The Familiars

by Halls, Stacey

  The third time was worst of all. Richard was away, and I’d been playing with Puck on the lawn outside the house, tugging him around by a stick he had clamped in his mouth. My stomach was big by that time, as though I’d swallowed a globe. A line had appeared down my front, and in my naivety I thought that’s where the skin would come apart and my baby be lifted out when it was ready. That afternoon I’d fallen over more than once, and got muddy and wet, my playful Puck jumping all over me when I was down, licking my face and making me laugh. I remember the laughter dying in my throat when I saw Miss Fawnbrake watching me from the dining chamber window. Then for a long time the joy didn’t come back because that evening, while I dressed for bed, the pains started again and didn’t stop for three days. A doctor was called, Richard arrived from Yorkshire, and in a blur of pain and darkness I remember the feeling of something leaving me, and a midwife holding what looked like a white rabbit by its feet. For two weeks I did not leave my bed, and Miss Fawnbrake was a malignant shadow in the corner. One day she disappeared and came back with Richard, who for the first time in our marriage raised his voice at me.

  ‘What is this about you rolling around on the lawn like an animal? Letting the dog trample all over you? Fleetwood, it’s like you insist on behaving like a child and have no interest in becoming a mother.’

  He may as well have called me a murderer. If there had been a knife with my untouched bread, or a red-hot poker in the fireplace, I would have rammed it into Miss Fawnbrake’s pallid chest, and proved him right. Once Richard could see how much passion she inspired in me, and how I ground my teeth when she walked into a room, he finally deigned to make rid of her with the idea that her presence was causing me to miscarry. While I did not think him right, I did not think him entirely wrong either. How I dreaded her face appearing at the door each morning to dress me, and how I hated the low, confidential conversations she conducted with my husband, with the servants. Before I could tell Richard about my day, she had done it; before I could greet him at the door, she’d taken his cloak. If she could have carried his child for him, no doubt she would have done. The night Richard dismissed her, I found one of Puck’s turds beneath my pillow, dug from the grounds and carried up four flights of stairs in her chapped, swollen hands. Never again would I have a companion; it was like having a sister who hated me.

  Halfway home from Padiham, my horse’s steady rhythm jolted to a shuddering halt, and before I realised what was happening it began backing up and rearing, its eyes rolling and nostrils flaring. Surrounded by tree trunks and a chorus of rustling leaves, at first I did not know what had startled it. I knew it disliked harts and even deer, as it was not a hunting horse. Then a movement ahead drew my eyes. A red fox was tensed ten yards away, large as a young doe and just as sleek. I had only a second to take in its pointed face and flattened back, its bristling tail frozen in a perfect line behind it. What I remember thinking before I fell was how unmoved by us it was, as though we had disturbed it in some private reflection.

  The last thing I saw before my horse flailed again was the animal’s reproachful golden eyes. I hit the ground with a crack, landing on my left wrist and feeling several things at once: the pain in my arm, the wet ground underneath, and the mounting knowledge that the horse was going to crush me underfoot. For it was panicking, rearing and bucking around the clearing I was lying in. I placed my good hand on my stomach and spoke calmly to the horse, but its hooves went on pacing, its flanks sweating. My wrist sang with pain and I thought I might be sick. I tried to push myself up and cried out with the shock of it. There was a tree trunk two or three yards away, so I leant on my elbows and tried to drag myself towards it.

  ‘Damn fox,’ I muttered. ‘Damn mule.’

  ‘Don’t move.’

  A woman emerged between two trees. At once I knew her – she was the same strange girl from the woods the other day. Proceeding cautiously towards the beast with her hands outstretched, she did not speak or click her tongue, but the effect of her presence was as though she had, with her clear gaze and steady grip. The mare stopped its twitching and came to a submissive halt, its dark eyes rolling. While the woman held the clammy animal still, I watched her golden hair twisting from beneath her cap, her long face serious. Her hands were slim but too bony to be elegant.

