The Familiars

by Halls, Stacey

  A breath of noise stirred behind me, and I knew immediately that there was someone else in the room. I turned slowly, searching here and there in the dark, and almost jumped from my skin to see a tall figure in a white nightdress standing directly beside my bed, where my head had been. A scream died in my throat.

  ‘Alice?’ I whispered, barely able to hear myself over the rushing in my ears.

  She did not move, apart from swaying slightly. I could not see her face.

  ‘Alice,’ I said, louder. ‘You are frightening me.’

  Silently, she walked back to her bed and climbed into it. It took so long for my heart to stop racing, the edges of the window were light by the time I went to sleep.

  ‘Do you remember what happened last night?’ I asked her in the morning as she scrubbed herself with linen. She stared at me. ‘You were standing over my bed.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Yes. You frightened me. I thought my heart would stop.’ She appeared surprised, and told me she did not remember. ‘You sleepwalk?’

  ‘Yes, but only …’

  She fell quiet, and began scrubbing again.

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  A few nights later, I woke with that same feeling again, and there she was, ghostly and moonlit, and then again a few nights after that. It was always unsettling, because it felt almost as though she was guarding me from something, and I could not say if even she knew what it was.

  The cook at my mother’s house was a woman named Mrs Knave, and it was thanks to her that after a long winter of hibernation, my appetite returned. She fed me apple pie, bread and butter, biscuits, gingerbread and marchpane. At mealtimes we had flaky salmon with creamy parsley sauce, oyster pies, and beef that was soft and pink in the middle. There were fluffy potatoes and buttery carrots and cheese pasties that burnt my tongue. Each night I had rosa solis – brandy with cinnamon – and slowly the colour began to return to my hollow cheeks. I hadn’t been sick once. After my conversation with Alice about my mother’s housekeeping, I had the coal in the fireplaces replaced with wood and the tallow candles with wax, instructing the suppliers to bill Richard directly.

  One morning the movement in my stomach woke me before it was fully light. I lay with my hands on my rounded stomach, taut as a drum skin, thinking how strange the sensation was and listening to Alice’s steady breathing. Dr Jensen’s words came back to me as they often did in the early, lonely hours, so I slipped out of bed and went to the window. The sky was a beautiful deep blue but the forest of trees that surrounded the house was still in shadow. Beyond them was the village.

  The chamber was warm and the air stale, so I found my cloak and put it on over my nightdress. The passage outside was silent, my mother’s chamber door closed at the far end. I went quietly down to the kitchen, my mouth parched for a ripe pear or juicy apricot. I found a pear in a basket on the floor and went to the back door, turning the key to step outside and eat while dawn broke and birds sang above me. The juice coated my hands and chin as I stood beneath the wide sky, thinking about everything but wishing my mind was still. My stomach rolled and tiny fists and feet pummelled and kicked.

  ‘Good morning,’ I whispered. ‘Shall we watch the sun rise?’

  My skin itched again and I scratched absent-mindedly, my attention caught by something at the edge of the bank of trees. It was an animal, weaving in and out of the trunks. In the morning light it looked the same colour as Puck, but he was fast asleep on the Turkey carpet. I stood still against the wall and watched it come all the way around, looping through the trees as though making for the house without wanting to be seen. It was a fox. It held my gaze as we each waited for the other to move first, then a large bird, a rook or raven, burst out of the treetops and flapped, cawing into the morning. By the time I looked back the fox had gone, but something about it pulled a thread in my head somewhere. It wasn’t until I went back upstairs and found Alice in our chamber making her bed that I realised what it was. She looked up when I came in, and I saw it: her eyes were the same colour as a fox’s, like coins in the sun.

  CHAPTER 12

  Two letters arrived at once: one for me, one for my mother, both from Richard. Even though they were only slips of paper, I felt that somehow he had arrived at the house, barging in where he was not welcome. His slanted handwriting always looked rushed no matter if a letter took him all afternoon, and there it was, spelling out my name. While my mother pulled hers open straight away, I put mine in my pocket.

  Alice was outside. She had been spending time in the woods, searching for plants she could grow in the kitchen garden, and I’d often look out of the window to see her kneeling on the soil, her skirts bunched underneath her, her white cap bobbing among the green. A few days after the itching started, I watched her go from the garden to the kitchen door with a fistful of flat green leaves, then bring them to me in my chamber. She told me to rub them on my skin where it itched, and soon after it stopped altogether and my skin grew milky again.

  ‘When we travelled here, you said children are more trouble than they are worth.’

  I was standing outside, watching her at work in the soil. Dirt streaked her face. She sat back on her heels and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, warm from her industry despite the chill spring day.

  ‘And here you are planting a bed to help grow one that is not yet born,’ I considered. ‘I wonder if you are afraid of having them, knowing what you do about the delivery of them. Usually midwives are old and past their childbearing years, or those I have seen are.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  She seemed thoughtful and distracted at the same time. I watched her pull up a weed and toss it in her basket, and decided to go inside, because the fresh breeze was no longer pleasant, but then she spoke.

