by Stacey Halls
Roger tapped his nose and, folding his handkerchief neatly in his place, pushed back his chair to rise. “Allow me to introduce my most valuable witness.”
He left the room, and a little gasp went round the table when he returned with his wide, bearlike grip around the small shoulder of a little girl.
She strode with him into the room and they stopped short of the table. She could not have been older than nine or ten, and had a pale, pointed face with wide, clear eyes. Grayish-brown hair straggled from her cap, which was newly starched, and although her apron was tied tightly, her simple wool dress drowned her. She was not afraid to look each of us in the eye, and when her bold gaze came to me I could not look away. What I found disturbing was that she was neither afraid nor impressed, her expression as smooth as a painted portrait.
“This,” Roger announced, “is Jennet Device.”
“A popular name among their kind,” wheezed Mr. Bannister.
“Master and Mistress Shuttleworth, Master Lister, allow me to introduce you to my source of all knowledge. Jennet has been helping Mr. Bannister and me with our investigations. She is Alizon’s sister.”
I saw Katherine glance quickly at the girl with an expression both suspicious and fearful. She looked as though she would put another person between them if she could.
I turned to Mr. Bannister and whispered, “She is staying here at Read Hall?”
“Indeed.” He breathed. “In one of the children’s old chambers.”
I wondered what Roger’s family would think of that—I barely knew what I thought of it myself. The witch Alizon’s own sister? Nobody was speaking, and the way they were looking the Device girl up and down made my skin crawl, so I spoke. “Hello, Jennet,” I said. “How are you finding Read Hall?”
“Right nice,” the child rasped in a strong accent.
“And how long will you stay?”
“She will stay until the trial date is set at the summer assizes.”
Katherine made a small noise. “Summer? Roger, she will really stay for that long?”
“Where else would you have her go, Katherine? Her family is at Lancaster gaol and there they will stay until they are called before the Lords Justices.”
His words did not seem to disturb Jennet in the slightest; she continued to look around at the guests and the room itself, her wandering gaze absorbed by the portraits, the paneling and family shields on the wall. She had surely never seen such things in her life, nor a fire as great as the one that towered above her, nor food so plentiful.
“Will you have some of our second course, Jennet?” asked Roger. “We have roast chicken and beef, and bread, and some butter that was made this morning.”
Jennet nodded eagerly and was seated at the end of the table next to Katherine, who appeared no less uncomfortable. Though a trace of a hostess’s smile played on her lips, it did not reach her eyes. Her earrings glittered.
“Jennet was at Malkin Tower on Good Friday and has told me all that was said—including the plot against Master Lister here,” Roger declared as he returned to his seat. “There were quite a number of people present that her brother James told me of, and Jennet has confirmed all the names on the list. We work well together, do we not, Jennet?”
The child was eyeing the half-finished food at the table, and I could not help but glance at her every few seconds. Her head was so small I imagined Roger could crush it with one hand. She did not appear at all affected by the incarceration of her entire family, and I could not decide if that chilled me or made me pitiful.
The second course was brought and Roger and Richard talked of other things that interested them: the price of salt, what their cattle got at market. Jennet ate like a wild animal, with grease smeared all up her face and hands. I was still watching her when I heard Richard tell Roger he had ordered a gun, which made me look round sharply.
“A gun? Richard, you did not tell me that.”
Richard glanced at Roger as if to share something with him. “Fleetwood, I hardly think I need consult you,” he said. “Unless you have an expertise in guns I know nothing of?”
The table tittered, and I flushed. “Won’t it go off in the house?”
“Not if it is handled correctly, which it will be,” Richard said in an insolent way, and he repositioned himself more directly to Roger, indicating the topic was closed.
I tried to speak to Master Lister on my left but he was acting very strangely and would not make eye contact. I think the presence of the child frightened him. Katherine squirmed next to Jennet and did not speak to her once.
Before long the topic came back to Roger’s hunt for witches. “Let us speak of it away from the child in case it should give her nightmares,” Roger said. “Jennet, go up to your chamber and I shall send for you in the morning.”
The little girl slid sideways from the table without even removing her chair, she was so thin. She made no noise as she left and the moment she had gone, it was easy to believe she had never been there at all.
Roger turned back to us and grew confidential. “Her mother was beside herself when she found out the child had handed them over. I thought she would go mad before my eyes.”
Mr. Bannister burped beside me and pardoned himself, covering his mouth with a brown-spotted hand. “She is a sight for sore eyes, Elizabeth Device,” he said. “She’d give you a fright if you saw her—one eye set up in her head and the other looking right down at the floor.”
I felt as though a bucket of icy water had been thrown over me. I stared dumbly at Mr. Bannister, and he mistook my disbelief for fascination. “She does sound like something from a comedy play, but I’m not making it up. How she has three children by two men I’ll never know.”
My mouth was dry as sand. “Where do they live, the Devices?”
“Just outside Colne. A horrible, damp hovel is Malkin Tower. How folk live like that, I don’t know.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“This will not be pleasant. You will need a strong stomach.”