  I tried to push myself up again and winced with pain, my wrist burning.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  She spoke again in that low, musical voice, flickering like a flame in all the green. She was wearing the same old dress as before, the same mutton’s wool cap. As she knelt beside me, I smelt lavender, despite her dirty clothes. Carefully she took my wrist in her long, white hands and I gritted my teeth. Releasing it gently, she looked around, got up and snapped a short stick from the low branch of a tree. The woods whispered and shivered around us, and for a brief moment I thought she might use it as a weapon to strike me with. But she knelt again, ripped a length of fabric from her grubby apron, tied the stick to my wrist and bound it tightly in three places.

  ‘Only a sprain,’ she told me. ‘Nothing is broken.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ was all I could say. She regarded me with those curious amber eyes. ‘Why do you wander about the forest alone?’

  ‘Why do you?’ she said.

  With my good hand I reached for my stomach, feeling for anything amiss. Her eyes travelled down my front, concealed by folds of velvet and brocade, then flicked over my face: my dry lips, my bloodshot eyes and grey pallor.

  As if she could smell the sickness on me, she said, ‘You are with child.’

  My vision blurred, the forest leapt around me, and as though she had invoked it, I leant over and vomited on the roots of a tree. Sweat drenched my face and I wiped at it with a shaking, muddied hand.

  ‘You live at the big house by the river?’ she asked.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You told me last time. I will help you back, Mistress …’

  ‘Shuttleworth. There is no need for it.’

  ‘You can’t ride, and you are weak. I will take the horse.’

  ‘I’m not getting back on that stupid mule.’

  ‘You must. Here.’

  Guiding the horse nearer, she made a cradle for my foot, and with difficulty I hoisted myself up. My skirts were damp and muddy, and made a mess on her hands, but she did not seem to mind, and reluctantly I clicked my tongue and dug my heels in, and we began at a gentle pace.

  It was spring, and the trees would soon stand proud and green as a cavalry, though the last of the winter wind bit their trunks and shook their branches. It crossed my mind that when these budding leaves enjoyed their short time on earth before turning orange and falling to coat the floor, I would likely not be here to see it. I closed my eyes and we rode on in silence.

  ‘Thank you for helping me,’ I said after a while. ‘I may have been trampled to offal by the time my husband found me.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Richard Shuttleworth. Where do you live?’

  After a pause, she named the village a few miles to the north-east.

  ‘Colne is not so close. What brings you to my land again?’

  If I sounded peevish, I half-meant it. I had not forgotten the massacred rabbits, the limp form dangling from her bloodied fist.

  ‘This is your land too? I did not know.’

  ‘And if you had not been on it I might not have lived to tell the tale.’

  We moved in a more companionable silence, me on horseback, she on foot. I only wondered later how she knew the way, with the trees so thick and the uneven ground showing no clear paths. But I let her lead me, as relieved as the horse was that someone was taking charge. My wrist throbbed and my teeth were thick with sourness.

  ‘Are you ill with the child?’ she asked.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I can give you something to help.’

  ‘You can? You are a wise woman?’

  ‘I am a midwife.’

  My hea
rt beat a little faster and I sat up straighter.

  ‘You deliver babies that live? And the women – they live themselves?’

  ‘I do everything I can.’

  That was not what I wanted to hear, and I sat back in the saddle, a cloud eclipsing my brief moment of hope. We did not speak for another minute or so, then I asked if she had infants of her own. But her reaction to the simple question surprised me. I saw a twitch of something in her face – was it irritation? – and she kept her eyes on the ground. The knuckles on her hand holding the rein flared bone-white as she gripped it tighter. I had upset her; I always managed to say the wrong thing, and my shame sat heavily on me.

  After the longest time, she spoke, so quietly I might have missed it.

  ‘No.’

  I sighed inwardly. I knew not how to speak to women my age, having no friends or sisters. Eleanor and Anne Shuttleworth were the closest I had to either, and I could hardly bear to be in their simpering, frothy company for more than a day or so. This stranger was being polite, as a poor village girl might with a gentlewoman. But for once in my life I wished for a normal conversation with a young woman, as equals, sitting across from one another at a card table or side by side in saddles.

