The SoulNecklace Stories

by R. L. Stedman

  “Can’t I stay here, sir?” Everything Will knew was contained in this small patch of land. Even though the village was no more, his heart remembered this as home.

  “What is here for you now, boy? There is no village remaining. I will be recalled to another school. And the Davies do not need an extra mouth to feed.” With an air of decision about him, the Master stood up. “Don’t look so downcast, lad. It is best to be with family at a time like this. Your aunt may not sound so sympathetic in her letter, but I am certain she will improve upon acquaintance.”

  * * *

  “Aye. I know the ferry crossing.” The Courier was a brown-haired Yorkshireman with few words. “I can take t’boy there. We leave tomorrow, lad. Take nowt but what you can carry on your back.”

  And so Will was slung aboard a placid chestnut mare named, improbably, Thunderbolt.

  “Because thunder’s t’only thing to make her faster than a trot, lad.”

  The Courier had the saddle, Thunderbolt being his mare, while Will bounced on her haunches, trying to keep his legs clear of the saddlebags. It was a fine spring morning and the sun was drying the dew off the hedgerows. As the mare climbed the hill, the low light touched wreaths of smoke and rising mist, tinting them gold. The Schoolmaster waved from his doorway.

  Will turned, gazing at the bonfire that had once been a village, until the mare reached the brow of the hill and trotted down the other side. Then all Will could see were the high moors and the sea in the distance. All he had ever known was gone.

  Chapter Four

  Beware the Governess

  Many years ago, when I was very small, I used to play racing games with my father, along the battlements of the outer keep where the parapets were wide enough for us to run together. Daddy would chase me and I would hide behind the stonework, but my hair or my dress, or my laughter, would give me away and he would find me and catch me.

  One morning, I was running, giggling madly because Daddy was following me. Then I turned – he wasn’t there, he’d stopped. At first, I thought it was because I was too fast for him and felt most proud of myself. Until I saw he wasn’t watching me at all. He was staring at the tower. I looked up, following his gaze. The tower was falling! I clutched at his hand, until I realized – it wasn’t the tower that was moving; it was the clouds, racing across the sky.

  “So much stone, holding something so small,” Daddy said. “Dana, something inside that tower is very important. It keeps the whole Kingdom safe.”

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  “Just a necklace.”

  “A necklace? That doesn’t keep you safe. It makes you look pretty.”

  “Ah, but this one is special.”

  I looked up at the tower again. There was a patch of darker shadow at its top. “Look, Daddy. There’s a window!”

  My father ruffled my hair. “You have good eyes, Dana. The tower is very tall.”

  “I bet you could see for miles from there.” Something passed across the high window. “Daddy, I thought I saw ...”

  “What, Dana?” Daddy was looking over the battlements, watching the oxen pulling the heavy plough, and I know that he was thinking of the harvest to come. Daddy was always thinking about crops and the harvest.

  “Daddy! Look!”

  He shaded his eyes, peering up at the tower. “What is it?”

  “I saw something.” I shaded my eyes with my hand so I’d look like him. “Look!” There, at the top of the tower, just below the arrow point of the roof tiles, was a scrap of white.

  “It can’t be. She hasn’t been seen for years.”

  I waved at the scrap of white. It raised a hand in reply. “Daddy, look! Look, Daddy, there’s someone there. Hello! Hello!”

  Then my father did something strange. Squatting down, he pulled me into his arms, bending over me as though trying to hide me from the person in the tower. “Dana, that’s nothing.” His voice sounded scared and sad. “It’s probably a crow. They nest up there.”

  I peeped around his shoulders. For the first time I realized that adults could make mistakes. It was definitely a person. She was waving at me.

  * * *

  When I was little, I thought the Castle was the center of the world. All my life I had lived behind its stone walls. The Castle was set as close to the middle of the island as possible; it was the heart of the Kingdom and from its ramparts we could see for miles. North, east and west, the horizon was open, bounded only by wild moorland and empty sea. But to the south were distant mountains. Purpled with haze or white with snow, at times they seemed so close I could almost touch them. Sometimes, when a storm blew up, they were hidden in cloud. I had always wanted to see what lay beyond those mountains.

