Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  Maud padded barefoot past the servants’ rooms and down the stairs. This time the door to the first-floor landing was ajar. No one had raised the blinds at either end of the passage. It was bathed in a strange fiery glow.

  Her parents’ bedroom doors were also ajar. The bedroom was empty, the great bed neatly made up. The sashes were down and the air was thick with a coppery, sickly-sweet smell. Maud went through to the dressing-room.

  Biddy Thrussel was bending over Maman, who lay on the divan in a vast scarlet stain that spread on either side of her like monstrous wings. Maud knew at once that she was dead.

  The voices she’d heard the night before came back to her.

  ‘… an unenviable choice, my dear fellow,’ Mr Broadstairs said quietly.

  ‘And I fear that you must make it forthwith,’ said Dr Grayson. ‘There is a chance that Mrs Stearne’s life could be saved. But then the child would surely die.’

  ‘And if you save the child?’ said Father.

  ‘Then I fear, no hope for Mrs Stearne. And who knows but the child might not survive for long after being baptised—’

  ‘But long enough for that,’ cut in Father.

  ‘Oh yes, I’d imagine so.’

  This time it was Father who tapped ash on the windowsill. Maud saw his signet ring. ‘Is it a son?’ he said abruptly.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Dr Grayson. ‘We shan’t know that till it’s born.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid I must press you. What is it to be?’

  More smoke hazed the air.

  ‘Save the child,’ said Father.

  MAUD remembered lying by the Mere, watching a beetle crawl up a reed. She was cold; her nightgown was soaked in dew. She deserved it. She had stolen Father’s hagstone and now Maman was dead.

  Later she saw a dragonfly like the pendant Maman had bought her in Brussels. Then Nellie was licking her toes and Jubal was lifting her and carrying her back to Wake’s End.

  Maman died on the 9th of June. The baby, baptised Rose, died the following night. The next day Miss Broadstairs moved into Wake’s End to run the household and order the mourning attire. The brooch she wore at her throat held a tiny plait of her dead sister’s hair. This gave Maud an idea. Before the coffin was closed, she crept in and stole a lock of her mother’s hair.

  What lay in the coffin didn’t look like Maman. It didn’t smell like her and it felt cold and hard. It wasn’t Maman. It couldn’t be. The kiss Maud planted on its cheek felt oddly insincere.

  All Wakenhyrst attended the funeral, and tradespeople came from Ely and Bury. Great-Uncle Bertrand was in America and couldn’t be reached in time and Lord and Lady Clevedon were in Italy; they sent their carriage as a mark of respect.

  Being a girl, Maud wasn’t allowed to go, but she watched from the round window at the end of the first-floor passage. When they carried the coffin into the family vault, she knew that she oughtn’t to have let Maman go down there on her own. But she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything.

  Father never mentioned Maman again. Every Sunday he put flowers for her on the family monument, and several times Maud saw him writing in his notebook. She wondered if he was doing so out of grief, or because he felt bad about having chosen Baby Rose instead of Maman.

  Why had he done that? How could baptising a baby who’d lived less than a day matter more than Maman?

  ‘I know it’s hard, my dear,’ said Miss Broadstairs in a hushed voice. ‘But we are all born in sin, even poor little Baby Rose. So she had to be baptised, or she couldn’t go to Heaven. You do understand?’

  Maud nodded without comprehension. She began to feel vaguely sorry for Father, who’d been faced with such a terrible choice.

  That was all she could manage: a cloudy grey sorrow. Everything was grey, as if she was living in fog.

  Months passed and the fog didn’t lift. Nurse was busy with Felix, and although Miss Broadstairs returned to the Rectory, she often came and set exercises for Maud.

  Maud spent hours alone in the library at the writing table that became her desk. Before Maman’s death, she would have thought this was Heaven; but it was part of her self-imposed punishment that she mustn’t open a single book.

  She worked obediently at her exercises, and ate her meals with Felix in the day nursery. She took sedate little walks around the carriage-drive and down the elm avenue. But she never watched the geese, or gazed out of her window at night. And she never crossed the foot-bridge into the fen.

