Isobel Read online

  The kitchen was deserted, the shutters closed. Andie happened to know that one of the panels of the shutter was missing - she had no idea how that happened - and she went to sit in the window, peering through the broken slat.

  There was fire, now. Animal noises that had been frightened or angry were now terrified. Men fled with small animals tucked under their arms, or tried to pull horses and cows away into the woods, but now the household staff were fighting back. The war-ready men were largely gone, but the younger and older men put up a valiant fight against the raiders: mountain men, Andie learned later.

  A tall figure went by, blocking Andie’s view of the yard for a moment, and then silhouetting against the torches as he strode into the middle of the yard.

  “Be gone!” he yelled, and Andie nearly fell out of the window with the authority of the words. Andie stiffened as she recognized Damien, her father’s manservant, laying on the ground, a strange man holding him up by his shirtfront with a dagger poised over his head.

  “Damien,” she squealed, pushing the shutter open. She was half way out the window in her bare feet and nightgown when Isobel pulled her back into the kitchen.

  “Hush,” she said, pushing the other shutter open. “Rafa sees him.”

  The tall man hit the jackal at full speed, bowling him over and drawing a long sword from a sheath at his hip. Andie leaned forward, watching with intense curiosity as Rafa stabbed the man in the chest and ran on. She settled back into Isobel’s lap and looked at the woman. Elissa would have covered her eyes or sent her back into the main room. Isobel just watched out the window, keeping both of them low. The woman glanced at her.

  “There are hard things in the world, child.”

  Andie didn’t know what that meant, but she was happy to get to watch, so she didn’t ask any questions.

  Rafa tore through the raiders, peasants in cotton to his plate armor, and scattered them into the woods, then sent the servants out to recover the animals. The barn was on fire, and horses and goats raised a cacophony of panic. Rafa turned his attention to this, instructing someone to go into the house, and getting everyone else into a line from the well. He kicked over the water trough and chased the surge of water into the barn. Isobel sat up higher, and Andie clambered out of her arms, going to sit in the windowsill again.

  The side of the barn exploded with the force of a kick, and Rafa shouldered his way out, carrying a fat goat. Three horses streamed out after him, circling the yard in high-strung aimlessness.

  “Lily,” Andie cried, going to jump out of the window.

  “You’ll get trampled,” Isobel said, catching her. “They’ll get her.”

  Rafa went back into the barn, dragging a cow back out behind him, then went to join the bucket line, where the hardier women had joined to help put out the fire. Another ten minutes, and the yard was lit by the moon alone, again, though sections of the barn still glowed with embers that hadn’t yet turned to ash.

  Isobel gathered Andie up and carried her back to the main room.

  Either a couple of nights before or after, Andie woke from a hard sleep to the sound of screaming. She bolted out of bed and down the hallway to be brushed aside at the door to her mother’s room by one of the women. She stood in the hallway for several minutes, and her mother screamed again. Andie was stiff with fear.

  Isobel appeared in a long, light green sleeping gown and gave Andie a strange look as she entered the room.

  “Get the midwife,” Andie heard Isobel say.

  “It isn’t time yet,” Charis argued. “She’ll be here all night.”

  “Then she’ll be here all night,” Isobel answered. “Go get her.”

  Andie scrunched her mouth and nodded. That was right. Korinna came out of the room and rushed down the hallway. There was soft speech that way, and then the front door opened and closed. Andie stood against the wall, listening to Isobel direct the action in the room. It was scary. Nothing was supposed to happen to her mother. Girls in the village had told her about the women who died in the effort to bring a baby, and one of them had said something that Andie hadn’t understood about Phoenician hips, intended to imply that her mother wasn’t suited for childbirth.

  The girls in the village were mean.

  Charis brushed past, making a sharp noise at Andie and pointing her back toward her bedroom. Andie ignored her, but went to sit across the hall from the doorway, where she’d be less conspicuous. Women came and went, carrying things, fetching things. No one noticed Andie now.

  Elissa screamed again.

  Andie hugged her knees.

  “I thought you might be here,” someone said. Andie looked up as Rafa picked her up and carried her away.

  “Best not to hear things you can’t do anything about,” he said.

  “Is Mama going to be okay?” Andie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rafa said. “But she has Isobel and Charis and the rest of them watching over her.”

  “It hurts her,” Andie said.

  “She screamed the night you were born, too,” Rafa said. “But then you were born. And then it didn’t matter.”

  “The big girls said Phoenicians are too skinny to have babies.”

  “And yet there continue to be Phoenicians, don’t there?” Rafa asked. Andie laid her head on his shoulder, considering. He sat down in front of the fire place, where servants were stoking the fire to bring light into the room and drive away the cool damp of the night.

  “Mama said my father is very happy she’s having another baby,” Andie said.

  “I imagine he is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he needs a son who will inherit his property and his fortunes, mostly,” Rafa said. “But partially because a house that is full of children is never joyless. Do you want a little brother?”

  Andie had thought about this.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Many little girls do.”

  She looked forward to having someone that she could tell what to do, to no longer being the little kid, and she imagined that Nelius would be distracted from teaching her by teaching her younger sibling, with so much more to learn than Andie, so Andie could sneak away more often, but she thought that the little boys at the market were stupid and noisy, and that the house was often too full of noisy people as it was.

