Tremble (2 page)

Dorothy looked away politely, trying to steer her mind away from the guilty observation that she was projecting onto her aunt the stereotype of hag. It was politically incorrect, and she hated being politically incorrect. Peter, her married ex-lover, had often accused her of being too self-conscious, too aware of making the acceptable move.

Ironically, that was how he’d manipulated her into bed in the first place, playing on her initial rejection of him because he was married. Well, that and her astonishment that he found her desirable. Physical attraction was not something Dorothy had ever associated with her unfashionably buxom body. She wore her shape like a crucifix, blind to her own inherent splendor. There was history in her bones and a stoic grace in the sway of her hips that spoke of Boadicea. A very Celtic sort of beauty.

Dorothy settled into her new job within a couple of weeks. Although far humbler than the Imperial War Museum, Shrewsbury Castle had its own stately grace. Situated on a hill overlooking the town of Shrewsbury and the border counties (known as the Marches to the Welsh), the fortress had been built to ward off the fierce Welsh tribes who had ventured into England. Originally medieval, it had been rebuilt in the fourteenth century and fortified again in the seventeenth century, and little now remained of its Norman origins.

Dorothy’s office was an octagonal room at the back of the ticket booth. Most of her fellow workers were volunteers; she was one of only two paid staff. Part of her job was to classify the immense collection of historical objects donated to the museum, which ranged from medals to souvenirs picked up on the battlefield. The classification process gave her the illusion of control. It felt therapeutic to sort through the vast pile of medals, each one a minutia of history, as if giving meaning to her own personal chaos.

In the village Dorothy noticed that the name Owen seemed to evoke both dread and a slight hint of envy, especially from the long-suffering wives. As soon as it was known that she was Winifred’s kin, people began to shun her. One woman in the supermarket openly referred to her great-aunt as that “crazy old lesbian.” She even mentioned a live-in girlfriend during the war, but when Dorothy confronted her the housewife became suddenly vague. “You don’t look like an Owen,” she muttered, turning to the frozen peas.

Dorothy found she didn’t mind the isolation; there was a certain solace in her exile. It appealed to the martyr in her and somehow legitimized the indulgence of her grief over the loss of her lover. She took to conjuring up less attractive memories during solitary walks through the nearby mountains and woods, as a means of finally exorcising him: the large white hairy belly that flopped over his trousers; his arrogance; the way he constantly criticized her and then expected her to counsel him about his marital problems. She also began to rely more and more on her great-aunt.

Winifred had insisted on setting Dorothy up in the little house adjacent to her cottage, furnishing it with the meager pieces Edith had left after her death. Winifred cherished having a relative to confide in again, and many a night Dorothy found herself trapped in front of her great-aunt’s gas fire, listening to yet another tale of the Gynia Mwyn and their extraordinary female lineage.

The ancient spinster was busy herself. She had decided to dedicate the next few months to putting her affairs in order, as she was convinced that she would die at the end of summer. As befitted a woman who loathed the English, Winifred was a staunch antiroyalist and was determined, to the point of death, not to be a recipient of the queen’s obligatory telegram on her hundredth birthday.

At six o’clock on a cold wet late-summer’s morning, Dorothy was woken by a loud banging on the front door and the news she had been dreading.

The church organist stood there, clutching the morning papers over his head.

“Get decent, girl, your great-aunt’s decided to die.”

Dorothy pulled her raincoat over her flannel nightdress and rushed through the heavy drizzle to Winifred’s cottage.

Winifred lay in the nineteenth-century brass bed, her skin pulled taut and transparent across her bones. She was arguing with the local priest. “No, Keelan, I will not make my last confession. I’ve got nothing to atone for and the Lord himself can testify to that.” Her head fell back against the pillows, the effort of speech exhausting her.

“You’ve not made an appearance in church for over twenty years.” The priest, a large florid-faced man with a well-known drinking problem, was insistent.

“I beg to differ,” Winifred snapped back. “I have
never
stepped into that heathen place of superstition!”

