I staggered towards the road out of the town, keeping my head bent in case anyone should recognise me. Everywhere, I jostled through crowds, the warm press of bodies making me sweat and panic.
‘Have you heard the news?’ One woman said to another. ‘Queen Anne has died!’
A man shouted; another woman uttered a prayer for the queen’s soul. The babble of voices rose in pitch, and the crowd pushed and heaved. My thoughts swam. In a wild moment, I had the thought that it should have been me who died, that there had been some great error, my life saved instead of hers.
My heart froze at the feel of a rough hand on my shoulder. I turned, fearing it was someone from the gallery, come to right the jury’s wrongs, to set me back on the path to death. But it was one of the jurors. The square-jawed man with the pitying eyes.
I saw for the first time the richness of his clothing: both his cape and doublet were embroidered with silver thread. Standing in front of him in my crude gown, I felt every bit the pauper I was.
For a while, neither of us spoke as the crowd flowed around us.
‘My wife,’ he said eventually, slowly, as if it pained him to speak the words. ‘She nearly died in childbed, delivering our son. A wise woman in our village saved both their lives. Beatrice, she was called. I said nothing, when they accused her. She was hanged.’
He took a velvet pouch from his breeches and pressed it into my hands, before melting away into the throng.
I looked inside the pouch and saw gold coins. I understood, then, that I had this man – or the woman who saved his family – to thank for my life.
On the road, I found a pedlar travelling by donkey and cart. He would take me back to my village, he said, for one of the gold coins. I should have been wary of him, a strange man in the dark, but I reasoned that even if he killed me it would be a quick death compared to the long one I faced on the road, without food or shelter.
The pedlar gave me some ale and a sweetmeat. Then he put me in his cart, amongst his wares, which were soft shawls and blankets. Nestled among them, I felt almost as if I too were an exotic ware from some distant land, spun from foreign cloth. I tried to stay awake but the blankets were warm and comfortable and the motion of the cart gentle and rocking, as I imagined the ocean to be.
When I woke next, we were half a mile from Crows Beck.
I knew when I saw the gate swinging on its hinges that the villagers had been at the cottage. Those who broke bread with William Metcalfe, who mourned John Milburn.
The shutters had been torn from the window, and lay in a splintered, ruined heap.
The front door was dented, the lock broken. Inside, shards of glass sparkled on the floor like fallen stars, and I had to be careful where I stepped. The smell of herbs and fruit hung rotten in the air and I realised they had broken my precious jars of salves and tinctures.
I lay down on my pallet, which was slashed so that tufts of straw poked through. I slept. When I woke at dawn it was to a sea of broken things.
It took me the better part of two days to put the cottage to rights. Mercifully, they had left my dear goat unharmed, though my absence meant that her ribs now showed clearly through her hide and, when I put my hand to her, she bleated in fear. ‘All will be well,’ I murmured as I led her inside, though I was not at all sure that it would.
One of the chickens had died, but the other had lived. I could still have eggs for my breakfast, and milk from the goat. I made nettle soup and dandelion tea from the plants in the garden. They hadn’t got to the vegetable plot, either, so I pulled beets and carrots from the earth and ate and pickled them. They were small, misshapen things, hard with frost and forced from the soil before their time.
I broke up one of the chairs and used this for firewood. The cottage was very cold, with the shutters gone from the windows, and I ripped one of Mother’s old gowns in two and used it to block the draught from getting in.
When I had done all this, I was ready.
I took down the parchment, quill and inkhorn from the hiding place in the attic, thankful that it had not been discovered.
Then I sat at the table and began to write.
I have been writing for three days and three nights now, pausing only to make fires and food, and to check on the animals. I do not want to sleep until I have finished.
They could come back, you see. The villagers. They could drag me through the village square, in protest against the verdict, and hang me themselves. Or they could find another crime to accuse me of.
So I must write what has happened while I still breathe. Perhaps I will go away from here, when I have finished. I do not yet know. The thought of travelling on the open road frightens me. And I cannot bear to leave the cottage behind. I wish I were a snail, and the cottage my shell that I carried with me everywhere. Then I would be safe.
It is hard to write the next part of my story. So hard that, even though it happened first – before I was arrested, tried and acquitted – I come to write it last. My heart has shrunk away from it until now.
But I promised to set things down as they happened and this I will do. The act of it brings me comfort. Perhaps if someone reads this, if someone speaks my name after my body has rotted in the earth, I will live on.
I am trying to think of where the beginning is. Who decides where things begin and end? I do not know if time moves in a straight line, or a circle. Here, the years do not pass so much as loop back on themselves: winter becomes spring becomes summer becomes autumn becomes winter again. Sometimes I think that all of time is happening at once. So you could say that this story begins now, as I sit down to write it, or you could say that it began when the first Weyward woman was born, so many moons ago.
Or you could say it began a twelvemonth ago today.
Last winter was a cold one, stretching its fingers well into spring. On this particular night early in 1618, there was a storm, and so when I heard the pounding, I thought it was only the wind at the door. But the goat, who I keep near me in the winter months, looked up with eyes of liquid fear.
A high female voice called my name.
When you have grown up with someone, as close as sisters, you come to know her voice even better than your own. Even if you have not heard it call your name for seven years.
So I knew before I opened the door and saw her, standing there with shadows ringing her eyes, that it was Grace.
32
VIOLET
The doctor’s hands were cold on Violet’s abdomen.
‘Hmm,’ he said. Violet could see white specks of dandruff clinging to his brilliantined hair. He turned to Nanny Metcalfe, who hovered next to Violet like an anxious moth, her hands wrung red.
‘Are her menses regular?’ he asked.
Menses? Whatever were those? Violet wondered if the doctor had meant her mens, Latin for mind. Well, that certainly wasn’t regular. Far from it. For instance, although she knew that it was the doctor who was touching her, not Frederick, and that she was lying comfortable and safe in her bed rather than in the woods, her heart fluttered in her throat. The smell of brandy and crushed flowers returned and she fought the impulse to retch. She wanted desperately for the doctor to take his hands away, for him to stop poking and prodding at her stomach. It was taking all her willpower not to scream.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Nanny Metcalfe, flushing. ‘Always on the fifteenth, like clockwork.’
Violet thought of the clots and clumps of blood that came out of her every month, accompanied by days of cramping pain. So that was what he meant. She’d never heard the medical term for it before – Nanny Metcalfe always referred to it as her curse. It had barely occurred to Violet that it was something that happened to other girls, too. Last month was the first time it had let her alone in years. She hadn’t missed it one bit.