A Skinful of Shadows

by Frances Hardinge

  Makepeace returned to her work in the kitchen, doing her best to look like a crestfallen penitent. Her thoughts, however, burned with new force and clarity.

  Next time we will need a better way to deal with the dogs. I must try to befriend them all, not just the ones that sleep in the kitchen. And our plan must be flawless, or I will not be the one who suffers most. James is brave and clever, but he does not always think things through.

  I have drawn the Elders’ attention to me. If they watch me, they will see through me. So I must be beneath their notice. I must be unlovely, unremarkable, boring. I must be careful and patient.

  I will find a way to escape from here, even if it takes me years.

  As a matter of fact, it did.

  PART TWO: GOTELY’S CAT

  CHAPTER 10

  A lot can change in two years and a season.

  Twenty-seven months is long enough for a place to seep into your bones. Its colours become the palette of your mind, its sounds your private music. Its cliffs or spires overshadow your dreams, its walls funnel your thoughts.

  Humans are strange, adaptable animals, and eventually get used to anything, even the impossible or unbearable. Beauty living in the Beast’s castle doubtless had her routines, her little irritations and a great deal of boredom. Terror is tiring, and difficult to keep up indefinitely, so sooner or later it must be replaced by something more practical.

  One day you wake up in your prison, and realize that it is the only real place. Escape is a dream, a lip-service prayer that you no longer believe in.

  But Makepeace was used to fighting against the slow poison of habit. Her life with Mother had taught her how to keep herself unrooted. This is not your home, she reminded herself, again and again and again.

  Fortunately, Makepeace had Bear, whose hot and turbulent instincts told her, over and over, that she was in a prison, loaded with chains she could neither feel nor see. Then there was James. It was harder for the siblings to meet now, since James had been given new duties that gave him less time with the other servants. He was now the personal servant of Symond, Sir Thomas’s blond-white heir, and had become his errand boy, companion, sparring partner and personal footman.

  In spite of the household’s efforts to keep the siblings apart, however, the two snatched opportunities to meet in secret and hatch plans.

  In two years and a season, you can learn a lot about escape planning. Makepeace discovered a flair for it.

  James came up with bold, cunning schemes, but never noticed their flaws. He was confident, she was doubtful and distrustful. But doubt and distrust had their uses. Makepeace had an eye for problems, and a quiet cunning when it came to solutions.

  She hoarded every chance penny she was given, and secretly spent them on a threadbare change of clothes, in case disguises were needed in a hurry. She learned the rituals and habits of all Grizehayes’s inhabitants, and discovered the old house’s myriad hiding places. She stubbornly worked on her penmanship, so that she could try her hand at forgery if required.

  Two years and a season taught her to be a cautious, patient thief, squirrelling away oddments that might be useful on the run – a small knife, a tinderbox, some paper, candle stubs. She had powder to lighten her face and hide her pockmarks, and charcoal to darken her brows. Makepeace collected unwanted or ill-guarded rags, and in the quiet times before sleeping had gradually stitched them together to create a makeshift rope, just in case one was ever needed.

  She had even secretly drawn her own map of the local area on the back of an old playbill, adding to it gradually whenever she learned of another landmark.

  And from time to time, to everyone’s disgust, James and Makepeace tried to escape from Grizehayes, and were dragged back in disgrace.

  In two years and a season, you can learn from your failures. You can discover patience and cunning. You can teach everybody to overlook you.

  Makepeace learned to hide in plain sight. Eventually she was treated as part of the kitchen, like the ladles and tongs. By the time she turned fifteen, she had become accepted. Trusted. Taken for granted. The other servants now saw her as a surly extension of the grumpy old cook, rather than a real person with secret thoughts. ‘Gotely’s Shadow’, they sometimes nicknamed her. ‘Gotely’s Echo’. ‘Gotely’s Cat’.

