One morning she had woken to laughter—high pitched horsey-laugh---an old whinny—and she had risen from her coverlets, pausing at the doorway of her rooms to trace the inscription upon her door—and inscription she had carved in dreams but woke to find quite real.
Who comes to me I keep,
Who goes from me I free,
Yet against all I stand who carry not my key.
She whispered the words again in her mind as she made her way down the hall, to find that Granny Tess had very suddenly died---that it had been she who had imitated the horses just before expiring.
Susan sat at the foot of the woman’s bed, unblinking, unmoving for nearly an hour before she braved the cold and the wood and the streets and the stares to find the Reverend Steenwyck.
Of course, he was false-cordial—and though he seemed to be very sorry that he could not lay the corpse in hallowed ground, he offered no alternative to the dilemma. His eye wandered away and must have thought of things of greater importance than God—because he was staring at her braid.
Susan fixed him with a dark adaptive eye.
“If you’re so very sorry, then why do you continue in such course of actions?” she had asked, just before she turned and stepped into the cold again, raising her cloaks about her and hurrying back as best she could.
***************************************
The dead woman was heavy—unwieldy—and on her father’s horse---the only one who stayed—the other, less-loyal, frightened creatures having bolted at the fire and not returned—
--on her father’s horse she rode, through snow and ice—sheet thick and crystalline glass-slick until she came to the clearing—
The cold, dead, enormity of the tree pierced her heart like a cardinal’s beak.
She dismounted and very silently began to dig—unaware that the snow had paused only here—within these grounds.
It was an eternity of digging, but Griffin was forced into silence by her mere location, and she found a sort of strange peace in it all.
Apologising twice for the lack of a coffin, she rolled the shrouded woman into the half-deep hole and began to fill it with dark snowless soil.
A thought—disjointed—
**Will she sing in my head now that she’s gone, too?**
But it fled as she paused over the Hessian’s grave—her nameless secret---
--she had learned, quite recently that he’d been buried in haste—his head chopped off by his own sword—and thrown into the earth without ceremony.
“For that I am truly very sorry, “ she said, and came to stand atop the mound, removing her glove and placing her bare, white hand upon the thorny dragon’s head. “though I’m hardly a priest…I cannot bless this ground….though if blessings are only as holy as the men who deal in them I can guess that my blessing carries just as much weight as the Reverend, who—by the way---is not, what I think people would call—a good man. A God-Fearing man, yes, but not a Godly man. By any count.”
She stayed there for quite some time, the cold invading her—chilling her blood—and she drew her cloak around her.
“I’ve no choice but to leave her with you, my dead friend---the only one who hasn’t left me—excepting, of course, Griffin---but it’s a mite difficult—disconcerting at best when one has a ghost within one’s own head.”
A pause again, and a deep breath.
“She was a wise woman, in her madness---and may she honour you with her company—for she, too, would be forgotten, if not for this place, my father’s horse…and me, I suppose.”
A few more words and she made her way back to the manse, this time finding foxes by the hearth.