by Stacey Halls
“Alice, tell me,” I said as I pulled a clean smock over my head. “Am I keeping you from your father?”
“No.”
“Or anyone else?” I said. She shook her head. “The man in the alehouse...” I hesitated.
She looked sharply at me. “You saw him?”
For the second time I’d admitted to spying. I colored slightly, and nodded. “Just in the passage as he was leaving. Did he upset you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She turned so I could not see her face.
I combed my hair and picked up my corset wrapped in pearl-colored silk, rapping it lightly with my knuckles. I decided I would wear my gown without it today; I could not bear to bind my stomach again.
Alice saw me playing with it. “Do you ever tire of wearing clothes you cannot put on yourself?” she said.
“No,” I said truthfully. “I only dress once a day. Apart from today.”
We smiled at one another, and I knew I was forgiven.
A knock came at the door and someone collected the bathwater while another servant brought sugar biscuits and hot milk, which I shared with Alice. She said that she had eaten better in twenty-four hours than she had all year. We sat eating the biscuits and feeding crumbs to Puck, and with sugar crystals on my lips and my hair clean and soft and my gown fresh, it would have been easy to forget why I was here, but I couldn’t quite manage it. The reason Alice was with me was because I was growing heavy with child, and the reason I was here in this bright, airy chamber fifty miles away from my own was because my husband had another woman. It was all such a mess, but somehow it didn’t feel completely hopeless. Not yet anyway.
Before long my mother came in, and made no attempt to hide her displeasure at the sight of Alice sitting on her bed, her legs tucked to the side of her, a cup of milk resting on her skirts that were dusted with sugar. My mother did not knock; she preferred startling people, as Alice was now, coloring slightly and sitting properly.
“Will you dress today, Fleetwood?” my mother asked.
“Perhaps.” I saw her eyes flick momentarily to my stomach, which was more pronounced in just my nightdress with no layers of silk or velvet or wool piled over it. “Have you no wood for the fires? We are like two servants hunched over dying coal embers.”
Her eyes shone very black. “We keep a good economy in this house. If you prefer a wood fire I can fetch you an ax.”
We glowered at one another, then she left, closing the door firmly behind her.
“No wood, no wheat and no wax candles,” I thought out loud. “I am beginning to think my mother is growing cheap in her old age.”
Alice prodded the ashes in the hearth with the iron stoker. “How does she get her money?” she asked.
“I had never thought about it, but I suppose...from us.”
A bird sang in the canopy of trees beneath the window, sweet and clear. Us. I had always known that word to mean my husband and me, but all along he had two versions. Which one did he think of first? I slid my wedding band off my wet finger and slipped it on again. Off, on, off, on.
“You grew up here?”
“Here? No. I grew up at Barton.”
“Barton? But isn’t that...”
“Yes.”
Her eyes were wide. “Your husband keeps his mistress at your house?”
“I don’t see it as mine, but yes.”
“Why not?” I felt her golden eyes on my face.
“It was not a happy place.”
She let out a laugh, curling her feet beside her once again. “How can a manor house not be a happy place? Did you not have fancy gowns, and fine food, and servants?”
I did not smile. Earlier she had allowed me a glimpse into her life—a keyhole’s worth, but still a glimpse. She waited for me to decide how much to tell her, her clever eyes never leaving my face. I sighed, and crossed my legs to mirror hers.
“My father died a few years after I was born. I don’t remember him. Then it was just my mother and me. I had no friends or cousins or anyone to play with, apart from my bird, Samuel. One day I left his cage too close to the fire and he died. He was the only friend I had. I was a miserable child. Whenever I misbehaved, my mother threatened to send me to my husband. I should have got another pet, something to keep me company, but I didn’t.”
“Your husband?” Alice asked suddenly. “You mean Richard?”
“I was married before Richard.”
Before I could stop it, the memory that I fought so hard to forget leaped into focus: the parlor, my mother’s skirts disappearing around the corner, my husband’s deep, cracked voice, “Come to me, Fleetwood.” His large hand reaching under my dress.
“You were married before? So you were...you are divorced?”
“Heavens, no. The marriage was annulled so that I could marry Richard.” I sighed. “My mother decided the Bartons and the Shuttleworths made a better match. If Richard had not agreed... I would still be wed to Master Molyneux.” I had not spoken his name aloud in such a long time, but quite to my surprise it had no effect on me. It sounded like any name. “And I do not think he was a good man.”
Alice was quiet and thoughtful. “How old were you when you married the first time?” she asked.
“Four.”
Alice was shocked into silence. Then she said, “How old was he?”
“About thirty.”
“How awful,” she whispered.
“I only met him twice. Once at Barton, and the second time at our wedding. After that, my mother took me home to live until I was ready to be his wife. Thankfully that day never came.”
There was pity in every line of Alice’s face, and something else: a grave kind of understanding, as though she, too, knew what went on in the world, and had seen some of it.
