Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  Two days after that, Father came back.

  FATHER returned in mid-October, and by December Maman was pregnant again.

  It was a bitter winter with black frosts and Arctic winds. Maud was barely allowed out. She missed Chatterpie savagely, but though she put food on her windowsill, he never appeared. Sometimes she glimpsed Jubal skating along the Lode, and at night she heard distant, mysterious cracking noises. It was the ice on the Mere. It belonged to another world.

  Once again, the library was forbidden. ‘No you can’t borrow my books,’ scoffed Richard, pompous after his first term at boarding school. ‘You wouldn’t understand them, you’re only a girl.’

  Felix was born in July, five weeks after Maud’s eleventh birthday. When he didn’t die in the first few days, she became uneasy. He was bound to die sooner or later and the longer he left it the worse it would be for Maman. But Felix clung on. In fact, he thrived.

  As the weeks went by it dawned on Maud that he was going to live. She tried to be glad for Maman but she wasn’t. She was angry. Now she had two younger brothers who would look down on her always.

  It was a wet summer, and Maud’s worries about Maman, forgotten when she was free, came surging back. In September when her mother resumed poor-visiting, Maud went with her to keep her safe.

  Wakenhyrst was three miles away across the Common. As well as the Rectory it had a stonemason, a wheelwright, a blacksmith and a shop in the back room of the Eel Grigg. The post-office was four miles off at Carrbridge, where the village children trudged to school when they weren’t in the fields picking stones. According to the servants, Lord Clevedon never did anything for his tenants, who had to make do with outside earth-closets and water from the pond. As Maud perched on a stool in a tiny cottage parlour, she struggled to ignore the stink of the pigsty and the chamberpot under the cot.

  Maman sat beside an old carter who was dying. She was praying, but everyone else just wanted him to die. Mr Broadstairs had rattled through his prayers and left, and the carter’s sons were out in the fields cutting corn. His sour-faced daughter stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. Next week was harvest horkey and she had brewing to do.

  ‘Not long now,’ said Biddy Thrussel.

  ‘Not before time,’ muttered the daughter.

  The dying man was sucking in horrible rattling breaths. Maman took his hand in hers. Maud nearly vomited.

  ‘Best be drawing the pillow,’ said Biddy. Heaving herself to her feet, she pulled the stained pad from under the old man’s head. Maud thought how awful it must be to feel your pillow yanked from under you, and to know that you’d been given up for dead.

  But it worked. The dreadful rattling ceased.

  A bee bumped against the wall. Maman crossed herself and pressed the dead man’s hand to her breast.

  Biddy was rolling up her sleeves. ‘You can send to pass the bell now, Sal. I’ll make a start.’

  Briskly, the daughter turned the mirror to the wall while Biddy put a saucer of salt on the old man’s chest, to stop him walking.

  Maud was disappointed. The face of the corpse was the colour of candlewax and bore no trace of the heavenly peace that Miss Broadstairs had described.

  Maman was still clutching the dead hand. Maud tugged her sleeve. ‘Maman, don’t!’

  That was the last time Maud went poor-visiting. Shortly afterwards, Ivy arrived, and Maud learned the truth about the dead hand – and babies.

  Village girls went into service at eleven, but Ivy was thirteen when she started as scullery maid at Wake’s End. The eldest of ten, she’d been needed at home until pond pox had lessened her mother’s load by taking off three.

  From the beginning, Maud was wary because Ivy was pretty. She looked like a gypsy, although if you’d said that to her face she’d have scratched your eyes out. She was dark and thin, with a snap and a sparkle that even then caught men’s attention. ‘An early-ripe,’ sniggered Jessop.

  What you noticed first was her mouth. It was small but extremely full, the upper lip peaking to a swollen cushion of strawberry flesh. Some years later, Maud learned that this put Father in mind of how a groom tames a horse by twisting its lip in a rope.

