Cook is behind these lies about witches. She and my sister-in-law wish to put me in a ‘home’ and sell the fen. When I was a girl it stretched beyond the church, but that part was common land and sold after the War. I may be poor, but I will never allow my fen to be drained and turned into fields for pigs.
Naïvely, I had supposed that by allowing one interloper into Wake’s End I might be rid of the lot. I shan’t repeat that mistake. If you badger me again I shall burn the notebook. Lest you dismiss that as an idle threat, I enclose a page ripped out at random. That is all you will ever see. I will never tell you or anyone else my ‘story’. I must be left alone.
Maud Stearne
Letter from Dr Robin Hunter to Miss Maud Stearne,
16th November 1966
Dear Miss Stearne,
Please forgive me for troubling you again and I beg you not to harm the notebook – but I’ve just been inside St Guthlaf’s for the first time since it was renovated and what I found was so astonishing I had to write.
I’d heard of the medieval painting known as the Wakenhyrst Doom, discovered under remarkable circumstances in 1911 – but I’d never seen it until today. As you’ll know it’s a typical Last Judgement, in that Hell is far more convincing than Heaven. What makes it extraordinary is the link with your father’s paintings.
I know you don’t wish to hear about them but a detail in Painting No. 2 is crucial. Three of its creatures have become justly celebrated. Dubbed ‘The Three Familiars’, they are now known as ‘Earth’, ‘Air’ and ‘Water’. It is the hideous ‘Earth’ who sparked my epiphany in St Guthlaf’s.
I had stood before the Doom for hours and it was only as the vicar was turning off the lights that I noticed a scaly little devil in one corner. He is naked, squatting with legs indecently splayed, and though he has hooked a female sinner with his spear, he isn’t leering at her, but at us.
That was when I happened to glance at my working file, the cover of which bears a copy of ‘The Three Familiars’. ‘Earth’ met my gaze with his lecherous wink. I glanced back to the devil in the Doom. He too is winking, and his toad-like grin is very similar to that of Earth.
In fact it’s identical. That was when I knew. The creatures in your father’s paintings aren’t fairies or elves, and certainly not familiars. They are devils.
Forgive my incoherence, it’s 3 a.m. – but please don’t ignore this letter. I’m desperate to know what you think.
Yours very sincerely,
Robin Hunter Ph.D.
Eastern Daily Press, 20th November 1966
Storm Damages Historic Home
The storm that battered Suffolk yesterday night caused considerable damage in the parish of Wakenhyrst. Worst hit was historic Wake’s End, erstwhile home of famous artist Edmund Stearne. The roof is said to be close to collapse, and experts estimate the cost of repairs at many thousands of pounds.
Letter from Maud Stearne to Dr Robin Hunter,
24th November 1966
Dear Dr Hunter,
Come to Wake’s End the day after tomorrow at two o’clock and we will discuss the sale of my ‘story’.
Yours &c,
Maud Stearne
60 Years Earlier
‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’
VOLTAIRE
MAUD started awake with the cry ringing in her ears. She lay in the dark, listening to her brother turn over in the other bed and Nurse’s snores rumbling through the wall. She didn’t know if the cry had been real or in a dream.
There it was again. Her stomach clenched. It was coming from downstairs: from Maman. It meant the groaning had begun. Please please don’t let her die.
Every year Maman got the same illness and it often ended in a baby. Her middle swelled so that she couldn’t wear stays, and Dr Grayson made her take constant nips of brandy, which she loathed. Then came the terrible time the servants called the groaning, when Maman’s middle would burst and Maud would huddle in the nursery and stop her ears.
The best way for a groaning to end was with a bloody chamberpot, as that was soonest over. Second-best was a dead baby and worst was a live one, because Maman cried when it died – which it always did. Maman was careful never to cry in front of Father, as he didn’t like it.
Now that Maud was nearly nine, she knew it was her task to save her mother. She had to do something to keep the babies away. She’d tried praying but it didn’t work, probably because it was God who sent the babies.