“Why do you look like that?” I almost laughed. “Did you think I could choose a husband? Catch someone’s eye in the alehouse?”
“I suppose so.”
“The thing is, if I could, I would still have chosen Richard.”
“You must love him a great deal.”
“I do,” I said simply. “He rescued me from a different future, and gave me a new one. I had no say in the matter. But you—you are lucky. You can choose whomever you like.”
She gave a small smile. “I have never been called lucky before.”
“Do you meet lots of men at the inn?”
“Drunks, plenty.”
“A world of choice, then.”
We both laughed, and there was a comfortable pause. I wondered if this was what friendship was like.
“I can’t imagine going home,” I said after a while, growing serious again.
“What will you do?” Alice asked.
“I have no idea.” I twirled my wedding band round and round. “Do you want to hear a story?”
“Yes.”
She was almost like a child, with her knees pointing out and her elbows pressed into them.
“I do not know where it came from but people in the village at Barton, where my house was, say that a wild boar was running around causing havoc in the forest. My father offered up my hand in marriage to the person who could slay the boar. A hunt followed, and on St. Lawrence’s Day, the eldest Shuttleworth son slew it. There is an inn on the site called The Boar’s Head, and I’m not sure which came first, that or the story.”
Alice was confused. “But your father died before you were...”
“It’s just a story,” I said. “And do you know the best part? I am terrified of boars.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I have nightmares about them chasing me. I must have heard that story when I was a child because I’ve been afraid of them for as long as I can remember. The Barton family crest is three boars. I cannot bear to have it anywhere in the house, though Richard insisted w
e put it above the hearth in the great hall, should guests forget my lineage.”
I had not told anyone but Richard so much about myself, and felt slightly exposed. Alice was quiet.
“I bet you are not afraid of anything,” I said.
“Of course I am,” she said, and she pulled at a loose thread in her apron. “I am afraid of lies.”
* * *
That night, in the early hours, I woke suddenly. The room was black, with the candles burned down and their smoke not quite escaped. Something had woken me—a noise or a movement. It might have been Puck—he had taken to sometimes sleeping in the room with us. I closed my eyes and tried to get comfortable beneath the counterpane, but could not dismiss the feeling I was being watched. I pushed off the bedclothes and crawled to the edge of the bed to look over at Alice’s truckle bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The white linen glowed faintly in the moonlight, empty of any shape sleeping on top. The narrow bed was empty.
A breath of noise stirred behind me, and I knew immediately there was someone else in the room. I turned slowly, searching here and there in the dark, and almost jumped from my skin to see a tall figure in a white nightdress standing directly beside my bed, where my head had been. A scream died in my throat. “Alice?” I whispered, unable to even hear myself over the rushing in my ears.
She did not move, apart from swaying slightly, giving her the strange impression of laundry drying in a light breeze. I could not see her face.
“Alice,” I said, louder. “You are frightening me.”
Making no noise, she walked back to her bed and climbed into it. It took so long for my heart to stop racing, the edges of the window were light by the time I went to sleep.
“Do you remember what happened last night?” I asked her in the morning as she scrubbed herself with linen. She stared at me. “You were standing over my bed.”
“Was I?”
“Yes, you frightened me. I thought my heart would stop.” She appeared surprised, and told me she did not remember. “You rose from your bed while in a fast sleep?”
“Yes, but only since...” She stopped, and began scrubbing again.
“Since what?”
“Nothing.”
A few nights later, I woke with that same feeling again, and she was there, ghostly and moonlit, and then again a few nights after that. It always unsettled me, because I could not see her face, and was almost glad, because I did not know what I would find on it.
The easy way she took up the position made me wonder if it was something she had done in wakefulness. Could she have been dreaming of watching her mother in her sickbed? Or was she dreaming of the forest, feeling the leaves and mud beneath her feet and the birds in her ears? I never did find out, because she could never remember. That’s what she told me.
* * *
The cook at my mother’s house was a woman named Mrs. Knave, and it was thanks to her that after a long winter of hibernation, my appetite returned. She fed me apple pie, bread and butter, biscuits, gingerbread and marchpane. At mealtimes we had flaky salmon with creamy parsley sauce, oyster pies and beef that was soft and pink in the middle. There were fluffy potatoes and buttery carrots and cheese pasties that burned my tongue. Each night I had rosa solis—brandy with cinnamon—and the color slowly returned to my hollow cheeks. I hadn’t been sick once. After my conversation with Alice about my mother’s housekeeping, without consulting her I had the coal in the fireplaces replaced with wood and the tallow candles with wax, instructing the suppliers to bill Richard directly.
One morning the movement in my stomach woke me before it was full light. I lay with my hands on my rounded stomach, taut as a drum skin, thinking how strange it was and listening to Alice’s steady breathing. Dr. Jensen’s words came back to me, as they always did in the small, lonely hours, so I slipped out of bed and went to the window. The sky was a beautiful deep blue but the forest of trees that surrounded the house was still in shadow. Beyond them was the village.
