I would wait, I decided. Though Mary seemed unkind, I thought that it could not especially profit her to tell Matthew of my condition. And any day, I thought, I might feel the child quicken. If that happened, I would tell him.
†
Troubled thoughts spoiled my pleasure in walking into town with Grace, though the day was crisp and the wind from the sea. As we drew near the square a late-rising weaver was fastening back his shutters to let the bright day in; a blacksmith waited for his forge fire to get going, leaning in the sun. A woman came out to her doorway to shake a mat, and smiled at me as she folded it in two and turned back inside. Business was going on as usual. It did not seem like a town crippled by suspicion; it seemed just as it had when I was young, if a little plainer, a little smaller, after London. Yet of the six or seven men working on the roof of the assembly rooms, repairing winter-blown slates, three were in their forties, or older, the others not sixteen. War had not left Manningtree entirely untouched.
Grace was wondering aloud what would be done about the Whitsun fair this year: Christmas had been but solemnly kept, she said, what with the cold and in obedience to the Parliament-men, but there had been nothing said so far about not feasting a little on Whitsun. ‘I went my first year or two, when I came into your mother’s service,’ she said, ‘and what they do with the ox is they put two kinds of pudding inside it, and then they roast it whole like that.’ She sighed. ‘I can’t wait till Lent is done with,’ she said, and I smiled. She had shown no sign of awkwardness after my brother’s performance the other night, how he had scolded her. But perhaps she came from a household in which shouting and banging things about were simply what a man did.
Suddenly I wondered whether I should have asked Matthew’s permission to come out. But no, I thought. Even when Mother’s health had declined and Matthew had begun to make the decisions for our household, I had always been able to come and go freely in the daily running of it – he could hardly have prevented me, without paying someone to do the work I did. In any case, he had asked me to attend to the sorting and the renovations in our old home. So I was only doing his bidding.
It was strange to turn into South Street and see the closed shutters at Mother’s house. The building was as I remembered: the tall brick face with its five windows giving out into the street, and the short stretch of gravel between the front door and the road. Grace was quiet as she held open the gate for me. Some maintenance had been kept up: though there were weeds in the gravel, the raised beds at the front, which once held strawberry plants, had been dug up and raked over. The side gate that led round to the stable had been rehung. All at once I did not feel so much fondness for the house as melancholy. What did it mean, I thought, that the wrought-iron boot-scraper by the door could outlast my husband? Aware of Grace’s eyes on me, I governed myself to be steady. I fitted the key into the front door and turned it.
I let Grace go in before me. Tactfully, she excused herself and went off down to the kitchen, but I stood for a moment. In the passage were Mother’s soft indoor shoes, left unregarded where she must last have slipped them off, before she ceased to be able to climb the stairs.
I climbed them myself, trailing a hand up along the wall. I went into the guest room; it still contained the same bed, with a pallet-bed tucked underneath, the whole draped in sheets against the dust. I checked the chest at the foot of the bed: linen, and under that a few men’s shirts and collars, cleaned recently, by the smell. Matthew must stay here, then, I thought. I wondered whether it was for some purpose, say when he was late at a dinner in town, or whether it was for sentiment that he came.
I went along to Mother’s room next, thinking to check her clothes were shut away against moths. When I opened the door, the air was very still. The bed was spread with a red counterpane; briskly, I flipped it back. Matthew was right: the mattress had been scrubbed and aired by someone, but even though the careful application of cold water had soaked most of the red out, still the yellow trace of the bloodstains remained, blossoming across the surface. It would need to be burned. The bed hangings, too, were faded and worn. For the first time, I thought of what it must be like to wake day after day and stare at that same drab canopy.
