by Julie Hearn
“Nell,” says Mistress Bramlow. “There is talk in the village. Talk of … ill-wishing.”
Nell keeps her eyes on the baby s small, trusting face. “If ’tis Silas Denby spreading such talk,” she answers slowly, “then no one should pay him any mind. My granny warned him. She warned him clear as day that too much purging can do a body mischief. I know. For I was here when she said it.”
Mistress Bramlow sighs. Not Silas Denby. No. Although his grumblings and grouchings are certainly adding fuel to the gossips’ fire.
“It isn’t Silas Denby,” she tells Nell. “’Tis the ministers daughters. Have you not heard what is happening up at the big house?”
Nell holds Amos Bramlow a little tighter and rests her cheek on the soft down of his head. She has heard nothing—nothing at all—but a shiver passes through her, a premonition of something bad.
“What is it?” she says. “What?”
So Mistress Bramlow tells her about the ministers daughters, afflicted by some strange malady that confines them to bed and has them shrieking and writhing like demented things. About the pins they are spitting and the terrible words that they bark, like dogs, at the sight of visitors or holy water.
“’Tis said the minister be half mad with anxiety,” she whispers. “’Tis said he believes his daughters are being drawn to Satan. That someone—a witch—has cursed them, in the Devil’s name, and that they be battling with all their strength to keep possession of their souls.”
Nell keeps her face blank.
“Those be troublesome, foolish girls,” she says. “And it will all turn out to be nonsense.”
Up in the roof space the cunning woman turns in her sleep and starts to babble.
“Starchwort … with vinegar … and dung of the ox … laid upon a plague sore … or a filthy ulcer …”
“She’s dreaming,” Nell says quickly. “Only dreaming.”
Mistress Bramlow looks anxiously up, then back to where Nell sits, her thin arms cradling the baby. She opens her mouth, then closes it again, although there is plenty more she could say.
She could speak of the sheep’s heart stuck full of gooseberry prickles that Mistress Denby has hung above her door—a gory yet potent charm to protect her home from witchcraft.
She could tell how the Watchers spent the whole of last night in a dark huddle under the stars, watching and waiting to see if anyone came to the churchyard. For after twelve of the clock, as everyone knows, a witch may summon the Devil by walking widdershins round hallowed ground, chanting the Lord’s Prayer backward.
She could warn the cunning woman’s granddaughter that there is an ill wind blowing and that both she and her granny are slap bang in its path.
But Mistress Bramlow is a person who always hopes for the best. How could she not, when her little son seems to hover constantly between this world and the next? So she tells herself that Nell is probably right. It will all turn out to be nonsense. And she drinks a glass of cordial, gathers her shawl and her baby, and goes home.
Left alone, Nell sinks onto the bench, scoops up the dun chicken, and wonders what to do. Maybe, she thinks, Grace Madden has confessed to the minister that she is with child, and he, in his wrath, has banished her to her chamber with instructions to stay abed until her time comes. Maybe all this is playacting and scaremongering, a ploy to keep the truth from getting out. But why involve the sister? The stupid one? And why not act out a duller, more acceptable affliction? Why draw so much attention to the house, the room, the girl, and—before long—her belly?
It is a puzzle. It needs sorting. Above all, thinks Nell, there is the unborn to consider. The other Merrybegot. Too much excitement in an expectant mother is not good for the one growing inside her. Not healthy. Grace Madden should be looking after herself now, not spitting pins and behaving like a lunatic.
No.
The dun chicken has fallen asleep. Its heart pulses through its feathers against Nell’s hand, and its stupid head lolls against the crook of her arm. As living things go, it is pretty much a waste of space, but here it is—and Nell loves it.
Grace Maddens unborn, she tells herself, is at least as deserving as a daft chicken of a bit of love and care. And as a midwife, a healer, and a fellow Merrybegot, it is up to her to make sure it survives.
