The Familiars

by Stacey Halls

  “My midwife will need a chair,” I said.

  My mother stared at me, then looked Alice swiftly up and down before rising and striding from the room. Alice was taking no interest in her surroundings, staring absently at the threadbare carpet at her feet. My mother returned with a servant behind her carrying a sturdy chair, which he set against the wall before bowing and quietly closing the door on his way out.

  The room was completely silent as we all waited for the other to speak. It did not take long for me to lose my temper. “You invited me to travel forty miles but have nothing to say?” I snapped.

  No matter how rude I was, her face remained inscrutable. She was white as chalk and I noticed she had more lines at her eyes and lips than the last time I saw her.

  My mother sighed deeply, closing her eyes. “I hoped this day would not come,” she said.

  “Did you think I would not find out?”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “Why? Why would you not tell me if you knew? Richard has betrayed me, he has broken me and our marriage, and you knew. My own mother!”

  “I was trying to protect you,” she said slowly. Her white teeth flashed and her eyes were dark.

  “How can I trust you? I cannot trust anyone. Not one person,” I said. Apart from Alice, added a voice in my head.

  I started to cry, and my mother watched, her expression awful, as I held my face in my hands. “I hate you!” I screamed at her. The sound ripped through the small room, bouncing from the wooden walls. “I hate both of you. You have both betrayed me.”

  She let me gather myself and I slumped back in my chair, a sullen child again. My breathing slowed and I wiped my face dry.

  “You will stay here,” my mother said eventually.

  “Until when? Until she has the child?” I asked.

  “What child?”

  Understanding dawned on my mother’s face. She reached for the arm of her chair with one white hand and her impossibly pale face turned paler. “She...”

  “She will have his child,” I said.

  She closed her eyes. “The stupid fool,” she whispered.

  I did not know who was the fool, or if we all were.

  “And you know she is at Barton?”

  My mother nodded. Perhaps absently she flexed the finger that held her plain gold wedding band. I saw her mind working. From the corner of my eye I was aware of Alice, frozen as a statue in ice. My mother had not asked her name or even acknowledged her existence; we may not have needed a false name after all, because it was likely she would never be asked it.

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Judith Thorpe.”

  “How did you come to know?”

  “It is not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “What is important is that you succeed in carrying this child, as you have not done before.”

  My stomach dropped. “Why?”

  She licked her teeth. “Fleetwood, listen to me. If you do not produce an heir, she will.”

  Her voice rang clear in the room, and we stared at one another, understanding one another for possibly the first time in our lives. I felt suddenly cold all over.

  “But she is not his wife.” Alice spoke, surprising us both.

  “An illegitimate child is as good as an heir,” my mother said darkly. “They may not be able to inherit directly but a man can bequeath all kinds of things to his bastard—estates, land, property. Especially if there are no others. The only other way a bastard can be legitimized is if his father and mother marry,” she added dismissively.

  James’s writing swam before my eyes: Mr. William Anderton to bring marriage license from York. I covered my mouth with my hand.

  “He means to marry her. He knows I am to die.”

  “Die?”

  I told my mother about Dr. Jensen’s letter; the order of a marriage license I found in the ledger. I was shaking so violently I might have been fitting.

  “Fleetwood!” My mother was shocked and appalled as I twitched and shivered, apparently having lost control of every limb.

  Alice shot up next to me. “Have you rosa solis?” she asked my mother.

  “What is that?”

  “Brandy and cinnamon. Have it made for her, it will help.”

  My mother fled from the room and Alice took my hand in hers: pink against gray. Presently my mother returned with a servant bearing a tray on which was a pewter cup. Alice took it and handed it to me, and the pewter clattered against my teeth as I choked back the drink. It fired my throat and warmed my insides, and gradually the shivering slowed to a gentle twitch. My mother replaced the cup on the tray and asked for bread and wine to be brought.

  “Mistress,” the servant said softly. “There is no more manchet, just cheat.”

  “Bring it whatever,” my mother snapped. Then she turned to Alice, and her dark eyes were interested. “What is your name?”

  “Jill, Mistress.”

  My mother nodded once, to indicate both approval and dismissal, and returned to her seat before me. My head was thick with thoughts. I felt the child in my stomach move as though reminding me it was still there. It felt like when a carriage ran over a dip, not entirely unpleasant, and I cupped my stomach with my hands and rubbed as though to warm it, remembering those words that were now as familiar to me as my own name: Her earthly life will end.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Alice and I shared a room at the top of the house because it was warm—the start of summer had not yet reached this far north. She was on a truckle bed brought in and set next to mine, and she slept in a peculiar way, curled round on the mattress, without using the pillow. I knew because I barely slept. Not wanting to wake her with my rolling and creaking, I eventually got up and sat at the window.