  Makepeace was as unlovely as she could make herself. Her clothes were always baggy and ill-fitting, and often streaked with dripping or flour. Her hair had started to learn the same defiant witchiness as her mother’s, but like the other servant women she kept it carefully wrapped up in a turban-like linen cap. Her expressions changed slowly, and she let people think that her thoughts were similarly slow. They were not. They were as quick as her fingers, the deft, calloused hands that nobody gave a second glance.

  She kept most people at arm’s length. Over the years, some Bear-ness had bled into her behaviour. Because Bear did not like people approaching too quickly or coming too close, neither did she. When strangers wandered within five feet of her, it made her feel angry and frightened, as if they were charging at her screaming. She could feel Bear wanting to draw himself up and menace them, to make them back away. He tried to snort low, guttural threats, and these escaped her throat as angry-sounding coughs. Makepeace had earned a reputation for fits of sour temper, and territorial defence of the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t go running into there without warning,’ the errand boys were cautioned, ‘or Gotely’s Cat will swipe you with her ladle.’ But the household made a joke of it. Nobody guessed at the Bear-temper Makepeace had learned to keep in check.

  Over time Bear had learned to accept the kitchen, in spite of the heat and noise. He knew all its smells now. He had rubbed himself against the door jambs to make them his, so the kitchen felt safer. Just as slowly, Makepeace had introduced him to the idea of promises and bargains. Hush now, Bear, and later I will let us run in the orchard. Don’t lash out, and later I shall steal us a fistful of the scraps meant for the poultry. Hold back your rage now, and some day, some day, we shall escape to a world without walls.

  The two tiny smallpox marks on Makepeace’s cheek had never faded. The other serving women sometimes nagged her to do something about them, cover them with powder or fill the pits with fat. She never did. The last thing she wanted was for anyone’s gaze to linger on her.

  I am not worth your attention. Forget about me.

  James, on the other hand, was attracting notice. Whenever Symond went away to attend court or visit relations, James would be left behind, and would become just another servant. But whenever Symond returned to Grizehayes, James’s star would rise again, and his spirits with it. The two were thick as thieves, and suddenly James knew all the doings of the family, the court and the nation.

  The servant women still teased him, but their tone was different now. He was now a seventeen-year-old man, not a boy, and it was whispered that he had prospects.

  In two years and a season, a country can fall apart. Cracks prove deeper than anybody expected. They can become crevasses, and then chasms.

  News came piecemeal to Grizehayes. Sometimes it arrived in sealed letters that went straight to Lord Fellmotte’s room, but then trickled down through the household in overheard fragments. Sometimes pedlars and tinkers brought word-of-mouth news, seasoned with rumour and gore.

  These scraps could be patchworked into a picture.

  As the Year of Our Lord 1641 wore itself out and yielded to 1642, the tension between the King and Parliament became ever more dangerous.

  London was simmering and divided. Mobs clashed, rumours spread like wildfire, and the King’s party and Parliament’s supporters were convinced that the others were plotting against them.

  For a while it seemed that Parliament was winning the battle of wills.

  ‘I don’t understand the whole of it,’ said Mistress Gotely, ‘but they say Parliament wants to do more and more without the King’s say-so. By the time they’ve finished, the King won’t be a king at all – just a poppet
with a crown. He should show them a bit of right royal wrath.’

  Apparently the King thought so too.

  On the fourth day of January 1642, King Charles marched to the House of Commons with hundreds of armed troops, to seize the five men he thought were Parliament’s ringleaders.

  ‘But when he got there,’ said Long Alys, who had heard the news from Young Crowe, ‘those men had escaped! They must have had spies to tip ’em off. And the rest of Parliament would not tell the King where they were gone, and faced him down! And now the trained bands of London are told to protect Parliament, against their own King! Oh, they’re all showing their traitors’ colours now.’

  A line had been crossed, and everyone could feel it. Until now, both sides had been raising the stakes, sure that sooner or later the other’s nerve would break. But now weapons had been brandished. There were rumours that Parliament was raising an army against the King, and pretending it was for a war in Ireland.

  ‘Of course, the King’s gathering his own troops as well!’ Old Crowe was overheard saying to his son. ‘How else can he protect his crown and his people against Parliament?’

