Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

  Maud uttered a cry and ran to the window. She stood there staring while I rang and gave orders for the carcase to be removed. She soon recovered her composure, however, and by evening she’d forgotten the whole affair. By nature she is phlegmatic and insensitive. She lacks the capacity for strong emotion.

  Later

  Ivy is surprisingly sensible about the Doom. ‘Ugh!’ she told me with a shudder. ‘They knew what they was doing when they whited it over.’

  Yea, from the mouth of an illiterate rustic comes truth. That painting is neither sacred nor infernal. It is merely an unsightly daub. I will think no more about it.

  ‘I’M sorry about your bird, Miss.’

  ‘Thank you, Walker.’

  ‘Is there ought I can do?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Very good, Miss.’

  ‘Um… Walker?’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Actually there is something. His perch. Could you take it away?’

  ‘At once, Miss.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She was proud that she comported herself so calmly. After all, nothing could bring Chatterpie back. It was only rational to carry on. So when Ivy flaunted an iridescent tailfeather in her hat, Maud’s response was measured and calm. ‘Don’t you know it’s bad luck to kill a magpie?’

  ‘I dun’t believe in bad luck, Miss.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. It believes in you.’

  Seeing Ivy’s eyes widen gave Maud a momentary satisfaction, even though she knew that what she’d said was meaningless. Chatterpie was dead. She had to accept that. There was nothing to be done.

  Sleet battered the windows like shot, and every so often she glanced up from her typing and received a fresh jolt on seeing no perch in the laurel bush. Clem had done what she’d asked the same day, but now she wished he hadn’t. It was too soon. It felt as if Chatterpie had never existed.

  She would have liked to have marked the magpie’s death in some way: to have cut off her hair in mourning and thrown it in his grave. Only Chatterpie didn’t have a grave. Ivy had flung him on the bonfire.

  From The Book of Alice Pyett,

  transl. & exegesis by E.A.M. Stearne

  Despite the burden on her conscience, this creature could not bring herself to confess her secret sin. And her dread of Hell became so great that she—

  A magpie thudded on to the chimney stack, and Maud pressed the wrong key. She put her hands in her lap. Father liked his drafts to be perfect. She would have to begin again.

  While the magpie clattered about on the chimney, she discarded the spoiled page and loaded a clean one in her typewriter. The magpie glided down to the lawn and shook out its wet feathers, then paraded before her at a swift waddling run, as if seeking her attention. It wasn’t, of course. It had no special gleam in its eye and no grey scar on its leg. It wasn’t Chatterpie. Chatterpie was dead.

  Maud’s hands began to shake. There was an ache behind her eyes. Very deliberately, she rose and left the library, took her coat and hat and let herself out of the front door; quietly, so as not to alert Father. Sleet stung her face. The pain in her chest made her gasp.

  The coach-house was deserted. It was nearly noon and the servants had gone for their dinner. Maud ducked into the harness-room and hid behind the feed bin. She heard Blossom and Bluebell munching their feed. Her breath came in heaving gasps. She felt as if her head was about to explode.

  Footsteps on the gravel, then Father’s voice: ‘Ah, Walker. Have you seen Miss Maud?’

  Maud clapped her hands across her mouth.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Clem, startlingly close.

  ‘Well, where is she?’

  ‘I think I seen her heading for church, sir.’

  ‘Good Heavens, at this time of day?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  An exasperated sigh. ‘Very well. Go on with your work.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Still with her hands over her mouth, Maud listened to Father walk away.

  ‘Master’s gone back indoors, Miss,’ Clem said quietly.

  She wanted to thank him but she was crying too hard. He touched her shoulder. ‘There, now.’

  ‘It was m-my fault,’ she panted between jerky wrenching sobs.

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘Yes it was! I f-fed him, I made him come to his p-perch. If he hadn’t tapped on the window—’

  ‘He’d of been on the roof, or the gables. Thass what chatterpies do.’ He stood beside her, patting her shoulder as if she were a horse.

  After a while her sobs eased.

