The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  The rain was soft, like Richard kissing my shoulder.

  The papers in my pocket would be soaked.

  Alice. I had to save Alice.

  I opened my eyes, but it was as black as if they were shut. I closed them against the pain, and waited for the darkness to come.

  * * *

  “Mistress?”

  Birds were singing. The sound of them was so cheerful. Arms lifted me. Another stab of pain coursed through me, like I was lowering myself into a scalding bath.

  “My God, look at her.”

  “Is she dead?”

  They sounded afraid, and I had no wish to open my eyes and look at whom they were talking about.

  “Is she bleeding?”

  I was being lifted up, but I was heavy, my dress soaked with rain. More pain, too much to make a sound, and cold—so cold.

  “She’s shivering.”

  “Quick, be quick, man!”

  Then I was moving, with a steady rhythm like a baby being rocked in a cradle, and I could see green leaves and dark branches waving above me, and hear the wind sliding through the woods. I liked the woods, and felt safe there, and I must have fallen asleep because suddenly I was being carried upstairs, laid across a powerful chest like an offering. Strong arms held me, and we moved upward, and I wondered if this was God taking me to heaven. Then I was in my chamber, being lowered into bed, and the counterpane was pulled back, and all the drapes opened, and people were standing around the bed, but I did not have time to look who they were because another crease of pain was starting, and it brought me back to life, because although I was awake, I felt as though I was dreaming. And that’s when I realized where I was, and what was happening to me.

  The baby was being born.

  I screamed, and tried to sit up, and at some point my gown and jacket and farthingale had been removed and I was lying in my smock, which was stained red from my waist to my ankles. “No,” I murmured. “No, no, no. Richard! Alice, where is Richard?”

  “We are fetching Richard,” said a small voice next to me, and I saw one of the boy apprentices from the farm standing inexplicably by my bed.

  “The boars,” I told him. “I need Alice. Send for Alice.”

  He wrung his cap in his hands, frightened out of his wits.

  “George, go back outside and wait for the midwife,” said another voice, and it was James the steward’s, who was standing at the foot of my bed. His face was gray.

  “Midwife?” I asked, aware that another roll of pain would soon knock me sideways. “Is Alice not coming? Only she can help me. Where is she?”

  And then I remembered. I had left Lancaster to visit John Foulds, and have his statement, because the trial was today. Alice was standing trial, several miles away, and I was here, bleeding, and that only meant one thing. My earthly life was ending, and so was hers. A great roaring wail came from somewhere in my stomach and escaped from my mouth. “Alice! I must get to Lancaster—the trial is today. Am I too late?”

  “The master is on his way, Mistress, he is almost here, and a doctor, too, and a midwife.” James’s dark eyes were shining with terror.

  “Where is my gown? Fetch my gown.”

  Someone—not James—brought it to me from where it must have lain crumpled on the floor, wet with soil and blood and rain.

  “The pocket, open the pocket.” I could not do it myself; I was braced against the pain, propped on my elbows, trying not to look at the blood coating my smock and the sheets, trying not to cry. But I was so terrified, and no one knew what to do, least of all me, and if I was going to die on this bed I at least wanted to hold my husband’s hand while doing it, because I loved him, and I forgave him everything, and hoped he did me. Bits of paper were being drawn out of the ruined gown, and I snatched them out of the woman’s hand—a kitchen servant—and cried out with relief, for they were dry, protected by the lining.

  And then I was being trampled, again and again, by this great wheel of agony, and then it went away, and someone came and told me to sleep, and bathed my head with a cloth, but it was not Alice, and it was not the same.

  “Alice is innocent. I saw John Foulds,” I muttered, and this voice said “shh, I know, I know,” and then perhaps I did sleep, because the next thing I was awake, filled again with panic that the trial was happening several miles away and I was not there, and could not move.

  And then Richard was in the room, filling it with his compelling power and authority, as if the king himself had walked into my chamber.

