Фрэнсис Хардинг - A Skinful of Shadows

She thought herself feverish indeed when, one day, she was brought into the main room and found a stranger standing by the hearth. He was tall, and wore a dark blue coat. His beaky face was topped by a shock of white hair. It was the man she had chased like a will-o’-the-wisp on the evening of the riot.

Makepeace stared at him, and felt her eyes fill with tears.

‘This is Master Crowe,’ Aunt told her slowly and carefully. ‘He’s come to take you to Grizehayes.’

‘My . . .’ Makepeace’s voice was still rusty. ‘My father . . .’

Aunt unexpectedly wrapped her arms around Makepeace, and gave her a brisk, tight squeeze.

‘He’s dead, child,’ she whispered. ‘But his family have said they’ll take you in, and the Fellmottes will look after you better than I could.’ Then she hurried off to gather Makepeace’s belongings, teary with tenderness, anxiety and relief.

‘We’ve been keeping her bundled up in the blanket,’ Uncle was murmuring to Mr Crowe. ‘You’ll want to do the same when she’s wild. Whatever those rogues at the inn did to her, I think they knocked the wits out of her before someone chased them away.’

Makepeace was going to Grizehayes. That was what she had told Mother she was going to do, on that last fatal day. Perhaps she should feel happy, or at least feel something.

Instead, Makepeace felt broken and empty, like a scooped-out eggshell. The hunt for Mother’s ghost had led her to a dead bear. And now, Mr Crowe, who had seemed the key to finding her father, had only led her to another grave.

For years the minister had talked of the end of the world, and now it had come. Makepeace knew it, she felt it. As the carriage bore her out through Poplar, she wondered in her dazzled way why the earth did not quake, nor the stars drop like ripe figs, and why she could not see angels or the shining woman from Nanny Susan’s visions. Instead she saw clothes drying, and barrows rattling, and steps being scrubbed as if nothing had happened. Somehow that was worse than anything.

As the carriage lumbered north-west, Makepeace tried to understand what she had been told.

Her father had been Sir Peter Fellmotte, and he was dead. His was an old, old family, and they had agreed to take her in. It sounded like a bittersweet ending from a ballad, but Makepeace felt numb. Why had Mother refused to talk about him?

She remembered Mother’s warning. You have no idea what I saved you from! If I had stayed in Grizehayes . . .

It was a mistake to think of Mother. Makepeace’s head filled with the memory of the nightmare ghost with Mother’s features. The malformed voice and the grey face in tatters . . . Makepeace’s brain went to the dark place again.

When she came back from it, she felt sick and exhausted once more. She was still sitting in the carriage, but wrapped tightly in a sheepskin blanket so that it pinned her arms. A rope was bound around her, holding it in place.

‘Are you calmer now?’ Mr Crowe asked her levelly as she blinked in confusion.

Hesitantly Makepeace nodded. Calmer than what? There was a new bruise swelling on her jaw. There was also a bruise in her memory, an indistinct shadowy feeling that she had done something she shouldn’t. She was in trouble somehow.

‘I cannot have you jumping out of the carriage,’ said Mr Crowe.

The sheepskin blanket was thick and warm, but rough with an animal smell. She clung to that smell. It was something she understood. Mr Crowe said nothing more to her, and she was grateful for that.

The landscape slowly changed over the long, damp ride. The first day it made sense to Makepeace, with its misty meadows and thriving, pale green cornfields. During the second day, the low hills raised their hackles. By the third, the fields had yielded to moorland, over which lean, black-faced sheep scrambled.

At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was splashing along a rising road turned to soup by the rain. On either side lay bare fields and pastureland, the horizons guarded by a line of sombre hills. Ahead, behind a small coven of dark, twisting yews, stood a grey-faced house, graceless and vast. Two towers rose above its facade like misshapen horns.

It was Grizehayes. Although Makepeace had never seen it before, she felt an instant recognition, like a great bell tolling deep in her soul.

By the time they arrived, Makepeace was cold, exhausted and hungry. She was unbound and unswaddled, then handed over to a red-haired servant woman with a tired face.

‘His lordship will want to see her,’ said Crowe, and left Makepeace in her care.

The woman changed her clothes, wiped her face and brushed her hair. She was not unkind, but not kind either. Makepeace knew that she was being tidied for company, not cosseted. The woman tutted over Makepeace’s nails, which were ravaged and torn. Makepeace could not remember how or why.

When Makepeace was almost presentable, the woman led her down a dark passageway, silently waved her through an oaken door, then closed it behind her. Makepeace found herself in a great warm chamber with the biggest, fiercest hearth she had ever seen. The walls were covered with hunting tapestries, where stags rolled their eyes as embroidered blood ran from their sides. A very old man was propped up in a four-poster bed.

She stared at him with fear and awe, as her scrambled mind tried to remember what she had been told. This could only be Obadiah Fellmotte, the head of the family — Lord Fellmotte himself.

He was in earnest conversation with white-haired Mr Crowe. Neither seemed to have noticed her entrance. Feeling self-conscious and daunted, Makepeace hung back by the door. Nonetheless their low voices reached her.

‘So . . . those that accused us will accuse no more?’ Obadiah’s voice was a low, rasping creak.

‘One killed himself after his ships sank and his fortune was lost,’ Mr Crowe said calmly. ‘Another was exiled after his letters to the Spanish King were discovered. The third’s romances became common gossip, and he was killed in a duel by his mistress’s husband.’

‘Good,’ said Obadiah. ‘Very good.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are there still rumours about us?’

‘It is difficult to kill a whisper, my lord,’ Crowe said carefully ‘Particularly one that involves witchcraft.’

Witchcraft? Makepeace felt a thrill of superstitious terror. Had she really heard that word aright? The minister in Poplar had sometimes spoken of witches — twisted, corrupted men and women who secretly bargained with the Devil for unholy powers. They could put the Evil Eye on you. They could make your hand wither, your crops fail, your baby sicken and die. Causing harm by witchcraft was illegal, of course, and when witches were caught they were arrested and tried, and sometimes even hanged.

‘If we cannot stop the King hearing such rumours,’ the old aristocrat said slowly, ‘then we must stop him acting on them. We must make ourselves useful to him — too useful to lose. And we will need a hold over him, so that he dares not denounce us. He is desperate to borrow money from us, is he not? I am sure we can make some kind of bargain.’

Makepeace continued to stand by the door, tongue-tied, the heat from the hearth tingling over her face. She did not understand everything she had heard, but she was fairly certain that such words and thoughts should never, ever have fallen upon her ears.

Then the old lord looked across and noticed her. He scowled slightly.

‘Crowe, what is that child doing in my chamber?’

‘Margaret Lightfoot’s daughter,’ Crowe said quietly.

‘Oh, the by-blow.’ Obadiah’s brow cleared a little. ‘Let us see her, then.’ He beckoned Makepeace over.

Makepeace’s last faint hopes of a warm welcome collapsed. She approached slowly, and halted at his bedside. There was costly lace on Obadiah’s nightgown and the cap that drooped over his brow, and Makepeace started helplessly calculating how many weeks it would have taken her mother to make it. But she realized that she was staring, and dropped her gaze quickly. Looking at the rich and powerful was dangerous, like peering into the sun.