A Masquerade of Spiders

Chapter 26: The Wrong Side of Revenge

Chapter 26: The Wrong Side of Revenge

One winter day, when I was nearly ten, my mother had made more stew than we could eat, so I was sent to old Hunna who did not have much silver or livelihood, to give her a warm meal. Hunna smelled sour, like our old mutt had before he died, and her fingernails were long and yellow, but she had illustrated storybooks which we read together. By the time I left her cottage, it was already dark.

I passed by the tavern, yellow light spilling onto the snow. And there, outside, in the glow of the lanterns, was a man and a woman. The woman wasn't young, but her belly was heavy and round with a baby. And the man wobbled in front of her. He was her husband, and she was his wife. He was yelling at her, calling her names that mamma wouldn't approve of. I covered my ears, so I could tell her that I didn't listen.

But then, just as I was passing them, the man hit the woman. He swung his whole body into his arm, and then the slap echoed like a clamp of thunder through the street and she crashed into the snow.

I froze on the spot, and he looked right into my eyes and snarled, "What do you think you're looking at, you little brat?" His speech slurred, and his eyes were unfocused.

"If you hit the mamma with the baby inside, you'll hurt the little baby," I said, curling my hands into fists. "You mustn't hurt the little baby. Babies are precious, see? They don't all survive."

"Baby..." he drawled stupidly. "The whore's been out with other men. It's no baby of mine!"

He stepped towards me, feet crunching in the snow.

I sensed the danger, but my mind was on a single track, and I couldn't stop explaining to this stranger why babies had to be kept safe. "I had three little brothers, see? But now I have none. And mamma cried and cried each time a baby died. You mustn't hurt a baby. You mustn't—"

He swung his arm at me, and I slunk out of the way, just like when Marin and I played that game with the rope that could come at your feet and at your head and you lost when it touched you. I narrowly missed a patch of ice on the road, managing only just to hop over it.

But the man didn't see the ice, and he slipped on it, crashing face first into the trunk of a grand oak tree. Once he was down, he couldn't pick himself up. It was as if his limbs wouldn't work. When he turned himself round, I could see dark blood spilling from his nose and mouth. "Look at what you done!" he bellowed. "You little bitch. Me tooth is broken. Little ugly bitch."

"Serves you right for tryin'ta hit children," said the woman, his wife, who had gotten to her feet and stood by me, hands on her hips. She patted me on the head, ignoring her husband who flailed on the ground like a dying fish. "Thank you, little miss. But you best run along now to your mamma. Be a good girl, won't you?"

"But...What's the matter with him? Is he ill?"

"When men take their wine more seriously than their life," she told me, "they become like this. You'll see. He'll be in his right mind again tomorrow, and apologise, then have his wine again because it hurts him to stop. But I won't come to collect him then. Let him sleep in the snow and freeze, for all I care."

I ran home, and told my mother what had happened.

"Does wine make men hit people?" I asked.

"It often does," she replied. "Wine brings forth our darkest impulses."

I burst into tears, and when mamma asked me why I was crying, I didn't have the answer.

But the answer came to me over time. The man drunk on wine haunted my dreams. Papà told me that wine created merriment, but what I had seen had looked like an illness. The wine that I was to inherit, the beautiful crimson, it was a phantom that ran inside men.