  ‘I’d give thee my kerchief,’ he said. ‘Only it’s not dainty enough.’

  Maud sniffed. No one had ever applied that word to her. Wiping her eyes with her fingers, she pinched the bridge of her nose to hold back the tears. ‘I don’t even have a body to mourn,’ she said savagely. ‘She flung him on the bonfire as if he was rubbish.’

  ‘Ah now that’s where you’re wrong, Miss.’

  She peered at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  He grinned his shy grin. ‘I pulled en out the fire, din’t I? He’m up the hayloft in a scrap of sacking. A mite singed, mind. But the frost’s keeping en fresh.’

  ‘Oh Clem, thank you! That’s the best present I’ve ever had!’

  ‘What, a half-burned chatterpie?’

  She gave a spluttery laugh.

  He had one elbow on the feed bin. She saw the snaky veins on the back of his hand and his knobbly wristbone. She touched it with her fingertip. He flinched, but didn’t pull away.

  She realised that she’d called him by his first name. ‘Clem,’ she said again for the joy of saying it aloud. ‘Thank you, Clem.’

  From The Book of Alice Pyett,

  transl. & exegesis by E.A.M. Stearne

  Despite the burden on her conscience, this creature could not bring herself to confess her secret sin, and her dread of Hell became so great that for weeks she was amazingly tormented by spirits. Devils pawed her and hauled her about, scorching her with flames. She beheld the torments of Hell, where the souls of the damned are eternally fried in fire as if they are fish in hot oil, while others are endlessly drowned and brought back to life in freezing meres, only to be drowned and drowned again…

  ‘Father, shall you need me after tea?’ said Maud, handing him the latest page of Pyett.

  He glanced up from his desk. ‘Really, my dear, I can’t quite say. Had you something you particularly wished to do?’

  She wanted to take Chatterpie’s body to the Mere, but she realised that she’d made a mistake in seeking permission. Father never told her if he needed her until the last minute. Even if he said he didn’t, he frequently changed his mind and interrupted her just when she’d settled down with a book. Sometimes she wondered if he did it on purpose; but on the whole she thought not. She wasn’t important enough for that.

  ‘There’s nothing particular I wanted to do,’ she lied. ‘I’ll be in the library if you need me.’

  Soon afterwards he brought in another page for her to type. ‘I should like this before luncheon if you can manage it.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  He glanced out of the French windows, and she saw him notice the absence of Chatterpie’s perch. For a moment his light-blue eyes met hers. Neither of them mentioned the bird.

  When Father had gone, Maud sat with her hands in her lap. The last few pages in his notebook had included sketches of the devils in St Guthlaf’s, and also one of Chatterpie. Maud had seen it the day after the magpie was killed.

  I hate you, she told Father silently. You killed Maman and now you’ve killed Chatterpie. You have forfeited my love. From now on there can be only hate.

  It was the first time she’d admitted this to herself and she felt no guilt; merely satisfaction and a sense of strength.

  As it turned out, Maud was able to visit the Mere after all, because Father developed eye-strain and went upstairs to rest; or to have connection with Ivy, Maud didn’t care whi
ch.

  It was a raw March afternoon with no hint of spring in the air. The sleet had turned to freezing mizzle, and a bitter east wind shivered the surface of the Mere. Clem had done a good job of wrapping the carcase. Only Chatterpie’s sharp black beak poked out of the sacking, reminding Maud of the day when she’d rescued him and wrapped him in her pinafore.

  Chatterpie had been dead for two days and was beginning to smell, but that was good. It was part of Maud’s penance. Cutting off a lock of her hair, she tucked it inside the shroud and bound it in place with a black satin ribbon criss-crossed around the pathetically small corpse. Then she tied the bundle to a brick she’d brought from the kitchen garden. She couldn’t have said precisely why she did all this, except that it was important to offer part of herself to the fen: to ensure that Chatterpie would be at peace.

