Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Matilda. Her hair was dark, her skin olive, and her eyes as yellow as corn. She lived in a small village with her parents and brothers. Some days she was industrious, working hard to help her mother around the house. Other days she would sit at the window and watch those who passed with the same stare men and dogs use to eye meat and women. No one quite knew what to make of her, but she harmed no one and was loyal and loving to her family, so the villagers tolerated her eccentricity.
Matilda’s maternal grandmother lived in a small cottage in the woods. She had a reputation as a wise woman, a healer, and – if crossed – as an efficient caster of curses. Matilda loved to spend time with her grandmother, who taught her herblore and told tales of women who chose to be something other than what society thought they should. Matilda’s mother did not like her daughter to spend too much time with the old woman, for her mother scared her and Beth feared that in time her daughter would grow to be like the old witch. Then God only knew what would happen.
A good few years after her bloods started, Matilda was still unmarried in a village that married off its females at a young age. It kept them busy – rearing children and tending a house left little time for questioning. Matilda, though, was different. What had been tolerated as amusing eccentricity in the child was seen as a streak of danger in a young woman.
At seventeen, Matilda walked with a swaying gait that mesmerised and unsettled those who watched. For a girl as yet unbedded she seemed to know how best to affect the men around her, and even some of the women. Her attraction was effortless, like a scent that floated from her skin and tickled the nostrils of her admirers.
Village boys her own age would have liked to know what waited under her skirts. They had tried to find out; some had worked up the courage to ask her to walk out with them, but when she rested her yellow eyes on them, their cool depths turned the would-be suitor’s knees to jelly and his heart to lead. Matilda smiled and walked on.
Her mother noticed the gazes that followed her daughter. Best, she thought, to take advantage of them, of the girl’s beauty, of the desire she roused. Beth approached several families with the offer of Matilda as a wife. While no one was so rude as to laugh out loud, no one accepted. As the tone of her offer became desperate, Matilda’s mother sensed pity in the eyes of those she entreated, shaking their heads and saying no.
Something about Matilda suggested she would not be easily quelled, would not go quietly to a bed not of her own choosing and, perhaps, children gotten on her and left in her care would turn out as different as their mother; a yellow hue of strangeness running in their veins.
* * *
Each time a boy faded from her daughter’s side Beth’s hopes shrank. They mingled with her fear and tasted of bitter almonds at the back of her throat.
One afternoon, she called her daughter to her. Beth’s voice was harsh, with disappointment, with the fear that put a hard edge on her concern for her child. And failure – she could smell the scent of failure on her own skin – in spite of her best efforts the child had turned out too much like her grandmother. When she closed her eyes, Matilda’s mother saw her daughter living alone and strange in a cottage deep in the woods.
On this particular afternoon, she handed Matilda a basket of food and told her to take it to her grandmother. The old woman was ill, unable to care for herself, and Matilda was to stay with her as long as she was needed. If the old woman died, then Matilda was to come home and the men would go back and bury the old witch.
‘Don’t you care, Mother?’
Taken aback, Beth slapped Matilda so hard that blood spurted from the girl’s nose. When the yellow eyes turned on her mother’s furiously pale face, they didn’t even blink.
Matilda wrapped herself in a red cloak that her grandmother had knitted. The wool was the same shade as the blood trickling from her nose; as she wiped the fluid away it settled into the warp and weft of the fabric as if it belonged there. She plucked the basket from her mother’s hand and turned. Beth’s voice stopped her momentarily.
‘She’s not how she should be. She never was, not a normal mother, not a normal woman. Nor are you.’ The yellow eyes flicked to her once more, amused, fluid, fearless.
‘No. Not like you,’ Matilda said, and with that the last apron string snapped as if severed by sharp, angry teeth. Matilda left, her hips and hair swaying. She did not see the outstretched hand reaching to pull back the words, nor the tears that ran down her mother’s face.
* * *
The way to Granny’s wended through the woods. Stick to the path, was the village wisdom. Don’t leave it or you might be lost – worse still, you might be changed. Change was worse than loss; change meant you no longer fitted into your place, you couldn’t be recognised by your kin, and that was the greatest danger of all.