Alice took up one of the things she had set on the dresser in my chamber: a knife that folded in on itself, encased in a horn shell. For a terrible moment I thought she meant to perform surgery on my stomach, but she saw my expression and her scowl softened. “I will breathe your veins,” she explained. “It is the only thing for too much blood.”
She drew the dull-looking blade out of the horn handle and showed me how the point of the knife was flat, not sharp, and how a small triangle shape jutted down from it at a right angle. It was a curious-looking thing. She told me it was called a fleam, and she would place it on a vein in my arm then drive it in like a stake with the small wooden stick she held in her other hand. I had seen enough of my own blood and felt enough pain to fear neither.
Alice had appeared as mysteriously as ever, crossing the lawn in front of the house with round-shouldered purpose. She offered no chitchat, but nor did I. We’d grown easier in each other’s company, however—as easy as two women can be who could not be more different. I liked her soft voice, and wondered if she read to her father by the fire. Then I remembered she couldn’t read. Her voice was the only soft thing about her, though, I thought idly as she moved about the room with a brisk directness, her back straight, her neck long and equine. She’d have made a fine mistress of a house like this in another life. Probably better than I. Working in an alehouse might harden a person. Being poor almost certainly did. Still, she would leave wealthier than she arrived.
She told me to take off my jacket and layers so that my arms were bare, then pulled a chair over to the window and nodded for me to sit at it. Then she tied a length of ribbon round the top of my arm and prodded the white skin at my elbow.
“Alice,” I said. “Do you think that it will have eyelashes by now?”
“Eyelashes?”
“Do you think the baby will have eyelashes?”
> “What a strange question. It’s hard to say.”
I nodded.
“I will need a large bowl, and fresh linen and water. And a needle and some pale thread.”
I swallowed and fetched them from various parts of my room, but not before turning the key in my chamber door. Richard was with James and the ledger, and Alice was standing at the fireplace looking at the plaster figures on either side.
“Are they your family?” she asked.
“No. Prudentia.” I pointed. “Justia.”
“What does that mean?”
“Prudence and justice is the Shuttleworth family motto.” I nodded at the fleam. “Where did you get that?”
She wiped the blade on her apron for a few moments, then said, not unkindly, “You take such an interest in where my things come from.”
“Well, I am glad you did not ask me to find one. First, I would not know where to look. Second, I can imagine James’s face if I told him I’d ordered one.”
“Who is James?”
“Our steward.”
“Why would you have to tell him?” she asked.
“Everything we buy goes in the household ledger he keeps, and everything that leaves Gawthorpe, whether it’s beer from the brewery or chickens from the farm or midwives for the mistress.”
“Even me?”
“Yes, even you.”
My hand throbbed as the blood collected in it. She asked me to pass the bowl—a pretty brass one decorated with flowers, given to us by Richard’s mother—and set it on the dresser, placing my arm above it.
“Are you ready?”
Before I could say yes she had driven the fleam into the crook of my arm with the wooden stick, and I yelped like a puppy as she drew it out. Warm, red blood began gushing immediately from the hole she had made. I clapped my other hand over my mouth but could not take my eyes from the grotesqueness of it. I looked like a character in a medieval tapestry scene.
“What does prudence mean?” asked Alice, adjusting her grip on my arm.
A light, clear pain flooded through my whole body. “Ah...prudence. Prudence means... How long does this go on?”
“Until the bowl is half-full.”
“Half-full?” It was coming out so fast.
“What does prudence mean?” Alice said again.
“It means cautiousness. Proceeding with care.”
“And justice means freedom?”
“No,” I said, trying to look at anything but the bowl filling as easily with my own blood as if it was wine being poured from a bottle. My head felt as light as it did in the church, when I fainted. “Justice means fairness. Lack of prejudice.”
Working as quickly as she had before, Alice pinched the skin on either side of the piercing and drove a needle through it. I looked away as she stitched it with thread, wincing every time it made a puncture.
“I will look like a cushion,” I said, feeling her breath on my arm. “This will work, do you think?”
“Breathing the veins is the best way to bleed while you’re not having monthlies,” she said. “Bleeding can be healthy from the right place.”
She washed the blood from my arm and pressed a ball of linen to it, instructing me to hold it. Puck lumbered over, curious. I pulled the pad of linen away from my arm and saw how fresh blood was leaking through the thread. Puck sniffed and licked at it a few times before deciding it was not as tasteful as he imagined.
Immediately I recalled Roger’s words, Do you let your pet suck blood from you, Fleetwood? I almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
Alice wrapped my arm in a strip of linen and tied it before leading me to the bed and instructing me to lie down while she tidied up. The wound was on the same arm as my sprain—I had quite the inventory of injuries since meeting her, and I told her so. She smiled and closed the drapes.
“I do not feel any different,” I said after a while.
“Give it a day or two,” came her voice. I heard the tinkle of glass, or it might have been the pin rolling onto the floor. “If you feel no better we can try the other arm, with more blood. You still have the willow bark I gave you?”
“Yes.”
