The Familiars

by Halls, Stacey

  She obliged. ‘I cannot stay long, I have to … go soon.’ I nodded, watching the delicate way she cut the cheese with long fingers. ‘This is your first child?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I realised I sounded exactly the same as she did earlier when she said that she did not have any children. As she ate quietly, I twisted my wedding band, considering. What had I brought her to my parlour for, if not just to show her my gratitude? I thought of Richard’s concern. All is well. For how long would it be well? And there was something about Alice that invited confidence: the way she’d tamed my horse in the clearing without speaking.

  ‘I have lost three children,’ I said quickly.

  She let go of the knife, sitting back and wiping her hands on her apron, dusting crumbs from her fingers. I could not look her in the face, so I stared at the carpet, noticing Puck’s orange hairs scattered here and there, so fine they looked woven in.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was full of kindness.

  I rubbed at one of the wooden lions on the arm of my chair.

  ‘My mother thinks I am not able to have children. She likes to remind me I am failing to carry out my duty as a wife.’

  The silence from the chair opposite was thoughtful and patient.

  ‘How old were they?’

  ‘All of them died before they were born.’ I pulled at a loose thread of gold in my skirt, then tried to tuck it back in. ‘After the first time, Richard was worried, so he hired a woman to watch over me.’

  ‘Watch over you?’

  ‘To see I was eating right, things like that. He was worried,’ I said again.

  ‘About you or the child?’

  ‘About both of us. What did the two of you talk about earlier?’

  ‘This and that. Work.’

  A sting of jealousy made me sneer a little.

  ‘He talked to you of his business?’

  ‘No. I work at the sign of the Hand and Shuttle in Padiham. I did not know you and your husband owned it.’

  ‘Do we?’ I asked, realising too late how ignorant I sounded. ‘I thought you … So you have two places of work?’

  ‘Babies are not born every day. Not in Colne.’

  ‘How long have you worked there?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘How much do they pay you?’

  She took a long drink of beer and wiped her mouth. It made me envious to watch her enjoying her food and drink. My stomach growled.

  ‘Two pounds,’ she said.

  ‘A week?’

  Alice stared at me. ‘A year.’

  I knew my face glowed scarlet, but I did not look away. In a whole year she made what I paid for three yards of velvet. I shifted in my seat and adjusted the rags from her apron around my wrist, which was beginning to itch. The smooth oak was cool where it met my skin.

  My mouth was dry. I wanted to tell her about Richard moving out of our chamber, about how in February I was sick forty times in one day. ‘Can you help me have a baby? A living one?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘I will pay you five shillings a week.’

  The sum would no doubt send James the steward’s eyebrows into his hairline as he entered it into the ledger, but my grasp on money had humiliated me, so I knew any offer had to sit comfortably between generous and fair. Richard had once said that money was impossible to discuss with poor people. Alice was quite clearly poor, and – I looked at her hands for rings – unmarried. I now knew what he meant.

  ‘That’s five times what I earn now,’ she said softly.

  She reached a finger under her cap to scratch at her hair, and set her beer down gently. My stomach made a noise we both heard; I had not eaten a morsel.

  ‘I will also give you use of a horse, so you can ride here and to the inn at Padiham. Colne is a long way to walk.’

  She considered this, licking her lips and staring at the fire, before asking, ‘Are you further along now than you have been before? When will it come?’

  ‘Early autumn, I suppose. The last time was … somewhere near the end.’

  ‘I would need to examine you,’ she said. ‘When did you last bleed?’

  ‘Christmastide. There is something else.’

  Putting my cup down, I reached into my gown and pulled out the letter from the doctor that I’d shoved into my jacket when I dressed. I’d kept it locked behind a small square panel in my dresser, and the key I hid between the rope and mattress beneath my bed. I unfolded it, smoothing it out and feeling the intimate warmth of my body heat. But Alice did not take it, and a frown had creased between her eyebrows.

  ‘I cannot read,’ she said dully.

  There was a sudden scratching at the door, and we both sat up straight. I stuffed the paper down the side of the chair but no one entered.

  I called, ‘Yes?’

  When no answer came I got up to open it. Puck stood panting on the other side and, I dropped to my knees.

  ‘It’s only you. Good boy.’

  He followed me to my chair and I saw Alice’s eyes widen at the size of him.

  ‘He is a gentle giant,’ I reassured her, letting him settle at my feet. ‘I am constantly brushing dog hairs off my skirts, but I don’t mind really. Finish your cheese or he will have it.’

  ‘He is very big,’ Alice said.

  Puck lifted his russet head when she spoke and barked once, loudly.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I told him.

  ‘What is he?’

  ‘A French mastiff.’

  ‘Was he a gift from your husband?’

  Instinctively I reached to scratch his ears.

  ‘No. I rescued him from a bear-baiting pit in London. He was thin and starving, tied up in the street next to a bear warden selling tickets. I went to stroke him and the bear warden kicked him. He said dogs were useless if they were soft and I would ruin him. I asked him how much for the pup and he said he wasn’t worth the rope tied around his neck. So I picked him up off the ground and said I would take him. He changed his mind then, said I was denying him a prize fighter. I gave him a shilling, and we left without a backwards glance. I named him Puck, for a character in a play Richard and I saw a few days before – an imp of the forest. Not that there is anything imp-like about him.’