A boy followed her. A little younger than her, but almost a man, and desperate to win the admiration of the older boys. The task he had chosen to prove himself was Matilda; his goal was amorphous. “Matilda” encompassed a myriad of things: walking out, kissing, sliding a hand up her skirt, or perhaps something more brutal, something he did not dare name.
He watched as the red cloak disappeared into the woods, flashing in and out of the trees and undergrowth. He hung back until they were far enough from the village that any protests she made would not be heard.
She cast a furtive look behind her and left the path, stepped into the undergrowth and tugged on the tie of her red cloak. The warm wool slipped from her shoulders as she disappeared between two enormous tree trunks.
Swiftly he moved forward then saw, coming from the other direction, an enormous grey wolf. A male, in its prime, almost five feet tall at the shoulder, with grey eyes to match its fur. It stopped, sniffed (the boy was grateful he was downwind), then followed Matilda’s scent.
The boy had only a small knife. He didn’t like Matilda enough to risk his life for her; then again, her gratitude might be worth something. Hearing nothing more, he moved forward.
The first noise to come to his ears was growling, low and hard. Next came a whimpering, a moan: deep, but female. He crept through the trees, his boot catching on something soft. Her cloak lay like a spill of blood, still warm from the touch of her skin, intimate against his hand. His eyes alighted on the rest of Matilda’s discarded clothes and then on Matilda herself.
She knelt on all fours, naked and brown, her face against that of the great grey wolf as they licked and sniffed at each other. Then she turned and offered herself to the beast, shaking with excitement, whimpering. The wolf covered her and she howled as he entered her.
As the boy watched, hard and panicked, he saw fur sprout over her limbs, saw her teeth lengthen and her jaw distend, saw her yellow eyes slit in lupine desire as the great wolf moved over her. Unable to stop himself, the boy rose. His movement caught Matilda’s attention. She howled in fury and, with an effort, pulled herself from her mate.
The boy’s eyes widened. He saw sharp teeth in a wet mouth, a white circle set within a red one. Saw the muscles in her forelegs tighten and bunch in the moment before she leapt. There was only sky above for the briefest of moments, then pain and a wet sound, and, finally, nothing more.
When the boy was still and bloody, she gave him one last shake. At this sign, the male, who had waited patiently, joined her and they ate their fill, as though at a bridal feast.
* * *
Matilda shrugged back into her human skin. She picked up her basket and her cloak and continued on her way. The great grey wolf loped beside her, sometimes pushing his head against her hand.
Behind them, a woodsman stumbled onto the remains of the boy. His distress was multiplied by the fact that he was the boy’s father. He tracked the wolf’s prints, noticing how they intersected with a human set of prints.
Matilda and her mate arrived at Granny’s house. The wolf waited patiently, lying across the doorstep like a large dog while Matilda entered.
‘Still alive?’ she asked the lump in the bed.
Laughter answered her as she put the kettle on the fire. Settling herself on the edge of the bed, Matilda held the old woman’s hand and peered into her face. Surrounded by hair that had once been black but was now almost white, the face was strange: thin, the angles more lupine than human, the pale eyes tilted towards the sides of the head, yet beautiful in the same way as a wild thing. She looked weary but well and Matilda thought she would recover.
‘Still alive, little sweet. What did you bring me? Some of your mother’s broth?’ Her eyes greedily picked at the basket lying on the table. ‘Did she send good wishes, too, my daughter?’
‘She fears.’ Matilda dropped her gaze, sadness that she had hidden from her mother showed there.
‘She always has,’ said Granny. ‘Beth fears for you more than she can love you. Because you’re different.’
‘Because I’m like you.’
‘Yes. Like me.’ She opened her mouth to continue but growling and shouting outside the cottage interrupted them.
Matilda put her nose to the windowpane in time to see a woodsman raise his axe and cleave her mate in two. She howled in despair. Her grandmother struggled out of bed.
The woodsman hacked at the body of the wolf, his sobs punctuating the slap of the axe in the wet flesh. The trees rang until the mingled sounds were absorbed into their bark, marking them as surely as age would.
The man stopped only when he heard the grandmother calling to him.
‘Thank you for saving us,’ she croaked. She touched his shoulder and urged him inside. He blinked his eyes to accustom them to the gloom of the cottage. ‘But we didn’t need saving.’