  Rafa leaned against the tall back of the rocking chair and she curled against his chest, the heat from the fire lulling her into a quiet as he rocked.

  Elissa screamed again and Andie stiffened. Rafa put his arms around her and kept rocking, beginning to hum. The sound made her numb, quiet. He had a deep, rich voice that didn’t need words to be beautiful, and her head vibrated with it. Her eyes drooped and she drifted away gently. The next scream was far, far away and something that someone else was worried about.

  Her mother gave birth to twin boys that night. A week later, she fell into a feverish decline that kept her in her bed for weeks. Andie understood this later, but at the time, she worried that someone had abducted her mother. They wouldn’t let her into see her, and the house ran with a hushed, clenched efficiency as everyone tried not to be the one to light the simmering tempers among those who were caring for Elissa.

  There was a wet-nurse who cared for Rhesus and Talos; they were small and sickly, themselves, and required someone to be with them nearly every hour of the day to ensure they kept breathing. Andie was certain she had never been that feeble.

  She held the boys once or twice in the first couple of weeks, alarmed at how the grown-ups hovered over her to make sure she didn’t drop them, but she often crept out of her room to sit on the floor outside of their room, listening to the nurses in her mother’s room on one side and the boys’ room on the other. There were words she didn’t understand, and fear.

  She spent lots of time outside, when she could get away, but then Charis decreed that she wasn’t allowed beyond the yard alone, because the raiders had hit several other estates nearby, one during daylight.

&n
bsp; Meanwhile, the summer turned brutally hot. Andie stole fruit from the kitchen more often, but Helene was on her guard and would send her back out of the kitchen with a swat. Nesius was crabby, and Charis was unlivable.

  Rafa and several of the war-aged men who had stayed behind for various reasons started making rounds to other homes, trying to catch the raiders in the act again, and Isobel mainly kept to her chamber when she wasn’t in with Elissa or the boys.

  With older eyes, Andie looked back on those weeks with the realization that she had never seriously considered the possibility that something bad could happen to Elissa or Rhesus and Talos: Isobel was there, and she carried with her such a confidence that it simply wasn’t possible that one of them would fail to recover.

  Once or twice Andie caught the maids or the kitchen staff gossiping about the dark woman, speculating that she was a witch or a demon, the way she kept pulling Elissa back from the brink, and with the strange medicine she used, but Helene argued that it was simply northern medicine, and that Elissa had a strong constitution. Then she caught Andie trying to steal rolls and swatted her out of the kitchen again.

  The staff was in a characteristically foul mood one afternoon as the heat remained unbroken and several of the neighbors came to pay their respects to Elissa and see the new boys. The twins, for their part, were less green than normal, and made awake noises that weren’t screams for a few minutes. Andie sat on the floor next to the wet nurse, watching them. She was wary. Talos had spat up on her the day before, from the wet nurse’s arms. She’d smelled like sick milk all day.

  She’d caught a frog in the yard that morning, and was playing with it, letting it squirm from hand to hand without holding it tightly.

  “What is that?” the wet nurse asked, leaning over to see what Andie had. She let the creature’s head break through between her thumb and forefinger and the woman pulled back in horror.

  “What is wrong with this child, bringing such a creature into the house? Doesn’t she know there is illness here?”

  “What is it?” a neighbor asked, standing from a lounge.

  “She has a toad,” the wet nurse said, gathering up the twins and backing away. “Who knows, but she could be the reason they’re all sick. Has she been allowed to hold the babies?”

  “Of course she has,” Charis said, approaching. “What are you doing?”

  Andie opened her hands, and the frog jumped free. The neighbor shrieked and jumped out of the way, bumping into a servant, who spilled a pitcher of wine on Charis.

  “Out! Out! Get out!” Charis said, grabbing Andie by the back of her dress and lifting her clear of the floor. “I’m more than done with you being underfoot.”

  “But…” Andie said, struggling to get away. The frog was going to get stepped on in the chaos.

  The neighbor had fallen over and the servant scrambled away, going for something to clean the pool of wine. Another neighbor, a man, was helping the wet nurse get the babies out of the room, and Damien entered from the kitchen to see what was wrong.

  The frog bounced off of his ankle and then crunched under his other foot.

  Andie screamed, wrenching free from Charis.

  “You killed it!” she screamed. “You killed it!”

  “Good riddance,” the wet nurse yelled from the hallway, followed by the sound of her spitting. Andie pushed Damien off of the frog and knelt in front of it, crying over the tiny broken body. Damien hadn’t yet figured out what was going on, but he was unaccustomed to tolerating anyone treating him with anything other than extreme respect, especially not someone six years old and three and a half feet high. He jerked her to her feet and slapped her. She stopped crying for an instant, swallowing, then began to sob.

  “That is quite enough,” he said, pushing her roughly toward the hallway. “Get out of my sight.”

  Andie stumbled down the hallway, hot, frustrated, shamed, hurt, and angry. Deeply angry. She bumped into someone in the hallway and lifted both fists to hit them, but Isobel caught her wrists with both hands.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “The babies and a frog and he killed it,” Andie said, sniffing and coughing as she cried.

