Image taken from page 78 of “Songs for Little People,” published in 1896. (The British Library)
The Sourdough Posts: Under the Mountain
Ah, and the last Sourdough post! “Under the Mountain” loops back to the events of “Sister, Sister” and some of the characters, but this time it focuses on Magdalene, Theodora’s daughter. When the inhabitants of the Golden Lily Inn and Brothel left Lodellan in the dead of night, to go and live on the country estate Theodora had purchased, Magdalene was still little. She had only brief memories of her father, Stellan, the prince of the city, and had been rescued by her mother from the troll-wife who’d been posing as Polly, Theodora’s lost sister.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the mother and daughter, and how their lives might be after that night, and after Theodora’s desperate race through the streets to save her stolen child. I thought that knowing that her sister, her true sister, had been stolen away also might trouble her, especially given how much bitterness and resentment had been sown in that relationship by the false Polly. I thought it would turn into guilt and eat away at Theodora. Perhaps she wouldn’t have gone off looking for her sister if things with Magdalene hadn’t become so fraught.
And I thought about Magdalene, a teenager and growing more angry and unpleasant by the day, though unable to really control herself as she wasn’t who she’d been brought up to believe she was. She was fighting against a nature she didn’t know she was heir to … yet she still loved Theodora fiercely, still had that attachment to her mother that sent her out into the world to follow her and bring her home. Of course, things seldom go as planned.
Under the Mountain [extract]
The sight of the inn picks at the stitches of my memory. The splintered shingle, emblazoned with a faded golden lily, swings in the breeze. I stare at it for a while, trying to catch at the recollection, mentally trying to scratch an itch I can’t quite locate. I push the aged door and it swings to easily. The place seems deserted, but in a corner, wedged in the angle of a padded bench beneath a hissing gaslight, is a man, pieces of parchment gathered in front of him. His hair was black and he was handsome, once. Now the hair is shot with iron-grey and he’s crumpled, body, face, and (I suspect) soul. His bearing speaks of loss.
‘Faideau?’ I ask.
He blinks, and I realise I am nothing more than a silhouette against the light. I close the door so he may see me clearly: tall and strong, long blonde locks, high cheekbones, ice-blue eyes. No sign of the unwellness, of the ache in my bones that does not come from hard riding. I find the shadowy space a relief.
‘Who wants to know?’ He is not drunk, but he is aggressive. His eyes are dark.
I did not need to come here. I had no requirement to speak to anyone but those who would have sold me fresh provisions and stabled my horse for the night. I know where I’m going, having studied Theodora’s books and the notes she left behind. I did not need to visit this place. I don’t really know why I came. I do not remember him, but this is the man Theodora mentioned with a sad amusement, a pang for what might have been. This was the one who did not take advantage of her favours after her fall from grace. When she changed from princess to whore and embraced her new calling as much to embarrass my father as to soothe her own pain, this was the one man she did not hold in utter contempt. Thus, she told me later, she did not sleep with him.
‘I’m Magdalene.’ I see him all uncomprehending. ‘Theodora’s daughter.’
‘Theodora.’ In his voice is such love and ache for my mother that I am embarrassed for him, to see his heart so naked. ‘How is she?’
How to say, to tell anyone how she was? How her night terrors had been getting worse. How thirteen years of them had made her gaunt and thin, drawn shadows under her eyes and washed their pale blue to the grey of a sickly sky. How long streaks of silver-white had threaded through her hair. How Theodora, whose beauty once made kings and clergy weak, had begun to fade.
‘Gone. She’s gone,’ I say and he misunderstands and I think the heart will flop out of his chest. ‘No, no! She is alive, but she is gone. She—left me.’
‘You? Left you?’ And I know he is thinking back to that night when Theodora ran through the streets of Lodellan and saved me from the thing posing as her sister. And he asks himself what I have asked myself: how could Theodora leave me?
‘She slipped away in the night, left me a letter. Went to search for Polly, her true sister. She said even if all she finds are the bones, it will help.’
He slumps even further down as if the mention of Polly adds weight to him. When he raises his eyes to meet mine I see secrets there, pushing their way to the surface. But I don’t want them.
‘Do you remember? Any of it? The time when childer went missing?’ he asks, peering at me. I take a seat opposite as he continues, ‘You don’t look like her, you know. Not at all.’
I shake my head. ‘I do not remember.’
But sometimes I dream of a pretty blonde woman. She grows and changes. Her voice remains honeyed even as she turns into something that will eat me; something that is all appetite. I fear my mother had similar dreams, for she would wake clutching at me, feeling to make sure my flesh was my own. That it did not shift and change into something other. He wipes a hand across his face and I see the map tattooed there. Curiosity shimmers.
‘What’s that?’
‘A reminder,’ he sighs and looks at the marks on the back of his hand as if they are foreign to him. ‘How are the others? Grammy, Kitty?’
‘Kitty and Livilla and their children left a few years ago.’ I do not tell him why. I do not tell him how they feared for their off-spring in the face of my tempers; how their last words to Theodora were bitter. ‘Fra died last spring. Grammy and Fenric are there, old but well enough. Rilka we see sometimes—she comes and goes according to her own counsel.’
He looks sad to know these things. ‘Have you gone to see your father?’
‘No, why would I?’
‘Why would you come here?’
I hesitate. ‘I don’t know. I had to stop somewhere.’ I cannot tell him about our fights, Theodora’s and mine; about the rage, about my guilt, about my last words to her, but I think he may guess. ‘I just stopped here for one night, for supplies. I remembered the inn, or at least I seemed to.’
