Weyward(37)

She is still for a moment, thinking of what Simon would do if he knew she was pregnant. How he would treat their child.

Things will be different, this time. She will be different. She will be strong.

She remembers the way she appeared in the mirror, when she tried on Aunt Violet’s cape. That dark glitter in her eyes. For a second, she felt almost powerful.

She will keep her baby, her Weyward child. She knows, somehow, that she is carrying a girl.

She will keep her safe.





19


ALTHA


Even though they’d let me dress, I felt the pressure of a hundred eyes on my flesh as if I were still unclothed. The men stared with hunger, like I was a sweetmeat they wanted to devour. All except the man with the pitying eyes, who turned his gaze away.

After a time, I could not look at them: not the public sitting in the gallery, nor the judges, the prosecutor, or the doctor. Grace, in her white cap. I had wanted to bring the spider from the dungeons, a friend amidst foes. But I knew it was not safe, that it would only darken the cloud of suspicion that hung over me. Now, a sparkle caught my eye, and I saw that the spider had followed me, that it was spinning its web in the corner of the dock. Tears filled my eyes as I watched its legs dance over the shimmering strands of silk. I wished I could shrink myself as small, and scuttle away from this place.

I was born with the mole. The one I had scratched away, my first night in the castle. I should have thought to do it sooner, before they brought Doctor Smythson to the gaol, back in Crows Beck. But my wits were deadened, from lack of food and light, from resisting the questions of the prosecutors’ men. And it was a gamble, in any case: the wound is crusting over now; weeping and angry. Doctor Smythson might have seen it for what it was.

The witch’s mark, they call it. Or the devil’s. It serves as instant proof of guilt.

My mother had one too, in near enough the same place.

‘Matching,’ she used to say. ‘As befits a mother and daughter.’

It wasn’t the only thing we’d had in common. Everyone said I was the spit of her, with my oval face and shocking dark hair.

I used to be proud of this, especially after she first died. I would stare at my reflection on the surface of the beck, desperate for a trace of her in my features. The rippling water blurred my face so that it was just a pale moon. I imagined it was my mother, looking at me through the veil that separates this world from the next.

I wondered what she’d make of it. Of her only daughter, stripped naked in a courtroom, while men roamed their eyes over her. Searching for a sign that she had sold her soul to the devil.

What did they know of souls, these men who sat on bolsters all day, clothed in finery, and saw fit to condemn a woman to death?

I do not profess to know much of souls, myself. I am not a learned woman, other than in the ways my mother handed down to me, as her mother handed down to her. But I know goodness, evil, light and dark.

And I know the devil.

I have seen him. I have seen his mark. His real mark.

I have seen these things. And so has Grace.

I dreamed of him, sometimes, in the dungeon. The devil. The form he takes when he appears.

I also dreamed of Grace.

Most of all, I dreamed of my mother, on that final night. Her last in this world. Her dry fingers in mine. The little rasping sounds of her breath, her skin so pale I could see the blue-green veins beneath it, like a network of rivers. Her parting words. ‘Remember your promise,’ she said. She has been gone these last three years, but the memory of her in her sickbed was as strong as if I had just lost her.

Time seemed changed by the trial. Whereas before, my days had been broken up by little rituals and milestones – milking the goat of a morning; picking berries in the afternoon; readying tonics for the sick in the evening – now there was just court and sleep. Fear and dreams.

The day after he questioned Doctor Smythson, the prosecutor called the Kirkby lad. Daniel.

We’d attended his birth, my mother and I. I couldn’t have been more than six years old, had only seen animals birthed. Lambs in blue cauls. Kittens with milky eyes. Birds, hatching pink and scrawny. I had felt their fear, coming into the world with all its unknowns. Its dangers.

I did not know birthing babies was something humans did, too. I took my own existence for granted, and it was only after watching Daniel’s mother push him out of her body that I learned my mother had made me with a man and pulled me from her like a root from the earth. I never found out who the man was. She refused to tell me. ‘That is not our way,’ she’d said. She hadn’t known her own father either, she told me later.

As a babe, Daniel Kirkby had screamed so loud that I’d covered my ears. But in court he spoke with a quiet voice. He was solemn and wide-eyed when he took the oath. I saw him look towards me, then away, like a horse flinching from the whip. He feared me. My mother would have been sad to know this, having assured his safe passage into the world.

‘How long have you worked at the Milburn farm, Daniel?’

‘Just since last winter, sir.’

‘And what was the nature of the work you undertook?’

‘Just helping, like. Whatever the master needed. Milking the cows, when Mistress Milburn could not.’

His cheeks coloured, at her name on his lips. His eyes flickered, roaming the gallery. I wondered if he was seeking her face.