SHE WAS THERE ALREADY.
Sitting on the Green Trunk.
She was wearing a straw hat, and her head was bowed. Her hands were joined. They lay in her lap like a white dove.
I had this thought: that she had always been there, only before I’d been unable to see her.
Very quietly I dismounted. I didn’t take my eyes off her but, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw someone else slipping away between the trees into the green gloom. Lady Alice?
She sat as still and patient as Mary on my ring.
I let go of Pip’s reins and stepped up to her.…
All the way from Caldicot to the Green Trunk, I kept thinking how long it’s taken to meet my mother but how I would have gone on forever, because nothing mattered so much.
Pip’s cantering hooves drummed my own heartbeat; it sang out the words that have driven me on: Winnie announcing, “Everyone needs to know who their own mother is,” and Gatty saying she’d search just the same as me, and Lord Stephen saying, “Your mother is your mother and you should find her.”
…and very slowly she looked up.
Her violet eyes.
Her Ygerna-eyes deep as the little wood-violets that grow round the fringes of Pike Forest. Her almond-shaped face.
I gasped. “I’ve seen you before.”
She gazed at me, unblinking.
“In my stone. I can’t explain it. Well, I will!”
She swallowed. Her breasts heaved.
“You are…I mean, you are my mother?”
Slowly, gently, she nodded.
Her eyes were filling with tears.
“I’ve thought and thought of all the things I’d say, and what I’d say first, and what I wanted to say most, and now I can’t think of one thing.”
“I’ve seen you every day,” she whispered.
“Every day?”
“Looking like you did on my ring. Giving me that apple.”
We both wept then. I drew her up and pulled her to me, and by mistake I knocked off her straw hat, and we sobbed and howled. I never knew there was such pain.
I kept screwing up my eyes. Trying to stop.
She was so small. So slight. Just a scrap.
“They…they…”
She couldn’t say the words. Her sobbing and gasping kept getting in the way.
“They…they said you were sickly and died.”
My mother’s whole body was shuddering.
“I…I thought they murdered you,” she said.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“They wouldn’t let me see you,” my mother said, and I could hear the lovely Welsh lilt in her voice.
“Who?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t tell me anything about you.”
She trembled, as if she had caught a fever.
I sniffed, and somehow inside me I began to feel more calm again; the calm spread right through my heart, then my head. I held my mother to me, warm and quivering.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Sir William’s dead. You do know that. Don’t you?”
“It’s them,” she gulped.
“Who? You mean Thomas and Maggot?”
My mother pressed her head against my chest.
“They can’t hurt you. Not any longer.” I could hear my voice was hoarse.
Suddenly my mother jerked away from me. Her face was cracked and glistening.
“I loved you!” she cried. “I loved you so much! I never wanted Sir William! I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want you.” She grabbed my shoulders. “You never thought that?”
“I…I wasn’t sure,” I said.
“I wanted you! I loved you!” my mother cried. “I didn’t want you to be taken away. I couldn’t bear it!”
“I think I’ve been waiting all my life to hear that,” I said huskily.
Mair. My own blood-mother. Her own son. We were inside-out somersaulters. Dreamers, red-eyed and waking.
“I thought you might be like Sir William,” she said in a low voice.
Fiercely I shook my head. “I’ve kept trying to find you,” I said. “From the day Sir John—Sir William’s brother—told me about you. I came here before to meet you, you know.”
I rubbed my sore eyes and my mother looked at me.
“Your ears stick out like mine,” she said, wonderingly. “I’ve longed to know what you looked like.”
“Once I thought I was growing a tail,” I said. “I was afraid.”
My mother laughed and sobbed, both at the same time. “You’re so handsome,” she said.
“You live at Catmole?” I asked her.
My mother nodded.
“Lord Stephen told me,” I said. “He was my lord, and he wanted me to meet you. He and Lady Alice. You do know Catmole’s…well…you know it will be mine now?”
My mother looked anxious.
“I can go away,” she said in a low voice.
“Go away?”
“I will. If it’s difficult.”
“Away? Never!”
My mother stared at me.
“Not now! Not ever!” I shouted.
She smiled the ghost of a smile. “You’ll scare the birds away!” she said.
“Listen to them!” I cried. “Each one of them! That lark! Singing its heart out!”