His world – with its own set of bewildering rules and jargon – couldn’t have been more foreign to her. And yet he’d listened attentively as she’d gushed about her job in children’s publishing. About the thrill of reading manuscripts, of immersing herself in a story that no one else had yet experienced. She’d even told him how reading had been such a comfort – a life raft, really – after her father’s death.
‘I love your passion,’ he’d said, placing his hand on hers, the fine hairs of his arm gold in the candlelight. And then, with a tenderness that made tears prick her eyes, ‘Your father would be very proud of you.’
Other images from that night haunt her, too. Simon helping her into a taxi, asking her to his for a nightcap. Sinking down into his soft leather couch, brain muddled from too much wine …
‘You’re so much prettier when you smile,’ he’d said, as she laughed at one of his jokes. He had leaned over, brushed the hair from her face and kissed her for the first time. He touched her gently at first, as if she were a wild animal he might spook away. Then the kiss deepened, and his fingers were firm on her jaw.
I must have you.
It was romantic, she told herself the next morning, the way he undid her trousers, pulled down her underwear, pushed himself inside her. The strength of his need.
In the early days of their relationship, she returned to that memory again and again, smoothing its rough edges into a lie she almost believed. It would be years before she remembered the word she had whispered, mind and body dulled by alcohol, as his face blurred over hers.
Wait.
Suddenly, she can’t bear the sight of the letters anymore. She folds them up and puts them aside.
She clutches her mug of tea tightly, letting it warm her hands. Outside, it is raining in earnest now; the windows are jewelled with it. She can’t see the garden, but she thinks she can hear the branches of the sycamore, scraping across the roof in the wind.
Nausea grips her stomach. The only sign of the baby, other than a new heaviness to her breasts. She wonders if it is normal, this feeling that her guts are pushing up into her throat, if it indicates how far along she is. Almost two months since her last period, since the familiar twist of pain in her womb, the smear of blood on her underwear. Always the colour of silt, of soil, on the first day. Looking more like something from the earth than from her own body.
Simon didn’t care for blood, unless he’d been the one to draw it. He collected the bruises that bloomed across her skin as if they were trophies, fingering them with pride. But her menstrual blood flowed from her body with its own rhythm, one that he didn’t care for and couldn’t control. He hated the feel of it, slimy and fibrous. The smell. Like an animal, he said. Or something dead. So, Kate had one week a month when her body was her own.
And now she is sharing it.
She pictures the clump of cells, clinging to her insides. Even now, splitting and reforming, growing. Into their child.
Will it be a boy, she wonders, and grow up to be like Simon? Or a girl, and grow up to be like her?
She isn’t sure what would be worse.
16
ALTHA
It had been strange, seeing Grace again. Strange to think of how we’d started off together, side by side, and had ended up with a courtroom yawning between us. She in her neat gown and me in my shackles. A prisoner.
The dungeons were silent, but for a distant wail that might have been the wind, or the souls of those already condemned. I searched for the spider, looking under the matted straw, and my heart ached at the thought that it had gone, had left me to my fate. But just as I had given up hope, and curled myself into a ball on the ground, I felt it brush against my earlobe. I wished I could see it: the glitter of its eyes and pincers, but the night was too dark, with not even a sliver of moonlight coming through the grate. So dark that I felt as if I were in my grave already.
If I were to have a grave, that was. I didn’t know what happened to witches after they were hanged. I wondered whether anyone buried them. Whether anyone would bury me.
I wanted to be buried. If I must depart this life, I thought, let me live on in the soil: let me feed the earthworms, nourish the roots of the trees, like my mother and her mother before her.
Really, it wasn’t death I feared. It was dying. The process of it; the pain. Death had always sounded so peaceful, when it was spoken of in church: a gathering of lambs to the bosom, a return to the kingdom. But I had seen it too many times to believe that. The sweep of the reaper’s shadow over an old man, a woman, a child. The face contorting, the limbs flailing, the desperate gasp for air. There was no peace in any death I had seen. I would find no peace in mine.
When I did sleep, I saw the noose, tight around my neck. I saw the breath choked out of me in a white vapour. I saw my body, twisting in the breeze.
They had finished with Grace, it seemed. But I saw her there in the gallery when they took me into the dock the next morning. As of course one would expect. What woman would not want to know the fate of her husband’s accused murderer?
We rose when the judges entered the courtroom. I saw one of them look at me, eyes narrowed, as if I were the rot at the centre of the apple, a canker to be cut away.
The prosecutor called the physician, Doctor Smythson, to the stand. As I knew he would.
They had brought him to see me, at the village gaol. Before they brought me to Lancaster. Though I was mad with hunger and exhaustion, I had not yielded to their questions. They asked if I had ever attended a witches’ sabbath, had ever suckled a familiar or lain with a beast. If I had given myself to Satan, as his bride.
If I had killed John Milburn.
No, I said, though my throat was caked with thirst and my stomach groaned with want. No. It took all my strength to force the word from my body. To protest my innocence.
I had, until then, held on to hope as if it were a stone in my hand.
But when they brought Doctor Smythson to the gaol I feared it was over.
Now, I watched him take his oath on the Bible. He was an old man, and his veins made red patterns on his cheeks. That’ll be the drink, my mother would say, if she were here. He’d indulged in it as much as he’d prescribed it. Though that was by far his least dangerous method of treatment. As I looked at him, I remembered Grace’s mother, Anna Metcalfe: her milk-white face, the colour sucked out of her by leeches.
The prosecutor began his questioning.
‘Doctor Smythson, you recall the events of New Year’s Day, in this, the year of our Lord 1619?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you able to relate them for the court?’
The physician spoke with confidence. He was a man, after all. He had no reason to think he would not be believed.
‘I began the day at dawn, as is my custom. I’d been up late, the night before, with a patient. The family had given me some eggs. I remember I ate them with my wife that morning. We had not long broken our fast when there was a hammering at the door.’
‘Who was at the door?’
‘It was Daniel Kirkby.’
‘And what did Daniel Kirkby want?’
‘I remember thinking he looked very pale. At first I thought he might have taken ill himself but then he told me there’d been some sort of incident, at the Milburn farm. Involving John Milburn. From his face, I knew it was not good. I collected my coat and my bag and set off to the farm with the boy.’