She gave a gift to the women of Trewarnen, long ago. Twenty-one years. A gift they have forgotten, a gift that went unrewarded.
When She saw that the women of Trewarnen did not appreciate Her gift, She was angry, She would not forgive easily. She vowed to punish them differently. She would not kill or feast or starve. She did not take back what was Hers, snatch it from ungrateful hands. Instead, She gave the women a punishment, one drawn over years, built from a hundred little horrors. First, She broke them apart. She made their lives hard. She gave them struggle. She let Her gift separate the women of Trewarnen, let Her presence sully their bond, until the women scattered.
The one who held the gift She punished the most. She followed the woman wherever she went. When the woman left the farmhouse for a cottage, She trapped her. She made the neighbours distant and turned the woman cruel. She found a way to reach into the woman and curdled her inside out.
Eventually, She stopped. She let the woman leave; She went to sleep. When She gave the gift, She was already old. By then, Her bones were weary. She was too tired.
She could live with one gift not adequately repaid.
And then the woman asked for another.
Once again, the shame of the night before followed me home, and I found myself resolute in the opinion that no one need know. I had no reason for getting lost on a walk I knew so well, or for seeing strange lights, and I didn’t want to hear any explanation they’d offer.
Instead of going into the house, I sat in the garden, squeezing myself between a hydrangea and some raspberry canes. As the berries burst in my mouth, I realised I hadn’t eaten properly since the toast on the day I walked to the village. More so, I wasn’t hungry. My desire for a warm bath was gone too. I no longer felt like I needed to scrub myself clean.
I remembered the garden as a child, when my mother was away with doctors or for appointments, and my aunt would deposit me back here, away from my grandmother’s pinching fingers. I would take a glass jar and a piece of cardboard with me and squat to the ground, moving like that, hoping to catch burrowers or fairies in amongst the weeds. Ysella was always too busy – keeping the peace between Esolyn and my mother – to make the garden pretty. Whatever seeded back here stayed, even the invasive plants. So, she let Himalayan balsam bloom, allowing the wind to disperse its seed across the moors into the village, sprouting small saplings of worry like spreading rumours. She let bird seed germinate in the cracks of the path, until strange tufts of grass filled the gaps. Ysella always left last year’s bulbs in the ground, refusing to swap them out for newer, better ones, and the second-year tulip and hyacinth rose from the soil like the dead, vaguely reminiscent of their past selves. The tulips were sprawling, yellow-bellied and leggy with weak blooms that would peek out under excessive foliage. The hyacinths naturalised. Instead of sturdy cones full of flowers they spindled upwards in search of light, five or six flowers on each pencil-thin stem.
I could never resist the hyacinths when I was a child, their star-shaped flowers gleaming like sweets. The smell of motherly love that leaked from them dragged bees helplessly towards their flowers and I followed. My obsession was driven by the way the bulbs irritated my skin. I had helped my mother plant them two years before, and after handling the papery bulbs my arms had risen with itchy pink spots, a Rorschach test of allergy. I sat in the kitchen and scratched my skin until the pink spots turned red and bled. When Mum found me afterwards, I told her I never wanted to see a hyacinth again. She laughed and then rubbed honey onto my raw skin and told me to wait until next spring. You’re allergic only to the beginning, she said.
By the next spring, all was forgotten, forgiven. Ysella dropped me in the garden, and I brought the petals to my mouth, surprised by how rubbery they were, lightheaded with their scent. I spread the flower open, using two fingers on one hand to part it, marvelling at the cobweb that had settled in the middle. Is it shelter or a trick? I bit down on the hyacinth petal, feeling the small gush as the liquid burst forth on my tongue. I wanted to spit it out but instead held it there, forcing myself to see it through. I was expecting them to taste sweet, like sugar, but they tasted of nothing at all, nothing but wet.
From then on, I thought of flowers as liquid, dripping through your fingers. Leaves were different. Leaves tasted of earth, mud and gravel, wet grass. Real things. It was only flowers that disappeared on the tongue.
I heard a squawk, followed by a crash and the shouting voice of my mother.
A jackdaw, the first I had seen, was perched on the roof, stepping from side to side as it peered down the chimney. The chitter chatter of the babies was gone. Through the window, I could see my mother pulling on her gardening gloves, flinging open the front door. Another nest fallen.
