The Minister's Daughter

by Julie Hearn

  Behind her the dun chicken begins to scratch and peck.

  “Behave,” Nell tells it. “And lay an egg for once. Two eggs, if you please.”

  Then she snatches her bonnet and shawl from a peg beside the door and goes running through wet cobwebby grass, down the slope that leads to the edge of the village and the dense wood where the best primroses grow.

  Meanwhile the cunning woman is dreaming. A strange, troublesome dream; part memory, part prophecy. Her son is there, behind her eyes. Nell’s father. Gone for a sailor these many years. Gone … gone … In her dream he is coming to meet her, with a bundle wrapped in sheepskin clutched to his chest. “Look after her,” he says, but his words are whipped away on a bitter, northerly wind.

  “Plantain … ,” moans the cunning woman. “Fresh leaves … crushed … for wounds.”

  The image of her son wavers, like a reflection in troubled water. “Look after her,” he says again. And the cunning woman knows that he has traveled across some great divide—oceans … time … even death, maybe—just as surely as he came to her, in the flesh, twelve winters ago, with his newborn daughter wriggling in his arms.

  Look after her.

  This dream is a sign. Some kind of warning.

  There is no rest in sleep nowadays for the cunning woman. She is still dog-tired when she opens her eyes. And her bones, as she clambers down from the roof space, grind in their sockets like pestles in empty mortars.

  The girl is nowhere to be seen.

  Gone … gone …

  The cunning woman bends over her cauldron and gives the dregs at the bottom a bit of a stir. What potion or lotion had she planned to mix today? Was it the meadowsweet and parsley infusion, for Mistress Coombe’s cough? Or wormwood steeped in the blood of a hare, to ease the pains in Silas Denby’s great windy gut?

  Nell will remember. She will wait for Nell before starting anything. Where is the girl? These are strange times. Troublesome times. She must remind the girl to be careful.

  Shivering and mumbling, the cunning woman scoops up the dun chicken and settles herself on a rough wooden bench. Her fingers touch crumbs and a few tiny bones, scattered like spillikins upon the seat.

  The piskies have been. They have eaten their sparrow and gorged on cake. In return … yes … they have left the root. The special root that shrieks so piercingly when pulled from the earth that no mortal can dig it up without going mad. Dried and grated, this root is a wonderful tonic, particularly for barren wives. Supplies of it are running low, so the cunning woman is grateful to the piskies for remembering her this day.

  “Thank’ee,” she croaks, just in case any of the scabby wee things are hanging around. “Thank’ee thrice and thank’ee nice. And thank’ee once again.”

  Something scrabbles beside the open door—something small, hidden behind the cunning woman’s broomstick. The dun chicken stretches out its neck and clucks softly. The cunning woman holds tight to its warm feathery body, so that it cannot launch itself from her lap and go skittering across the room. It would be no contest, a tussle between a piskie and a chicken, for piskies fight dirty when cornered and can see off rats, cats—the occasional dog, even—with no more than their incisors and the razor-sharp ends of their filthy fingernails.

  A rustle of twigs, and there it stands—a wizened, cross-eyed, elderly piskie, annoyed at being caught napping and digesting its sparrow meat, when it should have been long gone, back to its ditch, with the others.

  “It s all right,” the cunning woman tells it. “’Tis only me. Me and this daft chicken.”

  The piskie grunts, turns, and bends over. It is wearing trousers made from a stolen kerchief, with a flap at the back, which it is about to lift.

  “Wait,” says the cunning woman. “I see you. You see me. A question asked must be answered free. My granddaughter. The Merrybegot. Be she heading trouble s way?”

  The piskie pauses. Then it raises its head—as knobbled as an old potato—and sniffs the air.

  Ah. The cunning woman is not so senile that she cannot observe, listen, and learn. The piskie has sniffed the air. It knows, then, just as she herself has always known, that answers to important questions come not from the hollows of the mind, but from beyond the self. From the elements.

