A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  I stared at the open hand above me nailed to the cross. The painted blood around the wound in his palm shone fresh, as if Christ was hurling it down upon us. ‘Why, Lord? Why do you punish us with yet another plague on your holy well?’

  Guilt burned in me. Was He punishing me for deceiving our holy order? But if we failed, if I failed and the priory closed, what would become of all the frail creatures we sheltered – our servants, Meggy and Sebastian? Who would care for Sebastian? He would not survive without us. It was my duty as prioress to protect those I had taken a sacred oath to serve.

  But an insidious voice nagged in my head and it was one I couldn’t smother. It whispered that I had once knelt before another altar, placed my hands in the lap of another prioress and, before my brothers and sisters, had vowed faithfully to serve the order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem with my life. To honour one vow meant breaking another. What if there could be no right way, no sinless path, only a greater or lesser wrong? And which was the greater wrong? Who would tell me, when God refused to answer me?

  If any of my sisters had come to me, I would have told her that her duty was obedience to the order, yet as their leader, as the one responsible for so many lives, was it not them I should put before all else? We were pledged to be the serfs and servants of the blessed poor. Should I say, ‘I cannot protect you, because I have vowed to obey the order. My oath of obedience is more important than your survival. My soul is worth more than your life’?

  I stared down at the cold flags, painfully aware that I was kneeling directly above the holy well. I must have faith! I had assured my sisters that we had survived the plagues of frogs and flies, which had seemed to spell doom for the well. We had prayed and they had vanished as if they had never been. Like the woman with the issue of blood who reached out in faith to touch Christ’s robe, I had only to reach out my hand in faith and the spring would cease to flow red. I had only to believe it.

  Chapter 31

  Hospitallers’ Priory of St Mary

  Meggy sat on her stool, slumped against the wall, a snore escaping her from time to time as she drifted comfortably between dozing and sleep. It was not yet time to damp down the fire and huddle beneath the blankets, and she was enjoying the blessed warmth from the flames. It was the only time her feet ever seemed to be warm these days. Although a stone was heating on the edge of the hearth, ready to be wrapped in sacking and slid under the covers, it always cooled long before morning. But she counted herself lucky. The hut, though barely long enough to lie down in, was dry, the door solid, and her belly was full of hot pottage. As she knew only too well, there was many a widow, like her, who that night would be huddling hungry in a doorway or coughing her lungs out with a dozen others in a wet, lice-infested byre.

  Meggy was dreaming of her son, not the stocky lad who’d marched off to fight the Scots, but years before when he was little, small enough to run beneath a horse’s belly. They were in her husband’s forge and her son was giggling as he tipped a box of horseshoe nails on to the ground. She was scolding the lad and scrambling to pick them up before his father returned, but no sooner had she put some back in the box than the little lad scattered more. The nails were growing smaller and smaller, harder to gather, and there were so many. Now the boy was banging the tongs against the anvil, making it ring through the smithy. The noise would bring his father striding in, and the child would be in trouble.

  Meggy jerked awake and, for a moment, she thought the sound she could hear was the echo of her dream, but it was coming from the gate. Someone was singing, not the plainsong of the chapel or the bawdy chorus of a drunken pedlar, but an eerie high-pitched keening, like the ghosts on Fire Tor.

  She dragged her cloak about her shoulders and hurried out to the small gridded window. The rain had stopped for now, but thick clouds crowded against the moon, smothering the light. Meggy cursed herself. Roused suddenly, she had neglected to bring the lantern. She was on the point of returning for it when she caught a wisp of singing again, like a feather spun towards her on the wind. It was a woman’s voice, she was sure of that, and it was coming from outside the priory. But who would be out there on the moors at this hour? A soul needing help? The sound certainly tore at your heart, like a woman grieving over a new grave.

  She almost found herself drawing back the beam that braced the gate. But she knew the tricks the outlaws used. She slid back the shutter covering the gridded window and peered out. Torches were left burning on either side of the main gate to guide latecomers and the lost, at least until the midnight hour, by which time they had usually burned away. The insipid orange light clawed at the darkness, as the wind twisted and flattened the flames. But she could see no one standing in front of the door, no grieving mother or shivering child.