I rose to help, but my mother caught my eye through the sealed window and motioned for me to sit back down. I did as she said.
I pulled Ysella’s notebook from my bag and turned to the page I’d stopped at the day before.
The Cunning Woman and You
You, back with the cunning woman, sat at her table. Picking her food from your teeth with hands unwashed, agreeing to kill your only chicken to fix the babi, to feed the babi.
You, your hands steeped in blood, feathers in your hair, the meat grey and tough.
You, removing the plate from the babi, throwing the thighs, breasts and legs in the bin, uneaten. The babi, watching you with its mouth folded shut. Never eating, growing bigger.
You, sleeping on the cunning woman’s floor. Your own room gone for coin, your goat tied up outside, coughing.
You, blade in hand, the handle heavy. Your body still sore from the last man you took, your head aching from the babi, the babi that screams and grows, screams and grows, larger than a babi ever should be.
You, come of age and are returned.
You, what’s left of your goat at your feet, one last chance for the babi. The goat, unlike most, worth more to you alive than dead, but gone now anyway. The babi, beating its head from side to side, grabbing your legs so hard it leaves splinters.
You, unfocused as the cunning woman says she’s out of ideas. The babi, unfixable. Surely dying or surely wrong.
You, thinking of the trader bound in cloth.
Not a changeling, like I’d first thought, but a myling, ‘larger than a babi ever should be … surely wrong.’ If this poem was family lore, it would be mine, not Claud’s. The baby, taking and taking as the desperate mother empties herself out. The trader bound in cloth, the one that made the trade and collected the coins, had to be the Pedri, that much was clear. And another sentence had been underlined by Ysella: You, come of age and are returned. No matter how I read it, I couldn’t make sense of that one. It didn’t fit with the rest of the lines, though it was written in the same way. I flicked back to the first half of the poem. The piece that was underlined there was just part of a sentence: a babi that has changed. It seemed unrelated, but even so, I wrote both lines in the back of the notebook, along with the line from ‘The Baker and the Bread’: the Pedri makes a trade.
Ysella returned home to find me still sat in the garden, raspberry juice across my T-shirt. She frowned at the mess I had made, but before she could scold me, I asked her if I could borrow her old bike. Need to cycle off this hangover, I told her. She disappeared for a moment and returned with the bicycle. It was old – red, cream and rusty – with two thin tyres and dodgy brakes. It was exactly what I needed.
I took myself out on the moors, heading towards Dozmary pool.
When I moved to Manchester, I’d learnt the city by bike, a habit I’d picked up from home, where no cars and no buses gave me no choice. My city bike was old, with a basket on the front for cigarettes and bottles of water. I’d get up early, at the same time as the birds, and ride right from my front door. My bike took me to work, the shops, to parties. It took the top layer of skin from between my thighs and gave me stories, toned calves and a constant spattering of mud. The bike was buttercup yellow, bought with my student loan money in an ode to my mother.
My mother had a thing about buttercups when I was growing up. Poisonous yellow suns. Their roots creep under the ground like teeth, erupting with golden flowers where you least expect it. A string of them around the neck was supposed to be a cure for madness. Now, children hold one under the chin to see if they’re in love. Whenever I find them, I wear mine tightly round my neck.
My room in the city was on the top of a concrete hill, overlooking many more hills and many more rooms, and at the very bottom – the canal. I cycled along the towpath as often as I could, before the creatures would crawl out from under bridges, pushing their way through reeds and rubbish. If I cycled far enough, I found I could change my own landscape, find miniature fields and manicured gardens. I would only stop the bike when I saw something interesting – a heron calling murder, a dead fish, its guts spread open like wings. It was in the city that I built my first nest, wrapping myself up in student bars and greasy spoons, beer gardens and charity shops. I tried on old fur coats and Barbour jackets, bleached my hair, and pierced my nose. I couldn’t be further from the city now.
Dozmary Pool was where it ended, for Claud. Out of sight, hidden from the road, scrubbed from the horizon by a sea of bracken and bramble. To get close enough to see it, I abandoned the bike behind some gorse near the road and pulled myself over the locked gate, bouncing on my toes as I landed. I was never allowed to come here when I was a child. When I first found out I hadn’t been baptised in the pool like the other women in my family, I had assumed my mother’s flakiness was the cause. It was only through talking to Ysella when I was older – around twelve – during one of my mum’s episodes, that I found out why my mother hated Dozmary so much.