  Outside a cock is crowing. Smoke begins to rise from chimneys, in soft wavy lines. Down in the village Mistress Bramlow lifts her month-old baby from his crib and frets when he won’t feed. The blacksmith stokes the great fire at the forge and curses his absent son for a love-struck scallywag.

  Nell, scattering primroses in a quiet lane, feels a shadow at her back and turns to find the minister watching her. He is in the next field, standing among corn like the grim reaper or a particularly dour scarecrow. He is looking for frolickers. Heathens. Merrymakers. A few minutes more, and he will catch sight of the blacksmiths son sauntering out of the woods with bracken fronds stuck to his shirt and a smile like a slice of sunshine lighting up his face. He will put two and two together and come up with the wrong answer.

  Meanwhile his elder daughter will have returned home, unnoticed. She will have let herself into the house the same way she left it—hand over hand, one tiny foot after another, seeking and finding a route through the creeper that looks like a shawl, but can serve as a ladder, from bedchamber to earth and back again.

  All of this the piskie senses as it lingers in the cunning woman’s cottage, sniffing. The distant future, too, is whirling in the air. Tiny signals. Bits of information, dancing around like motes of dust. The piskie snuffs a bit of that up too and tries not to grin too broadly. Piskies love trouble. It is their favorite sport. It is Shakespeare and Greek tragedy rolled into one. It is human life at risk and in the raw.

  Ooooo.

  “Well?” says the cunning woman.

  The piskie licks its lips. Its voice, when it comes, is dry and rasping.

  “Oh, merry … merry … Merrybegots,” it caws. “Trouble coming. Shape of the ranter. Shape of the frog. Shape of the heart that cannot love.”

  The cunning woman shifts on the bench, ruffles the chicken, and sighs.

  “I be too old for riddles,” she says. “And for shapes. I need things clearer now. But thank’ee anyway. For the warning.”

  Bending right over, the piskie lifts the flap of its trousers. A flash of its arse—rough as a split log and more clotted with muck than the rear of a sheep—and it is out, into the morning, and away.

  Sunday: The little church is full. It always is. There are those who truly believe; some who are trying to; and a few who never will, but need to pretend, for the look of it.

  Nearly everyone remembers when there was stained glass in the church window, all lit up on sunny days, like little bits of heaven. There was an altar, too, with a statue of the Virgin Mary, a tall candle always burning, and niches where folk could leave roses, or apples, or locks of hair from a sickly child in need of the Lady’s blessing. None of those things are here anymore. They were papist trappings, according to the minister, and no great loss to anyone. There is a plain table now where the altar used to be and nothing at all in the window except a rectangular view of the heavens themselves, be they cloudy, fair, or bucketing rain.

  No one knows what has happened to the beautiful statue of Mary. Some claim it was rescued, under cover of darkness, and is standing, still, in some private chapel or secret chamber. Others will tell you it was carted deep into the wood and thrown among brambles, where it lies, facedown, weeping bright blue tears. But those who understand the way of the world say it got smashed to smithereens with a mallet.

  Nell misses the Lady. Expecting nothing much from today’s sermon, she sits next to her grandmother and drifts into a dream. She is thinking about going later to gather cress beside the old pond. In her mind’s eye she can see the play of light on water and the way certain trees lean toward their reflections, dipping and trailing their branches in the shallows like wood nymphs washing their hair. Should the day continue hot, she will leave her c
lothes and her bundle of cress among the reeds and go into the pond herself. It will be lovely, she thinks, to float there awhile, looking up at the great bowl of the sky and—

  “There is lewdness among us, good people. Lust. Lascivious behavior and willful disobedience….”

  The minister is in full spate. Nell smothers a yawn. No doubt he has got wind of Silas Denby, and some of the other men, journeying fifteen miles over the moor to get drunk and sing bawdy songs. Perhaps he followed them one night and caught Silas Denby with a strumpet. Perhaps …

  “A daughter of Eve. Steeped in sin!”

