A lull fell in the howling wind and I heard the smallest noise, a snuffle: someone crying.
I followed it to another table, this one larger, where a jug and basin were set out with a washcloth. The Witch was under it, curled into a ball. I crawled under with her. Her face was splotchy with tears, knees drawn up to her chin and hair stuck to her cheeks. Gently, I teased them free, tucked the errant strands behind her ear.
‘I span and span,’ she mumbled.
I dabbed her cheeks dry with the cuff of my dress.
‘There’s nothing I can do.’ She looked at me then, eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘Please believe that I tried.’
I smiled because I didn’t know what else to do. ‘I know you did.’
The moon was poor illumination, so I fetched a taper and lit the candles in the sconces. It still didn’t seem enough, so I brought in all the candle holders and candelabras from around the study and lit them, arranged them along the mantelpiece, her dressing table, by her bed, on the washstand, any spare surface I covered with glittering light.
Then I brought in the biscuits, found a jar of preserved cherries, put the coffee to warm over the fire. Her rough hands in mine, I drew her out into the open to see what I had done.
She turned, taking in her bedroom transformed and me at the centre. ‘What did you do?’
My face fell. ‘You don’t like it?’
Her eyes glittered like the candlelight reflected in the mirrors, and I saw she was about to cry again.
‘It’s beautiful. Thank you.’
We sat cross-legged on the bed, the plate of biscuits between us. I split one up and fed her small pieces.
‘Here, you need sugar. My mother always said...’ I broke off. I hadn’t thought about my mother for a long while, how she would sit with me while I ate a stack of lebkuchen at Christmas, asking me questions about myself. I had always thought it was a happy memory, but I saw now that she only needed to ask me all those questions because she didn’t know me at all. She had dropped in like a guest, enquired about my progress until her duty was done and then she had drifted away again into her own world, turning back in on herself. ‘Never mind what my mother said.’
I let us sit in silence, snapping biscuits in half so we could share the comfort. When the coffee was warm again I poured us two cups, folded her shaking hands around the warm china and wished there was something I could do. But I knew there wasn’t. People didn’t work that way. You couldn’t think their thoughts for them or do the work of healing on their behalf. Whatever she was trapped in, she would have to come through it in her own time. All I could do was stay with her in the darkness, witness her suffering and not turn away; that was one gift I could give.
When the biscuits were gone and the coffee was finished, I still sat with her until finally, in a small voice she asked, ‘Why do you love me? I don’t understand it.’ Her voice was barely above a whisper, hoarse from crying, but I could hear every word like crystal. ‘Why would someone like you want to be with someone like me?’
For a moment I didn’t say anything, thinking. Then I left her alone on the bed as I fetched the basin and heated a jug of water on the fire until it was warm enough, poured it into the bowl and brought it and a washcloth to the side of the bed.
‘Give me your feet.’ I held out my hands.
She licked her lips, pink tongue flickering, then slithered around so her legs slipped out from beneath the cloud of nightgown and those two filthy, dirt-encrusted feet were before me. I had shied away from them so many times, looked at them in disgust from the first moment I met her. I thought they made her animal but I understood it differently now: they were her hurt made manifest. They made her human.
‘I don’t understand love,’ I said, submerging the cloth in the water. ‘I don’t know how it works or what it is for. I’ve read poetry and novels and listened to music and viewed art all about love but it was like another language. I thought it must be something that wasn’t meant for me. Until I met you.’
There was a soft intake of breath but I didn’t look up. Instead I drew one foot towards me and began to run the wet cloth over the sole in long slow strokes.
‘I understood what hate was. I hated you at the start; you were rude and cold and cutting and whatever bargain I thought I had made to escape my loneliness turned out to be so much worse than I’d feared. But I also came to understand that loneliness isn’t a fixed state. We think rocks don’t change, that the mountains around us are eternal and unmoving but it’s not true; they are in constant metamorphosis. Worn down by the elements, melted by fire and gouged by ice.’
Slowly, pale, rough skin was showing through, calloused from so long barefoot, and some of the dirt was bedded in, like the sole of a shoe. When I was done, I pulled it out and wrapped it in a dry towel and looked up at her.
‘Loneliness can be something other people do to us, and something we do to ourselves. Sometimes we don’t know anything different; sometimes we’ve been so hurt, we like the familiar pain of self-inflicted isolation better than the pain of abandonment we’ve been taught to fear. Sometimes we think it’s the only place that will have us.’
She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t begin to read, my baffling, infuriating, lonely Witch. I took her other foot, dipped it in the water then began to scrub a little roughly.
‘I hated you because you made me so lonely, when that was what I had been hoping to escape. Until one day, I realised I had got it the wrong way round: I hated you because you meant Iwasn’talone. At least in isolation the only person I had to deal with was myself. Other people are the most difficult thing in this world; they think and do things you have no control over, want things you can’t understand. But other people can also be salvation. You offered me a new idea of myself, if I would let you.’
The water was murky now, the cloth almost too filthy to remove the dirt.
‘Around you, I forgot those familiar lonely paths and found myself four steps towards you, tangled in the undergrowth and yelling.’
She smiled at that, a curl of her lip I would have called a sneer before but I saw it differently now.
‘Youmade all that fight worth it. You, who are so clever I want to read through every night to catch up. You, who are kind in the most unsuspecting ways. You, who are the most brave and selfless and resourceful and steel-spined person I have ever known. I am in awe of you. I don’t understand love. I don’t know what it means, but I think it means some of this, at least. So: I love you. Not for anything you’ve done for me, but because you see me. You truly see me. And I see you.’ I dried her foot, and got up on my knees to kiss her cheeks where they were wet with tears, kiss her eyelids and her hands. ‘I love you.’
