It had been a hot summer: the hottest in decades, my mother said. We had roamed all over the village and splashed through the beck, and, once we tired of that, stolen away to the cooler air of the fells. There we’d found slopes and crags wreathed with heather and mist. We’d climbed so high that Grace said she could see all the way to France. I remember laughing, telling Grace that France was very far away, and across the sea, besides. One day, we’d go and look for it, I said. Together.
At that moment, an osprey screamed overhead. I looked up to watch it fly, the sun tipping its wings with silver. Grace took my hand in hers, and a feeling of lightness spread through me, as though I too was soaring through the clouds.
Even then, some of the villagers feared our touch, as if my mother and I carried some pestilence, some plague. But Grace was never afraid. She knew – then, at least – that I would never bring her harm.
On our way down, I lost my boot to a bog. I remember being so nervous about telling my mother that I barely said a word to Grace as we walked back. She wouldn’t understand, I thought. A yeoman’s daughter, she’d had new boots every twelvemonth. My mother had sold cheese and damson jam from dawn till dusk, and tended each sick villager who came to our door to pay the cobbler to repair mine.
But Grace had come in with me, when we’d got to the cottage, and had told my mother it was her fault the boot had been lost to the mud. She’d insisted on giving me her spare pair.
I’d worn them for years after, until they pinched my toes purple. I’d been saving them, thinking I’d give them to my own daughter one day.
There was another reason that this summer, of our thirteenth year, was so strong in my mind when I looked at her across the courtroom. It was the last of our friendship.
And the last of my innocence.
In the autumn, as the leaves fell from the beech trees, Grace’s mother fell sick.
My mother woke me well before dawn, candlelight chasing shadows from her face.
‘Grace is coming here. Something is wrong,’ she told me.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
She said nothing, but stroked the crow that perched on her shoulder, its feathers sparkling with rain.
It was the scarlatina, Grace said, as she sat at our table not long after, still trying to catch her breath. She’d run the whole 2 miles from the Metcalfe farm. Her mother had lain, pink-cheeked and sweating, in her bed for three days and two nights, she said. When she was awake, which was rare, she cried out for her long-dead babies.
Grace told us that her father had called for the doctor, who’d said that the patient had too much blood in her body. All that blood was boiling her from the inside out. I watched my mother’s face, her mouth set in a grim line, as Grace went on. The doctor had put leeches on her mother, Grace said, only it wasn’t helping. The leeches were growing fatter while she grew weaker.
My mother stood. I watched as she filled her basket with clean cloths, and jars of honey and elderberry tincture.
‘Altha, fetch our cloaks,’ she said. ‘We must make haste, girls. If the physician keeps bleeding her, I fear she will not last the night.’
The moon was obscured by cloud and drizzle, so that I could barely see as we walked. My mother strode on determined, gripping my hand tight. I could hear Grace breathing hard next to me.
In the darkness and the wet, I could not see my mother’s crow, but I knew that she flew on ahead through the trees, and that this gave my mother strength.
We were halfway there when the rain grew heavier. Water dripped from my hood into my eyes. In the rush to leave I had forgotten my gloves, and my hands were numb with cold. It seemed like an age until I saw the squat, sunken shape of the Metcalfe farmhouse in the distance, the windows yellow with candlelight.
We found William Metcalfe slumped over his wife’s sickbed. There was no sign of the physician. The bedchamber was filled with candles, a score of them at least: more than my mother and I used in a month.
‘Mama does not care for the dark,’ Grace whispered.
In the bed, Grace’s mother looked like she was asleep. Only, it was no kind of sleep that I had ever seen before. Anna Metcalfe’s chest rose and fell rapidly under her nightgown. In the leaping candlelight, I could see her eyelids flickering with movement. Then her eyes opened and she half rose from the bed, screaming and tearing at a leech at her temple, before sinking back down again.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ William Metcalfe murmured over his wife’s crumpled form, ‘pray for us sinners …’
He turned suddenly, having heard us come in at that moment. I saw he clutched a string of crimson beads to his lips: these he quickly stowed in the pouch of his breeches.
‘What the devil are you doing here?’ he asked. He looked hollowed out by exhaustion, his face almost as pale as his wife’s.
‘I brought them, Papa,’ said Grace. ‘Goodwife Weyward can help. She knows things …’
‘Naive child,’ he spat. ‘Those things she knows won’t save your mother. They’ll condemn her soul. Is that what you want for her?’
‘Please, William. Be reasonable,’ said my mother in a tight voice. ‘You can see that the leeches are just making her worse. Your wife is frightened and in pain. She needs cool cloths, and honey and elderberry, to soothe her.’
As she spoke, Anna let out a moan. Grace began to cry.
‘Please, Papa, please,’ she said.
William Metcalfe looked at his wife, then at his daughter. A vein throbbed at his temple.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But you must stop if I say so. And if she dies, it will be on your head.’
My mother nodded. She set about removing the leeches from Anna’s skin, asked Grace to fetch a jug of water and a cup. When these arrived, she knelt by the bedside and tried to get Anna to drink, but the liquid just dribbled down her chin. She laid a damp cloth over her forehead. Anna muttered, and I saw her fists clenching and unclenching beneath the bedclothes.
I sat down next to my mother.
‘Will you try the elderberry tincture?’ I asked.
‘She is very far gone,’ my mother said, keeping her voice low. ‘I am not sure she will be able to take it in. We may be too late.’
She took the small bottle of purple liquid from her basket and un-stoppered it. She held the dropper over Anna’s mouth and squeezed. A dark splash fell on her lips, staining them.
As I watched, Anna’s whole body began to shake. Her eyes opened, flashing white. Foam collected at the corners of her mouth.
‘Anna!’ William rushed forward, pushing us out of the way. He tried to hold his wife’s body still. I turned around and saw Grace standing in the far corner of the room, her hands over her mouth.
‘Grace, do not watch,’ I said, crossing the room. I put my hands over her eyes. ‘Do not watch,’ I said again, my lips so close to her face that I could smell the sweetness of her skin.
The room was filled with the terrible sounds of the bedframe shaking, of William Metcalfe saying his wife’s name over and over.
Then it grew quiet.
I did not need to turn around to know that Anna Metcalfe was dead.
‘Why did you not save her?’ I asked my mother as we walked home. It was still raining. Cold mud seeped into my boots. The boots that Grace had given me.