  ‘They’re both strutting like cocks and showing their spurs, and hoping it won’t come to blood,’ was the less charitable view of one of the stablehands.

  This cannot be happening, was the feeling everywhere. Surely there is a way to prevent this! Surely nobody wishes for war!

  But in August of 1642, in a field at Nottingham, the King had his royal standard raised and fixed in the ground. Its silk rippled as he read a declaration of war.

  That same night the King’s standard blew down in a storm, and was found in the mud.

  ‘It is an ill omen,’ muttered Mistress Gotely, rubbing at her gouty leg. She always claimed that she could feel coming storms as pains in her leg, and sometimes said that she could sense bad luck too. ‘I wish it had not fallen.’

  When a country is torn in two, it splits in surprising zigzags, and it is hard to guess who will find themselves on one side and who on the other. There were stories of families divided, friends taking up arms against each other, towns where neighbour warred against neighbour.

  Parliament held London. The King had made his base in Oxford. There was some talk of peace negotiations, but many more accounts of battles.

  At Grizehayes, however, the war always felt distant. There were preparations, of course. The men in the villages drilled on the commons, and green uniforms were made up for a local regiment. The Fellmottes ordered weapons and ammunition as well, and had the defensive walls of the great house repaired. Yet the idea that war could reach the Fellmotte stronghold seemed absurd.

  We will never change, said its grim, grey walls, and so nothing will really change, for we are all that matters. We are the great rock amid the world’s sea. The doings of other men may wash and crash around us, but we are eternal.

  CHAPTER 11

  In the season of bitter winds and long nights, Christmastide finally arrived. With its feasting and merry-making, it mocked the grey skies and defied the barren fields. It was a bright arrow through winter’s dark heart.

  For most people, the twelve days of Christmas were a very welcome break from work. However, there was no rest for the feast-makers. Makepeace was run off her feet preparing tarts, pies, soups, collops, roast fowl of every size, cold meats and iced extravagances. She was even put in charge of roasting the vast boar’s head, a patched and monstrous thing whose cooked snout still had an honest piggishness. Makepeace did not feel bad about cooking dead beasts and birds. They would have understood the belly’s need to be full, the hungry taking of life to stretch out one’s own life.

  To see Makepeace doggedly working, you would not have guessed at the secret plan burning in her heart like a cool and quiet fire.

  As usual, James had struck the first spark.

  ‘Twelfth Night!’ he had whispered to her one evening. ‘Think of it! The house will be full to the rafters! It’s the one night of the year when everybody from the farms and villages is allowed to feast in the hall at Grizehayes. The courtyard gates will be open, and the guard dogs muzzled. So . . . when the crowds start to leave, we slip out too. They won’t miss us for hours.’

  As Makepeace ran breathlessly from task to task, her mind was picking away at the scheme, It was a good plan, and could work, with enough cunning. But there were risks. Even if they got away, the siblings would be left homeless and friendless in the depths of winter, amid bare, hungry fields. She was not even sure she could count on Bear’s night vision, since he was ‘awake’ much less in colder months.

  Worse, many of the other Elders would be visiting Grizehayes for the feast.

  We’ll have to stay out of their way, James had said. Or they’ll know what we’re planning. They’ll see through us, right to the bone.

  By the time Twelfth Night finally arrived, Makepeace was exhausted, and had several new burns on her hands and arms from spitting fat, hastily handled skewers and jostled kettles.

  The great hall was trimmed with sprigs of holly, ivy, rosemary and bay, and in the huge, blazing fireplace could be seen the charred and glowing remnants of the Yule log, its ribbons long since burnt to shrivelled rags.

  Trappings of heathenry! the Poplar minister would have exclaimed. They might as well be sacrificing a bull on an altar to Baal! Christmas is a Devil’s snare, baited with ale, idleness and plum duff!

  Nobody else seemed alarmed by it, though. The villagers started to arrive in the afternoon, in nervous, jocose groups, marvelling at the carvings and clustering around the warmth of the hearth. A little cider lent them some confidence, and the time-blackened beams of the hall echoed with their raised voices and laughter. By the time the sun was setting, the hall was packed.

