Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter Read Free Book Online

is warm and the town is quiet in the grip of a Sunday afternoon. Edda’s folk are resting in their houses; those who didn’t nod off in church this morning are napping, and even those who did are doing much the same. Remaining alert during one of Pastor Alhgren’s sermons gets harder as I get older and less tolerant of any sort of religion, however to show it would mark me out. Thus we drag ourselves along to the enormous wooden church that was built on an oversized patch of land on the eastern border—a goodly walk from the pastor’s home in the centre of town—when the old one was deemed too small for the pious population. Rich citizens such as the Markhams and the Brautigans paid for it, buying indulgences and forgivenesses with their kind coin. While I pinch the scant fat of my upper arms to stay awake, Gilly avoids a fit of the fidgets by reading the prayer book, and trying not to guffaw. Sometimes she cannot help herself and so has developed a manner of appearing overcome with religious emotion at such times, which has graced her with an entirely unwarranted reputation for piety. It makes Pastor Alhgren give her approving, measuring glances while he waits for his sickly wife to finally surrender to his God’s will.
    “Aunt Patience, your mother . . .” begins Gilly and stops at my warning glance; we both look around to see who might be listening. But all is still and we are the only people out in the sun. I nod, knowing she’ll keep her voice low. She moves closer. Having told her my tale, given her a piece of my history, has opened a gate. I’m unsure whether to regret it or not.
    “Aunt Patience, your mother, she must have been very great to do . . . what she did. Can you do it?”
    I shake my head. “She never taught me how to travel to the unseen spaces.”
    “Just like you won’t teach me magic?” In her tone is a hint of injury.
    “Gilly,” I say. “My dear Gilly, as I’ve told you before, it’s not that I don’t want to, but that you’ve no magic. You’ll be a gifted herbalist, but to do what Wynne did, to do what I once did, you need more than a sharp and willing mind. It’s in the blood.”
    “If I were your true child, would I be able to do it?” She sounds resentful as if there’s some betrayal in my not giving birth to her. She’s unwilling to accept that the lack in her is anything but a withholding, a refusal on my part.
    “Perhaps, but I cannot say for certain. Wynne came from a long line of cunning women, each of them with a different talent. I’ve met some, though, more powerful than you could imagine, and their daughters have no ability at all. Yet some of those enchanters come from mothers untainted by talent.” I sigh. “We are all balanced at some point on the witches’ scale, my Gilly-girl, but where we stand can’t be controlled or predicted. Your own mother might have been the most puissant sorceress ever to exist and still you be born untouched.”
    “I don’t remember my mother at all. You’re lucky, Aunt Patience, to have memories of yours.”
    “I know,” I say and the years have not dulled my shame at how quickly I sought a replacement for mine. At how quickly I saw in Dowsabel the mother I
wanted.
Wynne, I think, tried to do her best by me but was not entirely sure what needed to be done. “I hope, Gilly, that I have gone some way to making up that absence.”
    I do not say I took her out of guilt, out of remorse at having left Dowsabel’s daughter Olwen alone in that hut in the woods, praying the couple I saw burying a child that very day would take her into their hearts. Whether she survived or met her end another way I cannot know, and forever it seems I ignored the ache that lived where the infant had once been. I’d never had a child of my own, as much through luck as design: I did not want to drag one around behind me as Wynne had. Yet when I’d seen Gilly by the roadside, weeping and abandoned, I could not walk past her. I could not leave