Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Rosemary picked up little Gillam and bounced him gently. The toddler had been clutching at her knees and wailing since she set him down. The moment she picked him up, he stopped.

“You’re spoiling him,” Hilia pointed out.

“No, I’m just holding him,” Rosemary replied. “Besides, I don’t think he’s the mistake. If anything, he’s the only good thing I got out of my mistake.”

“Oh, I don’t mean him !” Hilia responded instantly. Her own baby, only a month old, was at her breast, eyes shut, all but asleep as she nursed. Gillam arranged himself in Rosemary’s lap and then leaned over to look down curiously at the baby. He reached a hand toward her.

“Let her sleep, Gillam. Don’t poke her.”

“You paid enough for your mistake,” Hilia went on, as if there’d been no interruption. “You’ve suffered for close to three years. It’s not fair he should come back and try to start it all up again.”

“It’s his house,” Rosemary pointed out. “Left him by his grandfather. His bit of land. And Gillam is his son, as he bragged yesterday at the tavern. He has rights to all of them.”

“This is not his house! Don’t you dare say that! Don’t you dare defend that wretch! His grandfather said it was for Gillam when he deeded it over. Not Pell. His own grandfather knew he couldn’t trust Pell to do the right thing by you and his child! And you are Gillam’s mother, so you have just as much right to be here as Pell does. More, because you’re the one who did all the work on it. What was this place when he left you here, with your belly out to there while he went traipsing off with that Morrany girl? A shack! A leaky-roofed shack, with the chimney half fallen down, and the yard full of thistles and milkweed. Now look at it!” Hilia’s angry words rattled like hail on frozen ground as she gestured around the tiny but tidy room. It was a simple cottage, with a flagged floor and stone walls and a single door and one window. On the sill of that window, an orange cat slept, slack as melted honey in the spring sun.

“Look at those curtains and the coverlet on the bed! Look at that hearth, neat as a pin. Look up! That roof’s tight! Well, it needs a new thatch, but where you patched it, it held! Look out the window! Rows of vegetables sprouting in the garden, half a dozen chickens scratching, and a cow with a calf in her belly! Who did that, who did all that? You, that’s who! Not that lazy, good-for-nothing Pell! That stupid little slut winked an eye and wriggled her rump at him, and off he went, to live off her and her parents. And now that she’s done with him, now that her father sees what a bent coin he is and has turned him out, what makes him think he can come back here and just take over everything you’ve built? What right does he have to it?”

“As much right as I do, Hilia. Legally, we are both Gillam’s parents. We both have the right to manage his inheritance for him until he’s a man. As Gillam’s mother, I can claim that right, but I can’t deny it to Pell, too. And that is how it is.” She spoke sadly, but a smile had come to her face to hear her friend defend her so stoutly.

“Legally.” Hilia all but spat the word. “I’m talking about what is right and real, not what is legal! Has that wretch actually dared to come here?”

Rosemary bit down on her rising fear and hoped none of it showed on her face. “No. Not yet. But I heard yesterday that he’d come back to town and was talking in the tavern, saying it was time he went home and took up his duties as a father and landowner. I think he’s working up the courage to confront me. I heard he was staying up at his father’s house. I don’t think his mother has any more use for Pell than I do. Her life is hard enough, with the way Pell’s father knocks her around, without having another man to wait on. So I don’t know how long she’ll tolerate him under her roof. They’ll both lean on him to leave, and I suspect his father will push him in this direction. He’s always resented me living here. He’s always said that the cottage and land should have come to him first, not gone directly to Pell.”

“Didn’t his grandfather offer it to Pell when he got you pregnant?”

From anyone else, such a blunt reminder might have stung. But this was Hilia, her oldest, truest friend. Rosemary sighed. “Yes. He actually brought us both out here, with a minstrel to witness the vows. He told Pell it was time he stood up and acted like a man and took care of the child that he’d caused and the woman he’d ruined.” It was still hard to say the phrase aloud. She sighed and looked at the wall. “Pell refused then. He said we were both too young, that one mistake shouldn’t cause another. And a month or two later, he proved he was right on that. He left me. But at least I’m not married to him. He gave me that much freedom.”

“Freedom!” scoffed Hilia. “No woman with a babe on her hip is free of anything. What did his grandfather say when Pell said no?”

Rosemary forced her mind back to her tale. “Soader was a good man. He tried to help Pell do what he thought was right. When Pell said he wouldn’t wed me, Soader said he wouldn’t waste the minstrel’s fee. He willed the cottage and land to my unborn child, boy or girl, right then. It made Pell angry but he dared say nothing. He was already out of favor with the rest of his family. Our baby owning a cottage at least gave us a place to live. It made Pell’s father furious, I heard later. He felt that the cottage should have gone to Soader’s daughter, his wife, so that he could have the good of the land. Not that there was much good to it when we got it.

“But Soader meant well. He said that a couple that works together takes the true measure of each other.” Rosemary sighed again. “Well, I guess that when I was here alone, I got Pell’s true measure. I was sad when Soader died last year. He was Pell’s mother’s father, and the only one of Pell’s family who came to see Gillam at all after Pell left. Right up until he took the lung cough, he came every month.”

“He gave you money, then?”

Rosemary shook her head. “No. But he brought food sometimes, and other things. He gave me a rhubarb start, and walking onion bulbs that spread. Things I could use to better my life, if I were willing to work with them. He was a good man.”

“Good man or not, letting Pell refuse to marry you was not the ‘right’ thing for him to do.”

“Actually, it was. Hearing him refuse to speak the marriage oath before a minstrel was important. Up until then, I was sure he would marry me, right after the baby was born. Not that he’d ever asked me or I’d ever asked him. I guess I was afraid to ask. Soader wasn’t. I didn’t want to hear what he made Pell say, but it was a good thing for me to know sooner rather than later.”

Rosemary sipped at her cooling tea. It loosened her throat that had closed tight as she recalled that humiliation. Kendra the minstrel had looked aside from her shame, but Soader had met her gaze steadily and quietly observed, “So that is how it will be.”

“Of course, later, when we were alone, Pell had all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t be angry at him.” Rosemary forced the words out, trying to keep her tone light. “And I believed them. I believed that he was ‘married to me in his heart’ and that there would ‘never be another woman.’ I was so foolish.”

For the past three years, she’d been pushing herself to take responsibility for the mess she’d made of her life. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes she looked around and thought, If I can make that big a mistake, I can make just as big of a correction. And she’d thought she’d done so. She’d worked hard. The repairs to the cottage had been done by her own hand or paid for by barter. She’d turned the old garden over, one shovelful of earth at a time. She’d barrowed in manure dropped on the roadside by passing horses and worked it into the soil herself. She’d traded labor for seed and starts, and she and Gillam lived cheap and stingy to save up the coins for a spindly, worm-plagued yearling cow. That cow, healthy now, was soon to drop her first calf. The chickens had been eggs, kept warm near the hearth and turned daily, a dozen eggs to hatch a mere two pullets and a cockerel. But they had multiplied to a decent flock now. Her daily gathering kept a stack of wood by the side of the house and a neat pile of split and ready kindling beside it. She could do things, make things, and cause change to happen.