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Raisa darted to Bosom’s side, restrained herself from taking the objects from her. Jans’s mother leaned over Da’s head to peer at them. Liga’s scalp crept, and then the rest of her skin. The baby was in her like a third bag of mudwifery, invisible to these women.
    Bosom laid the things wet on the table like two dead mice, and timidly tweaked their folds apart.
    ‘That,’ said Jans’s mother heavily, ‘is the way Mud Annie wraps her devilments. I ought to know. I went to her often enough for help getting babbies.’
    ‘Erw,’ said Bosom at the wet black crumbs in one of the bundles. She sniffed them and made a face. ‘Some furrin spice.’
    ‘Oh, she puts all everything in it,’ said Jans’s mother. ‘Some that’s supposed to work and some that’s just for dazzlement. I rekkernise that smell.’
    ‘It was not of good times for you,’ said Raisa, her head on one side in a sympathy that was just a touch pleased with itself.
    ‘It was not.’
    ‘Did he have some ailment, Liga?’ said Bosom.
    Liga started. She had been scrubbing busily at Da’s toes, which were all wood and black crevices and kicked yellow toenails. ‘I—No. Not that I know about.’
    ‘Might not have been such a thing as he would tell his daughter,’ said Raisa, and Bosom nodded to show she knew the kind of thing that might be.
    Well, Liga also knew it, didn’t she? Yes, there was some ailment, all right.
I cannot help myself
, he had groaned often enough in her ear.
A man must do it or he will go mad
. And then he would perform that madness on her.
    It was then—and only Liga noticed it, she thought, because she was the youngest one and the unmarried one—that Jans’s mother lifted the cloth off her father’s marriage parts and washed them, with exactly the correct degree of detachment and efficiency. Look at it, Liga thought—not exactly looking, herself—so small and nothing, crinkled up there, and the bags below. How could I have ever felt him harmful, with just that shrunken flop to hurt me with? Now that his mind is taken out of it, now that he’s not directing it, it is all such scrags, such as you might trim from a plucked bird, nothing fearsome at all.
    As for the rest of him, now that he had no will to move himself, no mind or voice, he was just so much meat, wasn’t he, that they prepared for cooking in the ground, cooking away to nothing. He was just a slab of flesh lit coolly from the unshuttered window, with unpleasant glistens at the head end, of wet hair and wound and teeth.
    ‘What will you do, girl? Who will you go to?’ said Raisa.
    ‘Yes, I have been wondering that,’ said Bosom. ‘It looks dire on your Longfield side, with your uncles gone to gypsies and that aunt of yours—where did she follow the man to? Middle Millet, was it?’
    ‘And Prentices will not have you, I don’t think,’ said Jans’s mother, ‘seeing as they would not take you when your mam went. You might try them, though, now that he is dead, for it was your da they took exception to, mostly.’
    ‘She does have Longfield eyes, though, and the cast to her face,’ said Raisa. ‘They will not like that.’
    ‘If they know he is not alive to bother them for money, maybe . . .’ said Jans’s mother.
    They were all looking at Liga.
    ‘You might try Rordal Prentice. Or his goodwife; she may have a heart for her granddaughter.’ But Bosom sounded doubtful.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Liga. ‘I will have to think.’ And she made a vague movement on Da’s shin with her cloth. The idea of her doinganything, or going anywhere, was entirely new to her. Everything up to now had been constructed on her father’s purposes—her whole life and, she assumed, the world around it. She had had thoughts that were her own, now and then—such as when that carriage had passed, up on the road—but she would never have been so daring as to call them wishes, and the notion of herself pursuing them, pursuing anything in her own name, was