Keturah and Lord Death

She looked steadily at me, as if trying to determine whether I was being impertinent. My question, however, was sincere, for though I knew what marriage was and how some loves looked and how babies came, still I did not know how love was supposed to feel.

She said, “Do you not love the babies you tend while their mothers are afield?”

“Yes,” I said, “but …”

“It is all of a one, my dear, all of a one. There’s that baby who is loved, and then one day he loves so as to make another baby. Wear our souls out in love, we do, or looking for it.”

She leaned closer to me. The color of Grandmother’s eyes was hard to tell, the sun had bleached them so, but they were quick and piercing.

“Now I will tell you a true thing, child, and if you are wise you will remember it. The soul, it longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you would be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul. Look for a soul-and-heart love.”

A soul-and-heart love, I thought. Yes, that was what I would have, and I was minded of my urgency to see Soor Lily for a charm.

I asked, “What chores today, Grandmother?”

“Lass, everyone who came to mourn with me did chores enough to last a week. The women cleaned and washed, Ben Marshall cared for the garden, and Tailor did all my mending and tanned a fleece. Tobias did the yard, and Gretta and Beatrice did all the carding and spinning. Take the day for your own, child,” Grandmother said, “but go not one step into the forest. I won’t lose you again.”

That command I wished with all my heart I could obey.

* * *

I had two errands—to speak to John Temsland or his father, and to visit Soor Lily. While the latter was the easier to accomplish, it was the more dreaded.

Soor Lily lived near the road to Marshall, a short way into the green gloom of the forest, with her seven great sons, each the size of two men, who loved her and obeyed her slavishly and would not leave her for a wife. Though the air was still as I entered the wood, leaves of the trees whispered and seemed to bend, as if they were a little more alive than other trees for living near Soor Lily.

When I came to her house, I saw that the door was of oak and enormous, so that her boys, I supposed, might enter in without ducking, as they must do to enter any other house of the village. Not that they were often invited.

As I stood nervously before the door, I saw two of her big boys peering from behind the outhouse, and two more in her huge and mysterious garden. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should speak to John Temsland first. But even as I turned to go, Soor Lily opened the door.

“Come in, Keturah,” she said, half bowing. Her manner was unsurprised, as if she had been expecting me.

“You know my name?” I asked. We had never spoken to each other before.

“Everyone is speaking of you today, and not in quiet voices. But before, I knew you for your beauty.” She spoke in a soft, watery voice. “’Twas no fairies you saw in the wood, Keturah,” she said, and I felt glad that she did not believe it.

Soor Lily had been well named. Her walk was measured so that she seemed to float like an autumn lily in a pond. Her clothes she wore in layers like petals, and no one could tell if she was fat or thin. Her skin was pale and waxy, her expression unreadable.

The furniture in her home was of large proportions. Great chairs made of rough-hewn logs and a table almost as big and heavy as Lord Temsland’s were set before a gigantic fireplace. Soor Lily’s pots, the size of cauldrons, hung from the ceiling, along with nets of bulbs and bunches of drying herbs. A great wooden closet stood against the wall opposite the fireplace, its carved doors discreetly closed. It was all very tidy and clean, and there was no evidence that Soor Lily was a witch.

Though she was.

She sat me in one of the great, solid chairs. In it, my feet did not quite touch the ground, though I was as tall as any woman. I listened for sounds of her big sons, but all was quiet.

She curtseyed a little and then laid out two cups. She wore her hair unbound. “Have some tea. You must be tired from your long walk. So tired. Here is tea. Here, here, my beauty … So nice to know there is someone in the parish more vilified than I.”

Her voice was a chant, soothing and gentle and throaty.

“I don’t believe in love potions,” I said stoutly, refusing to touch the tea.

“No, no, you don’t,” she said quietly, reassuringly. She put warm scones before me, each the size of a pie plate. She hovered around me, at once diffident and attentive, like a bird brooding over her chick, lightly touching my shoulder, my back, my arm. Finally she sat at the table beside me and looked at me as if she were hungry and my eyeballs were just what she had been craving.

“I don’t believe in sorcery, and I don’t believe in love sorcery most of all,” I said, though the defiance in my voice had lost its edge.