The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  “You are alone? Where is Richard? Fleetwood, you are full-bellied, you should not be riding now, surely.” There was fear in her voice, and she helped me into the house. I gave another groan. “Where is the pain?”

  “It started yesterday, I tried to ignore it but...it’s not time yet, Katherine, it’s too early.”

  “How bad does it hurt? Does it come in shocks?”

  “No, it’s constant.”

  I let her guide me to the great hall, where she had been embroidering a cushion. There were pins and thimbles and lengths of thread strewn over the draw-leaf table, and I thought of sparse Malkin Tower, and how all Alizon Device wanted was some pins. Katherine helped me into a chair.

  “Should I call the physick? A doctor?”

  “No. I need my midwife, Katherine. Ever since Alice was put in gaol I have got worse. I felt fine until she was in there. Roger said he would try to get her out, but I need her now with me at Gawthorpe. I asked him if she could stay with us until the trial—I will not let her go anywhere, you have my word and Richard’s. Please, ask Roger.”

  This I said through labored breaths, and Katherine handed me a cup of ale brought by a discreet servant. Compared to the life and chaos of the Law house, here it was as quiet as Gawthorpe. Roger’s father stared down at me from his portrait.

  “Roger is away—I forget where. Oh, Fleetwood, I am so worried. Tell me, what can I do?”

  “I need Alice,” I said weakly. “I need to get her out of gaol. Only she can cure me. She knows the herbs, and she knows the right tinctures.”

  “Perhaps the apothecary could help in the meantime? I will have our man ride out for him.”

  “No. I need Alice. Only she can help me. Only Alice. There is no time to write to Roger, or to the castle—I must go myself so she can help me.”

  “No, you should go home—but not until you have rested here. I will make up a room for you and I will tell Roger when he gets home that Alice should be released for your health. I think he is at York, actually...never mind, he will be home soon, today or tomorrow.”

  I thought of being shut up in one of Roger’s chambers and thought it no better than the gaol at Lancaster: he might lock me in and throw away the key.

  “Katherine, do you think you can persuade him to let her out?” I asked feebly.

  Her eyes were wide with compassion, her lined face grave. She cast around helplessly for some words of comfort. “I had an excellent midwife from Liverpool, but this was many years ago, I would not know how to reach her...”

  “No, it has to be Alice.”

  She wrung her hands together. “Fleetwood, I... She is a prisoner of His Majesty, I don’t see how...”

  “Just until the trial,” I said hurriedly. “I am worried my life is in danger.” For the first time there was fear in my voice, because what I was saying was true.

  “But the woman is on trial for witchcraft. The penalty for that is death. She will not be allowed to roam free before the trial. She will disappear!”

  I knew suddenly that we were being watched, and not by one of the painted faces around the hall. I looked toward the doorway and saw a pair of wide pale eyes staring back. Jennet Device did not look away, and her gaze was full of judgment beyond her years. I knew it was ridiculous to be frightened by a child, but there was something very strange about her. After all, she had stolen my necklace, and how without being noticed? I would not have wanted her staying in my house, gliding soundlessly over the flooring, appearing in doorways like a ghost.

  “Katherine, might you have your man check on my horse? I abandoned him quite at the door in my haste to reach you. I hope he has not wandered off.”

  Katherine leaped up, hurrying from the room in her effort to help. With her gone, Jennet slipped into the room and went over to the fireplace, kneeling in front of one of the stiff-backed oak chairs. She appeared to be carrying some scraps of cloth, and began setting them out on the seat, one next to the other.

  Unable to disguise my curiosity, I stood and went to stand beside her. “What are those, Jennet?”

  I noticed they were knotted in such a way they resembled human bodies—a large knot at the top for a head, with more knots and lengths between to represent arms and legs. I had seen these poppets before in church, in the fists of infants to hush them from crying or growing irritable. I felt certain Jennet was not a child who grew up with toys.

  “Who gave you those?” I asked. “Was it Roger?”

  “I made ’em,” she rasped in her scratchy little voice.

  “And you’ve stuffed them, too, how clever. What with?”

  “Mutton’s wool.”

  I felt certain she had only brought them in here to show them to me, like a cat bringing a mouse to its master. I looked at her thin, shapeless dress; unhappiness and neglect in every line of her. Because of this child, my friend and midwife was rotting in a place that light never reached, and would almost certainly meet her death at the rope. Because of this child, so many others were in there with her. I wanted to take her bony shoulders and shake her so hard her teeth rattled and her eyes rolled. I wanted to scream at her to take back every word, every lie she had told through her sharp little teeth. I could not look at her; I went back to the chair and sat facing away, staring instead at the genial face of Roger’s father, Alexander.

  Jennet was whispering something, and the sound of it made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.

  “What are you saying?” I demanded, so sharply she turned in surprise and regarded me with those wide, contemptuous eyes.

  “A prayer to get drink,” she replied, the picture of innocence.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Crucifixus hoc signum vitam Eternam. Amen.”

