Two days later, I’m bringing the bowl of red-tinged water and used bandages down from Leonora’s room after her evening treatment; she complained there’s been no change and I told her to be patient. I’m just outside the kitchen when I hear raised voices: Burdon and Mrs Charlton and Luned. Usually there is a veneer of harmony amongst the staff – or at least since my arrival, or at least in front of me. I remind myself that there’s only so much I can know of what went on prior. I pause, wait by the closed door, listening.
‘It’s not her fault, Cadec Burdon, I’d swear on it.’ That’s Mrs Charlton.
‘The girl’s slack as a sow’s tits and you know it. Getting worse by the day.’ Burdon, with a nastiness I’ve never heard from him before. ‘She left it out by the hearth, then panicked when she realised what she’d done. Luned, be honest: you put the ruined milk in the cool room after it spoiled, didn’t you?’
‘I put it away when I was meant to, Mr Burdon, I swear! As soon as Tib Postlethwaite delivered it.’ She sounds like a wounded child; where’s the piss and vinegar I’ve become accustomed to?
‘Then why is it curdled, girl?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’ Luned’s voice trembles.
‘She did put it away, Burdon, I watched her do it.’ Mrs Charlton sounds as if she’s about to lose her temper.
‘Well, that’s as may be but the milk’s still spoiled. It’s a bloody waste.’ His voice is shaking, the anger burning down.
‘There’ll be more brought in the morning, you know that. In plenty of time for their breakfast.’ There’s a pause and I imagine her raising a finger to Burdon’s narrow face. ‘And you won’t say another word about it, not to Mistress or Master.’
‘No point saying anything to Master,’ he snipes.
I push into the kitchen to see them huddled by the table, glaring at the three large blue jugs thereon and each other. Luned’s been crying and she swipes at her cheeks in embarrassment as she sees me.
‘Is all well?’ I ask and go to the sink to wash the bowl and bandages. Luned flounces out without a word, and Burdon follows her a few moments later with nothing more than a nod to me. Mrs Charlton remains staring at the crocks. I hang the bandages by the fire to dry, then approach, touch her arm.
‘Mrs Charlton? What’s happened?’ As if I’d not been eavesdropping.
She points at the table. ‘That girl… she put the milk away. I saw her take it from Tib’s hands, pour it into these containers, hand the pail back, and then take them straight to the cool room. Even if she’d left it out a few hours in this weather? Nothing would have happened like that.’
I lean closer to the table and the smell rising from the vessels makes me gag. It’s ridiculously strong, terrible as decay. The milk is a dark grey, an oily slick covering the top instead of a layer of fresh cream. It might have curdled if left by the heat of the fire, but this colour? I’ve never smelled anything like it, but I’ve heard of it happening. A shiver creeps up my spine.
‘What could do that?’
‘Sometimes such things happen, Mrs Charlton. Perhaps the cows had eaten some plant that was not healthful. I have seen it happen.’ I have not. ‘There’s nothing to worry about – beyond Burdon blaming Luned.’
‘Miss Jessamine’s complaining of a cold spot in the hallway outside her room.’ Seemingly off on a tangent, she twists her hands.
‘Mrs Charlton—’
‘And last eve I found the front door wide open well after midnight. I don’t know why I came down, but there it was, agape to the night and whatever’s in it. How did that happen?’
‘Perhaps Burdon forgot…’
‘Does that man strike you as likely to forget his duties?’
Perhaps if he’d overindulged in his preferred brandy, I think. ‘Mayhap Eli…’
‘Boy’s an arrant fool but he knows better than to leave the house unsecured. There are times when you leave the ways open – and you take precautions – but last night wasn’t one of them. Last night was the ordinary sort when things slip in that you don’t want in your home.’
I stare at her. She’s not stupid, Mrs Charlton, but I don’t know what else to tell her. Certainly I don’t need her speaking of ghosts, bringing the priest up here to cleanse the place – then I remember Leonora won’t have the god-hound in the house. ‘I’ve not felt anything. Nor seen anything.’
‘Nor me, but who knows when such things make themselves known?’
‘I think it best to be calm, Mrs Charlton. Let’s not panic until we need to. And if there’s anything about, well, then there are ways to deal with it. I’m sure you’ve got some ideas.’
‘And I’m sure you do, too, Asher Todd, for all your clever ways.’
You don’t know the half of it.
‘Let’s wait, then? Make plans when and if we need to. But perhaps put those outside the door and deal with them in the morning? Too late to start with such a mess.’ I smile. ‘I was going to make a pot of tea. Will you join me? No milk, of course.’
She nods. When I’m done, I find a bottle of ordinary old whiskey in the pantry and throw a generous drop in each cup. We sit by the fire, as we’ve done before. When I sense she’s calmed, her shoulders have lowered instead of hunching about her ears, when her hands loosen their grip on the mug, I clear my throat.