  Daisy said the cottage where Ivy grew up was the poorest in Wakenhyrst. ‘Lousy as a cuckoo she were,’ said the housemaid disapprovingly. ‘We had to dunk her in kerosene afore we’d let her in the door.’ Maud later learned that until Ivy came to Wake’s End, she’d never seen water from a tap, or had milk in her tea. It was also said that during her mother’s frequent confinements, she’d been expected to ‘take on’ her father. Had Maud known all this earlier, things might have been different between them.

  Ivy was sly, with a knack for sniffing out weakness. The first time she met Maud, she sized her up at a glance.

  It was in the back yard, and Ivy was scrubbing the doorstep. Somehow, she’d learned that Maud liked starlings. ‘My dad hates starlings,’ she said boldly.

  ‘Indeed,’ Maud replied with glacial disdain.

  ‘He’m a thacker, an starlings break the reeds so they’m no use. He nets en by the score for starling pudden.’ She shot Maud another glance. ‘Ma twists off their heads. Says it takes off the bitterness.’

  ‘You made that up,’ Maud said shakily.

  Ivy grinned. But later, Cole told Maud that it was true.

  It never bothered Ivy that she was only a skivvy while Maud was the Master’s daughter, and Maud accepted her dominance without question because Ivy was two years older, and pretty. She didn’t like Ivy, but she wanted Ivy to like her.

  In November Felix went down with croup. When Dr Grayson pronounced him out of danger, Richard was furious: until Felix was born, he’d been the precious only son. Maud was relieved. She’d become used to the idea of Felix remaining alive and if he were to die now it would be the most dreadful shock for Maman.

  ‘You’re nivver a mother till you’ve lost one,’ said Ivy, coming on Maud in the larder, stealing bacon rinds for Chatterpie.

  ‘Then Maman is indeed a proper mother,’ Maud said loftily, ‘for she has lost seven.’

  Ivy snatched a bacon rind and crammed it in her mouth. ‘Master’s been busy, then, an’t he?’

  Maud was puzzled. ‘I – suppose so,’ she said uncertainly.

  Ivy pounced. ‘You dun’t know what I’m on about.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘Go on then, tell.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘You dun’t know!’ crowed Ivy.

  The following Sunday, Ivy showed Maud what she meant.

  Nurse was in the kitchen chatting to Cook when Ivy grabbed Maud’s hand and dragged her outside. She pointed through a gap in the hedge at two dogs playing in the mud. At least that’s what Maud thought they were doing.

  ‘Thass how you get babbies,’ sniggered Ivy. ‘The man sticks his thing up you and squirts slime. They all does it. Even the quality.’

  The dog on top had glazed eyes and a lolling red tongue. It was jerkily pumping its hindquarters. The dog underneath was baring its teeth but making no attempt to escape. Eventually the big dog jumped off. Maud glimpsed a sharp red sausage between its hind legs with a cloudy droplet at its tip. She felt prickly and hot.

  People did that? Father did that to Maman?

  For weeks afterwards when Maud was in the presence of a man, an image would flash into her head of the sausage between his legs. Her cheeks would burn with shame and she would try to reassure herself that nobody could possibly know what she was thinking. But she was certain that it showed.

  There must be something dreadfully wrong with her, or this wouldn’t be happening. And the worst of it was that it did simply happen. It didn’t matter who it was: Dr Grayson, Mr Broadstairs, Cole, Steers, Jubal, even Father. She pictured that moist red sausage in its secret nest of cloth.

  Towards Christmas the images grew less frequent. By the time the bells of St Guthlaf’s rang in 1909, they’d ceased. But by then the damage was done. Maud was observing her pare
nts with new eyes.

  When she knew she wasn’t being watched, she would stare at her father without comprehension. He looked so handsome and well groomed – and yet he did that to Maman.

  And he did it a lot. Maud remembered what Dr Grayson had said to him when she was hiding under the side-table. ‘Perhaps not every night, eh?’

  ‘I wish you weren’t always ill,’ Maud said to Maman.

  ‘So do I, ma chérie,’ said Maman, stroking Maud’s hair. It was a sleety afternoon in January, and with Father in London and Richard at school, they were having tea in the drawing-room.

