The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  To save her unborn child, she will trust a stranger.

  To protect her secret, she must risk her life.

  1612 Pendle Hill, England

  Young Fleetwood Shuttleworth is with child again. As the mistress of Gawthorpe Hall, she is anxious to provide her husband with an heir. But none of her previous pregnancies have come to term. Then she discovers a hidden letter from her physician that warns her husband that she will not survive another pregnancy.

  Distraught over the frightening revelation, Fleetwood wanders the woods of Pendle Hill, where she comes across a young local woman named Alice Gray who is gathering herbs. A midwife, Alice promises Fleetwood she can help her deliver a healthy baby. But soon Alice is drawn into the frenzied accusations of witchcraft sweeping the countryside. Even the woodland creatures, the “familiars,” are suspected of practicing the dark arts. Can Fleetwood trust that Alice is really who she says she is?

  As the two women’s lives become intertwined, Fleetwood must risk everything to prove Alice’s innocence in order to save her own unborn child. The hunt for witches reaches fever pitch. Time is running out. The trials are about to begin. Both their lives are at stake. Only they know the truth. Only they can save each other.

  Set against the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, this rich and compelling novel draws its characters from historical figures as it explores the lives and rights of seventeenth-century women, ultimately raising the question: Is witch-hunting really just women-hunting?

  Praise for The Familiars

  “The Familiars is an intricate and sensitive portrayal of a brave, tenacious young girl carving her place in the world. A must-read novel.”

  —Heather Morris, bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz

  “An intriguing story about a fascinating period of history full of brilliant female characters.”

  —Libby Page, author of The Lido

  “Enthralling, spellbinding, terrifying, full of twists and turns, written with heart and soul.”

  —Kate Williams, author of The Storms of War

  “Assured and alluring, this beautiful tale of women, witchcraft and the fight against power is a delight.”

  —Jessie Burton, New York Times bestselling author of The Miniaturist

  The Familiars

  Stacey Halls

  Stacey Halls grew up in Rossendale, Lancashire, and has always been fascinated by the Pendle witches. She lives in London and has worked as a journalist for Stylist, Psychologies and Fabulous. The Familiars is her first novel.

  To my husband

  Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  LANCASHIRE,

  EARLY APRIL, 1612

  “Be ever well in blood, for otherwise she will not long

  be at your commandment but make you follow her.”

  The Book of Falconry or Hawking,

  George Turberville, 1543–1597

  “PRUDENCE & JUSTICE.”

  Shuttleworth family motto

  CHAPTER ONE

  I left the house with the letter because I did not know what else to do. The lawn was wet with late-morning dew that soaked my favorite silk rose slippers, for in my haste I hadn’t thought to put on pattens. But I did not stop until I reached the trees overlooking the lawns in front of the house. The letter I had clutched in my fist, and I opened it once more to check I hadn’t imagined it, that I hadn’t drifted off in my chair and dreamed it up.

  It was a chill morning, misty and cool with the wind racing down from Pendle Hill, and though my mind was in turmoil I’d remembered to take my cloak from its place at the end of the wardrobe. I’d given Puck a perfunctory stroke and was pleased to see my hands weren’t shaking. I did not cry, or faint, or do anything at all except fold what I had read back into its old shape and go quietly down the stairs. Nobody noticed me, and the only servant I saw was a brief glimpse of James sitting at his desk as I passed by his study. The idea that he might have read the letter himself crossed my mind, as a steward often opens his master’s private correspondence, but I dismissed the thought quickly and left through the front door.

  The clouds were the color of pewter jugs that threatened to spill over, so I hurried across the grass toward the woods because they were a good hiding place, and I needed to think. I knew in my black cloak I’d be conspicuous among the green from servants’ prying eyes at the windows. In this part of Lancaster, the land is green and damp, and the sky wide and gray. Occasionally you see the flash of a deer’s red coat, or a pheasant’s blue neck, and your eye is drawn swifter than they can disappear.

  Before I reached the shelter of the trees, I knew the sickness was coming again. I pulled the hem of my skirt away from where it splattered the grass, then used my kerchief to wipe my mouth. Richard had the laundrywomen sprinkle them with rose water. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, and when I opened them I felt very slightly better. The trees shivered and birds sang merrily as I went deeper, and in less than a minute I had lost Gawthorpe altogether. The house was as conspicuous as I was in these parts, made of warm golden stone set in a clearing. But while the house couldn’t keep you from the woods, which seemed to draw ever closer and were visible from every window, the woods could keep Gawthorpe from you. Sometimes it felt as though they were playing a game.

  I needed to think. I took out the letter and opened it again, smoothing out the creases that had formed in my tight little fist, and finding the paragraph that had left me reeling:

  You can divine without difficulty the true nature of the danger that your wife has been in, and it is with solemn regret that I impart on you my professional opinion as a physick and expert in matters of childbed: that upon visiting her last Friday sennight, I drew the deeply unfortunate conclusion that she cannot and should not bear children. It is with excessive importance that you understand if she finds herself once more in childbed, she will not survive it, and her earthly life will come to an end.

