Oh God. The baby.
She places her hands over her stomach, willing her child to show her some sign of life.
Please. Kick. Let me know you’re OK.
But there is nothing.
She needs to get help. Wincing at a bolt of pain in her shoulder, she twists to reach for her phone on the passenger seat. Please God, don’t let it be broken.
She exhales with relief when she sees that the screen is intact. Relief turns to horror when, unlocking it, she sees only one bar of reception: it flickers for a moment, then disappears.
Shit.
She thinks she’s about 5 miles from the cottage: the road loops around the fells in long, lazy circles, adding extra distance. The direct route, across the fells, is shorter. Two miles, no more, she thinks.
At this hour, while the light dims in the sky, the woods seem so black and thick that it feels as if the car has been swallowed up by a beast and has come to rest in its ribcage. She imagines the dark stretch of trees, a spine running across the land.
She could wait by the side of the road, see if someone drives past. Then she remembers how quiet it is here, how she hasn’t seen a single other car for the entire journey back from Ivy Gate. And no one is going to take to the roads in a blizzard. She could be waiting till morning. It’s already so cold in the car with the broken windscreen. People die of exposure in situations like this, don’t they?
She doesn’t have a choice. If she wants to get home before night falls, she’ll have to walk.
She pushes the car door open, scraping against branches, gasping as the cold hits her.
Snowflakes sting her face as she makes her way back to the road, stumbling over icy tree roots and clogs of mud. The tarmac is dusted white. There is the body of the animal – it is a hare, she sees now – splayed out and flattened. She can’t take the road, not unless she wants to risk sharing its fate.
She turns back to the woods, the leaves hissing with the wind.
There’s only one way home.
37
ALTHA
When five days had passed, I collected the mixture from the attic and strained it. As I bottled it, I saw that it was a clear amber colour, like the waters of the beck.
Two nights later, Grace came, as she had said she would. I remember it was a clear night, and the moon hung bright in the sky. This time, Grace wore a shawl wound tight around her neck and chin, so that only her eyes were visible, flashing beneath her cap.
She would not come in.
‘Are you quite well?’ I asked, for she was a strange sight, with her face half covered like a bandit.
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice muffled by the shawl. ‘Do you have the tincture?’
‘It will be painful,’ I said as I gave it to her. ‘It will bring on cramps and blood. And with the blood, the beginnings of the babe. Will you tell John it is a miscarriage?’
‘I will burn the remains. John cannot know,’ she said. ‘How soon will it take effect?’
‘In a matter of hours, I should think,’ I said. ‘But I cannot be sure.’
‘Thank you. I will take it tomorrow night, while he is at the alehouse. His sleep is restless tonight – I must be getting back quickly.’
She turned to go.
‘Will you – will you let me know that you are well?’ I asked. ‘That it has worked?’
‘I will try to come another night and tell you.’
She walked away quickly, taking care to open the gate so that it did not creak, although there was no one around for miles.
I passed the next days and nights in a state of distraction. In the evenings, I flinched at the slightest of sounds, then lay restless on my pallet until the night sky paled with dawn.
On the Wednesday, Mary Dinsdale, the baker’s wife, came to see me about a cut on her hand.
‘Have you heard the news from the village?’ she asked, as I dressed the wound with honey.
My heart jolted. I was sure she was going to tell me that Grace had died, but it was just that the Merrywether widower was engaged to be married.
The following night, there was a knock on my door.
It was Grace. This time, her face was uncovered – she wasn’t even wearing her cap – and when I raised my candle, I flinched at the sight of it. The skin around her right eye was swollen pink and shiny, her bottom lip bruised and torn. There was a smear of blood on her chin, and bright flecks of it on her collar. I noticed faint yellow marks on her neck.
I led her inside and she sat slowly at the table. I put a pot of water on the fire and gathered some rags, so that I could clean the cut on her lip and soothe the swelling of her eye. When the water had warmed, I combined it with ground cloves and sage for a poultice. Once this was ready I knelt next to her and applied it to her wounds, as gently as I could.
‘Grace. What has happened?’ I said quietly.
‘I took the draught last night,’ she said, her eyes on the floor. ‘As soon as he had set off for the alehouse. Some nights, when he drinks, he comes home early and falls asleep by the kitchen fire. Other times, he is out much later, and when he comes home he is … without his senses.
‘It would have been easier if he had come home early and fallen asleep until morning. I could have stayed up in the bedchamber and, when it was over, burned my shift. I have two others so perhaps he would not have noticed. I would have just needed to take care not to bloody the bedclothes.
‘But he didn’t come home. Not for hours. The pain was so much worse than I thought it would be, so early. You should have warned me. It felt as if the babe was gripping at me from the inside, fighting the draught … so much pain caused by such a small thing. When it came out, it didn’t even look like a baby at all, or anything living that I have ever seen. Just a mass of flesh, like something one might buy from the butcher …’ She was crying now.
‘I was getting ready to throw it on the fire when he returned. I thought that maybe he would be too drunk to know what he was looking at. But he was not. I told him that I had lost it – I had hidden the tincture bottle – and he was angry. As I knew he would be. He hit me, as you can see. Though compared to the other times, he was almost merciful.’
She laughed that dry, crackling laugh again, but her eyes shone with tears.
‘Grace,’ I said. ‘Do you mean to say that he has – he has been even rougher with you than this?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘After I laboured – twice – and gave him a blue corpse instead of a bonny, bouncing son.’
I was silent. She looked up and saw the shock in my face.
‘I made sure no one knew I was pregnant, the second time,’ she said. ‘I tightened my stays over the bump and, when I got bigger, took care to see as few people as I could. In case it happened again. Then – afterwards – Doctor Smythson was sworn to secrecy. John didn’t want anyone to know that his wife had a poison womb.’
‘I am so sorry, Grace. I wish you had come to me. Perhaps I could have helped.’
She laughed again.
‘There’s no helping it,’ she said. ‘Doctor Smythson says he cannot find the reason. But it makes sense to me – God could not mean for a living child to be brought into the world by such an ugly act.’
She looked away, staring into the fire.
‘That is why I came to you,’ she said. ‘I thought that if it happened again – if this baby were dead like the others – he might kill me.’