Free Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter Page A

to be choked down, like bad food, rather than breathed easily. Even the flames in the hearth formed a different kind of fire, when Mrs Green lit it, a fire which menaced as it warmed and did not warm sufficiently while it puffed out such piercingly acrid smoke her eyes were always watering. Sounds drifted into the room, raucous cries and the neighing of horses. Sometimes she heard ferocious inhuman howlings, she thought these were the cries of wolves outside in the forest. And sometimes she thought she heard music which seemed to come from within the house itself, though often she confused it with the sound of the wind sighing in the branches outside. If Jewel did not come to visit her, then neither did his tutor; it was as though she were in quarantine.
    ‘Well, Donally reckons it’s all right for you to come downstairs in the morning,’ said Mrs Green one night, taking bone pins from her coil of hair which then fell down in thin, grey wisps round her creased neck. ‘But, here – I’ll say this, never eat anything that I haven’t cooked for you myself, nor given you with my own hands. And you keep beside me, mind, don’t go running off.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘It’s what you might call a health precaution,’ said Mrs Green. She shrouded herself in a voluminous flannel nightdress and blew out the flame of the small, foul lamp. This lamp was nothing but a lint wick floating in a saucer of animal fat. Then the old woman lay down besideMarianne; Marianne could just make out the shimmer of her fleshy back, a stout wall.
    She watched Mrs Green prepare her some breakfast in the empty kitchen where the huntsmen had eaten hours before. Mrs Green used a metal pot over an open fire; she mixed flour from a sack stolen from those who had effortfully tilled the soil, kept good seed and sown it, reaped, harvested, milled, bagged and then been deprived, though they were the rightful bakers and eaters of the flour and its subsequent bread if there was such a thing as natural justice. Nevertheless, Mrs Green scooped up a handful of flour by right of conquest, since the need of the Barbarians was greater. To make her bread, she mixed the flour with salt, water and animal fat in a bowl of very rough pottery.
    ‘Bread’s a bit of a luxury,’ she said, but her unleavened bread was only a sour kind of biscuit. She also made a thin porridge with some other grain; this porridge tasted principally of smoke. There was cold meat. There was some milk for Marianne, though it was poor milk and Mrs Green mixed it with water to make it go further. Marianne sat at an immense, foundering table and ate the strange food that was now her regular diet.
    The kitchen was more a cave. There was still glass in most of the windows but this glass was now so caked with the grime of years that only the great fire crackling on the hearth and the door, open to the morning, gave any light. Joints of meat either undergoing the process of smoking or smoked already hung everywhere from hooks and huge, lacquered bluebottles buzzed about. A few pieces of worm-eaten furniture still remained and the ancient dresser was still mysteriously loaded with cracked and ancient pottery which the tribe was too superstitious to utilize. There was a large sink full of a brilliant moss which also coated the flagstones underfoot with emeraldine fur. There was a smell of earth, of rotting food and of all-pervading excrement. Marianne drew herself coldly inside her skin and ate because to do so was necessary though by no means pleasant.
    The child Jen sat on the table and squinted inquisitively at her. It was another cold day and Jen wore a tunic of long-haired fur that made her look like a little Ancient Briton. Marianne contemplated the archaic child and wondered if her clothing were proof of the speed with whichthe Barbarians were sinking backwards or evidence of their adaption to new conditions. Then Jen slapped her hand. She spilled a spoonful of porridge.
    ‘I don’t like it when