  Her thirteenth birthday came and went; then the anniversary of Maman’s death; then Harvest Festival and Christmas. As Father didn’t wish to engage a housekeeper, Maud and the servants managed on their own. The accounts were easy enough, as Maman had always needed Maud’s help to balance them. For ordering Father’s meals, Maud used the menus which she’d found in her mother’s desk. They were written on ivory notepaper in Maman’s graceful foreign-looking hand, and they smelled of violets. Maud copied them into an exercise book for use with Cook, and hid the originals in her handkerchief drawer.

  She wondered why the servants could cry so readily, while she couldn’t cry at all.

  On Twelfth Night, she woke with a stomach ache. She felt sticky between her legs. Lighting her candle and throwing back the bedclothes, she saw a red stain on the sheet. She screamed.

  Nurse burst in and slapped her till she stopped. Nurse said the blood was Maud’s ‘courses’. They would happen every month and while Maud had them she must stay out of the kitchen or she’d spoil the meat and turn the wine sour. Also she mustn’t ever wash while she had her courses or she would surely die.

  Miss Broadstairs had other names for them: the spinster’s curse and the married woman’s friend. She gave Maud a pad filled with sawdust and a canvas harness to hold it in place.

  ‘But why does it happen?’ said Maud.

  Miss Broadstairs’ horsey face turned red. ‘It isn’t nice to talk about, dear. I believe it’s simply that girls grow faster than boys, so they need to get rid of the, er, excess.’

  Maud hated what was happening to her. She hated her new breasts and the hair between her legs. She wondered if the latter was normal and felt too ashamed to ask.

  Mercifully, Father noticed nothing; but he wrote and engaged a governess, a Miss Lark, to start after Easter – Miss Broadstairs having timidly reminded him that Maud would soon be fourteen.

  Fourteen? How had that happened? In the grey fog, every day was the same.

  Until, that is, the second coming of Chatterpie.

  It was a blustery March morning at the start of Lent, and Maud was working at her desk. Today’s exercise was harder than usual, a précis from a book on medieval history. She wanted to get it right, as it concerned Father’s own period, the fifteenth century.

  The fire in the grate hissed, and outside the rain had stopped. Maud glanced up – and there was Chatterpie bobbing his tail to keep his balance as he swung back and forth on the well-bucket.

  Maud hadn’t forgotten him, but he belonged to the time before. As she watched him hop down on to the wall and clean his beak on the moss with confident swipes, she wondered if he remembered the day four years before when he’d nearly drowned.

  But was it even him?

  As if he knew what she was thinking, he made a graceful swooping glide on to the lawn and landed right in front of where she sat. At that moment the clouds parted and sunlight transformed him into a bird in a stained-glass window, ablaze with sapphire, emerald and amethyst. Maud saw the grey scar on his leg. His black eye met hers. Oh yes it’s me all right.

  Did he remember that she had saved him? Or did he only recall the horror of the well – and perhaps even blame her?

  With his familiar squeaky cry, Chatterpie flew off across the orchard – and as Maud watched him go, something inside her changed. The grey fog lifted. She could feel again.

  And she wanted Chatterpie back.

  To the right of the French windows, a clump of laurels hid the stables from view. In a f
ork of the nearest shrub, Maud tucked a rind of cheese.

  Within ten minutes it was gone. She hadn’t seen Chatterpie take it, but she knew it was him, she saw the flicker of his wings as he fled to an apple tree.

  It might take weeks to gain his trust, but she relished the task. Her aim was not to tame him. She just wanted to bring his wildness closer.

  She left more food, always in the same fork of the same laurel and always at the same time: after breakfast, and again after tea. Chatterpie was cunning and fast and he hated being watched. When Maud was at her desk, he wouldn’t come at all unless she kept her head down. She was never able to glimpse him from the corner of her eye, and no matter how stealthily she turned, he’d always gone. It was the same if she hid behind the curtains, or opened the French windows and listened. He would outwit her with scornful ease, and all she would see was the dip and sway of branches springing back into place.

  She made Daisy buy her a looking-glass in the village, which she propped on her desk at an angle, so that she could keep watch without Chatterpie knowing. It was a momentous day when she saw his reflection cast about shiftily, before making off with the cheese.

