The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  “What for, Mistress?” she’d ask in astonishment.

  “To help me grow a baby.”

  “All you need is a husband for that!” And she’d slap her red hands on her apron as tears streamed down her round face while she laughed and laughed. Then the whole town would know, and it might get back to my servants, who would tell in turn how the master had quitted my chamber, and us not five years married. No, it would not do.

  I rode my horse out of the town and took a shortcut through the woods. It was easier to think there than in the house, which was too quiet when Richard was away. I’d found the scale of Gawthorpe and the silence of it frightening at first. Wherever Richard went I would follow, and he called me the little ghost. If there were any ghosts, he said, which there weren’t because the house was so new it shone like a minted coin, they would think I was one of them, so would leave me alone.

  I suppose if only I had been more assertive, Miss Fawnbrake would never have arrived. When Richard called me into the hall, I saw her wide back turn from where she was standing at the fireplace so she could regard me with her glassy, vacant eyes that were too far apart, like those of a fish. Ten or more years older than me, she looked all wrong—her ruff was floppy and needed starching; her dress was too tight. Even her name was wrong: Miss Fawnbrake belonged to a coltish, beautiful young woman, and she was none of those. But what unnerved me the most was how she stood at Richard’s shoulder as though she had lived at Gawthorpe all her life. Richard was telling me he had found me a lady’s maid, to keep me company in the house. Dread poured into me, filling me from bottom to top as he told me how I’d be like a lady at court, who had women to sit and read with them or play games and music. In my meekness I could only stare at her hands, which were pink and dry like smoked ham, folded patiently with too much wrist showing because her sleeves were short. Richard knew I didn’t play music or practice my Latin vocabulary; he knew I liked to hunt and be outside with my dog, and the house was the problem, and him being away. Did he not?

  By this point I’d lost the first baby, but this was worse. I’d gone tearfully into the dining chamber, where Richard came to me, leaving Miss Fawnbrake curling her swollen knuckles.

  “I don’t want a nurse, Richard,” I had told him, my voice cracking.

  “You prefer to be alone? Fleetwood, you say the suits of armor frighten you.”

  “They do not anymore.” Hot, salty tears were falling down my cheeks, and I began to cry like the infant I was. My husband did not see me as mistress of the house. “I am not a child, Richard,” I’d sobbed.

  If only I could go now to that frightened girl, I would kneel on the Turkey carpet and take her cold little hands in mine; if only I could have done it years before that and said things will get worse before they get better, but better they will. Would I believe myself?

  Recalling her rough pink hands and her bloated, pockmarked face still makes me queasy. She was with us for eight months and I lost two babies in that time, one after the other. When I began bleeding and begged her not to tell Richard, she marched from the room to inform her master. Richard raced upstairs to find me hunched over the bed as pain folded me in half again and again. I wish he had not seen how incapable I was, how keenly the child did not want me as its mother. The first time I’d miscarried, before Miss Fawnbrake arrived, we’d been walking in the long gallery, talking about commissioning our portraits, when I felt a strange plucking below, and thought my bowel had opened. I did not know what was happening, did not know there had even been a baby, and Richard had tucked me in bed and washed me with a warm cloth and fed me broth and marchpane. He was sad, but also delighted that we had conceived.

  “We will have a baby by Christmastide!” he had said, smiling, and I had smiled weakly back, believing him.

  There had been no pain, just sorrow, and love. But then Miss Fawnbrake arrived, and there had been a great deal of pain, and even more sorrow, and guilt, and everything else.

  The third time was worst of all. Richard was away, and I’d been playing with Puck on the lawn outside the house, tugging him around by a stick he had clamped in his mouth. My stomach was big by that time, as though I’d swallowed a globe. A line had appeared down my front, and in my inexperience I thought that’s where the skin would come apart and my baby be lifted out when it was ready. That afternoon I’d fallen over more than once, and got muddy and wet, my playful Puck jumping all over me when I was down, licking my face and making me laugh. I remember the laughter dying in my throat when I saw Miss Fawnbrake watching me from the dining room window, and then for a long time it never came back, because that evening while I dressed for bed, the pains started again and didn’t stop for three days. A doctor was called, Richard arrived from York, and in a blur of pain and darkness I remember the feeling of something leaving me, and a midwife holding what looked like a white rabbit by its feet. For two weeks I did not leave my bed. Miss Fawnbrake was a malignant shadow in the corner, and one day she disappeared, and came back with Richard, who for the first time in our marriage raised his voice at me.

  “What is this about you rolling around on the lawn like an animal? Letting the dog trample all over you? Fleetwood, it’s like you have no interest in becoming a mother and insist on behaving like a child.”

  He may as well have called me a murderer. If there had been a knife with my untouched bread, or a red-hot poker in the fireplace, I would have rammed it into Miss Fawnbrake’s pallid chest, and proved him right. Once Richard could see how much passion she inspired in me, and how I ground my teeth when she walked into a room, he finally deigned to make rid of her with the idea that her presence was causing me to miscarry. While I did not think him right, I did not think him all wrong either. How I dreaded her face appearing at the door each morning to dress me, and how I hated the low, confidential conversations she conducted with my husband, with the servants. Before I could tell Richard about my day she had done it; before I could greet him at the door she’d taken his cloak. If she could have carried his child for him, no doubt she would have done. When Richard dismissed her, that night I found one of Puck’s turds beneath my pillow, dug from the grounds and carried up four flights of stairs in her chapped, swollen hands. Never again would I have a companion—it was like having a sister who hated you.

