A Skinful of Shadows

by Frances Hardinge

  And beyond them, something sprawled in an overgrown ditch, half hidden by the reeds. Something dark. Something about the size of a man.

  Makepeace felt her stomach somersault. She had been wrong about everything. If that was a body, then the ghost was not Mother at all. Perhaps she had just discovered a murder victim. For all she knew, the murderer might be watching her at this very moment.

  Or perhaps this was some traveller struck down by the savage ghost, and in need of help. No, she could not run, even though every nerve in her body told her to.

  She drew nearer, feeling mud squelch under her shoes with every step. The thing was dark brown, large and mound-like, and jewelled with the quick green-and-black bodies of flies.

  A man in a wool coat?

  No.

  The shape grew clearer. At last Makepeace could see what it was, and what it was not. For a moment she felt relieved.

  Then she felt an awful wave of sadness, stronger than her fear or revulsion, stronger even than the smell. She slithered down to crouch beside it, and used her handkerchief to cover her mouth. Then she very gently stroked her hand over the sodden dark shape.

  There was no sign of life. In the mud nearby were gouge-marks, from its weak attempts to drag itself out of the ditch. There were bleeding, yellow-edged sores that looked as if they had been left by chains and shackles. She could hardly bear to look at the torn mouth, the seeping gash and trickle of dark blood.

  Now she knew that she did still have a soul. And it was on fire.

  Makepeace was muddy and briar-torn by the time she reached the backyard of the Angel, but she did not care. A small, wooden stool was the first thing that came to hand. She scooped it up, too angry to feel its weight.

  The two travelling entertainers were murmuring fiercely in a corner, and paid Makepeace no mind. Or at least, they paid her no mind until she swung her stool and hit the tallest in the face.

  ‘Gah! You crazy little wretch!’ He stared at her in disbelief, clutching his bloody mouth.

  Makepeace did not answer, but hit him again, this time in the gut.

  ‘Leave off! Have you gone mad?’ The shorter entertainer grabbed at Makepeace’s stool. She kicked him hard in the kneecap.

  ‘You left it to die!’ she yelled. ‘You beat it, and tortured it, and dragged it about by a chain until its mouth tore! And then when it couldn’t stand any more, you threw it down in that ditch!’

  ‘What’s come over you?’ The landlady was beside Makepeace now, a strong arm around her, trying to restrain her. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘THE BEAR!’ bellowed Makepeace.

  ‘A bear?’ Mistress Bell looked at the strangers in bafflement. ‘Oh! Mercy. Did your dancing bear die, then?’

  ‘Yes, and how we’ll make a living now, I don’t know!’ snapped the shorter man. ‘This place is cursed – nothing but bad luck, invisible devils, crazy girls—’

  The taller man spat bloodily into his hand. ‘That little trull knocked my tooth out!’ he exclaimed incredulously, and gave Makepeace a murderous glare.

  ‘You didn’t even wait for it to die before you ripped the ring out of its muzzle!’ screamed Makepeace. Her head was singing. Any moment now, one of these men would take a swing at her, but she did not care. ‘No wonder it came back! No wonder it’s raging! I hope you never escape it! I hope it kills you both!’

  Both men were shouting, and the landlady was trying to calm everybody down at the top of her voice. But Makepeace could hear nothing over the green-black buzz of anger in her brain.

  Makepeace tugged hard at the stool, and the short man yanked back. She yielded to the motion, guiding the stool upwards so that it smacked into his nose. He gave a squawk of pure rage, and let go of the stool, lunging for an oaken walking stick that rested against his pack. The landlady sprinted away, screaming for help, and Makepeace found herself facing two men with bleeding faces and fury in their eyes.

  Their wrath was nothing, however, compared to that of the Bear as it charged out of the marshlands.

  Makepeace was looking the right way to see it, or almost see it. The Bear was a dark, smoky pucker in the world, four-legged and hump-backed, larger than it had been in life. It galloped towards the trio with frightful speed. Translucent holes marked its eyes and its gaping maw.

  The impact knocked Makepeace off her feet. She lay on the ground stunned. The darkness that was the Bear towered over her. It took her a moment to realize that she was staring up at its great, shadowy back. It stood between her and her enemies, as if she were its cub.

