Haunted by Love

Haunted by Love

A baby’s cry.

Slipping through the chink where the shutters do not quite meet. It threads the rafters, gathers in the corners, grows until it fills the cabin like smoke.

I sit at the table, hands wrapped around an empty cup, and wait for it to fade. It never does quickly. Grief doesn’t, I’ve learned. It lingers, like damp in stone.

The fire on the hearth is low. It never quite remembers when it began. Some nights I cannot recall laying in the wood. Yet there it burns, sullen and begrudging, as if offended by its own persistence. Shadows cling to the rafters; strips of smoke curl along the beams, blackening the old oak where Tomas hit his head that winter and cursed the gods for making wood harder than his skull.

The cradle is gone. The space it should fill beside the hearth, empty now, waiting for something I cannot give it.

I frown. I cannot remember when I moved it out. I remember its sway, the way my hand had found the worn curve of the rocking-rail without looking. I remember the little blanket, blue-grey, with clumsy embroidered stars. My stars. My crooked needle, my crooked fingers.

It is always dusk when the child begins.

Always the same. Cry, cradle, latch.

The door does not open quickly. It groans in the jamb like an old man considering whether to rise, then gives way inch by inch. A spill of cold evening air presses in ahead of him, sharp with wet earth and yew-smell, a distant reek of the village midden.

He fills the frame the way only the living used to—broad shoulders, thick wrists, cloak dark with damp to the knees. The lantern in his fist throws a wavering circle around him, catching on the streaks of grey in his beard, the split in his lower lip, the hollows worn under his eyes.

Tomas.

He does not look at me. He never does.

He steps over the threshold with the slow, careful tread of a man afraid to wake something. Sets the lantern down on the hearth-stone, the light throwing his shadow hard against the wall. He stands there a moment, still as a post, head bowed. “Storm’s easing,” he mutters

My heart stumbles. Every night it does this; every night I am foolish enough to be surprised he has come back. “You’re late,” I say, though my voice is little more than a breath. “I thought the hill had taken you this time.”

He does not answer. Of course he doesn’t.

“You never could come in out of the wet like a sensible man.”

The old words. The ones I used when there was still bread to scold him over and boots to warm by the fire.

He drags a hand down his face. The knuckles are raw, scoured by labour or stone. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse with the day. “You would tell me to change my clothes.”

“Yes,” I murmur. “I would.”

“Day was long,” he says, unasked. “The field’s half-turned now. Rains’ll have their way soon enough.”

He pulls out the stool and lowers himself onto it with a long, weary sound. The lantern light etches every line in his face. He looks... older. Older than last night. Older than he has any right to be.

“How long has this gone on?” I whisper.

He does not turn. He never hears me when I ask anything that matters. I cannot say how many nights have passed, how many dusk-lit returns, how many evenings I have sat with my hands curled around an empty cup, listening to the screaming child and waiting for Tomas to fill the doorway again.

Days bleed together here; dawn and dusk, dusk and dawn, and the thin hours between when the fire sinks low and the world hangs in a held breath.

I try to remember the day he died.

But there is only a darkness where the memory should be.

No board laid across trestles.

No sheet drawn over a familiar face.

No final kiss to a brow cooling in the dawn.

I tell myself grief took it. Grief does that sometimes. It hollows a soul until even memory slips from its grasp, leaving only the echo of something lost and the ache of not knowing what.

I remember waking in this cabin, alone, the first time I heard the baby cry—sharp enough to peel the skin from my thoughts. I remember the door opening without my bidding, Tomas stepping inside, rain on his shoulders as if he’d merely walked home from the fields.

He huffs something like a laugh. “Turning the soil this late… chasing daylight like a fool. You’d have scolded me for it. Memory’s a kind of sorcery.” He says. “I cling to it like a drowning man to a rotten plank.”

He falls quiet a moment. The fire pops, low and grudging.

Then his fingers curl into fists on the table. “I hear her, every day, just as I step through the door.” His voice frays. “Her cry rattles through these walls like an old echo that hasn’t found its way out.”

His gaze lifts—not to me, but to the small window beside the hearth. The glass is black, reflecting only firelight and the faintest shape of the room. “Sometimes I think,” he says, “if I were quiet enough… if I held my tongue and listened… I might hear you.”

I turn my head.

The window beside the hearth is small, leaded, slick with soot. I have not looked through it in—

When did I last look?

The baby cries again.

We both flinch.

It’s closer this time, threaded through his voice, answering some note of pain that slipped free unguarded. It rises, wavers, then breaks into hiccupping sobs. My womb clenches in answer.

