The formidable Lady Bramley had soon sent those other temporary re-enforcements to help, just as she'd promised— housemaids on loan from the family's country estate ten miles away. Mr. Wilding also went to the market fair in Shrewsbury one day and hired several workmen to tackle the over-grown grounds and crumbling house exterior. These new additions were greatly appreciated by all except Biddy, who — however she might try to pretend otherwise—had enjoyed a fairly easy life at Slowly Rising, doing much as she pleased and largely unsupervised, before the young couple took over and began cleaning out the cobwebs, expecting things to be done and meals to be cooked the way they needed them.
"Of all the bold-faced cheek," as Biddy was oft heard to complain, when asked politely to do her job.
Now she bemoaned all the extra mouths to be fed and spent her days banging pots about with a great deal of noise but very little industry, producing meals as colorless and tasteless as ever. Meanwhile, Diggory, who obeyed no new orders but followed his own daily routine as it was once laid out for him in the tunnels of the past, watched this influx of youthful vitality with a mixture of scorn and dark humor. He spent most afternoons in the shadow of an oak, chewing on his gums, guzzling cider and laughing fit to burst whenever anybody's flesh was stuck by a thorn, their head got in the way of a falling plank, or they lost their footing on the rungs of a ladder. As if this was all laid on for his amusement.
Did the ancient fellow know, Amalie wondered, that his name was derived from the French word for "gone astray"? He did rather seem to be lost in his own world, but not unhappily, as long as the changes being wrought did not directly affect him. He slept in a hut in the woods and came into the house only for meals— if he had not caught himself something to cook over a campfire.
"Is it not cold to sleep out there in winter?" Amalie asked him once, to which he laughed uproariously, as if "cold" was something felt only by the delicate and the foolish.
"Diggory would rather be outside than in," said Mrs. Wilding. "He feels it is his place and he takes pride in it."
"Like an old sheepdog that sleeps in the farmyard, in all weathers, to stand guard?"
"Precisely. Indoors I suppose he would feel trapped, uneasy."
Apparently the harsh life did him no great harm for although he was bent and hobbled along at a snail's pace, he was believed to be the oldest living resident of the county. Not that anybody knew his age, only that he had "always" been there, a figure remembered by parents and grandparents in their youth.
"Perhaps he is like the ravens kept at the Tower of London," Mrs. Wilding remarked with a chuckle. "If he leaves us, the house will fall."
Although suggested in a playful tone, this thought seemed quite possible to Amalie, whose experiences made her far more open to ideas that other folk dismissed out of hand or took to be a jest.
Diggory certainly showed no fear of losing his place. On the rare occasion he came indoors, he delighted in nothing more than insulting Biddy— or "Fustylugs" as he called her— and she, red-faced and frustrated, could only yell back in colorful language, any threats she might make meeting with his throaty cackle and a defiant biting of his crusty thumb.
Amalie asked him one day, "What did you mean, Diggory, on the morning I arrived, when you said not another one? Another what?"
At which he snorted and then croaked, "If thee don't know, I shan't be the one to tell thee," and he hobbled off, muttering under his breath about "daft wenchies" and the place being full of them.
Slowly Rising sighed and stretched as it felt more sunlight and fresh air against its insides; as the windows were cleaned, walls washed and painted, door handles polished, latches oiled, and shutters unjammed and re-hung. Every day there was noise that drowned out the whispering and humming revenants— joyful, busy noise that blew the dust about, shook the damp foundations and made formerly unruly weeds quake in fear. Through it all the pond watched, unmoved, waiting.
Amalie, as she had promised Mrs. Wilding, gladly took on the challenge of any task that was set before her and quickly settled in.
"McKenna is a treasure," she overheard her mistress exclaim to Mr. Wilding. "I do not know how I managed without her."
Buoyed by this, she walked with an extra spring in her step that day.
"What are you smiling at, McKenna?" teased one of the maids on loan from the Bramley estate. "You look all dreamy-eyed, as if you've had a note from an admirer. Or perhaps you plan a secret lover's tryst."
"There are many more things to be happy about in life, Mary," she replied crisply, "than boys and silly love affairs."
"Like what then?"
"Satisfaction in one's work, of course. Knowing, at the end of the day, that one has done one's very best."