Resolved now, she plonks the sleeping chicken under the bench and reaches for the pestle and mortar. Cinnamon, nutmeg, honeycomb, and tansy … that is what she must pound together, then mix in milk with a fresh egg for nourishment. And then she will take this concoction herself to give to the ministers daughter.
And something else …
Now where is it?
Leaving the container of half-bashed nutmeg for a moment, Nell crosses the room, stands on tiptoe, and reaches high into the sooty throat of the fireplace.
There.
A frog. Very dead, very dry, and very, very flat.
A wizened yet potent charm to keep an unborn from harm.
It ought to be enough, Nell thinks. It should be enough. But all the same, just in case, she goes to the place—the secret place—where the most powerful charm of all is kept hidden away, wrapped in dock leaves and weighted by a magical stone found in the maw of a swallow.
Light as half a feather. As transparent as water-smoke. The fairybaby’s caul.
The minister’s housekeeper answers the front door and steps back in alarm when she sees the cunning woman’s granddaughter standing bold as brass on the step, with her bag of bits.
“You’ll do no good here, with your potions and powders,” she snaps at her. “Go away home, child. Quick before the minister catches you, calling at the front door like any highborn lady. Whatever next …”
Nell stands her ground.
“I have to see them girls,” she insists. “The older one—Grace—would wish it so. Let me pass.”
The housekeeper wrings her big chapped hands in her apron and darts an anxious look behind her, toward the room where the minister has been closeted away, writing furiously for hours.
There is a bowl of red roses and the white flower called “baby’s breath” on a table beside the stairs. They are all shedding their petals—big red ones, like gouts of blood, and tiny white ones, like snowflakes; yet they were picked only this morning. It is but another bad sign in a house already buzzing with strange portents.
“Well?” says the cunning woman’s granddaughter. And she seems so sure of herself and of whatever she has in her bag that the housekeeper decides it can do no harm to let her see the minister’s daughters. Who knows? It might even help where all else has so far failed.
And if it does, the minister will surely thank her for having let the brat in. He might even smile, and how lovely that would be.
“All right, then,” she says. “The first door you come to, at the top of the stairs.”
Quickly Nell slips into the hall and up the wide polished staircase.
She thinks about knocking at the bedchamber door but decides it will put her at a disadvantage to appear so timid and polite. She is on a mission, after all, and must maintain the upper hand.
“Good day,” she says, barging straight in. “Its me. What be the matter here?”
The girls in the bed are too startled at first to react. Their faces and their hair are so pale that they, the bolster, and the coverlet drawn up to their necks seem composed of the same stuff. There are drapes across the window, blocking the light, and the room is all musty, like an animal’s lair.
Grace is the first to move. Up out of the bed she leaps, staggering a little on weakened legs.
“Out!” she hisses. “Out, out, out!” And before she knows it, Nell finds herself bundled from the room and into a window seat jutting from the passageway.
Grace Madden smells bad, and her eyes are wild.
“I’ve brought you a potion,” Nell tells her. “Not that kind,” she adds as the older girls eyes light up in desperate hope. “A cordial, to nourish you and make you easier in your mind.”
The light fades immediately from Grace Madden’s eyes. “A pox on your cordials!” Her fingers tighten on Nell’s arms. “Tell me this and only this. If ̷ if the thing inside me be no more … if I be rid of it for good and all, how would I know?”
Nell gapes at her.
“Tell me!”
“Well …”
“Tell me!”
Nell braces herself and shrugs the pinching fingers away.
“You’d know,” she says grimly. “There would be pain. Then a great gushing of blood, like the courses, only worse. It would come away from you, like being born. Believe me, you’d know.”
Slowly Grace Madden steps away, moving backward from the window seat as smoothly and listlessly as a ghost. And Nell can tell, just by looking at her, that whatever damage she has wished for, or tried to do to her unborn, the Powers are watching over their own. The Merrybegot is safe. At least for now.
