“Maybe I don’t mind so much. If he wants to draw my picture again,” she said at last. Delphine smiled encouragingly.
“You really don’t mind?”
“No. He’s a very good and famous artist, isn’t he? That’s what you told me. So I suppose I… I should be honored.”
“I’ll tell him. He’ll be very happy.”
“You should feel humbled that he wants to draw you,” Élodie corrected her. But Delphine merely rolled her eyes, so Dimity ignored the remark.
Two days later, the thing that Dimity had been most dreading occurred. She was upstairs in her bedroom, getting changed for breakfast after feeding the pig and the chickens, collecting the eggs, and emptying the chamber pots down the privy. Her bedroom had a small window facing north, over the approach along the lane, and as she arranged her hair into a twist at the back of her head, stabbing it with pins to hold it, she saw Charles Aubrey approaching the cottage. He had on his close-fitting dark trousers and a blue shirt with a waistcoat done up against the early morning cool. With her heart hammering, Dimity put her face up to the window glass and craned her neck to watch as he came right up to the door. What had Valentina been wearing? She tried desperately to think; hoping she wasn’t still in her robe, the diaphanous green one that swirled dangerously and let the outline of her body show through, with all its shadows and patterns. She debated whether she should run down herself, get to the door first and make some excuse to send him away. The kitchen table was strewn with dead frogs. She pictured it, and shut her eyes in horror. Dead frogs with their soft bellies slit open and their guts scooped out into a bowl; bodies cast aside with filmed, sightless eyes and webbed feet dangling. Valentina had two charms to make: one to break a curse, one to keep a new baby safe. The pink-and-gray entrails would be packed into glass jars and sealed up with wax; sprigs of rosemary wound around the tops as if the herb could hide the death inside.
Too late. Dimity heard him knock, heard her mother at the door almost at once, and then their voices rising muffled through the floor. His a deep rumble, soft like the hum of a breeze; Valentina’s low and hard, challenging. Dimity inched to her bedroom door and cracked it open as softly as she could, just in time to hear the front door close, and two sets of footsteps move into the sitting room. With that door shut, there was no way she could hear what they were saying. The Watch had walls of solid stone, walls that had absorbed centuries of words, and kept hold of them. Five minutes or so later, she heard him leave. She waited as long as she could force herself to and then went downstairs, wearing her trepidation like a garland.
Valentina was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette with one hand and picking up odd fragments of entrails with the other, flinging them into the bowl.
“So,” she said heavily. “That’s where you’ve been running off to, when you should have been helping me. Tarting yourself around with posh incomers.” Dimity knew better than to try to defend herself. It only made Valentina more angry, more vicious. Cautiously, she pulled out the chair opposite her mother and sank into it. Valentina was wearing the green robe, but at least there was an old apron tied over it, smeared with blood and stains. Dirty, but opaque. Her rough yellow hair was tied back with a piece of twine, and her eyelids were still smudged with last night’s green eye shadow. “There was I, thinking you were out finding us useful things. Wondering what was taking you so long on every errand. Now I know!” Her voice rose to a bark.
“I was, Ma! I swear it-only Delphine’s been helping me-she’s learning all the plants and helping me… that’s Mr. Aubrey’s daughter…”
“Oh, I know all about her, about all of them. He’s been telling me all about it, though I never asked to be told. Peering into every corner, curious as a cat. I had to shut the sitting room door, because I couldn’t stand his roving eyes no more! He had no business coming here, and you had no business telling him he could.”
“I didn’t, Ma. I swear I never did!”
“Oh, you’ll swear to anything, won’t you? I see that now. I won’t know from one minute to the next if you’re telling me the truth from now on, will I? Shut up!” she snapped when Dimity tried to speak. They sat in silence for a minute, and Dimity looked at her hands and heard her pulse thump in her ears while Valentina took long, aggressive pulls on her cigarette. Then, like a snake, she struck, reaching forwards and grabbing Dimity by the wrist. She pulled her arm onto the tabletop, the soft underside uppermost; held her glowing cigarette an inch from the skin.
“No, Ma! Don’t do it! I’m sorry-I said I was!” Dimity cried. “Please! Don’t!”
“What else have you not told me? What have you been doing up there with them?” Valentina asked, with her eyes screwed up suspiciously and her breasts swaying behind the apron as Dimity fought to pull her arm away. Her grip was like iron. “Stop pulling at me or I’ll cut your bloody arm clean off!” Valentina snapped. Dimity went still, her body slack with fear even as her heart rose up in her chest, perilously high. She didn’t think her mother would go that far, but she couldn’t swear to it. Sweat broke out across her brow, chilly and slick. A glowing ember came loose from the cigarette and landed on her skin, where it sank in and smoked. At once a blister began to form, a white bubble at the center of a bright red ring. Still Dimity did not flinch, too frightened to move even though the pain of it was shocking. Tears blurred her eyes and she had to swallow several times before she could speak.
“It was just as I said, Ma,” she said frantically. “I was playing with the little girl, and teaching her the plants. That was all.” Valentina glared at her a moment longer, then released her.
“Playing? You’re not a baby anymore, Mitzy. There’s no time for playing. Well then,” she said, putting the cigarette back between her lips. “Some good may come of your lies after all. He wants to draw you. Reckons he’s an artist. So I told him he’d have to pay for the privilege.” The thought seemed to raise her spirits, and after a while she got up and put her arms above her head to stretch; then she wandered off towards the stairs, ruffling her fingers through Dimity’s hair as she passed. “Finish those charms while I’m resting,” she said. Only once she had left the room did Dimity dare to blow the ash from her arm. Her chest was so tight it was hard to draw the breath to do so. She turned the blister to the light, saw the way the surface shone. She waited, careful not to disturb her mother with the sound of her crying. Then she got up and went to find witch-hazel ointment to smear onto the burn.
So how did your mother react when Aubrey came to ask if he could draw you? I suppose that’s the kind of thing that not everybody would be keen on. Especially with you only being, what, fourteen, was it?” The young man opposite was talking, asking more questions. He had a way of leaning forwards and steepling his fingers between his knees that put her on edge. Overeager. But his face was kind, only ever kind. Her left arm was itching, and she rubbed her thumb along it, pressing the pad into her slack flesh until she found the scar standing proud of the skin. A small, smooth bobble of hardened tissue the exact size and shape of the blister it replaced. She’d kept knocking the scab off inadvertently, kept losing the plasters Delphine stuck over it. I was frying liver and the fat spat. Underneath the scab the wound was deep and angry. The silence in the room was profound, and suddenly she sensed more ears than the young man’s waiting for her to answer him.