  Alice gazed thoughtfully at the spoilt beast on the Turkey carpet. His tongue was the size of a salmon, lolling happily from his jaws.

  ‘How far he has come in life,’ she remarked. ‘I have heard of bear-baiting but never seen it.’

  ‘I find it dreadful. They are bloodthirsty people in London; perhaps it’s because they can’t hunt.’

  We sat in a silence more comfortable than before, and she nodded at the letter in my hands.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘That the next time I am in childbed I will die.’ Saying it aloud for the first time, I felt the tendrils loosen around my neck. ‘As you can see, I am going to need a miracle. God has blessed me with many things. I am not sure that being a mother is one of them, but today I played for a wise woman and there you were. I so want to give my husband a son – he longs for it.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I am his wife, and I hope to be a mother. I do not want him to be a widower.’

  I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. Alice was openly regarding me with an abject pity, and briefly I wondered how she could: she who was poor, and unmarried, who had two jobs and no horse. Perhaps the fine house and handsome husband and expensive clothes meant nothing to her, and perhaps she could also see that they were of little use to me, who could buy anything I wanted except the thing I wanted most: to succeed as Richard’s wife, and pay him back for what he did for me, for the future he took me away from. For him, I wanted to fill the house with sticky hands and dusty knees. While we had no children, we were not a family; we had a house but not a home. Even spending a lifetime locked up at Barton, with my mother’s disapproval the first thing I saw in the morning and the last I saw at night, was preferable to the alternativ
e. Were it not for Richard, I knew where I would be.

  ‘Mistress?’

  Alice was looking at me with concern. The fire spat and sputtered, and the knife still stuck out from the cheese like a dagger hurled into a tree.

  I leant forwards, urgent for the first time. My desperation had been there since I’d met her, had been building for months, but now it was gushing out of me.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Say you will help me.’ I realised I was gripping the arms of my chair. ‘I need you to save my life, and with it another one. Help me live, Alice. Please help me be a mother, and have a child.’

  She was looking at me strangely, weighing me up, unsure of the purchase. When she finally nodded, it was like she had taken my hand.

  CHAPTER 5

  That night, in bed alone, I had The Nightmare. The forest was pitch-black and cold, and my feet crunched on dead leaves when I moved, so I stayed still, unable to see even my hand in front of my face. My heart thudded, and my ears strained for sound. Then the boars came, shuffling and grunting nearby, their greedy breath hot and curious. I closed my eyes to hear better, and felt something brush against my skirts. Everything went still. A bead of sweat trickled down my face, and then the silence broke, and it began. The noises the beasts made were awful – high-pitched, excited screeches and barks. I started running blindly, my hands out in front of me. I was crying, and they were behind me, snarling and gnashing their jaws, their stabbing tusks like knives made of bone. I tripped and stumbled to the ground, covered my head with my hands and whimpered. They found me, circling their fallen prey. They were hungry, they were going to pierce me, gouge me right the way through with their tusks. A ripping, shooting pain cut me in half and made me pull my knees up, but they were bound in my skirts, and I cried out.

  I was in my bedroom in bright daylight, soaked with sweat. My heart was loud as a bell, my face wet with tears, but relief drenched me as I realised there were no boars, and I wasn’t in the forest. My breathing slowed, and my wrist ached dully. The tight rags Alice had told me to wrap around it had come loose, trailing beneath me in the bedclothes. I yawned, blinking in the sunlight, stretched and turned over.

  Sitting next to the bed, watching me like a hawk, was my mother.

  She waited as I tried to push myself into a sitting position. I did not look at her, but knew that her mouth would be a thin line as she examined my wild black hair, my skin grey as the ashes that lay in the fireplace. Mary Barton disapproved of illness, weakness or failure of any kind; in fact, she found it offensive. Before either of us spoke, I heard the tread of Richard’s boots in the passage, his coin belt jangling.

  ‘Look who is here for a visit,’ he announced, coming in and resting a hand on my mother’s rigid shoulder.

  Mother’s black eyes met mine. Her head was bare and her collar, starched to perfection, fanned out high around her. Her white hands were folded serenely in her lap and her expression was one of great restraint. She was still wearing her outdoor cloak, giving the impression that she had either just alighted her horse or was about to leave. She always felt the cold, which was why she’d moved out of Barton after Richard and I were married, complaining of the size of it, settling at Richard’s suggestion into a more modest house further north.

  Not north enough.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ I said.

  ‘You missed breakfast,’ she said.

  I licked my teeth. My breath was rank.

  ‘I will have some food brought up,’ Richard said, leaving and closing the door behind him.

  I pushed back the thick counterpane, climbed out of bed and went to get a length of cloth to clean my teeth, my mother watching me all the time.

  ‘This chamber is like a pigsty. Your servants should be more attentive – what else could they possibly be occupied with?’ she said. When I ignored her, she went on. ‘Will you get dressed today?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Standing sentry above the mantelpiece, either side of the Shuttleworth coat of arms, were two plaster female figurines half my height: Prudence and Justice. Sometimes I imagined them as my friends. My mother’s straight back and position in front of the fireplace set her directly in the middle of them, making her look like their third sister, Misery.