I crossed to the cupboard and opened it, and the smell that came out was Mother. I stood, gazing at her clothes, her other things. It is peculiar to feel you are prying somewhere you should not, but to know that the only person who could catch you is dead. On the top shelf of the cupboard sat her sewing box, and my throat caught as I thought of how many times when Mother grew distant and fretful I had snarled my sewing on purpose, to give her something to untangle, something to chide me for: something to take her out of her thoughts. I looked at her clothes, where they were laid away on the lower shelves. They had a dampish smell, from her habit of putting on her clean shifts when they were not quite dry. But there was another smell over the damp, like old herbs, pleasant.
I began to look through the clothes, rummaging, trying to fight the feeling of furtiveness it gave me to do so. The gowns seemed like bodies, sleeves like arms. Shawls and cloaks. Everything had been hastily stowed, and some of the pockets were turned out: one of Mother’s nurses, perhaps, searching for stray coins. At length I reached the nightgowns. All had once been white, but some now were grey with washing. Others had specific stains that had refused to fade, stains like those on the mattress, which despite Grace’s undoubted efforts were still the pale, delicate yellow of butter when it melts in the pan. I was surprised to feel tears start in my eyes. These things would be good only for rags.
I felt again the sting of having been left such scraps of worthlessness, but at the same time I knew that they were all I deserved. For I felt keenly, standing there, that I had abandoned Mother. Each piece of briskness I had shown her came back to me; each wistful thought of my true mother, and all the times when, as a young, restless girl, I had secretly wished that she was still alive and in Mother’s place. I shut the cupboard door: I would come another time to pack the clothes away.
As I left the room, I found I was holding Mother’s warmest shawl, the red one she had worn every day. I tucked it under my arm as I shut the door behind me, and went to my own old chamber, thinking to look in there. But when I tested the door, it would not shift. Next I tried the door to Matthew’s old chamber, and tried it again, using my shoulder. But it would not move. I thought of the size of the bunch of keys at Mary Phillips’s belt. I placed a hand on the upper panel of Matthew’s door, and then I bent to put my eye to the keyhole. I could see only the dim, draped shapes of furniture. I thought of a tale told to me once by our servant Sarah at Wenham – Sarah who had half brought me up. It was a tale in which a curious child’s eye was met with a darning needle. I blinked as I went back down the stairs, and stopped in the parlour to lay down Mother’s shawl and collect myself before I went into the kitchen.
Hearing me, Grace turned, holding a large, fine, glazed bowl. ‘Look, mistress! I had forgotten this.’
‘Some of the doors upstairs are locked.’
Grace put down the bowl. ‘Yes, mistress. Your own old chamber and the master’s. They were storerooms in truth, by the time your mother died, and they were always kept locked. Did Mary Phillips not give you the keys?’
I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. ‘She must have forgotten,’ I said. ‘In any case, let us work in here for today, and in the parlour. We can look at the bedchambers another time.’
We began with checking and packaging the dry goods that had been left behind – oats, flour – to send back to the Thorn. As we worked, I let Grace ask questions about my life in London: I took care that what I said should match anything I had already told my brother, but still I found that I grew merry, as we worked and talked. When she asked about my midwifing, I wondered whether Matthew had mentioned it to her, or whether Mary Phillips had overheard something and passed it on. But I was ready with my answers to Grace, having spent some time recalling what my landlady had told me of her pro
fession. I made my life in London sound charmed and easy, exciting even.
We had moved into the parlour, and Grace was helping me lift the drapes from the chairs so that I could feel each for dampness, when she paused. ‘Mary said – she told me that you have lost your husband,’ she said.
I straightened. ‘That’s right.’
‘I wish – I wish you had said, mistress.’
‘I suppose that God –’ I began, thinking to say, ‘I suppose that God will take back whom He loves.’ But I halted, wishing to meet Grace’s kindness with some greater honesty than that. ‘I suppose it is a thing that happens,’ I said. Though I had not thought it would happen to me.
I could push it aside no longer. It was melancholy to be back in the house where I had cherished my first secret liking for Joseph: where he had arrived in my life, disguised as a piece of good fortune.
I forced a smile, and turned myself to folding one of the drapes. ‘You ought to marry, Grace,’ I said.
