‘Yes, her child, but I am grown now. I am grown!’ Thea ran her palms over her face. ‘I do honour you, Mama. If I didn’t, your book would be ash.’
Anna Maria stared at her daughter then, nodding grimly to herself, went outside.
Thea sank to her heels against the wall. ‘No light.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘What a cruel thing to say to someone.’
There is a cave not far from here. I found myself at the mouth of it during those years of wandering, when I did not keep track of days or the changing face of the moon. Inside the cave were ochre paintings that suddenly pulled me into time. I sat and looked at them and time passed and I knew it was passing, but there was give in its direction, there was curve, and days passed like a whirlpool, its distance extended only within, against, beside itself.
There is ochre on the ground here, where I sit. I feel it underfoot, even in the dark. This country is clay country. Ochre country.
That I could draw her face with it. Draw us, mark us in time. We were here. We existed in time. We exist.
The night before her wedding, Thea called me by name.
She was in bed. My head was on the rise and fall of her ribs, my hand filling her upturned palm. It was late. The house was quiet. I was memorising the creases of her elbows, the whorls of her fingers, like a mother tongue I was afraid of forgetting. I was saying goodbye.
‘I dreamed about you, Hanne,’ she whispered.
I felt rather than heard her voice. It went through me like a song.
‘I dreamed we were birds. I felt feather quills shivering out along my skin, and then there was water beneath me. We were flying. Then a sailor shot you out of the sky and you fell into the sea, and I drowned trying to find you. I forgot I could not swim.
‘Hanne, I miss you.’ I felt her ribs seize with emotion. ‘I thought that faith would be enough. I thought the forest . . .’ Thea began to cry. I entwined my fingers with hers and waited until she fell asleep. I did not know what to say.
All that night, I composed hymns to the sound of her heart. Hymns that might hold its steady beat in perpetuity, once she was wed and gone from me.
The morning of Thea’s wedding, there was a heavy autumn mist on the ground. It was impossible not to think of Thea as I first met her, all those years ago.
Here we are, two ghosts. Telling each other we’re alive.
I heard Flügel’s handbell calling the congregation to the church as Anna Maria peered through the small window beside the door to the cottage, white headdress crisp and sharply folded. She called out to Thea, dressing in the bedroom. ‘I can see Radtke’s wagon arriving for Hans. Goodness, you’d best move yourself.’
‘Here.’
And there was Thea, standing beside the table, her hair white against the black of her wedding dress, covered with a wreath of green leaves. She looked a sprite. She looked a woman. Sombre and serious. The sight of her filled me with reverence.
‘Oh. Thea.’
‘I cannot do these buttons.’
Anna Maria slowly walked around her glowing daughter and fastened the high collar. ‘You’re trembling,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Are you nervous?’
‘I think I might be sick.’ Thea turned, eyes searching her mother’s. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you look very fine.’
I was a pilgrim before an apparition. In that moment it was impossible not to imagine, however briefly, that Thea was marrying me. I knew that such a thing was an impossibility. I knew that no one ever contemplated such a thing. And yet, for one hallowed heartskip, that moment expanded into a life. Shared bed under two framed myrtle crowns. Skin on skin. Hours of ordinariness and days of rain, and night-walking to the creek, and sun-warmed clothes in arms. More time together than we had ever been allowed. More time. More time.
Anna Maria pulled her daughter into a close embrace and rested her chin upon Thea’s head. ‘You will be married then.’
The moment passed, and I was only shadow admiring the light.
Silence stretched the length of the room. Anna Maria stepped back, smoothing Thea’s hair behind her ears. Her expression shifted.
‘You’re crying.’
Thea nodded.
‘What is it?’
Thea shrugged. Tears spilled out over her cheeks, even as she furiously wiped them away. Salt water. Streams of it. My bones and blood were full of it. I wondered that Thea and Anna Maria couldn’t smell the ocean, that they didn’t drown in the water creeping across the floor.
‘I know I should be happy,’ Thea said. ‘I am happy, I think. I don’t know. I feel as though I have been waiting for something to change. I . . .’