But the other maids looked at her as if she had two heads and then turned away to snicker and pull faces. She told herself that it did not matter what they thought. Mrs. Wilding was happy with her, and that was the most important thing.
She had noticed one of the outdoor workmen slyly watching her and trying to flirt. She gave him no encouragement and left such antics to the other girls. After Edward, the graspy-fingered footman, she was extra diligent. Men had done nothing for the two women who raised her, nothing but make a mess and try to bring them down. So the last thing Amalie needed was some fellow winking at her. It could not be very good for him either, to shut one eye while wielding a hammer, but men were generally not very bright. As evidenced by the fact that they thought killing each other was the best way to resolve a disagreement.
As she had observed at the upper floor windows on the day of her arrival, there were several very strong female revenants— or back-comers— living at Slowly Rising. Like Coquin they wanted to go on playing, saw no reason why they should not do as they pleased and considered the living to be in their way.
"I be not gone," one of them protested, that whisper scampering through the walls of the house like the echo of a child chanting as they played a skipping game.
The revenants did not concern themselves with the damage and upset they might cause in the process of remaining past their welcome. But she understood their desire for more life. When a soul was forced to abandon its body before the proper time— in other words before it was prepared to go— their natural instinct was to go on as they had been before.
Some did not even know they were lost.
"Laisse-moi sortir," Coquin exclaimed from her pot. These promises to behave herself were many and frequent, pleading or angry, depending on her mood.
"No," Amalie replied firmly. "You cannot come out yet."
Inside the chocolate pot, the stirrer squeaked as it spun and the voice sang softly, "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, Dormez- vous, Dormez-vous...?"
"Now I know how you must have driven maman to her grave, Coquin," she muttered. "No wonder she was always so tired."
"Let me out, Amalie! So pretty, you are, young Amalie... hardworking, eager and clever. Comme elle est mignonne!"
"Sweet-faced, am I? Flattery will not secure your release, so you may as well be silent."
Like the flare of a struck match, the gentle cajoling turned to a sharper demand. "Laisse-moi sortir! Let me out!" Then back again as that puff of light, with no air to let it grow, was weakened and then snuffed. "I will be like a lamb. You will not know I am here."
Amalie swiftly covered her ears with her quilt and burrowed deeper into her bed. Before she risked letting her own pet demon out for exercise, she had better learn all that she could about the existing troublemakers.
Fortunately Biddy, having worked in the house for thirty years, had many lurid tales to tell about the Wildings. In the evenings, after supper, sitting by the kitchen fire with her pipe, she liked to scandalize and horrify the temporary maids with her stories.
"A family of shameless women, that's what they were in this 'ouse. Never keeping a man among them in any proper, respectable way, but using any fool male to breed the next generation. Like stud 'orses. Then throwin' the fellow out once he'd served his wretched purpose. No babe were born male— at least, none that survived its first few breaths. And I doubt that were a coincidence."
"You mean it was murder?" one of the maids exclaimed in horror, her eyes like saucers.
"I don't say what it were as fact," the cook replied darkly. "All I can tell you, is that those Wilding babes what lived was all girls. All girls for centuries, ever since Amos Wilding were scared to death in his own bed."
"Until Mr. Adam Wilding was born." Amalie, sitting in her usual corner with the mending, had not joined the conversation until now. The others had probably forgotten she was there. Indeed, a few of them jumped when she spoke. Reaching into the sewing basket for more thread, she added, calmly, "He survived, of course, or we would none of us be here."
"Aye. But he survived only just by the skin of his teeth. His mother, Rosalynde, gave birth alone 'ere, made out it were a female and called it Wednesday Wilding. I daresay she would have kept up the lie as long as she could, dressing the child as a girl, but instead she quarreled fierce with her mother and walked into that pond out there. Never surfaced again. Tried to drown the babe too and failed."
That, of course, was when the local blacksmith, Marcus Wyatt, rescued Wednesday, renamed the boy Adam, and raised him as his own son, with nobody knowing any different for three decades.
