The Magpie's Library

by Kate Blair

  The magpie nodded at it, emphatically.

  I leafed through. Much of the book was blank, but the girl couldn’t still be alive. I turned back to the crowded handwriting at the start. Was the first letter an ‘f’, a ‘j’ or an ‘i’? The text was already moving. Could I be pulled into a book I couldn’t read? I squinted at the first word.

  Jcabal? Fsebil?

  The letters reached my hands. The words spread over my fingers. But I should go. Mum would worry. I tried to close the book, but it stuck to my hands with a webbing of words.

  “Can you stop it doing that?” I swiped at the letters with the fingers I had free, rubbed at them on my skin, but they tangled, tying me tighter to the book.

  “Please? I need to go home.”

  I strained against the tug, trying to yank my hands away as the book drew me toward the now-blank page.

  “No! Please!”

  Right before I was dragged in, the first word settled on the back of my hand. The letters spread out, and I could finally read it.

  Isabel. It said Isabel.

  A BABY CRIED in my arms. Its little hands were bunched into fists, its red face crinkled into a grimace. The girl whose body I was in rocked the baby as she paced. She wore a dress of soft wool trimmed with fur, the dress from the cover of the book. Her long skirt rustled against what looked like hay spread over the floor. Her breath came in gasps as she tried to hold her sobs at bay. With each gasp came the smells of the room: wood-smoke, rosemary and a sweeter scent that turned my stomach.

  A single candle sat on a wooden table. It barely broke the darkness, and as it flickered, the shadows danced. The windows were shuttered and wind whistled around the outside of the house, like a creature trying to get in. A bed took up much of the room, with a young woman lying in it. There was a whisper as the blankets shifted, and an arm moved.

  “Alice!” Isabel hurried over. “Thou art awake!”

  My sister must look upon her son. For it shall soon be too late.

  “Here.” She laid the baby on the bed, next to the young woman’s head.

  See how he quietens. He knows his mother.

  “Nicolas.” The word was a croak. The girl on the bed moved her hand to the baby, who clutched at her finger. She smiled. Her face was wet with sweat or tears.

  She is too hot. The childbed fever overtakes her.

  She was dying, I realized as Isabel’s memories took over, as I sank into her story.

  The young woman in the bed had just given birth, and now she was dying.

  MY BODY QUAKED, shaken by the grief held tight inside. The midwife said there was naught that could be done. The priest had been, and my dear sister had been given forgiveness for her sins.

  “Nicolas. Oh, is he not a fine boy?” Alice’s voice was passing weak, barely stronger than the whistle of the wind outside.

  “A bonny boy indeed.” I stopped, for fear that a sob would smother my words.

  “Grieve not, for I shall soon be with my husband. With our brother.” I leaned in to catch Alice’s words, soft as her breath. “Yet mine heart aches. For what shall become of Nicolas?”

  Alice leaned back upon her pillow, her face bright as she beheld her son, as though the light of heaven shone already upon it. The divine gates would surely open to her, and I wondered if it had been so for Maghew.

  I could not think that he would be damned, as Father had said. I had believed him to be blessed. Was that not what the stories said of the seventh child of a seventh child? Yet it seemed he was just as subject to the wheel of fortune and the dark scythe of death as any other boy.

  My sister exhaled: a long sigh. No inhale came after.

  “Alice.”

  Her eyes were yet open, fixed upon the canopy above her head. She moved not, and turned not her gaze upon her son when he began to cry. Nicolas’s keening was a wordless mourning, rising and falling. For he knew the terrible truth afore I did.

  “Alice!” I grasped her hand. “Alice!”

  She had gone. I fell forward, my head upon her sheets as I wept.

  “Alice.” Her very name unraveled me, and the grief possessed my body. For a while, it took my voice, my sight, and my reason, and I bellowed like an animal.

  Nicolas brought me back to myself, his mourning louder even than my own. His little mouth was a wide “o.”