  He fell on me, taking my hands, and his face was wet. “My little ghost, what have you done?”

  I was vaguely aware there was another woman with him, a stout, wide sort of presence with pink skin, and I thought in horror that it was Miss Fawnbrake. But Richard told me it was a midwife from Clitheroe, and she would... But I was not listening, because now he was here, something strange was happening, as though I was sinking into sleep. But I had something to give him—I felt around on the bed for the papers, and thrust them into his hands.

  “Richard, you have to go now, you have to read these at the assizes.” My mouth was very dry, and my voice faint.

  “What is this?”

  “Richard, please, listen to me. These statements could set Alice free.” Another bolt of pain seared me like an iron white from the furnace. “You have to go and insist they be read, or read them yourself. It’s my statement, and John Foulds’s.” My head was spinning, my vision blurring. Her earthly life will come to an end.

  “Of course not, Fleetwood, I am staying here, with you.”

  “You have to do this!” I all but screamed. “Get her out, Richard. Get her out! Only she can save me, and only I her!”

  “Enough!”

  His voice was like the voice of God, swimming around in some great cavernous darkness, because I was drifting away from him, from my chamber, from everything. I thought I knew the pain, but it turned out I’d only had the best of it, and the worst was to come.

  I was being stabbed with knives. I was being washed with flames. Chains covered me, and kept me down, though I tried to lift myself, and couldn’t. My limbs: full of water. My body: cut in half, sliced from the scalp. Every inch of me screamed, except for my mouth, because when I opened it nothing came out. Water—I needed water in my mouth. Water to extinguish the flames that licked along my spine. I was on fire. I was dying, I was dead, and must be in hell. I could feel water streaming out between my legs, because they were wet—I needed it on my skin, in my mouth. Darkness came again, mercifully wrapping me in its thick black cloak.

  “Fleetwood.”

  “Fleetwood.”

  “Fleetwood.”

  There was love in the voice, and grief, and it was shaking with both of those things. A woman’s voice, or was it a man’s? Was it God’s? The pain—I was pain, it was not separate from me, was not something happening to me. Darkness came again, and I was grateful.

  A blackbird sitting on the bedpost. The sheets white, and clean, and tidy. Blue sky framed in the window. The bird cocked its head, expectant. Samuel, I thought. His feathers gleamed, but were streaked in parts. He shook out his wings, and a black cloud appeared, like smoke. Soot. He had flown down the chimney, and wanted me to let him out. “All right,” I sighed.

  A streak of fur against my arm. I knew it was a fox before I opened my eyes. It was standing on the floor by my bed, staring at me with wide amber eyes. It looked as though it was desperate to tell me something, and I laughed, and said “What is it?”

  And then the strangest thing happened: the fox opened its mouth and spoke, and it was female, and what it said was: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” Shame on him who thinks evil of it.

  * * *

  The darkness went on for so long, I could not remember what light looked like. But then there was candlelight, dotting my vision like pearls on a black velvet
dress. A cool hand on my head brought me out of the darkness. It was the hand of light, but the hand of darkness tugged at my feet, at my arms. No, I want to stay in the light. I tried to brush it away, concentrating on the small, cool hand—or was it a cloth?—on my head that was anchoring me to the room in the wild, dark sea that raged on inside me.

  “Push,” a voice said. “You have to push.”

  A white cap. A twist of golden hair tumbling from it. It was the girl from the forest with the bag of rabbits. What was her name?

  A wave of pain crashed into me, and to end it I had to strain against it, to push it away and out of my body.

  “Push!”

  Something spilled, and there was a gush like a barrel of fish knocked over. The wave was coming again, building slowly, then crashing, and I strained harder, harder, harder, until I thought I might burst.

  “When it comes again, push!”