  A woman, then. Who could that be? Not Mistress Bramlow, for she loves her husband dearly and, anyway, wouldn’t have the energy. Not any of the Watchers, either, for they are so bogging ugly. … Maybe Mistress Denby has had enough of her husband’s scoundrelly ways and is making a cuckold of him with some farmhand or other. Maybe …

  “Even now, good people, she feigns innocence. Wide-eyed as a lamb, she sits as if the wrath of our Lord is of no more consequence than a distant roll of thunder or the prickle of a thorn.”

  Oh, dear. Nell is intrigued now. The whole congregation is intrigued.

  Who is it?

  Which woman or maid among them has dared be lewd and lascivious, knowing full well that the minister misses nothing and will label you a trollop simply for wearing a ribbon?

  From her place next to her grandmother, Nell can see the minister’s daughters holding themselves as still as can be, their hands folded in their laps, their eyes downcast. The older ones cheeks are as pale as milk, but there is something about the set of her profile …

  Quickly, for it isn’t ladylike to gawp in church, Nell swings round, to look at the blacksmiths son. His face is crimson. His face is a beetroot. And he is sweating worse than a spooked stallion.

  Nell puts two and two together and comes up with the right answer.

  “You!”

  The minister raises his right arm, like a mad deity about to hurl a thunderbolt, and points one shaking finger.

  Slowly, the whole congregation turns and stares. Nell feels her grandmother’s hand steal across her own, to hold it tight.

  “Me?” Me?

  “Do you deny it, child? Do you dare to deny it? Here in the Lord s house? Do you deny that you indulged in wanton pleasures and heathen ritual, at the dawning of the month, against my express command and the teachings of our Lord?”

  For several seconds Nell can only gape at her accuser. In the hush of these seconds she finds herself wondering how she could ever have likened his features to a parsnip. For parsnips, when all is said and done, are familiar, wholesome things, and this person is clearly crazed.

  “Do. You. Deny it?”

  “Yes, I bogging well do!”

  The cunning woman’s fingers press gently down. It is a warning to her granddaughter to be careful. To accept this humiliation, however unjust, however cruel, rather than rile the minister.

  Trouble coming. Shape of the ranter.

  Nell snatches her hand away.

  “Tell him, Sam Towser!” she cries, wheeling round on the bench. “Tell him it weren’t me!”

  But the blacksmith’s mute and horrified son will not even look at her.

  “Tell him, Sam!”

  Useless words … falling on deaf ears. And no point turning on that Grace one, either, with a mouthful of bitterness and blame. For she is a good girl. A good, pretty, God-fearing girl. And no one would believe it. No one.

  Toward the back of the church the baby, Amos Bramlow, begins to cry. It is a weak and weary sound, as if he suddenly understands the kind of place and time he has been born into and cannot bear it.

  “Hush now,” whispers his mother, but the baby cries on, and the sound of it—the pity of it—dulls Nell’s fighting spirit like nothing else and fills her with a kind of despair.

  I don’t care, she tells herself, slumping against her grandmother with her fists clenched, and her eyes and mouth closed tight, to keep her own wailing in. I don’t care what anyone thinks. They can believe what they like. I don’t care.

  The cunning woman places one arm around her shoulders. It is a gesture of solidarity, in front of everyone, but it is not enough. It is nowhere near enough.

  · · ·

  “I didn’t do it. It weren’t me! It were her—that hoity one. His own daughter! I know it was.”

  “Be still. Be calm. Everything passes, and so will this.”

  “No, I won’t be calm. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. I’m going straight to the big house now, to tell him. I am!”

  “No, girl. No. It will do no good. It may even cause more harm. Listen to me. Listen. For I know these things….”

  They are back at their cottage, with the door closed. The cunning woman is rummaging among her stone bottles, looking for something soothing. Camomile. Strawberry. Something sweet. With a tincture of poppy, perhaps, so that the girl will sleep.

  Nell, meanwhile, is rampaging round the cauldron, butting her head into dangling bunches of rosemary, betony, comfrey, and hyssop, and kicking out at everything—fate, bits of kindling, the dun chicken.

