1999. The woman, Lowen, took the new baby from the farmhouse and spirited her, quick-fast, across the moors. She flew over spikes of gorse and waded through bouncing marshes, landing safely in the village, in the cottage where together they would live, for eight long years, before the two of them would come home.
The new baby, she named Sprig. A sprig of thyme. A shoot, a twig, a spray.
The sprig and the woman could not root in the cottage house. It would not let them. Oh, how welcoming the farmhouse had been before. What precious gifts it bestowed upon the woman, what chance it had given Sprig. The cottage did not want them. The cottage knew too much already. The buildings in these parts are almost as old as Her, almost as old as us. They have no patience for the fleeting whims of people. And the people, the people of the village, they had no patience for Sprig and the woman either. They did not trust Sprig, who seemed loud and dirty. Sprig, whose words were muddied and whose play seemed scavenging. And the woman, so clearly desperate, so quietly regretful – away from her mother, the great mother, and the rest of her family. The villagers knew that the woman had done something wrong, that the sprig was the wrong thing. And so, they closed her out.
When the villagers closed her out, the cottage copied. With walls made of pumice stone, it had soaked up too many stories in its years. It did not want the loneliness in its stone.
Eight years passed before the woman and the little sprig of thyme left the cottage behind. Trewarnen waited for them. It welcomed their return. And so did She, ever closer to recalling Her trade.
In the night, I walked downstairs, and I was hit with a wall of heat and musk. My mother and Ysella had argued all evening, before leaving again, the front door locked behind them. I had watched them stalk across the moors, Ysella with her bucket, my mother trailing behind.
There was nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do but roam the house. After switching the lights on, I went straight to a window for fresh air, but it was sealed shut. I placed my hand on the closest radiator: cold. The warmth had to be radiating from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. It felt like body heat, a room packed full of arms and legs and sickly-sweet breath.
I settled for removing my cardigan and dumped Folk and Ysella’s notebook on the table, pushing old coffee cups and plates out of the way. I was sure that Folk must’ve come from my mother. Ysella had been far too evasive about it all to give me the book.
I pulled my tobacco from my pocket and rolled a cigarette, not bothering to go outside. The stuffiness of the room should absorb the smoke without anyone realising. It took me five clicks of the lighter to get a flame, and by the time it finally sparked, my eyes were watering in frustration.
The question remained: why was Ysella being so secretive about it all? Clearly, the rest of the village already knew something of the story, just as Paul did that evening in the pub. They had arrived at the house in a mob, angry and scared. Ysella thought the Pedri had something to do with Claud, but the villagers seemed more concerned about me. When they all came to Trewarnen, Tony had acted like I was a catalyst for the things that were going on across the moors. Or a conduit. Like my return had kicked everything off again, made everything worse. But if that were true, why did my mother ask me to come home? Why did she make up the memorial and lure me back here? Was that what they had been arguing about? My aunt clearly didn’t want me to know anything about the Pedri, she’d tried her best to keep me away from it all. So why have me here at all? Why not just answer my questions as I asked them? If the words themselves scared her, why keep the notebook in the house? I kept coming back to the same thought: she would only keep it hidden from me if she truly believed in it, if she actually thought I was in danger.
Cigarette in hand, I looked at the book in front of me. Maybe the task would be pointless, but the research itself was surely the smart step to take. Attempting to find reason in unreasonable behaviour is something a well person would do. It felt like an impossible task, like I’d find nothing at all, or something much more complicated than I’d started with.
I turned the thin pages of Folk with one hand, ignoring any sections that looked too pristine. I was looking for pages that had been scribbled on, folded over, marked in some way, anything to help me make sense of what I was reading. I found what I needed when I reached a section on trades and children. At the top of the page, an illustration, skewed like those at the beginning of the book. A landscape, rolling hills, trees, low-hanging clouds, almost idyllic. And there, coming out of the ground like flowers, babies. Babies everywhere. I read quickly, greedily. Most of the writing was factual, listing out specific cases of the Pedri using its – her – children as an object of trade, offering up babies to desperate families and then recalling them years later, when they were fully grown. The different ways these supposed spriggans were returned made me pause. Each death was in connection with the land, this very moor. A gorse fire, a suffocation in a marsh, a landslide, buried alive, frozen. Drowning.
