The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  * * *

  I went straight to James’s study. Even though the fire was lit, I was cold as stone and my teeth chattered in my head as I drew out the thick book bound in calfskin. In his neat handwriting was a list of everything bought and paid.

  March: two loads malt; rundlet of sacke; three great salt lings delivered to Thomas Yate in London...

  What was I supposed to be looking for?

  April: Michael Thorpe to Colne with bacon; half a year’s rent for Ightenhill Park; the carriage of a gun down from London.

  Could it be the gun? I knew about the gun!

  Mr. William Anderton to bring marriage license from York.

  I paused on this, my finger holding the place. Why would anyone at Gawthorpe need a marriage license? No one was betrothed, as far as I knew.

  That’s when I noticed a word so familiar to me I had overlooked it altogether:

  Sweet soap to Barton.

  Coals from Padiham pit to Barton.

  Chickens bought at Clitheroe to Barton.

  Barton.

  Barton.

  It had been my name and also my home. But nobody lived there: it had been empty since my mother and I moved out four years before.

  “Mistress, here you are.” James stood in the doorway, his usually composed face a mask of concern. “Was there something you needed?”

  “No, James, thank you.”

  I slammed the book shut and moved around the desk, embarrassed. But when I brushed past him into the passage, suddenly the rage returned: How was I doing something wrong by looking at my own household ledger? Why shouldn’t I care how the property I’d brought to this family was being kept, as though none of it was my business? Something told me I had to be careful. I’d left Alice in that dank little room at the alehouse and they were my parting words to her. “Where will you go?” I’d asked, and she had shrugged, and stared only at the empty hearth. I’d been too consumed to offer my help, and galloped the short ride home in a fog of my own turmoil.

  “The master has been searching for you,” said James. That’s when I realized his usual composure was absent; he was very pale, and grave.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “One of the servants has been taken ill—Sarah, the chambermaid. Richard has asked me to send for the doctor.”

  “Very well. What is the matter?”

  “She complained of a headache, and now is in a fever. She is delirious and asking for her mother.”

  “Then send for her mother. Or can she be sent home?”

  “I think it might be best, once the doctor has seen her. In case it’s catching.”

  I frowned. There was far too much in my head at once, with supplies being sent to Barton and servants being struck down with illness and Alice’s association with the Devices, and the ruby necklace. More had happened today than in a year.

  “She seemed fine earlier,” I thought out loud, remembering how she’d spoken up in Richard’s household meeting. Then I remembered Alice’s anger when the room emptied, and my stomach sank. I prayed silently that the sweating sickness or some other deadly disease had not come to this house.

  The passage outside was dark, and James’s study was friendly and warm, and a twenty-mile ride that I had no wish to make lay ahead. But it had to be now.

  “James, I need you to do two things for me—have my horse saddled, and pass Richard a message.”

  “The master is due to return any moment...”

  “The message is this—I am going to Colne to take a room at an inn there, and try to persuade Alice to return as my midwife.”

  He looked at me in astonishment. “But, Mistress...”

  “I feel as though Richard handled the necklace business quite poorly—you were there. You saw it. But of course you won’t tell him I said that. I am afraid he has cost me a skilled midwife who I trusted and liked very much, and I will have no one else deliver my child. Tell him what you will. The real reason, James, is that I cannot stand to look at my husband for the way he treated the staff. You are all loyal and precious to me, and I hope you won’t think badly of him for it. That is why I am taking a room there, just for tonight. I think there is an inn called the Queen’s Arms there. That’s where I’ll go. Please tell him not to follow me, and I will be back in the morning.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded smartly. “Yes, Mistress.”

  I turned, and then, as though I’d just remembered, half turned back, hoping my face was hidden in the darkness and did not give me away. “Oh and, James? How are things at Barton? All in order?”

  His face fell at once, and he went quite gray. It was all I needed. He opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish while I waited calmly. “Might you need something fetched from there, Mistress? It has been shut up for...”

  “Four years, has it not?”

  His mouth closed. His Adam’s apple quivered as he swallowed his words. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Very well. I will get my cloak.”

  * * *

  I arrived shortly after night fell. There was no moon, only clouds, so everything was black, but I saw the vast shape of the house lurking ahead, and warm light burning merrily in a room on the ground floor. I had not wanted to come back here ever. I did not want to see the chamber my mother and I shared. I did not want to see the parlor where my childhood ended in the time it took my mother to fetch something. I did not want to see the creaking staircase, the high, cold ceilings or the empty cage where I had found Samuel dead one winter morning after he’d been left too close to the fire.

  I dismounted a few hundred yards from the house when a noise, or rather a presence made me turn my head, and something very low and slim crossed the grass to my right. It was no more than a silky shadow, but it paused, its brush-like tail straight out behind it: a fox. It froze, still as a statue, and we stared at one another, and my skin tingled. But then it bolted and disappeared in the blackness, and I carried on alone, stumbling on the front steps and cursing the clumsy pattens that protected my slippers. I flung them off and they clattered to the ground.