  Now I was out of sight of the house and could react with some privacy, my heart was beating furiously, and my cheeks were hot. Another surge of sickness overcame me, and I almost choked on it as it burned against my tongue.

  The sickness came morning, noon and night, wringing me inside out. At the most, it was forty times a day; if it was twice, I felt lucky. Veins burst in my face, leaving delicate crimson stems around my eyes, the whites of which turned a demonic red. The awful taste in my throat would last for hours, sharp and choking as the blade of a knife. I couldn’t keep food down. I had no appetite for it anyway, much to the cook’s disappointment. Even my beloved marchpane lay in broad, unsliced tablets in the larder, and my
boxes of sugar candy sent from London gathered dust.

  The other three times I hadn’t been this ill. This time it felt like the child growing inside me was trying to escape through my throat instead of between my legs, like the others who announced their untimely arrivals in red rivers down my thighs. Their limp little forms were grotesque, and I watched them be wrapped like fresh loaves in linen.

  “Not long for this world, the poor mite,” the last midwife said, wiping my blood off her butcher’s arms.

  Four years married, three times in childbed and still no heir to put in the oak cradle my mother gave me when Richard and I married. I saw the way she looked at me, like I was letting them all down.

  Still, I could not fathom that Richard knew what the doctor had said, and had watched me fatten like a turkey at Christmastide. The letter was bundled in among several papers from my three childbeds, so it was possible he could have missed it. Would he have done right by me withholding it? Suddenly, the words seemed to fling themselves from the page and wrap around my neck. And written, too, by a man whose name I did not recognize, so wreathed in pain was I when he visited that I could not recall a single detail about him: his touch, his voice, or whether he was kind.

  I’d not stopped to catch my breath, and my slippers were truly ruined now, soaked with greenish mud, for it had been raining. When one of them got stuck and came off, sending my stockinged foot into the wet ground, that was more than I was prepared to take. With both hands I made the letter into a ball and threw it as hard as I could, taking a brief moment’s satisfaction when it bounced off a tree several yards away.

  If I had not done that, I might not have seen the rabbit’s foot a few inches from where it landed, nor the rabbit it belonged to—or at least what was left of it: a mangled mess of fur and blood, then another, and another. I hunted rabbits; these had not been slain by a hawk or a falcon making a neat little kill before circling back to its master. Then I noticed something else: the hem of a brown skirt brushing the ground, and knees bent, and above them a body, a face, a white cap. A young woman was kneeling not ten feet away, staring at me. Every line of her was alert with an animal tension. She was shabbily dressed in a homespun wool smock with no apron, which was why I did not see her straightaway among all the green and brown. Flax-colored hair spiraled down from her cap. Her face was long and narrow, her eyes large, their color unusual even from a distance: a warm gold, like new coins. There was something fiercely intelligent, almost masculine, in her gaze, and though she was crouched down and I standing, for a moment I felt afraid, as though I was the one who had been discovered.

  Another beast dangled from her hands, one eye resting on me without blinking. Its fur was stained with red. On the ground next to the woman’s skirts a roughly hewn sack lay open. She got to her feet. A breeze rustled the leaves and grasses around us, but she remained perfectly still, her expression unreadable. Only the dead rabbit moved, swinging slightly.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

  She began bundling the rabbits into her sack, bent over like a cripple. My crumpled letter lay pale and bright among the massacre, and she paused when she saw it, her long fingers hovering, stained red with blood.

  “Give it to me,” I snapped. She held it out from where she stood, and in a few quick strides I’d snatched it from her. Those golden eyes did not leave my face, and I thought a stranger had never looked at me so hard. Briefly I wondered how I must appear, with no outdoor shoes and my slipper lying in the mud. No doubt my face was flushed from vomiting, and the whites of my eyes would be red. The acid in my mouth made my tongue sharp.

  “What’s your name?”

  She did not speak.

  “Are you a beggar?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is my land. You have been poaching rabbits from my land?”

  “Your land?” Her tone was accusatory, or surprised. Her voice was soft, her accent local like my servants’. It broke the strangeness of the situation like a pebble tossed in a pool. She was just an ordinary village girl.

  “I am Fleetwood Shuttleworth, the mistress at Gawthorpe Hall. This is my husband’s land you are on. If you are from Padiham you would know that.”

  “I am not,” was all she said.

  “You know the penalty for hunting on another man’s land?”

  She lowered her eyes, taking in my thick black cloak, my gown of copper taffeta peeking through the bottom. I knew my skin was dull, my black hair made it sallow, and I did not wish to be reminded of this by a stranger. I suspected I was younger than her, but I could not guess her age. Her dirty dress appeared not to have been brushed or aired in months, and her cap was the color of mutton’s wool. Then my eyes fell on hers, and her gaze met mine, level and proud. I frowned and raised my chin. At four feet eleven inches, everyone I met was taller than me, though I did not intimidate easily.