  Through its murky outline, she could still see her two foes, stepping forward, one raising his stick to strike at her. They could not see the Bear. They could not guess why the downward strike fell awry, batted to one side by the swipe of a great, shadowy paw.

  Only Makepeace could see it. Only she could see how the Bear’s rage was burning it away, how it spent itself in every motion. It bled wisps as it roared its silent roar. Its flanks seemed to steam.

  It was losing itself, and it did not even know it.

  Makepeace pulled herself up on to her knees, dizzy with the bear-reek and the song of its rage in her blood. Reflexively she put out both her arms, encircling the raging shadow. All she wanted in that moment was to stop the wisps escaping, to hold the Bear together and stop it melting into nothing.

  Her arms closed on darkness, and she fell into it.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘She’s been this way for days now,’ said Aunt’s voice.

  Makepeace did not know where she was, or why. Her head throbbed, and was too heavy to lift. Something was trapping her limbs. The world around her was phantom-vague, and voices seemed to float to her from a great distance.

  ‘We cannot go on like this!’ said the Uncle-voice. ‘Half the time she’s lying there like one dead, and the other half of the time . . . Well, you’ve seen her! Grief’s turned her wits. We need to think of our children! They’re not safe with her here.’

  It was the first time Makepeace had heard him sound frightened.

  ‘What will folk think of us if we cast out our own blood?’ asked Aunt. ‘She’s our cross to bear!’

  ‘We’re not her only kin,’ said Uncle.

  There was a pause, then Aunt gave a great huff of a sigh. Makepeace felt Aunt’s warm, worn hands gently grip her face.

  ‘Makepeace, child, are you listening? Your father – what’s his name? Margaret never told us, but surely you know, don’t you?’

  Makepeace shook her head.

  ‘Grizehayes,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Lives . . . at Grizehayes.’

  ‘I knew it,’ whispered the Aunt-voice, sounding awed but triumphant. ‘That Sir Peter! I knew it!’

  ‘Will he do anything for her?’ asked Uncle.

  ‘He won’t, but his family will if they don’t want their name dragged through the dirt!’ said Aunt firmly. ‘It wouldn’t look good to have someone with their fancy bloodline put in Bedlam, would it? I’ll tell them that’s where she’s bound if they do nothing.’

  But the words were just sounds again, and Makepeace sank into a dark place.

  The next few days swam by indistinctly, like pike through murky water. Most of the time the family kept Makepeace bound up in a blanket like a swaddled babe. Whenever she was lucid enough they unwrapped her, but she could not follow what they said, or help with anything. She tottered and stumbled, and dropped everything she tried to pick up.

  The smell of cooking pies from the kitchen, usually homely and familiar, now made her feel sick. The scents of the lard, the blood of the meat, the herbs – they were too much, they were blinding. But all the while, it was the smell of the Bear that haunted her. She could not scrub away the dank, warm reek of its mind.

  She tried to recall what had happened after she reached for the Bear and the blackness swallowed her, but her memories were a dark swirl. She thought she remembered seeing the two travelling men, though. She had a murky image of them bellowing, their pale faces
striped with blood.

  Beasts did not have ghosts – at least that is what she had always thought. But evidently they did, now and then. By now it had probably burned itself away into nothingness in its quest for vengeance. She hoped it had been happy with that bargain. Why had it left her so sick? Perhaps, she thought hazily, mad ghost-brutes could infect you with fever.

  She thought herself feverish indeed when, one day, she was brought into the main room and found a stranger standing by the hearth. He was tall, and wore a dark blue coat. His beaky face was topped by a shock of white hair. It was the man she had chased like a will-o’-the-wisp on the evening of the riot.

  Makepeace stared at him, and felt her eyes fill with tears.

  ‘This is Master Crowe,’ Aunt told her slowly and carefully. ‘He’s come to take you to Grizehayes.’

  ‘My . . .’ Makepeace’s voice was still rusty. ‘My father . . .’

  Aunt unexpectedly wrapped her arms around Makepeace, and gave her a brisk, tight squeeze.

