Corrag (6 page)

M
AYBE
I should not have saved them—those cats. They brought more than dead mice to the doorstep, in the end.

Mr Fothers started it. Maybe he didn’t like how I saved those five.
Cats,
he said?
Green-eyed?
And he spoke bad words about me, like how I squatted in bogs. Like how, one twilight, I’d shifted into a half-bird and screamed my way home from the elm wood.
Her right arm was a wing…This is true.

So it went. Small things which once meant
reivers
—no moon, or worms in the miller’s flour—no longer meant
reivers,
for the reivers were dead. Who, then, caused this? Where was the blame? People were quiet, at first. People bit on their tongues.

It was
king
that made it worse. The proper trouble started then—in the year that King James fled away to France, and in his place came the Orange, Protestant one with his very black wig. He sat on the throne still warm from James, and England called this
glorious. What a revolution!
they said. But Cora didn’t think so. She sucked her bottom lip. She looked at stars for a long, long time. One night, I tugged her sleeve. I asked,
what does this mean?
And she shook her head, said
trouble, I reckon—that’s what it means. Kings always do.
And it did. For
king
makes blood boil over. It makes the air feel thick, and strange, and so just as the wind span the weathervane, so eyes turned to look at the cottage by the burn with its holly and bog-water.

Slowly, there was more.

Small doings. A calf was born with a white star on its head—neat, and clear. Very pretty. But curious, too, so it was talked of—
a marked calf…
said the men.
How uncommon.
And then Mr Dobbs, whose field the calf was in, took to sneezing all day and all night. Cora said it was the air being full of flowers—but no one else thought so. And an owl screeched down from the church tower at midnight, and the cherries from the cherry tree were tarter than most years. A rat was seen on the half-moon bridge. And in late summer, when the air was heavy with heat and no wind, and the skies flashed with a storm, Mr Vetch’s affections moved away from his wife and onto the fair-haired buxom girl who sold ribbons, in Hexham. Mrs Vetch was distraught.
He’s lost his mind,
she wailed. Out in the street, wringing her doughy hands, she wailed,
it’s a bewitching! A madness! Surely, it is…

We watched this. Cora and me.

That word
…she whispered. And she glanced up at the rumbling skies.

It took a day or so. But
witch
came in.

Whore,
said Mr Fothers, as my mother walked by.

In church, Mr Pepper did his best. He said
we are God’s children and He loves us all the same
. But it stopped nothing. It did not calm Cora, who stood outside at night. She said
what is coming? Something comes…I feel it.
Then Mr Fothers said that Cora stole his grey mare when the moon was full. He said the horse sprouted wings, and they flew to the Devil and back. A flying horse? A flying lie is better. But he locked the mare up every full-moon night, and rode a brown cob instead. It kicked out at shadows, and snorted—but Mr Fothers preferred to risk his neck on the brown horse than his eternal soul on the mare.

H
ATE
her? Cora? Oh he did.

I don’t know why. Her beauty perhaps. Her power, and her knowledge of the world, which was so strong that I felt it, as she passed—it brushed my skin, like breath. Maybe he heard of her meetings with unknown men by the Romans’ wall and he longed for that—to be such a man. To untie her bodice in the northern dark. But how could he? Being married, and church-going? Nor would my mother have let him. She said he had a chicken’s look about him—with a loose chin, and a look like everything was worth a peck or two.
Foul man
she called him.
Fowl.

I see the goodness in most people, for most people are good. But his was hard to see.

He drowned the striped cat in a bucket. He threw stones at me. His wife was meek as a duckling is, and once she bought groundsel from Cora for a bruise that was damson-dark. It was hand-shaped, too—Cora told me. Mrs Fothers blushed, said she had fallen—
clumsy me!
—but we knew this wasn’t from falling. The poor lady tried for hemlock once but Cora didn’t keep it. That’s a very final herb—it kills you, and not kindly. Cora felt very sorry for Mrs Fothers’ lonely life.

These are proofs of Mr Fothers’ wickedness.

He beat his grey mare also.

And he killed my mother. I know it—here, inside.

I shall bring this all together like if I was sewing.

William sat on the throne. He was a wheezy king, and like he’d sent his wheezing out on horseback to the north, a consumption came up northern parts. Word came up of people dying foully in York. Cora said she had no herb to cure it if it came to Thorneyburnbank. So we waited. It never came to my knowing. But Mr Pepper fell down dead in church—from a tired heart, most likely—and folk muttered
pest
. Cora was restless and stood waist-deep into the burn. She eyed me very strangely and had no sleep in her.