  Maud sat on the rug beside Maman’s chair, grinding a speck of soot under her thumb. ‘Couldn’t you – ask Father not to?’ she mumbled.

  Maman’s hand stilled. ‘Not to what?’

  She squirmed. ‘… so you don’t have babies.’

  ‘What?’ Maman sat up. ‘Maud, look at me. Who’s been talking to you?’

  ‘No one. It’s just – you’re always so fearfully ill and I hate it!’

  Maman gave her a penetrating stare, then turned away. ‘The Bible says: “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.” It’s not for us to question these things.’

  That evening, Maud heard Daisy and Valerie discussing an old country cure which they called the Dead Hand. Valerie said it turned her stomach. Daisy said yes but it was a proper good way of blighting a woman’s parts.

  Suddenly Maud remembered Maman clasping the dead carter’s hand. She hadn’t been holding it to her breast, but to her belly. She’d been trying to blight her parts, so that she wouldn’t have babies.

  A fortnight later, Maud found out that the Dead Hand hadn’t worked. Maman was pregnant again.

  ‘Master’s been busy,’ said Ivy with a grin.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Maud said coldly.

  With Ivy’s laughter ringing in her ears, she rushed upstairs and flung herself on her bed. Now Maman would have to endure months of sickness and the agony of the groaning – and for what? For a bloody chamberpot or a bawling scrap of flesh that would probably die anyway.

  Father could have spared her all that – but he’d chosen not to. Not every night, eh?

  Maud’s days of obedience were over. With Nurse she was sulky and recalcitrant. With Miss Broadstairs she was the nightmare child who wouldn’t learn her catechism. She was even unpleasant to Maman, for she blamed her too. Why hadn’t she made Father stop?

  One Sunday in Bible Class, Maud answered back to Miss Broadstairs. The rector’s daughter burst into tears and complained to Father, who summoned Maud to his study.

  As before, he kept her waiting in the gap between the doors; and as before, he was writing. But this time, Maud wasn’t scared.

  ‘Miss Broadstairs tells me you were uncivil. Do you deny that?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  He rose to his feet. ‘Then you know what to do.’

  Determined to show no emotion, she turned her back to him and rolled down her garters and stockings. Raising her skirts above her calves, she took her bottom lip between her teeth. Father administered ten stinging blows with the strap. She didn’t utter a sound.

  By the time she’d adjusted her clothing, he had resumed writing. It wasn’t his notebook. She hadn’t seen that for years.

  ‘You may go,’ he said without raising his head.

  There was a soughing in her ears. She pictured Maman’s exhausted face and swollen belly. She saw the dogs pumping and shuddering in the mud. She remembered what Father had written in his notebook about preventing conception: ‘I find such measures revolting, unnatural, and wrong.’

  She wanted to dash the inkpot in his face.

  That night, a patch of skin between her thumb and forefinger began to itch. The more she scratched the worse it itched. By morning it was oozing and swollen. It was the start of the eczema that would plague her all her life.

  Two days later she was going downstairs when she noticed that the door of her parents’ bedroom was ajar. Inside, she saw Father’s childhood memento hanging from the bedpost. It was a flint with a hole in it: what villagers called a hagstone.

  Maud took it.

  MAUD was still standing by the bedpost clutching the hagstone when she heard Father coming upstairs. She froze like a trapped hare. He never came upstairs in the afternoon. He worked in his study, always.

  Already he’d reached the landing. She darted behind the chaise longue.

  She heard him pause in the doorway. She heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. ‘What? What?’ he muttered. Floorboards creaked as he strode to the bed.

  Maud’s world tilted. Father was kneeling on the bed like a housemaid, groping behind the headboard. Now he was flinging pillows aside. Father, who detested unseemliness, was tearing off blankets and throwing them on the floor. He was lifting the mattress and peering underneath.

  Maud was horrified. She had hoped to disconcert him – but this turned everything upside-down.

  From behind the chaise longue, she heard him stride to the bell-pull. ‘Daisy!’ he roared. It was the first time Maud had ever heard him raise his voice.