Shaking out a cushion, she avoided my gaze. ‘Mistress, I am happy where I am.’
That made me wonder again, about her liking Matthew. Still, I felt sorry for her. Draped over the back of one of the other seats where I had placed it, I saw Mother’s shawl. I took it up, ran the fabric through my hands then bundled it, and held it out to Grace. ‘Here.’
‘Surely not, mistress,’ she said, reaching out for the shawl, stroking the material herself, admiring.
‘My brother will not like to see you in it,’ I said, ‘but you can wear it when you leave us. When you marry,’ I repeated, ‘or go into service in some other house.’
Grace held the shawl doubtfully, but she did not give it back. I wanted to ask her, now that we had built up a confidence, what precisely she had meant when she said my brother had a book with witches’ names in. What she had heard, and from whom. But something held me back. We went on working, and I felt the day slipping away too fast. The truth was that I did not want to go back to the Thorn: to Matthew, to Mary Phillips, and to everything else I did not understand. I had thought that a few hours away from there would leave me knowing what I should do. But I did not know. I felt even less certain than before.
†
We worked until five or so, when the light was declining; then we covered the piles we had made in the parlour with dust-sheets, and stood looking at what we had accomplished. Then I said, ‘Why don’t we stay?’
‘Beg pardon, mistress?’
‘We could stay the night.’ I saw her face turn wary. ‘It is what I often did in London, with long birthings. Why walk back to the Thorn only to come again in the morning?’ The bed and pallet in the guest room, I thought, would serve. It might even be pleasant, to hear breathing in the night again that was not my own.
‘Will it be all right?’ Grace said, uncertain.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I will answer for you to Mary.’
So Grace lit a fire, then went to the Bell to get us some cold pies and have a boy sent over to let them know at the Thorn that we would not be back. I went upstairs to make the beds, and when Grace returned, we uncovered the two chairs nearest the hearth and sat with our plates, the rest of the furniture crouched around us as darkness came down.
‘I know nothing of you, Grace,’ I said. ‘Your family, where are they from?’
She finished her mouthful. ‘My people are from Cambridge,’ she said. ‘Though my mother and father, they are both dead.’
‘You have no kin here?’ I said.
‘Mary Parsley, she is my second cousin,’ she said.
‘Ned Parsley’s wife?’
Grace nodded. Had not Bridget said something about Ned Parsley, about his child dying?
‘Grace,’ I said. ‘I have been thinking on what you said, the night I came here: about my brother having a book of witches’ names.’ She put down her pie crust. ‘Can you tell me, to your knowledge, of what Elizabeth Clarke is accused?’
‘I believe that the Rivets did refuse her some alms,’ Grace replied. ‘And then, soon after, Goodwife Rivet was taken in a fit.’
‘I see,’ I said, though I did not, and Grace seemed disinclined to say more. I could tell she thought it odd, us staying there at Mother’s house, and I was beginning to worry that it was odd, that I had made the wrong decision.
While Grace took our dishes through, I picked up a book of sermons. When she had finished in the kitchen, Grace came back to settle in her chair, and soon began to doze. Trying to read, I could not prevent my mind flitting between how agitated Matthew had been after church and, at the same time, how ridiculous it was that he should suspect Bridget of having any hand in harming him. I could not settle to the sermons: the language of them seemed in some strange cadence, which had me thinking of the sing-song way we had been made to learn our catechism when we were small. I laid the book aside.
Cold, I edged my chair closer to the fire. Sitting there made me think of when the chimney-sweepers had come, those friends of Joseph’s, and knocked a thing down that had smashed in the grate. It was one of those bottles, witch bottles some called them, which folk put in their chimneys to catch anything that might try to come down: come down in some altered shape, wanting to get into the house. In sweeping up the fragments, I had swept up also a ball of hair, foul with soot. Matthew had been out of the house on some errand; Mother got herself worked up about the thing having been displaced, and made me put just the same contents – the hair, the rusty bent pins – into a different bottle. Sealing it up with ordinary wax, I had felt uneasy, thinking that Father, surely, would never have approved such a proceeding. But Mother had made me get the sweeping men to stow the bottle again, in the same niche inside the chimney: it was up there now, not three feet above where I was sitting.