  He came and went so swiftly that Maud had to watch the mirror all the time, or she would miss him. Her favourite moment of each visitation was when he first flew in, because he would stretch his neck and peer at her, to make sure that she wasn’t looking.

  She felt as if she had entered a secret world. She greeted him silently on her way to church, and in her room she listened for the thud of his feet on the roof and his harsh cry echoing down the chimney. When she broke her prohibition against books, she was delighted to read that magpies build their nests with roofs, to keep out the rain.

  One morning halfway through Lent, Maud entered the library and saw to her horror that Chatterpie’s laurel had been butchered. The magpie was in the orchard, clattering with alarm, and the under-gardener was dumping the severed branches in his wheelbarrow.

  Maud flung open the French windows. ‘What have you done!’ she shouted. ‘How dare you!’

  The boy dropped an armful of branches and snatched off his cap. ‘S-sorry, Miss. Mister Cole said to tidy up.’

  ‘You should have asked!’

  ‘I dun’t mean to frit your chatterpie, honest I dun’t!’

  ‘Well you did, didn’t you?’ To her horror, she was close to tears. ‘Be off with you! And don’t you dare cut another twig!’

  The next afternoon she was startled to see that a stake had been planted in what remained of the laurel, with a cross-bar nailed to the top. It wasn’t exactly a bird-table, but since it was less obtrusive, it might entice the supremely wary Chatterpie.

  Maud found the under-gardener in the kitchen garden, hoeing potatoes behind the glass-house. ‘Did you put that stake in the shrubbery?’ she said sharply.

  A strawberry stain rose up his neck as he stared at his boots. ‘Yes, Miss,’ he mumbled. ‘Did I do wrong, Miss?’

  ‘How do you know it’ll work?’

  ‘My mam liked birds, Miss. It’ll bring your chatterpie, you’ll see.’

  She looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?’

  ‘Clem Walker, Miss.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  The blush spread to his cheeks. ‘I dunno, Miss. You was upset. I felt bad.’

  Maud blinked.

  He looked to be a few years older than her. Sturdy and raw-boned, he wore a gardener’s green baize apron over the labourer’s uniform of corduroy breeches, waistcoat and jacket. A blue and white spotted kerchief was tied around his brown neck, and his thick straight hair was the colour of straw. He cast her a shy glance and she saw that his eyes were grey.

  He was kind to her. That was all it took.

  SPRING gave Maud plenty of excuses for chancing upon Clem Walker. The looking-glass helped too. From now on she wasn’t only spying on Chatterpie.

  To his face she called him Walker, but in her head he was Clem. He was handsome, but not like Father. Clem’s beauty lay in his kindly expression and in the slow flush that warmed his smooth brown skin.

  Maud loved watching him mow the lawn in front of the library. Once when he wasn’t about, she tried pushing the mower herself, and was thrilled when she couldn’t budge it an inch.

  She had conversations with him in her head. She pictured him being involved in some minor accident and her coolly coming to his aid and loosening his neck-kerchief.

  She knew she was being ridiculous. She wasn’t even fourteen, and the gulf between them couldn’t be bridged. In her wildest imaginings she never went further than respectful admiration on his part, and distant friendliness on hers. But his presence lent a secret glow to her existence. She dreaded the arrival of the new governess, Miss Lark.

  She also spent long, despairing sojourns before her looking-glass. Those tiny eyes and that heavy jaw. Her only tolerable feature was her thick brown hair. She took to washing it in salad oil and borax, and brushing it for hours.

  What to do about her clothes? Even at Wake’s End, the revolution in fashion was being felt. Gone were the leg-of-mutton sleeves and hourglass silhouettes that had ruled Maman’s life. Maud longed for one of the new hobble skirts and a petticoat that didn’t rustle. She wanted a corset that made her hips disappear and reached halfway down her thighs, with a pair of cord fetters around her knees to make her take dainty steps.

  But maybe Clem didn’t mind that she was plain? She was greatly encouraged after Miss Broadstairs lent her Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. Clearly some men could see past plainness to what lay underneath. Perhaps looks didn’t matter as much as she’d feared.

