Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Rosemary had blinked again as Pell broke into a run toward the girl. No, it wasn’t a child. It was a young woman, as slender as a child, with rippling waves of black hair blowing in the wind with the edges of her silly little cloak. Her garments made her look younger than she probably was. And more foolish. Who would go out dressed so lightly on a day at the end of autumn? Rosemary shook rain from her eyelashes and recognized her. Meddalee Morrany. The sea trader’s daughter. She lived across the bay, but sometimes came to visit her cousins. Always well dressed was she; even as a child, she had flaunted embroidery on her skirts and ribbons in her hair. Well, she wasn’t a child anymore, but her father’s wealth still wrapped her.

“She just needs to stay there until the squall passes,” she called after him. She hefted the sack in her arms. Damp had penetrated her shoes, and her toes were icy.

He’d already greeted the shivering girl. They were speaking, the girl smiling, but the rising wind swept their words away from her. He turned to call to her, “I’m going to help her get to town. You take the potatoes home. I’ll be along in a bit.”

She’d stood in the rain in shocked disbelief as he opened his black cloak as if it were a raven’s wing, smiling and gesturing to Meddalee to take shelter under it. And the girl laughed and did.

“What about her?” Meddalee Morrany’s question had blown to her on the wind. She was smiling as she pointed at Rosemary.

“Oh, she’ll be fine. She can deal with the rain. I’ll see you later, Rosie!”

She’d had no choice then. She’d been cold and wet, weighted with the potatoes and fish and her unborn child and the hurt he’d loaded onto her. He hadn’t offered to put his cloak around her when the storm had blown up. No. He’d saved that for a stranger. For a pretty girl in a pretty dress, with a slender waist and rings on her fingers. Not for the girl who was pregnant with his bastard. She’d watched them walk away from her and could not think what to do. Then the wind blew stronger, pushing her toward home, and she’d gone.

She’d staggered home, arrived soaked to the bone and made their supper and waited for him. And waited. Waited for all that night, and the next day and night, and through the weeks and then months that followed. She’d wept and hoped and waited past the birth of the boy, waited for him to come back to his senses and come home to his new family, waited for the girl’s family to see how worthless he was and drive him off, waited even after his grandfather had come, shamefaced, to see his great-grandson.

By then, the gossip was known to all. Pell had followed Meddalee that day, right onto the boat that was to take her back across the bay to her father’s big house in Dorytown. The gossips of the village had taken great pains to see that she knew all the details. Her father had taken a liking to Pell. Everyone always took a liking to Pell, with his handsome face, his wide smile, and his easy ways. He’d given Pell a job in one of his warehouses. For a short time, she tried to believe he had done it for both of them. She pretended that he’d gone off to make a fortune for them. Soon he’d come home, his pockets full of his wages, to make things right for them. Perhaps he’d carry her and Gillam off to a cozy little house in Dorytown. Perhaps he’d stride into the cottage one night, his arms laden with toys and warm clothing for his son. Then wouldn’t the villagers have to swallow their mocking words! Then wouldn’t they see that he had loved her all along.

But Pell never came. The days passed, she struggled on, and her boy grew, day by hard day. Her foolish dreams had turned to bitterness. She’d mourned and wept and cursed her fate. She’d hated him and longed for revenge. She’d blamed Pell, and then Meddalee, and then herself and Meddalee and finally Pell again. She had, as Hilia told her bluntly, been a bit mad. Impossible to reason with. And then, sometime in the last year or so, she’d stopped feeling anything about Pell, except to hope that he’d never come back and disturb the peace that she’d finally found.

“I’ll see you later,” he’d said all those years ago. She bit back the impulse to ask him if this was “later.” She watched him as he walked toward her door. His hair was as glossy and well kept as ever, his boots were new, and the coat he wore must have been tailored to display his broad shoulders so well. Had Meddalee chosen it for him? She glanced down at her mended skirt, soiled where she had knelt to inspect her plants. Her shoes were worn and stuffed inside with dry grass, not stockings. She brushed her rough hands against her skirt again and felt grubby and angry. She’d been a pretty girl once, if a poor one. Now she was only a poor woman in worn clothing with a growing child.

That was another thing he’d taken from her. There would never be a suitor knocking at her door, never be a man courting her. There would never be a partner for her, only her son sharing her life.

He didn’t even hesitate as he opened her door. Did he notice that she’d repaired the leather hinges, that it no longer scraped against the ground or gapped at the top and let the wind in? If he did, he made no comment. He paused only an instant on the threshold, and then stepped inside. She found herself hurrying after him. She didn’t want him to wake Gillam, didn’t want the boy’s first sight of his father to be as a frightening stranger looming over him.

She found Pell gazing around the room and felt a hot pulse of satisfaction at how surprised he looked. It wasn’t the cobwebby hovel that his grandfather had first given them, nor the shoddy cottage it had been during the few months they’d lived here together. Her gaze followed his and she found herself almost as surprised as he must have been. Not at the changes she’d made; she’d become accustomed to the blue curtains at the window, the moss and clay chinking in the walls and the neatly swept hearth and kindling box and Gillam’s little three-legged stool beside it. No, what surprised her was to realize that when Pell had lived there, she had accepted the hovel as it had been, thinking that surely if it could be made better, he would know how and would do it. It was only after he had left her, only after she had roused herself from the torpor of despair and become angry that she had decided that whatever she could fix, she would. She’d decided then that whatever she did to the place didn’t have to be perfect, only better than it had been. And it was.

“He’s big!”

Pell’s words brought her back to the present with a jolt. He was looking at Gillam in shock. Emotions struggled on his face—pride, guilt, and something else perhaps. Dismay?

“He’s nearly three,” she pointed out briskly. “He’s not a baby anymore.”

“Three,” he breathed, as if the number were astonishing. He continued to stare.

“You were gone three years,” she enumerated for him. “Children grow.”

“He’s a little boy. It didn’t seem that long,” he said, and then, as if he realized that perhaps that was a tactless thing to say, “I never meant for it to happen that way, Rosie. It was just, well, you were pregnant, and we were huddled in this place with next to nothing and my parents were furious with me. I felt so trapped. I was a young man and there was no fun left in my life. The idea of having a wife and a baby both, and I hadn’t intended to have either, not for a long time. I couldn’t stand it.”

“And she was pretty and her family was wealthy and for whatever reason, they let you move in on them like a tick on a hound. And then she threw you off and here you are, back here because you can’t think of any other place to go.”

She spoke flatly, in a low voice, but without anger. It surprised her. She didn’t feel angry, just impatient for him to leave. Let him look around and see how humbly they lived and then be gone. She had to wake Gillam soon and give him some supper, or he’d not want to go to sleep until late. And she had planned to work on a quilt tonight, fine meticulous work after Gillam had gone to sleep. The last quilt she’d made carefully, she’d traded for a ham. This one, if she were fortunate, might get her a piglet. She wanted to sit by the fire tonight, hunched over her work, sewing carefully, and think about how she would build a pen for the pig and feed him garden waste and take him to the beach to scavenge. She wanted Pell to be gone. Once he’d been a future full of golden dreams and promises. Now he was a past that stung whenever she thought of him. She didn’t want to look at him and wonder how it might have gone if he’d truly been the man she’d thought he was. She wanted to be alone and dreaming about her own plans, the plans that she could make real.