Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Unbidden, she recalled the passion she had once felt for Pell, the physical arousal his touch had created and their joyous unions. For one moment, heat surged through her. Then it faded. Her memories of their joinings were eroded, like a wooden carving that had weathered away, leaving only lumps where it had once had a face. She’d been wild about him, uncontrollably drawn to him. But now she could not think of him without recalling how he had humiliated and abandoned her. Those memories abraded any joy she had felt in him to expose the foolishness beneath it. No. No girlish silliness. She would force herself to see Pell only as he was, not as she had once dreamed him to be.

He was still standing behind her. It made the skin of her back and neck prickle, and she was torn between hoping he’d touch her again so she could reject him and praying he wouldn’t touch her again because she might turn into his embrace. Her heart was beating too fast. She risked a glance over her shoulder, but he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Instead he was staring intently at the top of the hill.

“Is someone coming?” she asked him and followed his gaze just in time to see a lantern vanish from sight.

“No. Just someone passing by,” he said. Then he announced abruptly, “I might go into town tonight.” He turned and went back into the cottage. She welcomed his absence, but his hasty withdrawal surprised her. Obviously, he found her that disgusting. Odd, that his rejection could still sting. No. Not odd. Stupid that she could even care about him to that extent. He’d left her and their child for three years. How could she let herself crave his company, even if she only craved it for the chance to hurt him? She’d thought she’d gotten wiser than that.

She wrung out her cleaning rags and hung them to dry. The evening was closing in. Would he go to town or stay at the cottage? With that question, she realized that she dreaded another night confined with Pell. She could only tolerate it if she believed it would be the last one. Her mixed feelings, her emotional anger, and her physical need for a male were shredding her. She’d be better off to sleep with a wandering minstrel than to take a known traitor into her bed. Remember who he was, not what his body was like, she counseled herself. Protect herself and her child.

Slowly she went back into his house. The dishes were on the table as he had left them, and the hearth was spattered with grease and ash. Everywhere she looked in the cottage, she could see his marks, as if he were a cat who had to spray and scratch to claim his territory. He reclined on the bed, his boots on and a gleaming smudge of grease at one corner of his mouth from the meal. Gillam was on the bed beside him, playing with a handful of the rooster’s tail feathers. The rumpled bed, the dirty dishes, the ransacked cupboard . . . slowly she recalled that after Pell had left, there was actually less work for her to do. Less clothing to wash and less careless mess to tidy. She didn’t want this life back. With or without Pell’s touch on her at night, she didn’t want to live with him, clean up after him, and take his orders. She cleared her throat and tried to speak casually as she tidied the room.

“The cow will drop her calf soon. I’d best take her to Ben’s tomorrow.”

He turned his head and squinted at her. “Take the cow to Ben’s? Why?”

“When I bought her, he warned me that sometimes a cow’s first drop is difficult. He knows how to turn a calf if it needs doing. He said he’d help me when the time came, if I brought the cow to him.” More lies. He’d never said any such thing. She wouldn’t take the cow to Ben’s. She’d take the cow to Hilia. She and her husband were not wealthy, but they were solid. They’d give her what they could for the cow and the calf inside her.

“Best do it, then.” There was no suspicion in his voice. Plainly he cared nothing for the cow or the calf to come. “But leave the boy here with me. It’s time Will got to know his papa. Time I taught him a thing or two about being a man.” He poked the boy and Gillam giggled.

No. Never. She had been right. It was her son he was after; that was why he’d come back. Her beautiful, clever Gillam; that was what Pell would take and twist him into someone she didn’t know. Her fledgling plan sprouted wings. “I’ll go very early so I can be back in time to do my regular chores,” she said. And she’d take Gillam with her when she went. Pell had always been a heavy sleeper. Tomorrow, before dawn, she’d slip away. She’d have to go the long way; the tide would be in, and the heavy cow couldn’t go down the cliff-side path. By the time Pell woke and then eventually wondered where they were, she and Gillam would have left Hilia’s and be on their way. If he thought to look for them, he’d go to Ben’s first. She doubted that he’d make much real effort to find them and bring them back. He’d wait here and expect her to come cowering home. She wouldn’t. She’d leave it all behind and run.

She tried not to care about what would happen next. He’d kill her chickens, of course, one at a time and eat them. That couldn’t be helped. The garden, she knew, would go to weeds and vanish. There was only one other creature to worry about . . . Anxiety clutched at her heart as she realized that Marmalade hadn’t come to greet her when she returned. She hadn’t seen the cat at all.

“Odd. I haven’t seen the cat,” she said. Her heart was thudding sickly against her stomach.

Pell gave her a sideways glance. “Neither have I. But when I do, I’ll kill him.”

“Kill him,” Gillam repeated with no concept of the meaning. He jogged the end of the rooster feather against his own chin and giggled.

“That’s right, Willy,” his father said and leaned across the bed to tickle him. Gillam wriggled and shrieked with delight. It was all Rosemary could do to keep from leaping across the room, seizing her child, and fleeing with him. For a fleeting instant, the two of them looked so alike, the man grinning hard and the child flinging himself about and shrieking with laughter as he sought to escape his father’s touch. For a heart-stopping instant, she couldn’t love her son, not when he looked so like Pell. She turned away from both of them unable to abide that.

Tomorrow, she would run. Before things could become any worse.

Some things, you can’t run from. You have to deal with them and be done with them.

She wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but something not a sound made her glance up into the dimness under the rafters. A cat’s eyes glowed at her from the shadows. Don’t come down! she mentally begged him. She made a pretense of gathering garbage from around the cottage, added a handful of bones from around the chicken carcass, and carried them outside. She walked to the edge of the farmyard near the trash heap and set them down. In a heartbeat, Marmalade was there. He wound twice around her ankles, purring like a storm and then settled down to crunching the bones. She crouched down beside the cat in the gathering darkness. “I have to go away, Marmy. So do you. I wish I could tell you to run to Hilia’s house and live there. She’d take you in.”

He stopped his crunching and looked up at her, his eyes boring into hers. I live here, his gaze seemed to say .

“So did I,” she said, and sudden tears choked her. “But I can’t stay here any longer. He’s going to change too many things. He’s going to kill my chickens. And make Gillam into someone named Will, someone like him. And make me into . . . something.” She didn’t have a word for what she would become. Something he ordered about, something that cleaned up after him and gave her body over for his use, and never spoke about the things that had used to belong to her, never spoke of the ways he had hurt her and wronged her. “I can’t become that. So I can’t stay here.”