The closing of the bedchamber door has something very final about it.
“Wait!” Nell leaps from the window seat, bangs that door wide open, and hurries to the side of the bed. Grace is climbing back into it in slow motion. Without a word, she pulls the coverlet up over her body and lies there, like something strange and lovely made of alabaster. Her sisters face beside hers is a gargoyle in comparison.
Nell wonders how much the younger sister knows. Decides it doesn’t matter. For everyone will know soon enough about Grace Madden’s pregnancy. In a month or so there will be no hiding it.
She takes the bottle of nourishing cordial from her bag and sets it down on the bed, in a dip between the two bodies.
“I’ll leave this here for you,” she tells Grace. “And I suggest you take it. I suggest you look after yourself and your Merrybegot from now on.”
The beautiful face remains expressionless. The ugly one looks puzzled.
It is a pivotal moment. Had there been a piskie in the room, it would be jumping up and down, frothing at the mouth in its excitement. For moments like these hold catastrophe within them, like an invisible egg that could crack at any second, releasing something that will seep, and spread, and have all kinds of consequences. Just a few words … a little string of words will do it.
“Your sister be with child,” Nell tells the ugly face. “By Sam Towser, the blacksmiths son. She—”
“Noooooo. Father! Father! God in heaven! She burns me! She burns me! Aaargh!”
Nell is horrified, so appalled she can neither speak nor run. For the sound spilling from Grace Madden’s mouth is so far removed from ordinary speech that it hardly seems real. It is beyond anger, beyond spite, beyond the worst emotion you could ever imagine a good Puritan girl might feel. It is harsh. It is frenzied. It is demonic. And she is thrashing around like a thing possessed; arching her spine, tearing at the coverlet, baring her teeth like a rabid dog.
Appalled Nell turns back to the younger sister.
“We must help her,” she cries. “Her mind … her mind be all but unhinged. ’Tis fear, I believe. But she mustn’t be afeared. And she must hush up, before your father—”
In the hallway below: a flurry of voices, the banging of a door.
Grace is holding herself rigid now, her arms flung wide, her eyes rolling back in their sockets.
“I burn!” she howls again. “She burns me!”
Nell is waiting still for some sign from the younger sister. Some flash of understanding—a little empathy. It isn’t happening.
Is this girl really so dim-witted, Nell wonders, that she hasn’t understood?
But, no. Patience Madden is simply mulling the information over.
“We must calm your sister,” Nell appeals to her. “We must think clearly, before the minister—your father—comes.”
For an instant it seems as if Patience Madden is about to say something wise. But then her eyes narrow, her pinched lips open. And: “Father!” she screams, in a voice every bit as frenzied as her sisters. “Come quickly. Save us!”
And there are footsteps thudding up the stairs. And—
Nothing. With all of them against her, there is nothing Nell can really do. Still, as a last resort, she scrabbles in the cloth bag with a trembling hand. The caul, she thinks wildly. She could rip the coverlet back—she might just have time—and fling that caul across Grace Madden’s belly. Would it work? Would it save a human life before it is full-formed? Before it draws its first breath, even?
She hesitates. She doesn’t know. She has no idea. And it would be a terrible shame to waste such a valuable charm …
The frog, then. The frog-charm will have to do.
So as the door crashes open and the minister bursts in, Nell flings wide her right hand and throws the wizened gray-green amphibian onto the bed. Dead and flat as it is, it looks like it is leaping, for its dried-up legs are still perfectly formed, like a diver’s. Through the air it goes, in a neat curve, before landing skull-down on Graces stomach.
The sisters’ screams leave their mouths in one great, earsplitting wave. The bottle of cordial strikes the floor as they flounder and kick and throw their arms around as if fending off a plague of locusts.
The minister appears to be dithering. Ashen-faced and halfway across the room, he seems torn between rushing to the aid of his stricken daughters, or calling upon the Lord, or grabbing Nell by the scruff and hurling her down the stairwell.
