Hilda’s Daughter

author’s note:

i started writing this short story in november, and it’s taken me until now to get it finished and (somewhat) edited. as i am with most of my short stories, i really have no idea how to feel about it. it feels dated - it’s pretentious and stylized in a way that i wouldn’t start a story now. i’m really just insecure about writing in the first person in general; it always feels artificial and weirdly angsty. this is also one of those stories where it’s so much more fun to be the author than to not be the author, because it doesn’t really make sense and it feels superior to know something that the readers don’t. so it’s “art.” i’m very reluctant to publish this at all, actually, but it’s so much easier to not share things than to actually succumb to the public’s opinion. but here i am. i would appreciate all of the feedback you could muster. thanks.

I was sixteen one afternoon, and being taught to sew by the caretaker; and it was a wondrous day, the first true sunshine since last autumn or before.  The lawn was golden with glare, and I knew that there would be chutes there in months’ time, and blossoms blooming after that.  My mother came home from work on this afternoon and said, with Ina and me just feet away with needles in hand, “I’m never going back there.”  It was in a most idle voice, and I was startled; but before any salutations were made, Mother marched straight to her bedroom.

“Mistress doesn’t like the spring,” was all that Ina said, attention back on her fabric.  I leaned toward her and absorbed myself with the thread again.  Who didn’t love the springtime?  But she was my mother and there was always something indescribable to me about her preferences and her doings.  And then Ina taught me to do double-stitches and patterns and I quite forgot about it all.

And I did not see Mother for the next few days; although, as Ina had rightly observed, the weather warmed considerably.  I spent little time wondering where she was until confronted by the gardener Jeorge, whose story was brief and financial.

“She won’t pay me none, Miss Meriel.  All idle ’n bed––you’d think her the queen.  And I need money.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I got a family!” said Jeorge, outraged.

“No––why doesn’t she pay you?  Mother doesn’t leave things till late.”

“I dunno.  She was in bed when I talked to her, but she didn’t seem too sick.  Hard to know ’n all, o’course.  Maybe the pollen’s made her ill.”

“She doesn’t really take ill,” said I, who could never remember Mother sick as long as I’d known her.

But the days dragged into weeks, and I didn’t see Mother, not even to fleetingly cross through the door or to order the servants around.  It was unusual, all of it.  Jeorge was furious.  Ina was worried.  She told me to worry too, but I didn’t.

“Her work must not be going well,” I said refusingly, when the weather was so warm that the grass was drenched in dew.

“She hasn’t paid me,” said Ina.  “Why wouldn’t your mother pay me?  I’ll lose my job if this continues.”

I couldn’t respond to that.  We were always well off––refusing to pay the servants simply wasn’t Mother.  And after a while I did grow exceedingly curious about where she was, despite my insistence that nothing could be made of her absence.  I did not want to believe Jeorge about Mother’s stay in her bedroom, but her bedroom did feel the natural first place to look.

I entered her room in the morning, and at first I thought the space vacated, for it was damp and dark.  The lights had been extinguished, but a single window stood open, and by its bright light I could see a figure lying on the bed, wrapped in a quilt like a mummy.  The place was dead silent.  Mother did not stir.  I wondered if she was dead.

“Mother, is that you?” I asked, fighting to keep an incredulous note out of my voice.  Mother did not need my bad manners now––she was clearly ill.

The quilt moved, and it cracked open minisculely.  In a wild fantasy, I imagined myself gazing upon a twisted form, ghost-like in pallor and with sweat streaming down a wan, skeletal face.  In real life, however, Mother looked just like herself.  Her features were expressive and colorful.  As soon as the light fell on her face, her eyes shut tightly.  From her covers, her hand grew and groped in the air, as though feeling for my face.

“Meriel,” she muttered.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said, reassured.  “Why haven’t you paid Ina and Jeorge?”

“Meriel,” she said again, ignoring my question.  Her voice had regained its usual harsh, businesslike tone, but she still didn’t open her eyes.  The light from the window looked painful to her.

“Yes, it’s Meriel.”  I stooped over her bed, and, with an admiral amount of nerve, I poked her hard on the forehead with an outstretched finger.  The skin was warm, but not burning.  “It’s me.  I’m sorry that you feel ill, but can’t you take care of Ina and Jeorge?  They need paying.”

Mother opened her eyes blearily.  She looked rather bored.  “I’m not ill,” she said restfully.

I looked at her, this time not bothering to conceal my incredulity.  “Get out of bed, then.  There are things to be done.”  I felt vaguely angry.  Perhaps that was why I was acting so out of turn.