  A chilling thought gripped her. Was it the voices of the dead that had awoken her, the restless spirits that roamed the moor trying to find their way back to the villages of the living? The corpses of murderers, self-murderers and madmen had been thrown into those black, sucking mires for centuries, for they weren’t welcome in hallowed ground. The souls of the innocent, too, wandered the lych-ways: the babies born maimed, left out to perish; the beggars dying alone, unshriven, their corpses lying out for the birds to pick their bones. Their ghosts would never lie quiet for they had no graves to rest in.

  Meggy crossed herself, and reached for the shutter, struggling to slide it back over the grid, but the wood had swollen in the months of rain. As she fought with it, the wind gusted the flames of the torches, and as the tongues of light snaked out, for a moment they illuminated a tall figure standing motionless in the darkness, unmoved by the buffeting of the gale. Meggy glimpsed a bone-pale face, a tangle of long hair darting out like lightning bolts about the skull. She couldn’t tell if it was a ghost or human, only that it was staring at her, as if it was her that it had come for. The wind gusted once more and both torches were extinguished, as if that spirit had snuffed them out. All the world was plunged into darkness. But the singing rose again, riding the wind, like a shrieking hawk.

  Her hand trembling, Meggy caught the edge of the wooden shutter and heaved with strength born of fear. The wood slid home with a crash, and she turned, leaning her back against the great oak gate, trying to recover her breath. Then a cry escaped her.

  The boy was standing behind her in the dark, empty courtyard, his blind eyes suddenly glowing ghost-green, like a wolf’s in moonlight. His arms were stretched out towards the gate, as if he was trying to grasp the wild notes that were rising like a flock of birds. He turned his head slowly, until he seemed to be staring right at the door that led into the chapel. A sudden silence filled the courtyard – even the wind held its breath. Meggy had never seen such deep blackness, known such dark silence. She could no longer hear the low rumble of water in the cave echoing up through the stones or the wind crying on the moors. It was as if she was lying in her own grave, beneath the earth. No sight, no sound, only darkness.

  And she could not know that in that moment the prioress’s prayers had been answered – the spring had ceased to flow red. In fact, it had ceased to flow at all.

  Chapter 32

  Morwen

  ‘But what does it mean, Kendra?’ the old villager wailed.

  Her tiny granddaughter lying at her feet gave a faint mew and tried to turn herself over, but the effort was too great and she flopped back, grizzling fretfully. There wasn’t a peck of flesh on her and the floor of our livier was digging into her sharpened bones. I winced for her, knowing the pain of sleeping on the hard earth, but Ma and her visitor glanced at the small bundle indifferently, as if it was a kitten they might toss into a pool to drown. Neither moved to lift her.

  ‘Whole moor is turning widdershins,’ the old woman continued, ignoring her grandchild. ‘I’ve never known such rain. I’ve not a wort or a pea that’s not rotted or been gobbled by birds. There’s not a single chick hatched by my hens this year that didn’t die of the gapes even afore it got its proper feath
ers, and now I’ve only one old bird left, and I daren’t let her out of my cottage for fear a fox’ll snatch her or the tinners.’

  At the mention of tinners, Ma spat into the fire. ‘There’s your answer. You want to know why all’s gone amiss, it’s those tinners penning their beasts in the sacred stone circle. Using cup stone as a seat for their filthy arses and pissing on the queen stone.’

  I shifted on my haunches by the door. I’d not seen the tinners actually pissing on the great stone, but they probably did, for they treated the sacred circle worse than a midden.

  ‘Tearing up the land, they are,’ Kendra said. ‘Dragging the streams from their natural beds.’ She wagged her finger at the old woman. ‘But Old Crockern’ll have his revenge on any man who tries to harm Dertemora. He always does in the end. You dare to scratch Crockern’s hide, the old man will break you, body and soul. You mark my words, he’ll let loose his black hounds from their kennels in the woods and he’ll hunt those tinners to the highest peak of Dewerstone and drive them over the edge. Smash on to the rocks below, they will, every man jack of them. And wisht hounds will be waiting to feast on them. There’s many have fallen to their deaths there and their corpses never found.’ Ma’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

  The old woman shuddered. ‘Dewerstone’s an accursed place. Still, I reckon it’s no more than those tinners deserve.’

