The Minister's Daughter

by Julie Hearn

  In the fire something pops and crackles, like a burst of laughter. The dun chicken stretches and squirms on Nell’s knees. It is full of corn and seems happy enough, but for some reason it will not settle.

  “I shall fend for myself, you know,” Nell is saying. “Wherever it is we sail to. I shall make a study of all that lives and grows in the place and be a midwife and a healer there. I will do that, whatever happens.”

  “I believe you will,” Mistress Bramlow tells her softly. “And you will do it well. Your granny—”

  She never finishes. For the dun chicken has raised itself up on Nells lap and is clucking fit to burst.

  “Whatever is it?” Nell scolds. “What’s the matter?”

  Perhaps, she thinks, the witch-finder’s spur did more damage than they know. Perhaps the poor old chicken is in pain and they haven’t realized.

  What to do?

  Her granny taught her only the one spell for such a worrying situation. This is it:

  A SPELL TO PERK UP AN AILING CREATURE

  Take four red thistle blossoms and place one at each of the four quarters. Place a flat stone in the center, and upon it lay the creature, held in place by thine own hands if necessary. Loudly summon the Powers of the earth (unless this be a flying creature, in which case let it be the Powers of the air). Anoint the animal with three drops of carnation oil while calling, “Across the ground you’ll walk or run, when this healing work is done” (unless this be a flying creature, in which case let thy call be: “Through the air you’ll soar anew, when this healing work is through”). So mote it be.

  But Nell has no red thistle blossoms to hand, only seaweed. And she isn’t sure whether a chicken that flaps a lot but can barely manage to lift itself off the ground counts as a creature of the earth or of the air.

  Too late to wonder. With a final, raucous cluck, her beloved creature-of-no-particular-element launches itself at the ground, landing heavily on its side and dangerously close to the fire.

  “Oh!” Nell jumps to her feet and bends to grab it. But it limps and flaps away from her, across the room to where the spoiled bird shape still covers the floor, looking like nothing much anymore, except, perhaps, a map of somewhere very strange.

  And as Nell and Mistress Bramlow watch in dismay, the chicken starts to spin and waggle its daft body among the shells and weed and feathers as if it doesn’t quite know what to do with itself.

  “Perhaps its innards be all upset by the journey,” Mistress Bramlow suggests. “Perhaps its about to poop.”

  “I don’t know,” Nell says in distress. “I don’t know what the matter is, and I don’t know what to do.”

  The dun chicken flops down among the picture-mess and goes very still.

  “Oh no!” says Nell, appalled.

  But it isn’t dead or even dying. Only concentrating very, very hard, its eyes blinking and blinking and blinking as if it has suddenly seen something unbelievable.

  “Aha,” says Mistress Bramlow. “I think I know what be happening.”

  Precisely as she says it, the dun chicken gives a triumphant squawk, shuffles its hindquarters in an important way, then rises up on its ridiculous feet and struts and limps back toward the warmth of the fire.

  “Well, I never,” says Nell. “Well, I never did.”

  “That chicken never did, you mean,” chuckles Mistress Bramlow. “But it has now.”

  And both of them stare in astonishment and delight at the big brown egg lying among the scatterings of Nell’s bird shape like some kind of landmark or a perfect gift.

  All the Bramlow children are standing in the lane, jumping up and down to keep warm while they wait for the coach that is bringing their mother home—in time for Yule as promised.

  The youngest one has dropped a mitten near the ditch and cannot find it. She is puzzled by this, since it is a bright red mitten and should be easy to spot among the mess of frozen brambles and fallen leaves.

  “Hurrah!” the others cry. They have heard the approaching clatter of hooves and wheels and are jostling to be the first one hugged when their mother arrives.

  Squatting down, still searching for her mitten, the youngest girl hears a rustling and sees a small something, with a mucky face and bits of moss on its head, about to burrow deeper into the icy mulch of the ditch. It is holding her mitten.

  “That’s mine,” she tells it. “Give it back.”

  The thing wrinkles its nose at her.