  “What?” Isobel asked.

  “He killed it,” Andie said, crying harder. Isobel picked her up and carried her back into the main room.

  “She has a handprint on her face,” she said, her voice sharp enough to silence the frenzy of people arguing and complaining in the room. “If I ever find out who put it there, they will pay dearly. Tell me what happened.”

  “She brought a toad into a house of sickness,” the wet nurse said. “It’s the least she deserves. She’s probably the reason her mother is going to die. She’s cursed them. If she were mine, I’d send her to the stable master for a whipping.”

  Andie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

  “She’s underfoot and a nuisance. She needs to learn how to behave,” Charis said, face dark with anger as she watched a girl cleaning up the wine.

  “She wouldn’t be underfoot if you let her go out,” Isobel observed. “No one cares for her and no one watches her. Where else do you expect her to be?”

  “My children sat quietly by her age,” Charis said. “She’s been allowed much too much freedom. She shows no respect.”

  “And I’m sure your children grew into shining examples of civic pride,” Isobel said. Andie didn’t understand why that was a bad thing, but from Isobel’s voice, it clearly was. Isobel shook her head and looked around at the neighbors, the staff, the wet nurse. “There may be a curse on this house, but she didn’t bring it.”

  Isobel turned and left, her long hair falling behind her like a cloak. Andie ran her fingers through it, feeling bad because she caused tangles, but it felt good between her fingers. The door to Isobel’s room closed behind them, and Isobel set her down on the bed.

  “Ay, this heat,” she complained, sitting down at her dresser. “How do you survive it?”

  “It’s better outside,” Andie said and sniffed. “Did I really make mama sick?”

  “No,” Isobel said, then suppressed a smile. “Though I don’t understand why you would bring an amphibian into the house, it didn’t make anyone sick. The woman has superstitions.”

  “Superstitions,” Andie said. She didn’t know what the word meant, but it sounded like justice.

  “You find them everywhere, different superstitions, but the same women.” She paused, gathering her hair up behind her head and clasping it. “It is so hot. And the air feels as if it could choke me.”

  Andie looked around the room. One of the servants had apparently brought a certain number of Isobel’s personal things, and the walls were hung with small decorations that hadn’t been there before.

  “Andromeda,” Isobel said. Andie looked at the woman, finding that Isobel had started winding her hair, piling loop after loop of it up on her head. “Do you swim?”

  Andie looked away, conspiringly, and nodded.

  “Can you find the shore from here?”

  She nodded again. There was a beach where she wandered and collected shells within her range. If Lykos caught her there, he’d tan her for sure, but her feet took her there, anyway.

  “Good girl,” Isobel said. “Let’s go.”

  Isobel called out in her strange language and the girl with the blond hair appeared, taking a series of orders with sharp nods and leaving. Isobel pinned her hair into place, all of that hair, stacked into coils on the top of her head. It mystified Andie. She stared at it, then hopped off the bed as the girl returned with a stack of linens. Things to dry off with, things to wear in the water, things to wear after they swam. Isobel dropped them into a wicker basket and looked around the room. She said something else to the servant, who nodded, then looked at Andie and winked. Andie grinned at her.

  “This way,” Isobel said, lifting Andie to the window. Andie looked at her with wide eyes, but clambered easily through the window and hopped onto the ground. Isobel
handed the handbasket to the girl and eased out the window, sliding onto the windowsill and rotating her feet up and out of the room, then onto the ground outside. For a moment, Andie hoped she would learn to move like that one day. Isobel took the basket from the girl and looked toward the yard, then started in the direction of the sea air. The girl waved, then closed the shutters behind them.

  It had been more than a year since Elissa had walked to the beach with Andie, and Andie didn’t have any other friends to take her, so she was excited to show Isobel her route. She ran ahead, picking flowers and fallen leaves and interesting stones and bringing them back to Isobel. The woman accepted them and inspected them individually, then put them into the basket as they walked.

  The beach was about fifteen minutes away at Andie’s pace, and Isobel walked with her head up, tall, enjoying the open air and the scenery. This close to the ocean, they rarely got snow or freezing weather, and the plants were wild. Andie could see where it snowed in the mountains during the winter, but the same storms only brought them rain except on rare occasion.

  On the beach, Andie ran to the huge fallen oak where she hid her treasures, moving aside the flat rock she’d found to cover them and carefully digging out the sand from the seaweed lining she used to hold them. Isobel sat on a weathered branch of the tree, watching as Andie pulled things out and lay them on the white sand in front of her. A hawk’s feather, half a turtle shell, an un-hatched bird’s egg, a tiny, dried-out seahorse. She laid them out before Isobel with careful fingers like an offering.

  “You spend a lot of time here,” Isobel said. Andie squatted in front of her treasures and nodded. There had been a starfish, but she’d told it a vast number of secrets and thrown it back into the ocean when her mother had told her that she was going to have another baby.

  Isobel reached down and picked up the bird’s egg, rolling it from palm to palm and admiring it.

  “Why did you bring the toad into the house?”