The lips of her mouth upturned in a slight grin.  She raised her head a moment, then flopped back onto the pillow.  “Meriel,” she said, instructively, “leave me be.”

And an order was an order, so I left her be.

A stony silence was now present in the house, for it had been the whereabouts of three weeks since I had last seen Mother awake and upright.  The servants growled in fierce, angry whispers, but Ina said no more related to payment.  The weather remained mild and sunny.

I wondered about Mother, about the coolness of her forehead and the expressiveness of her face.  She was not sick.  Was she hiding?  Had we, perhaps, run out of money after all?  Had something dreadful happened?

Jeorge left his work in a grumbling fashion, muttering about family and how Mother was taking advantage of him.  I watched him go.  I would miss him; he had been a grouchy but stable presence in my life.  He was one of the many people whose job it was to care for me, and he had done it well––he was a sort of paternal figure.  He very nearly didn’t say goodbye as he strode down the hallway and stopped before the front door.  He had unlatched it and was stepping into the sun-streaked lawn when Ina called after him, “Won’t you say goodbye to your mistress, Jeorge?”  I thought she meant Mother, but Jeorge lumbered back and bowed and I shook his hand.  It wasn’t much of a farewell; I was too dumbstruck at being regarded as a mistress to say anything of importance to him.

Ina reported, a few days later, that a few of our gardeners had left too, and some of the cooks.

“Why?”

“Why?” she repeated, surprised.  “They’re not being paid, Miss Meriel, same as Jeorge.  Same as me.”  She paused, and then she said, “I feel inclined to tell you, Miss Meriel, that I don’t much blame them.  They’ll run out of food if they stay here.  Your mother is––well, if I’m permitted to speak ill of her, your mother does seem to be taking awful advantage of her workers.”  Another pause, and then she said, “I would leave myself, if I didn’t have to stay to look after you.”

And it happened very suddenly, that the bustling house became deserted.  People trickled out one at a time until they all left at once, in huge congregations, marching fumingly to the front door, always the same.  The majority of them did not make their leaving known to me, and I would only discover someone’s absence when I called for them and they did not come to me.

I was bewildered before I was upset.  My life had been so normal until it was not.  Yet it took me such a very long time to fully pinpoint the source of the trouble, to be awakened to the horror that Mother had left me.  What was wrong with her?  I asked Ina over and over again what had happened to Mother, and Ina never knew the answer, and I raged until I became so upset that I cried.

The house rang with a terrible silence that I had never known before.  When I walked outside on a blazing spring afternoon, I found the gardens vicious and overgrown; and the heat had come at last, so that the sleeves of my sweater stuck to my skin.  The wild growth was somber to watch, so I remained instead in the huge house with its ringingly silent halls.  After a while, I gained the impression that the only two people living between its vast walls were Ina and me.  I told her this one afternoon, as the hot air wafted through the open windows of the parlor.  And then I asked her, for the last time I ever would, what had happened to my mother.

“I don’t know that, Miss Meriel,” she said gently.

“But where did she go?”

“As far as I know she’s still sleeping soundly in her bedroom.”  The voice was gentle.

“But there’s no food.”

“Then… she’s starved to death in there.”

“Mother wouldn’t starve,” I told her, with the air of one stating the obvious.

“No, of course she wouldn’t.”  Ina stared out of the window for a long time, and then she said, “Meriel, your mother still lives in this house, just like she lives in you.  You can take comfort in the fact that she’ll always be present.  People who leave don’t really leave, you know.”

Her words were impressively vague, and she spoke them with such importance.  I had no idea what she was talking about.

“If you want to know what happened to your mother, you know where she’ll be.”

Images flashed in my mind––Mother splayed in bed, soulless and fleshless, her face a gaping skull, the skin wound too tight around her bones.

“I won’t,” I said aloud, though there was nothing I had been instructed to do.

How long had it been since I had last seen Mother?  Individual days didn’t seem to exist now; rather, they were like hazy ideas of things which seeped ever-closer together, like one long, limitless chain.  It occurred to me that the sweltering air drifting from the windows was the air of summer, not spring.  I felt weak with exhaustion.

The terrible day came when Ina left me.  She told me that she herself would starve if she did not find more work.

“There’s food in this house!” I yelled at her.  “Look!”  There was a gaping pantry stocked with a fortune’s worth in food.  I dragged her down the steps.

“No, Meriel… no, I can’t eat that.”

