And all because she had come downstairs this morning dressed for riding in one of her father’s old shirts.
2
Aunt Cord had been at the stove, wrapped in her dressing gown and with her hair still netted. She dished herself up a bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the table. Susan had known things weren’t good as soon as her aunt I timed toward her, bowl in hand; she could see the discontented twitch of Aunt Cord’s lips, and the disapproving glance she shot at the orange Susan was peeling. Her aunt was still rankled by the silver and gold she had expected to have in hand by now, coins which would be withheld yet awhile due to the witch’s prankish decree that Susan should remain a virgin until autumn.
But that wasn’t the main thing, and Susan knew it. Quite simply put, the two of them had had enough of each other. The money was only one of Aunt Cord’s disappointed expectations; she had counted on having the house at the edge of the Drop to herself this summer… except, perhaps, (or the occasional visit from Mr. Eldred Jonas, with whom Cordelia seemed quite taken. Instead, here they still were, one woman growing toward the end of her courses, thin, disapproving lips in a thin, disapproving face, tiny apple-breasts under her high-necked dresses with their choker collars (The Neck, she frequently told Susan, is the First Thing to Go), her hair losing its former chestnut shine and showing wire-threads of gray; the other young, intelligent, agile, and rounding toward the peak of her physical beauty. They grated against each other, each word seeming to produce a spark, and that was not surprising. The man who had loved them both enough to make them love each other was gone.
“Are ye going out on that horse?” Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at one corner other mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.
“Aye,” Susan said.
“Ye should eat more’n that, then. 'Twon’t keep ye til nine o’ the clock, girl.”
“It’ll keep me fine,” Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and disapproval in her aunt’s eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before trouble could begin.
“Why not let me get ye a dish of this?” Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse’s hoof stamping down in mud-or shit-and her stomach clenched. “It’ll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can’t be bothered with chores-”
“They’re done.” And you know they ’re done, she did not add. I did em while you were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.
Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck-Susan had no idea how the woman stayed so thin, really she didn’t-and watched it begin to melt. For a moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after all.
Then the shirt business had begun.
“Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you’re wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It’s the least ye can do to show yer-”
Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn’t interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture-it was almost velvety from so many washings. “This rag belonged to my father!”
“Aye, Pat’s.” Aunt Cord sniffed. “It’s too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man’s button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman’s bustline…”
The riding blouses were on hangers in the comer; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn’t even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars… and, of course, the low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn’t, if she could possibly help it.
“My 'woman’s bust-line,' as you call it, is of no interest to me and can’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I’m out riding,” Susan said.
“Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony’s drovers should see you-even Rennie, he’s out that way all the time, as ye well know-it wouldn’t hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw yer wearing one of the camisas that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have lo he such a stiffkins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”
“What does it matter to ye, one way or t'other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”
Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. “How dare thee use that word in my house, ye malhablada? How dare ye?”
That was when her tears began to flow-at hearing her call it her house. “It was my father’s house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in! He took ye in, Aunt!”
The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her aunt’s face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt’s shadow fell over her. Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek throbbing, her eyes burning with tears, her throat swelled and hot. At last she found her feet.
“Ye ungrateful girl,” her aunt said. Her voice was soft and so full of venom it was almost caressing. “After all I have done for thee, and all Hart Thorin has done for thee. Why, the very nag ye mean to ride this morning was Hart’s gift of respect to-”
“PYLON WAS OURS!” she shrieked, almost maddened with fury at this deliberate blurring of the truth. “ALL OF THEM WERE! THE HORSES, THE LAND-THEY WERE OURS!”
“Lower thy voice,” Aunt Cord said.
Susan took a deep breath and tried to find some control. She swept her hair back from her face, revealing the red print of Aunt Cord’s hand on her cheek. Cordelia flinched a little at the sight of it.
“My father never would have allowed this,” Susan said. “He never would have allowed me to go as Hart Thorin’s gilly. Whatever he might have felt about Hart as the Mayor… or as his patrono… he never would have allowed this. And ye know it. Thee knows it.”
Aunt Cord rolled her eyes, then twirled a finger around her ear as if Susan had gone mad. “Thee agreed to it yerself, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Aye, so ye did. And if yer girlish megrims now cause ye to want to cry off what’s been done-“
“Aye,” Susan agreed. “I agreed to the bargain, so I did. After ye’d dunned me about it day and night, after ye’d come to me in tears-”
“I never did!” Cordelia cried, stung.
“Have ye forgotten so quick. Aunt? Aye, I suppose. As by tonight ye’ll have forgotten slapping me at breakfast. Well, I haven’t forgotten. Thee cried, all right, cried and told me ye feared we might be turned off the land, since we had no more legal right to it, that we’d be on the road, thee wept and said-”
“Stop calling me that!” Aunt Cord shouted. Nothing on earth maddened her so much as having her own thees and thous turned back at her. “Thee has no more right to the old tongue than thee has to thy stupid sheep’s complaints! Go on! Get out!”
But Susan went on. Her rage was at the flood and would not be turned aside.
“Thee wept and said we’d be turned out, turned west, that we’d never see my da’s homestead or Hambry again… and then, when I was frightened enough, ye talked of the cunning little baby I’d have. The land that was ours to begin with given back again. The horses that were ours likewise given back. As a sign of the Mayor’s honesty, I have a horse I myself helped to foal. And what have I done to deserve these things that would have been mine in any case, but for the loss of a single paper? What have I done so that he should give ye money? What have I done save promise to fuck him while his wife of forty year sleeps down the hall?”