Her gaze drifted to the windows giving on to the fen. The fen had power. Maybe it could help.
Father hated the fen. He forbade Richard and Maud to cross the foot-bridge and venture in, and all the windows overlooking it – which meant almost all of them – had to be kept shut always. Cook was under strict orders never to serve fish or fowl from the fen, especially eels. Father said eels were unclean as they fed on dead things.
Nurse didn’t like the fen either. ‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’ she’d say, thrusting her spongy face close. ‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.’ Strangely, though, Cole the gardener disagreed. He often went in to catch a tench for his dinner. He said if you watched what you was about, the fen couldn’t do you no harm.
Secretly, Maud sided with Cole. To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. In summer the scent of meadowsweet drifted across the Lode and the reeds rang with the eep-eep of frogs. In winter Maud could hear the ice cracking on the Mere and the skies were alive with vast skeins of geese. One afternoon they’d flown right over the garden, and the beat of their wings had lifted Maud as if she were flying. It was the grief of her life that she couldn’t open the windows and listen to the wings.
For her seventh birthday, Cole had brought her a present from the fen: a viper’s sloughed-off skin. Maud kept it behind the loose piece of wainscot under her bed. It was her most precious thing.
Now as she listened to her mother’s moans, she knew that the time had come to use it. If she climbed on the chair by the window, she could see the fen. She could pray to it on the viper skin to keep Maman safe.
Scrambling out of bed and keeping one eye on horrid Richard, she prised the wainscot loose and extracted her treasure. Her brother went on sleeping, so she crept to the chair, hitched up her nightgown and climbed on, ducking beneath the curtains and peering round the edge of the blind.
She stopped breathing. There was an owl on the windowsill.
At first all she saw was its wings folded over its back. Then it swivelled its head right round and she saw its moon-white face and deep black eyes.
Nurse said that a bird tapping on your window means death. But the owl wasn’t tapping the pane, it was staring at Maud.
Please keep Maman safe, she begged it silently. Please keep the babies away.
The owl turned and glided off into the night. The fen was flooded with blue moonlight. Along the Lode the willows stood motionless, the reeds as still as planted spears.
Nurse said owls bring bad luck, but Cole said that’s only if you shoot one. Maud knew that this owl was a messenger from the fen. It had perched on the windowsill opposite her bed, not Richard’s – and it had looked at her.
Did this mean that her prayer had been heard, and Maman was safe?
Maud wasn’t allowed to leave the nursery during a groaning, but she had to find out if Maman was all right.
The passage on the top floor wasn’t too frightening because apart from Richard and Maud, only the servants slept up here. The stairs down to the first floor were scarier. Maud avoided the creaky step and eased open the door at the bottom.
At the other end of the passage, the doors to her parents’ bedroom were open, and Father stood in the yellow lamplight, a column of crimson in his dressing-gown of Chinese brocade.
Fortunately his back was turned, and he was speaking to someone Maud couldn’t see; she guessed it was old Dr Gr
ayson. She couldn’t make out what Father was saying, but he sounded calm. Surely he wouldn’t be so composed if something were wrong? Seeing no servants, she assumed that Daisy and Valerie were with Maman in the dressing-room, where the groanings took place. Greatly daring, Maud crept along the passage.
It was indeed Dr Grayson talking to Father. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s an inherited flaw…’ he said in a low voice.
‘Inherited?’ Father said sharply. ‘There’s never been anything like that in our family.’
‘My dear fellow, I mean that of Mrs Stearne.’
‘Ah. But she can have other children?’
‘To be sure. Although perhaps… a spell of rest?’
Maud could tell by Father’s silence that he was displeased. So could the doctor, but just then he spotted Maud. ‘See there, we have an audience.’
Father turned his head and Maud nearly fainted. ‘What are you doing downstairs?’ he said brusquely. ‘Where’s your nurse?’