‘That little building by the stream, with the millwheel?’ I ask, and she raises a brow. ‘What’s it for? No one seems to go there.’
‘That,’ she says, ‘was made over for Master Luther when he went off to Whitebarrow University to become a doctor. It was a mill from when this family were less important and there was no big house here – now the Aclands in the Tarn are the millers. Mr and Mrs Morwood had it converted into a little surgery for Master Luther.’
I blink. A tremor runs through my right arm, a strangely localised shock. Whitebarrow. ‘Mr Morwood is a trained physician?’
She sniggers, leans close, shakes her head. ‘Burdon told me. The young master was sent off to the university town; it was his finest wish to study, though his parents weren’t too keen. But Luther insisted and they gave in, which I’m given to understand had been the way of things. They converted that little structure so Luther Morwood would have somewhere to play doctor and look after the health of those on the estate and in the Tarn.’
‘What happened?’ I almost say No one’s been in there in years.
‘Failed his studies. And behaved abominably by all accounts, such that he was sent down. All that wasted money. A matter of great shame. Burdon said that’s what set the old man off on his own merry path to the grave via every gambling den and whorehouse he could find along the way.’ She sits back and looks very satisfied; Mrs Charlton truly does not like Luther Morwood, but keeps it well concealed from him. Whenever I see her interacting with him she’s nothing but polite, businesslike: Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir.
‘Yet there’s no doctor in the village?’
‘Was one but he died and Mr Morwood’s never let him be replaced. If it’s not too bad it clears up. If it’s otherwise then nature takes its course and we all go down to the bone orchard. Women in childbed rely on the women around them; when Miss Jessamine’s been pregnant, the doctor comes from Bellsholm to make sure she’s safe.’ I stare at her. ‘Those in the Tarn make do with whatever the apothecary knows; some of the women have remedies, but no one wants to be too obvious about it lest that old priest screams, Witch.’
‘But what about the family?’
‘The old mistress called in a man from Youngling’s Brook about her eyes, but he wasn’t able to offer any help. Nor any specialists from the big places.’
‘There’s a convent not far from here,’ I say, almost to myself. ‘They’ve a sanatorium attached.’ The tea in my hands is cold now and I’ve barely taken a sip. ‘The nuns are clever healers or so I’ve heard.’ It’s also where the clever Whitebarrow doctor-professors send any cases they cannot cure or kill off, a convenient hiding place − except for the fact that the nuns there do often manage what the medical men do not.
I wonder at Luther not allowing a physician here – could he really not bear to have one around? To see someone succeed where he’d failed? To let the folk of the Tarn suffer because of his ego? It is not beyond imagining. Mrs Charlton sighs and rises. She reaches for her empty mug; I raise a hand. ‘Leave it, Mrs Charlton. I’ll tidy. Off you go, you look tired.’
I clean up after she’s gone, but I do not go to bed.
* * *
I knock on the cottage door and listen; I seem to do that a lot. Truly, much of my life seems to have been spent waiting outside rooms, hoping to be let in. The memory annoys me and I turn the handle, pushing just as he calls, ‘Come in.’
I’ve only seen him at a distance these past few days, and the desire to take the knife again, do a proper job, has only marginally lessened. I know it’s nothing more than anger and humiliation. That he made me afraid and I don’t like being afraid; so much of my early life was spent in that state.
I want myself back, I want my equilibrium returned and I will take it.
The cottage is an open space, small; a big bed in one corner, a tiny kitchen in another with a table and two chairs, a settee by the fire, its fabric worn but once pretty, a blue and gold brocade, something discarded from the big house as no longer good enough and that washed up here as too good to throw away. The only part of the room that’s closed off is one corner; a bathroom, I imagine.
Eli’s standing by the table, pouring water from a heavy iron kettle into a blue enamel mug. He’s wearing dark trews and an undershirt that’s got pink stains across the chest.
‘You’re bleeding.’
‘I wonder why,’ he says.
‘Take your shirt off.’
‘Now, now. A man likes a little romance first.’
I move to where he stands, put my hands on my hips. ‘Perhaps you’d rather I tell Mr Morwood he’s got one of the wicked wolves in his employ?’
‘What makes you think he doesn’t know?’
‘Because I think if he did he’d have either hunted you over hill and dale, or pinned you on the table in his little surgery trying to figure out what makes you tick.’
Eli removes his undershirt and sits heavily on one of the rough-hewn kitchen chairs. I put my satchel on the table.