  I stared at her, piecing the vocabulary together. My Latin was poor because I had no attention for reading. Something about a cross, and eternal life? I wondered where she had learned it, because the words were pure popery. Had she said them in front of Roger? And if so, were the Devices in gaol only because they were Catholic? It made no sense—half the families in Pendle were. Roger knew that, and as long as they presented themselves at church each week and kept their eyes to the ground he gave them no trouble.

  Jennet came toward me and took the empty pewter cup at my elbow, and held it to the imagined lips of her poppets so they could drink.

  “Where did you learn that, Jennet?”

  “My grandmother,” she lisped.

  “You say that and she brings you a drink?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “Drink is brought.”

  “In what sense?”

  “In a very strange manner.”

  I watched her tend to her flock. Everything she said was strange. Had I been this precocious as a child? Almost certainly not. So perhaps a different approach was needed. As Richard said with his birds, loyalty was earned not demanded. I would not bring up the necklace, then. And Roger’s threat lodged in my mind: that Jennet might be encouraged to remember others present at her home. The idea was too grave to consider. I sighed.

  “Jennet?” I glanced at the doorway. “I think you may know my friend. Alice Gray?”

  She stayed hunched over her poppets. Her lank hair spilled down her back from beneath her cap. She did not reply, and neatened her cloth figures, brushing imaginary dust off them.

  “Do you know her, Jennet?”

  She lifted her shoulders: an acquiesce.

  “You do know her?” I leaned forward. “Do you think you might have got it wrong about her being at your house that day, at Malkin Tower?”

  “James stole a sheep for us to eat,” she said, pointing at one of her toys. They leaned drunkenly on one another. She pointed at another. “Mother told him to.”

  I licked my lips. “Do you remember Alice being at your house? Is she a friend of your mother’s, or had you n
ot seen her before?”

  At that moment I heard feet on the flags, and Katherine appeared bearing a tray. “More ale—are you recovered, Fleetwood?”

  I sat back, disappointed, and eyed the child in front of me. Jennet was smiling, and when I realized what about, a chill saturated me from head to toe.

  “Drink is brought,” she said happily, and turned back to her little creations.

  “Jennet, will you leave us?” Katherine asked in a strained voice.

  The child gave her a look, and swept up her toys in an armful, sending the pewter cup I’d drunk from clattering to the floor. She did not pick it up, and glided silently from the room. Now it was Katherine’s turn to sigh, and I noticed properly the lines around her mouth, the dull exhaustion in her eyes.

  “How much longer will she stay with you?” I asked gently.

  Katherine shook her head. “Roger cannot tell.”

  “Surely it is his decision?”

  “While she is here she is...useful to him. So I suppose when she stops being useful.”

  Her bluntness took me aback.

  Katherine sat back and sighed, reaching for her cup and drinking deeply. When she had finished she wiped her mouth and said, “I cannot tell you how glad I will be when the assizes leave and all this will be over.”

  “But, Katherine, how can you wish haste on the sacrifice of innocent lives?”

  “Innocent?” Katherine was bewildered. “Fleetwood, you nor I can make judgment on that.”

  “Do we not have eyes and ears like our husbands, and the men who will condemn them?”

  “You speak as though you know the outcome already.”

  “But I do, everyone does! In history, when have witches ever been treated with lenity? Katherine, we must do something!”

  Katherine gave a pleasant little laugh that made me want to slap her.

  “Fleetwood, your head is full of fancies. You speak as if we are in a play, all with a part to act. You and I have no role in the king’s justice. We support our husbands.”

  “We cannot stand by and let this happen!” I cried. “We must do something!”

  “Fleetwood, please,” Katherine coaxed. “Sit, you will exert yourself and cause harm to yourself and your child. Sit down. May I speak frankly with you?” It was unexpected, and all I could do was nod. “Richard loves you very much. He is very fond of you. The pair of you are lucky to be companions in marriage, not like most of our kind.”

  Briefly I wondered if she knew about Judith, or if Roger would have kept her in the dark about that, too, like he did all his women.

  “You must concentrate on raising a family, and being a wife. People...talk around here, you see, Fleetwood. And I know we are out of the way here as gentry folk. We are far from large cities, we have a certain privacy in this corner of the land, but that does not mean we can behave without propriety.”

  I shifted in my seat, the silence of the hall ringing in my ears. I waited for Katherine to wet her lips before going on. “You are very young, and very earnest, and dear. You are mistress of the finest house around. This child will make your life so full, and rich, and happy. You must take care to involve yourself in the right things, like the family and the home, and not be so upset by things that you have no agency over.”

  I felt as though she had crushed me like a carriage wheel. The words died in my throat, were lost in my sinking heart. “I want to help my friend,” was all I could say without choking. “Or she will die. And I will die with her.”

  The realization was lapping at my edges again—the knowledge that without Alice, I may as well have a rope tied, too. She had promised to save me, and I had promised to save her, and the chances of those things happening were now so small they had vanished from significance. I realized I was thinking in days now. When I tried to picture what my child might look like, and me holding it in my arms, I could not. Neither could I picture my life in five, ten, twenty years’ time. The date of the summer assizes loomed, and my life as I knew it was contained in these short weeks.

