The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  The Lords Justices exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

  “Is Padiham in the forest of Pendle, too?” Sir Edward asked politely.

  “The boundary is that river there.” Richard indicated with his knife. His tone was generous, but his mood unreadable. “So you are safe in this house.”

  “You cannot swear to that,” Roger said. He was looking directly at me. “Seeing as one of the accused has been a guest here, and may well have left her evil stain on it.”

  Several powerful, intelligent gazes turned on me at once, and my voice died in my throat.

  Roger’s massive presence commanded the table, and the men peeled their eyes from me to look in disbelief at him. “One of the accused is a woman called Alice Gray, and she was Fleetwood’s midwife.” He said the word with the same incredulity as if she’d claimed she was a mermaid.

  Sir James pulled a puzzled face. “How very unusual.”

  “Quite.” Roger did not move his eyes from my face.

  In that moment, I hated not only him but Richard for inviting him, when he knew my mission. Things would have been entirely different with them both out of the way. I could have pleaded Alice’s case and perhaps made some difference. But here we were, all together like one unhappy family. At that moment, the main course was brought out: a huge pike curled gracefully on a platter the size of a carriage wheel.

  Richard’s eyes met mine, and there was danger in his look, but also something that looked like guilt. Perhaps he realized now why I had invited them to dinner, and how he had made it impossible.

  “Gentlemen, before we enjoy our next course, may I speak with my husband’s permission?” I glanced again at Richard, who gave a quick, solemn nod. Roger cleared his throat, but I went on. “The woman who has been a guest here was my midwife, and friend, and her name is Alice Gray. She is on trial at the Lancaster assizes, accused of murder by witchcraft.”

  An attempt at a protest came from Roger, but I continued. My voice was high, and nervous, and I prayed it wouldn’t falter. “Alice was working for me for some months, and she is an exceptional midwife. She is highly skilled, and learned her skill from her late mother, Jill.”

  I swallowed and looked at each of them directly, and they were all staring back at me, rapt, as though they had never heard a woman make a speech, as though I was a performer and they’d paid a penny.

  “Alice is very generous, and obedient, and kind,” I went on. I knew I was standing on the edge of a cliff with one foot dangling over; one mistake and I would slip. “A long time ago she was... She...”

  I faltered, then I felt the most curious thing: waves of encouragement were radiating from somewhere close by, like heat from a fire. I breathed in, and felt warm, and comforted, so carried on. “A long time ago she found herself in a terrible situation no woman should be unlucky enough to experience. She has few family and friends—her only friend is sitting in the dungeon at Lancaster. I hope that...”

  I blinked as tears came to my eyes. My throat became thick with emotion. “I hope that you will not punish her for the tragedy she endured, because she has already suffered immeasurably—”

  Roger cut me off, shooting up in his chair. “I think we have heard quite enough. This is not a courtroom and the woman’s plea will be heard where and when it is appropriate.” His face was a dark red-purple with years of wine and getting his own way, his eyes little beads of malevolence.

  I nodded and turned again to the Lords Justices. “I invited these men to my home, and I’m sure they do not consider it impertinent of me to talk fondly of my midwife, who they will soon meet in different circumstances. Are you offended, gentlemen?”

  They shook their heads, bewildered but polite. Silence covered the table like a dustsheet, and the only noise was the rain falling softly against the windows.

  “Gentlemen, when we are finished eating I will show you around the house, if you would like to see it,” Richard said.

  Everyone was glad of the change in atmosphere, and the mood lifted as Richard cut fish for everyone and told a brief history of his uncles. Only Roger and I sat like dark clouds, wondering which of us would burst first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  One dreary, rainy afternoon a few days later, I was lying in my silent confinement when Richard knocked on the chamber door. He told me Lord Montague’s players were in the area and would perform at the house that evening. Usually this would thrill both of us, but things were different now.

  “Why in heavens would James agree for them to come at a time like this?” I asked, moving to sit upright.

  Richard sighed. “I asked him to invite them months ago. They only announced their arrival this morning.”