Claud, weighed down in the water at Dozmary pool, not even trying to swim. In the same lake she visited weekly, the same lake Esolyn used to baptise my mother and aunt. The same lake my aunt didn’t want me visiting as a child.
I turned to the next page, to see if there were more illustrations, but instead I found a note, in pencil, written down the side of the margin.
EL – DO NOT LET LOWEN SHARE THIS.
I choked on the smoke in my lungs, coughing onto the page in front of me in shock. Little droplets of spit sprayed across the handwriting. It wasn’t Ysella’s, looping and neat. It couldn’t be my mother’s, though I was sure she’d given me the book. This was written by someone else. A steady hand. Were the EL initials?
When my breathing calmed, I went to take another drag from my cigarette and found it had stuttered out, the end gaping black. I must’ve tapped it against the table too hard, dislodged the little burning cherry of light somewhere onto the floor. I made a quick plea to my lighter, cartwheeling it in my hand a few times to spread the remaining gas through.
There were certain subjects that I never discussed with my mother – she would not speak openly about grief, her illness, my birth, or even her life before I was born. All knowledge I have of their childhood has come to me from Ysella, who is liberal with her recollection of family history. My mother, on the other hand, would only speak to me of the past in warnings and lessons, and even then, they came in code. I’ve learnt about her through the myling, the night-time whispers, the stories. My mother cannot handle reality – that is what me and my aunt have kept from her, tried to shield her from. She loves to tell stories, to share them with whoever will listen, always has. Which meant whoever wrote the note, demanding that my mother not share it with others, believed that the book – or this section, at least – was true, and that it would be a problem for her to pass that on
I looked at the note again. Ran my fingers over the squat block capitals, felt the way they were indented deep into the paper. It was familiar – and so was the EL.
I ran into the kitchen and pulled open every drawer until I found them: an inch of cards, held together with a fraying elastic band. I carried them back to the table and placed them in front of me, breaking the elastic band with my nail. The first few were birthday cards to me from my aunt. Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen. A Christmas card from my mother. I moved through them quicker, my hands clumsy with impatience. There had to be older ones in there somewhere. Seeing that EL, along with the handwriting, had sparked an idea. After flicking through almost thirty cards, I found them. Two old Christmas cards, creased and cheap with robins on the front.
Inside the first, in the same handwriting, addressed to my mother: Lo, Nadelik Lowen, Esolyn X
And below that, for my aunt: El, Nadelik Lowen, Esolyn X
The only person brave enough to shorten Ysella’s name that way.
*
Ysella found me bent over Folk at the kitchen table, where I had been sat for most of the night. Her hand on my arm made me look away from the page – I looked at her fingers, wrapped nervously around my wrist, and saw that I was bleeding. I had been scratching at my arm as I read, raising welts from my wrist to my elbow. When Ysella let me go, a pimple of my blood had burst against her finger, which she put in her mouth to suck clean.
The book had been splayed open in front of me, and it wasn’t until she’d dropped my hand that she realised what I’d been reading. Her hand moved from her mouth to her neck. She held herself there, gently, caressing, as she spoke.
‘I suppose there’s nothing for it now,’ she said.
She had caught me. I watched quietly as her voice broke.
‘Don’t look surprised, I knew your mother would find a way to get that book to you eventually. Just like I knew you had my notebook. This is what Lowen wanted, for you to come back and learn it all. I tried to keep you from coming home, I tried to send you back because I knew this is what would happen. Once you were here and you had that book, I knew I was running out of time. I tried to fight it; Lord knows I did. We did well, didn’t we?’ she asked, looked down at me. I could smell her need, the reassurance she wanted. It was earthy. I didn’t reach out, didn’t blink. I wanted to see if she’d cry. Her throat dipped, in and out, quickly. I thought of the eels in the bowl, twisting.
‘We did. We did everything – I did everything I could, but God, I’m tired. I’ve fought and fought for you, but even I can’t defeat nature, no matter how hard I try. I hope you can see that, how much I’ve tried. Do you have anything to say, after what you’ve read?’