  “There is nothing I can do, Fleetwood.” Katherine’s voice was gentle. “Roger will not release her. She is on trial for murder by witchcraft—a crime punishable by death.”

  “Roger has it wrong. She has been cheated, by almost everyone in her life. I cannot let her down like the others. You must come with me to the castle, and plead for her release. You are Roger’s wife, you must have some authority.” I heard myself, and knew it was hopeless, and my shoulders sank in abject misery.

  “You are distressed. You need to rest. Let me take you to one of our chambers.”

  “No, thank you. I must go.”

  “You cannot ride home—you are unwell.”

  “I will go slowly.”

  Katherine smiled. “You are more like a man than a woman. I insist on having our man ride alongside you.”

  I reached into my skirts for the letters I’d written in the early light. “I have a favor to ask of you, Katherine.”

  “Oh, Fleetwood...what have I just said—”

  “Please. I ask nothing of you but this.” She was listening, and I gathered my nerve, and pressed the papers into her hands. The sealing wax was like bloodstains. “When is Roger next going to Lancaster?”

  “In a day or two, perhaps. Are these for him?”

  “No, and he cannot see them. I want you to go with him, the next time he goes. Say you wish for a change of scenery, and want to visit the shops—I don’t know. But go, and when you are there, you must find a way to visit the castle, alone. They know who I am—Roger will have warned them, which is why I can’t do it. You must hand these to the coroner Thomas Covell’s clerk at the castle. Don’t give them to anyone else—put them into his hands, and tell him to pass them with urgency to their intended. If the clerk asks questions, use Richard’s name, and say they are from him.”

  Katherine raised her eyebrows. “I don’t understand.”

  “Please, Katherine. I would not ask if it was not a matter of life or death.”

  “And there is nothing deceitful in this? Nothing that slanders my husband’s name? Why can he not know about it?”

  “He just can’t. If you do not wish to have my blood on your hands when I die in childbed, then you will do this for me.”

  We stared at one another, and there was a flicker of something like defiance in Katherine, but not toward me—I could see her tasting it, examining how it sat on her.

  “I will do it,” she said, nodding.

  I could have kissed her, and almost did, but settled for taking her hands in mine and squeezing them. She tucked the letters into her skirts.

  “A thousand times thank you,” I said.

  “Roger will be back from York tomorrow I think, unless the execution is planned for then.”

  “Execution?”

  “You have not heard? They found the woman Jennet Preston guilty of the murder of Thomas Lister’s father. She hangs today.”

  * * *

  Over the next days, I occupied my old role as the ghost of Gawthorpe, waiting at various windows for Richard. When I saw him approaching from the stables, I watched for a moment his easy swagger, the lightness of him after his trip to Preston, and I thought how untouchable he was, how easily he glided through life. The law would not touch him with a yardstick. Then I went to let him in.

  He seemed surprised to see me opening the door, then read something in my face, because he stopped. “What is it?”

  “Come inside.”

  His face fell. “You have lost the baby?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  Relief swept through him, clearing his face, and he mounted the steps, removing his gloves while I helped with his cloak. I led him through the house to the parlor and closed the door. Puck was dozing lazily beneath the window, and forced himself up to greet Richard, wiping h
is hands with his large tongue.

  “Do you remember the other day when Roger came to dinner and told us about the Lords Justices at the assizes—Altham and Bromley?”

  “Yes,” was his weary reply.

  “I have invited them to dine at Gawthorpe.”

  There was a pause, in which Puck wandered back to his warm spot. The baby adjusted its position in my belly, trying to get comfortable, and I rested a hand on it.

  “You invited them to dine here. At this house.” I nodded. Richard stared. “For what purpose?”

  “For the purpose of illuminating the plight of the Pendle witches.”

  Richard did not blink. His voice was calm. “You are making things very difficult for yourself, Fleetwood. For both of us.”

  “This is not about me, or us. This is about Alice and how she did not murder a child.”

  “That is for the jury to decide, not you, or Roger.”

  “Roger has already decided!” I cried. “He has already decided!”

  “Lower your voice,” Richard roared.

  He began pacing, his fury a clear, high note in the room. Pockets of red bloomed on my cheeks and I felt white-hot rage sizzle in my head. My ears rang, and I felt for my chair, sitting back down slowly. Puck whined and whimpered next to me, trying to reach my hands. I rested a trembling palm on his head and covered my face with the other.

  “When are they coming?” Richard asked.

  “When they pass through Lancaster next week.”

  “And Roger knows about this?”

  “No.”

  He gripped the back of the chair and shook his head. “You are making a mockery of the Shuttleworth name. For far too long I have let you run around like an infant, and now this.”

  “I make a mockery of our family? You are the one with two families!”

  “Damn you to hell, Fleetwood, I thought we were finished with that. Plenty of men have mistresses, it is not uncommon.”

  “We are common, then, are we? It is not the sort of thing that can be finished. I am trying to help an innocent woman—what is so wrong with that?”