I wondered if it truly afforded any protection, as the superstition holds it does. I remembered once when Bridget had spoken of how, when I was tiny, she would trim my fingernails with her teeth, casting the clippings straight onto the blaze that no one might get hold of them and use them to do me harm. I remember she caught my look, as she said this, then added that it was the usual practice of most mothers and nurses, and rather careful than ungodly.
Listening to Grace breathe, I stretched myself. I had hoped that Matthew and Bridget would have reconciled, in the years I had been away, but instead my coming back to Manningtree had been like entering a room where two people are sitting; they may have fallen quiet, but you know that in your absence something has been done, something said. I wished Father was there to counsel me, and not only about Matthew and Bridget, but about other things. What a person should believe, and not believe.
In the distance, Lawford church clock struck ten. I got up to stand over the fire, held out my arms to it; with my foot, I nudged Grace. ‘Go to bed.’ My voice brought her awake, and she clutched the arms of the chair.
She rubbed her face. ‘Are you coming, mistress?’
‘In a while. You might bring me a blanket, before you go.’
She brought one, and then went up, yawning. It was pleasant to hear her moving about overhead as she settled herself, but the comfort soon died away. Hunched in my chair, listening to Grace’s snores carry down the stairs, I tried to read again, to distract myself, a household book of Mother’s: how to preserve green walnuts, make a poultice for a hot wound.
†
I woke with the book in my lap, and a hammering at the front door as if someone was trying to break it down. The fire was almost out, and I heard Joseph calling my name: Alice, Alice! It sounded as if he was crying. I scrambled to my feet, but then the cold brought me round and I stopped, because of course it could not be Joseph. I stood still, rooted by the certainty that it had been Joseph’s voice I had heard, and if it was not him then it was something else, using his voice. Then it came louder – ‘Alice!’ – and I heard the panic in it and I thought: Matthew.
I felt along the hall. Even fumbling with the door I was doubtful, but then I got it open and my brother was there, solid a
nd panting.
‘Alice, thank you – where’s your light?’ He was trembling, clinging to the door and in the way of me getting it shut. I felt his dog slip past me into the house.
‘I’ll get one, just come in,’ I said. His breathing was so fast in the dark I laid a hand on his chest to calm him, or to convince myself that he was truly living and himself. The air was cold. ‘Matthew. Matthew,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here? What is it?’
‘I thought – there was a – God!’ His voice cracked. ‘There was something there, just there.’ He was holding the doorframe for support, and pointing into the dark. All I could make out were the empty strawberry beds, the gravel and the quiet road beyond.
‘Matthew, take a breath. You’re all right. Now, what, out here?’ Once I was sure he was not hurt I had almost teased him for making such a racket, but I saw now that his fear was real.
He was at my shoulder, almost hiding behind me. I turned to see his eyes searching the raised bed just beside the front door. ‘Just there.’ He pointed, whispering. ‘It was sitting in the strawberry bed. I didn’t see it till I was close, and then I cried out. I dropped my keys. I think it ran –’
‘Well, a fox, then?’ I said.
‘Hush! No. I don’t know. It was like one, of that size, but it was black, I don’t know –’ He let go of my arm, but then he swayed, and took hold of it again.
‘Perhaps it was a loose dog,’ I said quietly.
He was starting to get his breath. ‘It wasn’t a dog.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I said to him. ‘Where have you been?’ I heard a noise from behind us and saw Grace already on the stairs, tucking herself in with one hand and holding up a lamp. ‘Matthew, why don’t you come in now?’ I tried to guide his elbow. ‘You should have something to drink.’
He resisted. ‘Alice. I think it was sent. I think it was sent to wait for me.’
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