  ‘How many children do you want to have?’

  I wrapped my arms around myself.

  ‘Two,’ I replied. ‘So that they will never be on their own like I was.’

  ‘A boy and a girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Two boys. I wouldn’t wish a girl’s life on anyone.’

  Richard’s letter stayed where it was in the pocket of my gown, and though I forgot about it, two days later my mother decided that it two days after his word came was the appropriate time to discuss him. I knew what was coming from the way she set her spoon down; I could see her tasting his name in her mouth.

  ‘Fleetwood,’ she said. ‘Have you thought about when you will go back to Gawthorpe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have not thought about it?’

  I glanced at Alice, sitting directly across from me, stirring distractedly at her meal and honey.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Tell me then.’ My mother took up her spoon again. ‘What have you been thinking of?’

  Until that moment I had not noticed a copy of the King’s Bible lying next to her hand. She saw me looking and lifted it, opening it at the ribbon marker.

  ‘While we eat, let us consider the gospel according to Luke. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”’ She placed the book next to her bowl and took up her spoon again. ‘What do you think to that passage, Fleetwood?’

  I pretended to consider and licked my teeth.

  ‘I think that it is remarkable how with his Bible, the king has a presence in every household, and on every bookshelf. He encourages us to not condemn others, yet seems to do little else. Papists, witches …’

  ‘The king has not written the Bible, Fleetwood. This is the word of God. The king writes about witches in his own publication.’

  ‘He does?’

  She got up and left the room, coming back a few moments later with a slim volume bound in black calfskin, which she handed to me. I pushed my bowl away and lifted the soft cover. The word Daemonologie was printed below an ink depiction of the Devil. Flames licked his body and great wings expanded behind him. I looked up at my m
other, who indicated for me to read on.

  ‘“Written by the high and mighty Prince James,”’ I said.

  Alice was looking at the book in my hands and I remembered she could not read. I turned the page and followed the king’s words.

  ‘What does it say?’ Alice asked.

  ‘“The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the witches or enchanters, has moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch in post this following Treatise of mine …” He has written a book about witchcraft?’ I asked my mother, leafing through what appeared to be a very thorough treatise.

  ‘Twenty or more years ago, a ship he was travelling in to Scotland was cursed by witchcraft. He put around a hundred witches on trial for treason. There are witch trials held there twenty times a year. One of the stable boy’s distant relatives was executed not long ago; here in Westmoreland we are not far from the border. Your friend Roger Nowell is only keeping abreast of the times, Fleetwood. The execution of heretics is nothing new.’

  Nick Bannister’s spidery handwriting came into my mind: Alice Gray, of the same.

  It had been easy not to think of it since we had arrived here, or at least it had been for me. I wondered if the child Jennet was still at Read Hall.

  ‘But the definition of witch is new.’ Alice directed this at my mother. ‘These are peaceful people, carrying on as they have for centuries. It’s only since the king came to the throne that people became fearful. Have you never needed the help of a wise woman?’

  Mother shimmered with hostility.

  ‘How dare you address me in so insolent a manner in my own house? Are you a midwife or an authority on politics?’

  I gave Alice a warning glance. A flush was creeping up her throat.

  ‘Jill merely means that perhaps not all those accused of witchcraft are guilty,’ I said quickly.

  My mother’s neck was mottled a furious scarlet.

  ‘You defend these Devil worshippers who use blood and bones and hair to carry out their sorcery? What is peaceful about that? They are godless people.’

  Alice’s eyes were on the table now – she knew she had spoken out of turn.

  ‘Enough,’ my mother went on, straightening her napkin on her lap and addressing me. ‘Let us return to the matter in hand: when you will return to Lancashire, and to your husband. You have had time apart, and now it is only right that you go back. You are a wife, and wives live at home, not with their mothers.’

  ‘What if Richard has moved that woman in?’

  ‘He would do nothing of the sort.’

  ‘So I suppose she will go on living at our house?’

  ‘Where else would you have her? She is not in your parish, not in your way. She is out of sight and out of mind.’

  I threw the king’s book on to the table.

  ‘She is not out of my mind. She might be out of yours but it is not your husband who has a woman. How can you defend her? And him? If he is such an angel, why does he have you furnishing your house like a yeoman’s wife?’

  ‘I am content with my lot, as you should be yours,’ was her cold reply. ‘That nasty temper of yours is no doubt what drove him away.’

  ‘What drove him away is his need for an heir, and his wife not being able to give him one.’

  My eyes stung and my throat was tight.

  ‘Fleetwood, do you think Richard is the first man to have a mistress and a bastard?’

  The ghost of an itch sent my fingers to my scalp, my neck.

  ‘Next you will tell me that Father had twenty.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. My father did, though.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘My father had three wives, and all of them had his children by the time they were married. When his first two wives died the next set was ready to move in. Not me,’ she said quickly. ‘But I had many brothers and sisters. Father’s will was ten pages long – he left something to all of us.’

  ‘So you are telling me,’ I said slowly, ‘that if I die, this woman will easily take my place and move her children in, and nobody will remember me at all?’

