Twelve

‘Up so early?’

Without her starched white headscarf Sophey looks shrunken and frail, like a baby without its swaddling. A teething baby, thinks Lisbet, not wholly unkindly, as she watches Sophey hobble into the kitchen, cradling her cheek. Her jaw is swollen around a sore tooth, the skin flushed. Her hair sticks in thin strands to her forehead, fluffy as a chick’s behind her ears. Her pale scalp shows through, and Lisbet thinks of what Eren had told her of the theories in town, of hot blood and enlarged brains, wonders if her mother-in-law’s is pushing at her skull.

The skin around Lisbet’s own eyes is tight and bee’s-wing thin. She has not slept, though her whole body ached with tiredness. The baby kicked and kicked, shuddering her ribcage until she could do nothing but rise and tend the bees, hoping their hums would soothe the child, soothe her own racing mind.

‘What is wrong with you?’ Sophey’s black eyes bore into Lisbet’s belly. ‘Is it Henne’s boy?’

Lisbet shakes her head and pushes her hair back. Sophey narrows her eyes. ‘Your hands are filthy.’

Lisbet clutches them in her lap. Though she has scrubbed and scrubbed, her fingernails are still rimed in muck from the forest floor, from where she flung dirt at Nethe. Looking back those hours have a dreamlike unreality, but there, under her fingernails, is proof.

On their walk home, Eren trailing at a distance behind, and Nethe focused on her feet with the deliberate steps of the drunkard, Lisbet had asked Nethe if she understood, truly, what she was risking, if Plater discovered them.

Nethe came up short, and her gaze was so like Henne’s, so completely serious, Lisbet shuddered.

‘Dismemberments,’ she said. ‘Drowning.’ Then turned her head back to the path ahead, and kept walking.

Now, Lisbet looks across the table at her mother-in-law, who after all these years spent side by side is so distant from her. They still know so little of each other.

‘You look a wreck.’

Lisbet meets her gaze unblinkingly. Her eyes burn with exhaustion. Sophey sucks on her tooth, and spits blood out to the yard, picking up her scarf and beginning to tie it with swift, practised movements. With it on, she is herself again, unassailable.

‘There is fresh water?’ says Sophey. ‘And you have seen to the bees?’

Lisbet nods, her head heavy on her neck, her tongue stirring dryly in her mouth.

‘To bed then,’ says Sophey briskly. Lisbet blinks at her, amazed. ‘You are no good like this. Mute and dead-eyed besides. Back to bed, and wake my daughter.’

Lisbet rises meekly, her knees clicking.

‘It will be easier,’ says Sophey. ‘When Henne is back.’

Finally, Lisbet clears her throat. ‘Yes.’

Sophey has mistaken her silence for missing, her dull countenance for lovesickness. But after what she learnt last night at the dance tree, Lisbet would gladly never see Henne ever again. How could he watch his own sister beaten and banished, Ida be married under duress, and not protect them? Lisbet eyes Sophey, and wonders if and what she knows. Her evident dislike of Ida, her need to keep her away from her daughter – could Lisbet ask?