  He left immediately and, wearily, I forced myself out of bed to get dressed.

  I should have been surprised to see Roger sitting in the great hall, his hands knitted together resting on his large belly. But when I walked in, with Puck at my hand, my eyes were drawn not to Katherine, pale and drawn-looking on his left; instead they fell on the dark-haired woman sitting on his right. Her eyes were cast down into her lap, but her white collar lifted her features and pulled them from some distant corner of my mind. Behind the table, she had attempted to conceal beneath folds of brocade and taffeta her huge stomach. My head swam.

  “Mistress,” Roger said pleasantly. “May I introduce Judith, the daughter of my great friend Jeremiah Thorpe of Bradford—not to be confused with the Thorpes of Skipton, but perhaps a distant relative?”

  There was a stunned silence, broken moments later by footsteps in the passage. Richard appeared in the other doorway. It took less than a second for him to take in the scene before him, and the color drained from his face.

  What little resolve I had, the kernel of hope stuck deep inside me that had got me this far, vanished, like some tiny object being pulled into a great, powerful river. I knew it the moment it went, and I knew, too, that it was gone for good.

  “Roger,” Richard managed to say. But he was not angry; he was as breathless and surprised as if his friend had stabbed him.

  Then several things happened at once. Puck began barking, unsettled by the awful feeling in the room; James arrived in the doorway to announce the Lord’s players, who could be heard assembling in the hall; Richard regained his color all at once and turned an unsightly beetroot purple—I had never seen him so angry—and Judith looked up. When I watched her, all the noise in the room and in my head quietened. Her heart-shaped face was the color of cream, and her plump cheeks were the delicate warm orange of roses. Her liquid dark eyes gazed fearfully at Richard, but there was also guilt there, and admiration, and respect, and I could not deny it: love.

  The chaos of the room came back and I put my hand to Puck’s head, which silenced him instantly. He whimpered once and stood still. James trembled in the doorway, his mouth a perfect hole of surprise.

  Richard strode over to where Roger was sitting at the table, a thorn between two trembling roses. “Roger, what do you mean by this?” he roared. “What on earth possessed you to do this?”

  Katherine looked tearful, and had lost more weight since the last time I saw her. With a distant pang of guilt, briefly I wondered what it had cost her to defy Roger for me. Judith looked terrified, her lovely features arranged in an expression of anguish.

  “Answer me now before I get that sword down and run it right through you, damn you, Roger, answer me!”

  Roger’s eyes traveled uneasily to the monstrous weapon that glittered above the fireplace. “As you know, Richard, Judith is a friend of the family, and I invited her to stay at Read Hall for a spell as she is sometimes short of company. So when Lord Montague’s men announced their arrival in Pendle and inquired as to whether I would enjoy a private performance at Read, I found out they were also performing at Gawthorpe, so naturally I saw the opportunity to bring our families together for the...occasion.” He s
pread his hands wide to encompass everyone in the room.

  If I felt my resolve be swept into a river, then Roger was the river. I did not know where his evil stopped: it could not be stopped. It was so forceful and smooth, gathering everything up as it went along and swallowing it.

  “Master?” James tried timidly to thaw the frozen scene before him. The only person who was at ease was Roger, drumming his ringed fingers. Behind him, where the low voices of the players buzzed a minute before, there was a hush as they awaited instruction.

  Very slowly and stiffly, Richard turned to face me. His face was a mask of grief. It probably mirrored mine. “Fleetwood, will you join us?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion.

  I blinked through tears at Judith, the woman with whom I shared a husband and now a home. She kept her gaze on her hands, which were folded in her lap. I sniffed and nodded, taking a seat next to Richard.