  * * *

  The morning after my midnight run across the cobbles, it was the sun that roused me – and Nurse.

  “Well, slug-abed?” Nurse bustled in, followed by the chambermaid. “Don’t just stand there, girl. Make up the bed.” This was to the maid. “Princess, I’ve set your breakfast up in the schoolroom. You’ve got a new governess starting today. You need to look presentable.”

  I stretched and blinked. How had the sun gotten so high in the sky? Nurse never allowed me to sleep out my rest; she always hustled into my chamber and, if the noise of the door opening didn’t rouse me, she’d pull off the bedclothes.

  The day, so bright, suddenly seemed dimmer. I hated governesses. I go through them like boots, Mother said. And then she normally added something about needing to be more ladylike.

  “I should go see Daddy,” I said, firmly. Princess-like.

  But Nurse, who’d known me since I was a baby, was not easily cowed. “I’m sure he can manage without you, Princess.” She straightened up, her arms full of cloth. “You’ll get yourself dressed, like a Christian. And then you’ll break your fast, and then–”

  “I will talk to Daddy.”

  She snorted. “No such thing. I’ll do your hair for you.” She touched my head, her fingers gentle, but I still flinched. I didn’t like people being near my face. “Whist now. ’Tis like a bird’s nest.”

  She pulled me in front of a big floor mirror that Mother, in an attempt to make me feminine, had had set up in the corner of the room. “Look at that. Not a good impression for a governess.”

  “It’s a perfect impression,” I said sulkily. “Let her know what she’s in for.”

  In the reflection the chambermaid bit back a smile.

  Nurse had a point. My red hair (there’s no other word for it – it’s red, like blood, or rust) had escaped its braids and drifted in wisps across my face. I pushed it out of the way and tried not to look at my face, so freckled and pale.

  Behind me Nurse clucked. “Be sure you’re taller than me now, my dumpling. Soon you’ll be a grown woman.”

  She stood beside me in the mirror, a little stout creature with her head swathed in a cream scarf and her body wrapped in linen. As usual, she looked like a pile of walking clothes; wider than she was tall. But her eyes were kindly, and her hands were soft. I kissed her pink cheek.

  “Sorry for rousing you last night,” I said.

  She flushed. “Get along with you, now. Should you be sorry for a dream? ’Tis not your fault. Now, get you dressed, Lady, and then to breakfast.”

  In the mirror I saw the chambermaid cross herself. She was right to do so, for it was no ordinary dream. The story of my flight across the courtyard had obviously got around.

  * * *

  My bedchamber was in the topmost room of the east tower. There were three leadlight windows set into the walls with settles beneath them, just right for lying on and reading. Some of the lead around the panes was loose, so the glass rattled in a strong wind and blew the curtains like the breath of a monstrous animal.

  The chambermaids hated it; they thought my chamber was haunted. But I loved my room, for when I looked out the window I seemed suspended in empty air, with nothing below except the tops of the trees in the pleasure wood, moving in the wind
like a green sea. And further out, the honey walls of the outer keep, and beyond them a smudge of shadow of the moat and then the darker green of the wild forest to the horizon, where the gray-blue of the sea met the lighter blue of the sky.

  I stared at the distant ocean and tried to keep my head still, so that Nurse wouldn’t pull my hair more than usual. Behind me the chambermaid muttered and clanged at the fireplace, and threw clouds of ash and smoke up into the air.

  “Don’t get that mess on the sheets, girl.” Nurse dropped the brush, leaping to pull the sheets out of the way.

  “’Tis them pesky crows, Mistress. Been nesting in the chimney again.”

