Missed Part 1? Read it here. 

Larietta was a member of the large, old family, though neither she nor any other could have told you how. She grew up largely by her own devices, shuffled between convents and basement kitchens and the streets. When she blossomed into womanhood her fortunes turned, for a blacksmith’s apprentice in the village where she scrubbed floors found her beauty irresistible. They wed on a Friday, and Monday he hit her for the first time.

When she knew she was with child, she went to the village wise woman, and then she was not. So she did, seven times in four years, and then her husband, village Smithy now, threw her out as barren.

When Lari (for so she called herself, as her best and only friend) was small, she remembered her parents talking about their family and the big old home they possessed. So, desolate, beaten and weary, Lari went home.

The large old home was a good fit for the broken little wife; desolate, beaten and weary itself, it welcomed her as only the soul’s true home can. She sat, stony, in its cold dank halls, unshed tears threatening to tear down the walls around her heart. She wandered through the labyrinthine passageways, her thoughts and feelings twisting illogically, she and the house losing their way together. She ventured into the bleak sunshine (for it was winter) and gleaned seedy grain fields and thrice-thawed apples and wild roots, and together she and the house eked a life from the fallen splendor around them.

Months folded over, and Lari grew to know and love the large old house. In all her time living in what had become her refuge she had seen no one else, met none of her distant and more distant family members, had in fact enjoyed no human contact whatsoever from the time of her arrival. She didn’t crave it; humans had been cruel to her, and the house good. She began to care for the house as it had cared for her, and for the first time in her brief and battled life she was happy.

She was happy, also, for the realization that had grown in her heart and in her womb, that one final child was hers to keep. She did not think of her husband’s face or form, but of the new child, safe now from his wrath, whom she would soon hold in her arms.

But when the time came, it was soon, too soon. She held the child and then wrapped it in an old red curtain and laid it to rest beneath the budding apple tree, and with it she laid her smile and her song.

So it was that Lari went back to the large old house, broken on broken on broken. She could not sleep and wandered the crumbling hallways at night, weeping now, all the tears of the unwanted child and the ill-used wife and the bereaved mother no longer held behind the walls that had given way to grief.