by Kevin Sands
With surprising skill, Wise used the ink and quill from my sash to draw a remarkably detailed map on an old rag. “Here’s my farm,” Robert said as Wise sketched. “If you follow the brook to the east, it’ll meet the River Axe. From there, you go south. Seaton’s here, on the coast . . . and the village of Axmouth is farther upstream . . . and Sybil’s house is north of that. You’ll know you’ve gone too far if—” He snapped his fingers. “Baronet Darcy.”
“Who?” I said.
“Sir Edmund Darcy. He has an estate on the Axe. It’s a ways north, but he’s been kind to us. He helped replenish my cattle a few years ago, when they fell to the quarter evil. I know a baronet’s not a lord, but it’s said he knows many of the peerage. Perhaps he might recognize you.”
Wise scratched Darcy’s estate onto the cloth. As neither of them could write, I inked the names on the map myself, trying to fix the directions in my mind.
Both Seaton and the Darcy estate sounded promising. Robert told me they were too far apart to reach in the same day, so I decided I’d try Seaton first. With Sir Edmund’s estate so close to Sybil’s, I could go there on Tuesday when I visited the cunning woman.
Robert agreed that made the most sense. “You’ll remember to ask Sybil about Emma, won’t you?”
I felt guilty. In trying to solve my own problem, I’d forgotten about Jane Lisle’s daughter. I looked over to the corner, where the moppet played silently with the pigeon.
“Jane mentioned a trade,” I said. “The White Lady took her daughter—and left this girl in exchange?”
“That’s what she thinks. Emma vanished four days ago. We found this little one the next morning.”
“Do you believe it?”
“No. This girl’s no demon child. But you saw the marks on her body, and she refuses to speak. Something terrible happened to her out there.”
“You think the White Lady had her.”
Robert scratched at his beard. “Maybe. Though if she did, I don’t know how the moppet escaped. The White Lady doesn’t give children back.”
I had no way of knowing where this girl had come from. But Jane’s daughter . . . “With the weather this bad, isn’t it possible Emma just got lost?”
He shook his head. “Would have seen her tracks in the snow.”
I bit my lip, thinking. “Maybe you’d better show me where she disappeared.”
• • •
The creek where Emma vanished was close to the farm. We set off north, through Robert’s fields, into the thin line of woods that followed the stream. Robert explained there’d been a heavy snowstorm that night.
“Then what was Emma doing up here?” I said.
“Collecting water,” Robert said.
“From the creek?” I frowned. “Why send her out in a storm? Why not just melt the falling snow?”
“Because of the storm. Wasn’t natural. Jane believed it was tainted with black magic.”
The snow thinned slightly as we moved under the branches that hung over the stream. I could see faint tracks, rendered mere depressions in the white by the snow that covered them over. As for the creek itself, it surprised me: Though the water ran shallow, it was wider and faster than I’d expected. And, despite the cold, only a few inches of ice jutted from the banks.
“Too swollen to freeze, my lord,” Robert said. “Before the snow, we had heavy rain for weeks.”
The storm had left very little to see. I spotted a lump next to the riverbank. When I brushed the snow off, I saw the top of a bucket. “This was Emma’s? For gathering the water?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Who first noticed she was missing?”
“Well, her mother was the one who came to me. But Wise was the first to spot it.”
I turned to the old man. “You followed her tracks down here?”
He nodded and pointed to the bucket.
“You saw the bucket . . . but no Emma.”
He nodded again.
“Was there any blood? Any signs of a struggle?”
He shook his head.
“Anything else? Where did Emma’s footprints go?”
He moved his fingers like walking legs, then pointed to the water.
“The tracks went to the creek . . . then stopped?”
He nodded.
“Could she have crossed it?” I asked.
“No,” Robert said. “We searched the entire area the next morning. There weren’t any tracks to be found.”
Maybe that was because she’d stepped onto something that wouldn’t leave them. “Does anyone on the farm own a boat? Or a raft, something like that?”
He shook his head. “There are rocks, upstream and down. Water’s not deep enough to let one through.”
An awful idea occurred to me. I snapped a branch from a nearby tree and stuck it in the water. The current tugged on the wood. By the time I stretched far enough for the creek to deepen, my fingers strained to keep their grip. “How old was Emma?”
“Five, last October. ’Bout the same age as the moppet.”
I thought I knew what had happened. “I don’t want to dash anyone’s hopes,” I said, “but isn’t it most likely the girl fell in? The water’s high, it’s fast, and it’s cold. If Emma stepped into the edge of the creek to collect it, she could easily have slipped and been carried away. She probably drowned.”
“It’s possible,” Robert admitted. “We looked a fair distance downstream, though, and saw no body.”
With such a heavy snowfall, the water could have dumped her into a bank, where her corpse would have been covered. “We should check.”
We walked the banks of the river for half a mile. It was hard going in the snow, made even slower by the fact that we didn’t want to pass her for lack of care. We didn’t see anything. Once we reached the downstream rocks, however, I noticed that while there wasn’t enough space for a boat to pass, there was enough to let through a body. Especially a five-year-old girl’s.
“You said this leads to the River Axe. And from there?”