  The servingmen were run off their feet ferrying plates of food to the hall, and carrying ale and cider from the cellar, along with the few barrels of drinkable wine left over from the newly deceased year. There were always too few hands at the ready, so Makepeace found herself scampering between kitchen and hall, bearing plates of tongue, bowls of pale and lumpy brawn, and platters of cheese and apples.

  Over by the hearth she could see James filling the cups of the ‘better kind’ of visitor. Unlike Makepeace, he was considered handsome enough to wait upon the family and honoured guests. He was quick of wit, well-proportioned and athletic, with a pleasant-ugly face and an easy charm. Nobody seeing his good-humoured smile would guess that he was planning his escape that very night.

  Wait for me at midnight in the chapel, he had told her. Nobody will be there tonight.

  A great oaken throne placed near the hearth was clearly intended for the lord of the manor, but neither Lord Fellmotte nor Sir Thomas was in evidence. Instead it was occupied by Symond, who seemed to be revelling in his lordly role. He was surrounded by other courtly young bloods, also in their early twenties. If gossip spoke truly, they could all boast of eminent families or powerful patrons.

  The whole festival bore the marks of Symond’s interference. He had come back from court a self-appointed expert on elegant dishes, extravagant masques and the scandalous dresses that the ladies of fashion were almost wearing this year. On his insistence, Mistress Gotely and Makepeace had been struggling to stuff birds with other birds, and make marchpanes in the shapes of sailing boats.

  According to James, Symond had said he needed to be the best at everything. Perhaps it was just lordly vanity and a wish to be admired, but for a moment she wondered if the family’s golden boy was trying a little too hard. Why did he have so much to prove, and who was he trying to prove it to?

  Wassailers arrived at the door with a fiddler, declaring in song that if they were not given drink and meat they would set upon the company with clubs. Everybody cheered uproariously and stamped their feet, and the singers were welcomed in. A great wassail bowl of hot, spiced lamb’s-wool ale was brought in, golden apple pulp floating in its depths. A single piece of bread was pulled out of the bowl and ceremoniously
presented to Symond, who accepted the toast with a gracious dip of the head.

  Amid the laughter and uproar, Makepeace saw one of Symond’s friends slap his lace handkerchief into his cup of ale, and crumple it into a sodden ball to throw at his friend’s face. She felt an unexpected sting of anger.

  Stop being a Puritan, she told herself. It is his handkerchief and his ale – he can spoil them if he wants.

  And yet the waste enraged her. Somebody had worked for weeks to make that lace, stitch by careful stitch. Unknown sailors had braved terrible dangers to carry the soup’s spices from other lands. She herself had spent some time preparing the lamb’s-wool ale. The young blade’s little show of ‘lordly high spirits’ had wasted more than money or fine goods; it had wasted other people’s time, sweat and effort without a thought.

  Makepeace was still gnawing on this thought when she noticed that the joyous crowd near Symond’s throne was hushing and respectfully parting to let a single figure pass.

  Lady April was one of the Elders. She was not tall, and yet the sight of her seemed to chill the merriment and wildness out of everyone. The lace trim of the old woman’s black cap threw a perforated shadow over her puckered brow, bony nose and wrinkled eyelids. Her face was covered in the paint known as tin glass, leaving her skin eerily white with a metallic gloss. Her mouth was a vermilion sliver. She looked like a portrait come to life.

  Makepeace felt her own skin crawl and her blood chill. Was James right about the Elders seeing what you were thinking at a glance? She pulled back into the crowd, afraid that Lady April might turn an icy gaze upon her, and immediately know about all her schemes and the runaway pack of provisions and supplies Makepeace had hidden in the chapel.

  The handkerchief-thrower, however, failed to notice Lady April’s approach. He scooped up his handful of sodden lace and hurled it again, only to gawp aghast as it flopped against the hem of Lady April’s cloak. All colour instantly drained from his face, and his grin was replaced by a look of pitiable terror.