  Halfway home, my horse’s steady rhythm jolted to a shuddering halt and, before I realized what was happening, she began backing up and rearing, her eyes rolling and nostrils flaring. Surrounded by tree trunks and a chorus of rustling leaves, at first I did not know what had startled her. I knew she disliked harts and even deer, as she was not a hunting horse. Then a movement ahead drew my eyes, which fixed suddenly on the source of her alarm. A red fox was tensed ten yards ahead, large as a young doe and just as sleek. I had only a second to take in its pointed face and flattened back, its bristling tail frozen in a perfect line behind it. What I remember thinking before I fell was how unmoved by us it was, as though we had disturbed it in some private reflection.

  The last thing I saw before my horse flailed again with the effort of communicating her terror was the animal’s reproachful golden eyes. I hit the ground with a crack, landing on my left wrist and feeling several things at once: the pain in my arm, the wet ground underneath and the mounting knowledge that the horse was going to crush me underfoot. For she was panicking, rearing and bucking around the ten-yard-wide clearing that I was lying in. I placed my good hand on my stomach and spoke calmly to the horse, but her hooves went on pacing, her sweating flanks strong as a damn. My wrist sang with pain and I thought I might be sick. I tried to push myself up and cried out with the shock of it. There was a tree trunk two or three yards away, so I leaned on my elbows and tried to drag myself toward it.

  “Damn fox,” I muttered. “Damn mule.”

  “Don’t move.”

  A woman emerged between two trees. At once I knew her—she was the same strange girl from the woods the other day
. Proceeding cautiously toward the wild horse with her hands outstretched, she did not speak or click her tongue, but the effect of her presence was as though she had, with her clear gaze and steady hands. Submitting gratefully to direction, the mare stopped her twitching and came to a halt, her black eyes wide. While the woman held the sweating beast still, I watched her golden hair twisting from beneath her cap, her long face serious. Her hands were slim but too bony to be elegant. I tried to push myself up again and winced with pain, my wrist burning hot as coal.

  “Don’t move.”

  She spoke again in that low, musical voice, flickering like a flame in all the green. She was wearing the same old dress as before, the same mutton’s wool cap. As she knelt next to me, I smelled lavender despite her dirty clothes. Carefully she took my gray wrist in her long white hands and I gritted my teeth. Looking around, she got up and snapped a short stick from the low branch of a tree. The woods whispered and shivered around us, and for a brief moment I thought she might use it as a weapon to strike me with. But she knelt again, ripped a length of fabric from her grubby apron, tied the stick to my wrist and bound it tightly in three places.

  “Only a sprain,” she told me. “Nothing is broken.”

  “What are you doing here?” was all I could say. She regarded me with those curious amber eyes. “Why do you wander about the forest alone?”

  “Why do you?” she said.

  With my good hand I prodded my stomach to check it was still there and didn’t hurt, but my corset made it difficult to tell. Her eyes traveled to my front, concealed by folds of velvet and brocade, though perhaps not to her, then flicked over my face, my dry lips, my bloodshot eyes and gray pallor.

  As if she could smell the sickness on me, she said, “You are with child.”

  My vision blurred, the forest leaped around me, and as though she had invoked it, I leaned over and vomited on the roots of a tree. Sweat drenched my face and I wiped it with a shaking, muddied hand.

  “You live at the big house by the river?” she asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “You told me last time. I will help you back, Mistress...”

  “Shuttleworth. There is no need for it.”

  “You can’t ride, and you are weak. I will take the horse.”

  “I’m not getting back on that stupid mule.”

  “You must. Here.”

  She made a cradle for my foot, and with difficulty I hoisted myself up. My skirts were damp and muddy, and made a mess on her hands, but she did not seem to notice or mind, and reluctantly I clicked my tongue and dug my heels in and we began at a gentle pace.

  It was spring, and the trees knew it, but the weather had not caught up with them. They stood proud and green as a cavalry, though the wind bit their trunks and snapped at their leaves. It crossed my mind that when these same leaves turned orange and fell to coat the floor, I would almost certainly not be here to see it. I closed my eyes and we rode on in silence.

  “Thank you for helping me,” I said after a while. “I may have been trampled to offal by the time my husband found me.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Richard Shuttleworth. Where do you live?”

  After a pause, she said the village a few miles to the northeast.

  “Colne is not so close. What brings you to my land again?” If I sounded peevish, I half meant it. I had not forgotten the massacred rabbits, the limp form dangling from her bloodied fist.

  “I did not know it was your land.”

  “And if you had not been on it I might not have lived to tell the tale.”