  Oh, did it have to come again? Yes, it was coming now, and I was ready for it this time, braced against it like I was about to do battle with some ancient deity, and knew that I would lose, but would do my best anyway. There was a horrible cry, an agonized groan, and I wished whoever it was would stop, but then I realized my mouth was open and my lungs were emptying, and it felt good, like I was wringing myself out, because it was louder than the pain.

  And as my cry died, another one started up. But this one was much softer, and in short little bursts rather than one great long note. The crashing waves had stopped, and were coming now in little lapping motions, like bathwater against the tub. That strange noise again, almost like a lamb, or a kitten. Suddenly I felt more tired than I’d ever been in my life. I wanted to sleep, and although my limbs were heavy as lead, my heart drummed on furiously, going bang bang bang.

  But there were people in the room, and they were being loud, even though I wanted to sleep. I heard the word blood over and over, and they sounded panicked. Had they never seen blood before?

  Sleep—I needed sleep.

  “Fleetwood, stay with me. Fleetwood, stay here.”

  Where else was I going? I was too tired to move. The darkness that had been tugging me earlier had now wrapped my hand in his, ready to take me with him. Ah, that’s where they meant. Don’t go with him. I can’t go, I said. I have to stay. Another tug, more insistent this time, and with it I knew it would be quiet there, and peaceful, and safe. I was already lying down—it would be so easy to surrender to warm, thick darkness.

  “Fleetwood, drink this.”

  Just wait a moment, I need to have a drink. A drink would be good. With difficulty, for he was strong, I removed myself from his silky grip, and felt a cup at my lips, and something warm and sweet in my mouth. Then the liquid was replaced with something hard and earthy, and I was told to chew.

  As I came to my senses, the room was mercifully quiet. A single bird sang outside the window, framing the light gray sky, and the fire burned merrily, filling the room with the scent of woodsmoke. A woman was bent over the fire with her back to me, stirring a pot, and the sharp tang of herbs scented my chamber. Pain echoed around my body still, and every part of me wanted to sleep. I watched her, and saw the creamy curve of her neck, and the mischievous way her hair refused to go neatly in her cap. She stood and went to look at something at the foot of the bed, and made a gentle noise.

  “Alice,” I whispered, and I don’t know she heard me, but she looked up, and I saw she was crying. She moved toward me, and knelt beside my bed. I went to sit up, but she put a firm hand on my arm. We looked at one another for a long time, and I wanted to ask her things, but the effort of speaking would not be worth the answers, because for now they did not matter.

  “Willow bark,” she said, and I realized the bitter wood was still in my mouth, and it was perhaps helping, for my mind felt clearer and my heart no longer galloped. I wanted to wipe her cheeks, because tears were falling down them freely, collecting on her jaw and running down her neck. “You should sleep.” She moved to stand up, her skirts rustling.

  Obeying like a child, I closed my eyes. There was another rustle, and the comforting scent of lavender, and I felt on my forehead her lips, very softly, and her breath on my cheek.

  When I reached again for the darkness, it was not there.

  PART FOUR

  “Kind friends know and keep.”

  Kay-Shuttleworth family motto

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Richard Lawrence Shuttleworth was born just before dawn on the twentieth day of August 1612, the same day that ten witches were hanged on the hill overlooking Lancaster.

  Alice Gray was not one of them.

  It was only because Puck had run from that deep pocket of forest to Gawthorpe, which was actually only a mile away, that all three of us—Alice, my son and I—survived. His barks at the cellar door roused the servants, who woke James, who woke some of the apprentices, and my dog led a torchlit procession through the trees back to where I lay in the mud, arriving as daylight broke on the first day of the witch trials. One of the men—the best rider on the fastest horse—raced forty miles to the Red Lion at Lancaster to fetch Richard, who was worked into a frenzy not knowing where I was, and having asked at every door in Lancaster if anyone had seen a small woman with a large stomach and a huge dog. All I’d left was a note saying I’d be back before the trial started. He had even gone to the home of Thomas Covell the castle keeper, but the words died in his mouth as he realized Roger might be sitting in the parlor with an ear to the door, so he stammered an apology, and left.