  “My husband would bind your hands to his horse and drag you to the magistrate,” I said, more boldly that I felt. When she did not speak, and the only sound was the trees hissing and shuddering, I asked again, “Are you a beggar?”

  “I am no one.” She held out the sack. “Take them. I did not know I was on your land.”

  It was a strange answer, and I wondered what I would tell Richard, then I remembered the letter in my fist. I squeezed it hard.

  “With what did you kill them?”

  She sniffed. “I did not kill them. They were killed.”

  “What an odd way of speaking you have. What is your name?”

  I had barely finished when in a flash of gold and brown she turned and ran away through the trees. Her white cap flitted between the trunks, the sack bouncing against her skirts. Her feet thudded onto the earth, quick and deft as an animal, before the woods swallowed her whole.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sound of Richard’s waist belt preceded him everywhere. I think it made him feel powerful—you heard his money before you saw it. If, say, you were a thief, and you had the idea of relieving him of his coins, you would swiftly change your mind when you saw the dagger, followed by the look in his eye that not so much asked for a fight, but welcomed it as a friend. When I heard the familiar jangle and the tread of his kid leather boots on the stairs, I took a deep breath and brushed some imagined dust off my jacket. I stood as he entered the room, bright and invigorated from a business trip to Manchester. His gold earring caught the light; his gray eyes gleamed.

  “Fleetwood,” he greeted me, putting my head between his hands.

  I bit my lip where he kissed it. Could I trust my voice to speak? We were in the wardrobe, where he knew he would find me. Even though nobody had lived at Gawthorpe before us, it was the only room that truly felt mine. I had thought it extremely modern that Richard’s uncle, who designed the house, had thought to include a room just for dressing when he had no wife. Of course if women designed houses they would be as much a part of the plans as a kitchen. Having come from my own house of gray stone under gray skies to Gawthorpe, with its rich, warm color, as though the sun was always rising on it, and three floors of gleaming windows, bright as the crown jewels, and the tower in the middle, I had felt more like a princess than a mistress. Everything was new, including us, though part of me felt old as time. Richard had led me through the maze of rooms and all the fresh plaster and shining panels and little passageways teeming with decorators and servants and carpenters like ants in a nest made me feel dizzy. I tended to keep at the top of the house, out of the way of everyone. If I had a baby in my arms or a child to take down to breakfast I might feel differently, but while I didn’t, I kept to my rooms and my wardrobe, with its pleasant view of the rushing River Calder and Pendle Hill.

  “Conversing with your clothes again?” he said.

  “They are my constant companions.”

  Puck, my great French mastiff, roused himself from the Turkey carpet, stretchi
ng and yawning and revealing a jaw so wide it could fit my head inside.

  “You fearsome beast,” said Richard, going to kneel by the dog. “Not for long will you be the singular object of our affections. You will have to share them.” He sighed and got to his feet, weary from a long ride. “You are well? And rested?”

  I nodded, tucking a loose strand of hair under my cap. Lately it had been falling out in great black clumps when I combed it.

  “You are troubled. You have not... You are not...”

  “I am fine.”

  The letter. Ask him about the letter. The words hung thick, an arrow poised on a pulled bow, but there was nothing but relief in his lovely face. I held his stare for a moment too long, my dark eyes on his light ones, knowing my opportunity to ask him was passing, slipping through my hands like sand.

  “Well, Manchester was a success. James always thinks he should go with me on these trips but I fare just as well alone. Perhaps he is only exasperated because I forget to write down receipts. I’ve told him I keep them as well in my head as in my jacket.” He paused, ignoring Puck sniffing at him. “You are in a quiet mood.”

  “Richard, I read the midwife’s correspondence today. And the doctor’s, who delivered the last.”

  “That reminds me.” He reached deep into the emerald velvet of his doublet, his face lit with a childlike excitement. I waited, and when he withdrew his hand he dropped into mine a strange object. It was a small silver sword, long as a letter opener, with a shining gold hilt. But the end was blunt—it would not cut a cake—and all over were little spheres dangling from miniature hooks. I turned it over in my palm and it made a pleasant tinkling sound, like horses coming to a halt.

  “It’s a rattle.” He beamed, shaking it so it jangled. “They are bells, look. It’s for our son.”

  He did not even try to disguise the longing in his voice. I thought of the drawer that I kept locked in one of the bedrooms. Inside were half a dozen things he’d bought the other times—a silk purse with our initials, an ivory horse that could fit in a palm. In the long gallery was a suit of armor he bought to celebrate the first time my stomach grew. His faith that we would have a child was clear and strong as a stream, even when he was trading wool in Preston and passed a trader selling miniature animals; when he was with our tailor and saw a bolt of silk the exact color of an oyster’s pearl. With the last one, only he knew if it was a son or daughter, and I did not ask, because I was still not a mother. Every gift he gave me was a token of my failure, and I wished I could burn them all and watch the smoke rise from the chimney and be swallowed by the sky. I imagined where I would be without my husband, and my heart was full of grief, because he had given me happiness, and all I’d given him were three absences, their souls extinguished in the gentlest breeze.