  However, in her darker moments she knew that all her efforts were doomed – because of her eczema. Years of scratching had given her scaly patches on her hands and forearms. ‘These aren’t fingers,’ she would hiss in a frenzy of loathing. ‘They’re claws. Disgusting lizard claws.’

  Miss Broadstairs gave her Sulpholine Lotion with a commiserating smile that set Maud’s teeth on edge. The lotion made no difference. Maud begged Biddy Thrussel to bring her something stronger, and swore her to secrecy. While she waited for the wisewoman to prepare the potion, she swallowed her pride and donned the Nottingham lace gloves which Lady Clevedon had given her when she was confirmed.

  Her worst fear was attracting Ivy’s mockery. Eating her fill in the Wake’s End kitchen had transformed the scrawny village girl into a plump, big-breasted beauty. When Sarah left to get married, she’d been promoted to under-housemaid and now dimpled becomingly when Dr Grayson chucked her under the chin. The female servants hated her, but Ivy laughed them to scorn, secure in the slack-jawed admiration of Jessop and Steers. Even Felix seemed fascinated by her, probably because she never made a fuss of him like the rest of the staff.

  To Maud’s relief, Clem regarded Ivy with alarm, while Ivy acted as if he was beneath her notice. Cook muttered darkly that Ivy had other fish to fry.

  One day, Maud learned from Daisy that Clem’s mother had died of pond pox last summer. She pounced on this as common ground.

  ‘Does your father speak of her often?’ she asked when he was raking the gravel in the elm avenue.

  He scratched his head. ‘Can’t say as he do, Miss.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same with me! Father never speaks of Maman. I can’t understand it.’

  He gave his slow shrug. ‘Mebbe he can’t, Miss.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He reddened. ‘Well. I can’t talk of Ma. Cuts too deep.’

  Maud looked at him. How wise you are, she thought. You have seen what I did not: that Father can’t speak of it. It cuts too deep.

  Full of contrition, she thought of her father’s frequent headaches, and of the little brown bottles of laudanum which Dr Grayson prescribed. Father was grieving. But privately. In his own way.

  On Easter Sunday, Maud dined downstairs with him for the first time.

  Nurse wouldn’t let her put up
her hair, but Maud thought that her new lime-green poplin was not unbecoming, and as her eczema was currently in abeyance, Father might not even notice if she kept her hands in her lap. She was horribly nervous. She reminded herself that he was grieving. She must show all her sympathy and tact.

  To her surprise, he seemed in need of neither. ‘I’m in an excellent humour,’ he declared as he carved the joint. ‘In fact, superlative.’

  Maud stared at him. Father never spoke like this. He looked intimidatingly handsome in his dinner jacket and his eyes were more alive than she’d ever seen them: that light, astonishing crystalline blue.

  ‘Miss Broadstairs showed me one of your watercolours,’ he said. ‘It was really quite tolerable. Should you care for painting lessons?’

  ‘I – don’t know, Father.’

  ‘I had a fancy to paint when I was a young man. My pater was against it, but I took lessons at Cambridge all the same, and then in Italy. If one persists, one can always achieve one’s desires.’ He compressed his lips, as if at some pleasing private recollection. Maud felt a burst of sympathy. He and Maman had toured Italy on their honeymoon; he must be thinking of her.

  Shyly, she asked if his headaches were any better. When he said that they were, she mustered her courage. ‘Father, I wondered… we have so many books in the library, I could easily educate myself… with Miss Broadstairs’ supervision, of course. So would you – could you put off Miss Lark? I mean, cancel her?’

  He tasted his claret. ‘I quite forgot to tell you. I cancelled the governess a fortnight ago.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Father!’

  ‘That précis you prepared – the chapter from Moore and Blackthorne. It was surprisingly competent.’

  She flushed with pleasure.

  ‘You seem quite taken with the English mystics.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ In fact, the only one she was remotely interested in was Alice Pyett, and that was only because Father was. Even then, Alice Pyett’s mysticism struck her as faintly ridiculous. She had been the wife of a prosperous merchant until she’d had a vision of Hell, and developed a habit of sobbing noisily for hours. At the time people thought she was either blessed by God, or troubled by demons. Towards the end of her life she had dictated her experiences to a monk. But The Book of Alice Pyett, although known to history from references in other works, had been lost for centuries.