Free Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter

recollecting the first things she had sewn with it.
    ‘You don’t understand a mother’s heart,’ she said. Her speech was studded with commonplaces.
    ‘No, but would you?’
    ‘I’m too old to change back, now,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’ve got used to the travelling and all. I’d have taken, perhaps, my granddaughter, my little Jen, and gone down to the coast. Jen’s mother doesn’t take good care of her, she’s soft in the head, Jen’s mother, and Jen’s father, my son, that was, he’s dead. I’d have gone to the coast, I’ve got a daughter that married into the fishermen down there. Perhaps that’s where I’d go, if Jewel got killed, ever.’
    ‘And do you trust none of the other brothers? Aren’t they your foster-sons, too?’
    ‘Wild boys,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Wild boys, all.’
    Marianne sat covered with furs against the cold while Mrs Green talked in a gentle, murmurous stream, talk of an old woman starved for company, and every other word she said betrayed her passion for her eldest foster-son. Marianne unblocked the dam; she said:
    ‘How can a man call himself Jewel without embarrassment?’
    ‘Jewel Lee Bradley, his mother was a Lee. The Lees are Old Believers, they’re clannish but they’ve got class. They were travellers before the war, you see. Jewel’s his mother’s boy, though he doesn’t recall her; she was ever such a good-looking woman and that pleased to see a boy, since she’d had two girls before. Both of which died. But she was so pleased to see a boy she called him Jewel, her Jewel. And then she died herself, poor thing; she had him and never stopped bleeding. All her blood ran out of her womb and I suckled her boy, since one of my own just died. They’re all dark, the Bradleys, like their father, old Bradley, he was black as pitch but then, he rarely washed, if ever. All the same, black as pitch under the dirt. And all the Lees are light on their feet and graceful, he gets that from his mother. And good with horses, the Lees are famous for it. Tamers of horses.’
    Marianne was interested to find evidence of a Barbarian snobbery. If Jewel was an orphan of the hurricane, he was also one of its aristocrats, which might account for the extreme arrogance of his bearing. He did not come to get his foster-mother to comb his hair for him again; nobody visited her now she was well for now she was a prisoner. A hard scab covered the wound on her leg and she could walk as well as ever but Mrs Green still would not let her out of her room and Marianne no longer had any clear idea of how long she had been there.
    If time was frozen among the Professors, here she lost the very idea of time, for the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours nor even morning, afternoon and evening but left it raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion. Marianne was fastened into the room by means of the trunks of some trees which were placed across the door outside and she was left quite alone, for, now she was no longer sick, Mrs Greenoccupied herself with her other duties about the house and only came to Marianne to bring her sad, heavy food or to lie down beside her on the mattress and sleep. The weather continued bad; she watched mists of rain shift and coalesce.
    As it grew dark, apparitions of horsemen appeared between the melting trees. Leaving the woods, they crossed the river, their horses loaded with carcasses of deer, wild pig and sheep; and men in their dripping furs were so plastered with mud they seemed not men at all but rather emanations of the shaggy forest. Mud and weariness rendered every one anonymous and the wide, wet brims of their felt hats hid their faces; she could never distinguish Jewel among them. Miserable dogs lolloped beside them and they rode in silence.
    She felt herself removed to a different planet. Here, the very air had a different substance, dank, chill and subtly flavoured with ordure,