  I reined in my sorrow. I should not think of myself at such a time, should not allow Alice’s death to undo me, not when her child needed me. I wiped at my face with my foresleeve, then took his small weight into my arms. I tried to smile.

  “Dost … thou wish for a tale?”

  I carried the screaming bundle across the room. He had loosened his swaddle, and waved his tiny fists. His eyes were squeezed shut with the misery of infancy.

  I laid him gentle upon the rushes of the floor, and unbound the cloth wrapped around his small form, just as I had with Maghew, when I was but a young girl, and he a babe in arms, afore he was locked away from us.

  “I shall tell thee of thy mother. Her hair is …” I glanced at her. “Her hair was the brown of chestnuts, and more than anything, she loved to dance, loved to kick her skirts out as she spun and turned.” My voice caught. Yet I would be telling Alice’s story for years. I should start it while her soul was close enough to hear.

  I re-wrapped the babe, gently holding down his arms as he squirmed against me. He opened his eyes.

  “She would dance till she lacked breath and her cheeks glowed. And one day, a handsome knight saw her dancing, and knew he must marry her.”

  Hand over hand with the cloth, tightening it as Nicolas watched, as his cries quieted.

  “He asked her father for her hand, and since the knight was of good name, the match was made, and the families celebrated.”

  I tried not to think of my Thomas, back in London. I hoped he was safe from the sweating sickness, hoped I would see his kind face again. I tucked in the cloth, turning Nicolas into a worm with a pink face. He would not wiggle out of that. I carried him to the wooden chair.

  “But whilst out riding, the knight was thrown by his horse, and he perished.” Nicolas gazed at me. I would let him think of his father proudly astride his steed, not suffering for days before his injuries claimed him.

  “His beautiful wife was with child. She returned to her family, who were happy to care for her. But the Lord called her too. She left a boy, so that all could remember her.” The baby’s face blurred to a pink blob as my tears came.

  Nicolas waited for more. I knew not how his story was to end.

  I had promised Maghew happily ever after in the tales I told him, yet I no longer believed in such fine endings. Who would win Nicolas’s wardship? Would they be kind, or cruel? He was so small, so delicate in my arms. I had failed my brother; I had left him to die alone.

  I must not fail Nicolas.

  “I shall ask Thomas to buy his wardship as a wedding gift,” I whispered to Alice. “With the Lord’s help, we will raise him.”

  A soft knock came upon the door. I carried Nicolas over and opened it to the wet nurse. Her hands were at her chin, tying her cap, as if she had but recently awakened.

  “I heard his cries,” she said. “He needs a feeding.” She kept her gaze low, away from my face. She would have heard my weeping, too, for my grief had not been quiet.

  “My sister has gone to her rest,” my voice quaked. “I shall keep watch over her tonight.”

  The servant bobbed a curtsy. “I shall tell the master.”

  She reached for the babe, and I handed Nicolas to her. I closed the door quietly behind them, and turned to my seat by the bed.

  Tomorrow Alice would be draped in black cloth. Tomorrow the bells would ring her to her resting place. Tonight, it was my duty to watch over her.

  Who watched over Maghew? Such a dark duty should have fallen to me.
But could I have borne it? Mayhap I could have passed the time telling him tales. I could have told him how I begged Father to let us share a tutor, but he said Maghew’s lessons were not meet for a young lady. That learning Latin and Greek would inflame my stomach towards vice.

  I wished I had told Maghew how much I loved him before I left.

  The sobs shook my back, and my fingers grew wet with tears.

  I was going to ask Maghew if he would live with us at Thomas’s estate, where the air would be more healthful. Yet when I saw how he reacted to my betrothal, an internal voice bade me keep quiet, for fear of further vexing him. Thereafter, everything happened apace: Maghew’s sickness growing grave just as we heard news of Alice’s husband. Then came the hurried journey out to our country house, where Alice met us, heavy with child. We had not had time to grieve our brother when her labor began.

  Now there were but five of us left.