  ‘I have just had a thought,’ I announced, trying to sound merry. ‘I do not know the name of my saviour.’

  ‘Alice Gray,’ she answered quietly, before adding, ‘The women who do not live … It’s only when it cannot be helped. I know it to look at them.’

  I swallowed. ‘How do you know it?’

  Alice Gray considered her response.

  ‘It’s in their eyes. It’s giving over to … whatever is beyond. You know the daylight gate?’

  I nodded, wondering what dusk had to do with childbirth.

  ‘The light and the darkness are equal forces – partners, if you will – then there is a moment, very quick and quiet, where you can see the day giving in to the night. That’s when I know. That’s what it’s like.’

  She sounded like a witch, and I almost told her.

  ‘You think me full of fancy,’ she said, mistaking my silence.

  ‘No, I understand. The death is inevitable, like the darkness.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Not for the first time, I wondered what the darkness felt like when you were half in the light. I think I may have come close to it before, but the pain anchored me to the earth. I watched Alice Gray’s dull cap bob alongside my horse’s shoulder, and imagined telling her about the doctor’s letter. But as with Richard, the words would not come.

  ‘You are young for a midwife,’ I said instead.

  ‘I learnt from my mother. She was a midwife. The best, actually.’

  I felt the doctor’s words tighten once again around my neck, and with my good hand I adjusted my dirt-spattered collar.

  ‘When you say you know it to look at a woman with child?’ I asked. ‘Are you ever wrong?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Alice replied, but I sensed she was lying.

  Where she had been eloquent earlier, now it was as though a curtain had come down over her mood. Without turning, I examined her from the corner of my eye. She was not beautiful but there was some vital quality that made her interesting to look at: the long nose, the intelligent, searching eyes, the hands that brought life into the world. She was quickly becoming one of the most fascinating people I’d met.

  I swallowed again, tightening my grip on the rein as though it tethered me to this life.

  ‘Do you know it to look at me?’

  Alice Gray glanced up at me, then her amber eyes returned to the floor.

  Back at Gawthorpe, the servants made a great fuss getting me off my horse and inside the entrance hall. As they lowered me down, I searched for Richard’s face in the four or five gathered on the steps, and more in the windows. But of course, I thought dully as they helped me up the steps like an old duchess, he was away. In all the activity, I remembered Alice, and slapped a maid’s hand away as she tried to remove the crude stick-and-rags splint.

  ‘I shall keep it on, Sarah,’ I said, as usual managing to sound spiteful rather than gracious.

  How queer the servants thought me. For a whole year at first I dared not give them instruction – some of them were forty, fifty years my senior. Once, when I was fourteen or so, and brushing my horse in the stable, I heard one of the yard boys call me the child bride. I had stayed there until dusk, prickling with shame, afraid to come out in case they’d know I’d heard. When Richard asked where on earth I’d been for so long, I told him, tears smarting in my eyes, and the boy had been dismissed within the hour.

  Sarah let go obediently, but not before I saw the story forming in her mind, the one she would save for the buttery. That’s when I noticed Alice, almost out of sight, descending the front steps. I called her and she paused, framed in the rectangle of daylight, for the entrance hall with its warren of passages was very dark. The servants came to a collective hush, regarding her with open curiosity.

  ‘Will you come in for something to eat?’

  My ears were growing red, and I had to clear my throat, knowing everyone was paying attention.

  Alice looked uncertain, as though trying to determine whether I had issued an invitation or a command. But Sarah decided for her, ushering her in with an impatient tut and closing the heavy door behind her to keep out the spring chill. Inside the lanterns flared and settled, and Alice wrung her hands. Burning with self-consciousness, I turned to one of the kitchen girls, who was standing uselessly aside.

  ‘Margery, have bread and cheese and something to drink sent to the parlour, and take Miss Gray there. I will change out of my wet things and see her there.’