  ‘The things that come out of your mouth!’ my mother cried. ‘That is not what I am saying. While you can have children, your place in the family is safe. Deliver your husband’s heir and nobody will give a thought to this other woman, just as nobody gives a thought to the hundreds of other women and their bastard children in homes all over the country.’

  Her chair screeched against the floorboards as she forced it backwards and strode from the room. I waited until her feet were on the stone flags outside, then I took the king’s book and threw it at the wall.

  But Daemonologie turned up again later that day on Alice’s bed. I asked her about it when she came in from the garden, her palms dirty.

  ‘I thought you could not read.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, pouring water from the jug into the bowl on the dresser. ‘I wanted to look at it. Would you read it to me? I want to know what he says. The king.’

  ‘Why do you?’

  Brown water lapped the sides of the bowl as she rubbed her hands and wrists.

  ‘Please,’ she said, and then, ‘I spoke out of turn with your mother. I should not have been so bold.’

  ‘Think not on it. I don’t.’ I sat on the end of Alice’s truckle bed, reaching for Daemonologie and leafing through it. ‘I have no idea why it is written in dialogue.’ Alice looked blankly at me. ‘Dialogue, like what is spoken in plays.’

  ‘I have never seen one.’

  I opened it at chapter three. ‘“Epistemon says: I pray you likewise forget not to tell what are the Devil’s rudiments.”’

  ‘Rudiments?’

  ‘“I mean either by such kind of Charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken goods, for preserving them from evil … by curing the worm, by healing of horse-crooks, by turning of the riddle, or doing of such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything, meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.”’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Doing things by words without applying anything. Curses,’ I said. ‘Healing things or maiming them from afar. I find it hard to believe the king found time to write this when he was ruling Scotland.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he would write a book about it. But then, if I could write a book, maybe I would,’ Alice said.

  I laughed. ‘You? Write a book? Women do not write books. Besides, you have to learn to read first.’

  ‘If you can write a letter why not a book?’

  ‘Alice,’ I said gently, ‘it’s not what is done.’ I had a thought. ‘Have you seen your own name?’ She shook her head. ‘Would you like to?’

  She nodded, so I took out Richard’s letter, still wrapped in ribbon, and brought a feather and ink from the desk in the corner of my mother’s room. I sat down beside her on the truckle bed. In one quarter of the paper, bordered by ribbon, I wrote Alice’s name and blew on the ink before handing it to her. She smiled and took it from me, holding it up as though it shone in the light.

  ‘What does that say?’ she asked, pointing to the letters curling up around the red ribbon.

  ‘That’s my name.’

  ‘Why is it longer than mine when they take the same time to say? Fleet-wood. A-lice.’

  ‘That isn’t how it works. Each of those things is a letter. A-L-I-C-E. They each make a different sound, but when you say them all together they sound different again.’ In the top right-hand square I wrote her name in widely spaced letters, then handed her the pen. ‘You try.’

  She gripped the feather in a way that made me smile.

  ‘No, like this.’

  I showed her. In a shaky hand, she copied the A in a new square followed by the other letters. I burst out laughing when she showed me.

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘The way you’ve written it with the A so far away, it looks like a lice.’

  ‘A lice?’

&
nbsp; ‘If you separate the A from the rest of the letters, your name becomes “a lice”.’

  ‘What?’

  She screwed her face up in such a way that I could not help but laugh. Then she began smiling, and before long we were rolling about like two daft milkmaids, clutching ourselves as tears ran down our faces.

  ‘Get the A right first,’ I told her. ‘Then the other letters after.’

  That night as I undressed for bed, I saw the paper on the desk with the quill lying next to it. Richard’s words remained unwrapped and unread, and in the one remaining corner a little army of As travelled across the page, like an infestation of lice. An infestation of Alices. It made me smile.

  CHAPTER 13

  The window of the chamber Alice and I were staying in overlooked the front of the house, as well as the approach uphill and the woodland either side that was thick with partridges and pheasants. One morning I heard hooves outside, and thought Richard had finally come. But standing at the casement, peering through the glass, I saw a young woman wearing a beautiful pea-green gown, with a waist I could only dream of, dismounting her horse while another, plainer woman in scarlet waited beside hers. I gasped as I recognised them.

  ‘Richard’s sisters are here,’ I told Alice, choked with panic.

  I’d got up late that morning, feeling hot and lazy, and had only just finished breakfast in my nightgown. I jumped back from the window and began putting my hair in rolls. My mother had gone to the village, but I did not know when she would return, so I would have to be the hostess.

  Mrs Anbrick, the housekeeper, came to the chamber door and rapped smartly.

  ‘Mistress, your sisters-in-law have come to pay you a visit.’

  The housekeeper was a warm, pleasant woman with soft skin and twinkling eyes – how she and my mother rubbed along together I had no idea. Now her tone was excited, impressed, even; visitors were rare at this house. I thanked her and when her footsteps had died away, I turned to Alice, keeping my voice low.