  I shivered too, thinking of Sorrel. I’d been so vexed with her that I stormed and railed around Fire Tor loud enough that it was wonder Ma hadn’t heard me down in the cottage. But after, I could have cut out my tongue. I’d thought she might come back to the cave, when her temper cooled, but by the time I went out she was long gone. It was my fault. I’d been journeying afore I even had words to explain it, thought it was natural, that everyone did it. But they don’t, not even my own sisters. Too late, I realised that Brigid had brought Sorrel to the moor for me to show her how, but I’d driven her away.

  I had to find her. I’d summoned her to come. But she was strong that one: if she felt it, she could resist it. I closed my eyes, silently calling her, pleading with her. But suppose she came back to the cave and I wasn’t there. I had to get up to it. If only the old woman would leave, Ma and Ryana would fall asleep and I could slip out.

  I peered around the old woman at the naked child lying between her and Ma’s fire. They seemed to have forgotten the little mite was the reason her granddam had come. The girl whimpered. She was barely three summers old, but looked like a wizened crone. Her ma had run off in the night with the last sack of dried beans they’d had, or so the old woman said. ‘Left me and the little ’un to starve to save her own skin,’ she grumbled, spitting on the floor.

  The little girl stared up from the deep pools of her eyes, her ribs fluttering in and out, like the breast of a trapped bird. I could tell she was finding it hard to breathe, lying flat on her back, but she was too weak to sit up. I had to stop myself darting over and lifting her, but Ma’s staff lay within easy reach of her crooked fingers. She didn’t take kindly to any interference when she was working.

  Over in the corner, sheep-face Ryana was supposed to be making a powder to heal the sick child, pounding a roasted mouse in an ancient stone mortar, with dried lungwort plucked from beneath an oak tree. But Ryana’s hands were idle and her mouth had fallen slack, as she listened to the two old besoms.

  ‘Between the tinners tearing the lights and liver out of the land and the black crows nesting over Bryde’s Well, is it any wonder Brigid is angry?’ Ma said.

  The old woman clutched at a small bag around her neck, fashioned from a scrap of grey rag, one of Ma’s charms. She lowered her voice as if Mother Brigid herself might be eavesdropping at the door. ‘I swear on my husband’s grave I saw the water in her well turn to blood right before my eyes. Now I hear tell it’s run dry. That true, is it, Kendra?’

  ‘It is!’ Ma sounded as if she’d stopped up the well herself. ‘Blood gushed out, as if someone stabbed Old Crockern in the heart. Three days and three nights it ran with blood, filled the whole cave. Then the gore turned to dust, like burned bones on a pyre, and a great wind filled the cave and blew it away. Not a drop of water has flowed from that spring since.’

  I studied Ma’s face. That hadn’t been quite like Meggy had told the tale when she’d come to her, angry and afraid. But Ma said the birds had already shown her when she was journeying – leastways that was what she said to Meggy.

  The old woman fingered the amulet around her neck. ‘My grandfather used to tell stories round the hearth come winter, and he said the well ran dry once before. Year of the long drought, it was, when all the streams and rivers dried. Must have been when your granddam, no, your great-granddam was keeper of the well. She told the villagers the streams wouldn’t flow again till the well did. Terrible cruel, they say it was, whole flocks of birds lying dead, like black snow, on the ground and they reckon you could hear the moaning of the cattle all night as they died. People, they died too, but silently, like the birds.’ Wonderingly, she shook her grey head. ‘Terrible cruel,’ she repeated to the fire.

  Ma nodded. ‘My great-granddam, she sat outside the well fasting and praying to the goddess.’ She reached over and poked Ryana in the ribs with her stick. ‘You paying heed to this, girl? See that you do, but keep grinding while you listen. Your ears are stuck on your head, not your hands, so there’s no cause to stop moving your fingers.’

  Ma stared into the burning heart of the peat fire. ‘My great-granddam didn’t move from the spot for days. Her lips were so parched they cracked wide open and her skin sank down to her bones till folks thought she’d already died and it was a skeleton sitting there. Then old Brigid spoke to her and told her what she must do. Told her to catch herself a live long-cripple, and cut its head off on the cup stone, so blood would run into the cup, then anoint the queen stone and the well stones with the viper blood. Then she was to hang the body of the long-cripple in the branches of a twisted oak tree in the wood, high as she could reach. She did exactly as Brigid had bade her, and afore dawn the first cloud appeared, by midday rain was falling and by nightfall the well was flowing again, streams too.’

