In a year, Marek had gone from lowly lamb herder’s son to the lord of Lapvona. He hadn’t asked for the title, but there was nobody left to hand it to. He tried his best to make himself feel at home. He took over Villiam’s chambers and outfitted himself with all the clothes from his closet. He had hoped that fine clothes and nice food would distract him from his woe, but of course they only gave him more anxiety, as wealth and power always do. Ivan sent a staff to account for the land and earnings and to manage the manor. Marek had nothing to do, they said. ‘Just be happy that Ivan has this all taken care of.’
Despite Marek’s lordship, Jude still refused to be a father to him. He refused, too, Marek’s offer of a room in the house, preferring to keep his bed with the eyeless horse even though Ivan’s men now managed the stable. Jude had nothing to do. Marek even had Petra go down to buy some lamb babes from a farmer in the village. They had brownish gray tufted hair and black faces, ears, and feet. Marek brought them to Jude on silk ropes tied around their small necks and handed him the reins.
‘You can start again,’ Marek said hopefully. ‘And you can keep as many babes as you like. Forever.’
‘Babes don’t stay babes,’ Jude said back. ‘Anyway, these are not the right kind.’ He let them go, refused to even pet them.
‘Will nothing make you happy?’ Marek asked.
Jude shrugged and walked off. Marek let the babes go free, trusting that Ivan’s men would know what to do with them. He gave up. He had everything and nothing. His father couldn’t even look him in the eye.
‘Sometimes something new can remind you of something you lost,’ Petra said later, trying to comfort him.
‘How do you know? What new thing have you ever got?’ Marek asked. He liked to bully Petra because she took all his accusations very literally.
‘Let me think. I had a new apron once. And when I think about it now, the new apron did make me sad, because the old one had fit me so well for so long. But then it caught fire and the left part got burnt, so I had to replace it. I miss that old apron,’ she said mawkishly.
‘The nun,’ Marek asked Petra. ‘Is she happy?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen her since the wedding.’
‘Take a guess.’
‘Hmm.’ Petra had to think about it. She rubbed her hands together and stared at the wall, as though conjuring some kind of mystic knowledge. Marek leaned back in his bed. He had developed an obsessive habit of picking at his cuticles. He peeled tiny strips of his skin up from the nails, chewed them up and spat them out on the bedspread.
‘Every new mother must be happy,’ Petra said after some time had gone by and Marek had given up on her answer.
‘She’s not a new mother. She’s been a mother as long as I’ve been alive,’ Marek argued.
Petra winced at her misstep. ‘You are right. She must be so proud to have you as her son, the lord of Lapvona. Just like Villiam, God rest his soul.’
He didn’t like to be reminded of Villiam. He had been so stunned by his sudden ascension to lord that he’d had no idea how to give instructions for Villiam’s burial—the one responsibility Ivan’s men would take no part in. Marek was paralyzed. ‘Where should we dig?’ the stableboys asked him. ‘I don’t know yet,’ Marek answered. ‘Leave him where he is, I guess.’ And then an Indian summer came and Villiam’s body bloated severely. His neck was thick and white and laced with yellow seeping into the white collar of his shirt, which had strangled his bloated throat. His eyes were swollen—they looked just like Ina’s horse eyes—and his lips had split, revealing his long, gray teeth, like something Clod had carved out of wood. Lispeth, on the other hand, had been buried right away by the servants. Klarek and Clod dug her grave in a clearing in the forest, where all the past servants’ bodies were laid to rest.
Finally, Marek assigned the task of burying Villiam to Jude. It seemed just punishment for his father’s coldness. Marek watched him digging from afar, forbidding anyone from stepping in to help him. In the end, the grave was very shallow, only a few inches deep. It was something to see, at least, Marek thought. The body didn’t disappear up to heaven—by burying him so poorly, Jude deprived him of his chance to ascend. So Villiam simply lay there under a thin blanket of dirt, slowly picked apart by magpies and rats and squirrels and mink, all the sweet little animals, God’s gentlest creatures.