  All I could think of was Richard’s woman. The more I tried to picture her the less clear her face became, but I was sure I had never seen her before that moment, that she was not someone I had met before. I wondered if she slept in my old bed at Barton, and if Richard did, too, when he was there. All the times he had gone away and kissed my forehead, and I had watched from a window as he departed on his horse. Halifax, Manchester, Lancaster, and farther: Coventry, London, Edinburgh. But really: Barton, Barton, Barton.

  Tears came easily now, and I tried not to sniff too hard or make much noise. I could not imagine going back to Gawthorpe but I could not stay here either, forever a guest in my mother’s house. I was stuck in the mud, and sinking. But for now I was sitting at the window looking out, and while it was still dark I would not think of the next day, or the day after that. And I was still alive, and my child, too, for it was squirming like a newborn kitten now, and I felt it all the time—I was never truly alone. Then I realized that if it was born, and if I lived and became a mother, I would never be alone, and the thought came like a ray of warm sunshine on my face. I may have lost Richard—or a part of him—and my marriage was no longer what I thought it would be, but I would have a friend.

  I turned to look at the sleeping form of the woman who was my only means of achieving it. Her golden hair fell down her back, and her chest rose and fell peacefully. I thought of the man who’d upset her in the Hand and Shuttle, how she’d said children were more trouble than they were worth. I felt as though she was the first person I could call a friend, but how much did I really know about her?

  As though aware in some part of herself that she was being watched, she shifted in her narrow bed and whimpered. I watched her settle again, then she stiffened, her hands scrabbling at her covers as though searching for something. “Leave her,” she whimpered, so quietly it wouldn’t have woken me if I was asleep. “No, don’t touch her! Leave her.”

  Her face was a mask of pain, contorted in agony, and I froze with alarm, unsure of whether or not to wake her. But as suddenly as she’d begun, she mel
ted into peace, her body relaxing and her face smoothing back into sleep. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who had nightmares.

  I sat with my hands on my stomach and watched the inky-blue sky grow darker before it got lighter, and it was only when the birds began to pierce the silence that my eyes grew heavy and I climbed back into the bedsheets, which were cold.

  * * *

  Breaking our fasts that morning, we made a somber group. Alice went as though to eat with the servants but I insisted she sit with my mother and me, and when she refused I pleaded. Neither she nor my mother were happy about it and sat with their faces pinched as their eggs were set down in front of them. The bread was brought, but it was different than what I was used to, and I remembered what my mother’s servant had said the night before, that they only had cheat flour, made of bran, not wheat.

  I scratched at my clothes and cap where they felt tight and yawned. Alice was nibbling at a boiled egg, and I took one from the bowl and held its warm weight in the palm of my hand. Against the thick white of it, my skin looked yellow.

  “Fleetwood, is there something wrong with your egg?” my mother asked.

  I bit into it and found it surprisingly delicious: salty and solid, not like the trembling, watery things my kitchen served in their shells. I had to put it down to scratch my arm, rubbing the material of my dress hard where I could not touch the skin.

  “Fleetwood,” my mother said. “Do you have lice?”

  I thought I might, although I hadn’t seen any. It felt as though I was being tickled very softly and finely all over, from my ankles to my ears. I scratched at my neck, my face, my wrists and my stockings: anywhere I could reach. “Perhaps I do,” I said. Poor people got lice, unclean people, not me, who rubbed myself with linen every day and dabbed oil of roses at my wrists and throat.

  “Eat your breakfast,” my mother said. “If only you had the appetite of your midwife.”

  Alice colored and paused buttering her bread, setting the knife down slowly.

  “I prefer manchet to this cheap stuff,” I said to make my mother color in turn, which she did. But I was lying: the seed loaf was warm and nourishing, and delicious with the homemade butter.

  The itching started up again and my knife clattered to the table as I sprang up to relieve the backs of my legs.

  “Fleetwood!”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I stuck my fingers down the back of my dress, but as that brought relief my arm tingled where I’d rubbed it a moment before.

  “Control yourself, you are causing a display.”

  “This has not happened before, and the moment I come to stay with you I itch from head to toe. Do you wash the bed linen, Mother?”

  “Of course it is washed, don’t be absurd!”

  “I need to get out of this dress.” I stalked from the room and wished my dress could fall away like a cloak, but it was a fussy one with ribbons and Alice had helped me get into it that morning. I stopped in the doorway. “Jill, will you help me?”

  She looked relieved to abandon breakfast and followed me out of the dining chamber and upstairs.

  I was impatient as she unlaced every ribbon and lace that she had tied not half an hour before. “Hurry, please!”

  The gown fell down around me and I stepped out of it, then my corset had to come off and the French farthingale be pulled from my hips. By the time I could sit down to untie my stockings, I was shoving up the sleeves of my underclothes to tear at my skin with my nails. I reached under my nightgown to get to the flesh at my stomach, which was hard and smooth where before it was doughy. I pulled a pin from my hair and used it to scratch down the back of my neck.