The priest barely controlled his temper. “There you go, blaspheming on your deathbed! That’s enough to send you to the wrong place right there, if you get my meaning.” He leaned back, quaking with anger. He was determined to be the first to convert an Owen, even if it killed her in the process.

Dorothy sat quietly at her great-aunt’s head. She noticed that Winifred was clutching her knitting bag against the yellowed lace bed coverlet.

“Pagan I am, pagan I die. It’s what you’ve all been accusing me of for decades anyway. Oh, the hypocrisy! It’s enough to hasten my end, and I’m not due to die until four o’clock.”

She turned her face blindly toward her great-niece. “Dorothy, is that you?”

“It is.” Dorothy tentatively reached across and took Winifred’s hand into her own. The flesh was so withered it felt like the claw of death itself.

“Tell this self-appointed social worker to piss off so I can get on with the delicate act of passing over,” the old woman hissed.

Dorothy ushered the priest into the hallway. “Father, it might be better…”

“I should have known she’d react that way. They’re a stubborn bunch of heathens, the Owens. I’ll be praying you don’t go the same way.”

Propelled by a rush of familial loyalty, Dorothy pushed the tenacious cleric out into the rain.

Back in the bedroom her great-aunt was humming the “Internationale”
under her breath. For a moment Dorothy thought she might have fallen into total dementia. But then Winifred’s eyes fluttered open.

“Come here, child, it’s almost time. The goddess will come for me on the hour.” She clutched at Dorothy’s skirt.

“Auntie, don’t say that.”

“Enough with the bullshit.” With a supreme effort Winifred held up her knitting bag. It jiggled slightly in the candlelight.

“This is what I’ll be leaving you.”

Dorothy’s eyes widened with apprehension as she braced herself for a hedgehog or, worse still, some endangered rodent, like a pygmy shrew, when Winifred reached dramatically into the bag and pulled out a withered root. Dorothy tried hard to conceal her bewilderment.

“It’s lovely,” she muttered in an unconvincing manner.

Ignoring her niece’s lack of enthusiasm, the old woman dangled the vegetation proudly. It hung like a limp turnip. Dorothy peered closer. It looked like a large twisted stem of ginger and was covered in strange reddish hairlike roots.

Winifred pressed it into Dorothy’s hand. “Never betray the mandrake,” she gasped. Then, as the grandfather clock chimed four, she died, her bony hand still fastened around her niece’s wrist.

They buried Winifred’s ashes at her favorite spot on the riverbank, according to the complicated instructions she had left in her will.

“Unconsecrated land,” the mourners whispered knowingly to each other as Dorothy got down on her hands and knees to place the strange pewter casket into the damp black earth.

The local men’s choir broke into a Welsh folk song—Winifred had specified no religious music—the tenor voices swelling and floating up with the evening mist. Above the funeral proceedings hovered a single black raven. Dorothy looked up at the bird, then down at the rushing water. A wave of loneliness swept over her. Now she was the only one left, the last of the clan.

A middle-aged woman dressed flamboyantly in a long silk dress approached her. A ravaged face that must once have boasted a handsome beauty peered out from under an enormous hat. She took Dorothy’s hand and drew it toward her bosom.

“I knew your great-aunt. She was one of the circle. One of the ancient ones. She’s up there now,” she whispered dramatically, pointing to the contoured disk of the rising moon already visible in the steely sky. “Up there, riding with Arianrhod on a great white mare toward Caer Arianrhod to join her sisters. One day you too shall inherit the mantle.”

The woman released Dorothy’s hand and, with a studied swish of her skirts, turned and walked across the muddy embankment toward a waiting BMW. Dorothy noticed several of the parishioners crossing themselves as the stranger cut across their path.

Later that night Dorothy sat on her narrow single bed and watched the shadows cast by the fire dancing across the wooden roof beams. The silence was profound. She reached across and picked up the mandrake root from the cherrywood table beside the bed. She slowly turned it in her hands. What does one do with a mandrake root? Cook it? Eat it? Plant it?

She held it up to her face. A strong musk radiated from it, strangely animal, even familiar. She tried to think where she knew the scent from, but the memory kept escaping her. She turned it upside down. The root had feathery offshoots that looked as if they belonged in soil.