  While wine and sacke was brought, six or seven men trooped into the gallery and took a bow. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” A young, handsome one in the middle spoke. He had a wide mouth and a clear, gentle voice. “Master and Mistress Shuttleworth, thank you for inviting us into your splendid home. Tonight’s play is a national favorite from one of the greatest living playwrights, and it is certainly one of our favorites to perform. A tragedy of ambition, a maze of morals and with a touch of magick, cast your imaginations to deepest, darkest Scotland—which should be relatively easy in these climes.” He paused in anticipation of a titter of appreciation, so no doubt the collection of stony faces a few yards below unsettled him. “Ladies and gentlemen, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth!”

  With a flounce of his cloak, the assembled men left the gallery save for three, who had pulled their cloaks up over their heads and sat hunched in a tight circle. I was vaguely aware of all this, but my mind was occupied by a dull kind of numbness. I had seen the play before.

  * * *

  “Round about the cauldron go;

  In the poison’d entrails throw.

  Toad, that under cold stone.

  Days and nights has thirty-one...

  Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

  While the players chanted, from the corner of my eye I was aware of Judith, sitting still and upright, her face turned up toward the players but perhaps looking about at the room: at the china vases in the cabinets, the polished sconces on the walls, the portraits, all ordinary things, but no doubt of great interest to her eyes. She would be drinking in every detail of his house to savor and think of later, to imagine him wandering about the rooms where before he would have wandered about in her imagination. Unless, of course, she had been here before.

  Rain lashed at the windows; the players could barely be heard and were raising their voices, sounding slightly hysterical.

  “Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

  Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf.

  Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,

  Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark.”

  The rain lashed, and Judith’s presence was loud as a bell. I could feel her casting glances at me, but I kept my face on the gallery. How lifeless we must all look, how dull and bored. The clock ticked loudly. I thought of the stairs down to the dungeon, and the door closed on the darkness. Tick, tick, tick.

  Root of hemlock, digg’d i’ the dark.

  A servant taken ill. A rag poppet on a bed, tied with black hair to a child. A bowl of blood, vanished. A falcon ripped to death. A nightdress in the dark, floating palely, coming ever closer.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Please, stop.”

  Richard leaped up in alarm and clapped his hands. “Gentlemen. My apologies, but my wife has been taken ill.”

  I was vaguely aware of confusion, and apologies, and the gathering up of things and more faces appearing in the gallery, and the clink of coins. I sat staring at my hands that were ice-cold and dead-looking. Soon I might actually be dead, and Alice, too, but this room and these people would remain, and the year 1612 would become a distant memory, a long time ago. Wine would be poured for Richard and his new wife, and Roger and Katherine would play with their pink-cheeked child. I could feel the other child’s presence in the room, feet away from me, waiting to be born, waiting to claim its place, and Judith mine.

  Even in life I had been the little ghost, and now I was consigned to death. I held my stomach, and imagined disappearing. It would come soon, no doubt, but it would not be gentle, like the light leaving the sky. It would be painful, and terrifying, and lonely, with no cool hand on my head, no amber eyes willing me calm. There would be a trial, and Alice would die, then I would die, both of us killed in an outbreak of misfortune. I closed my eyes, and thought of my child, and how much I wanted us both to live. My earthly life was coming to an end, and the end was nigh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was the day before the assizes opened, and almost every man and woman in the county and those surrounding it had come to see the fates of the Pendle witches unfold. The streets of Lancaster were thronged with horses and carts and people and dogs and cows and chickens and children and all kinds of obstacles that led our coachman to curse audibly and repeatedly behind Richard and me as he navigated the cart carrying our luggage and a travel-weary Puck. Sat tall on my horse, I kept my eyes down as we crossed the cobbles to join the throng moving up the hill, feeling my skin prick with stares. I wanted to disappear, but with the size of my stomach I was as conspicuous as if I’d grown a beard. The narrow streets were a mass of brown clothes, white caps, black hats and unwashed skin. I watched a little boy of one or two stumble into the road in front of my horse and be wrenched back by his mother before the horse’s plate-sized hooves claimed him. She caught my eye, and I think she was surprised at how indifferent I was, how unmotherly.