  The entrance was dark, and that old chill caressed me at the door “Hello?” I called. I dared not—could not—think of what, or who, was in the room I knew to be the great hall. At worst it might be a vagrant—or would that be best? The door opened with no resistance into the entrance hall, and in my slippers my feet were almost silent. The only sound I could hear was my breath ragged in my chest and my blood pounding in my ears. I walked blindly in the dark, my hands out in front of my face, to where the door for the great hall was, feeling my way along the walls. I tried to ignore the thought that I might touch the face of a person waiting for me in the dark. After combing the walls from top to bottom, I found the handle I’d been searching for and pulled it.

  A warmly lit scene met my eyes. The sconces were glowing around the walls, and the glass above the fireplace cast light back into the room that reflected again off the chandelier. At the great fireplace that measured ten feet across—the one I used to walk around inside and be scolded for when my slippers were ruined on the ash—a woman was seated. I felt as though I was dreaming, floating, as I approached her, for she did not seem to get any closer. She noticed me, and stood. She was older than me by a few years, and her dark head was uncovered. She looked very afraid, and I did not understand, and then I did, and my heart fluttered and stopped.

  A noise in the passage behind me should have startled me, but did not, so when James appeared behind me, breathless and steaming from the gallop from Gawthorpe, I barely reacted. My eyes were fixed on the woman before me, because her cloak had fallen open when she stood. Her stomach was round like mine.

  The floor tilted. The stone flags rushed to welcome me as their old mistress, and I was grateful for their embrace as my world came crashing down, and my body went with it.

  PART T
WO

  WESTMORLAND

  (NOW CUMBRIA),

  MAY, 1612

  “Laws [are] like cobwebs, where the small flies are

  caught but the great break through.”

  Sir Francis Bacon

  CHAPTER TEN

  The cushion cover I was embroidering was so dreadful it looked as though a child had sewn it with its eyes closed. But nobody said so, and I decided that when I finished it I would give it to my mother’s cook, who, with Alice’s herbs, was feeding me the most delicious food I’d tasted in my life. I knew she took pleasure in watching my cheeks fatten and my stomach grow. I began by stitching the plants Alice had laid on my dresser: the lion’s mane–like marigold, the tiny buds of lavender. If Alice noticed, she didn’t say anything, but she was not interested anyway—she was spending hours at a stretch outside on her hands and knees in the soil, coming in with her hands and dress dirty and washing them with the jug in the chamber that we shared.

  * * *

  James had escorted me back to Gawthorpe, through the wind and rain, and as soon as I reached my chamber there I locked the door. It stayed locked for a full day and night, and I grew used to the sound of Richard pounding at it because it was difficult to mind anything with my stomach so empty. Prudence, Justice and I waited, for what, we didn’t know, but then late on the second day, when I began to think seriously about having my fire lit and some food sent, one of the chambermaids came to the door and said there was a messenger arrived from my mother. Through the keyhole I told her to pass on to the messenger that I wished to be left alone, and her voice became more anguished as she returned and introduced a male voice I did not know.

  “Mistress Barton wishes me to inform you that a caroche is waiting outside Gawthorpe,” the voice said. I waited. “She asked me to pass on that it will not leave until you are in it,” the messenger said.

  “Then it will be there until it rots,” I said from my bed.

  The man cleared his throat. I wondered who else might be standing with him in silence. “Mistress Barton is inviting you to stay with her at Kirkby Lonsdale. She thought you might wish for a change of scenery.” There was a deferential pause. “I am to wait here until you are ready.”

  I stayed where I was for quite some time, sprawled in and out of the bedclothes. Eventually, my voice choking, I said, “Are you there, Richard?”

  After a pause, the messenger said, “I am quite alone, Mistress.”

  With an almighty effort I dragged myself off the bed and went to look at the keyhole. All I could see was a clothed thigh and sword sheath. I went back to the bed. Even after a day and night, I still had not been able to comprehend the scale of betrayal. It began in my bed and spread down to the brewery that was sending beer; the study, where our loyal servant James committed each individual blow to ink. It had traveled to the Hand and Shuttle, where I assumed Alice had heard of it. And it even seeped into my past, spreading its stain on my already unsentimental childhood. That was almost worst of all: that Richard was keeping his woman in the house I grew up in, that was handed over to him like a parcel the day we married, because he knew I would never go there again.

  That was when the thought occurred to me: Did my mother know about the dark-haired woman with her full belly? As the afternoon wore on the question hummed in my ear like a fly, and then I heard Puck barking on the other side of the door. He scratched and whined outside it, and I realized I had not given him a thought, concerned with only myself. I went to sit at the door.

  “Puck,” I said in a small voice. “Puck, stop. I am here. I am here.”

  Tears streamed down my face as he howled, a sound that felt as though it was ripping me in two, and no matter what I said he would not be quiet. The need to hold him overwhelmed me, so I turned the key in the lock and he fell inside, knocking me onto the floor. His huge tongue wiped at my face and I could not help but laugh as he climbed all over me, whining and panting and making noises of pure pleasure. When he had quite finished I pulled myself up to sit. The messenger stood away from the door, waiting diffidently.

  “I will come but only on my terms.” He bowed graciously, then stood up straight, expectant. “I will bring my dog. And there is somewhere we must stop on the way.”

