I awoke the following morning to the bright sound of chirruping in the garden. I pushed the sheets back from my face, for they were too hot and heavy. I felt leaden enough from lack of slumber even without the addition of their weight. I thought to sleep some more, but still the sound went on, a cheerful refrain to my dark remembrances, and I finally forced myself out of bed and went to look out.
The garden was thriving in the heat; in fact, to my eye it had run almost entirely wild. Spires of lupins vied for the sun with foxgloves, whilst a hardy vine of some sort had found a way through everything. I recognised roses, pinks and marigolds planted along the edges of the paths, a profusion of colour, but a creeping weed had taken root in their midst and its tendrils had wound their way amongst it all. Negotiating the profusion, clinging to strands surely too light and new to bear its weight, was a blackbird. Its beak flashed yellow as it pecked; its eye was a dark liquid shine that reminded me of something, though I could not think of what.
Beyond the garden wall was the hillside, its brilliant verdure outshining the multitudinous colours about the cottage. It was fleeced with hundreds more of those dandelion clocks; there appeared to be no end of them. I remembered the children’s game, where we had used them to count the hours, and now here they were still, just as they had been when I was a boy at my mother’s knee. The memory made me feel quite melancholy; I knew not why.
I finished my ablutions, dressed and went downstairs, glad that I had returned the cottage to at least a semblance of normality. It was a pity that I had been so caught up in the influence of night and ruined my wife’s novel; but it could not matter. Helena would be more herself this morning, just as I was; I felt certain of it.
My wife was not yet downstairs and I wondered if she too had slept badly after our argument. Our untouched repast of yester-eve was still spread upon the table, the cheese dried, the bread curled. I cleared it away and cut a little fresh bread, nibbling on it as I waited for Helena to rise. As I did, I surveyed the vista: the little village of Halfoak dozing in the sun. I could not but wonder what lay beneath its calm surface and bethought me that perhaps Lizzie’s journal would tell me. I had hidden it away once more in my room and I was anxious to open it again.
I thought he might wish to make a wife of me, but he did not.
I sighed. Poor Lizzie. But of course, I could never have married her. Helena had struck nearer the mark than she could possibly comprehend: no, I had not known my cousin; years of neglect and separation had seen to that. But I should have done something. I had not realised how she had looked up to me, how she had clung to the memory of our little meeting. The thought of her fruitless pining hardened my resolve.
I went into the kitchen and set more bread and butter upon a plate, prepared a ewer of water and carried them upstairs. I tapped gently on my wife’s door with the ewer and called out to her, but there came no reply; she must still be in slumber. I would wake her with a kiss, and our bitterness would be behind us. I put down the plate while I opened the door, then picked it up once more before I walked in.
My greeting failed on my lips. Helena stood with her back to me, facing the open window. Her posture was stiff and she did not turn as I placed the ewer on her washstand, noting the disarray of her brushes and accoutrements, which was not like my wife; she had always been so neat. Helena remained at the window, her head tilted back slightly. She must be staring up at the sky, or perhaps Pudding Pye Hill.
“Helena, I have brought a little bread and butter. Are you feeling refreshed, my dear?”
I waited for an answer, but there came none. I could not see her face, and for an awful moment I thought I heard the un-restrained, mocking laughter of Mother Draycross; I remembered all the wild talk of changelings and I found I did not want to see. I didn’t want to know.
I shook such silly thoughts away and went to her side. Her cheek was pale, her demeanour solemn. “My dear, you don’t look well. You must eat something.”
“I cannot eat.” Her voice was dull, a monotone without expression or warmth.
I reached out with my free hand and touched her arm and at that, she caught her breath. Her lip twitched, but still she did not meet my eye; she only resumed her former watching, staring out unblinking at the hillside. I found myself wondering what had so caught her attention and I peered out too, but there was nothing: only the flowers nodding gently in a faint breeze, and the blackbird, digging its beak into some fleshy morsel it had discovered.
“I will wait downstairs for you if you wish, Helena, but pray, do take something, my dear. It will make you feel more yourself.”
“I cannot eat.” She spoke in the same dull tone as before, words without emotion.
“Helena, let us not quarrel. What is it that ails you?”
She would not acknowledge the question; she did not even show that she had heard. I looked into her face a moment longer and then I turned and left the room. I was outwardly calm, but inside, my blood was rising. She had said such things—dreadful things—in her frenzy. How could she now spurn my overtures in such a provoking fashion? I had taken on the role of the peacemaker and yet was being met with nothing but rebuff.
I stopped dead on the landing.
These changelings can be identified by their weaknesses, or some disfigurement, or by a sweet temper turning of a sudden into querulous and unnatural ways. They might refuse to speak or eat. A good wife may be transformed into a shrew.