  A whisper in my head told me Maghew was not gone. I just had to reach for him, and we would be together. Forever. How I wished to believe it.

  The candle guttered and the shadows crowded me, reaching in from the corners of the room. When the flame grew long once more, I was no longer alone.

  A magpie stood beside the bed.

  I turned to the windows. Yet I knew they were shuttered, and the door was closed.

  “What art thou?”

  The bird replied not. It gazed on Alice, black eyes glistening as if it mourned her as I did.

  It hopped behind the bed. The curtains were closed upon the other side, so I was not able to see where it went. I followed. But the magpie was gone.

  A door stood in its place.

  I raised a hand to stifle the cry upon my lips. There had been no door within this wall afore now, and certainly not this door. This door belonged in London. I knew it well, although the form of a magpie was newly scorched upon the familiar wood.

  I had let this door shut upon my brother, when he had needed me most.

  I pushed it open. Had I not dreamt of doing so every night since we left? Yet it did not open into Maghew’s bedroom. It did not open into that awful day a few weeks ago. It opened into a room I had never seen before, bare as a monk’s cell.

  “Maghew?” My voice was a whisper.

  The dark mud of the walls was not plastered. It was empty but for a glass vial in the center of the dirt floor and the magpie that perched next to it.

  My little magpie.

  The bird had much of my brother about him: the brightness within its eyes, its quick, nervous movements. Yet Maghew was gone. His body grew cold within a London grave. His soul should be with the Lord. How could a boy such as him escape the reach of death?

  Such power belonged to the cruel things of the world; things that took delight in the agony of mortals, things that drove us apart. This chamber was too dark for the light that had dwelt within my brother.

  It was a trap.

  A shiver went through me. “Oh Maghew, what hast thou done?”

  The bird nodded at the vial, as if it contained the answer. It looked like the herb oils and rosewater that Thomas’s family traded in. Like the perfumes he had given me. I stepped closer, until I could see what was upon it, etched into the glass: the image of a magpie.

  I knew that to touch it was to put my very soul in peril, yet I had to know the truth. I picked up the vial, and with shaking hands, unstoppered it. The air in the room changed, as if the small flask sucked everything within it.

  Before I could cry out, I was dragged into the dark glass.

  I FOUND MYSELF back in the library, slumped on the chair in the center.

  The branches felt tight around me, keeping me safe from the outside world. I remembered the Tudor room, the cucumber scent of the floor rushes, the warmth of the woodsmoke, and the feel of the clothes. But in spite of all the changes between my time and Isabel’s, the emotions were the same: worry, sorrow, grief, loneliness.

  I turned to my companion. “Was that you in Isabel’s story?”

  A little nod.

  “How old are you?”

  The magpie swept a wing in the direction of the shelves. The meaning was clear. He had been here for as long as the books had.

  “Why was Isabel afraid? Why did she call you Maghew?”

  The bird shook its head sadly.

  “This would be so much easier if you could talk.”

  Memories of my own life slipped back. Of the figure waiting for me outside the library. Of running out on Mum and Grandpa. Of being drawn into the story before I could tell Mum where I was.

  I pulled out my phone: 7:06 p.m. Mum would have called the police by now. There was no message from her, but there wouldn’t be, since I had no reception. I hurried to the door and stopped; afraid the dark figure was still on the other side, waiting for me in the night. I had to get somewhere my phone would work.

  But the door was magic, wasn’t it? And it had moved once already.

  “Is it possible to open this door inside Hayling Library, rather than on the outside?”

  The magpie twitched its head back toward the books.

  “Sorry, I haven’t got time. But if I can go into the real library, I’ll be safe. I can call Mum and I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

  The magpie’s wings slumped slightly, but it hopped to the door. The old wood shimmered like a motorway in a heatwave. Once it was solid again I creaked it open, just an inch, and felt the stale indoor air on my face, smelled the floor polish. I could make out the metal shelves and the spines of books lurking in the dark.