"The boy's grandmother, Marguerite Wilding, hired me then, after 'er daughter drowned in the pond," said Biddy. "The ol' witch needed somebody else to clean up after 'er, and Diggory wouldn't. I reckon she were afeard of 'im, truth be told." She sucked on her pipe, plucked it from the gap in her teeth, and then added, "She lived 'ere alone fer the rest of 'er life, shut up in this tomb of a house, afraid o' the daylight and fresh air, shouting orders to me down them stairs and 'avin' meals pulled up through that cupboard there in the wall. Never a thank you, nor a beg your pardon. Nothin' but complaints. She were a mad, bitter, wicked ol' hag."
"You should not speak of your former mistress in such a way," Amalie protested. "Your disloyalty is shameful. A good servant should never air grievances, and this talk is surely a bad influence on the other maids."
"'Ark at miss 'oity toity, ere! I were the only servant in the house, missy, which means I knew 'er better than most. I put up with the madam's temper tantrums daily, for precious little thanks. Or wage."
For centuries therefore, the Wildings— all women after Amos— had lived in this once-grand manor house on the edge of the village. Men were not welcome to stay among them, except for the curious old sentinel, Diggory, of course, and he stayed whether anybody liked it or not.
Since the Wilding women never married, as Biddy said, they bore all their daughters, scandalously and unapologetically, out of wedlock. Anybody who knew about the child named Wednesday, the last child born at Slowly Rising, had assumed it was another female. When it's mother drowned, the locals also presumed she took the babe to those watery depths with her. No bodies were recovered, but, strangely, it seemed as if few who drowned in "the pond" ever were. It was really more of a lake than a pond, and nobody knew its depths.
Then, when Marguerite Wilding died last year, she left everything to Adam, her unsuspecting grandson, in an irrevocable trust. Marguerite, it turned out, had known of his rescue from the pond, but kept it to herself for the remainder of her life, apparently deciding the boy would have a happier existence in the blacksmith's care than he could have with her, in lonely state, at Slowly Rising. It was an odd act of surprising tenderness in an otherwise selfish, difficult woman's life.
"Perhaps she was simply relieved to have him taken off her hands," Mrs. Wilding remarked, as she and Amalie folded laundry together one day. "A daughter had been enough for her to manage and that had not ended well, had it?" She shook her head. "Rosalynde Wilding rebelled against her mother. She even talked of getting her child baptized in church, according to Mr. Cleary, whose father was vicar here before him. But Marguerite forbade it and called her daughter a traitor to the family. The Wildings never attended church here, you see, not after the death of Amos. He had his own pew in the church, naturally, as the local squire, but it has stood empty now for more than two hundred years. You'll see his name still carved upon it, if you care to look. After Amos, his children, daughters born of his marriage to Belle Arden, kept to their own beliefs."
"Amos married Belle Arden, madam? The same Belle Arden who cursed the village?" And sang in the walls.
Her mistress nodded. "After Amos tried her in the ducking stool, like her sisters, and she walked back out of the pond to grant her curse, she decreed that Amos must cut out his heart and give it to her, or else every male child born in Slowly Fell would die before its second birthday. The only alternative was for Amos to marry her, thereby giving his heart figuratively rather than literally. And, as she insisted, half his fortune too. His wealth could serve her better than his death, of course. I doubt she really wanted his heart. He does not seem to have been a very pleasant man."
Amalie still tried to make sense of it. "Why would he agree to marry her? Did he not believe her to be a witch?"
"Well, in the beginning he had not accused Belle, only her elder sisters. Her thought her too young and insignificant, it seems, to cause him any trouble. But when her sisters died in the ducking stool, young Belle swore vengeance and brought attention to herself by cursing folk, loudly and dramatically, all over the village. Amos had no choice but to accuse her too after that. Of course, he must have known she was just an ordinary woman, like her sisters. He had only wanted to get his hands on their land. But he could not very well admit that there was no witchcraft after all, could he? Not after he'd already caused the death of her sisters. That terrible act had to be justified. So he was rather stuck, when Belle turned the tables and used his lie against him."
"I see, madam. If he tried to calm the villagers, by saying that her curse had no power, then he would have to admit she was no witch and that he had tried her falsely. Her sisters too perhaps."
"Quite so. I'm sure the superstitious villagers here drove Amos to the altar with the prick of pitchforks in his back. But by marrying Belle, he made himself savior of the village, a martyr. And Belle lived comfortably out of the arrangement, when, upon their marriage, she became the wealthiest woman in the county. I daresay she found other ways to get her vengeance on Amos over the years, while she lived here as his wife."