Now he was looming over her. His face was as severely beautiful as the alabaster knight in church, and the pupils of his eyes were black holes in icy pale blue.
When Maud still didn’t move, he put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a little push. ‘Off you go, you’ll catch cold.’ It was the first time he’d ever touched her, and although it didn’t hurt, she was awed by the strength in his fingers.
But not even Father could stop her from finding out about Maman, so instead of climbing back upstairs, she hid on the bottom step.
Presently she heard a rustle of skirts, and saw Daisy emerge from the dressing-room. The old housemaid was frowning and carrying a covered chamberpot.
Ducking out of sight, Maud heard Daisy rustle into the bathroom. Then came the gurgling roar of the water closet, and Maud caught a sweet, coppery smell, like on the day they killed the pig.
She sagged with relief. The fen had heard her prayer. Maman’s illness had ended in the best possible way: with a bloody chamberpot.
Next morning before breakfast, Father sent for Nurse. Nurse returned to the nursery with a face like thunder and gave Maud a thrashing with the stiff-bristled brush. Her eyes were red when she went down to the breakfast-room for morning prayers.
As Father began the reading, her thoughts drifted to the owl. If she stole a mouse from the traps in the pantry, maybe she could lure it back.
‘Thy will be done,’ intoned Father. To her relief, his gaze passed over her and settled on the servants’ bench. ‘Steers,’ he said to the butler. ‘Ada is improperly dressed.’
There was a gasp behind Maud, and Ada began to cry. With the distant curiosity of the saved for the doomed, Maud saw that a lock of the kitchen-maid’s hair had escaped her cap. It was a pity. Maud had liked Ada. But Ada knew the rules: no loose female hair at Wake’s End. That was why Nurse plaited Maud’s so tight that it hurt. Her plaits hung to her waist and horrid Richard liked to pull them. Maud wished she could chop them off but that was also against the rules.
The rules governed every moment of Maud’s day and there were two different kinds. One sort belonged to the lower orders: it was called superstition and Father detested it, which meant that the servants observed their rules behind his back. Thus Daisy left a dish of bread and milk for witches outside the boot-room door, and Cook avoided bad luck by hanging a hagstone from her bedpost. (Even Father did that, although his stone was merely a childhood memento.)
The other rules were Father’s – and much stronger, as he had God on his side. They included never running about in the garden and always being silent downstairs. The rule Maud hated most was the one against animals. Father tolerated Blossom and Bluebell as they were needed for the carriage, but dogs were banned from Wake’s End and Jessop had orders to drown any cat that strayed into the grounds.
What made these two sets of rules so dangerous was that you got punished if you mixed them up, but you couldn’t always tell what kind of rule it was. If you spilled salt, you had to toss a pinch over your left shoulder; but was that to blind the Devil, as Nurse said – or was it because Judas Iscariot spilled salt at the Last Supper?
Maud pictured the two sets of rules as a pair of gigantic thorny walls leaning over her. She knew exactly what St Matthew meant when he said: ‘Narrow is the way, and few there be that find it.’
LIKE the house at Wake’s End, St Guthlaf’s Church was part friend and part foe.
The outside was mostly foe. The tower had slitty eyes and there were monsters snarling from the gutters. Worst was the stone crow near the porch. It perched on the head of a howling man with its talons sunk in his eyeballs.
Inside, what Maud feared most were the devils. They were carved on the font, the columns, even the ceiling. Father said that in olden times they would also have been painted on the walls, but they’d been whitewashed by the Puritans. Maud thought the stone devils were quite bad enough.
The Sunday after the groaning, she felt horribly at risk without Maman. As she followed Father up the aisle, she nodded a particularly polite greeting to the bench-ends: the unicorn, the mermaid, the wodewose, the Seven Deadly Sins. She was counting on them to keep her safe.
Things improved when she reached the family pew. The kindly old chest against the wall had stumpy little legs in case of floods and was made of bog oak from the fen. Its carvings helped Maud stay awake during Mr Broadstairs’ sermon. She didn’t care for St George but she adored the dragon. She knew that the very next moment it was going to bite that spear in two and fly away.