  ‘Why do you look amused, Fleetwood? You are mistress of this house – get dressed at once.’

  Puck whined to be let in, so I let him. He sauntered towards my mother, sniffing her skirts then dismissing her.

  ‘I cannot understand why you keep that beast in the house,’ she said. ‘Dogs are for hunting and guarding, not treating like infants. What is that on your wrist?’

  I gathered up the ribbon and began to tie it more tightly.

  ‘I fell off my horse yesterday while riding. It’s only a sprain.’

  ‘Fleetwood,’ she said, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder to check the door was closed. I could smell the sickly pomade she dabbed at her wrists. ‘Richard tells me you are expecting again. If I am not mistaken, you have lost three children before they came to this earth.’

  ‘I have not lost anything.’

  ‘Then I will put it plainly. Three times you have failed to carry a child. Do you in honesty think you should be throwing yourself off horses? You are not being careful enough. You have a midwife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘She is local. From Colne.’

  ‘Might you have been wiser to employ a woman who came recommended from a family we know? Did you or Richard speak to Jane Towneley? Or Margaret Starkie?’

  I stared at Prudence’s plaster face. Her stoic gaze avoided mine. I was a wife, the mistress of one of the finest households for miles around, and I was standing in my nightgown being scolded by my mother. Had Richard invited her? He knew how I hated her. I clenched my fists, once, twice, three times.

  ‘Whomever I employ is my decision, Mother.’

  I coated the last word with honey, and her face, so composed at all times, betrayed a tiny flicker of fury.

  ‘I shall discuss it with Richard,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I want you to promise you are doing everything you can to carry this child into life. I am not convinced you are currently. More rest is required, and … indoor pursuits. Perhaps take up an instrument instead of galloping around like a squire. You have a fine husband, and if you start behaving like a wife and mother, God’s gift will come. I did not unite our families so you could play at being a princess in a tower. Now, I expect you to dine with me. Please get dressed and meet me downstairs.’

  I heard her descend the staircase and prayed that her portrait would fall from its hangings and flatten her.

  Richard poured a glass of red wine under my nose and passed it to my mother. It was dark as a ruby, the same colour that had leaked from me three times – surprisingly beautiful in its richness, drenching the bed linen and mattress that had to be burnt on a bonfire.

  To avoid its heady scent I lifted my face to the ceiling. The plasterwork in the dining room was decorated with dozens of bunches of grapes, their vines climbing out towards the corners, entwining like lovers’ hands.

  ‘No wine for you, Fleetwood?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Richard poured another glass for his friend Thomas Lister, who was passing through on his way to Yorkshire. We were sat around the fire, which was low, and the fug of it was making me drowsy. Not drowsy enough, however, to miss how Thomas’ greedy glance slipped to Richard’s rings when he handed his friend the glass. His own bare hand flexed in response and he caught my eye, looking immediately away.

  In years Thomas was somewhere between Richard’s age and mine, and his wealth was somewhere between a plain country gentleman’s and ours. He would have admitted to the first but never the latter. He and Richard had other things in common: they had married in the same year; their fathers had died; they had inherited large estates with mothers and sisters to support. Four years ago, Mr Lister Senior had been taken ill
at his son’s wedding, collapsing during the vows and dying a few days later. Thomas’ mother never truly recovered and hadn’t left the house in all that time.

  I found Thomas Lister a strange and rather interesting man – he did not easily make conversation, preferring to be somewhere on the edge of it. His wide eyes bulged slightly and he was very small and slim, like a woman. Richard said that his build made him a great rider, that he held himself straight as an arrow.

  My mother failed to mix comfortably with young people: she had a way of making them feel like infants, and Thomas stuttered a polite response when she asked after his mother. He was rescued by the entrance of Edmund, the apprentice, who told Richard that a woman had arrived from one of the farms with news of a dog that had withered a ewe. In those days we kept hundreds of sheep in the fields; the soil was too wet for anything else.

  There was a pause, in which Richard set his glass down.

  ‘To whom does the dog belong?’

  Edmund shook his head. ‘She knows not, Master. She found it running around, worrying the flock. She asks you to come quickly.’

  Richard hurried out. People were always coming to knock at our door and tell us their tales. Richard was generous, giving them grain when their crops were down and wood to repair their houses. There were two hundred families in Padiham and just as many problems laid at our door since we’d been here.

  ‘What takes you to Yorkshire?’ my mother asked Thomas.

  She was making the point of being a good hostess, taking pleasure in illuminating me as being a poor one.

  ‘I am going to a trial at the Lent assizes,’ said Thomas.

  ‘A trial?’

  The logs in the hearth cracked and burnt. I wondered how long Richard would be gone; it was the daylight gate, and darkness would soon press in at the windows.

  Thomas shifted in his chair.

  ‘A murder trial,’ he said softly. ‘The accused is a woman named Jennet Preston.’

  I sat up a little straighter.

  ‘Do you know her?’ I asked.