"Perhaps she put salt in his brandy and thorns in his shoes." Not that Amalie had ever resorted to similar tricks. Not for a long time, in any case. No, that was the sort of thing Coquin might do.
Mrs. Wilding laughed. "She did far worse than that, no doubt. It is believed that Belle discovered his infidelity one day, and since he had broken his pact, she renewed her curse against the village before walking into the pond and disappearing forever. That is how the legend goes. Whether any of it is true...who knows."
But Amalie heard soft laughter. A voice that ridiculed this story. Which part of it, though?
I be not gone.
"Her body was never found, madam?"
Mrs. Wilding shook her head. "Belle simply disappeared one day from all village records and reports. All we know is that when Amos died, years later, he was found in his bed with such a look of terror on his face that they concluded his wife came back to do away with him." The lady laughed. "People here are so easily frightened, so easily led. It only takes one foolish idea. Belle knew that and made the most of it. For a while, at least."
"She was a woman of cunning and resourcefulness then, madam."
"As were most women accused, back then, of witchcraft. They were simply midwives or women who cured the sick." Mrs. Wilding hugged a folded quilt to her bosom. "But the Arden sisters had led a solitary life in the woods, were known to be eccentric and worshipped nature according to the ancient, pagan traditions, so I suppose that did not help their cause when accused. As you must have noticed, folk around here do not like anything different, anybody that stands out— what is it, McKenna?"
She had turned her head to stare at the wall, certain she heard a whisper, closer than ever before.
"I be not gone. The wattle has eyes and the daub has ears. Scared to death. Scared to death. Scared to death. As he should be. Dead as a doornail. Where are my sisters? I be not gone. Where are they?"
"McKenna? You look worn out suddenly. Are you alright? Perhaps we've been working you too hard. You must take the afternoon off tomorrow, I insist. Take a walk down to the village and get away from the house for a while."
"I shall then, madam. Thank you." Amalie returned to the folding and, after a moment, she said, "Were Belle's sisters ever brought out of the pond, madam? Or were they lost there forever too?" If they died as witches it was unlikely they would have been granted a Christian burial.
"I'm not sure that anybody now living knows where those unfortunate women were laid to rest. Not even Diggory."
"Then perhaps they're still in the pond, madam." Amalie glanced out of the window to where that shining water waited, sunlight tickling its surface. "Like so many others who drowned there and were never found again."
"That is true." The lady shuddered. "Dreadful thought though it is. No Wildings since Amos have been buried in the churchyard. Once he was gone, his daughters—Belle's daughters—proudly resumed the pagan ways of their mother and aunts." She placed the quilt inside a drawer of the newly purchased linen press. "It is a great shame. All those folk lost to the pond and never recovered."
"Yes, ma'am." Amalie felt those wandering souls all lingering about the place. Dripping and trailing water through the house. Led by the ever-noisy Belle.
"The wattle has eyes and the daub has ears. Scared to death. He put me here and left me to mold and rot. Like the house. I be not gone. I be not done. Where are my sisters?"
Oh, an afternoon away from the house and its voices would be very nice.
"Like the house, left to mold and rot."
Abruptly she blurted out, "If Miss Marguerite Wilding had all that fortune, why did she let the house become so poorly while she lived, madam?"
"I think she must have been a very unhappy lady and the house suffered for it. Even if she had wanted to do anything to fix the place, I suspect she would have found herself stuck in that sadness, like a spider trapped in its own web, unable to move. She had lost everything and everybody. Long before her end she was all alone and nobody wants to be all alone. Surely, not even a Wilding woman. I know she was not a particularly nice person, but no one is born miserable. Life, and our reaction to it, shapes us all into what we become. Besides, she was Adam's grandmother, so I cannot think she was all bad. I refuse to believe it."
The house was quiet again. Contemplating. Brooding. She could feel the gentle vibrations as the floor throbbed under her feet.
"What of Mr. Wilding's true father, madam?"
The mistress closed the drawer of the linen press and paused to polish a brass handle. "My husband has no desire to uncover the man's identity. To all intents and purposes Marcus Wyatt was his father, for as long as he remembers. He is content to leave it so, out of love and respect for that man's memory."
Amalie understood that too. A parent was not made simply by their physical ability to create a child. A good father, as Lady Bramley would say, was made by quality of deed not quantity of seed, and Amalie knew that all too well.