“Past Axmouth and Seaton, into the Channel.”
It was hard to imagine a body floating through two towns and no one noticing it. Then again, it had been night, and the snowstorm would have kept most people inside. It was also possible there was no body to find because something else had taken it.
“Are there animals around here?” I asked.
Robert didn’t like the thought. “There’s a pack of wild dogs that roams the forest. But we would have seen tracks. Blood.”
Yet he wasn’t convinced of that, and for good reason. If her body was dragged off before the storm ended, the snowfall would have hidden the evidence. I shook my head. The most likely explanation was that Emma had drowned. A fast-flowing stream; the bank slippery with snow; no one around to hear her scream. Emma being snatched by the White Lady was probably just a fantasy. A terrible fantasy, yet still better than the girl drowning: After all, if she was taken, there was still hope her mother might get her back.
I said as much to Robert and Wise. They didn’t disagree, though Robert sounded disappointed. “Does this mean you won’t ask Sybil about her?”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.” But I didn’t hold out any hope.
• • •
My fingers were stinging badly by the time we returned to the farm. Despite the wonderfully warm sheepskin gloves Robert had gifted me, being frostbitten left them sensitive to the cold. I soaked them in water heated over the fire, which soothed them somewhat, and it was then that I remembered the sash around my waist. For all its bulkiness, I’d forgotten it was there. It just felt so natural to wear it.
The sash held two pain relievers, I discovered: willow bark and poppy. As the water had already relieved some of the pain, I decided to save those in case they were needed later for something more severe. I did, however, open the vial of aloe syrup. I slathered it over my fingers; it would help regrow my reddened skin.
It occurred to me then: What other injuri
es might my body reveal? I checked myself over, and found a terrible scar on my chest: my flesh, melted, as if I’d been burned. I ran my fingers over it, wondering what had happened.
I found more scars to wonder about after that. The biggest was on my left shoulder—it looked like I’d been stabbed—and the most recent was on one of my fingers, which I’d missed under the peeling skin. That scar was still raw and tender. I must have been cut badly.
These scars tell stories, I thought. But those stories, like all the others, remained silent in my head.
• • •
I stayed the rest of the night in the cob house. Robert invited me to join his family, but I didn’t want to cause trouble with his wife. So he brought me and the moppet our supper, plus some seed for the pigeon, and we three spent the evening in silence.
The girl didn’t want to let go of the bird, and though I called for the Voice in my head, that had disappeared, too. So I had little to do after dinner except lie on the bed and test my memory. It was slow, frustrating, and nauseating—literally—because any time I tried to recall something personal, it set my head to spinning and made me feel like throwing up.
Whatever my illness—or possession, I thought with a shudder—had done to me, it had left me with an affliction beyond strange. I discovered I could recall facts without trouble: recipes that used the ingredients in my sash; towns and villages of England; languages I could speak; the names of famous people, like our king, Charles II, or his brother James, the Duke of York, or his Warden, Lord Richard Ashcombe. But even the slightest push of my mind toward something personal made me sick. I finally stopped when a drive to remember my family had me retching over the side of the mattress. I just lay there, panting, and waited for the calm of sleep.
But the dream returned.
CHAPTER
9
I’M SO COLD.
A terrible wind whistles across the plain. I feel its chill, not in my skin, but in my bones; I hear its howl, not in my ears, but in my soul. It turns me to ice, far worse than any earthly storm could ever achieve.
Ice. My hands, my legs, are stuck in it, endless, deep, eternal. My friends are all dead. Only the bird, the bird of nothing-feathers, the bird of onyx eyes, remains, perched on its bent and crooked branch. I am alone.
BUT YOU ARE NOT ALONE, the bird says, and I look down, and I see it is not lying.
There is someone beneath the ice. I strain, and, as if delighted to show me, the soul-wind blows away the ash that covers the plain. I see her now. It is a girl of five, with long black hair knotted in a braid. Her mouth moves as she begs for my help, but I cannot hear her; her words are trapped below the ice. Only her fear can be seen.
It is Emma Lisle. I know this, though I do not know how. Her fingers scrabble against the ice that forms her prison, scratching and scraping in terror until her nails crack and bleed. She screams for me, and I can do nothing.
“Let her go,” I plead.
The bird replies. I WILL NOT.
The wind whistles and carries my words. “She is innocent! She is blameless!”
THEY ARE ALL INNOCENT. THEY ARE ALL BLAMELESS. MY INNOCENT, BLAMELESS PETS. I WILL KEEP THEM FOREVER.
And now I see: Emma is not alone. The plain stretches without end, and beneath it, children cry, children scream, children beg for release. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of them, all trapped under the ice.
The bird of nothing-feathers and onyx eyes looks down. The jewel-eyes glitter, and in the empty echo of the plain I hear its terrible words.
YOU
BELONG
TO
ME
The screaming woke me. And it was a time before I understood the screams were mine.
In panic, I yanked my hands from the ice—but they were not in ice. As the dream faded, I understood: I was in the bed in the cob house, where I’d always been.
A sob racked my chest. My hands were shaking. I felt the clinging wetness of the sweat that soaked my neck. My face was wet, too, but not from sweat. I’d been crying.