They buried Mr Pepper under an oak which dropped its leaves on his box, like it was crying. And the new churchman who came in wore eye-glasses above a dark moustache. He was young and had the look of rats in him—all whiskers and quick-moving.

Ah
said Cora seeing him.

There is worse than pestilence in our mortal world. There is falling from the sight of the God. There is the Devil’s work. There are those who know the Devil’s ways and is it not our duty to cleanse the earth? To rid it of such sinners?

Then there was a baby which came out blue, and dead.

Also, a hare was seen in the fields, washing its ears, and the moon rose behind it so that the whole village saw it—a hare, and a full, white moon…

Cora sniffed. She took me in her arms.

She kissed me over and over, and in my heart I thought
not long now
. For I had also seen the starlings flying west—a ball of them, rolling far away from us—and we slept side by side in those last few nights. Our hair tangled up, and blue-black.

A
DOG
barked in the village. And that night, Cora pushed the cats from my bed, grasped my hair in her fist and said
Wake up! Wake now!
I woke. I saw her eyes were very wide. She pulled me from my bed by my hair and I cried out, and was scared.

She said,
take my cloak. Take this bread. Take this purse, Corrag—it has all my herbs in it. Every herb I ever picked, or knew, is in this purse, and it is yours now. Keep it safe. Promise me?

I looked at the purse. Then I looked at her—into her eyes which were shining.

And Corrag, a horse waits—outside, in the marsh. She grazes there, and you must take her and ride her. Go north-and-west. Ride fast, and hard, and you will know the place that’s meant for you, when you find it—and on finding it, stay there.
She put her hand against my cheek.
My little ghost baby…
she said.

The dog’s bark came again, but closer.

I said,
are you coming too?

She shook her head.
You are going alone. You are leaving me now, and you must not come back. Be careful. Be brave. Never be sorry for what you are, Corrag—but do not love people. Love is too sore and makes life hard to bear…

I nodded. I heard her, and knew.

She fastened her cloak on me. She smoothed my hair, put up its hood.

Be good to every living thing,
she whispered.

Listen to the voice in you.

I will never be far away from you. And I will see you again—one day.

I wore her herby purse about me. I wore her dark-blue cloak which dragged on the ground, and I hid crusts and a pear in its sleeve. Outside, in the cold night-time air, I found Mr Fothers’ grey mare hock-high in the rushes. I mounted her, and looked to the cottage with the fish in the roof and the holly and my mother stood before it, red-skirted and black-haired, with a grey cat sitting by her, and that was my mother. That is Cora for always now.

Ride,
she said.
North-and-west! Go! Go!

We galloped into the dark, over heath and moor. I took the mare’s mane for she had no reins on her, or saddle. I saw the ground beneath us rushing by. I was all breathless and afraid. At the Romans’ wall we rested for a time. The world was very quiet, and the mist was less. The stars were out and I never saw such a starry night—it was like all the sky was with us as we went north, and all the earth’s magick also. I spoke to the wall. I told it of Cora, and I told it I was scared.
Keep us safe?
I asked it.
I am scared
. I think the mare heard me for her ears were forwards, and her mouth was very gentle when she took the pear from my hand.

We crossed the wall by a lone sycamore.

Then we rode amongst trees for a very long time. I don’t know when we crossed into Scotland, but it was somewhere in those woods. I patted the horse, and saw that all I had now in the whole world was a cloak, a purse, two crusts of bread and Mr Fothers’ old grey mare.

This is my final stitch tonight.

Cora. Who thought the pricking men might take her but no, the gallows did.

I don’t know this for certain. But I think they snared her that night, and a few weeks later they tied her thumb-to-thumb. I think she said nothing. I think she was strong, and defiant, and knew the realm was waiting for her so why be afraid? I don’t think she was afraid. I think she shook her hair free from the rope around her neck, and looked up at the sky, for she always looked up at the windy autumn skies. And then the trapdoor banged twice against its hinges, and she heard a crunch in her ears, and I wonder what she saw, in her last mind’s eye—if it was me, or her mother sinking under.

I also think that Mr Fothers saw it. I think he went home with a quietness inside him that had no name, and it grew in the weeks that followed. He saw Cora’s cottage be lost to the holly and storm-water. He thought of her with newborn calves or cherries, or with a lightning bolt that lit up the fields very briefly so that all things looked white and strange.

He found his stable empty and thought
Cora did this.

When her cats slunk by him, his heart creaked open like a door.