  Alice watched, scratching the nape of her neck thoughtfully as I contorted myself in front of her. “Perhaps a bath would help?” she suggested.

  A tub was brought and jugs of water from the kitchen. Then a chambermaid knocked on the door with a slice of soap, which was soft and black and homemade, not like the solid white cakes we bought. I did not know how to ask Alice to turn away as I undressed, but she did anyway. As everything fell to the floor, I half expected to see tiny black things crawling up and down my flesh and in and out of my clothes, but there was nothing. My skin was white all over, not flaming red as it felt. I started to laugh. Alice half turned from her truckle bed. “What is it?”

  “There’s nothing there. No lice. No rash. I must be addled.”

  I lowered myself into the water and splashed it all over, extinguishing the itching like so many little flames licking my skin.

  “Would you like me to leave?” Alice asked from where she was facing the wall.

  “No, stay,” I said.

  She lowered herself onto the truckle bed and kept her back to me, folding her legs beneath her.

  The water settled and I stared down at my stomach, which was much bigger than the last time I’d bathed. I couldn’t see the coarse black hairs below it. I moved the soap all over my skin, making it slick as an eel, and the itching dulled. I filled the jug and tipped it over my head, lathering my hair so it tangled into a knotted mess. The water lapped gently around me and I sighed.

  “Alice, have you heard of familiar spirits?”

  I heard her weight shift on the bed. “Yes,” she said.

  “Jennet Device told me her mother had a dog, and I saw a dog with her when you were...”

  Alice went still. “When I was what?” I swallowed. She turned and looked straight at me over her shoulder, her eyes bright and clear. “When I was what?”

  “Alice, do not look.” I attempted to cover myself in the tub, but her gaze did not stray from my face.

  “Were you spying on me?”

  “No.”

  “When?”

  “I...I went out riding to meet you. I saw you with her in the forest.”

  She turned again to the fire and reached for the iron poker, pushing it into the splintered coals. “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why did you not make yourself known?”

  “I...I was afraid. Of her. Of the woman. Elizabeth Device.”

  “Why?”

  “Her eyes. They frightened me.” How awful she had looked when she’d turned toward me, staring wildly in different directions. “Her daughter, Jennet,” I went on. “I cannot fathom why Roger believes everything she tells him. How can he? She is just a child.” As I said it, I thought of myself, and how I’d told no one about what happened to me, knowing no one would believe me. But that was different—Jennet’s stories were full of magick and spirits, like a tale told to a child to get them to sleep.

  “Maybe he wants to believe it. Maybe he is telling her what to say.”

  “Roger would not do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He is a good man. He has been good to us.” As my words rang out in the room they sounded hollow. Did Roger know of Richard’s woman? That would be a betrayal twice over, and worse even than my own mother’s. He called Richard and me the turtledoves. Either he was ignorant or cruel.

  “Alice, I am sorry for spying, I did not mean it,” I said after a long silence.

  My thoughts were becoming too much for me; I needed to separate them like threads and follow each of them in turn. I thought Alice hated me and watched her pick at something on her skirt. Her old dress badly needed mending and washing and her cap starching. I decided I would have it done here. I wondered when the last time she bathed was, if she longed to scrub herself clean. “Alice, would you like to bathe?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I can have more water sent up.”

  She bristled. “Do I smell badly? Do you think I have given you lice?”

  “No, of course not. There are no lice. I imagined it...” I saw the white pile of my underthings on the floor and watched them again to see if they crawled. “Alice, do
you think my skin looks yellow?”

  She glanced dismissively at me. “I couldn’t say—it does not look healthy, but then it never does.”

  She was full of resentment, and for the first time I did not know if I’d been right to bring her with me. Something had shifted in her the day I accused her of stealing my necklace, which was still missing—though she had brought no luggage to my mother’s, so if she did have it, she might have hidden it. But if she was not responsible, then she had every right to act off with me. Still, I was used only to being deferred to, and she treated me almost like an equal. Yet I realized I did not mind.

  I scooped water over myself once more, then stood up, meeting myself in the mirror at the dresser. My hair was wild, bunched up around my ears like a bird’s nest. My paps were full with dark rings around the nipples, the buds of which were also dark. Shadows hung beneath my eyes, which were a dirty white.

  I pressed myself with clean linen towels and wrapped a bath sheet around me to sit on the bed. Alice had not moved from where she was. I thought about where she might want to be: it was not here, but instinct told me she did not pine for the place she had left either; impossible anyway, now it was unsafe. Perhaps it was somewhere I had not pictured her where she felt most comfortable: in a lover’s arms beneath old sheets, or sitting comfortably with her father outside on a warm spring evening.