She also loved the frogs carved along the bottom. Cole called frogs ‘fen nightingales’, but Cook said a frog in the house is a witch in disguise. Last week she’d found one in the scullery and flung it on the fire. Nurse said it had gone all blistered and twitched for ages.
Maud began to feel sick. She wished she’d been allowed to see Maman, but she never was after a groaning, not for weeks. Maman made church bearable. She protected Maud from the devils, while Maud helped her mother past the family vault and the effigy.
The vault was in the churchyard near the path. It had a granite monument on top and slimy stairs leading down to a cobwebby darkness beneath; Nurse said you could see the coffins through the grille. Maman always averted her eyes when she walked past.
Maud rather liked Sir Adam de Braunche, the alabaster knight who slept in the aisle with his alabaster skeleton on a plinth underneath. But for some reason the skeleton horrified Maman. Maud would take her hand and thrill with pride when her mother murmured, ‘How brave you are, ma petite Mode.’
At last the sermon was over and they stood up to sing. As the organ began, Maud swayed. Suddenly she knew why Maman was frightened of Sir Adam and the family vault. It was because she thought she was going to die.
Black spots swam before Maud’s eyes. She pictured the bloody chamberpot and the frog twitching in the flames.
Nurse pinched her arm.
Father turned his head and stared.
As Maud pitched forwards, the dragon lifted off the chest and flew towards her.
Nurse wanted to thrash her for making a fuss in church, but Father summoned her to his study to explain herself.
Maud had only been there three times before. It lay behind not one but two pairs of double doors, so that Father could work undisturbed. When you opened the first pair, you were trapped in a nasty shadowy gap where you had to wait, dreading what was to come.
As Maud waited in the gap, she tried to think up something to tell Father. She couldn’t say that she’d fainted because of Maman and the bloody chamberpot, then he would know that she’d disobeyed him on the night of the groaning.
At last his voice said, ‘Enter,’ and she opened the inner doors.
He was seated at his desk, writing. The scratch of his pen was loud in the silence. ‘Tell me,’ he said without raising his head. ‘Why do you think you are here?’
Maud swallowed. ‘Because I fainted in church.’
‘Because you interrupted the prayers of others and negl
ected your own.’
‘Yes, Father.’
She watched him clean his pen with the pen-wiper Maman had embroidered for him last Christmas, then align his notebook with his green Morocco blotter. The notebook was bound in scarlet and stamped in gilt with his initials. Maud longed to know what he’d written.
‘Why did you faint?’ he said quietly.
Her mind went blank. ‘Um. I was looking at a frog.’
He frowned. ‘You’re not telling the truth.’
‘I was looking at a frog, Father, it’s carved on the chest and it reminded me of…’ She broke off. If she told about the burned frog, that would get Cook in trouble and then she would pinch Maud under her lung protector, where it didn’t show. ‘It reminded me of a dead toad I saw in the garden,’ she lied.
‘You ought to have been praying.’
‘Yes, Father.’
He adjusted the notebook a fraction. ‘Do you enjoy looking at the carvings?’
Maud was startled. Father rarely spoke to her and he never asked what she enjoyed. ‘Yes, Father,’ she mumbled doubtfully.
‘And why do you imagine they are on that chest?’
‘Um – because frogs are God’s creatures and will go to Heaven?’
‘What on earth makes you say that?’
She took a breath. ‘Because Miss Broadstairs says animals can’t go to Heaven as they don’t have souls but I know for a fact that she’s wrong, I found proof.’
‘Indeed. And where did you find this proof?’
‘In the Bible. Where Isaiah says about creating new heavens and the wolf and the lamb feeding together and not hurting each other on the holy mountain.’
Father wasn’t frowning any more. Two lines had appeared on either side of his moustache. He was smiling. ‘But Isaiah only meant that figuratively. Do you know what that means?’
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