The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  Burning with self-consciousness, I turned to one of the kitchen girls who was standing uselessly aside. “Margery, have bread and cheese and something to drink sent to the parlor, and take Miss Gray there. I will change out of my wet things and see her there.”

  Alice was looking with interest at the high ceilings, the dark corners, the sconces. I tried to smile at her before going to the staircase, hoping it was not obvious this was the first time in four years I’d had my very own guest.

  None of the servants offered to help me get out of my riding clothes, which, given how filthy and trampled they were, was difficult with two hands and impossible with one. My wrist ached, and Puck sniffed curiously at my legs, and when I was undressed, out of habit I put a hand between my legs to check I was not bleeding. Almost a full half hour later I was in a clean skirt and jacket, and went down with Puck padding behind me. Voices were coming from beneath the staircase where the parlor was at the back of the house, and I pushed the door open, to be greeted to my surprise by two faces.

  “Richard!”

  He came to me and kissed my cheek distractedly, taking hold of my wrist. “I was on my way to your chamber—I have just arrived back—what’s this about you falling from your horse, little ghost? And what is this invention? A fine improvisation, I must say. Miss Gray, is this your work? Fleetwood, are you hurt? I hope no one else is?”

  As always, Richard’s bombardment of questions made me feel dizzy, and I knew not which to answer first. Leaving my hands in his, I looked instead at Alice, whose face was expressionless, giving no hint of their conversation. The parlor was not grand, but in it Alice looked twice as poorly dressed, her dress drab and dusty against the jewellike Turkey carpets and honey-colored paneling.

  “You are surprised to see me. Did you forget I was not leaving until tonight?”

  Weakly, with his help, I sat down in one of the polished oak chairs by the low fire, which thankfully was crackling cheerfully. Before I could speak, Margery brought a loaf with cheese and fruit and a jug of ale, departing with a swift appraisal of Alice and her muddy hands.

  “Your hands—shall I send for water? Alice helped me back onto my horse,” I told Richard, who had begun pouring ale into two cups.

  “An angel of the forest,” he announced, handing one to her.

  Indoors, she was different—ordinary, almost, and younger, perhaps twenty-two or -three. She brushed her hands on her apron before accepting the cup and drinking thirstily.

  I realized Richard was waiting for an answer from me, his gray eyes on mine. “All is well?”

  He was in a good mood from his travels, as usual, light of spirit and foot and heart. Often I envied him for it. Sometimes he made me feel as though I wore a cloak of doom and gloom that would never unfasten, yet if the same one was placed around him he would shake it off as easily as a wet dog.

  “All is well,” I replied with a reassuring smile. For now, my mind echoed.

  He knelt and took my free hand, kissing it then filling it with the cup of ale. “I will leave you women to talk of French farthingales while I get out of these clothes. I think I will delay my trip another day. Besides, Easter is almost here so there will not be much business to be done.”

  My heart sang at his words, but before I could thank him he was gone, grabbing a fistful of grapes on his way out. I watched Alice, wondering what effect my husband had on her, but she just looked tired, with her hair tumbling out of her cap and her mouth turning down at the corners. The faintest hint of lavender drifted over again. The fire cracked and glowed, filling the little room with its comforting scent of woodsmoke.

  Before I could speak, she said, “What is a French farthingale?”

  I almost laughed, pleased I could answer her for once. “It’s a wheel you wear under your skirts at the waist, to make them wide. You have never heard of one?”

  She shook her head. “How is your wrist? You will need to bind it tightly with rags.”

  I prodded it gingerly. “Fine. I have come off my horse plenty of times. My friend Roger says you are not a rider unless you come off seven times, and one for luck. I suppose you come off frequently, rushing to women in childbed.”

  “I do not have a horse.”

  “Do not have a horse?” I was shocked. “Then how do you get anywhere?”

