Murkmere

by Patricia Elliott

She stared back at me, then to my amazement dropped her gaze and flung herself down on the daybed. “Oh, very well. Come with me if you must.”

  As the howling of the night dogs passed my window that night, I lay and shuddered, thinking of Matt’s body being torn limb from limb, his blood dark on the snow. Matt, who had visited the village all the years of my growing; who’d go there no longer. What had possessed him to come to Murkmere?

  And what had possessed me too?

  Tomorrow I’d give in my notice when I collected my wages from Silas. I’d tell him I needed to return to my aunt and take care of her. He’d know my true reason for leaving, of course, but I wouldn’t let him stop me.

  I promised myself that soon I’d lie on my own pallet next to my aunt; and with that thought I was comforted. Soon I’d be away from this dreadful place, where servant girls were driven to drown themselves and innocent men were murdered. No wonder my poor mother had run away.

  And what of Leah, with her heathen ways and doomed soul?

  I didn’t care what became of her. Not a jot.

  But I didn’t sleep well. Next morning, I looked out of my window as I wearily fastened my bodice, and saw that drizzle had pitted the snow with tiny holes as if mice had supped on it. Leah had been right about the thaw.

  Her mood hadn’t improved. At breakfast, she almost threw the oatmeal at the old footman, complaining that it tasted bitter and had black pieces stuck through it. All the time we ate we could hear the unruly clamor from the stable block as the men made themselves ready for the ice breaking.

  I didn’t see her again that morning, but I knew she’d be with the Master at her books. They’d hear the tumult of the ice breaking from his rooms: even indoors it seemed impossible to escape the distant chipping and thudding, the crack as the ice broke, the roar from the men as the shards were successfully netted from the water.

  I’d seen the stable hands troop out earlier, trailing the long wooden handles of the nets behind them, their dark figures silhouetted against the snow that was tinged yellow under the overcast sky. There was much joshing and guffawing as they met the keepers, who were standing ready with their sledges and mallets. Then they set off together, a small militia set on destruction.

  Our luncheon was late, but Leah seemed relieved now that the rowdiness of the ice breaking was over, and merely grumbled to herself when a strangely black suet pudding was put on the table before us.

  “You needn’t walk with us today,” she told Dog when we were upstairs later, and Dog had helped her fasten her boots. “There’s my mending for you to do instead.”

  As Dog passed me at the chamber door, she shot out her hand and pinched me. “Them swans nip harder than that,” she hissed. “You’ll see!”

  X

  Swanskin

  Leah and I followed the black lines the net handles had made as they were dragged along earlier; the snow crumbled under my boots like stale cake as I struggled to keep pace with her long legs.

  “Have you read the book I gave you yet, Aggie?”

  Is it possible she’s making conversation? I thought, amazed. “I began it this morning, Miss, while you were studying.”

  “What do you think of it?” She looked eager for discussion, yet I knew I’d only disappoint her with my answer.

  “It seems rather — blasphemous.”

  She gave her mocking smile. “How fond you are of that word! A great thinker wrote that book long before I was born. Nobody’s heard of him nowadays. His books are banned.”

  “Then isn’t it wrong to read it, Miss?”

  “I’m going to give you far worse books than that!” she said wickedly.

  I hugged myself, shivering a little with cold and the boldness with which she spoke. I could feel my amber digging into me. All that morning as I read the book, I’d imagined the eye of the Almighty boring through the ceiling above me. But I knew I had to finish it, and read more.

  “Do you understand the author’s argument: that events happen by chance and are not predetermined?” Leah asked.

  I hesitated, for I’d only learned the meaning of the last word that very morning. “But we’ve been taught that the Almighty has decided the future of the world, and there’s nothing mortal man can do to change His will.”

  “And you believe that? That men don’t have the freedom to choose their fates?”

  My head whirled. “I think so.”

