Robin Hobb - The Inheritance

IT WAS IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S jewel box. I found it after she died. Perhaps jewel box is too fine a name to give to the plain wooden cask that held so little. There was a silver ring with the stone long prised from the setting, sold to pay family debts no doubt. I wondered why she had not sold it whole. There were two necklaces, one of garnets and another of polished jasper. At the bottom, wrapped in layer upon layer of linen, was the pendant.

It was a lovely carving of a woman’s face. She looked aristocratic, yet merry, and I recognized in her features some of my own. I wondered which of my female ancestors she was, and why someone had taken such care to make so delicate a carving from such an ugly piece of wood. It was grey and checked with age, and weighed unnaturally heavy in my hand as I examined it. The chain it was fixed to was fine silver, however. I thought it might be worn alone if the pendant could be removed. I heard a footstep in the hall outside her bedroom, and hastily slipped the chain about my neck. The cameo hung heavy between my breasts, concealed by my blouse.

My cousin Tetlia stood suddenly in the doorway. ‘What do you have there?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I told her, and hastily set the box back on Grandmother’s chest.

She swept into the room and snatched it up, opened it and dumped the necklaces into her hand. ‘Nice,’ she said, holding up the jasper one. My heart sank, for I had liked it best of the three. ‘I’m eldest of the grand-daughters,’ she pointed out smugly, and slipped it over her head. She weighed the garnets in her hand. ‘And my sister Coreth comes next. This is for her.’ Her lips twisted in a smile as she tossed me the despoiled ring. ‘For you, Cerise. Not much of an inheritance, but she did feed and clothe you for the last two years, and kept you in a house that long ago should have come to my father. That is more than she ever did for my sister and me.’

‘I lived here with her. I looked after her. When her hands twisted so that she couldn’t use them anymore, I bathed her and dressed her and fed her…’ My hidden anger pushed the words stiffly out.

Tetlia waved my words away contemptuously. ‘And we all warned you that you’d get nothing for it. She burned through her own family fortune when she was a girl, Cerise. Everyone knows that if my grandfather had not married her, she’d have starved in the streets. And my father has been good enough to let her live out her life in a house that should have come to him when his father died. Now she’s gone, and the house and land revert to my father. That’s life.’ She tossed the plundered casket onto my grandmother’s stripped bed and left the room.

‘I loved her,’ I said quietly into the stillness. Rage burned bright in me for an instant. It was an old family dispute. Her father was the son of Grandfather’s first wife, and the rightful heir to all, as they so constantly reminded me. It counted for nothing with them that my grandmother had raised their father as if he were her own child. It scalded me that Tetlia would claim my grandmother as kin for the sake of being entitled to her jewellery, but deny that I had any right to share the family wealth. For a second I clutched that anger to me. Then, as if I could feel my grandmother’s gentle hand on my shoulder, I let the strength of my just wrath leak away from me. ‘Useless to argue,’ I told myself. In my grandmother’s looking-glass I saw the same defeated resignation I had so often seen in her eyes. ‘It’s not worth fighting for,’ she had told me so often. ‘Scandal and strife serve no purpose. Let it go, Cerise. Let it go.’ I looked at the gaping ring in my hand, and then slipped it onto my finger. It fit as if made for me. Somehow, it seemed an appropriate inheritance.

I left the room and went to my own chamber to pack. It did not take long. I had one set of clothes besides my own, and her old Trader’s robe of soft saffron. I hesitated before I put it in my rucksack. I had never seen her wear it. Once I had asked her about that only unused garment in her chest. She had shaken her head. ‘I don’t know why I kept it. It has nothing to do with my life any more. In Bingtown, Trader families wear them when they go to the Traders’ Council to vote on Trader matters. Saffron was my family’s colour, the Lantis family. But I gave all that up years ago.’

I fingered the soft wool. It was cut in an archaic style, but the wool would be warm, I told myself. Besides, I had no intention of leaving it for my cousins. Now that my grandmother was dead, her little house on the seacliffs and the sheep pastures behind it would go to my uncle. And I, the sole daughter of her daughter, would have to make my own way in the world. My uncle had scowled at me when I had told him last night that I had nowhere to go, and asked his leave to stay on for a week.

He replied heavily, ‘The old woman was dying for two years, Cerise. If, in two years, you couldn’t make a plan for your future, you won’t do it in a week. We need this house, and it’s lawfully mine. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go.’

So I went, but not far. Hetta, the shepherd’s wife took me in for the night. They were as angry with my uncle as I was, for he had already announced to there that he was raising their rent. In all the years that they had been my grandmother’s tenants, she had never raised their rent. Hetta was older than I, but that had never kept us from being good friends. She had two small children and was big with her third. She was glad to offer me a bed by the fire and a hot supper in exchange for help with her chores, ‘for as long as you want.’ I tidied the house as we talked, while she was relieved to sit down, put her feet up and put the last stitches into a quilt. I showed her both my ring and my pendant and chain. She exclaimed at the sight of the pendant and pushed it away from her.

‘The chain will bring you some coin, and maybe the empty ring. But that pendant is an evil thing. I’d get rid of it if I were you. Throw it in the sea. It’s wizardwood, the stuff a liveship is made from. I wouldn’t wear it next to my skin for the world.’

I picked up the pendant and looked at it more closely. In the candlelight, I could see faint colours on it, as if it had once been painted but had faded. The grain of the wood seemed finer, the features of the face more distinct than I recalled. ‘Why is it evil?’ I demanded of Hetta. ‘Liveships aren’t evil. Their figureheads come to life and talk and guide the boat on its way. They’re magic, but I’ve never heard them called evil.’

Hetta shook her head stubbornly. ‘It’s Rain Wild magic, and all know no good ever came down the Rain Wild River. A lot of folk say that that’s where the Blood Plague came from. Leave magic like that to those Trader folk who are born to it. It’s not for you and me. It’s bound to bring you bad luck, Cerise, same as it brought your grandmother. Get rid of it.’

‘She came from Trader stock,’ I reply stoutly. ‘Maybe that’s how it came to Grandma. Maybe she inherited from the days when we were Traders.’

Hetta pursed her mouth in disapproval as I put the chain back around my neck. I heard Hetta’s husband at the door and hastily slipped the pendant inside my shirt again. I’d always liked Hetta, but her husband made me edgy.

Tonight was no exception. He grinned to see me there, and grinned broader when Hetta said she’d invited me to stay the night. ‘You’re always welcome here, Cerise, for as long as you want to stay. There’s many a wifely chore that Hetta hasn’t been able to do for a time. You could take them on for room and board here.’

I smiled stiffly as I shook my head. ‘Thank you all the same, but I think I need to find a future for myself. I think I’ll go to Bingtown and see what work I can find there.’