‘You should stay then. Plenty of beds.’ He grins without humour. ‘Take your pick.’ 
*
The blue room has a view out over the Lilyhead fountain, but I don’t look down. Instead I stare straight ahead and concentrate on the sculptured lineaments of the palace. I have no memory of living there; I recall my father following us when we left that funny little man’s house on the night we fled Lodellan. I remember his blonde hair, and his lovely green eyes shining with tears in the lamplight. I remember how disgusted Theodora’s expression was when she gazed upon him. The sun is setting, all red-gold and raw, burning the sky as it plummets. Below I can hear the clank of pots in the kitchen like a call to arms.
*
Faideau has a disreputable apron tied around him, the lacy frills hang torn and frayed. I see no sign of the drunkard of whom Theodora spoke so sadly and fondly. His hands are steady on the knife and his movements, though slow, are assured. He sees me in the doorway and smiles. I wonder what Theodora would have said had she seen him like this.
‘Did you find everything you need?’
I nod. ‘Thank you.’ Wondering how much small talk there can be between we two.
‘Why did your mother leave you?’ he asks without preamble.
I lie. I lie because I don’t want to think about it. ‘I don’t know.’ He doesn’t believe me, begins to tell me his story, perhaps in the hope that one confidence will draw out another. ‘When I was a boy—’
‘I do not have time for this!’
‘You have plenty, missy, you’re not going anywhere in the night.’ He will reel out this tale at his own pace and I have no choice but to listen.
I’m old enough to know that secrets don’t spill quickly, they bleed, they seep.
‘When I was a boy, I was adopted by a very bad man. I was brought up by brigands but left to my own devices an awful lot. Often I’d sneak away to another part of the woods and watch a family who made their home there. Mother, father and a daughter, they were happy and loving. I’d watch all three, unseen. I was very careful never to let my foster-father or any of his men know. That family was my secret—I kept it to keep them safe.
‘I made friends with the little girl. I was treated so very well in their home. The first tenderness I ever experienced came from them. I wanted nothing in life but to be loved, to belong to that family. I would lie on my bed of bracken at night and dream of four walls and a hearth, of the sounds of people who loved me sleeping nearby.’
‘Faideau.’ I itch to shake him, to stop him, but he ignores me. I have enough shadows of my own; I do not wish to carry those of another.
‘Your mother, even then, was as beautiful as a new day. Then the baby arrived and I was displaced. The mother was preoccupied and Theodora wanted only to play with the new human doll. I interested her not at all. Perhaps if I’d been older I would have known that things would return to normal if only I’d the patience to wait. That their love hadn’t gone, merely been distracted.’ He frowns as if he could tell his younger self these things and thus avoid all that had come about.
‘In the woods, Magdalene, there are wolves, trolls, men who turn into beasts at the first sign of the moon, women who do worse. All in all, witches are the least of your worries. Things in the forest speak, things that shouldn’t, and they know what’s in your heart. A troll-wife found me hiding, watching Theodora and her mother and new sister at the stream.’
My heart clenches. His confession will hurt us both. ‘It—she—told me I could win their love if only I did her a favour. It was a joke she said, no one would get hurt—that sometimes we needed to use tricks to get what we really, really wanted.’
And he told me how he stole away the true Polly lying fresh in her basket, and took her to the doors of the kingdom under the mountain. How the troll-wife gave him another child in return, a misshapen lump of flesh, a wailing thing that she touched and moulded until it took on the appearance of the infant he had brought. How he returned it to where Theodora’s mother might find it and his head was filled with thoughts of how much this family would love him. But the guilt ate at him, night and day, so any joy he might have had was bitter. He was uncomfortable and afraid that somehow he might be discovered. That the mewling changeling might somehow betray him. His fear transmitted itself to the family and so they became ill at ease in his presence. After a while he stopped going to visit.
I could have told him, even I, that such an act will return a greater pain to the perpetrator than the victim, how selfishness is never rewarded. How, when I had screamed at my mother and wished her gone, the very next day she was. And how on the morning I found her missing I could not imagine a worse ache than that of the loss of her.
‘How could she not know you, Faideau? To meet you again?’
He shrugs. ‘When she came to Lodellan as the prince’s bride, all royal and shiny, there were so many years between us and I wore another name, once, when I was small. And I was so much less than I had been. The boy had faded from her memory; the man was a drunk. And so this,’ he gestures as if a shared history is spread before us rather than the components of a meal, ‘is all my fault.’
‘But you were only a child,’ I say. He smiles coldly.
‘Someone else said that to me once, or something very like.’ He shakes his head.
How do I judge this man? How dare I judge him? Had he been stronger, had he been better, Theodora may not have married my father and we would not have been as we were. My aunt would never have been stolen away; we would not have fled the city; we would not have had this vein of agony running through our lives. I would have had a different father; or I would not have existed at all. I do not find that last thought painful.
‘So, I ask again, Magdalene, why did your mother leave you?’ But I do not say anything, do not give him even a scrap and he hands me a plate. ‘I think you should leave very early. I don’t want to see you again.’
I almost open my mouth then, but he continues, reluctantly, as if he now gives me information against his will. ‘Your mother is known, Magdalene, in the forest. She travelled its ways long before she came to Lodellan. She knows its dangers. Be careful. Don’t stray from the path.’
***