THE TUESDAY CHILD

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by Nan, his sister, who knew him for her brother from the very first.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm.

My brother Wick was not a changeling, and I am the only one who never needed telling.

I will grant you he gave the parish a great deal to work with. He did not cry to be picked up, which frightened my mother more than crying ever could — a baby who does not mind being put down is a baby, the whisper goes, who was never quite yours to begin with. He would not look at your face; he looked past it, at the candle, or the window, or a bit of the ceiling that the rest of us had never found interesting and he plainly did. He lined the spoons up along the hearth by size, smallest to largest, every evening, and if you moved one he would put it back without a word and without a fuss, and he could do this for an hour, and be happy the whole time in a way none of the rest of us managed for five minutes together.

And the bells. When the chapel bell rang he screamed as though it were ringing inside his own head, which — I have thought about this a great deal — it very likely was, because Wick heard everything, all of it, all at once, and could not put any of it down the way you and I do without noticing we are doing it.

So. A quiet baby who would not be held, would not meet your eye, ordered the cutlery, and shrieked at the Lord's own bell. You can see how the story wrote itself. The parish did not even have to think.

Changeling. The word went round Mucklecombe the way words do — not said to your face, but arriving in your kitchen anyway, on the shoes of everyone who came in. The fair folk had been at the cradle. They had taken my mother's real boy — the one who would have cried and clung and looked up at her and been, in every particular, an ordinary comfort — and left this cold changed thing in his place, this stock, this fetch, this not-Wick, to be raised at her expense and love in place of her own.

I want you to understand what that did to my mother, because it is the whole of the tale. It was not that she stopped loving him. It was worse. It was that the story gave her permission to grieve a baby who was sitting right there on the hearth, lining up the spoons. She began to mourn the boy she was told she had lost — and every hour she spent mourning that one, she spent not seeing this one. She would look at Wick and her face would do a thing I could not bear, which was hope — hope that today he would turn out to be the other child after all, the returned one, the ordinary one — and Wick would look past her at the candle, and her face would close.

He was three feet from her and she was waiting for him to come home.

The cunning-man came, of course. There is always a cunning-man, and he is always confident, and he is always wrong, and he is never short of the next thing to try.

He looked at Wick for the length of time it takes to be paid, and pronounced. He gave my mother eggshells to brew, because a changeling, seeing something so daft as a supper cooked in an eggshell, will forget itself and cry out in the voice of its true, ancient, wicked age, and so betray what it is. (Wick watched the eggshells with tremendous interest and said nothing, being fourteen months old.) He gave her iron for the cradle-foot and a coat turned inside out and a rowan twig over the door, and each of them cost, and none of them did anything, because there was nothing there to do anything to — but the cunning-man never runs out, and when the small remedies fail he always, always has the big one.

I heard him start to say it. The old way. The hard way. The one the grandmothers only mouth. You put the changeling out on the— and you make it feel the— so that the fair folk, hearing their own child cry, come to take it back and return the stolen one, and every parish has a tale of a night it was done and a whispered tale of what was found in the morning.

My mother had the eggshell in her hand. She was so tired. She was so frightened. And I saw — I was seven, and I saw it plain, the way you only see things at seven — that she was frightened enough to do it.

That is when Goodwife Muckle put her head round the door, because Goodwife Muckle always knows exactly when to put her head round a door, and I have come to think it is the most useful gift in the whole realm.

She did not shout at the cunning-man. She did something worse to him: she ignored him entirely, the way you ignore a draught, and she sat herself down by the hearth next to Wick, and she watched him line up the spoons, and she said — to the spoons, really, not to any of us —

"I have seen a hundred of these."

Nobody spoke.

"A hundred, near enough, in my time. The quiet ones. The ones that count things. The ones that won't be looked at and won't be held the ordinary way and go off like a kettle at a loud noise." She reached out and moved the smallest spoon, just to see, and Wick reached out and moved it back, and something in her face eased, as though he had passed a test she had not told anyone she was setting. "And do you know how many of them were changelings, Goodwife? Out of the hundred?"

My mother could not answer.

"None," said Muckle. "Not one. There is no such thing, and I'll say it in the chapel if the priest will lend me the pulpit, which he won't. The fair folk did not take your boy. Nobody took your boy. Your boy is there." And she nodded at Wick, plainly, the way you'd point out where you'd left the bread. "He came made a little different, that's all — the way some folk come left-handed, and we don't leave them out on the dungheap, though I'll grant you the parish would if it could think of a story for it. He's not a fetch and he's not a curse and he's not a punishment. He's a Tuesday child. He came on his own day, in his own way, and he is not going to turn into a different boy, not tonight and not ever, and the sooner you stop waiting for the other one to come home, the sooner you'll notice you've had this one the whole while."

And then she said the thing I have kept for thirty years.

"You've been so busy mourning the baby you were told you lost, you've not once said good morning to the one you've got."

My mother put down the eggshell.

I think that is the bravest thing I have ever watched a person do, and she did it sitting still, in a kitchen, in front of a fool who was still talking. She put down the eggshell, and the cunning-man's remedy with it, and the whole warm terrible story that had let her grieve a living child — she put it all down, and she picked Wick up.

Not the way you pick up a baby. That had never worked; that was half of what had frightened her. She picked him up the way Muckle showed her with a tilt of her head — facing out, his back against her, both of them looking at the same window, at the same bit of grey Mucklecombe evening, not at each other.

And Wick, who had never once settled against a shoulder, went quiet against his mother's front, and lifted one hand, and pointed at the window, at nothing I could see —

and a moment later it began to rain.

He had known. He always knew. He knew rain the way I know my own name.

My mother laughed — a wet, cracked, astonished sound — and said, "You knew that was coming, didn't you," not to a changeling, not to a fetch, but to her son, to Wick, the first words she had ever said to the boy who was actually in the room. And he did not look at her, because he never would, but he leaned back the smallest amount into the warm of her, which for Wick was everything, which for Wick was clinging, and I saw her understand that, at last, and get her boy back, who had never been anywhere.

He is grown now, my brother, and I will tell you what the fair folk left us, since the parish was so sure.

They left us the only soul in Mucklecombe who always knows where the cat is. Who can tell you how many geese went over without looking up from his work. Who feels the rain a full hour before the sky admits it, so that no washing of my mother's has been rained on in twenty years, and half the village plans its hay by walking past our gate to see if Wick has brought the tools in. He notices what the rest of us are too busy to notice, and he has never once been unkind, because unkindness is a thing you have to not notice you are doing, and Wick cannot help noticing anything.

The cunning-man, I am glad to say, was run out of three parishes and now sells the same eggshells to the dry countries, where I am told they are believed.

The moral, from his sister: when a thing frightens a village, the village will hand you a story about it before you have finished being frightened, and the story will be confident, and it will be wrong, and it will cost you — and it will let you look straight at what you love and grieve for something else. The child is never a changeling. The child is only ever the child. Put down the eggshell. Say good morning to the one you've got. He has been there the whole while, and he knew it was going to rain.