  Geese rose from the Mere in a clatter of wings, and when she raised her head to watch, she saw Jubal on the far side. He was standing fishing on his punt with Nellie behind him. He looked just the same as when she’d last been in the fen, before Maman died. Maud nodded at him and he nodded back, but went on fishing. She was grateful for that.

  Telling Chatterpie farewell, she leaned over and dropped him in. He was gone in seconds. She didn’t cry. She was long past that.

  The wind rattled the reeds. Maud remembered the starlings shape-shifting like a giant hand. She told herself that the fen would endure and so would she. But Chatterpie was still dead.

  ‘May Father be punished for what he did,’ she prayed to the fen. ‘May his secret sin – whatever it is – eat away at him like acid. May he continue to see devils in church. And may his fear of the Doom grow and grow like weeds—’

  She broke off. She stared down into the dark brown water which was Chatterpie’s grave. An idea had come to her: a gift from the fen.

  She knew the precise date when she would put it into effect. It would mean waiting a couple of months, but that was all right. She knew how to wait.

  Easter came and went, and at the end of May, Maud turned fifteen. Still she bided her time. On the 9th of June it would be three years since Maman had died.

  The week before the anniversary, Maud went in search of Clem. She found him in the glass-house, scalding flowerpots. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me,’ she said.

  His cheeks darkened with the deep, slow flush she’d come to love. ‘Anything, Miss.’

  In common with most villagers, he was intensely superstitious, but he was pragmatic enough not to let it get in his way. Like Cole, he wasn’t afraid to venture into the fen, as long as he had a sprig of rowan in his cap and said the right charm.

  ‘It’s the season for eel-babbing, isn’t it?’ said Maud.

  He grinned. ‘Fancy thee knowing that.’

  ‘Bring me one, Clem. I want you to bring me an eel.’

  From The Book of Alice Pyett,

  transl. & exegesis by E.A.M. Stearne

  After this creature had been tormented by evil spirits for several months, there came a blessed day when the air above her opened as bright as lightning and she saw many white things flying like specks in a sunbeam. Then Jesus came in the likeness of a most beauteous man, and he sat upon her bedside and said, Daughter, recover and be at peace.

  After that the devils ceased to torment this creature, and she grew as calm in her wits as she was before, and was delivered from her sickness.

  From the Private Notebook of Edmund Stearne

  6th June 1912

  I take comfort from Pyett’s recovery, as it mirrors my own. I’m ashamed at the extent to which I’ve allowed that painting to unsettle me. I think bad air from the fen had a lot to do with it.

  Fortunately, summer has brought no more disturbances – be they from ill-executed daubs or importunate birds. My work is proceeding apace, and the household seems tolerably well run; I must give Maud some credit for that. I feel fully restored and have scarcely thought about the Doom.

  9th June

  This morning, Ivy found an eel in my washbasin – or so she says. She says that as she knows my dislike of the creatures, she made haste to remove it. A likely story. The chit either put it there herself, or else it never existed and she concocted the whole thing to alarm me and make herself appear indispensable.

  When I confronted her she became indignant, insisting that she’d found a large black eel coiled in my washbasin. ‘Stone dead it wor,’ she assured me. She swore to it on the Bible. I scolded her severely for that, but she still wouldn’t confess. I had to threaten to dock her wages, and even then she admitted her guilt so grudgingly that one would have thought her confession were the falsehood, not the prank itself.

  But it must have been her. None of the other servants would dare perpetrate such a trick. I shall have to watch Ivy. She is (in vulgar parlance) ‘getting above herself’.

  Strange how the mind works. I find the notion of an eel in my washbasin so revolting that I had Daisy scrub it out with lye.

  When I was a boy I once saw Cook making eel pie. After the creatures had been cut up, the parts continued to move. ‘Nowt so strong as an eel,’ Cook said. In Pyett’s time they believed that eels arose spontaneously from the ooze in the fen. Perhaps therein lies my dislike of the creatures. They inhabit the slime, and will eat any dead, rotting thing that sinks into it.

