Weyward(88)

But she isn’t.

Her blood glows warm; her nerve endings tingle. In the dark, her vision becomes clearer, sharper; sounds feel as if they are coming from inside her very skull.

The birds on the roof begin to chirrup and squawk. Kate imagines their bodies covering the house in one undulating, feathered mass.

She thanks them, welcomes them. Puts her hand on her stomach.

I am ready. We are ready.

Simon cries out downstairs and she knows that he has seen them too.

It is now, she knows. Now or never.

She opens the trapdoor.





48


ALTHA


I was busy, those last months of 1618. As the leaves turned red, so too did the sky, for a great comet appeared, chasing the stars like a streak of blood. My mother had often read the stars, and I wondered what she would say if she could see the red sky, if it would have told her what was coming.

Autumn gave way to winter, and the village was struck by fever. It seemed half of the villagers sent for the physician, and the other half – the ones who had not the coin to offer up their flesh to leeches – sent for me. In each fever-bright face – the eyes glassy with pain, the spots of fire in the cheeks – I saw Anna Metcalfe. I saw my mother.

A mistake could cost my life.

And so I stayed up working half the nights, either cooling a patient’s brow at their bedside or toiling in the cottage, preparing tonics and tinctures for the next day. My fingers smelled always of feverfew, as though it had seeped into the fabric of my skin from so much chopping and crushing. Each night I was so exhausted that I fell asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pallet. I did not even dream.

Neither Grace nor her husband fell ill, as far as I knew, but if they had, they would have sent for Doctor Smythson. They both attended church each Sunday, and though the pews were near empty that winter, with so many ill, I kept my distance and sat as far behind as I could. During the sermon I let Reverend Goode’s voice fade to a low hum, the words running into each other, and watched Grace’s red curls quiver as she bent her head in prayer.

I wondered, then, if Grace still kept the old ways, like her father. If she prayed to Mary for deliverance. Though I doubted the Virgin – who had been spared the feel of a man’s flesh on hers – could deliver Grace from her husband.

She looked the same as always. The face white and distant, the head bowed. No marks on her that I could see, but I remembered what she had said. That he was taking care not to harm her face. I could not bear to think what lay under her shift. I remembered my vision, at the bonfire on May Day Eve. The blood.

The fever that gripped the village burned itself out by advent, and though snow lay thick as cream on the ground, the church was full on Christmas morning. The villagers sat in the pews, with the ice on their hats and cloaks making them look like floured loaves. In my usual spot at the back, I craned my neck to see Grace. But she was not sitting next to John. I scanned the pews. She was not there at all.

All through Reverend Goode’s sermon, I wondered why she had not come. Had she caught the fever? After the service, John stood with the Dinsdales, and threw his head back and laughed at something Stephen Dinsdale said. He did not have the worried look of a man whose wife was ill, I thought. But perhaps that was to be expected. After all, from what I knew, Grace’s value to him was in her ability to bear him a child, and in this she had failed thus far. Perhaps he would be quite happy for her to wither away and die, giving him an excuse to marry a woman who could give him a son to carry on the Milburn name.

I stood as close as I dared in the churchyard, in case John said something that hinted at Grace’s condition. But I heard nothing: the villagers were merry with the promise of the festivities to come, and the churchyard was loud with chatter. After a time, people trailed off, bundling themselves more tightly in their cloaks and hats, wishing each other a happy Christmas. I felt sad, thinking of the feasts and laughter they would enjoy with their families, while I sat alone in my cottage. I watched as John turned to go and heard Mary Dinsdale ask that he pass on her best wishes to his wife.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘No doubt she’ll be on her feet by the morrow. Well, she’ll have to be, seeing as the cows need milking.’ He laughed, a harsh, cranking sound like the jaws of a plough, and bid them merry Christmas.

I walked home through white fields, under trees as bare as bones. I thought on John’s words, and the winter wind numbed my face and chilled my heart.

The next morning, I woke to such silence that I wondered if I had lost my hearing. Looking out of the window, I saw that snow had fallen so heavily in the night that the whole world was muffled by it. No birds had sung that morning and the sun, though weak and grey, was already high in the sky.

I hoped that the villagers would remain tucked up and warm inside their houses, perhaps still sleeping off the previous night’s merriment. I hoped that no one would see me as I set off into that still, white world.

As I walked through the snow, my feet cold in my boots and my hands raw in my gloves, my stomach twisted with fear. Whatever he had done to her, I thought, it must have been very grave if she was not fit to be seen in public on Christmas Day.

When I first came upon the Milburn farm, I thought that I was lost, or that it had vanished. Then, I heard the cows mooing in the byre, complaining of the cold, and I realised that a great lip of snow covered the roof of the farmhouse. I tried to climb the oak tree to get a better view, but my hands and feet could not find purchase, the trunk was so slick with ice. Then, I saw the dark figure of a man make his way from the white mound of the farmhouse. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking his long, flowing robes and the leather case he carried in his hand.