  Alice was looking with interest at the high ceilings, the dark corners, the sconces. I tried to smile at her before going to the staircase, hoping it was not obvious that this was the first time I’d ever had my own guest.

  None of the servants offered to help me get out of my riding clothes, which, given how filthy and trampled they were, was difficult with two hands and almost impossible with one. My wrist ached. Puck sniffed curiously at me, and when I was undressed, out of habit I put a hand between my legs to check I was not bleeding. Almost a full half-hour later I was in a clean skirt and jacket, and went down with Puck padding behind me. Voices were coming from beneath the staircase where the parlour was at the back of the house, and I pushed the door open, to be greeted by two faces.

  ‘Richard!’

  He came to me and kissed my cheek distractedly, taking hold of my wrist.

  ‘I was on my way to your chamber – what’s this about you falling from your horse, little ghost? And what is this invention? A fine improvisation, I must say. Miss Gray, is this your work? Fleetwood, are you hurt? I hope no one else is?’

  As always, Richard’s bombardment of questions made me feel dizzy, and I knew not which to answer first. Leaving my hands in his, I looked instead at Alice, whose face was expressionless, giving no hint of their conversation. The parlour was not grand, but in it Alice looked twice as drab, her dress dull and dingy against the jewel-like Turkey carpets and honey-coloured panelling. Indoors, she was different – ordinary, almost – and younger, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three

  ‘You are surprised to see me. Did you forget I was not leaving until tonight?’

  Weakly, with Richard’s help, I sat down in one of the polished oak chairs by the low fire, which thankfully was crackling cheerfully. Before I could speak, Margery brought a loaf with cheese and fruit and a jug of ale, departing with a swift appraisal of Alice and her muddy fingers.

  ‘Your hands – shall I send for water? I turned to Richard, who had begun pouring ale into two cups. ‘Alice helped me back on to my horse.’

  ‘An angel of the forest,’ he announced, handing one to her.

  She brushed her hands on her apron before accepting the cup and drinking thirstily. I realised Richard was waiting for an answer from me, his grey eyes on mine.

  ‘All
is well?’

  He was in a good mood, as usual, light of spirit and heart. Sometimes he made me feel as though I wore a cloak of doom and gloom that would never unfasten, yet if the same one was placed around his shoulders he would shake it off as easily as a wet dog.

  ‘All is well,’ I replied with a reassuring smile. For now, I thought.

  He knelt and took my free hand, kissing it, then filling it with the cup of ale.

  ‘I will leave you women to talk of French farthingales while I get out of these clothes. I think I will delay my trip another day. Besides, Easter is almost here so there will not be much business to be done.’

  My heart sang at his words, but before I could thank him he was gone, grabbing a fistful of grapes on his way out. I watched Alice, wondering what effect my husband had on her, but she just looked tired, with her hair tumbling out of her cap and her mouth turning down at the corners. The faintest hint of lavender drifted over again. The fire cracked and glowed, filling the little room with its comforting scent of woodsmoke.

  Before I could speak, Alice said, ‘What is a French farthingale?’

  I almost laughed, pleased I could answer her for once.

  ‘It’s a wheel you wear under your skirts at the waist, to make them wide. You have never heard of one?’

  She shook her head. ‘How is your wrist? You will need to bind it tightly with rags.’

  I prodded it gingerly. ‘Fine. I have come off my horse plenty of times. My friend Roger says you are not a rider unless you come off seven times, and one for luck. I suppose you come off frequently, rushing to women in childbed?’

  ‘I do not have a horse.’

  ‘Do not have a horse?’ I was shocked. ‘Then how do you get anywhere?’

  A trace of a smile lifted her lips at the corners.

  ‘I walk. Or if a yeoman is sending his man for me, sometimes he will bring one.’ I must have looked astonished, for she added, ‘Babies are often not quick to be born.’

  ‘I would not know.’ I felt her eyes watching me from across the room, burning like two rushlights. ‘Please, sit down. Eat.’