The laceration is longer than I recalled, from the mid-point of his chest to partway across the top of his arm before it becomes shoulder; it’s scabbed over but there’s some pallid liquid seeping. I take a bowl from a range of mismatched crockery on the sideboard; some white with blue patterns, others with pink and orange roses – old lady’s crockery, inherited from a mother or aunt or grandmother, gathered together as pieces break. I pour in hot water from the kettle, add a little cold from the tap over the stone carved sink, then fish a pouch from my satchel. I roughly tear the water betony stalks and leaves to sprinkle them into the container, then leave it to steep. I pull the other seat up and sit in front of Eli, our knees almost touching. I take a soft cloth from my bag, dip it into the fluid, dab tenderly at the wound.
‘Why are you doing this?’ he asks in a low voice.
‘Because if it gets infected, I’m given to understand there’s no doctor closer than a week’s journey. And if you die, who will answer my questions?’
‘What makes you think I’ll answer your questions?’
I press none-too-kindly at the cut and he sucks in breath through clenched teeth. I grin.
‘Tell me,’ I say, ‘about the wicked wolves.’
He hesitates and I press again.
‘Ah, gently for the love of fuck!’
‘As gently as you knocked me over?’
‘I don’t… don’t know my own strength when I’m in that shape.’
‘Indeed.’
He looks away, shakes his head. We both know it’s no excuse.
‘I’ll start: Once upon a time, the wicked wolves of the woods had the run of this land, before the Morwoods came. The wicked wolves hunted the people of the Tarn until one day a good god-hound took it upon himself to destroy this terrible scourge. Just one god-hound against a legion of wicked wolves.’ I grin. ‘This is the story Albertine tells me, and I’ve not been able to find anything – thus far – in my reading to either support or disprove this.’
He glares.
‘Yet here you are, clearly wolfish, or worse than a wolf and clearly neither dead nor vanquished. A wolf of the woods and, my experience would suggest, wicked.’
He raises a hand in surrender.
‘I know nothing more than my grandmother told me when I was a littlie,’ he says and I’m much gentler as I pat the wound dry. Reward good behaviour. ‘We were never the predators they said we were, and never hunted children. Bad husbands, dangerous men, cruel mothers; folk no one would miss if they thought about it.’ He smiles without mirth. ‘Those who weakened the village, who made it worse. And we kept the rest from harm, from outsiders, raiders and robbers and the like. It’s a very long time ago, Asher Todd, but the Tarn was always safe because the wolves maintained the borders.’
‘What happened?’
He shrugs. ‘A Morwood happened. That’s all my gran would say. We were slain.’
‘Not all of you.’
He shakes his head. ‘Some slipped through and away, hid in plain sight. Some neighbours remained kind. The line weakened. Here I am, the last of the blood.’
‘Why are you still here?’
‘Where else would I go? My people bled into this land. I stay here… I’m part of it.’ He hoods his eyes, turns away. I wonder if at night he dreams of once again running freely, of being lord of this place like his ancestors once were.
‘I’ve never seen anything like you, but I’ve read about them.’ I sit back. ‘All that power to shift and you use it to frighten governesses.’
He blushes. ‘Only one governess.’
‘Not the one before me?’ I risk asking – Jessamine mentioned her openly the other day, so perhaps I will get away with it. There is a jar of ointment, calendula and goldenrod in a suspension of lanolin, and I tenderly apply it to the cut.
‘A soft silly little girl? Where’s the fun in that? No challenge.’
‘Where did she go? The one before me?’
He shrugs. ‘Here one day, gone the next. Master Luther said she’d had a family emergency.’
‘Leave your shirt off a while, let that soak in, let the wound dry.’ I hold up a herb sachet and the jar of salve. ‘Bathe it with the water betony and apply the ointment morning and night until it runs out.’
He grabs my hand; his palms are prickly, his grip strong. ‘You’re not going to come and attend to me yourself morning and night?’
‘I’ve better things to do.’ I rise, pulling away. He doesn’t fight me, but raises a brow, leans back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest and winces as a result. ‘And if you try to scare me again, be in no doubt that I’ll finish what I started.’
He gives something that’s a little grunt, a little snort of a laugh. I repack my bag ready to step into the night. ‘Eli?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you leave the front door open at the big house last night?’
‘What kind of fool do you take me for? And have Mrs Charlton after my hide?’
I shrug and turn away, put my hand to the doorknob.
‘Asher Todd?’ His tone is tentative. Surprising.
I look over my shoulder. His expression is one of shame, a boy caught out.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for trying to scare you. I’m sorry for knocking you over. It was stupid and cruel. I am sorry.’ He nods.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was. But thank you for apologising.’
I can count on one hand the number of apologies I’ve had in my life from men. Then I’m out the door, striding back through the darkness towards the last light of the manor. I only just set foot in the kitchen when there’s a bloodcurdling scream from the floors above, loud enough to reach me and communicate pure terror. I set off at a run.