  Holding her breath, she listened to him interrogate poor Daisy. He sent her off with orders to search the house till the stone was found and Maud thought he’d gone too, but when she risked another look he was still there.

  She was shocked. Father had fine dry skin, and even on the hottest days he never perspired. Now his face was shiny with sweat. His hair was disarranged and when he touched his lips, his fingers shook.

  It flashed across her mind that if losing his hagstone could upset him so much, he must believe in its power. Father, who loathed superstition: who forbade Maman to tap a hole in her eggshell at breakfast. Father had lied. He had said that the hagstone was merely a memento, but he was no better than a cottager. He truly believed that it kept him from harm.

  The servants must have been too terrified to come near him because no one came upstairs and Maud heard him search the dressing-room himself. Should she flee, or stay where she was? He settled it for her by running downstairs.

  When she was certain he was gone, she crept out from her hiding place. She had to replace the stone on the bedpost and get out.

  But even though she knew this was the one thing that could save her, she didn’t do it. Instead, with a feeling that this wasn’t really happening, she slipped the stone in her pocket and left the room.

  She couldn’t have said why she did it. She only knew that some part of her was enjoying this. She had wanted to punish Father for making Maman ill, and at last she’d found a way.

  Now she wanted to see what happened next.

  What happened next was that Father questioned the servants one by one in his study. He started with Steers and worked down the hierarchy, ending with Ivy – on whom, as the newest member of staff, he placed the blame.

  Maud had not anticipated this, but she knew at once what she had to do. She couldn’t let Ivy take the blame. She had to confess.

  When she tried to imagine how Father would punish her, her mind went white. And yet the idea of sacrificing herself for Ivy had enormous appeal. She pictured Ivy humbled by her courage and for ever in her debt.

  By now events had spiralled so far beyond the everyday that Maud scarcely knew what she was doing. As if in a dream she walked downstairs, opened the two pairs of study doors, and marched in.

  ‘I took it,’ she said, placing the hagstone on Father’s desk. Then her courage evaporated and she nearly blacked out.

  His light-blue eyes were empty and cold. ‘Why,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look at me.’

  Not since she fainted in church had she met his stare. Then he’d viewed her as a child. Now he seemed to see her as an adult. Perhaps as an adversary. Dimly, Maud sensed that she had released forces which she didn’t understand.

  Father didn’t thrash her after all. He didn’t say another word to her. He rang for Nurse and gave orders that Maud
was to be locked in the night nursery and left to consider the consequences of what she’d done.

  It wasn’t long before she found out what those consequences were. The following morning, Maman went into labour.

  Afterwards, Daisy told Maud that Maman was in labour all that day and the following night. But Maud could only ever remember disjointed images: being locked in the night nursery and hearing Maman’s cries and the sounds of running feet.

  She remembered hammering at her door and shouting to be let out. She couldn’t break down the door but in the end she managed to force the one that opened into the day nursery.

  The day nursery was empty; she learned later that Nurse had taken Felix to the Rectory, but at the time all Maud knew was that she was alone on the top floor. When she raced down to the first floor, she found that the door at the bottom was locked. She hammered but no one came. She rushed back upstairs.

  The servants’ rooms were deserted. Nurse’s room was directly above her parents’ bedroom, so Maud flung up the sash and leaned out of the window. It was dark, and below she saw a yellow glow of lamplight. The blinds were up and the window was open, flouting Father’s rules. Maud found that shocking.

  She knew that Maman would be in the dressing-room, but she could hear no cries from below. From the open window beneath, she saw little twists of smoke and the red sparks of cigars. There were gentlemen down there, smoking at the bedroom windows. Maud saw a white cuff and a mottled old hand tapping ash on the sill. She recognised the voices of Dr Grayson, Mr Broadstairs and Father.

  Afterwards, she knew that she must have stood there listening, but in her memory everything was out of order. The next thing she knew she was waking hours later, curled on the rug at the foot of her bed. It was a hot June dawn and very windy. The wind was keening in the chimney. The green light filtering through the ivy was trembling.