Which bit was she referring to? Her notebook? Claud’s name on those pages? Or Folk – the one thing that made it all seem real? She looked nervous, holding her throat like that, as if she were balancing her head, scared of losing it.
‘Her mother knew, you know? Just like yours. But you were lucky, really. The way Lowen dealt with it. It was much kinder. I know it wouldn’t have felt like it, especially when you were small. But better that than what that woman did to her girl. The cruelty of it.’ She shook her head. ‘Unfathomable. We never wanted to leave you like that, you understand?’
Mothers, everywhere. Whose mother? My grandmother? Or Claud’s mother?
‘You know, my mam wrote that book. Your grandmother. She wrote it long ago, before I was born, even, and she wanted nothing done with it. Lord knows where the other copies went, but I had to hunt this one down after she was gone. She’d given her only copy to Mrs Rowe, for safe keeping. And then everything happened with Lowen, and Esolyn told me about it all. About the book, and the stories, and what Lowen had done. I didn’t want to believe her. You were only a baby. But I saw the change myself. And I held you at a distance, I admit, just when you were a baby. I’ll always regret that, because it pushed Lowen away for a while, too. It gave Mam permission to treat you poorly. I should’ve been warmer, whilst I could. This was never your fault. Your mother asked for it and then we all had to live with it, you too. But our mam, she could never get over it, she was furious. And Lowen, she’s always been so stubborn. The fight between them became bigger and bigger, and that’s why you went to the cottage in the village. Then Mam was gone, and you and Lowen moved back here, and she never spoke of it. She wouldn’t acknowledge that you were anything but hers. I started to think, maybe I could live like that too. And I did, for a while, at least when I was with you. And we got so close, you and I, because I knew you needed greater protection, and because I loved you. That part was simple. It was never your fault, but I couldn’t forget what Lowen had done. You were one of the great gifts of our lives, you understand? The greatest. Maybe I’m as spiteful as she is stubborn, but I couldn’t help but remind her, whenever I felt she was shirking her responsibilities with you … I would remind her that she’d done this, she’d asked for this. Maybe that made her a worse parent to you, for a while. I’m sorry about that. We’re both sorry for a lot of it. And now, with the time … I thought I could do something to help. I learnt the stories, and I thought I could change the course.’
She sat on the chair opposite me and sighed. She looked so very tired. ‘I really thought I could change it. Tell me, can I?’
I put my hand on hers, and I smiled. The one I’d practised. The tiger teeth I gave my mother, sat under this very table as a child who could not spell her own name. I pinched my cheeks, twice, quickly between thumb and forefinger, and pulled my lips back, like I had in front of the mirror only days before.
Ysella crossed herself. One finger fluttering up and down her face and darting along her shoulders. She’d never done that before. I realised she was scared of me.
‘Mam was right.’ She shook her head slowly, stepped back from the table. ‘You can’t fight nature. I thought your mother wanted what I did, what’s best for you. To keep you safe. But she’s been just as bad, it’s like she wants it to happen. I need you to go—’ she waved her hand at the stairs, ‘—and get in your room. I won’t ask twice.’
I didn’t move from my seat. I picked up Folk and held it against my chest. Coddled it. Cradled it. When I looked back at Ysella, she had sunk. Her skin was too big for her, her cheeks hung lower, her muscles spilling off her bones. Quieter, she said ‘Please. I’m not trying to be cruel. You need to understand. I didn’t want you to come here because I can’t bear for you to leave. Please, just go to your room.’
I shrugged, then nodded. As I turned to take the stairs, I felt arms wrap around my waist. Ysella pulled me backwards, forcefully, into an embrace. She held me there, against her chest, tight enough that I struggled to breathe. I leant my head against her, the touch of kindness softening me. She dropped a kiss on the crown of my head and spoke into my scalp: ‘Everything that we’ve done, we’ve done with love.’
With that, she let go of me and I went into my bedroom, aware that she was following me, but not looking back, not until I had shut the door and sat on the bed.
I heard my door lock from the outside.