  10th June

  I had that dream again. As before, I was standing beside the Mere, and although I haven’t been near the place in thirty years, it felt extraordinarily real. I smelled meadowsweet and I was conscious of reeds brushing my naked calves. I heard the high thin screams of swifts.

  As before, I was terrified of something that was rising from the deep. I couldn’t move, I could only watch it come closer. Nearer and nearer it rose, until it was floating just beneath the surface. Its face was obscured by a clotted mass of hair that shifted and swayed in a manner I found indescribably horrific. I tried to flee but my legs wouldn’t move. I knew that in another moment the hair would part and the thing would see me with its dead white eyes and my heart would burst…

  With a cry I awoke. In my confusion I fancied I heard a dreadful wet snuffling somewhere nearby, and I saw waterlight on the ceiling, a shifting green glimmer intertwined with the trailing shadows of weeds. What can have happened? I wondered. Has the Lode invaded the grounds during the night and crept up to the very walls of the house, bringing with it some denizen of the fen? Is it there now, crouching like an incubus on my windowsill? Glaring at me?

  Then I came fully awake – and of course there was no waterlight on the ceiling and no web-footed demon crouching on the sill. It was simply greenish sunlight filtering through the leaves that stirred and trembled around my windows.

  To my consternation I perceived that the window opposite my bed was partially open, its blind half-raised and its curtains flapping. Drifting in from the fen came the most revolting marshy stench.

  How could this have happened? Since I became Master of Wake’s End it has been my fixed rule that all windows giving on to the fen must remain shut. Any servant who disobeys me is dismissed forthwith. They all know this. Who then could have raised the sash?

  Later

  Whoever it was, they must have done it while I slept. I find that thought peculiarly disturbing.

  11th June

  I really ought to refrain from brandy after dinner. There’s no need to invent a furtive ‘someone’ stealing into my room; the riddle of the window has been more prosaically solved. Yesterday while cleaning the room, one of the maids doubtless raised the sash for a moment to shake out a duster – as they are permitted to do – and then neglected to lower it. When I retired, I failed to notice this because the blinds and curtains had already been drawn; and as the night was still, there was no breeze to alert me.

  At morning prayers, I drew attention to this error and reminded the servants of my orders. I reminded them too that my rule is a simple matter of hygiene. All manner of unwholesome things emanate from the fen. By that I
mean miasmas, mosquitoes, and bad air. They must be kept out.

  12th June

  This household is becoming more and more lax. First there was that deplorable affair of the window. Then on Monday the pie-crust at luncheon was scorched. And on three separate occasions Maud has handed me pages containing errors.

  I’ve also had to speak to her about excessive familiarity with the servants, having twice seen her talking to Walker in the orchard. I warned her that she will cause trouble for the lad by distracting him from his work. She was chastened and promised it wouldn’t happen again.

  13th June

  I’ve been feeling strangely oppressed and anxious. The house is pervaded by a dank, marshy smell, like that which troubled me last year. I had the drains thoroughly checked then, and have no wish to incur further expense by repeating the exercise.

  For some reason the smell is most pronounced in my study and my bedroom. There’s no accounting for it as we’ve had no rain for weeks; and yet the strange thing is that the curtains feel slightly damp to the touch. When I pointed this out to Daisy she had the impertinence to query whether it was indeed so. Well, I surely didn’t imagine it! I’ve ordered fires lit in all the grates and the rooms thoroughly aired. This has occasioned much grumbling behind my back, as the maids complain about lugging coal in this hot weather. Why do they think I pay them, if not to work?

  It’s all most vexing and I’ve been unable to do anything useful on Pyett. I re-write sections I’ve already translated, while neglecting my exegesis, which remains little more than a few scribbled ideas.

  This morning when I sat down in my study with a book, I was disturbed by a furtive scrabbling at the windowpane. It wasn’t the tapping of a bird; this sounded more like claws. On raising the sash, I thought I glimpsed something scuttling off into the ivy. I’ve ordered young Walker to cut back the plant around the windows, and set rat traps. If that fails, Cole shall summon Abe Thrussel with his ferret.