The chamber was warm and the air stale, so I found my cloak and put it on over my nightdress. The passage outside was silent, my mother’s chamber door closed at the far end. I went quietly down to the kitchen, my mouth parched for a ripe pear or juicy apricot. I found a pear in a basket on the floor and went to the back door, turning the key to step outside and eat it while dawn broke and birds sang above me. The juice coated my hands and chin and I stood beneath the wide sky, thinking about everything but wishing my mind was still. My stomach rolled and tiny fists and feet pummeled and kicked.
“Good morning,” I whispered. “Shall we watch the sun rise?”
My skin itched again and I scratched distractedly, my attention caught by something at the edge of the bank of trees. It was an animal, weaving in and out of the trunks. In the morning light it looked the same color as Puck, but he was fast asleep on the Turkey carpet. I stood still against the wall and watched it come all the way around, looping through the trees as though making for the house without wanting to be seen.
It was a fox. It held my gaze as we each waited for the other to move first, then a large bird, a rook or raven, burst out of the treetops and flapped cawing into the morning. By the time I looked back, the fox had gone, but something about it pulled a thread in my head somewhere. It wasn’t until I went back upstairs and found Alice in our chamber making her bed that I realized what it was. She looked up when I came in, and I saw it: her eyes were the same color as a fox’s, like coins in the sun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two letters arrived at once: one for me, one for my mother, both from Richard. Even though it was only a piece of paper, I felt that somehow he had arrived at the house, barging in where he was not welcome. His slanted handwriting always looked rushed no matter if a letter took him all afternoon, and there it was, spelling out my name. While my mother pulled hers open straightaway, I put mine in my pocket.
Alice was in the garden. She had also been spending time in the woods, searching for plants she could grow in the kitchen garden, and I’d often look out the window to see her kneeling on the soil, her skirts bunched underneath her, her white cap bobbing among the green. A few days after the itching started, I watched her go from the garden to the kitchen door with a fistful of flat green leaves, then bring them to me in my chamber. She told me to rub them on my skin where it itched, and soon after it stopped altogether and my skin grew milky again.
“When I met you, you said children are more trouble than they are worth.”
I was standing outside watching her at work in the soil. Dirt streaked her face where she’d moved her hair from it. She sat back on her heels and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, warm from her industry despite it being a chill spring day. “And here you are planting a bed for one that is not yet born,” I considered aloud. “I wonder if you are afraid of having them, knowing what you do about the delivery of them. Usually midwives are old and past their childbearing years, or those I have seen are.”
“Perhaps.”
She seemed thoughtful and distracted at the same time. I watched her pull up a weed and toss it in her basket, and decided to go in, because the fresh breeze was no longer pleasant, but then she spoke.
“How many children do you want to have?”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Two,” I replied. “So that they would never be on their own like I was.”
“A boy and a girl?” she asked.
“Two boys. I wouldn’t wish a girl’s life on anyone.”
* * *
Richard’s letter stayed where it was in the pocket of my gown, and though I forgot about it, my mother decided that two days after his word came was the appropriate time to discuss it. I knew it was coming from the way she set her spoon down; I could see her tasting his name in her mouth.
“Fleetwood,” she said. “Have you thought about when you will go back to Gawthorpe?”
“No.”
“You have not thought about it?”
“I have not.”
“Tell me, then—” My mother sipped at her spoon of meal and honey. “What have you been thinking of?”
Until that moment I had not noticed a copy of the Bible lying next to her hand. She saw me looking at it and lifted it, opening it at the ribbon marker. “While we eat, let us consider the gospel according to Luke. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” She set the book down and took up her spoon again. “What do you think to that passage, Fleetwood?”
I pretended to consider and licked my teeth. “I think that it is remarkable how with his Bible, the king has a presence in every household, and on every bookshelf. He endorses not condemning, yet seems to do little else. Papists, witches...”
“The king has not written the bible, Fleetwood. This is the word of God. The king writes about witches in his own publication.”
“He does?”
She got up and left the room, coming back a few moments later with a slim volume bound in black calfskin, which she handed to me. I pushed my bowl away and lifted the soft cover. The word Daemonologie was printed below an ink depiction of the Devil. Flames licked his body and great wings expanded behind him. I looked up at my mother, who indicated for me to read on. “Written by the high and mighty Prince James,” I said.
Alice was looking at the book in my hands and I remembered she could not read. I turned the page and followed the king’s words.
“What does it say?” Alice asked.
“The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the witches or enchanters, has moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch in post this following Treatise of mine... He has written a book about witchcraft?” I asked my mother, leafing through what appeared to be a very thorough treatise.
“Twenty or more years ago, a ship he was traveling in to Scotland was cursed by witchcraft. He put around a hundred witches on trial for treason. There are witch trials held there twenty times a year. One of the stable boy’s distant relatives was executed not long ago; here in Westmorland we are not far from the border. Your friend Roger Nowell is only catching up with the times, Fleetwood. The execution of heretics is nothing new.”