‘You killed my husband,’ said Matilda. She dropped her red cloak to the floor as her real covering made its way from inside to settle on her flesh.
* * *
In the autumn darkness, Matilda’s mother lay straight and stiff in her bed.
Her husband’s snoring stirred the air with a strange violence and she felt the urge to poke him awake, make him roll over, have him share her sleeplessness. But she had done it before and knew that it would earn her a slap across the ear, a casually bruising blow that would ache in the morning.
She turned on her side, facing the window, seeing the full face of the moon stare down at her. Beth could feel the pull of it in the tides of her blood and tried to studiously ignore it just as she had her whole life. Denying her mother, denying her self, denying her difference. Denying her only daughter.
Matilda had not come home. It was three days since anyone had seen her. The boy’s body had been found soon enough. When the party of hunters descended on the old woman’s cottage they found the remains of the woodsman, of Granny’s white nightdress and of Matilda’s red cloak, smouldering in the last coals of the fire.
A wolf had gotten in.
No, more than one: a pack.
Had to be a pack to slaughter three adults.
Matilda and her grandmother had been dragged away. Their bodies were being kept in some lupine larder.
Beth knew better. Her blood knew better. Somewhere they trod worn forest trails, the soft pads of their paws soundless and strong, eyes bright and all-seeing, coats soft as velvet and warm as wool, tongues long, wet and obscenely red.
A scratching at the door brought her back to the sleepless bed on which she lay. She slid from the sheets, slipped through the few rooms of the cottage silent as a shadow. In the front garden sat a young wolf. Behind it, outside the gate, sat another, older, its fur almost white. Two gazes, both intent, both cold, held her. Briefly she regretted opening the door, but it was a dried leaf of a thought, picked up and blown away as soon as it entered her head.
The young wolf rose and made its way down the garden path towards her mother. Beth, knees weak, sank to sit on the stoop. The yellow eyes mesmerised her and the beast stopped in front of her. Beth lifted her hand, rough and red with years of toil, reached out and fastened onto the fur, burying deep into the warmth and texture. She closed her eyes.
Surely now, she thought, surely now I am dead.
Then the fur, the warm body, were gone and when she opened her eyes the two beasts were fading into the night, down silent streets until they found the woods. In her lap, Matilda’s mother found a long red skein of wool, damp with saliva and strong with the scent of wolf. She wrapped it around her wrist as tears slid down her face, stinging like nettles.
* * *
Leonora sits back, looking satisfied.
The whole time she was telling the tale her smile did not waver, and I felt pinned beneath her gaze. Listening, I couldn’t help but wonder how much she knew. About me. About Eli. So, I held my breath, said nothing though my heart seemed to thud more loudly than it should. I said nothing, gave nothing away, not even to ask what she meant. Eventually, she tapped the table with one long finger.
‘The moral of the tale, Asher, is that when your child disappoints you, you may find a grandchild to fill the breach. Sometimes drive skips a generation. Sometimes you make mistakes with your own children, but time gives you the opportunity to make it right with their offspring.’
And part of me wants to howl. Part of me wants to shout, But I’m your granddaughter too! Your blood is in me, look at all I’ve done – don’t you see yourself in me?
Yet I don’t. Even in this moment – when I want to scream, when I want to strike out at poor Albertine, whose fault none of this is – I know that I can never disclose what I’ve done. What I still do. What I will do.
I nod, say, ‘I see. How fortune has favoured you with a second chance, Mrs Morwood.’ Then I rise. ‘I should see to the children. I must keep my promise.’
The morning is a blur. There is too much to do in the surgery but I do what I can: dusting, sweeping up mouse droppings, laying traps for those who remain, polishing as many pieces of glass as possible, washing and sterilising each instrument. Things are pristine and unused, untouched by Luther. I send the Binions to the apothecary with a list of herbs that do not grow in the manor gardens, and they not only bring back every single one, but find clippings of most for me to transplant. I give them a few more of the coins Leonora’s allocated as a budget for my little practice and thank them. They don’t reply, but I realise they’re not the fey idiots others believe. I fill jars, slip small neatly written labels inside each one, line them up in place. There is still more to do, but I am as close to ready as I can be. I had thought, when I was young – far too young to realise what the world held for me – and reading those books in our second saviour’s library that I would have professional chambers. That, as an adult, I would help people, dispense things to make them better. But as I grew, I eventually realised that no matter how much I read, how much I learned, whether it was freely given or knowledge I stole in the depths of the night – that no matter how clever I was – I would never have such a place to call my own.