  The old woman glanced towards the hide hanging in the doorway to keep the rain from blowing in. Drops of icy water were dripping from the bottom edge into the stagnant green puddle that oozed over the threshold. ‘Isn’t rain we need this time, that’s for certain. Rivers are brimming over, land is sodden, but still the spring is dry.’ Her voice cracked, brittle, fearful.

  ‘Brigid is angry.’ Ma spread her fingers in the smoke of the hearth fire. She shut her eyes, muttering to herself as she slowly closed her hand. The smoke vanished into her clenched fist, as if it had been sucked up. Kendra unclenched her fingers and the smoke slid out again, slithering up towards the blackened thatch above. ‘Brigid’s closed the water in her fist. Only when she opens her hand will the spring flow again.’

  By the time I had managed to escape from Ma’s cottage and run up the hillside, I was afeared that if Sorrel had come she would be long gone again, thinking she’d been mistaken and I’d not summoned her.

  Ma had blown the pounded mouse and lungwort through a cow’s horn into the little girl’s throat, making her cough, but she was too weak to struggle. It would ease her chest, Ma said, help her to breathe. But still the old woman was in no hurry to leave. Why waste peats on your own fire when you could share the warmth of someone else’s? She’d glanced pointedly towards Ma’s iron cooking pot, evidently hoping she could share whatever might be there too, but in that she’d be disappointed. Unless Taegan returned with a bite of food from Daveth and his brother, the pot was likely to remain empty, save for a spider that had foolishly scuttled in.

  Halfway up the hill, I was forced to stop to draw breath, though usually I could run all the way to the tor. The rocks above me were hidden beneath a dense fleece of clouds, and the grey mist rolled down towards me, clinging soft as lamb’s wool to my skin, cutting off all the sounds from below of
running water and the cackle of the ravens. I shivered. Hunger always made me cold. I took a gulp of air to call, and the grey fret slid like syrup down my throat.

  ‘Sorrel?’ Please let her be there.

  She was sitting by the entrance, legs drawn up, her head resting on her arms. She scrambled to her feet, relief and misery mingled in her eyes. We stared at one another, both opening our mouths to speak, both stopping to let the other go first. In the end, nothing was said – nothing needed to be said. But something had changed and it wasn’t our quarrel. There was a deep hole in her, a wound, like when a green branch has been torn from a tree.

  I grasped Sorrel’s cold, ragged fingers and pulled her gently through the crevice into the cave. Only when the gold and ruby firelight was lapping across the walls did either of us speak.

  Sorrel kept her head bowed before the crackling wood, while the voices of the cave nudged each other and whispered at her back. In a dull voice, she told me that the woman I’d charmed the clootie for was dead – not from the bleeding, she added quickly. They’d found Eva on the moors, her body mauled by dogs. I remembered Ma’s tale of Dewerstone and the wisht hounds, but it was hounds of men that had killed her, Sorrel said. Hirelings hunting for bondsmen or women who had taken off without leave.

  ‘Maybe if I’d talked to her more. Maybe if . . . Why did she go wandering out on to the moors? She knew there were men searching for runaways.’

  I saw the grimace of pain on Sorrel’s face and leaned forward. ‘The seven sisters spin the thread of life, that’s what Ma says. Spin it and cut it. You and me, we don’t hold the blade. No mortal does.’

  Sorrel stared deep into my eyes. ‘But I have to know why. Why did Brigid bring me here? I’ve dragged myself all this way to sleep in a hovel that’s not fit for goats. I break my back for a mouthful of food and I’m so far in debt to the master of the tin works that I may as well be bound like Todde, for I can no more leave than he can, all because I thought I heard a voice calling to me. All because a flower fell into a stream. But I did hear her. I know I did. What does she want of me? I ran away before. I was afraid to let go, afraid I’d never be able to return. And I’m sorry, so sorry. But now, after Eva, I need more than ever to find the answer. You can tell, can’t you? . . . You can see?’ The words hovered in the air between us, commanding and pleading.