from all the events of today, to stay for ever in this dark place with my guttering candle, to be walled in like a Papist nun. My mouth hurts. My knees and ribs and arms hurt. I want to slough off my flesh the way that grass snakes shed their skins. Yet it remains, white and sluglike, painful and unsheddable. The thought that I kissed John earlier appals me. Isn’t he supposed to be spiritual and remote? Isn’t that what I like about him? I want to scream that no, I am not to be touched, not by attackers, not by lovers, not by anyone. The urge to scream, in the way that the women who found the bodies screamed, comes roaring up from my feet, but all that emerges from my mouth is a tiny mew, like a kitten’s.
There is something freakish about today; everything feels abnormal and unfamiliar. I’m beginning to wonder if the bang on my head was worse than I thought. There’s Hugh for a start, sweet Hugh, fair-haired and funny, whom I thought I knew, but who now looms at me with a predatory look that is new. He has been fussing over my bruises, and teasing me tenderly about being legless so early in the day. Dear Lord, it is grotesque. Normally he would have joked uncaringly, and suggested a ride in the woods, or target practice, to take my mind off it. I wonder if Uncle Juniper has been advising him on techniques for wooing reluctant females. I look at them now, across the crowded kitchen, drinking and conversing by the gatehouse arch. Uncle Juniper, whose real name everyone has long forgotten, is hunched over and gesturing wildly, clearly describing something deeply bloodthirsty. I wonder for a moment if I am really going to be able to do this – seriously do it – marry Hugh and see my future settled for ever within these confines.
I decide to go and hide in the chimney corner. I seat myself facing the flames, my back against the hot stone, my skirts tucked in under my knees. The kitchen fire is roaring, and a tall blackjack of ale stands near me, on a griddle winched to one side away from the flames. Steam curls along the hot poker which Kate has plunged into it, and there is a smell of singed flesh where the poker leans against the lip of the big leather jug. The men who carried the corpses in appear up the slope from the wood cellar at the far side of the kitchen. Kate looks round from plucking thrushes at the table. “Help yourselves to ale, lads,” she calls. “I reckon you’ll be needing it.”
The smell of newly drawn feathers mingles with the other smells of the kitchen, live flesh sweating and dead flesh singeing, and I realise that my mood is shifting. Instead of feeling shaky and terrified, now I am starting to feel angry. I am angry with the men who attacked me, angry that Leo’s saving of me had to take such a terminal form, leaving me as good as a murderer, angry at the droning throb of my bruises, at the loss of my knife, at the confrontation awaiting us all when my father finds out about Verity, and above all, angry that such a good friend and cousin as Hugh has to be turned into a husband for me, by those too old and set in their ways to know what they are talking about.
The four men come over and ladle hot ale into their tankards. They nod to me but I pretend to be asleep. Leo’s son, Dickon, is mending the bellows on the opposite side of the fire from me, pleating new leather into the sides where the old has cracked, and if it were not for the tapping of his hammer I should probably indeed have slept.
My parents have not arrived yet. I find myself practising speeches to calm my father’s temper when he finds out about Verity and realises that the family’s plans to marry her to Gerald, and keep the two farms within the family, are in ruins. He beat her once for her involvement with James Sorrell, and he tried to kill James. Now, faced with the inevitable fact that they must marry, and quickly, I simply cannot imagine what he will do.
I wonder, too, what Gerald’s reaction will be. I watch him, a younger, darker, more angry-looking version of his brother, talking to Germaine in a far corner of the kitchen, stooping over her as she sits in a tall-backed chair putting tiny stitches into a pair of lace sleeves. Somehow, I don’t think he is going to be too distressed.
Aunt Juniper appears beside me. She points at Gerald and Germaine. “Just look at that, will you Niece? He spends so much time talking to that skivvy that he scarcely gets to see your sister at all. He should be over at Wraithwaite Parsonage at this very moment. I really don’t know what’s becoming of this family.”
“Germaine’s a bit more than a skivvy, Auntie,” I reply, wondering why I am defending the person who annoys me more than any other in this household.
“Nonsense! She’s a serving woman and she’s twice his age, and what Gerald wants to be doing talking to her is a mystery to me.”
People near us glance round and grin. I suspect Aunt Juniper is the only person to whom it is a mystery.
Mother comes in, her cheeks pink and her hair escaping from its cap. “That’s the last of the strangers on their way!” she declares. “I never thought I’d thank a Scot for anything, but I do thank him for forcing our men to stay at home.” She crosses to the hearth. “I’m going to open my elder wine. Give me a hand, Juniper. We have good reason to celebrate.”
“Them downstairs don’t,” mutters Kate.
I peer round the corner of the hearth as my mother and aunt lift out two wooden-stoppered clay flagons from the proving oven. “Give Kate a drink, Beatie, for pity’s sake,” Mother orders me. “I can’t be doing with her endless griping. Get out the silver goblets. I’m not using pewter any more. Cedric says it rots your brain.” She thumps the flagons on to the table and stares round her for a moment, hands on hips. “I can still scarce credit that the march on Scotland is stopped.”
“For now.” Kate slams her rolling pin into a soft mound of dough. “We wouldn’t have given up so easily in my day – one Scot and a whole war called off – I never heard the like of it.”
I take down the best goblets one by one from the dresser, whilst Mother and Aunt Juniper unstopper the flagons. I remember Father coming home with these goblets one Michaelmas, fifty of them in finest silver, beautifully wrought with patterns of herons and reeds. When I have passed everyone a goblet of wine, I go to sit on the bench at the long table, and as I do so there is a commotion in the gatehouse arch and my father comes crashing in. “What’s the merrymaking?” he bellows, and lurches towards the kitchen table. “Are the dead men laid out?” He throws an arm round Kate who is putting the lid on the thrush pie. “What’s in t’tart, Kate?”
“Songbirds.” Kate peers up into his face and scowls at him. “Cupshotten already, master? You wasted no time.”
“Aye well, Katie, you see we don’t have any time to waste, do we, as them downstairs will surely warrant.”
“You’re right there, master.” She stabs the pie crust three times with her pastry knife, muttering, “Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”
“Amen,” intones my father, and the two of them nod gloomily at one another.
I pour myself more wine. The sweet-smelling brew rocks to and fro in the shiny round bowl, red, maroon and purple in the shifting firelight. I see my mother leading my aunt away, arm round her shoulders, heads bent, to seat themselves in my place in the chimney corner. My mother is talking. My aunt is listening. I realise she is being told the news about Verity. With a surge of longing I want my own sister here, back where she belongs. I have no one here now who thinks as I do, who is prepared to laugh with me at the absurdity of our elders, and to defy them with me when necessary.
Suddenly Leo is at my side. I jump. I had not seen him arrive. I take a large swallow of wine, and then have to lean my elbows on the table to keep myself steady. He sits down next to me and asks, “How are you, lady?”
“Well enough.” I realise how ungracious I sound, and stand up to pour him some wine. “I thank you, Leo, for enquiring.”
He rummages at his waist. I catch the flash of a blade. “You’ll be wanting this back.” He produces my knife from where it was pushed into a sheath with his own. I stare at it, so familiar, with its horn handle and curved blade. “Was this what you used?” I ask him, appalled. Our eyes meet. It is as if we