5

Change was coming. You could smell it in the air, all sharp and peppery like radishes. Even our little village of Sweepfield felt restless. Every week brought talk of new discoveries: a lamp lit by electricity, a steam-powered engine, a needle that went in your arm to stop the pox. Down in the valleys villages grew into towns, and towns grew into cities, getting bigger and busier by the day. One morning we’d wake up and find Bristol on our doorstep, folks said. These were uneasy, exciting times.

There was one night, though, when the Old Ways won out. And that was Midwinter’s Eve in Pilgrim’s Meadow around the bonfire. We gathered to celebrate the end of the year with feasting and music and stomping, swirling dances. It was a time for feeling glad to be alive. For on Midwinter’s Eve, the spirit world came close to ours – so close, some said, you’d see the ghosts of those soon to be dead.

I’d grown up with these superstitions running through my bones. They were part of Midwinter’s Eve. Part of the thrill. Yet this year felt different, and all because of a strange sort of star in the sky.

The night of the festival was cold and full of starlight. One in particular shone brighter than the rest. It had a tail too, which made it look like a very bright tadpole. It had first appeared a week ago. ‘That isn’t a star, Lizzie, that’s a comet. It’s a different thing entirely,’ Mam had said when we’d been rounding up our geese for the night and I spotted it in the sky. ‘Old lore has it that they bring plague and famine and terrible fortune.’ She said it all wide-eyed and splayed-fingered, with laughter in her voice. And I laughed back, or pretended to.

Tonight the comet had grown larger. It sat low and heavy in the sky and felt like a nagging inside my head – of what, I didn’t know. We were here to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve, like our ancestors had done before us. It was a time for fun, and for stamping your feet against the cold, not for staring moodily at comets. All down one side of Pilgrim’s Meadow were food stalls selling roast pork, meat pies, hot currant buns. Potatoes baked in a pit dug into the ground. There was a cider stall, spiced wine, a tethered Jersey cow whose milk cost a penny a cup or nothing if you milked her yourself.

Right in the middle of the field, we’d built the bonfire. It was as tall as a house and as wide as a ship, and now the whole of Sweepfield village – all two hundred and twelve souls – stood around it, their faces glowing yellow in the firelight. It meant that whilst your back parts froze, your front sweated in the heat. My friend Mercy Matthews insisted we keep our distance from the flames.

‘Otherwise my face’ll go awful blotchy,’ she said.

I’d never seen Mercy look remotely blotchy. She had inky dark hair that fell below her waist and eyes the colour of blackbirds’ eggs. Even now, freezing cold and miserable, her nose was a lovely frost-nipped pink. She was, by far, the prettiest girl in Sweepfield and beyond. Everyone, but Mercy herself, knew it.

Moving back from the fire didn’t restore her spirits. It simply made us grow colder. My nine-year-old sister Peg tried waving a bag of liquorice in Mercy’s direction; that didn’t work either.

‘I can’t eat,’ she said, glumly.

Peg looked at Mercy, then at me as I raised my eyebrows. Mercy refusing sweets was like a fish refusing water. But I guessed what – or rather who – the matter was. Only one person had this effect on Mercy: Isaac Blake.

‘Come on, cheer up!’ I tried giving her a playful nudge. But the Old Ways also had it that Midwinter’s Eve was a time to discover true love, and it was this, I suspected, that was making Mercy so quiet.

Part of me understood how she felt. Not the true love thing – blimey, no. The boys in our village were a grubby-faced, gangly-limbed bunch, yet still thought themselves to be princes. That included Isaac Blake, the lad Mercy was soft on, and who, in my view, was not good enough to clean her boots. Like Mercy, though, I didn’t feel quite myself tonight, but I was determined to shake it off.

Slipping my arm through Mercy’s, I tried to be cheery for us both. ‘So, what exciting things have been happening in Sweepfield today? Any murders? Any grave-robbing? Anyone’s horse cast a shoe?’ – the latter being the most likely.

Mercy shrugged. Her mam ran the village bakery, where people without ovens took their bread and pies for cooking, or bought from her instead. She knew everyone’s business. A person only had to pick their nose and we’d heard about it by midday.

‘I suppose you know about the scientist?’ she said.

