leave him with her, but I do, tottering back to the main room and stoking the fire, filling the pipkin with water, adding valerian and chamomile to the nettle leaves, along with the last of the honey and a good dose of poppy. When I look back at the doorway he’s still beside the bed, and she’s still gazing at him with a docile expression, her face slack, and human. There’s something sinister about the tableau: a hooded figure kneeling beside a prone woman, and for a moment I forget which of them is the dangerous one. I hurry the rest of the preparations, straining and stirring sloppily and making a mess on the countertop. I have a brief flash of my old teacher tutting at me, and my lips quirk into a guilty smile before I remember Silas and Mama in the other room and I rush back to them.
I almost drop the cup when I see that he’s holding her hand, her frail fingers resting limply in his gloved ones. He gestures for me to pass him the cup, and I watch as he blows on it carefully before holding it to my mother’s lips. She sips obediently and he smiles at her in encouragement. I move back to the doorway, watching him lift the cup up to her and her fingers curl over his to hold it. A sour pain blossoms in my chest and I realize I’m jealous of how easy he is with her. My feelings for Silas have always been complicated, but this is a new low: jealous of my own mother because he is holding her hand.
And because she’s letting him. I’m jealous because it seems that all of her hatred is reserved for me. For Silas she can be calm, even when the sun is setting and the beast is stirring in her. By rights she ought to be clawing his face off, not watching it as trustingly as a baby bird watches the sky for its mother. Perhaps it’s me who she wants to hurt. Perhaps there is no curse; it’s that she hates me for being the one she’s stuck with. We are all the other has left, and yet she’d happily rip my throat out if she could.
Flashes of our life at home, of the four of us sat around the table a year ago, Lief and Papa enthusiastically debating some method of cow husbandry while Mama and I rolled our eyes at each other.
Of me, in the kitchen on my thirteenth birthday, unwrapping my gifts: a real apothecary’s apron with a dozen pockets; a set of glass vials; a notebook to record my experiments. Lief giving me seeds wrapped in twists of paper. My father guiding me outside, hands over my eyes, to a patch of land he’d dug and hoed for me.
Of Lief and me lying in the newly scythed fields and staring at the stars after the May celebrations the year I turned twelve, watching bats swoop low, picking insects out of the air, my jaw aching faintly because of their calls, calls I couldn’t hear but could feel. Then Mama and Papa appearing with hot cocoa and slabs of buttery, crumbly cake. Of the four of us lying back on blankets, looking up at the sky, tracking a barn owl ghosting across the moon. Of Papa’s arm, or Lief’s, around my shoulders, keeping me upright as we walked back to the farmhouse, exhausted but happy.
Of waking in the night to see my ten-year-old brother slumped at the end of my bed with a small shovel in his hand, almost asleep on his feet.
“What are you doing?” I’d asked.
“Go back to sleep,” he’d mumbled. “You’re all right, I’m here.”
But he’s not here now. He’s not here now.
A wave of grief hits like pain and threatens to knock me off my feet. I lean against the door frame, watching as Silas puts the cup down once she’s finished. He pulls the covers up, tucking them around her chest, and I have to fold my arms over the agony inside me.
Another flash: of Mama reading to Lief and me, before he moved into a room of his own; of Papa standing in the doorway listening, a glass of brandy in his hands, his eyes soft and fixed on Mama, of her faint blush under his gaze, her lips curving from the joy of his attention.
Of Lief and me tucking her into bed the night after my father died.