She appeared in the curtain fold with a piece of cloth no bigger than my hand, and took from its folds a single green leaf. She ripped a tiny edge off it and handed it to me. “Suck this,” she said. “It will stop the blood coming so quickly. But don’t have any more than that, and spit it out—don’t swallow it.”
I lay with my hands on my stomach, sucking the bit of leaf like a farm apprentice on a summer afternoon. It seemed to dissolve on my tongue, and a sense of peace washed over me. Though I’d only known Alice a fortnight, with her here my worries seemed to fade to dying embers, only to flare up again at night. She could not promise that she would save my life. She had not promised anything, in fact. But knowing she was trying to help me, I felt safer than I had perhaps since I married Richard.
“Alice, am I safe to keep riding in childbed?”
There was a pause while she considered. “I have not known many women who have horses, but my mother did, and she always said they could. Do you ride regular?”
“Every day,” I replied.
“Then you’ve no reason to stop if you’ve always done it, as long as you don’t come off. I expect for a skilled horsewoman it’s as safe as walking.”
“Richard seemed to think the last time that...it was my fault for being rough, riding around and playing with Puck. He thinks it’s not good for a woman. The truth is I’d die if I had to stay indoors all the time, sitting in hard chairs embroidering cushions, though he thinks that is the safest place to be.”
“Perhaps he wants to keep you where he can see you, like all husbands. Until they want you out of their sight, that is,” she added more bitterly.
“I thought you said you weren’t married?”
“I’m not,” she said quickly. And then as though she’d said too much and wanted to change the topic, added, “Oh, I found your horse that ran away. It’s back in your stable.” I was too surprised to reply. “Did you hear me?” she called from behind the drapes.
“Yes. Where was it?”
“A neighbor found it grazing in a field and brought it back.”
“You’re sure it’s the same one?”
“With the triangle of white on its nose? And a black tip on its ear? I’m sorry but the tack was gone, probably it threw it off.”
Or more likely someone stole it, seeing as I’d never known a horse to be rid of its saddle, bridle, halter and reins by itself.
Before I could reply, a noise at the door startled me, followed by Richard’s voice. “Fleetwood? Why is the door locked?”
I pulled open the curtains and Alice was already halfway toward me with my jacket, which I pulled on to cover the wound.
“Fleetwood?” Richard was rapping impatiently, and stepped immediately into the room when I finally unlocked the door. “Why was the door locked?” he asked again, directing the question at Alice.
She looked helplessly at me, and, panicking, I swiftly glanced over at the dresser where her things had been moments before, but it was empty and gleaming as usual.
“Richard, you must understand we do not want to be disturbed when Alice is doing her work.” I tried to sound soothing, but he was still glaring at Alice.
“And what work is that?”
I grasped wildly for an answer. “Feminine exercises.”
There was an awful period of silence that lasted perhaps five seconds, and Alice cast her eyes down to the floor. Where had she put her things so quickly? I eyed the corner of the room and the fireplace, but there was no sign of the bowl of blood.
“Very well,” Richard said finally. “Roger is downstairs, and wishes to see you. He has...someone with him.”
“Who is it?”
I could not say why, but there had been a coolness between us since Roger’s dinner. I wondered if I had irritated him by asking too many questions.
“You will soon find out.” He turned on his heel, but not before his eyes searched the room. “There is a strange smell in here, is there not?” His eyes lingered on Alice, then he left, closing the door firmly behind him.
“He meant the blood. I can smell it, too,” I told Alice, but her face was smooth. How like a window she could be: transparent one moment and dark the next. “Will you wait here while I see which guest has arrived?”
I could only hope Richard did not mean my mother. As I descended to the bottom of the house, I thought of the curious exchange I’d just witnessed. Richard had acted as though he found Alice’s presence offensive, revolting even. Well, he had chosen a woman as my companion once, and now it was my turn. But all thoughts of my husband and midwife evaporated when I turned the final corner of the staircase, for standing in the entrance hall were two figures: the expansive Roger Nowell and the parchment-thin Device child.
“Roger. Jennet.” I tried not to look so startled. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Jennet was not looking at me, but observing everything in her sight with her wide eyes—the oak banister, the portraits hanging in the gloom of the stairwell. She was still wearing the same old dress and starched white cap, which made her face look all the paler. Without saying a word, she walked to the picture window at the back of the house.
I blinked at Roger. “Do you have business with Richard?”
“Yes, he is waiting for me in the hall. I came to ask if it would not be an inconvenience to show Jennet around Gawthorpe while Richard and I discuss matters? She has never seen such a palace and would greatly enjoy a tour.”
I touched my arm where the fleam had punctured it; the linen was making it itch. I thought of Alice upstairs in my chamber, and looked over at Jennet’s small silhouette at the window.
Without waiting for an answer, Roger gave me a fatherly wink and departed, his polished boots echoing on the stone floor.
I swallowed and went over to where the child was standing. “That’s Pendle Hill.” I pointed at the looming mass in the distance. “And this is the River Calder. Sometimes you can see salmon jumping upstream.”