  “Should I send for a servant to pack your things?” he asked.

  “I will pack them myself.”

  * * *

  During the journey north, Alice and I came up with a plan. So Roger could not find her, she had left her position at the Hand and Shuttle, telling the landlord her father was ill, and needed caring for. I waited a few streets away in the carriage, so as not to be seen. When she climbed in I asked if there was anything she needed from home, and she said no. There was a nervous urgency about us both, because she was running away in all but name. We decided she would come to my mother’s as my companion Jill, which she told me was her mother’s name.

  As we waited at an inn yard while Henry changed horses, the smell of supper cooking and meat roasting wafted in, and I asked if she would like anything to eat. She shook her head. It was a pleasant May evening—warm and still—and we listened to the sounds of the yard, of horses’ hooves and people chatting and going about their normal lives, with the curtain drawn across the carriage door so nobody could see in.

  “You said your mother was a midwife,” I said. “Is she...”

  “She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was years ago.” Alice sat very straight, had good posture even without a corset.

  “What did she die from?”

  After a moment, she replied. “She had a fever. She was ill for a long time, then that carried her into the next life. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Did you learn about herbs from her?”

  She nodded. “She had a garden...her kitchen, she called it, because we did not have one. She grew things to eat, herbs... I try to keep it going because I know how she loved it. She told me the names of everything. We would go out walking and she would show me things and tell me what they could do. She said it was useful for a woman to know, for a wife and mother to keep her family together in this world. She loved to think of me with a family,” she finished softly.

  “Where did she learn her trade?” I asked.

  “Where does any woman learn it? By doing it, I suppose. She and her friend did it together, they would go where they were needed. Mouldheels, they called her friend Katherine, because she took so long over everything, making sure it was all right. She always folded her map away properly even if the mother was screaming to high heaven.”

  “And you would go with them?”

  Alice nodded and smiled at some private memory.

  “How many babies have you birthed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know...twenty? Maybe more?”

  Her answer surprised me—I had thought her more experienced, but then I hadn’t asked. After a while I asked if her father would miss her while she was away.

  She thought about it, then shook her head. “No. What I do, perhaps, but not me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cooking. Feeding the chickens. Keeping the house. Earning money.” Her voice was flat.

  “You never thought of marrying and having a house of your own?”

  Her face darkened suddenly, a cloud over the sun. She appeared to consider her answer, then said, “There is no difference in it, really. It’s the same life for a daughter as it is for a wife—just a different man telling you what to do.”

  “I suppose you are right,” I said. “But you would have infants of your own. Every woman wants that, it’s our purpose in life.”

  Alice lowered her eyes. “Children are more trouble than they are worth.”

  It was a strange answer, especially for a midwife.

  Henry climbed up onto the roof, jolting us in our seats, and we set off again. Whe
n she did not speak, I thought I may have offended her, until a few miles later, when I began to doze, and I heard her say in a quiet voice, as though to herself, “I have never been in a carriage before.”

  Darkness had fallen when we arrived. I had time to prepare myself because the ride up to the manor was steep, and I had to press my feet against the seat opposite to prevent sliding down. Set up high, the park stretched to the top of the valley where rocky debris and heather met the sky. The manor itself sat on the side of a hill in the midst of a copse of thick woodland. Puck was asleep, as was Alice. She was an odd sleeper and still somehow looked alert, her neck long, her face impassive, as though she had just closed her eyes.

  The carriage drew up and I climbed exhausted from it, dog-tired after my second long journey in as many days. Puck dropped to the ground behind me, yawned and stretched, and Alice after him. Henry unloaded my trunk and the wide front door opened at the top of the steps, spilling light onto our strange party and framing the clear silhouette of my mother.

  “Fleetwood,” she said, her thin voice carrying into the night. “I thought you would never come.”

  I glanced at Alice and together we ascended the steps.

  The house my mother lived in was owned by the Shuttleworths, bought by Richard’s uncle some two decades before as a place to rest or hunt on the road to Scotland. I had been once before, when my mother was ill with a bad chest and Richard persuaded me to visit.

  I decided I would get straight to business. Before my trunk had even been set down on the stone flags of the entrance hall I turned to face my mother. “Did you know of Richard’s woman?”

  “Of course I knew, Fleetwood. Now get inside before you are dead on your feet.”

  Though she’d only confirmed what I suspected, still I felt as though she had driven a sword through me, then pulled it straight back out again.

  Alice took my arm and almost carried me through carpeted corridors to a snug room that was sparsely furnished. There were no books, vases or jugs, just bare surfaces, as though they were waiting to have their things replaced after dusting. Mary Barton had always taken a Calvinist approach to furnishing, but here the carpet needed replacing, the fire sweeping, the windows washing. She took her seat by the fire and indicated I take the one opposite—even these were old and tired. I wondered if the furniture had been updated since Richard’s uncle bought the place twenty years ago. But it was warm, and a low coal fire burned in the grate. There was a mildly unpleasant smell, cloying and meaty, and it took me a moment to realize the candles put about the room were tallow, not wax. Burning animal fat slid down their sides, and I wondered why on earth my mother did not use wax, but did not ask.