  Richard and I traveled all the way in a numb sort of silence with Puck occasionally padding at our sides or trundling behind us, whining occasionally with discomfort. It was a welcome relief when the noise and distraction of Lancaster arrived. By midafternoon we were pulling in to the yard of the Red Lion, a modest inn shielded by trees, tucked away down a narrow road leading to the river. I barely noticed the room we were shown to on the third floor, but it was clean and well furnished, with carpets on the cupboards and a handsome four-poster bed. I glanced around the room for the truckle bed for Alice, before realizing there was none, and there would not be one again. When my trunk was set down with a thud I jumped, and the porter looked at me with curiosity. The baby bucked and rolled inside me, invigorated by the long and bumpy journey. I was so big my skirts hung inches away from my legs, and so far from the floor I might have grown upward, as well.

  Bread and milk was brought for the dog, which he ate gratefully before setting on the Turkey carpet in front of the fireplace. I could not settle so easily: I was cold and shivering, and lay on the bed, drawing my knees up to meet my stomach.

  Richard stood at the window, his hands clasped behind his back. Since the dreadful dinner a week before, I had barely spoken. I had barely eaten or slept. I drifted up and down the long gallery, my legs planted wide on the polished wood to balance my massive stomach. Or I sat at various windows, facing out, and the baby moved for both of us. I could tell Richard was still anxious I would lose it, and I felt like telling him there was no need to be so worried about things that were out of our control, when there was so much that we could have done, and had not. The appeals we should have made; the help we should have offered. I dared not think it was too late, but part of me knew it was: for me, for her, for everything.

  “How do you think it will go?” Richard spoke.

  I stared at the wall. “They cannot be found guilty,” I replied. “Their only witnesses are each other. They are like children telling tales.”

  “People are hanged for a lot less. Do you really think they know the Devil?”

  I thought of
Malkin Tower poking up from the moorside like a finger from a grave. How the wind had howled there; how it would drive you mad. I thought of Alice’s home, open to the sky; the damp streaming down the walls; the child she knew as a daughter buried in the thick wet soil. What was there for them in this life? In the shadows cast by their fire at night, perhaps they did see things they wanted to see. “If the Devil is poverty, and loneliness, and hunger, then yes, I think they know the Devil.”

  Richard went to the castle to find out when the witches’ trial would start. For the rest of the day I lay fully dressed on the bed, staring out the window at the trees, with Puck lying next to me, thumping his tail happily at being allowed on the counterpane. Even with the glass separating me from the street, I was aware of a strange quality to the air—it seemed to be oozing down the slope from the town toward the river, and I realized it was excitement. The trees shivered with it and it bounced off the walls and flags of the yard like rain. More carriages were arriving at the inn, and the yard was full of people with brightly expectant faces talking to one another. Women carrying babes cradled them patiently; men stood astride the cobbles with a sense of purpose. I knew that if I could listen I would hear a hundred different opinions, all of them certain. Neighbors denouncing neighbors, which was how the dungeon was filled. It was the most reliable trait of humanity. Rumor spread faster than disease, and was just as destructive.

  A maid brought a tray of food and set it on the cupboard, bowing clumsily, flinching when she saw the dog. I didn’t look at the tray, let alone touch it. I felt for the paper in my pocket I had put there the night before—my statement defending Alice’s innocence that I hoped to read aloud before the judges. A more eloquent version of my speech to the Lords Justices, I had written it at least five times, the paper blotting with ink and tears and tearing under my shaking hand. If they would not let me speak, I would try to have Richard stand for me. He did not know this yet, because I could not face him refusing me this one kindness, though I would never ask anything of him again. I did not know if they would let me read it at the assizes, did not know of any time when a woman had been allowed to stand up and speak when she was not in the dock. The idea of doing it sent my legs to melting, but then I thought of Alice’s face, blinking in the light after being kept in the dark. She had to be there, yet I had a choice. Roger had said no witnesses would be brought, but the Lords could surely not ignore the polite request of a member of the gentry, when they had dined at his house? I would leave it until the last moment to ask Richard, because I was not convinced myself that it would be enough, and until I was, I could not persuade him with conviction.