A Skinful of Shadows

by Frances Hardinge

  Did he ever find peace? asked Makepeace. She knew perfectly well what the doctor was suggesting.

  Who can say? He still lives, as far as I know. Perhaps he will, some day. And in the meanwhile, the stupid man is saving a lot of lives.

  Do you want to write some more today? asked Makepeace.

  If we can spare the time and paper.

  Whenever she had the chance, Makepeace bartered for paper. It was seldom cheap, and often used on one side, but it allowed the doctor to write up his discoveries and theories concerning battlefield surgery.

  Makepeace had also written two letters, not long after the fall of Grizehayes. The first was sent to Charity Tyler in Norwich, sending back her brother’s prayer book, and breaking the news of his death. It told her that he had wished to be reconciled to his cousin, and for an end to bad blood between them, and that he had loved his sister with all his heart. The letter also told her that Livewell had helped breach the walls of a Royalist stronghold and end a siege that might have cost many lives. It did not mention that this had happened after his death.

  Livewell would vanish soon, she was sure of it. There was something calmer about him now. Some day she would wake and find a hole in her mind like a missing tooth.

  I have polished my soul as much as I can, he had said recently. If I stay much longer I will only scuff it again.

  The second letter had been written with the help of Morgan. It was addressed to Helen, and was a very dull missive about children getting measles. On the back, however, a second encoded message was written invisibly in artichoke juice:

  Helen,

  By now you will have heard strange things of me. The truth is stranger still. I was not in the service of the Fellmottes when you met me, but nor was I working for your enemies. I am your friend and mean to prove myself so.

  The charter that you seek is at Whitehollow. Symond Fellmotte hid it in the lining of the secret door in the master bedroom. I moved it from that place, but not far. It is still under that same lining but up in the top corner, held there by a pin. I told him I had hidden it somewhere new, and thought it likely he would put his hand in the base to feel if it was still where he had placed it, and would find it indeed gone. I fancied that he would not search the rest of the door, but rather make himself mad searching everywhere else in the house. Folk look for things far and wide, but seldom close.

  If God wills it, we shall meet again, and if so I hope we shall still be friends.

  Judith-as-was

  Makepeace remembered the gleam in the witch-hunter’s eyes when he had heard about the royal charter. It would be better if the King’s spies found it and quietly destroyed it. She could not rid the world of witch-hunters, but there was no need to feed them. From the little she had seen, they were a hungry breed.

  Besides, it pleased her to imagine Helen exchanging cool, bland pleasantries with her unsuspecting Parliamentarian husband with Makepeace’s note hidden in her glove, and then sneaking out at night to adventures and espionage in the service of the King.

  I would like to write up my studies of ghosts as well, remarked the doctor, if I thought we could do so without being burned as heretics.

  I wonder sometimes whether your family had fallen into a colossal error. The more ghosts I see, the less sure I am that we are the same souls that once were living. For all we know, perhaps the real souls pass on happily to the Maker, leaving us behind. I think sometimes that we ghosts are . . . memories. Echoes. Impressions. Oh, we can think and feel. We can regret the past, and fear the future. But are we really the people we think we are?

  How does that change anything? It was too late for Makepeace to think of her spectral allies as anything other than friends.

  I do not know, said Dr Quick. It is a blow to my vanity to consider the possibility that I am nothing but a bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories, given life by somebody else’s mind. But then again, so is a book. Where is my pen?

  Makepeace let him use her hand to write. Not for the first time, she wondered whether the doctor would leave some day too, after he felt he had lived his afterlife to some account.

  Not Bear, though. Bear would never be parted from her.

  She could find no join, no place where she ended and Bear started. In that first clumsy embrace of the spirit, they had tangled themselves hopelessly, she supposed. Whatever happened, wherever she went, there would always be Bear. Whoever knew her, or liked her, or loved her, would have to accept Bear.

  She could even love herself a little now, knowing that she was Bear.

  For a good few days after her death, Hannah was very confused.

  She had been brought to the front line by love and desperation, in equal measure. It was all very well Tom saying that he must march with the Earl’s army, but if he left her all alone with a baby coming, then how would she pay for food, and where would she go? So she had packed her things and come along to war, even as she started to get thick about the waist.

  Hannah was not the only one. The baggage train of the army was full of other women – wives, lovers and the other sort – all pitching in with the cooking, nursing and fetching. She liked them, or a lot of them, anyway. It was muddy trudging, but she was young, and sometimes the whole adventure had a mad, exciting holiday feel. Her singing voice, so often praised in church, sounded even better by the campfire.

  But then a cart loaded with gunpowder had exploded, killing Tom. The shock of it caused her to fall down in a fit and lose the baby. Afterwards she had no stomach for returning to her own town without Tom. She had no home now. But where could she go? And without Tom’s wages as a soldier, how would she eat?

  Another woman whispered to her that if she dressed as a man and was willing to take the worst watches, she might ‘enlist’ and get a soldier’s wages. There were a couple of others in the camp who did so, and an officer who turned a blind eye.

  So Hannah became Harold. She was too slight to hold the line with the pikemen, so she was taught the tricks of the matchlock, and joined the lines of musketeers.

  During the great battle, after the musketeer line had broken in disorder, she had heard yells that the enemy were attacking the baggage train. She had run to the rear of the camp, through a fog of gunsmoke and chaos, to see men on horseback chasing the camp womenfolk and hacking them down with swords. She put a bullet in one of them, and wounded another with her sword, before a slice from behind ended her efforts and her life.