  I took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and stepped into the closed library.

  WHY DID YOU give her Isabel’s story?

  “She asked about the library, what it was for. I wanted to show her, as best I could.”

  Silva was kind. Many were entranced by my collection, but they so rarely tarried to talk with me, or touched me, as she did.

  Do you know what you are risking?

  “She … felt like a friend.”

  Silva is not your friend.

  “Perhaps she would be, if she knew me. Perhaps she would choose to stay.”

  Isabel knew you. And even she did not stay.

  The Whisper was right, of course.

  My sister burst into my bedchamber late on the day I gave the message to the servant. Isabel shoved open the bed curtains and slumped down hard upon the corner of my mattress.

  Her face was flushed as if she had been crying. I wondered if my message had reached our father. But there could not have been time for a break to have been made with her betrothed.

  “Isabel, how is it with thee?”

  “Did you hear of Rafe?” Isabel gasped.

  “Rafe?”

  “One of the serving boys.”

  A sickness sank through my stomach. “What … what news of Rafe?”

  Isabel looked up, eyes wide. “He has died.”

  “Died?”

  She nodded, biting upon her lip.

  My heart fluttered. “How?”

  “’Twas the sweating sickness. It afflicted him with a terrible speed. They say he had but a headache before noon.”

  I swallowed down the bile that rose within my gullet.

  “And, dear brother, that is not all.”

  “’Tis … not?”

  “Rafe stole from us. Oh, Maghew, look.” She put something cold and small in my hand: my silver buckle. I closed my fist around it, afraid my face would betray me. “They found this within his pocket.”

  “I … I cannot think how he came by it.”

  “In faith, ’tis hard to imagine Rafe as a thief. But there is yet more. He carried a letter.”

  I clutched the buckle tighter. It cut into my hand.

  “‘Twas addressed to Father, filled with the vilest slander. Int
ended to end my betrothal.” She wiped at her face with her sleeve. “I was friendly to him, and I knew not that Rafe could write. Mayhap that is why he wished to end the betrothal, as he hoped for my hand himself.”

  I exhaled as I realized her mistake. “Oh, Isabel. My heart is sorry for his death.”

  “I thank thee, Maghew.” She sniffed. “I shall pray for the Lord’s Mercy upon his soul.”

  “And I, too.” I remembered Rafe’s face, his eagerness for the buckle, and his hope it would help his family, and I felt discomforted. “Canst … thou give this to Rafe’s mother?” I held out the buckle. “His father died but a short time since and they have need of money. No doubt that is why he took it.”

  Isabel smiled, warm as a summer’s day. She took the buckle and clutched it to her chest.

  “Thou art a goodly man, Maghew. I shall ask Father to make some provision for Rafe’s mother. Yet now I must take my leave. The sweating sickness has reached our very door. We must pack, for we leave tomorrow. My wedding will be delayed until it is safe to return.”

  Rafe’s death shook me, of course. But my heart rejoiced that Isabel’s wedding had been postponed. Much could happen before we returned to the city. Maybe Father would rethink the match. Or perhaps the merchant’s son would succumb to the sweat too.

  No. Such thoughts were not worthy of a goodly man.

  You are not a good man, The Whisper said. Isabel is wrong. If she ever knew the truth, she would not love you.

  The Whisper was right. A good man would not steal. A good man would not write the letter Rafe had carried. But perhaps it was not too late. Perhaps I could still be the good man Isabel thought I was.

  A good man would confess his crimes, The Whisper said. And you will not.

  The Whisper was always right.

  That night, I thought I was safe. I thought I had won back my sister. But the Lord did not delay in His judgement. My meeting with Rafe brought its own punishment.

  The next morning, the fever was upon me.

  My linen shift was heavy with sweat, clinging to my chest. I rolled over, and the blanket wrapped me as tight as a swaddled babe. It was Isabel who found me. She pulled back the curtain. I tried to focus on her, through the shivering and burning that consumed me.