I sat like that for a moment, taking deep slow breaths, listening to the crackling of the fire. Then I noticed I wasn’t alone.
The moppet stood beside my bed, holding the pigeon. She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw sympathy. Slowly, she placed the bird on the bed.
The pigeon flapped her wings and hopped onto my lap. I took her, hands trembling, and held her against my cheek.
“Thank you,” I said.
The girl turned away.
“Wait.”
She hesitated.
“Do you have them?” I said. “The dreams. The . . . bird. Does it come for you, too?”
She didn’t answer. She just walked back to her palliasse and curled up in the straw. We lay there, she and I, in the quiet, neither one wishing for sleep.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1665
p e r
b u q s
CHAPTER
10
WHEN MORNING CAME, I CHANGED into “my” clothes: the ones they’d found me in on the beach. Such finery wasn’t tailored to withstand the cold, so, in an offer of kindness gratefully accepted, Robert gave me an oversize woolen shirt and deerskin breeches to wear on top. All this, plus the sheepskin coat, gloves, and hat from yesterday, left me looking faintly ridiculous but feeling pleasantly warm in the snow.
Robert came with the cock’s crow to give me provisions and something to start my journey to Seaton: wedges of freshly baked flat bread, slathered with clotted cream and strawberry preserve. The taste was heaven: rich and sweet, with the nutty flavor of cooked milk and strawberries, and it half made me think I should just stay at the farm until Sybil’s return.
But that would have meant another day of questions unanswered—and another night of terrible dreams. I needed to do something. Even if Seaton proved fruitless, at least I’d be moving. Beyond the map Wise had drawn, I asked if there were any further directions Robert could give.
“River’s the easiest path,” he said. “Coast’s too dangerous with cliffs, and all the roads are under snow. Be slow going, but stay beside the water. That way there’ll be no chance of getting lost.”
He pointed to the locations Wise had marked.
“You can’t miss Seaton. Baronet Darcy’s estate will be easy to find, too, when you go there. Looks like a castle, with a tower in the center.”
“And the cunning woman’s house?”
“That’s a little trickier. It’s not far from the Darcy estate, but it’s back from the river, in the woods. About half a mile north of the west river branch, you’ll see a tree that looks like a squashed giant. Walk a quarter mile east into the trees, and you’ll find her. She lives alone.”
A strange buzzing filled my head. A squashed giant, I thought. Where had I seen that before?
Had I seen it before? Or—
The Voice returned. The giant, it said. Think about the giant.
I pictured one in my mind. He was tall and strong, and maybe a little bit . . . pudgy? Or he had been pudgy? He wasn’t anymore.
Where had I seen him—?
It came to me. My dream.
Yes. There’d been a giant
in my
dream
• • •
I found myself dangling from Robert’s arms.
“My lord,” he said, worried. “Here. Sit down.”
“I’m all right.” I sat at the edge of the bed, catching my breath. “Just a dizzy spell. I’ll be fine.” Though I wasn’t so sure of that. I’d almost passed out.
Robert didn’t want me to go. He nearly insisted—but of course he couldn’t order me about. “You really should rest. At least another day.”
I declined. “Thank you for caring for me. Especially given . . .” I let the words hang between us. “I have something for you.”
I opened my coin purse and pulled out a gold louis.
His eyes widened. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and shook his head. “Very thoughtful, my lor
d. But it’s my privilege—my duty—to give aid to those in need.”
Reluctantly, I put my coin purse away. I looked over at the moppet, who’d grabbed her own plate of clotted cream and strawberry when the farmer had come in and huddled behind her palliasse to eat it. Her face was sticky with preserve. “What about the girl?”
“If you find anything in your travels that tells you where her parents are,” Robert said, “just send word. I’ll see she gets home safe. Otherwise, once the snow clears, I’ll take her to Exeter and see if I can find to whom she belongs.”
“But your wife. And Jane . . .”
“Don’t worry about them. The girl has a place here as long as she needs it. As do you.”
Our farewells said, I asked for one more thing. “Is Wise around?”
• • •
I caught the old man just in time. He was on his way to the woods, longbow slung over his shoulder, quiver full of arrows for the day’s hunt. He waited for me to catch up.
Even as short a run as that left me light-headed. I’d have to be careful about not pushing myself while I was out there, or I’d end up facedown in the snow. “You found me on the beach,” I said, between breaths.
He nodded.
“Could you show me where?”
We set off the half mile to the coast, clouds covering the sky, boots crunching through the snowy crust. I was pleased to see the pigeon following me; she was one of the few things that had started to feel familiar. Though I did feel a pang of guilt: Holding the bird had been the only time the moppet hadn’t seemed so scared. Now I was taking away the one thing that brought her comfort.
At least leaving gave me another chance to repay some of Robert’s kindness. “You seem a practical sort,” I said to Wise as we walked.
He raised an eyebrow.
I took a louis from my purse. “I tried to give this to Robert, but he refused. If I give it to you, will you buy things he and his family need? You’d have to keep it a secret.”
He winked.
We grinned at each other as he took the coin. I added a second louis to his palm. “For you. My thanks for saving my life.”