  No! she thought as she died. No! No! It is too soon. It is not fair. I was discovering a new life and I was good at this!

  But that thought was all that kept her company for the next few days. She was in darkness. It was a warm, strange darkness, and she did not think she was alone.

  Now and then, somebody tried to talk to her. It was a young man’s voice, and at first she thought it might be Tom trying to guide her to Heaven, but it didn’t sound like him and the accent was wrong.

  At last her vision returned. She was so relieved to see blue sky above her that she wanted to sob. However, she found that she could not. She appeared to be walking, but had no control over her own body. When she looked down, she found it was not her own body at all. It was still in male clothing, but now it seemed to be male indeed.

  ‘Can you see?’ asked the same insistent voice, sounding a little wary. ‘Can you hear me? My name is James.’

  What happened? she demanded. Where am I?

  ‘You’re safe,’ he answered. ‘Well . . . actually you’re dead, but also safe . . . in a sense. Makepeace – can you talk to her? I’m not used to this.’

  The person whose eyes Hannah was using turned to look at his companion, a girl a couple of years younger than Hannah. She could have been any market-girl, in her faded wool clothes and linen cap, but there was a knowing, serious look in her eye as if she had already watched the whole of Hannah’s life unfold.

  On her cheek, Hannah saw two faint smallpox scars, so small they might have been flecks of rain. They reminded her of the
two large freckles that had sat on Tom’s cheek in almost exactly the same place, and Hannah took this as a good omen. Desperate as she was, she would make do with any omen she could find.

  ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,’ said the girl called Makepeace. ‘But you’re welcome to travel with us as long as you like. We believe in second chances, for the people who don’t usually get them.

  ‘You’re among friends, Hannah. You’re home.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my editor, Rachel Petty, for showing superhuman patience and calm while I was half-witted with stress over my own delays, and for helping to lure Bear out of the shadows; Bea, Kat, Catherine and everyone else at Macmillan for being supportive, fun and perpetually on my side; Nancy for wisdom and common sense; Martin for putting up with my most frantic months of writing and editing, and for only mocking me gently when I worked until 4 or 5 a.m.; Plot on the Landscape; Rhiannon; Sandra for taking me to the exhibition on Sir Thomas Browne at the Royal College of Physicians; Amy Greenfield for introducing me to Chastleton and its wonderful secret room; Ham House; Boswell Castle; Old Wardour Castle; The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss; The King’s Smuggler: Jane Whorwood Secret Agent to Charles I by John Fox; The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England by Antonia Fraser; Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House by Miriam Slater; Women in early modern England, 1500–1700 by Jacqueline Eales; Her Own Life: Autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen edited by Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby & Helen Wilcox; 55 Days by Howard Brenton; The History of England Volume III: Civil War by Peter Ackroyd; and Lady Eleanor Davies, the abrasive, self-styled prophetess who managed to annoy virtually everybody, not least with her tendency to be right.

  I would also like to apologize to King Charles I, for forcing a fictional version of him to sign a highly nefarious document. I hope he will forgive me, and refrain from sending spectral spaniels after me in revenge.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Frances Hardinge spent a large part of her childhood in a huge old house that inspired her to write strange stories from an early age. She read English at Oxford University, and then got a job at a software company. However, a few years later her first children’s novel, Fly By Night, was snapped up by Macmillan. The book went on to publish to huge critical acclaim and win the Branford Boase First Novel Award. She has been nominated for, and won, several other awards, including being shortlisted for the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal for Cuckoo Song and winning the coveted Costa Book of the Year Award for The Lie Tree.

  THE

  LIE TREE

  FRANCES

  HARDINGE

  The leaves were cold and slightly clammy. There was no mistaking them. She had seen their likeness painstakingly sketched in her father’s journal. This was his greatest secret, his treasure and his undoing. The Tree of Lies. Now it was hers, and the journey he had never finished stretched out before her.

  When Faith’s father is found dead under mysterious circumstances, she is determined to untangle the truth from the lies. Searching through his belongings for clues she discovers a strange tree. A tree that feeds off whispered lies and bears fruit that reveals hidden secrets.

  But as Faith’s untruths spiral out of control, she discovers that where lies seduce, truths shatter . . .

  CUCKOO

  SONG

  FRANCES

  HARDINGE

  The first things to shift were the doll’s eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss’s face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.‘ Who do you think you are? This is my family.’

  When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; she keeps waking up with leaves in her hair, and her sister seems terrified of her.When it all gets too much and she starts to cry, her tears are like cobwebs . . .

  Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest to find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family – before it’s too late . . .

  A FACE

  LIKE GLASS

  FRANCES

  HARDINGE

  In the underground city of Caverna, the world’s most skilled craftsmen create delicacies beyond compare: cheese that can show you the future and perfumes that convince you to trust the wearer, even as they slit your throat. The people here are unlike any other: they have faces as blank as untouched snow. Expressions must be learned, and the famous Facesmiths will teach a person to display joy, despair or fear – at a price.

  Into this dark and distrustful world tumbles Neverfell, a girl with no memory and a face so incredible to those around her that she must wear a mask at all times. For Neverfell has a face that shows her emotions. A face incapable of lying. A face that is a dangerous threat and an irresistible treasure – a face that some would kill for . . .

  Also by Frances Hardinge

  Fly By Night

  Verdigris Deep

  Gullstruck Island

  Twilight Robbery

  A Face Like Glass

  Cuckoo Song

  The Lie Tree

  First published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-3551-5

  Copyright © Frances Hardinge 2017

  Cover illustration by Aitch

  The right of Frances Hardinge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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