  When his man from Gawthorpe arrived before breakfast, he said he heard the hooves on the cobbled yard beneath the window and knew it to be a message about me. He wasted no time, and rode home without stopping, sailing like an arrow in the wind. He told me how the skies were peach and blue, and reminded him of my dresses, and how he made a deal with himself that if I lived, he would have me a gown made in each of the beautiful colors he saw that morning. He said he made all sorts of bargains with himself—if I lived, he would refurbish my mother’s house from cellar to gables, with fresh plaster and paint and rugs and more books than she could read in a lifetime. If I lived, I would never sleep alone in our bed again, if that’s what I wanted.

  The servants had fetched the cook’s midwife sister from her bed in Clitheroe. When Richard arrived, breathless and shining with perspiration, she’d told him in plain terms that she did not hold out much hope for me, and that the Lord seemed ready to take my child and me into the next life. And Richard was white with rage, and dismissed her, and bid the servants find another one. As she left with her nose in the air, she passed him the papers from my skirts that he’d dropped on the floor by the bed, trampled by so many feet going in and out.

  And that was when Richard decided the only person who could save me was sitting in chains in the castle. So without changing riding habits or even stopping to eat, he rode all the way back to Lancaster, knowing he might never see me alive again.

  He left his horse at the gate, both of them almost expired, and burst—if a thirsty, exhausted man can burst—into the castle, and demanded that the Lords Justices allow him to read two testimonies relating to the trial of Alice Gray, which had already begun.

  He was barely aware of the ripple of astonishment from the gallery, or Roger’s thunderous expression from his seat by the judges, or the grand, high ceilings and rows of gleaming benches, or the jury, or if any of them were familiar to him and owed him money. All he knew was the paper in his hand, and his heart hammering in his chest, and Alice’s wretched face where she stood with the other prisoners, and the chains around her wrists and ankles.

  Lord Bromley granted his request, and Roger almost exploded with anger, rising up to protest, but the law prevailed, and Richard faced Alice at the bar and read my words, though his hand was shaking and his voice trembled. And after that he read the words of John Foulds, though he struggled even more with them, bec
ause his writing was so poor.

  And the jury went out, and Richard had to wait in the gallery, soaking wet and tired from riding almost eighty miles in less than a day, and when they came back in he searched their faces, every last one of them, and when a few of the gentlemen looked him in the eye—for by now he was certain he had played cards with a couple of them—he did not know what that meant, and thought he would die with the agony of waiting.

  When the foreman said the words not guilty he watched Alice drop like a stone a few yards away, and a great gasp went up from the crowd, and he had to shake his head to take in what he had heard, and he turned to the jury and whispered thank you.

  “And then what happened? Tell me again.”

  “And then I fainted.”

  I laughed and clapped my hands together. I was sitting up in bed, in a clean white nightgown, beneath fresh bedding—the previous had to be burned, along with the mattress. Little Richard was in my arms, and although he was small because so was I, he was perfect in my eyes. He had threads of black hair, fine as silk, and rosebud lips, and cheeks round as apples. His eyes were dark like mine.

  The first time I fed him, when I had time enough to look over every lovely bit of him at length, I noticed something on his arm, and was about to call the nurse when I realized what it was. In the crook of his tiny elbow was a brown birthmark, no bigger than his little fingernail, in the shape of a crescent moon. It matched the scar I had in the same place, where Alice drew blood from me. I checked the next morning to see if it was there, and it was, as much a part of him as his fingers and toes, and I folded his neat little sleeve down again and smiled to myself.

  “And then?” I sipped my warm milk, spicy with healing herbs.

  “Well, then we had to wait for the rest of the verdicts,” Richard said. Half-heartedly, he jangled the rattle he had bought all those months ago. It was not all happy news.