  “Come away from that ditch!” one of the bigger girls shouts, distracting her. “You’ll wake the piskies, and they’ll drag you in.”

  The coach is in sight now, and Mistress Bramlow is leaning out, waving madly and blowing kisses.

  The youngest daughter looks back at the thing—the piskie.

  “You won’t drag me in, will you?” she asks it. But this piskie seems in no fit state to drag anything anywhere. It appears to be having some kind of sneezing fit.

  “Bless you hugely,” says the youngest Bramlow. “I have to go now.” And she skips away, not minding about the mitten now that her mother has stepped out of the coach, her arms spread as wide as wings for hugs.

  In the ditch the piskie continues to sneeze, racked and rattled by the bits of information stirred up in the air by Mistress Bramlow’s return.

  Atchoo! Ooooo the death ofmonarchs … Chop, chop, there goes the head of Charles I.

  And what of the Prince-one, who sent that coach here, causing such a commotion? Oh, a lucky one—a charmed one … A ladies man, he’ll be. Oooo yes.

  And the girlie, the Merrybegot … Atchoo! Shell be fine, she’ll be fine … A respected midwife and a healer, that’s what she’ll be. Yes, yes … snug as a cat in a whitewashed cottage … in Jersey, that’s the place. Nice place … Rich pickings … She wont need no Prince-one helping her out, although she’ll let him think she does so he won’t get all huffy in the pride region.

  And a chicken always with her … even when she’s old and stooped … a daft bird, with a limp. Can’t be the same chicken down all the years, can it? Must be. Must be. Smelly old bird … Nyit, nyit.

  A-A-A-tchoo! … More stuff about that Prince-one. Charles II, he’ll get to be. And, yes … here’s the laugh. Here’s the wheeze … See him old, in his royal bed, surrounded by bishops and ticking clocks … about to snuff it … almost gone. And what’s this? What’s this he’s saying? And with everyone leaning over his face region, to catch his last words?

  “Let not poor Nelly starve.”

  And who does he mean? Who’s he talking about with his last gasp?

  That chit of an orange seller, Nell Gwyn?

  Ha-ha! Wrong!

  Atchoo!

  The Confession of Patience Madden

  THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1692

  I cannot dwell for too long on what happened next. I must tell of it quickly, for the memory, even now, has the power to make me afeared and all of a tremble.

  Yule passed without incident, a day of prayer and of waiting, like so many others before it.

  I had been given my own chamber: a pokey space, little bigger than a closet, at the opposite end of the house to the room Grace and I had shared. Our housekeeper said it was because I was a grown girl myself now and better suited to solitude.

  I knew this to be more of her nonsense, but I kept my counsel. In truth I was glad to be parted from my sister, for she was as big as a whale by then, and I had grown scared of falling asleep next to the thing in her belly that kicked often as if with hooves.

  The sky on the day of the birthing was blue-black, like a bruise, and I swear I saw sparks striking from the heavens before they opened, like a wound, and sent a great fall of snow to cover the ground and to seal us all in our homes.

  There were other omens, too. A robin found frozen on the step while a crow cawed nastily from the branches of an elm. The howling of a dog somewhere down in the village.

  Father kept to his study. I thought he might come out when Grace started to scream, but he didn’t. I
tried to follow our housekeeper up the stairs, but she spun round and snapped, “Keep to the parlor. And don’t come out until you’re told.”

  It was chilly in the parlor, for the logs in the grate were smoking and would not catch aflame. Another bad omen. I had completed my sampler and had no plans for another, so I busied myself for a while sorting the box of threads. It didn’t take long, and after that I simply sat.

  I don’t know how many hours I waited there, listening to my sister’s screams. I remember that the sky beyond the window grew blacker still as dusk fell and that snow piled up against the sill, like something trying to get in.

  And then the terrible shrieking stopped, leaving a silence that rang at first with echoes and then grew strangely heavy. Unbearable, too. I couldn’t bear it. I could not endure sitting there anymore, not knowing.

  Outside my father’s study I paused and listened.

  Nothing.