She pictured salt falling from a spoon, slipping silently, stealthily, down into the neck of a bottle as Archie McKenna clutched it in his fist.
Carefully lining up the corners of a pillow case, she said, "Biddy suggested that any other male children born here met with unhappy ends. Because of the curse."
"Oh, Biddy likes serving up her gory tales. I wish she spent as much time and imagination on her cooking. The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that any boys born here at Slowly Rising were delivered to the parish charity under cover of darkness. The vicar’s wife— god rest her soul– once told me that newborn males had, occasionally, over the decades, been found abandoned on the vicarage doorstep."
"And what happened to them then, madam?"
"They were taken to the orphanage in Shrewsbury or beyond. Nobody in Slowly Fell would take them because they feared raising a Wilding. That foolish curse, of course! Only the blacksmith, Marcus Wyatt, was brave enough to raise a Wilding boy, and he was careful to do so in absolute secrecy."
Amalie nodded, thoughtful. "To think of everything these walls have witnessed over the years, madam!" The wattle hath eyen and the daub hath earen. What ere ye do herein be remembereth.
"Indeed. As my husband says, it is no easy thing to inherit such a house," her mistress muttered, looking down through the window to watch the men working in the sunlight. "It does not come easy to him...all this. I must do whatever I can to help him be at ease."
"Yes, madam."
Amalie knew that Adam Wilding would need all the help he could get.
One night, as she took the stairs to her room at the very top of the house, her fingertips found splinters in the banister. She raised the candle in her other hand and saw, newly chiseled in the rotting wood by some sharp, rough instrument— or desperate fingernails— the words,
I be not gone.
Proof that the revenants in the house were stronger, gaining power every day, excitable and determined to be heard and felt.Now there was a man among them again, a master of the house for the first time in two hundred and twenty years— since Amos Wilding— and they didn't want him there. His presence ruffled their feathers. The angrier they got, the louder and stronger they became.The words came and went, sometimes loud enough to wake her from sleep; at other times little more than a whisper, or a wavering sob. It was as if she listened through a pipe with dents along its length, distorting the sound.
Inside the silver chocolate pot on her dresser, the stirrer spun rapidly every night, as Coquin waited with impatience to be let out. Their arrival in this house had made the creature restless, volatile and impatient too.
"Let me out for a little while and I will return to sleep again. I am cramped here. I always return, do I not?"
"Go to sleep," Amalie whispered. "I must find out more about the other revenants who live here, before I set you free among them."
Not all spirits played well together. Sometimes they started fires or floods, or fierce mistrals that blew houses down. Sometimes they caused sudden quarrels between lovers, or lust between enemies. They made cows behave as if they were moonstruck, stopped hens from laying, and generally constructed chaos for their own amusement.
And Amalie did not want anything bad to happen here to her kind new mistress. She had seen the scars on Mrs. Wilding's forearms when she dressed her in the morning, and so she knew that lady had already fallen foul of bad fortune— whether it be the fault of human hands or other beings. One day, when the time was right, she would ask her mistress about those poorly healed wounds, but Amalie recognized the scars left by flames when she saw them and that, for now, was all she need know.
"They used to burn witches," said Coquin from her pot. "Well, they tried. They didn't know it made us stronger."
Because when something burns it stays in the air to be dispersed with the smoke over far distances and in the tiniest of pieces. It becomes more powerful, indestructible, a part of the air itself and therefore a necessity of life. It is never lost. Never gone.
"Did you know, sweet Amalie, that the word departed used to mean, split in two? Divided? It is not a word of which to be afraid, mon ami."
What was the menace jabbering on about now? Lifting her head briefly from the pillow, Amalie urged again, "S'endormir!" Tired after a long day of work, she was in no mood tonight for Coquin's songs and stories. "To be sure, nobody else keeps such a noisy, chattering chocolate pot."
That brought her silence, for a while at least. If one did not count the indignant huffs belched forth at intervals from the spout of that silver chocolate pot.
Somewhere in the wall a woman laughed softly and water dripped.
It must be raining again. Warm, summer rain.
Amalie yawned into her pillow and let her limbs relax under the blanket. At least this house would never burn; it was too damp.
Nobody could catch fire here.