Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter Read Free Book Online Page A

her alone and unloved. I tell myself no lies: whatever good I did for her that day I did for myself, too. In caring for and nurturing her, I have salved my own wrongdoing. But she does not need to know that.
    She nods. “Yes, Aunt Patience, and I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me.”
    But there’s a hollowness to her words; she’s too young to be truly grateful, too young to recognise that the ache of not being as she wishes to be is something impermanent, something that will recede with time and a life lived. She’s too young to see beyond what she does not have to that which she does. Even knowing this, it hurts me.
    “The sun is gone,” I say and it has, and the heat with it. Nights are always cool in Edda’s Meadow. “Time to go in.”

Chapter Ten
    Charity Alhgren appears to be a harmless hapless woman, precisely the sort whose husband should have been able to do away with her long ago. Yet she has a strange obstinacy which manifests itself in a will to survive that Pastor Alhgren seems to neither understand nor indeed to suspect. Perhaps if he did he’d resort to a hammer instead of the attempts at slow medical murder he’s employed thus far. She brought him no great dowry, whatever looks she once had are gone, and she’s borne him no children, yet still she endures.
    On his monthly visits, Doctor Herbeau calls at the manse to hear the pastor’s concerns for his wife’s state, and gives Charity a medicine which she tells me looks and smells like tar. There is only one bitter dose, which he makes sure is swallowed; no excess is left behind that I might investigate. After he leaves, she struggles from her sickbed if she can and comes to see me, or I send Gilly to visit with a basket of fresh flowers from our garden and a bottle of herbal cure hidden beneath. Charity’s health picks up considerably afterwards, and the corners of her husband’s mouth turn down.
    I’ve asked why she stays and she always gives the same answer, which is to laugh and say
Oh, Mistress Gideon, what a question!
Yet I know she stays because she feels she has no choice; she has no family, no trade, no wealth behind her, and no place to go. I suspect it also gives her bitter amusement, beneath her sweet silly facade, to defy her husband so, a man who preaches fire and brimstone at adulterers and fornicators, drinkers and usurers, gamblers and gluttons, yet is determined to be the cause of his wife’s demise.
    “Take this before the doctor next comes. Two spoonfuls on an empty stomach. It should help expel whatever he’s putting into you.” Gods know I’d offer her poison for the pastor’s food, but she’s too timid for that, too afraid of striking back; the very suggestion might send her into a fit of hysteria. Her continued existence is the full extent of her rebellion. “And visit me again afterwards so I can see how well this has worked.”
    “Thank you, Mistress Gideon,” she says meekly.
    “Though I’d rather you left your husband.” I tell her this every time, now without hope.
    “Oh, I couldn’t do that, Mistress Gideon, you know,” she says and smiles, though she can barely keep her lips from trembling. She gathers her things. “I must go, the pastor will be looking for his luncheon.”
    But she’ll not be the one to cook it, for the pastor’s mother manages the household—a raisin of a woman, small and withered, but without her son’s murderous tendencies. Charity is sent to the markets like a kitchen maid. Without children—I have tried to help her, but her womb is beyond even my powers to heal—to secure her position, to give her a title beyond the empty one of “wife,” she has no true hold. Perhaps that’s why she does not leave: if she were to flee the one place where she has the illusion of a position, then what might she find? What might she be? She might simply fragment and all the pieces drift away. It does not occur to her that she might discover herself better off anywhere