Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

She stumbled back from him, and then turned and dashed out into the night, carrying Gillam with her. “Bad, bad!” the child shouted defiantly over her shoulder as she fled.

“Shush!” she warned him and covered the child’s roar with her hand. A panicky Gillam clutched and clawed at her stifling hand, but she ignored that as she ran and stumbled and ran again. Her knee wanted to fold under her. She couldn’t let it. She fled to the deep meadow grasses beyond the chicken yard and then dove to the earth and lay still. “Be quiet!” she hissed in the boy’s ear. “Be quiet. We’re hiding. We don’t want him to find us.”

She lifted her hand and a terrified Gillam hiccuped once and then clung to her silently. His breathing was harsh and loud; she feared Pell would find them. Her knee throbbed so badly that she thought she would not be able to stand again, let alone run. Pell appeared in the lamplit doorway, looking all around. He couldn’t see them.

“Rosemary!” he shouted.

She held her breath and Gillam huddled tight against her.

“Rosemary! Get in here, you stupid bitch. Clean up this damn mess. I want it all cleaned up before I come back!” He waited. She cowered silently. “Don’t think I’m going to forget this. I won’t. If you don’t come now, it will just be worse for you later!” He waited again. “You can’t stay out there forever.”

She watched him through a screen of grass stalks. He pulled his cloak up tight against the rising wind and threatened rain. He scowled helplessly at the vacant landscape around him. He wanted so badly to win this encounter. She feared he would stand there all night. But suddenly Pell strode away from the cottage, headed for the cliff-side road that went to town. She watched him as a darker figure against the evening twilight as he marched up the pathway. She suddenly felt another small warm body pressed against hers. She put her hand down and found Marmalade crouched in the grass beside her. She flinched with him when she set a hand on his ribs, and he cowered away from her touch with a rebuking growl.

“He nearly killed you, cat. I’m so sorry.” She barely breathed the words as she watched Pell hiking up the hill. She touched the cat and he rumbled again.

A thought slowly dawned on her. The cat had taken the blow to save her. “He was trying to hit me. He could have thrown me against the wall. Or Gillam.” She shook her head, trying to deny the thought. How had Gillam got into that sprawl in the corner? Had he already struck his own son? She heard again the word he’d flung, the one she sheltered Gillam from every day. Bastard. From his own father’s mouth. Their cottage was no longer a refuge, but a prison. Her defiance blew away with the wind.

“I have to run.” Rainy roads and no shelter. Unknown dangers for her and her boy. Hunger. What future could she possibly find? What would she have to do to feed them?

Marmalade stood and butted his head against her. Pell was nearly out of sight. She spoke slowly, scarcely daring to utter the thought aloud. “If I don’t run, I have to fight for my territory. Maybe to the death.” She shook her head at herself. Where had such an idea come from. “What am I thinking? I don’t know how to fight. He’s too big for me. I can’t win against him.”

The cat bumped his head against her hand and then slipped away. The grasses parted and swayed in his wake. He was headed up the hill, off on his night hunting. Pell had vanished.

She spoke aloud the thought that hung in the air. “Everything knows how to fight. Anyone with young knows how to protect them.”

Slowly she got to her feet. She reached down to touch her knee and felt the warmth. It was swelling. She picked up Gillam. He was still shaking and uncharacteristically silent. “Don’t worry. He’s gone. Let’s go back to our house.”

She tried to set him down to walk with her, but he just let his legs fold under him. He lay on his side, just as Marmalade had sprawled for that instant at the bottom of the wall. Her mind suddenly showed her a vision of her boy, flung against the wall and broken at the bottom of it. “No,” she said in a low voice. She wouldn’t wait for that to happen. She gathered him up, thinking how heavy he had grown, and tried not to think of taking him to the roads and how far she would have to carry him each day after he wearied. She didn’t try to bend her knee as she lurched along.

The cottage was a mess. Furniture and stores were the victims of Pell’s hasty search. She set Gillam down in a heap on the unswept hearth. He immediately began to wail. “Just a minute, son,” she told him as she put the bedding back on the roped bed frame. Already it stank of Pell. The whole house smelled of him, she thought to herself. She picked up her small money poke. She’d gripped the bottom of it when she shaken money out on the floor, and then tossed it onto the bed where the chink of the concealed coins would not be heard. She glanced inside. Five coppers. Not much but better than nothing.

Once the bed was back together and the blankets smooth on it, she scooped up Gillam and set him on it. He hadn’t stopped wailing, but his cries were becoming feebler. Terror and fury had exhausted him.

“I can’t tend you right now, son. Mama has to put some things together for us.”

She had the smoked fish she’d hidden from Pell, and the silver coin. She built up the fire and searched the floor with the lamp, righting the chairs and putting the cloth back on the table as she did so. Pell had missed the two coins that she’d had her foot on, and she found another copper stuck in a crack. Scarcely a fortune, but she slid it back into the poke. She put the poke in the bottom of a canvas sack, save for two coppers that she slid into her pocket. Never show all your money when you travel.

She looked into her cupboards, but Pell had eaten whatever could be immediately eaten. Habit made her tidy as she went, putting the house back in order even though she intended to leave it forever tomorrow. When she thought of that, she was tempted to wreck the place, but only for an instant. No. She had come to love the little cottage. Putting it to rights now was her apology to it for what Pell would make it: a dingy, run-down hovel with garbage strewn around it.

Gillam had stopped wailing. He was sound asleep. She left him in his clothes. She packed all their extra clothing into the bag. It didn’t even fill it. She used her quilting rags to create two straps on the canvas bag, and then packed her needles, threads, and scraps. One pan for cooking. Flint and steel. A few other odds and ends. There would just be room for the blanket from the bed. She slipped quietly from the house lest she wake Gillam and went out to the cow’s byre. She hid the bag there; if Pell came back early, she didn’t want him catching a glimpse of it and asking any questions. She patted the wakeful cow and went back to the cottage.

Her decision to run made, she could find no peace. She longed to leave immediately and knew that would be stupid. In the dark, carrying Gillam and leading the gravid cow? No. She would go at dawn. Pell would come in drunk if he came in at all, and he’d sleep late. She’d be up by dawn and gone, with her boy rested and light to see by. It was the sensible thing to do, and she was a sensible woman. If he came back tonight, she’d pretend deference to him, no matter what he demanded of her. She was strong. She’d make her preparations.

That, she told herself, was why she sat down in her battered old chair, the one that was even more battered now that Pell had tossed it aside in his search for her money, and did her crying then. She wept for how stupid she had been, and then for how much work and love she had put into the ugly little hovel between the fens and the cliffs to make it her own little cottage. And when she was finished, she found she was done with tears. The foolish connection she had felt to a place that had never truly belonged to her was gone. It would be Pell’s. Let him have it. He could have the cabin; she’d never let him have the boy.