  She looked at me pityingly. “Read the rest of the book, then. It’s a history. You’ll find things were different once.” She paused, and rubbed her neck absently. “Sometime later we took a wrong turning. I often wonder if there’s a world where things didn’t turn out this way, where they do things differently. The Master thinks there may be lots of universes, you know, each one only a little different from the others.”

  “But where would they be, Miss?” I said, puzzled, but respectful of the Master’s great intellect. “In the sky? There wouldn’t be enough room for them.”

  “Perhaps they all fit inside each other.” Leah made circles with her hands. “I had a set of dolls when I was small. One doll fitted inside another doll, and another inside that doll, and so on.”

  “But how does the Master think the Great Eagle would fly around all these universes?” I asked faintly.

  Leah laughed, and shivers ran all over me. “He doesn’t think about that at all, Aggie! Surely you realize he’s not a believer? The Master thinks that scientific information should dictate man’s path, not religion.” She went on passionately, careless of the horror her words caused me, “Imagine, Aggie, perhaps there’s another universe somewhere with a world almost exactly like ours, but without the Ministration. Without the Lord Protector. Of course there would have to be some other system of rule in their place. But a tolerant one that allowed people to think for themselves and be represented in government, just as we used to be.”

  “Hush, Miss, that’s treason!” I looked around nervously, but we were alone in the snowy landscape: not a keeper to be seen, not even a seagull flying through the leaden skies — for which I was glad, since seagulls are the Souls of the Drowned and can listen. “Surely Lord Grouted, the Protector, is kind? What he does is for our good. And he married the Master’s own sister! You must hear about him from her.”

  Leah stopped and faced me, her face bleak. “Mr. Tunstall’s sister? Sophia’s dead. She caught the plague one summer in the Capital. Some say the plague is carried in the canals of the city. She’d given Lord Grouted a son, which was all the Protector cared about — someone to take over from him one day. I believe he’s in the Militia now, in training.” She shuddered, then went on. “Perhaps it was for the best that Sophia died.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t remember meeting Lord Grouted, I was too small. But I’ve heard stories about him from the servants.”

  “So your guardian lost his sister as well as his wife and baby?” I understood the bitterness in the Master’s face.

  “He has me,” Leah said fiercely.

  And, of course, there was nothing I could say to that.

  “But these stories about the Lord Protector … ” I prompted after we had trudged on in silence for a while, our breath steaming in the dank air.

  Leah shrugged. “You’ll be able to judge him yourself soon enough. My guardian’s to hold a ball here at Murkmere for my sixteenth birthday. Lord Grouted and members of the Ministration will be invited.”

  “Then the Master must think he’s a good man!”

  She picked up a handful of snow and threw it at an ancient oak. “You’re such a simpleton, Aggie. Can’t you understand that Mr. Tunstall only invites them because it’s a chance to show he’s still Master here, that he can still manage his estate? Do you think he’d allow them beyond his door otherwise? It’s been years since his quarrel with the Lord Protector, and neither’s forgotten it.”

  I gasped, and my throat stung with the cold. “He dared to quarrel with the Lord Protector? Was it
about his sister?”

  “Sophia was in good health then; they’d come to stay. I was too small to understand what the quarrel was about. Mr. Tunstall’s never mentioned it to me, I only know what the servants have told me.”

  She was staring ahead at the frozen mere, biting her lip. I didn’t think she’d confide more, but then she sighed and the words came haltingly.

  “My guardian was in his wheelchair, as usual, when they began arguing. After using words to no avail, he attacked Lord Grouted with his bare hands, so the story goes. You’ve seen how strong his hands and arms are? It was after that he asked for iron bands to be put around his chair, so that if he did lose his temper again, others would be safe.”

  She gazed at me, her eyes shadowed. “You see, he’d almost strangled the Lord Protector.”

  The men had cleared the ice in a broad band round the rim of the mere, and the pewter gray water lay exposed and motionless. The black mud of the shore had been trodden clear of snow and was firm under our boots. Farther along, the way to the water was blocked by a growth of dark rushes slicing up through the surface and a thicket of shrubs that spread right round the mere.