Belligerently, disbelievingly, aggrievedly, I asked her why she couldn’t.

“My mistress has taken advantage of me, but I won’t take advantage of her,” said Ina maddeningly, and then she wished me the best I could have in life and walked into the blinding lights of the outdoors.

And then I was alone in the manor, with the phantom that might be my mother, might be her starved body.  I felt ill of mind.  I was terrified of walking into Mother’s room and seeing the limp, fleshless figure that haunted me, terrified by the thought of witnessing the bed that had become her grave.  I had nightmares of the pale, blank eyes that would loom from her corpse, and I woke up on many nights blurting words into the air, my body in a sweat.

The day came when I felt so insane from the silence and the emptiness and the vastness and the darkness that I walked down the hallway and towards my mother’s room.  The large wooden double doors that gated the bedroom stood imposingly before me.  My heart thrashed madly in my chest.  I wondered, stupidly, whether I should knock, and I stood frozen with this question permeating my mind until at last, on a reckless urge, I flung the doors open.

The room looked exactly the same as it had upon my last entry into it.  The room was dark but for a single window, which was ajar.  Beyond it I could see the snarled disarray of the once-beautiful garden.  The bed was illuminated by the window, and on the bed lay Mother.  Her eyes were open and blinking, her chest rose and fell in gentle cadence with her breathing, her gaze jumped to me as the doors swung open.  She looked just as alive and full as she had before.  There were no signs of a gruelling death by starvation.  I was so startled by this living, healthy Mother that I remained silent.

“Hello, Meriel.”  She smiled a little, though it looked difficult, and sat up against the headboard.

I gaped at her.

We remained silent for several seconds, me with my mouth slightly open and Mother with eyes fixed on the window opposite the bed.

“Will you do something for me, Meriel?” asked Mother, from the silence.  Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Of course you will.”

I found my voice, and all I could think to say was, “Yes.”

“Tend the garden.  I look at it every day and it makes me so sad.  Dig up the weeds and the pests, and bring the flowers and bushes water, and spread the flora evenly like it used to be.”  She paused, her eyes still on the wild snare outside.  “It would be such a relief.”

I disregarded these instructions, at last ready to speak what I thought.  “Mother, where have you been?  You’ve left me alone in this house––this den––with a ghost, without any servants, and if the food runs out I’ll starve to death, and you’ve been here this whole time alive and well and looking out of the window––”

“Hush,” said Mother at once––“it’s not polite to speak to your mother in such a way.  I’m telling you to tend the garden.  That is an order.  You, as my daughter, obey my order.”

Of course, I would obey her order––what had I been thinking?

I left the room without further comment, with a strange sense of unreality.  The conversation could not have taken place––I had expected a starved skeleton to lie in that bed, with blank eyes and cold, unused skin, and instead I found Mother, unchanged and intact and acting as though everything was normal in the world.  I doubted what I had seen, began to convince myself it hadn’t happened.

The fear was really there now, because the phantom wasn’t in the house, it was in my memory, and it had controlled me and warped my perception of everything.  I wondered what I had really seen in that bedroom, and again I pictured a grotesque, lived-out corpse, with flies crawling in its skin.  Mother’s skull found me in dreams.  When I would wake up, I would call for Ina to come and console me, and I was always greeted with silence.

But I had been told to tend the garden.  And what did it matter really, what was real?  So there was nothing for it: I had followed Mother’s orders since the beginning of time, was always right where she needed me, had done what she asked of me.

The air was blazing when I walked outside, the groping sun fiery hot on every inch of me it touched.  Sweat infested the insides of my clothing like maggot clouds, but I would not take off my sweater.  I grabbed bunches of my skirt to avoid tripping and trudged to the garden.  The weeds had expanded themselves onto the house, so that the mossy walls crept with winding, spindly stems.

I sat down gingerly on the long grasses, with my skirt tucked over my knees and shins to avoid staining my legs.  I held the knobbly stem of an unfamiliar-looking plant in my fingers and pulled it carefully out of the ground.  The roots gave in easily.  Other weeds were less willing, and I found myself positively yanking them upwards.  Several split from their stalks, and I was reduced to digging the roots up with my hands.  The entire affair was so sweaty, sweatier than anything had been in my life, that I stripped from my wool sweater and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt.