  ‘He’s dead, child,’ she whispered. ‘But his family have said they’ll take you in, and the Fellmottes will look after you better than I could.’ Then she hurried off to gather Makepeace’s belongings, teary with tenderness, anxiety and relief.

  ‘We’ve been keeping her bundled up in the blanket,’ Uncle was murmuring to Mr Crowe. ‘You’ll want to do the same when she’s wild. Whatever those rogues at the inn did to her, I think they knocked the wits out of her before someone chased them away.’

  Makepeace was going to Grizehayes. That was what she had told Mother she was going to do, on that last fatal day. Perhaps she should feel happy, or at least feel something.

  Instead, Makepeace felt broken and empty, like a scooped-out eggshell. The hunt for Mother’s ghost had led her to a dead bear. And now, Mr Crowe, who had seemed the key to finding her father, had only led her to another grave.

  For years the minister had talked of the end of the world, and now it had come. Makepeace knew it, she felt it. As the carriage bore her out through Poplar, she wondered in her dazzled way why the earth did not quake, nor the stars drop like ripe figs, and why she could not see angels or the shining woman from Nanny Susan’s visions. Instead she saw clothes drying, and barrows rattling, and steps being scrubbed as if nothing had happened. Somehow that was worse than anything.

  As the carriage lumbered north-west, Makepeace tried to understand what she had been told.

  Her father had been Sir Peter Fellmotte, and he was dead. His was an old, old family, and they had agreed to take her in. It sounded like a bittersweet ending from a ballad, but Makepeace felt numb. Why had Mother refused to talk about him?

  She remembered Mother’s warning. You have no idea what I saved you from! If I had stayed in Grizehayes . . .

  It was a mistake to think of Mother. Makepeace’s head filled with the memory of the nightmare ghost with Mother’s features. The malformed voice and the grey face in tatters . . . Makepeace’s brain went to the dark place again.

  When she came back from it, she felt sick and exhausted once more. She was still sitting in the carriage, but wrapped tightly in a sheepskin blanket so that it pinned her arms. A rope was bound around her, holding it in place.

  ‘Are you calmer now?’ Mr Crowe asked her levelly as she blinked in confusion.

  Hesitantly Makepeace nodded. Calmer than what? There was a new bruise swelling on her jaw. There was also a bruise in her memory, an indistinct shadowy feeling that she had done something she shouldn’t. She was in trouble somehow.

  ‘I cannot have you jumping out of the carriage,’ said Mr Crowe.

  The sheepskin blanket was thick and warm, but rough with an animal smell. She clung to that smell. It was something she understood. Mr Crowe said nothing more to her, and she was grateful for that.

  The landscape slowly changed over the long, damp ride. The first day it made sense to Makepeace, with its misty meadows and thriving, pale green cornfields. During the second day, the low hills raised their hackles. By the third, the fields had yielded to moorland, over which lean, black-faced sheep scrambled.

  At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was splashing along a rising road turned to soup by the rain. On either side lay bare fields and pastureland, the horizons guarded by a line of sombre hills. Ahead, behind a small coven of dark, twisting yews, stood a grey-faced house, graceless and vast. Two towers rose above its facade like misshapen horns.

  It was Grizehayes. Although Makepeace had never seen it before, she felt an instant recognition, like a great bell tolling deep in her soul.

  By the time they arrived, Makepeace was cold, exhausted and hungry. She was unbound and unswaddled, then handed over to a red-haired servant woman with a tired face.

  ‘His lordship will want to see her,’ said Crowe, and left Makepeace in her care.

  The woman changed her clothes, wiped her face and brushed her hair. She was not unkind, but not kind either. Makepeace knew that she was being tidied for company, not cosseted. The woman tutted over Makepeace’s nails, which were ravaged and torn. Makepeace could not remember how or why.

  When Makepeace was almost presentable, the woman led her down a dark passageway, silently waved her through an oaken door, then closed it behind her. Makepeace found herself in a great warm chamber with the biggest, fiercest hearth she had ever seen. The walls were covered with hunting tapestries, where stags rolled their eyes as embroidered blood ran from their sides. A very old man was propped up in a four-poster bed.

  She stared at him with fear and awe, as her scrambled mind tried to remember what she had been told. This could only be Obadiah Fellmotte, the head of the family – Lord Fellmotte himself.