  “This way,” said Leah. She went down almost to the water, making the moorhens skitter away in fright.

  I followed hesitantly, and suddenly she had parted the tangled bushes and disappeared.

  I began to push frantically through in the direction I thought she’d taken, scratching my hands and dislodging clumps of wet snow. The mud was soft between the bushes, and I was sinking.

  “Here,” said Leah’s impatient voice, and she hauled me up beside her, onto a causeway of small stones. “It’s the remains of an old path.”

  I grasped a handful of her cloak, frightened of losing her again. Mud had splashed right up my cloak and I was thankful I’d had the sense to wear my old one. My hat, though, was my new black felt, and I pulled it down firmly so it wouldn’t be knocked off by the overhanging branches and twigs that spiked out at all angles; its brim was already drooping in the damp air.

  “Quiet,” hissed Leah. “You’ll scare the swans.”

  But I was being quiet, I thought indignantly, as quiet as you could be when squeezing through a prickly jungle of vegetation surrounded by mud and water. I was making a heroic effort not to cry out at the creatures I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye: eels rising and slithering over the mud, voles slipping into dark places, the scurry of rats among the reeds.

  I don’t know how long we’d been struggling along when we came to a muddy beach and, at the water’s edge, a boat-house built of planks that were rotting and green. On the far side of the beach the path was blocked by a great fall of earth that had crumbled away from the bank to expose twisted roots and gaping holes, half full of snow.

  Leah scrambled up the rickety wooden steps to the door of the boathouse, and disappeared without a word. Not wanting to be left alone again, I climbed up after her.

  In the dim green light inside she was standing on a jetty that ran around the three walls. There was a smell of soaked wood that reminded me painfully of Aunt Jennet’s cottage on rainy days. A single boat floated like a shadow on the scummy water below our feet.

  “In the old days guests would go boating on the mere,” Leah said, her voice sounding hollow in the enclosed space. “But no one’s cleared the weeds for years. Besides, the swans nest in the reed beds by the island. They’d attack anyone who approached at the wrong time.”

  I wished I could stay there, protected by three walls, rotten or not. But as I turned back after her into the daylight, I heard her say, “I can see the swans!”

  Next, she had pulled me impatiently down the steps, and I knew I wasn’t safe anymore.

  There were swans on the marshy pools on the Wasteland, but I’d never seen them. Travelers sometimes thought them ghost birds when they saw them drifting in the murk. Now, as I saw those pale shapes emerge from the darkness of the reed beds near the island and skim languidly through the gray water, I understood why. Each swan glowed against the dullness of the mere, like a candle into which the lighted wick has fallen. Their necks were slender and elegant, and they carried their heads so proudly it seemed each one wore a crown.

  Leah was counting. “They’re all safe. Those men are such monsters with their mallets and noise. When the ice is thin enough the swans break it themselves, you know. I’ve seen them slit it with their bills and make a narrow channel to swim along.”

  I watched the swans weave between each other on the water, like dancers in a dream. “There are so many!”

  Leah smiled complacently, as if, like a trickster at a fair, she had produced them herself from inside her cloak. “They’re the descendants of a pair that came from the pleasure gardens of the Capital. They were given as a wedding present to my guardian.”

  So that was why she cared about them so much. She was protecting them for the Master’s sake.

  “You know the language of birds, Aggie. What do swans signify?”

  “But you don’t believe such things!” And I was quite sure that a copy of the Table of Significance wasn’t among the books in the watchtower.

  “All the same, tell me.”

  “True Love and Happiness in Marriage, Miss,” I said, thinking she’d laugh at me.

  But her face was sad. “In that case it was an excellent present. My guardian loved his wife deeply. Did you know that a group of swans together are called a ‘lamentation,’ Aggie? The swans still mourn for her, just as he does.”

