Page 93 of Bitterthorn

‘I promised,’ I said, too full of love and grief, ‘I promised I would not let you spin alone again.’

‘And I won’t.’ She pushed me towards the carriage. ‘Because you will come back to me.’

‘I will.’

It became a yearly pilgrimage to Blumwald to my mother’s grave.

I wondered what she would have thought of the Witch. I wanted to think she would have liked her, but the honest truth was that I didn’t know. She had died when I was too young, my memories of her were those of a child. I would never know her as a woman, just as she would never know me.

b

A bright June morning a year after the curse had been broken, I swept into the study in my bare feet and light summer skirts, and pulled the Witch from behind her desk. She still mostly wore black, but now and then she would raid my wardrobe and I would discover her wrapped in a peacock shawl or flashing a red petticoat. Today, she wore the grey stockings I had knitted for her.

‘Come with me.’

‘I’m in the middle of my correspondence,’ she protested. ‘The Elector of Bavaria is still enquiring about damaged watermills when the rivers ran backwards –’

‘I want to show you my courgette flowers,’ I said. ‘I’m going to stuff them with cream cheese and fry them and then you will love me more than yesterday.’

I used to think time was a river, flowing ever onwards but now I knew better. Time is a thread in cloth, woven backwards and forwards through warp and weft. The pattern is something we can only see once the fabric is finished.

Summer lay heavily over the castle with the promise of another year. The beginning of something new.

The Witch cast a last longing look at her desk heaped with letters and papers and ledgers. ‘Oh, very well.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

THE END