Their childhood had not been a peaceful one under Esolyn’s reign, something I found hard to grasp when I was young, because they had both seemed so very sad when she died. Now that I was older, and my own mother was becoming stranger, I began to understand how you could both need and resist someone at the same time. Where other mothers may’ve punished their children with extra prayers before bed or a switch on the back of the legs, Esolyn would taunt hers with superstitions. The water itself wasn’t the punishment – Esolyn didn’t believe that dunking would achieve anything, though she did think of her daughters as terrible little witches: snaggle-toothed and poorly dressed.
She took them there because of Jan Tregeagle. When Esolyn took her children to Dozmary, she would repeat the tale of Jan, although it’s not a story you’d need telling twice. At the lake she would tell her daughters to kneel, and they would plunge their small hands into the cold, inky water, and scoop. Tregeagle was a magistrate in the seventeenth century, who was known to harbour a particular type of cruelty. He was corrupt, living a life of luxury as he stole from the poor. When it was discovered that he had swindled a young orphan girl out of her inheritance, his punishment was emptying the bottomless pool of Dozmary with nothing but a limpet shell full of holes. Picture: Sisyphus by the lake.
Esolyn took my mother and the aunt to Dozmary to remind them that going against her word was pointless.
As I walked, the crisp copper of the dying bracken pulled against my legs, I thought of the line Ysella would repeat, whenever she spoke to me about Dozmary, and her mother:
Bos war, beware the waters of Dozmare, for Tregeagle is always there.
To my right, the hill climbed upwards, blanketed with life. To my left, it dropped into the valley, stretching out. I stood at a ninety-degree angle to the land around me as I followed the path to the lake.
Under my feet the ground was made of grasses and thatch, sedge squeezing around the edges of my trainers. If I were to drop and part the grass with my fingers or push back the ferns, I would find an entire ecosystem in miniature.
Insects battling tufts of grass, dodging oil-slick dragonflies on their way to the lake. March fritillary butterflies, their wings stained-church-glass orange beating around me, lazy in the heat.
I walked on my toes, imagining tiny houses hidden in the thatch, tables and chairs and bowls of porridge, all waiting to be eaten within this invisible forest. Above, massive granite sculptures, slabs upon slabs higher than my head. I would climb those rocks as a teenager, rolling my T-shirt up to my ribcage, milk-skin turned to the sun.
The pool was a stretch of still water sunken into the middle of the moor. Rotted wooden fence posts gaped across the centre of the lake, like cragged teeth.
I dunked my hands in the water, splashing my face. It had been a year, and I was still not OK with water. I could bathe, but I couldn’t swim. In the city, I was landlocked.
Back home, it was different. Out on the moors like that, I was sure I could see her in the still water.
Drowning is a silent death. On Claud’s first attempt, she was so high up that her entry into the sea would’ve been silent. A clink against a bowl. There was no shouting, but even if there was, the wind and the waves would’ve eaten that up.
When children fall into the sea, they have a diving reflex. Maybe it’s a call back to the womb, or the thought that safety lurks somewhere underneath. Either way, their instinct from birth is to hold their breath and sink when the surface of the water covers them. An adult might make a sound, at first, if they realise what’s happening to them before cold-water shock sets in. If they haven’t already swallowed half a pint of sea water.
The second time Claud tried to drown, there was no sea, just still water. Her inner child was present that day. She took over, held her in her arms and together they sank down, heart beating so fast the inside of her ribcage was probably bruised.
My bones were bruised too. I needed to shake these memories out of my mind. I cupped a hand into the pool, swirled the water around in my mouth. Salt and sediment.
My mother never told me the story of Jan Tregeagle; she left that one to my aunt. To me, all she said of Dozmary was that I should never to swim where horses drink – and horses would graze by Dozmary all year round. The hair that dropped into the water from their tails would turn to eels, eels big enough to wrap up and around your limbs, strong enough to drown you. They eat corpses, the big eels, whatever starts to decay, just like the sexton beetles do.