Strangely, I didn’t. ‘Eh? What scientist?’

‘He’s moving down from London it seems, and renting Eden Court for the year.’

‘That’s a big house for one person to live in, isn’t it?’ chipped in Peg.

She was right; it was. Eden Court was a tall, grey, forbidding place with turrets and battlements that made it seem like a castle. It sat two miles west of our village, where its jagged roofline was just visible from the road. A very rich, slightly mad family had once lived there. Nowadays it stood empty. The driveway was choked with weeds and the gates were always locked.

‘Can’t think why anyone would want to live there,’ I said. ‘It gives me the shivers.’

‘Well, he’s hired servants to make it nice again. They’ve been scrubbing floors like mad and airing out all the rooms, ready for when he arrives,’ Mercy said, then added, ‘So I’ve heard,’ which meant her mam had told her, so it was bound to be true.

I caught sight of my own mam, then. She stood nearer the fire than us. It was easy to pick her out in the crowd. No other grown-up had hair like hers – a mass of pale blonde curls that stood out from her head. Peg’s hair was the same. And in the glow of the bonfire, it blazed with light.

Like a comet’s tail.

The thought unnerved me: it didn’t seem right to link Mam with that ominous-looking thing in the sky. So I was glad when Mercy talked of prettiness instead. For that’s what Mam was – pretty – though that description didn’t quite fit either.

‘Your mam’s proper handsome, in’t she?’ Mercy sighed. ‘She in’t plain-faced like all the other mams. She’s got a real magic about her.’

‘Don’t let her hear you saying that,’ I said, though I was a little bit pleased.

It was what you did that mattered, Mam always claimed. She didn’t hold much stock with magic and superstitions. While Da was in his workshop making chairs and cabinets, Mam tended the house and our animals. Peg and me had to help out too, so did Da when the need arose. But it was Mam who worked hardest and fastest. It was a job to even try to keep up.

Tonight, she’d woven white winter roses into her and Peg’s hair. She tried to do mine but they wouldn’t stay, my hair being too straight and slippery. Reaching out, I pushed a stray flower back into Peg’s curls.

‘Are the other ones all right?’ said Peg, letting go of my hand to pat her head.

I did a quick check. ‘They’re fine.’

It was then I happened to glance down at her frock, and saw something wriggling inside her pocket.

‘Oh Peg,’ I groaned. ‘What’ve you got in there this time?’

Last week, she’d brought home a shrew. Before that she had a slowworm. And before that, a hedgehog which escaped and hid under the log pile. These pets of hers were becoming a habit.

‘It’s a little field mouse. I’ve called him Acorn. They were moving that hayrick in the top field and I saved him from getting stamped on,’ Peg said.

Now I knew for a fact they moved the hayrick back in September, so this was one of Peg’s little white lies. Not a big, bad lie, just a not-quite-truth, spoken in such a sweet way that folks didn’t think to doubt her.

‘Look at him, Lizzie, he’s such a dear,’ Peg said.

A tiny fawn head popped out of her pocket. Mercy screwed her nose up in disgust. ‘Ugh! And in the same pocket as the liquorice too!’

I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Well, it isn’t coming into our bed this time. Not after that shrew got inside my pillowcase.’

‘Acorn’s going to live outside,’ Peg said. ‘Honestly he is.’

One look at her huge brown eyes and I doubted it, somehow, not in this weather. It was toe-numbingly cold. And there was no better way to warm up than a spot of dancing, I decided. By now I’d had enough of big-sistering Peg.

‘Come on, let’s find Da,’ I said to her. ‘It’s time he took you home, anyhow.’

We found him at the cider stall in the midst of a rowdy crowd. On seeing us, Da put an arm round Peg’s shoulders and smiled glassily: he’d had more to drink than usual. It didn’t make him louder, though; if anything he looked more gentle, more dreamy-faced.

‘Time for bed, poppet?’ he asked Peg, who grumbled a bit. Then to me: ‘Two dances, Lizzie love, then home, all right?’

In a far corner of the field came the sound of fiddles starting up. Drumbeats wafted towards us on the icy breeze. Mercy caught my eye. We grinned like idiots at each other.

‘All right, Da,’ I said. ‘Two dances. I promise.’