too sick to do it herself.
‘I won’t allow it.’
Could she make it back to Bohortha in time? She had to try. There would be answers there, help in a beastly form, advice on inked pages.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Isolde’s question checked her. ‘Get your parents out of the room,’ said the wise woman. Her lips formed such a grave shape, it was as though she could speak to the soil. ‘Get them outside.’
‘What? I don’t understand.’ Kensa’s speech was slurred. ‘You’ll heal Elowen?’
‘I will try.’
A strangled noise cracked Kensa’s mouth open. She flung her arms around Isolde and went to kiss her cheek, until the wise woman stopped her.
‘I have not succeeded yet and may easily fail.’ Her wrinkled palm turned upwards. ‘Finally, I know what the Old Ways have been telling me. Give me what is precious to you, no tawdry bauble, only a token that has meaning – now, do it now.’
Kensa’s hagstone, the one given to her by her father, was exchanged.
She gave it without question. There was an odd distance in Isolde’s voice, which Kensa had never heard before.
Still, she did as she was told and, with some reluctance, Derwa and Mr Skewes obeyed instructions to wait outside.
Of course, there would be consequences. Those could be dealt with later. For now, what mattered was Elowen.
‘What’ll she do?’ Mr Skewes was unusually pliant in his exhaustion.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ said Kensa, ‘as long as she bloody does it.’
Her head was ringing, all bells, all ache.
Derwa was the one to hesitate. She looked to her eldest daughter and to Isolde, a shrewd expression in place. ‘Is this Christian?’
‘If you have to ask that then you already know the answer,’ replied Isolde.
Derwa nodded and let Kensa pull her outside, onto the sloping street. Another day was over, the sun was setting. Time had stopped flowing the way Kensa expected it to.
It was a fine evening, with clouds brushed to frills and dyed a merry pink.
Her sister would be saved tonight and she would help to do it. Only, when Kensa went back to enter her mother’s home, did she find the door locked against her, as it had been for the unwanted curate.
‘Isolde?’ Kensa rammed her shoulder against the wood.
Neighbours gathered as cats to the harbour when the catch has come, pulling Mr Skewes and Derwa aside, mumbling their sympathies.
Kensa could hear the platitudes slapping against her ears like wet fins and fishtails.
It was only when Kensa beat her fists on the wood and yelled, that Isolde finally inched it open.
‘I cannot do what must be done in this noise, Kensa.’
‘Let me in.’
‘I may be your teacher,’ said Isolde, a resigned fix to her features, ‘but I will not teach you all things.’
Kensa tried to ram her elbow inside. ‘You don’t trust me?’
‘Do as I say and look after your parents.’
‘Mr Skewes is not—’
‘If you want your sister to live, then get out!’
Kensa halted. Nodded, once. Stepped back and waited.
Confusing thoughts found her. She was meant to help Elowen, to give what needed to be given.
That wasn’t happening. What was happening?
She did not want to consider it and could not, mind unable to click into place.
Kensa knew what she’d asked for, yet did not let herself think on it fully.
It took an hour. Mr Skewes and Derwa stayed close.
The Jennings family soon came out to offer hot wine and supportive words.
Kensa ignored them. Ate nothing, drank nothing and sat on the front step, alone.
She would not leave the doorway. Her bottom was cold from the porch’s flagstones and her knees held tight to her chest.
Gone was the sun and the shadows grew around her.
Craning above was a pilchard sky, the stars collected as shoals.
Kensa swore that if the night had a tide, it was high tonight.
She prayed to it, bowed her head and gave her loyalty to whatever force – God or Devil or even the Bucka himself – if it would save her sister.
In the end, it was Isolde who came through.
Just as Kensa was beginning to fall asleep, the cottage door eased open.
The gnarled wise woman stood behind it, spent and sodden with sweat.
‘It is done. She will live.’
A slackened quality poured down Isolde’s face as she teetered forwards.
Kensa reached out to catch her, arms thrust around the older woman’s torso.
Behind her, on her pallet, was Elowen. Asleep, though with colour to her cheeks.
Mr Skewes almost knocked the healer and her apprentice aside in his effort to see his daughter, loud and not a little drunk.
His caterwauls were silenced by a forceful hush from Derwa.
‘There she is,’ Derwa said, her fingers to Elowen’s forehead. ‘There’s my little girl.’
Elowen stirred. ‘Ma?’
Relief. Kensa’s whole body sagged with it. Or would have, were it not for Isolde who leaned heavily against her. ‘Let’s get you settled,’ she said to the wise woman, attempting to angle them both inside. ‘You’ll have the chair and I’ll take the sill.’
Yes, she would stay the night. Curl up beside Elowen and plait daft things into her hair, tell her she smelled bad and make her laugh, somehow, as she had on occasion. At last, they could be true sisters after years spent in sourness. And she would forgive Kensa, she had to.
‘We must go, child.’
An urgent note marked Isolde’s request, despite the weariness beneath it.
If Kensa was to be truthful with herself, the wise woman looked terrible.
Eyes puffed and bloodshot. Hands clutched to claws.
Even her hair seemed whiter too, skin lacking colour, as though her blood had fled with the daylight.
That could be fixed. Couldn’t it? Yes, there would be potions and poultices to mend her in the cottage, Kensa knew that and trusted herself to administer them.
‘All right, I will get you home,’ said Kensa.
As was always the case with wise women, there was work still to do. But her sister was alive and all would be well from now on. She willed it, believed it.
Over their heads, the pilchard sky watched and knew better.