I thought of Frieda’s mother in Blumwald, waiting again on a child who had gone away and never come back.
‘Thank you,’ I said to Wolf.
There was open disgust on her face, a simmering anger. ‘You brought this trouble to our doors,’ she said and left me amongst the ashes.
I did not know what to do about the great hall. The remains of the grand staircase were spread across the flagstones, vast beams three metres long and melted nails and hunks of burned tapestry. Frieda’s body still lay amongst it, dusted grey with ash. I thought I should find something to cover her with, until Wolf brought men from the village to take her. I cleared up the smaller pieces as best I could, but the beams were twice as long as I was tall and so heavy, my strength failed at once. Perhaps they would have to become another feature of the hall, like the jut of limestone from the mountain below.
When the Witch roused and found me in the hall, her eyes slid over the corpse like it was another piece of charred wood. Like death was nothing to her. I did not know what to think of that. My Witch had been so undone by Frieda’s arrival, so helpless the night before – yet now she stalked through the world as though none of it had passed, her composure regained at such terrible cost.
I stood mute and alone in the aftermath of my choices.
b
Denial. That is the only name I can put to what came over me the following weeks. I had seen a horror too great in Frieda’s pain and death; it was as if it were too vast a feeling to contain in my body, so I simply didn’t feel it. I turned my mind away again as I had meant to before I’d known about Edgar’s letter, the footsteps, the maid in the kitchens at night, and stumbled through the routine of my day. I had thrown my lot in with the Witch, and the only way I could believe it to be the right path was to close off any other possibility. I had to make this work.
I understood now: it was a deal I would make, had been making from the start.
What would I not do, if it meant I could be loved?
b
As March melted the snow and the days grew brighter, I set about replanting the kitchen gardens. It was a little early but I knew there would be work assessing and clearing the wilderness that had consumed its beds before I could start a regimented sowing plan. The seeds I had asked for arrived, and I arranged the packets on my desk in a miniature map of the garden I planned to build. Salad vegetables at one end, herbs at the other. Medicinal plants kept carefully to the side; the current indiscriminate scatter of deadly blooms made me uneasy.
Planting took time, a surrender to the seasons and the forces of weather that were far beyond my control. Whether I came out one morning to find the rosemary flowering, or my thyme savaged by marauding squirrels, it was all the same thing. A process, a world far beyond my human dominion. I could not hurry it, or control it, only invest my time and care, and carry on with a hope and belief in the future.
I took to going bare foot while gardening, finding pleasure in the feeling of soil between my toes and knowing that this was another thing I would never have been allowed to do back in Blumwald. This was something distinctly part of my new life, the one I had chosen for myself and I relished it. I sang as I worked, digging and sowing and pruning and watering, sang as I brought finds back to the study, examined flints and white-streaked granite, sang even when the Witch laughed, called me sentimental and soft. But I didn’t care if she saw my softness. After that moment in the bath I understood: I wanted her to see me. All of me. I wondered now if I finally understood what Klara felt at those balls, brushing fingers with eligible young men as they danced, the lingering of eyes and the shortness of breath. All that I found now here, with the Witch. When her fingers grazed mine as I passed her a piece of fruit it was like being burned by sparks jumping from the fire. When she fixed a stray curl of my hair, or the trailing corner of my shawl, it was a revelation. Her body was something I was always aware of, its proximity to my own, its heat, its curves, the hidden silk of her skin.
Perhaps I was alone in this. But when she blushed as I caught her watching me, or when her breath grew rapid and shallow if I leaned across her to reach for a bottle of ink, I thought: perhaps not.
That kernel of something between the Witch and I grew like a weed, rapid and rampant in the cracks between the stone of our clashing natures, wild and beautiful all the same. I tended to my love like a garden, an unfamiliar seed planted out of curiosity and hope, and all I could do was wait to see what might come of it.
I realised, later, that I had misunderstood her. If I had been a little less consumed by nursing my own pain, I might have seen the loneliness in her for what it was. When I saw her slumped in a chair in the echoing dining room, I thought her angry, not unhappy. When she paced the great hall, looping the limestone spur, one hand always touching its ragged bulk, I thought her scheming, not melancholy. I did exactly as she did, lingered and unravelled in the same ways, but I could not see it. Perhaps that was why I could not understand the blank face she turned to Frieda’s death. I feared it signalled some inhuman coldness in her heart, but perhaps it was not so different to my own response: she coped as I did, with denial.
I found myself attending to her in a way I had never done with anyone before. I had never been so aware of another person. When she stabbed her finger with her quill I was there with a cloth to wash and bind the cut, when her hair became tangled I sat behind her as she picked at the knot with a comb. This was natural kindness that anyone would do, I told myself.
Once, I woke there, the clock chiming the small hours and found my glasses had been removed, and a blanket drawn over me. I had fallen asleep on the settle, lulled by the warmth and crackle of the fire, and the scratch of her pen nib as the Witch worked on her ledgers. All those dates and times marching along in some complex calculation I couldn’t understand. Now the fire burned low, only glowing embers and all but the oil lamp at her desk had been extinguished. My Witch was still working. I wanted to take the pen from her, to pull her onto the sofa with me to rest. I wanted to take the burden she carried and set it down, though I still didn’t know what that burden was.
She wasmyWitch, and I wanted her to know it.
She was mine, and I was hers.
b
I should have learned the lesson of my garden: what seeds are sown cannot help but grow. Cloth woven of a certain thread cannot become one of another.
Our life together was built on secrets and death, and nothing wholly simple or pure could take form in it. I buried thoughts of Frieda, but they sprang up in my dreams like nettles. When I closed my eyes she came to me, her manic face through the flames, and the twisted ruin of her dead body. And with it came thoughts of Edgar, and Frau Hässler – and worse, the maid standing mute in the corner, and the Witch cold and silent, walking the halls at night. My life here was the stuff of nightmares.
Soon, I grew sluggish and short in my days, making simple mistakes and snapping at minor inconveniences. I was exhausted from sleepless nights, and overwhelmed by a sense of frustration. How many times had I told myself I could live by my promise not to pry, how many times had I tried to close my eyes to the secrets within the castle?
A month passed after Frieda, and I lay awake under a gibbous moon. With the warmth of oncoming spring and the Witch at my side it was easier to believe I had done the right thing; but at night, when the cold came creeping from the stones and I lay all alone in the vast castle, dread took over. I could not sleep for fear of bad dreams, and had caught myself dragging my nails along my thigh before pinching the top. The realisation that I had fallen into old patterns again had sent a pang of hopelessness through me. This aspect of myself that I could not escape.
When the footsteps passed outside my door it was almost too much, and I buried my head beneath my pillow. Why could I not want something in the Witch and have it? Why did it have to be a torment?
I thought I would pay anything to be needed. To have a place I belonged.
b
The Witch pulled me up at breakfast the next morning when I sniped at her for eating the last of the marmalade. ‘What is wrong with you?’
