Page 3 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
But Cordelia did not go, because her mother would not have liked that. She did not ask. It was hard to tell, sometimes, what would make her mother angry, and it was not worth the risk. Still, for the last three years she had encountered the kind girl regularly. Ellen was the daughter of a wealthy landowner that lived nearby. She rode her pony, Penny, every day, and when she and Cordelia met, they rode together down the road, the pony taking two steps for every one of Falada’s.
So it was unsurprising when Cordelia heard the familiar hoofbeats of Ellen’s pony approaching. She lifted her head from Falada’s neck and looked up as Ellen waved a hello. Cordelia waved back and remounted. Penny shied at their approach, but Ellen reined her in.
Cordelia had never ridden any horse but Falada, so it was from Ellen—and from watching Ellen’s pony—that she learned that most horses were not so calm as Falada, nor so safe. When she was very young and the open doors in their house became too much, when she couldn’t stand being in that house for one more second, she would creep to Falada’s stall and sleep curled up there, with his four white legs like pillars around her. Apparently most people did not do this, for fear the horse would step on them. Cordelia had not known to be afraid of such a thing.
“Oh, Penny! What’s gotten into you? It’s just Falada.” Ellen rolled her eyes at Cordelia, as if they shared a joke, which was one of the reasons that Cordelia liked her.
“Penny’s a good pony,” Cordelia said. She liked it when Ellen complimented Falada, so perhaps Ellen would like it when she complimented Penny. Cordelia talked to other people so rarely now that she always had to feel her way through these conversations, and she was not always good at them.
“She is,” said Ellen happily. “She’s not brave, but she’s sweet.”
Ellen carried the conversation mostly by herself, talking freely about her home, her family, the servants, and the other people in town. There was no malice in it, so far as Cordelia could tell. She let it wash over her, and pretended that she had a right to listen and nod as if she knew what was going on.
Cordelia was not sure why Ellen rode out to meet her so often, when she could say so little, but she was glad for the company. Ellen was kind, but more than that, she was ordinary. Talking to her gave Cordelia a window into what was normal and what wasn’t. She could ask a question and Ellen would answer it without asking any awkward questions of her own. Most of the time, anyway.
It had occurred to her, some years prior, that not all parents could make their children obedient the same way that her mother made her, but when she tried to ask Ellen about it, to see if she was right, the words came out so wrong and so distressing that she stopped.
Something about today—the memory of the obedience or the fly or maybe just the way the light fell across the leaves and Falada’s mane—made her want to ask again.
“Ellen?” she asked abruptly. “Do you close the door to your room?”
Ellen had been patiently holding up both ends of the conversation and looked up, puzzled. “Eh? Yes? I mean, the servants go in and out of my dressing room, but I always lock the door to the water closet when I’m in it, because you don’t want servants around for that, do you?”
Cordelia stared at her hands on the reins. They were not wealthy enough to have servants, and there was an outhouse beside the stable, not a water closet. She pressed on.
“Does your family think you’re keeping secrets when you do?”
The silence went on long enough that Cordelia looked up, and realized that Ellen was giving her a very penetrating look. She had a pink, pleasant face and a kind manner, and it was unsettling to suddenly remember that kind did not mean stupid and Ellen had been talking to her for a long time.
“Oh, Cordelia…” said Ellen finally.
She reached out to touch Cordelia’s arm, but Falada sidled at that moment, and Penny took a step to give him room, so they did not touch after all.
“Sorry,” said Cordelia gruffly. She wanted to say Please don’t think I’m strange, that was a strange question, I can tell, please don’t stop talking to me, but she knew that would make it all even worse, so she didn’t.
“It’s all right,” said Ellen. And then “It will be all right,” which Cordelia knew wasn’t the same thing at all.
CHAPTER 2
A week later, Cordelia’s mother went into her large wardrobe and took out one of the dresses in rich, stunning fabrics, nothing at all like the faded gowns that Cordelia normally wore. Evangeline took a scarlet riding habit from among the dresses and it was as if she became another person as soon as the fabric touched her skin, a softer, sweeter one.
“Dear child,” she said caressingly, stroking her hand over Cordelia’s hair. “I’m off to see my benefactor.”
Once or twice a month, she would mount Falada and ride away and be gone overnight, and return with money, or with jewelry that could be sold in the city for money, to pay for bacon and flour and the services of the laundress in the town.
Cordelia knew full well that her mother was visiting a man, and that such things were not considered respectable. But this was how they survived and lived so comfortably. And besides, it was so much easier to be in the house when her mother was gone, as if she could finally draw a breath all the way down to the bottom of her lungs.
She watched from the window as her mother rode away, the scarlet fabric lying across Falada’s hide like a splash of blood on snow. Cordelia thought, as she sometimes did, about simply walking away, down the road. She wondered how far she could get, and if her mother would find her again. Not without Falada, though. I can’t just leave him here.
Instead, she sat in the kitchen and peeled potatoes. There was something very centering about peeling potatoes. She looked forward to having the whole evening to sit and think whatever she wanted and not be interrogated about what she was thinking or why she had any particular expression on her face.
Which was why it was such a shock when, barely an hour after she’d left, Cordelia’s mother slammed through the door, breathing hard, with her eyes like shards of broken ice.
Cordelia was so startled that the knife slipped and she gashed her thumb. She shoved it into her mouth, tasting copper and salt on her tongue.
The smell of wormwood swirled around her mother as she stalked into the kitchen. “Can you believe this?” she snarled.
Cordelia shook her head hurriedly, even though she had no idea what had happened. It was probably just as well that she had her thumb in her mouth, because otherwise she would have said something, and she was fairly certain that whatever she said would be wrong. As it was, her mother lifted her eyes and said, “Why are you sucking your thumb? You’re too old for that.”