Tomas presses his fist against his lips. His shoulders shake once, twice, and he forces the sound down hard. “Hush,” he rasps, to the empty air. “Hush, love. Hush now. Father’s here.”

“There is no cradle,” I say, more to myself than to him. “No babe.”

I frown. I cannot remember moving it out. I remember its sway, the way my hand had found the worn curve of the rocking-rail without looking. I remember the little blanket, blue-grey, with clumsy embroidered stars. My stars. My crooked needle, my crooked fingers.

I stand beside him. Close enough that, were he flesh, I might touch the rough of his jaw, the scar at his temple where the ploughshare flew loose. His hair smells of rain and the faint iron tang of tools. My fingers itch with the memory of combing it.

I lay my hand on his shoulder. Or try to. The air resists, then lets me through, like mist.

He swallows with effort. “Gods, Maera… I miss you.” he says softly—though not to me, never to me. His fingers uncurl from his fist and press flat to the table. “Miss your humming when you pretended not to worry,” he murmurs. “Miss the sound of your steps on these boards. Miss waking to you breathing beside me.”

He drags a rough hand over his face.

The baby sobs again—thin, strangled, as though trying to push through earth and wood to reach him.

“Forgive me,” he whispers. “I know you’d scold me for clinging. For talking to shadows till my throat dries. But it’s all I have left.”

I stare at him, at the bowed head, and a sprig of rosemary laid out on the table like mourning rites.

A ghost doesn’t know when to leave.

That’s what old Sister Rellin used to say in her sermons, the ones I half-listened to in the back pew. The dead linger when the living hold them too tightly. Sorrow is a chain. Grief is a tether.

“Is it me keeping you here?” I whisper, studying the soft fall of his hair, the slump of his shoulders. “Am I the chain?”

The baby cries. Not from the corner now. Not from the cradle that is not there.

From beneath my feet.

“I had a dream last night,” he says. “Saw you in the doorway with the babe in your arms. Thought if I’d just reach out far enough...”

My throat tightens. “I should tell you to rest. To stop pacing this night over and over like a wolf that’s lost its trail. But I’m afraid,” I admit softly, “that if you go… the crying will start again. And this time it may not stop.”

Tomas lowers his head into his hands. “The priest came today. Talked of letting go. Said it weren’t healthy.”

His mouth twists around the word. Not a village word; a physician’s word, a learned man’s. He hates it on his tongue.

“I told him he could go to the pit,” Tomas says flatly. He scrubs at his eyes with his thumb, as if they itch. “I know you’d laugh hearing me curse at a priest.”

I stare at him.

“I cannot let you go,” he whispers. “I know I should. Priest says souls can’t rest if we drag them back with our wanting. But the thought of you, there, in the cold earth...” He shakes his head, jaw clenched until it trembles. “I am a selfish man.”

My knees weaken. I would sink to the floor if the floor would meet me.

The cabin blurs. The walls thin like old cloth held to the light. Beyond them, I see faint outlines: a low stone wall, hornbeam trees, the black silhouette of the chapel down the slope.

“You hate the graveyard,” he says softly. “Always did. Said the yews made you feel like the dead were still listening.”

For a heartbeat, the cabin clings. The familiar outline of hearth and table, of hooks on the wall and herbs drying in the rafters, stretches thin as cobweb. Then it tears.

I walk out into the night.

The hill slopes away under a sky knifed with stars. Yew trees loom, their branches hunched like old crones leaning together over gossip. Between them, the graves lie in crooked rows. Some marked with carved stone. Others with wood gone soft and black with age. The earth is fresh-turned in only a few places. New hurts among older scars. A fox sits very still atop one of the mounds, its eyes twin coals.

Tomas walks a path worn by his own feet. The grass is broken there, trodden to mud. At its end stands a small mound, no higher than my knee, with a single stone at the head. The lantern light flares on it, picking out the chisel marks.

My legs want to buckle. Ghosts should not feel weak, I think numbly. The dead should not feel at all.

I force myself closer.

The stone is simple, roughly cut. Tomas has never cared for finery. But the letters are neat. He must have spent hours on them with hammer and chisel and raw, bleeding hands.

MAERA

WIFE TO TOMAS

AND CLARA THEIR UNBORN CHILD

No dates. Time has lost interest in me.

The baby’s cry echoes once in my skull, then fades into something softer. A coo. A sigh.

I look down.

There is no cradle. Of course there isn’t. Only a scrap of cloth caught on the grass; a little blue-grey strip, embroidered with crooked stars.

My stars.

I kneel. The ground does not chill my knees. I press my hands to the mound. The earth gives slightly under my palms, damp and soft, as if it remembers the weight it had to take.

“I am dead,” I say.

Saying it aloud makes it real.