Every night, cleaning laboratories and classrooms, offices and the narrow aisles of the enormous library, the days too after Archie gave me a means to be present in those spaces without hiding so much. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day… seeing those idiot boys with their privilege and power and no care for anything beyond themselves… seeing them getting the education I’d have slit more than one throat for. Seeing them fail, appear in classes drunk and loud and ignorant – yet remain. Remain and make their way through their studies, achieve their degree (whether with honours or otherwise, it did not matter), grasp their title, go out into the world to assemble surgeries such as I would never have. Knowing how badly some behaved and still retained their place at Whitebarrow made Luther’s failure all the more impressive.
The university provided learning, but only for a chosen few. A gathering of scholars to pursue their new theories − specifically to pursue a science untainted by the old ideas of magic, superstition – independent of the Church but still aligned with it and its goals of digging out anything they could not understand or control. That meant all the women who practised such cures as involved ritual as much as medicine. Some of the histories I read told how folk deserted the cunning women and witches, turned their backs and chose modernity. But the truth was that the Church hunted them, made them hated, made them dead. Drowned them, burned them, hanged them. The highest of the god-hounds encouraged and funded the neoteric medicine and destroyed anyone who failed to change. The women who could offer help soon began to disappear, living hidden deep in forests where they could remain unmarked and unburnt. Some continued to visit them, trading food and goods for healing. But for the most part, without an alternative, people had little choice but to turn to the doctors and their ilk.
Now. Here I am with everything I dreamt of – or a large part of it. The thing, at least, that I wanted for myself. I think I could be happy here, but for the other things that I did not wish for but are too difficult to be rid of. I could be happy here but for what I know about this family, my family. But for the things I have promised and cannot escape.
As I scrubbed and washed the sanctum I could forget, for hours at a time, all the matters that I did not wish to think upon. The acts I cannot escape. Leonora’s plans for Albertine, to make Luther nothing in his own home. But a tension runs beneath my skin, waiting for Mrs Morwood to hand me a sealed document, to say Take this to Zaria Taverell; for her will to be done. I’ve no fear now she’ll ask anyone else to do it for she doesn’t trust anyone in that house. I know I need to be ready when Luther returns; I will need to act quickly. But for some brief periods, I can forget.
In the afternoon I walk into the Tarn and take tea with Heledd, listen with a surprise that’s not entirely manufactured about the disappearance of the priest. Genuinely I have tried to put him out of mind, but my father’s insisted on appearing in the corner of my eye every so often – not in ghostly form, but an echo of some sort. A very weak one, mind you, but I do not think it’s guilt; I’m quite well acquainted with that.
When I ask how long he’s been missing, Heledd looks somewhat embarrassed. No one knows, she says. No one noticed until the congregation turned up this morning to find the little church empty, the little house too. The man so unpleasant – and with a history of wandering off drunk for days on end – no one had bothered to seek him out. Will the constable look? I enquired, and she shrugged. The priest would return in his own time or he would not. I wonder how long it will be before Leonora writes to the cathedral-city to ask for a new one.
We talk about the surgery and I can at last show someone how excited I am. I feel like a child with a new toy – even though it won’t last, this sanctuary. And I know that as soon as I leave she’ll be telling her neighbours, that gossip will speed the news around the Tarn, that there’ll be a string of villagers waiting for me tomorrow.
And when I return? Hurrying in the cold, barely beating the darkness? I go once more to the surgery. I make a fire for warmth, which I will bank before I leave so it will be easy to breathe life into tomorrow. I sit for a while because it is quiet and it is mine. I determinedly keep my mind clear of troubling thoughts and for a while, such a little while, I am calm, I am home.
And when I am suddenly hungry and in desperate need of dinner, I rise and turn around to see a figure in the doorway. A sharp intake of breath – I didn’t hear anyone – then they move, step from shadow into light.
It’s Luned.
I laugh, clutch at my chest. ‘You startled me.’