  He was in earnest conversation with white-haired Mr Crowe. Neither seemed to have noticed her entrance. Feeling self-conscious and daunted, Makepeace hung back by the door. Nonetheless their low voices reached her.

  ‘So . . . those that accused us will accuse no more?’ Obadiah’s voice was a low, rasping creak.

  ‘One killed himself after his ships sank and his fortune was lost,’ Mr Crowe said calmly. ‘Another was exiled after his letters to the Spanish King were discovered. The third’s romances became common gossip, and he was killed in a duel by his mistress’s husband.’

  ‘Good,’ said Obadiah. ‘Very good.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are there still rumours about us?’

  ‘It is difficult to kill a whisper, my lord,’ Crowe said carefully ‘Particularly one that involves witchcraft.’

  Witchcraft? Makepeace felt a thrill of superstitious terror. Had she really heard that word aright? The minister in Poplar had sometimes spoken of witches – twisted, corrupted men and women who secretly bargained with the Devil for unholy powers. They could put the Evil Eye on you. They could make your hand wither, your crops fail, your baby sicken and die. Causing harm by witchcraft was illegal, of course, and when witches were caught they were arrested and tried, and sometimes even hanged.

  ‘If we cannot stop the King hearing such rumours,’ the old aristocrat said slowly, ‘then we must stop him acting on them. We must make ourselves useful to him – too useful to lose. And we will need a hold over him, so that he dares not denounce us. He is desperate to borrow money from us, is he not? I am sure we can make some kind of bargain.’

  Makepeace continued to stand by the door, tongue-tied, the heat from the hearth tingling over her face. She did not understand everything she had heard, but she was fairly certain that such words and thoughts should never, ever have fallen upon her ears.

  Then the old lord looked across and noticed her. He scowled slightly.

  ‘Crowe, what is that child doing in my chamber?’

  ‘Margaret Lightfoot’s daughter,’ Crowe said quietly.

  ‘Oh, the by-blow.’ Obadiah’s brow cleared a little. ‘Let us see her, then.’ He beckoned Makepeace over.

  Makepeace’s last faint hopes of a warm welcome collapsed. She approached slowly, and halted at his bedside. There was
costly lace on Obadiah’s nightgown and the cap that drooped over his brow, and Makepeace started helplessly calculating how many weeks it would have taken her mother to make it. But she realized that she was staring, and dropped her gaze quickly. Looking at the rich and powerful was dangerous, like peering into the sun.

  Instead, she watched him from under her lashes. She fixed her gaze on his hands, which were loaded with rings. He frightened her. She could see the blue blood in his bunched veins.

  ‘Ah yes, she’s one of Peter’s,’ murmured Obadiah. ‘Look at that cleft in her chin! And those pale eyes! But you say she’s mad?’

  ‘Meek but slow most of the time, and frantic when the fits take her,’ said Crowe. ‘The family say it’s grief, and a blow to the head.’

  ‘If the senses have been knocked out of her, knock them back in again,’ Obadiah snapped. ‘No point in sparing the rod with children or lunatics. They’re much alike – savages if left unchecked. The only cure is discipline. You! Girl! Can you talk?’

  Makepeace gave a start, and nodded.

  ‘We hear you have nightmares, child,’ said Obadiah. ‘Tell us about them.’

  Makepeace had promised Mother never to talk about her dreams. But Mother was not Mother any more, and promises no longer seemed to matter very much. So she stammered a few broken sentences about the black room, the whispers and the swooping faces.

  Obadiah gave a small, satisfied noise in his throat.

  ‘The creatures that come in your nightmares, do you know what they are?’ he asked.

  Makepeace swallowed, and nodded.

  ‘Dead things,’ she said.

  ‘Broken dead things,’ the old lord said, as if this were an important distinction. ‘Weak things – too weak to hold themselves together without a body. They want your body . . . and you know that, do you not? But they will not reach you here. They are vermin, and we destroy them like rats.’

  The memory of a molten, vindictive face swooped into Makepeace’s mind. A weak, dead, broken thing. Vermin to be destroyed. She slammed the door on that thought, but it would not stay shut. Makepeace started to shake. She could not help it.