  “And why weren’t he picked on?” she cries, pausing momentarily as this particular piece of injustice hits home. “Why didn’t he get bawled at for being lewd and disobedient and … and steeped in sin?”

  The cunning woman considers her granddaughter’s face—all crumpled and tearstained now that there is no crowd to enjoy her humiliation.

  “’Twas ever thus,” she tells her. “Men and boys, they get away with all kinds.”

  Nell rubs one hand across her snotty cheeks and sighs a great, juddery sigh.

  “He should have told the truth,” she mutters. “Back there, in front of everyone. He should have said it weren’t me.”

  The cunning woman’s sigh is more resigned. “Men and boys,” she says. “Some are worthy of us and some aren’t.”

  “We could hex him for that,” declares Nell. “We could, Granny. On a waning moon, when the time be right for revenge. We could make it so he never frolics again. Not with anyone. Ever.”

  “No, girl.” The cunning woman is tired now. Tired and strangely pained around her middle. For many years she has felt it in her middle when a local woman is about to drop a pot lid. Usually the ache is dull and low in her abdomen. Only twice before has it been like this—a needling sensation as if tiny feet in pointed shoes are dancing in her womb.

  A fairychild. A fairychild is soon to be born, across in the neighboring county. Before long, under cover of darkness, there will be a rapping at the door, and she will be expected to go. It is a rare event, the birth of a fairy, and fraught with significance and danger. Piskies (praise the elements) drop their own litters—one, two, three—among stinging nettles and would spit in the eye of any midwife who tried to interfere. The fairies, though, they do things by ritual—beautifully, precisely, and with dramatic effect.

  But, oh, this time … this time … Just thinking about delivering a fairy makes the cunning woman tremble. She is too old for it. Too jaded. If it happens … If the call comes, Nell will have to go in her place.

  Only, Nell is so young … and not yet fully trained. She will need a particular kind of Knowledge to do this job properly. Harder still, she will need courage and great strength of mind to get home safely after it is done, for the fairies don’t always want you to leave. Sometimes they want you to stay with them. Forever.

  Beside her Nell is grinding some seeds in a bowl. Grinding and muttering and bashing away, as if the bottom of the bowl needs punishing. She has lit a candle—a dark one—and placed a knife dead center of the table, pointing south. She has found a lardy blob of wax, which she has every intention of melting, in a minute, and fashioning, by guesswork, to the approximate shape of Sam Towser’s private parts.

  “Wheres the hemlock?” she asks.

  The cunning woman shakes her head.

  “Let it be,” she says. “Let it go. There is other
Knowledge I must impart to you, and we do not have much time.”

  The Confession of Patience Madden

  THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1692

  It was toward the middle of May that I began to follow my sister. The nights were wretched hot by then. Too hot to sleep, although I always feigned it while I counted the seconds it would take Grace to cross to the window, then clamber out and down, to the mess of weeds and stones below. Another few minutes I would give her before flinging a dark cloak over my nightgown and going over the sill myself.

  Some thrill, it was, to be out in the night, like a bat or a ghost. Yet, to begin with, I was too nervous of shadows and the strange calls of owls and other things to venture beyond the garden. It was enough, that first time, to lurk behind the trunk of an elm, looking up at the stars and waiting.

  I half tumbled to her secret in the dim hour before dawn. For he accompanied her home—right up to the gate—and was in no hurry to let her go. He kept himself in shadow, so I did not glimpse his face, but from the shiver that went through me, I could tell this was no ordinary tryst.

  My sister … The sound of her simpering brought bile to my throat. In the semidarkness, and from a distance, I could just make out her hair, all loose like a mermaid’s, but with burrs as big as snails stuck in it, from lying on the ground.

  Part of me wanted to cry out: Grace! Are you mad to behave so? Come away! It would have driven her to fury, though. She would have struck me right there on the spot and made my days even more of a misery than they already were.

  Instead, I backed away and skittered like some small beast back to the house. My cloak caught as I sought blindly for footholds against the wall—for jutting bricks and thick stems—and I was trembling, scratched, and chilly with dew as I scrambled over the windowsill and back into bed.