  We moved on in a more companionable silence, me on horseback, she on foot. I only wondered later how she knew the way, with the trees so thick and the uneven ground showing no clear paths. But I let her lead me, happy as the horse was for someone to take charge. My wrist throbbed and my teeth were thick with sourness.

  “Are you ill with the child?” she asked.

  “Always.”

  “I can give you something to help.”

  “You can? You are a wise woman?”

  “I am a midwife.”

  My heart beat a little faster and I sat up straighter. “You deliver babies that live? And the women—they live themselves?”

  She looked at me strangely. “I do everything I can.”

  That was not what I wanted to hear, and I sighed and sat back in the saddle, a cloud eclipsing my brief moment of relief. We did not speak for another minute or so, then I asked if she had infants of her own. But her reaction to the simple question surprised me. I saw a twitch of something in her face—was it irritation?—and she kept her eyes on the ground. The knuckles in her hand holding the rein flared bone white as she gripped tighter. I had upset her. I always managed to say the wrong thing, and my shame sat heavily on me.

  After the longest time, she spoke, so shortly I might have missed it. “No.”

  I sighed inwardly. I knew not how to speak to women my age, having no friends or sisters. Eleanor and Anne Shuttleworth were the closest I had to either, and I could hardly bear to be in their simpering, frothy company for more than a day or so. This young woman was being polite, as a poor village girl might with a gentlewoman. But for once in my life I wished for a normal conversation with a young woman, as equals, sitting across from one another at a card table or side by side in saddles.

  “I have just had a thought,” I announced, trying to sound merry. “I do not know the name of my savior.”

  “Alice Gray.” She answered quietly, before adding, “The women that do not live...it’s only when it cannot be helped. I know it to look at them.”

  I swallowed. “How do you know it?”

  Alice Gray considered her response, and I watched her narrow shoulders in her wool dress that was slightly too big. “It’s in their eyes, a giving over to...whatever is beyond. You know the daylight gate?”

  I nodded, wondering what dusk had to do with childbirth.

  “When the light and darkness are equal forces—partners, if you will—then there is a moment, very quick and quiet, where you can see the day giving in to the night. That’s when I know. That’s what it’s like.”

  She sounded like a witch, and I almost said it.

  “You think me full of fancy,” she said, mistaking my silence.

  “No, I understand. The death is inevitable, like the darkness.”

  “That’s exactly it.”

  Not for the first time, I wondered what the darkness felt like when you were half in the light. I think I may have come close to it, but the pain anchored me to the earth. I watched Alice Gray’s dull cap that cried out to be starched bob alongside the horse’s shoulder, and imagined telling her about the doctor’s letter. But like with Richard, the words would not come.

  “You are young for a midwife,” I said instead.

  “I learned from my mother. She was a midwife. The best, actually.”

  I felt the doctor’s words in his letter tighten once again round my neck, and with my good hand I adjusted my dirt-spattered collar. “Do you know it to look at a woman with child?” I asked. “If there is a chance she might die?”

  “Sometimes,” Alice replied.

  Where she had been eloquent earlier, now it was as though a curtain had come down over her mood. She was not beautiful but there was some vital quality that made her interesting to look at: the long nose; the intelligent, searching eyes in a hungry face; the hands that brought life into the world. She was quickly becoming one of the most fascinating people I’d met.

  I swallowed again, tightening my grip on the rein as though it tethered me to this life. “Do you know it to look at me?”

  Alice Gray glanced up at me, then her amber eyes went back to the floor. “No,” she said.

  I could not tell if she was lying.

  * * *

  Back
at Gawthorpe, the servants made a great fuss getting me off my horse and inside the entrance hall. As they lowered me down, I searched for Richard’s face in the four or five gathered on the steps, and there were more in the windows. But of course, I thought dully as they helped me up the steps like an old duchess. He was away. In all the activity, I remembered Alice, and slapped a maid’s hand away as she tried to remove the crude stick and rags splint.

  “I shall keep it on, Sarah,” I said, as usual managing to sound spiteful rather than gracious.

  How queer the servants thought me. For a whole year I dared not give them instruction—some of them were forty, fifty years my senior. Once, when I was fourteen or so, and brushing my horse in the stable, I heard one of the yard boys call me the child bride. I had stayed there until dusk, prickling with shame and afraid to come out in case they’d know I heard. When Richard asked where on earth I’d been for so long, I told him, tears smarting in my eyes, and the lad had been dismissed within the hour.

  Sarah let go obediently, but not before I saw the story forming in her mind, the one she would save for the buttery. I would not have any of them come near my wrist. That’s when I noticed Alice, almost out of sight, descending the front steps. I called her and she paused, framed in the rectangle of daylight, for the entrance hall with its warren of passages was very dark. The servants also came to a collective halt, regarding her with open curiosity.

  “Will you come in for something to eat?”

  My ears were growing red, and I had to clear my throat, knowing everyone was paying attention. I was never more uncomfortable in a role than as mistress of a staff of servants.

  Alice looked uncertain, as though trying to determine whether I had issued an invitation or a command. But Sarah decided for her, ushering her in with an impatient tut and closing the heavy door behind her to keep the spring chill out. The lanterns flared and settled, and Alice wrung her hands.