She doesn’t say sorry or even shrug, she just paces to the desk, to where there’s the spare chair for the patient, and takes a seat. Luned lifts her face, watches, waiting for me to join her. There’s no less dislike in her expression, but it’s twinned with desperation. I sit.
‘What is it, Luned?’
Her mouth opens and a howl issues forth. She cries like a child and I suppose that’s really what she is, not much more than eighteen. I wait. I don’t hold her hand or offer platitudes – we’ve not liked each other enough (or at all) to do that. But I’m patient, hand her a handkerchief, then pour her a glass of the lemon-blossom brandy I’ve brought over for patients. She takes a sip, hiccups, sips again, wipes her eyes and nose.
I repeat, ‘What is it, Luned?’
Her voice is flat. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Ah.’
‘He’ll get rid of me if he finds out.’
‘Who?’ I ask as if I didn’t know.
‘Mr Morwood, you idiot!’ she yells.
‘And did you simply come here to insult me?’ If I hadn’t thought before that she was hard to like, I certainly do now.
‘I need your help, you bitch.’
‘Then be a little more polite, you cunt,’ I hiss at her, and the language shuts her up. She stares in shock. ‘Now. How far along are you?’
‘A month?’ She shakes her head, looks away.
‘I thought,’ I say thinly, ‘you were taking precautions.’
‘So did I, but it turns out sometimes things don’t work.’
‘Indeed.’ I scratch my head, rub my eyes with tiredness and irritation that I have to help this awful girl; that my sense of peace has been burned up like a moth too close to a flame. There’s a moment when I feel everything – myself, my mind, the world – wobble. Tilt as if I might slide off its surface and fall into blackness. I clench my hands into fists, feel the nails cutting into my palms. The pain pulls me back, steadies me. ‘What have you been using?’
‘Silphium.’ I raise a brow and she says, ‘My old nan knew a thing or two. She was the cunning woman in the Tarn until she died last winter.’
‘Ah.’ Pity she didn’t teach you a few more things while she still breathed. ‘Well, sometimes it doesn’t work if you’ve been drinking a lot of alcohol.’ She looks away and I think of those empty bottles of wine that have appeared in the kitchen some mornings when there’s been none consumed at the dinner table.
‘No!’ she fair screams and you’d think I’d made an indecent proposal. ‘Just give me something to get rid of it. I can’t have it. He can’t know. Just help me! If I have it, I’ll never get away from here.’
And because I don’t like her, and because I like Luther even less, I don’t insist. I don’t send her away empty-handed. I grind bay leaves and chamaepitys in the mortar, add some stinking gladwin for good measure, then put the powder into a small blue bottle. I tell her how to take it, the measure of it, how much hot water to steep it in and for how long before she drinks it on going to bed. I warn her it will cause cramps, but as she is not so far along they should not be too awful. She does not thank me when she leaves. I find my hands are shaking long after she’s an absence.
* * *
I put the children to bed after dinner and read them a story about a mother who turns into a swan and must fly away, but in the end she is reunited with her offspring. When I’ve tucked the girls in, I escort Connell back to his room, tuck him in even though he asks if he’s too old for that.
I smile. ‘Do you think you are?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not too old tonight.’
I kiss his forehead and agree, ‘Not too old tonight. But perhaps tomorrow night.’
‘Perhaps.’ He grips my hand as I’m about to turn away. ‘When will Father come back, do you think?’
‘A while yet,’ I say. ‘Four days’ travel to St Dane’s, then perhaps he will rest for a few days more, then another four to return.’
‘So, not too soon then?’
‘Not too soon,’ I say softly and squeeze his hand. ‘Sleep well, Connell. You’re safe.’
I searched Jessamine and Luther’s rooms last night and found no sign of any poison or herbs that might be used to make it. I only know that Luther made another attempt; he knows the Lewises have survived for he speaks with Mr Lewis on an almost daily basis (or did until Leonora unseated him). Surely he’d have said something to me if he thought I’d saved them and thwarted him? His reaction to his mother’s recovery was a sign enough of how he felt about such interference. Perhaps it was only a warning? Or perhaps it was nothing more than an amusement and experiment? Or perhaps he simply cannot be bothered to try again.
When I go to bed – my own, not Eli’s – I sleep deeply and dream of the night I found the Witches of Whitebarrow.