  But my ears were fine-tuned, by then, to the quality of silence, and I knew he was behind that door and in no hurry to come out, even though no one had ordered him to stay put until told otherwise.

  I had one foot on the stair and one hand on the banister when the door to our chamber—Grace’s chamber—flew open and the housekeeper ran out—really ran, as if the hounds of Hell were hot on her heels, as indeed they had every reason to be.

  Down the stairs she clattered, the large bowl she used for mixing held out in front of hen From her face I could tell that the bowl contained something unspeakable—something she could hardly wait to throw away.

  When she saw me, she stopped dead halfway down the stairs.

  “Get back in the parlor,” she hissed. “Now!”

  But I stood my ground. Petrified.

  For long moments we faced each other.

  And then, behind the study door, my father rang a bell. It was what he always did when he wanted another bottle of claret brought or more logs for the fire. Usually he would give one or two short rings, and then wait for the housekeeper to arrive. Only if she was tardy or hadn’t heard, would he ring the bell again, more insistently. This time, though, he rang that bell without stopping. Loudly. Madly.

  Perhaps he had heard our housekeeper on the stairs but could not understand why her footsteps had not passed his door. Or perhaps the sudden silence—the not knowing—was too much for him as well.

  The tinny clanging of the bell made little impression on me, but our housekeeper jumped as if stung, tightened her grip on the rim of the bowl, and resumed her descent of the stairs as if my presence in the hallway was no longer of any consequence.

  And I … I … I moved back just enough to let her pass—to let her run through to the kitchen, where her thick shawl hung on a peg beside the door, and then run out of the door and into the night, still clutching the bowl—out to some place where the contents of that bowl could be left to freeze. To die.

  I tell you now, our housekeeper did a mighty service that night not only to Grace, my sister, but to all humanity.

  For I saw what was in that bowl as she ran past me. I saw, and the memory of it, brothers, haunts me still.

  I cannot … I cannot …

  JANUARY 1646

  Twelfth Night: Stars, hard and bright as nail heads, studding the sky. Snow, great soft waves of it, clogging the lanes and beginning to freeze.

  Shortly after midnight, villagers gather at the edge of the orchard. The snow here rises past their boots and crunches underfoot like the flesh of windfall apples. The villagers are glad that the big white flakes stopped whirling an hour ago, otherwise, they might never have got here, and there would have been no ritual.

  One of the Watchers holds a fistful of amulets, stones shaped like bones and cores, swinging from loops of thread. Another carries a basin filled with squares of toast soaked in cider. Everyone else has brought pot and pans and sticks or spoons to bang them with.

  The trees loom in a straggly huddle, their topmost branches interlinked like the arms of arthritic friends. The oldest tree of all has piskies nesting under its roots—robust male piskies who don’t mind being woken every January by an infernal clatter, since it always ends with the leaving of boozy bread that lines their stomach regions and gives them cheery dreams for the rest of their winter sleep.

  This year these piskies are already awake before the first pot is banged. For something else roused them earlier. Something quite unexpected and so tingly on the nostrils that it was impossible to ignore.

  And now, right on time, here come the Apple Howlers.

  The noise begins, as it always does, with an earsplitting blast of gunfire. Three men—it is always three—pepper the sky above the treetops with musket shot. And then:

  “Hats full! Caps full! Bushels, bushels, sacks full!”

  Then the villagers invade the orchard, shouting and whooping and banging their pots and pans loud enough to shatter icicles. In single file they come, wading and crunching through snow to the oldest tree of all.

  If there are bad spirits wintering here, no one is sure anymore who or what they are. All anyone knows is that this ritual—to banish evil, to humor the piskies, and to protect the next apple harvest—is as much a part of village life as the birthing of pot lids, the shoeing of horses, and the slow turn of seasons.

  The oldest trees boughs dip heavily, weighed down at their tips by diamonds of ice. The Watcher with the amulets is the first to approach it. She has the first stone in one of her big chapped hands and is reaching to fasten it to a convenient twig, when one of her feet—

  “Eek! Get back, neighbors! Step away! ’Tis a piskie brat, as sure as I live and breathe!”

