The Girl Green as Elderflower by Randolph Stow

never wanted, without decent clothes to my back, without even much hope of a husband. When she started yelling, I say to myself, quite loud: “Mischief take the squawling bastard.” You ask if I sin anything. Well, I did. I sin that little bundle lift off the ground and disappear, and my heart was as light as a feather. I got my husband in the end, I got my house and my clothes, and I shall keep them. My husband know there was a child, but there int one now and there int no trouble between us. If she come, but she won’t, I should bolt the door against her.’
    The priest carefully closed his book, and sat drumming with his fingers on its cover. ‘But after all, Mrs Burrows, flesh and blood—’
    The young woman laughed harshly. ‘There int no happy memories for me in that flesh and blood. She come of a rape, and by someone I hate like you hate the Devil.’
    ‘I see,’ said the priest again. ‘Perhaps someone related to you?’
    ‘Like you say, you see,’ said the woman.
    The priest got up, and stood uneasy in the room, whose low beams oppressed him. ‘Then I must take up no more of your time.’
    ‘Let me show you to the door,’ said Malkin’s mother, going past him.
    On the step, in the breezy cold sunlight of the street, the priest said: ‘There is a point on which you may feel easy, Mrs Burrows. I can’t admire your later conduct, but by having Malkin baptized you have probably saved her from being lost eternally.’
    ‘I should have undone that,’ said the woman, ‘if I could. There it stay now, in black and white, for any nosey vicar or clerk to look at. I shall kick myself for that one day, I know. But you see, I warnt so sharp at fourteen as I hope I am now.’
    The priest watched as the heavy door closed, with a clash of oak and iron.
    For weeks there had been between Malkin and Lucy something from which the others, aware of silences falling suddenly when they entered rooms in which the two were, felt excluded. For the brown girl, who still cherished her dolls, was of a motherly mould, and something in the spirit-child, things which were never said, had touched her as she had not been touched before by anything but her pony. So whispered confabulations took place, and gifts were exchanged, of choice spring flowers and special titbits of food, such as Lucy’s homemade toffee, and the facetious sprite was at home with the rather solemn girl as she was with no one else.
    There came a morning, as Lucy on her pony ambled down a ride through Lady Munby’s woods, where the spirit spoke to her from a budding chestnut. Her voice was a little sad, as though with resignation. She said: ‘Lucy, I have been thinking of what you want, and you shall have it. When you are in your bed tonight, I shall come.”
    As soberly, the girl said: ‘Thank you, Malkin,’ and rode on in silence under the trees swelling with promise.
    But the matter occupied her thoughts all day, and she went early to bed, and waited with a grave expectation, a small nightlight faintly infiltrating the shadows of her room.
    When the sprite came, her voice seemed to rise almost from the floor, as if a very small child stood by the bed. She said: ‘You won’t touch me, Lucy? You won’t grab me, promise?’
    ‘No, Malkin,’ said the girl, ‘I’ve promised you already.’
    ‘Will you swear it, gal, by the Holy Trinity and all the persons of it?’
    ‘I swear,’ Lucy said, ‘by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’
    ‘Then look where my voice come from,’ said the spirit, ‘and you shall see.’
    Beside the bed a luminosity began to shape itself. Its outlines cleared, and Malkin was within reach of Lucy’s hand.
    She was in form a child of twelve months old, dressed in a white frock, smiling uncertainly but with a beseeching sweetness at the girl who leaned from her bed towards her. Her hair was fine and black, her eyes so light in colour that they seemed silver. With a timid movement she raised one miniature hand, as if to ward