  She shot me a sly glance, her mood changing suddenly. “Do you have a sweetheart?”

  The question surprised me, and I was put out to find myself blushing. I’d immediately thought of Jethro Sim, for no good reason at all. “Swans are thought of as messengers too,” I said quickly.

  “The Murkmere swans aren’t messengers,” she said, sad again. “The keepers clip their wings to keep them here.”

  The swans were gliding toward our part of the shore as if they had made the decision together. As Leah went closer to the water’s edge, they suddenly rose out of the water with a tremendous splashing and rearing of necks and bills.

  I didn’t know what to do; I was frightened they’d attack her. Now they were advancing up the beach toward her, waddling in an ungainly way, looking enormous against her frailty. She was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of dazzling plumage.

  She stood motionless, making a strange clicking sound with her tongue. The swans responded in the same way, varying their clicks with soft snorts. Then, very gently, they began to rub their heads against her black cloak. They ruffled her fine silvery hair and twined their necks round her gawky frame, up, down, while she ran her hands slowly over their feathers.

  Her face was rapt; she’d forgotten me. For her, nothing else existed at that moment but the circling swans, and she stood like a queen among them.

  I felt a chill run through me, as if I looked on something unearthly.

  I drew back, my gaze still fixed on her. The next moment I had slipped, clawing at the bank behind me, feeling a great root give under my hand, and sending clods of wet earth and snow thudding over the hard mud of the shore.

  The swans turned, and hissed furiously as they saw me, their necks rising and curving back as if they were preparing to strike. They began to move ponderously toward me, raising their wings with a sound like wet linen flapping in the wind. I could feel the vibration of their coming through my boots.

  “Go back!” shrieked Leah. She pointed at the bushes. “They can’t follow!”

  I scrambled back in, my heart beating fast, not caring whether my new hat was ripped to shreds.

  Leah was making soft, soothing noises. Gradually, the hissing died away and I heard the swans start to click and snort again. There was splashing, then silence.

  “You can come out,” Leah called. “They’ve gone.”

  The stretch of gray water was deserted. Leah took in my disheveled appearance without sympathy. “I should never have brough
t you here. They were trying to protect me.” Her eyes were bright; her cheeks had lost their pallor.

  “You look happy enough, Miss!” I blurted out resentfully.

  Her face softened and was suddenly vulnerable. “I discovered the swans when I was a small child. They’ve been my companions always, my only friends. I’ve had no one else to talk to.”

  Pity tugged at me. “I know what it’s like, Miss. My sister died when I was little.”

  She’d been gazing at the empty water but now she turned to me, her interest caught. “Didn’t you have friends, though?”

  “None of the other girls wanted to be friends with me,” I said, with an effort. “I was the schoolmistress’s niece. I was privileged, you see.”

  She smiled at me, as if she suddenly saw me properly for the first time. “Then we’re the same, you and I. We know what it is to be alone.”

  And I was so touched that I smiled foolishly back at her.

  As we turned to go I almost fell again. The globe of white root that nearly tripped me as it lay on the mud was the very same one I’d pulled out in my fall earlier.

  Leah steadied me, screeching with laughter at my disgruntled face, and then she saw the hole that the root had left behind in the bank.

  “Wait. There’s something in here.”

  The hole was nearer her eye level than mine. She flung back her cloak and rolled up the sleeve of her wool dress as if to plunge her bare white arm into the oozy darkness.

  “Don’t, Miss Leah!” I cried in disgust, thinking of what might be hiding in there: water snakes, coiled slippery and cold, and the crawling things with lidless eyes and sharp teeth that dwell in the dark.

  But she didn’t listen. She felt about and brought her arm out at last, mud-smeared to the elbow; she was clutching what I thought was the filthy, rotted carcass of some animal.

  I drew back in revulsion, but instead of dropping it at once, she examined it curiously. “It’s a sack, Aggie, and there’s something inside!”