The blank wall inside me fractures. Memories spill through the cracks—blood and sweat and Tomas’ shouting, the midwife’s muttered prayers, the priest’s thin hands, the moment the pain snapped off like a rope cut clean. Then nothing. Then waking alone, with only a baby’s cry and a cabin that would not let me leave.

“I am sorry,” Tomas whispers. He sinks to his knees opposite me, on the living side of the stone. His lantern rests in the grass between us like a small, trapped sun. “Cowardice has its claws in me. I’m too afraid to die and too stubborn to live without you.”

I stare at him, at this ruined man who comes night after night to pour his heart out to a mound of earth.

All this time I thought he haunted me. That he was the ghost and I the poor flesh-bound thing.

How small my imagination was.

I reach across the stone. This time, my fingers meet resistance. Not his skin. Not quite. But something. A warmth like breath against cold glass.

His head lifts, eyes wide.

For the first time, he looks directly at me.

There is nothing to see, I know that now. No clear outline. No dim, transparent shape. If he sees anything, it is perhaps a warping of the air, a shiver of light. Yet his gaze locks on that empty space above the stone as if it is the most solid thing in the world.

“Maera?” His voice is raw. “Is that—”

“Yes,” I say. “It is I.”

Tears spill down his face, unchecked. He has always prided himself on keeping his composure. On taking blows with his jaw set and his eyes dry. He weeps now like a man who has forgotten how to hold himself together.

“I don’t know how to let you go,” he chokes.

“I know.” I brush my hand along the line of his jaw. My fingers tingle with the contact. “But you must. For both of us.”

He shakes his head once. “I can’t. If I leave you here, if I stop speaking to you—what will you have?”

“Rest,” I say. “I glance down at the mound. “She is not screaming, Tomas. Not now. She only cried because we held her halfway between worlds. Release your grief, and you release her as well.”

His shoulders hunch, as if struck. He has loved that unborn child in an odd, fierce way—loving not what she was, but all she might have been. To ask him to lay that love down feels like another cruelty.

But to keep it as it is would be worst.

“You do not honor us by bleeding forever,” I say, more gently. “You honor us by living. By sowing and harvesting, by cursing the rain and laughing in the tavern and breaking your back in the fields. By remembering us in peace, not in torment.”

His gaze drops to the earth. “If I stop coming... it will be like burying you again.”

“Then bury me properly,” I whisper. “Once, instead of a hundred times.”

The wind moves through the yews, a long, low sigh. The fox slips away between the stones, bored with our anguish.

Tomas sits there a long while, lantern guttering. I feel the pull of the earth beneath me, a slow, insistent tug. The hill wants me. The grave wants me. So does sleep, the deep, dark, painless kind I woke from too early.

My fingers slide from his jaw. My hand grows thinner, the air taking more of me.

“I will stay tonight,” I say, because I am kinder in death than I was in life. “Sit with you once more.”

He nods, jaw clenched.

“But tomorrow,” I add, “you will not come at dusk. You will stay in the cabin. You will light the fire and eat the bread Osric’s wife brings, and you will sleep in our bed. Alone.” I lean closer. “Swear it.”

He laughs, a hollow thing. “You always did command more than any king.”

“Swear it,” I insist.

His eyes meet the emptiness above the stone. “I swear,” he whispers. “By the earth that holds you. By the child beneath it. I swear.”

We sit there, the living and the dead, on either side of the stone. He speaks of small things—the shape of clouds at dusk, the stubbornness of the mule, how the neighbours’ girl tried to bake bread and turned it to stone. I listen, as I always have, to the cadence of his voice. Love sits between us like another presence, unseen and unreasonable.

When at last the lantern dies, the dark that falls is not frightening. It is soft. Heavy. Full of the promise of an ending.

“I will miss this,” he whispers into that dark.

“So will I,” I say.

Dawn comes grey and cold. Tomas shivers, stretches the ache from his limbs, and rises. He lays his palm flat on the stone one last time.

“Rest, then,” he says. “Both of you.”

He turns. Walks back down the hill, slow, shoulders squared against the day.

I watch him go. For a moment, ache claws at me, begging me to call him back, to undo my own words. To demand his presence and his grief and his stories at dusk forever.

I do not.

Love is letting him leave. Love is making him live.

The baby’s cry is gone. In its place, a contented sigh. A rustle, like a small body turning in sleep.

I think of Tomas one last time—his hands, his laugh, the way he cursed the rain and praised the sun with equal scorn. I send a final wish after him, thin as smoke: that he might find another hand to share his bread, another voice to argue with in the long winters. That he might remember me without drowning.

Then I let go.

The hill breathes in.

I go with it.