  The amulet falls from her fingers, lands with a soft plop in the snow, and disappears.

  A piskie brat?

  The villagers crunch and scuffle backward, their mouths cold Os of surprise. Silas Denby holds his pot in front of his stomach, like an inadequate shield, and raises his spoon. He has known enough strange goings-on these past months to last him a lifetime. Any sign of trouble from piskies, and he will fight as brave and dirty as any soldier, for all he is armed not quite to the teeth with kitchen wares and so sozzled on cider that the trees here look like they’re dancing a jig.

  “Squash the boggers!” he bellows, jabbing his spoon in the vague and general direction of the stars. “Stamp ’em out!”

  But before he can either attack or fall over, the spoon is whisked from his grasp, and a woman—Mistress Bramlow, it looks like—is down on her knees beneath the oldest tree, spooning away snow and crying: “No! This is no piskie child, neighbors. This is … this is … Oh, the mite. The poor little mite!”

  Silas Denby can barely focus on the oldest tree’s trunk, never mind the thing half buried beneath it. What? he wonders. What is it, then? A badger? A fairy? An apple with legs? He belches uneasily as other villagers push him aside, craning their necks and raising their lanterns to see.

  Mistress Bramlow is bent low over whatever it is she has scrabbled up and is chafing and rubbing away at it with bare freezing hands.

  What is it? Will it bite her? Is she mad?

  The villagers wait, poised to run if necessary. The silence has a tingle to it, and the stars seem to throb minutely, above and between the branches of the trees.

  Then the thing on the ground opens its mouth and begins to cry.

  No one can mistake that sound. It goes straight to their hearts.

  “A boy,” Mistress Bramlow marvels, a sob catching in her throat. “A perfect baby boy.” And she holds him up to the light of stars and lanterns, so that everyone can see how human he is. How human and how alive.

  The Watchers cluck softly. A newborn. Just a few hours old, at most, and very small.

  Tsssk.

  Their sharp eyes scan the ground for some sign that a birthing took place here this night, with only the trees to bear witness.

  No mess. No blood on the ground. And no footprints remaining either, to show that someone carried this newborn here and laid him nake
d in the drifting snow as if upon a lambs fleece.

  Poor scrap. Poor little mite.

  “Will you take him in, Mistress?” The Watcher in charge of the piskies’ toast doesn’t often speak. Her voice comes out rasping and as rough as a man’s.

  Mistress Bramlow is swaddling the baby in her shawl and breathing on his nose to keep new ice from forming there.

  “Of course,” she replies. “Of course I will.”

  The baby is quiet now, looking up at her with eyes so dark, they seem black. He has a cleft in his chin so deep, it might have been pressed there by his guardian angel, and his hair, now that it is no longer filmed with frozen snow, looks like being fair. He will be beautiful one day. The promise of it is all about him.

  Other women are stepping forward, offering advice, their own shawls, and helping hands as Mistress Bramlow gets shakily to her feet, clutching the newborn tight.

  “Thank you,” Mistress Bramlow murmurs. “Yes, lets take him home.” In her mind she is thinking back … counting moons … working out whether this child is who she thinks he is.

  Her mind is whirring, working fast.

  Tomorrow she will visit the big house and tell the minister that a foundling has been discovered and that she is of a mind to raise him as her own. She will see what kind of a response she gets to that and take her course from there.

  The baby wriggles in her arms. The soft weight of him as they trudge down the hill is like and yet not like the way little Amos felt when she held him. For a moment it hurts to think of her own lost son. Her boy, dead before anyone could truly know him or the person he might have become.

  This boy, this foundling, will never take the place of baby Amos. But he will be like another son, for all that, and she and Jack and the girls will grow to love him for himself.

  And up in the tree, its face coarse and gray between sparkles of ice, a piskie blinks once, twice, and wishes this special pot lid well. A good person, he’ll grow to be. Happy in the heart and mind regions and devoted to the land. Seven sons of his own, he’ll have one day, and not one of them a ranter. How about that, then? Oooo yes.