  Hopefully, the girl wouldn’t get soot on my bed. Made from carved oak aged glossy black, its four posts and overmantel were crowded with intricate images of animals and creatures of faery: half-formed squinting figures that seemed at times part man, part tree or rock or stone. Some, toothed, clawed, were dressed only in scaled wings. Sometimes I lay awake, exploring the carvings with my fingertips. On good days, I discovered new carvings. Today, though, was not a good day. Today, there was a new governess.

  The governesses were interchangeable. They came and went with alarming regularity and I never bothered to learn their names. I’m sure they disliked me as much as I detested them, for I was a very bad pupil. As usual, the last one had left in a fit of temper and an outburst of tears. Governesses were never very robust. They seemed unable to cope with even small amounts of torture. That I had been responsible for stealing her sheets and feeding them to the Castle pigs really wasn’t that serious a crime. It was only sheets, and only pigs. Not really worth crying over.

  Why did I hate them so? Because they limited my world; they told me how to stand, speak, move. And where I could go. It probably wasn’t really the governesses’ fault, for they were only repeating the directions of my parents, and the expectations of the Court. But that didn’t stop me blaming them.

  “Where can she be?” Nurse fretted and pulled at my hair.

  I couldn’t see how it mattered if a governess failed to arrive. No, best not say that, she’d only tug extra hard and give her ‘importance of education’ lecture. “Not even at the Castle yet. What sort of a governess is this, if she can’t even arrive on time?”

  “Maybe she’s been waylaid by robbers,” I said, optimistically.

  Nurse paused in her brushing, staring at me in the mirror. “There’s no robbers in the Kingdom.”

  It didn’t stop me hoping.

  “Maybe she’s coming with the collier,” said the chambermaid, banging the steel pan on the fire stones. “He’s due today.”

  Nurse sniffed. “A governess won’t ride in a coal cart.” But for a blessed moment she paused her grooming, and set the brush down.

  “Can you do a braid, please?” I hated it when she left my hair out, all flowing and ornamental. It got in my eyes and in my mouth and made me feel like an uncombed horse. Probably thinking of a governess astride coal sacks, she only nodded and began quickly plaiting my hair, pulling it hard against my temples, so it wouldn’t come undone in the wind.

  “I’d best go on down,” she said. “Hurry, girl. Can’t have an untidy chamber on the governess’s first day.”

  “She won’t be here long,” I said sulkily. “They never last.”

  Nurse sniffed again, and tied the end of the braid.

  As usual, breakfast was set out in the schoolroom, a stone-walled room in the lower part of my tower. It would have been gloomy had it not been for the high windows set in the eastern wall that let in the morning sun. I couldn’t see out the panes unless I stood on a chair, an unthinkable action to a governess, so eating alone in this room usually reminded me of a condemned man eating his last meal. But this morning blades of sunlight, turning into beams in the dusty air, lit up the room and gave the place a vaguely spiritual feeling, as though all the angels in heaven were looking down and blessing me. Maybe they would work a miracle, and save me from this governess.

  I poured cream onto my porridge and chewed slowly, trying to avoid the lumps. Some days I felt like the lines of the song:

  In a cage of bone

  Sat a bird made of stone

  And a magic that cried to be free.

  Of course, in the song, a young girl had rescued the bird, whispering songs into its ear until its stone heart began to beat and the bone cage crumbled.

  Not that I didn’t love my Castle, with its strange twisting staircases and its chambers that echoed with unsaid secrets; it was just that there must be more to the world than this great fortress on the hill.

  I wanted to get away; I wanted to explore.

  * * *

  The Castle’s proper name is ‘The Castle of the Fallen’, which I used to find confusing.

  “Fallen what?” I had asked Daddy.

  He smiled. “Before the plumbing was put in by your great-grand-father, there used to be a fountain, and it fell down the ramparts, into the moat. So it might have been ‘The Castle of the Falling Water’. Some books call it the Castle of the Fell, or Castle of the Fall. Others say it could be Castle of the Fae.”

  “The fae don’t exist.”