Seizing her only chance, Nell makes a dash for the door. The minister whirls round, his black cloak billowing, one hand reaching out like a claw.
But Nell is too quick for him.
The housekeeper is at the top of the stairs. She had just started plucking songbirds to make a pie, and the hand she raises to cross herself as Nell pushes past leaves a smear of red on her forehead.
“Grace Madden be with child!” Nell shrieks as she clatters blindly down the stairs. “She be with child by Sam Towser, the blacksmiths son!”
There. It is out. Loud enough for the minister and the housekeeper to hear, even through the girls’ screams. It is surely for the best, Nell tells herself as she half runs, half staggers out of the house, down the steps, and into the tunnel of briars and vines that weave and trail and snag on her clothes as she stumbles, with knocking heart, toward the open gate.
It is surely for the best that they know the honest truth.
All around her the frenzied babble of little mouths sounds for all the world like the scraping of crickets’ wings in the heat. And the sniffy, sniff of hundreds of one-, two-, three-day-old nostrils is fainter than the faintest snuffling of a mole, far underground.
Shape of the ranter, shape of the frog …
Wheeeeeeee!
I had no choice, really I didn’t, Nell thinks, slowing to a walk once the great iron bars of the gate have clanged shut behind her. But her ears still ring with the girls’ cries, and she can only hope and trust that the minister will do the right thing by his ruined daughter.
By the time she turns into the cornfield, she has convinced herself that the minister will probably send Grace away. To a nunnery, perhaps, or a strict aunt—somewhere far from the village, anyhow—until the Merrybegot is born. He cannot abandon her. Not now that the other daughter knows. And the housekeeper too. It would reflect badly on him. Surely, as a God-fearing man, the minister will see to it that this special pot lid—his very own grandchild—survives somewhere and wants for nothing? Surely he will?
Won’t he?
The cunning woman cannot say what the minister will or will not do. It doesn’t seem important to her—or even all that real. She has made some broth and swept the floor, but her eyes have a faraway look, and whatever Nell says is sparking odd connections in her mind with things that happened a long time ago.
She doesn’t mention—because she has already forgotten—that she went for a walk herself this afternoon and that some unruly lads threw stones at her. She delivered those lads, all three of them, and saw them safely weaned. She cured one of the whooping cough by rubbing his back with a conco
ction of lily roots, peony, and the fat of a fox. Yet he taunted her today from a distance as she wandered down one of the lanes, muttering to herself as she tried to remember what quarter the moon was in and the types of plants she ought to be gathering. They had called her names, those boys. They had called her “witch” and “Satan’s drab,” and then they had thrown their stones and bolted.
“You were born a Merrybegot,” she tells her granddaughter, gazing dreamily over the cauldron’s rim. “You can be proud of that.”
Nell is crouched on the floor, feeding bits of corn to the dun chicken.
“Tell me again,” she says, stretching her palm as flat as it will go while the chicken picks and pecks. “About my mother. Tell me everything you remember.”
“You know all there is to know,” the cunning woman replies. “It is little enough, I grant you, but what more there was I was never privy to.”
Nell sits back on her haunches and lets what’s left of the corn sieve through her fingers onto the floor. The events of her day seem less threatening now that she has shared them with her granny. She is extremely worried still about Grace Madden and her unborn, but she is more inclined to trust in the Powers and let the future unfold as it will.
It is cozy tonight in the cottage, with a fire burning and the chicken eating its supper. And Nell is content to follow her granny’s mind as it meanders into the past, alighting on one bright memory here and another there, like an old butterfly doing one last round of a garden.
“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Nell says, resting the point of her chin on her knees and gazing wistfully into the leaping flames.
“She was,” crows the cunning woman. “Oh, she was, she was. As lovely as a rose in June.”
Nell sighs. “But wedded, though. Already spoken for.”
“Yes.”