  A trace of a smile lifted her lips at the corners. “I walk. Or if a rich yeoman is sending his man for me, sometimes he will bring a spare horse.” I must have looked astonished, for she added, “Babies are often not quick to be born.”

  “I would not know.” I felt her eyes watching me from across the room, burning like two rushlights. “Please, sit down. Eat.”

  She obliged. “I cannot stay long, I have to...go soon.” I nodded, watching her cut the cheese delicately with long fingers, her knucklebones white beneath her skin. “This is your first child?”

  “Yes,” I said. I realized I sounded exactly the same as she did when she said earlier that she did not have any children. As she ate quietly, I twisted my wedding band, considering. What had I brought her to my parlor 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 buried in the cheese, 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, finding here and there Puck’s orange hairs, so fine they looked woven in.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was full of kindness.

  I polished one of the wooden lions on the arm of my chair with my finger. “My mother thinks I am not able to have children. She thinks 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.” She nodded. “What did the two of you talk about earlier?” I asked.

  “This and that. Work.”

  A sting of jealousy made me sneer. “He talked to you of his business?”

  “No. I work at the Hand and Shuttle in Padiham. I did not know you and your husband owned it.”

  “Do we?” I asked, realizing 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.”

  I drank again, and thought idly of the rattle Richard bought that I’d stuffed in the drawer. Her earthly life will end.

  “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 hungry and thirsty, envious, even, 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 were beginning to itch. The smooth oak was cool where it met my skin.

  “You said you could stop me from feeling ill?” My mouth was dry. I licked my lips. I wanted to tell her about Richard moving out of our chamber, about how in February I was sick forty times in one day. She nodded. “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 hair 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 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, then asked, “Are you further along now than you have been before? When will it come?”

  “Autumn, I suppose. The last time was...somewhere near the end.”

  “I would need to examine you,” she said. “You have not bled since...?”

  “New year. There is something else.” I reached into my gown and pulled out the letter from the doctor that I’d shoved inexplicably 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 the letter, 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, dropping to my knees, I let out a sigh of relief. “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 bearbaiting 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 prizefighter. I gave him a shilling, and off we went without a backward 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 spoiled 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 bearbaiting 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 wished 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 looking at me with abject sympathy, and briefly I wondered how she could: she who was poor, and unmarried, who had two jobs and no horse, felt sorry for me. Perhaps the fine house and handsome husband and expensive clothes meant nothing to her, and perhaps she could see also 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 have my stomach grow, and 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 alternative. Were it not for Richard, I knew where I would be, not here, nor at Barton. I could only picture it, for I had never been. I remembered his kind face on our wedding day, how he held my hands in his and smiled as though he had been looking forward to it even more than I had. Thank you, I wanted to say to him that day, and the day after, and every day after that. Thank you for saving me.

  “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 leaned forward, urgent for the first time. My desperation had been there since I’d met her, had been there for months, but now it was gushing out of me. “Please,” I said. “Say you will help me.” I realized I was gripping the arms of my chair, and squeezing them. “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. Then she nodded, and it was like she had taken my hand.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 something brushed against my skirts. Then everything went still. A bead of sweat trickled down my face, and then the silence broke, and it began. The noises they were making were awful—high-pitched, excited screeches and barks. I started running, blindly, my hands out in front in case I hit the trees, which I never did. I was crying, and they were catching me, about to catch 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 screamed. They found me, dancing around me, 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, soaked with sweat in bright daylight. My heart was loud as a bell, my face wet with tears, but I was alone. 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 gray 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 bo
ots 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.

  I did look, and her 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 she had either just alighted her horse or was about to leave. She always felt the cold, which was why she 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 farther north.

  Not north enough.

  “Mother,” I said.

  “You missed breakfast,” she announced.

  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 on 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.”

  At that moment Puck sauntered in, 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 tugged at the bandage, wincing as it unraveled, and began to tie it more tightly. “I fell off my horse yesterday while riding. It’s only a sprain.”