  “Well, what do you think it should be?” he asked.

  I shrugged. It could be Fallen Angel, Fallen Star, or Fallen Tree. I tried each out in my mind, and liked them all. It didn’t really matter, though, what the proper name was. We just called it ‘The Castle’. After all, there was only one in the Kingdom, so everyone knew what you were talking about.

  Two thousand years ago, the Castle was a wooden-walled fort on a hill, built for protection against the wanderers of the time. Gradually, wood being flammable, the Castle proper was built. First the inner keep and tower, then the outer and finally the ramparts and the moat. The inner walls are gray and drab, but the outer walls are honey-colored stone that changes shade with the sun. It must be a fine sight to stand on the road below the mount and see the rising sun turning the stone pink. Not that I would be able to see it. I wasn’t allowed to leave.

  * * *

  I chewed resentfully. If I had been born a boy, I could wear hose and ride horses and carry a sword. And I would be allowed, even encouraged, to have adventures. Owein and Alden, my brothers, rode patrols around the coastline and fought pirates and met with aldermasters and theigns and parish priests. But because I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed beyond the Castle walls.

  The governesses had had many reasons to keep me here.

  “Ladies never walk alone.” That was the tall one with the pointy nose.

  I finally persuaded her to let me go into the pleasure wood. “It’s inside the outer walls,” I said. “Technically, I won’t be leaving the Castle.”

  So we went for staid, well behaved, boring walks between the oaks, and I listened to the wind whispering in their leaves, telling me of lands far away. Some of the boughs were set low to the ground, like stairs leading to the sky.

  “What are you doing?” said the governess. “Ladies do not climb trees.”

  It was the emphasis on ‘lady’ that annoyed me. “I am not a lady,” I said. “I am a princess.”

  That governess left after I nailed a dead fish to the underside of her bed. She couldn’t work with such an evil creature, she said, and I tried to look repentant.

  I tried the ‘princess’ line on her successor.

  “Of course you are a princess,” she gushed. “And that means that you are special.” She was fat and had bad knees and refused to walk anywhere.

  I complained to my mother. Mother, born and bred outside the Kingdom and so forever a foreigner, must understand that I, too, might wish to discover something new.

  “Why do you want to leave the Castle?”

  I shrugged. “I want to see the forest.”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to see it. Don’t you ever want to go somewhere new?”

  “No,” said Mother shortly. “I’ve been in forests. More times than I care to remember, thank you. They�
��re dark and damp and very uncomfortable. And there are plenty of animals there who would like to eat a well-fed girl like you.”

  Although Mother never helped me in my battle against the governesses, she did allow me to learn horse riding and tennis. So I practiced riding in the arena and played in the royal pleasure grounds.

  I considered trying to escape but I knew the guards wouldn’t let me, and any resulting scene would be not only pointless but embarrassing.

  * * *

  I picked a piece of grit from my teeth. The week following the Festival was a holiday for the cooks. As everyone gorged at Festival, and so had no appetite for at least a week, this didn’t matter too much except at breakfast, when it would have been nice to not have pieces of grit in one’s porridge.

  Nurse’s voice drifted down the stairwell, blending with the clanging of brushes and mops as the maids scoured my room of soot and dust and cobwebs. A pity they didn’t come in here, to this dusty, dreary schoolroom. But Nurse had decided that the schoolroom lay outside her boundaries. “It’s not my place, Lady, to manage the governess’s rooms,” she said primly.

  Daddy, too, had been wakened by a dream last night. A dream about me. Apparently I needed more time in the sun. I wasn’t getting much sun in this grim room.

  Outside, the weather was fair and this morning I was free from books and chalkboards and teaching. I should listen to my father’s dream and enjoy the sun while I had the chance. So what was I doing, sitting here like a prisoner too scared to seize his liberty?

  And if I wanted to get away from a governess, I would have to rescue myself. Only the brave deserve freedom went the saying, so today I would have to be brave.