I wondered, clawing and ripping at the beds of wildlife, whether Mother might be watching me from her window.  The thought sent a shudder through me, and I glanced quickly round at the windows of the house, but each was dim from the reflection of the sun, so I could not see inside.  I resumed my work, but the thought nagged at me and chilled me until I couldn’t bear it.  Mother’s window was the tall, decorated one.  I pressed my face against the glass and waited for Mother to blink back at me from the other side of the pane.  But I couldn’t see anything at all.  The room appeared very dark but for a faint silvery line in the corner that might be the beam of the bed frame.

I trudged inside when the sun began to set and slept, dirty and stinking, sideways on my unmade bed.  I dreamt of a sick patient in a hospital whose skin had been eaten away.  

The next morning, I did not pause to wash or change but stepped right outside.  The weather was, if possible, hotter than the previous day’s.  I found a small trowel in the abandoned shed and dug up the unwanted plants.  A large, snaring bush had tangled itself together one of the garden beds, and I spent considerable time hacking off each one of its limbs with the sharp side of the spade, until only a small green stump remained.  I barely had the energy to move indoors at sunset.  I slept on the parlor couch, which was nearest, and watched as the girl in the hospital who had no skin twisted and turned.  There were inlets and caves in her red flesh that were filled with maggots.

I woke to day three of gardening and immediately moved outside once more.  The bright sun prickled on my neck, but I had developed a tolerance, now––I would do the work, now, a hundred times faster, a hundred times more powerful, for a hundred more years if I had to.  The gardens were neater now, marked by separate clumps of plants as opposed to a single writhing mass, and I would make these beds perfect, flawless.  I combed the soil with my hands and found roots, nothing but roots, a million underground networks threading into and from one another like intricate spiderwebs.  I licked my lips, which tasted of tang and salt, and unraveled the roots like fabric between my fingers, as the sharp earth bit at my skin––like the sewing lessons where I had, on so many occasions, pricked my fingers with the needle.  My skin developed cuts and bled, as it had then.  My head was very heavy, my shoulders slumped, every inch of my body burning hot.  I was coming down, fast, upon the scorching dirt, maggots billowing around me.

A cocoon of humid air held me somewhere damp and dark.  Dimly I was aware of a breeze, of wearing several layers less clothing.  My throat was very dry.  A persistent need for water drove me to wake myself.

“Hi.”

The voice startled me deeply, and I felt something cold drop to the pit of my stomach.  I thought wildly of Mother, and then of the starving ghost that had haunted my dreams.

“What––”

I spun round, waiting for the bloody, skinless face to surface in the real world at last.

Somebody laughed.  “It’s me.  It’s not that mother you keep mentioning.”

It wasn’t Mother, only a boy.  He was maybe younger than I was and his face and overgrown hair were coated in grime.  We were sat beneath the shade of a large oak.  Beyond the fields I could see the house, and the garden beds––canals now ripped through the carefully tended dirt.

I sat up, a question burning at me.  “What do you know about my mother?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

“Oh.”  I slumped back down.  “Do you have any water?” I asked, blatantly.  All manners, it seemed, had been left in that scrupulously tended house with its many walls and rooms and servants.  I was different now.

“Yeah.”  He handed me a flask, and I drank without comment.

“What are you doing here?” I asked when finished.

“I noticed you passed out so I brought you to some shade.  Thought you might need some water.  You’re going to have to find a way to get some, if you want to work in this weather.”

“I have water.”

“Are you that lady’s kid, then?”

“Probably.”

“What are you doing laboring in the gardens?”

I stared at him accusingly.  “What are you doing here?  The servants all left.  The property’s not supposed to welcome strangers.”

“My grandfather told me to stay here.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”

There was a bit of silence.

“Well, I have to go,” I said.  “I have something to do.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me who I am?  I don’t know who you are––for all I know I’ve just let a criminal drink my water.”

“I told you––I’m Hilda’s daughter.”

“Well,” said the boy.  “I’m Duncan’s grandson.”

“Fine.”  I turned and walked into the sun-drenched fields towards the house.  I noticed as I did so that my sweater was missing, and my shoes and socks.  I must have kicked them off while I was unconscious, and I didn’t miss them; the ground was cooler under my toes, the air freer around me.

I labored until I fell asleep, exhausted, in the garden beds.  The girl with the maggots in her skin was at last turning her raw, infested face towards me.  I looked into her eyes, which were dark and wide.

I woke up having vomited on the earth beside me.  When I sat up, the boy––Duncan’s grandson––was watching me from a distance.  I wondered how long he had been there, lurking just out of my sight.  He was meant to be there, after all––his grandfather had told him to be.

I stood, hesitated, and yelled to him across the steaming fields.

“Is this real?”

He turned around and laughed.