I feel dizzy, like my knees are going to bend. Before they do, I sit down, close my eyes for a beat. I think of the stripped-clean spaces of our storehouse, my quarters with hammock stowed. My memory bag and candles the only objects on otherwise bare shelves. And then there is a shift in light. I jump up. Standing in front of the window to the back garden is an old woman.
I had thought that Netty was old, but I had never seen age. Not like this. The woman’s face is all wrinkles, like all the years and all the living of several people have been pressed into one body, one face. Her hair is as white and straight as the horsehair that viol makers buy from the tanners. She wears a cloak. I do not have time to be afraid.
I open my mouth, but before any words can come, the air around me is split by a scream. A shriek that has at its core the caw-caw of some strange animal — harsh and wild and black and frenzied. The sound is coming from her open mouth and it is rushing toward me so that I hold my hands up over my ears and face, and as her cry comes shrill and swift, she comes with it down the hall faster than is possible, with her cloak sweeping and flapping behind her like wings.
Before I can move, she is on me. Her two hands bent like claws round my throat. Nails in my skin and I cannot breathe. I am choking, drowning. In my nose is the smell of unwashed hair and rosin, as if her hair has been used to bow a viol’s strings after all.
Then suddenly I am released.
In the clawed hands, she has the leather pouch. She is hunched over it and I see a flash and feel the Lady’s small vital pulse of silence. She has removed the guildmedal. The next thing I see is the old woman’s head go back and her eyes twitch and roll. Her head goes back and something goes out of her. Or perhaps something goes into her. I cannot tell which.
I back away towards the far window. The glass cold on my back, some distance between us. The woman stands, still as still, the pouch in her clawed hands, the cloak settled over her.
After what feels like a long while, she emerges, blinking. Down her face, bright in the moonlight, are the wet tracks where tears have run, their simple lines gone crazed across the tricky wrinkles of her skin. Her head cocks to one side, and her eyes look out at me beady and wet and twinkled. Her face cracks and is remade into a smile. She opens her mouth and I tense for another screech, but what comes out, cracked and broken, is a tune.
‘Sing a song of sixpence’ — her voice is like gravel — ‘a pocket full of rye.’
I stand there baffled, with my heart banging and my arms held up against my chest as if I’m bracing against something.
‘Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.’
Her voice is full of mirth, as if she has told a wonderful joke. I look around. Junk. A house full of junk and a crazy old woman. We were fools not to listen to Netty. To hope that we would find some answer or help here, some mystery that would equip two pactrunners to bring an end to the Order.
‘When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,’ the old woman croons, and it seems as if she intends the song to reassure me. Her cracked voice falls from song into chant. ‘When the pie was opened,’ she says louder now, insistent, motioning with her head toward me. I look around to see if I can leave without pushing past her, as I don’t want to get close to those fingernails again. My throat stings where she grasped me. To my left is a kitchen. Like the hallway, it is crammed with junk, the only clear space the narrow bench and sink. An old gas oven sits next to the bench, its innards removed, a fire kindled inside it, a kettle atop and a cast-iron tureen directly on the coals. There is no other way out.
‘The pie, lover, the pie! All the darling birdies. Must let them out. Time to let them sing. You hungry, my love? Whistle up a cuppa, will you? Brown Betty’s behind you.’
I twist round fast. There is nothing behind me but a tall ladder of shelves stacked with eggcups, toast racks, candleholders, plates. She comes up behind me, a dark shape in her cloak, and reaches down a large brown teapot covered in a wool cosy. Then she kneels in front of the stove, gathers her hands in folds of the cloak.
‘Tea, tea, tea,’ she says under her breath. ‘Tea for two and tea for memory. Leaves are in the lolly box, lovely.’
On the shelf, there’s a tall red mettle tin with a picture on it. For a moment I am sure I have seen it before. The woman removes the green iron tureen from inside the cookstove. Then she takes the kettle hanging over the stove’s mouth. She puts the teapot and the tureen on a small table and gestures to the mettle tin again. In a dream, I reach and take it from the shelf. Bright red, beaten mettle. A strange old man in a black suit hacks into his cloth-covered fist. Where have I seen it? From a cupboard below she removes two plates, two forks and two cups, and puts them on the table.
Then she turns and grabs me. She holds my arms down and brings her face right up into mine.
‘Let’s have a good look at you, my dearling.’ Her eyes close to mine, her lips creased in a grin. ‘My dearling, my darling, my lily-livered starling.’
She smiles and then she whistles a tune into my face. The tune is our comeallye. I start back.
‘Scared, are you? Surprised, are you? Why should you be? Bells tolled to tell me you were coming. No knowing of mine. Memory’s my toll, not telling weather.’ She shakes her head. ‘Cloudy, though, very cloudy I’d say your outlook was. Don’t need much to telltale that.’
I pull my arms out of her grip.
‘Do you know a woman named Netty? She told me to find you.’ Her word mess is getting into my ears. I shake my head.
‘Netty. Netty?’ She pauses as if to ponder. ‘No… Don’t know no Netty. Not a Netty in the pretty lot of them. Not a one in the net, you know. And you should knot a net to keep it. Keep it from slipping out, dear.’ She looks at me as if she has said something final, conclusive.
Then she continues, ‘No Netty. But he hasn’t a worry, not he. A bird in the net’s worth two in the bush. Or in the moon,’ she says brightly, flinging a hand toward the window as if to release something clasped inside.
Then she turns back. ‘Tea, that’s the thing. That’s the stuff to patch it.’ And she breaks into song again.
‘The fishers of Galilee,
they never had enough tea.
With a net and a line
and a stitch in good time,
there’d be more than enough for all three.’
She looks at me as if expecting a response.
‘Yes?’ she asks.
‘I…’
‘Your fellow, your pretty one, waiting under the tree out there. Tea for him?’
‘No,’ I say.
No, I think. Let Lucien rest for a bit. Let him think we are moving ahead.
‘Right, then.’ She pours tea and opens the tureen and dishes what is in it onto the plates. ‘Drink up. Eat up,’ she says. ‘Remembering is hungry work, you know.’
I hesitate, smell the pie, thinking of her rhyme about blackbirds. But under the crust is a gravy with mushrooms and potato. The sauce steams and the smell is savoury. I feel my mouth fill with water. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
She watches me for a while; then she eats too. We drink tea without milk from the big teapot. After we have eaten, she gets up. She holds a hand out to me.
‘Now we’ve broken bread, you can’t go back, my dear. Only way out is through the belly of the whale.’ Her palm held out, wrinkled. Her nails long and clawed. I take her hand and let her lead me. I follow her through the kitchen to the cluttered hall.