I shook my head in rejection of my wife’s actions, my own thoughts, the constable’s words, the new day that awaited. I returned to my own room, closed the door firmly behind me and removed the journal from its hiding place. I began to read the earliest pages. The entries bore no dates and the simple modes of expression needed a little deciphering, but soon I started to draw some sense from the words.
Jem got a hare yester-night, from one of the men at the Horseshoes. I didn’t ask, though he promised at least it were took in the day, not in the dark. Even that rabble would not risk that. I skinned it and roasted it with a bit of rosemerry. We ate it all, and it were fine. It was as if we were just wed again, for a bit. Then he got that look in his eye, and it were even more like. Happen we should have a third along to join us soon, God willing. Jem goes on about it enough. Maybe this time . . .
I shook my head, this time in irritation. This was not what I sought. Last night my selections had been serendipitous, as if the book had opened at something meant for me to read. Now it resisted. I tried another.
Mary killed her pig and she gave me some of the scrattlings and a leg. We shall not starve today. I can smell it sizzling. Jem’s still working at the Grange so he doesn’t know yet. He is fitting them all up there and he says it shall be a relief when he has done it, for certain. And then he shall make boots for Mary’s bairn, so we shall last a bit. It is a blessing the rent is so low, though he never does think to be grateful to me for thinking of this place.
Meat and boots and petty local matters. For such a book, discovered in such a way, to repay me thus! I tutted over it and riffled through the pages, wondering if it would all be the same, more of their meals and the uneventful passing of their days. I had only some small gratitude that although she may have neglected in life to pronounce her aitches, she had not forgotten to write them. But this was merely the dull observation of a dull life; why had she nothing of import to say?
I realised I was crumpling the pages in my frustration and I smoothed them down. There had been some urgent reason her husband had wanted this book to be found. But he might never even have read it; his claim might have been nothing more than a bluff. Its existence could be purely a matter of coincidence, his insistence an invention to save his worthless neck from the rope.
I closed it and stared at its dried, cracked cover, but what I saw was my cousin’s face: her own cracked and blackened skin, that awful smile shining through it. I shuddered, feeling for a moment as if a chill presence had passed through the room. Perhaps it had; perhaps my cousin had been drawn here by the way that I had judged her.
But I believed in ghosts no more than I did in fairies: they were all the product of overheated and unregulated imaginations. However, in one sense, I was correct: I should judge neither my cousin’s clumsy modes of expression nor the affairs of which she had written, for these were private matters, never intended for my eyes, nor perhaps for anyone’s. Besides, she had been forced by circumstance to live among coarse creatures so I should not be surprised at a little vulgarity of expression, some slight provincialism in her speech. And yet it was so long ago that I had seen her, the actual flesh and blood of her, that her image was fading. It was almost as if she had come to be not quite real to me.
I turned to a later section of the journal. To judge by the thinness of the written pages that followed, it could not have been long before her death. Her hand was more than usually wild.
I said no to him again tonight and he was having none of it. He said I would take it and like it, and I said there was nowt wrong with me, only a chill and nothing a bit of kindness wouldn’t fix. He wouldn’t have none of that neither and then there was a knock on the door. He says go and see who it is, wife, only he said wife like it meant summat else. And I didn’t move so he went to see and they came in and stood there as if they didn’t even know who I was.
Then he says tha shall take it like it or not, and he had it in a jug, and it stunk. I knew it was what she had given to him because he started to say daft words, about wings and flowers and charms, and meadows and water, and I don’t know what else. Then he said in the name of God I had to say me own true name, and I said it. And then he said I had to drink it and I would not. I don’t know what she puts in that stuff, but its fowl and I said I would not have it, not in my own house with my own husband, and he did nowt but laugh. The others didn’t though. One of them got a hold of my shoulders and shoved me down, and held me on the floor, and I said it hurt but they didn’t care. The other went and grabbed my hair, right at back of my neck, and I started to cry then since I didn’t think they would have done that, helping just as if owt they said even made any sense. All the time, they would not even say nowt to me nor look at me. It were like I was nothing.
Jem pushed the jug into my mouth then, bashed it in he did and cut my lip, all swole up it is, and he poured stuff down my throat, and I had to swallow it but I choked and he said in the name of God, tell me you are my true wife, just tell me for God’s sake what is your name, and I told him I would not, and I never ever would.
I stared down at the rough scrawl. I could sense her terror and her dismay, not just in her words or how they ran on so rapidly, but in the way she had scratched them into the paper. My eyes stung at the cruelty that had been inflicted upon her, and yet a more terrible notion had risen to the uppermost of my mind: what if the constable should see this? Would he take this cruelty for the “proof” of which he had spoken? Here was her husband, attempting his “cure,” and here was Lizzie, by her own admission, refusing to state in the name of God that she was indeed his wife. And yet, was that truly unnatural? There was a more rational interpretation: she must have long regretted entering into matrimony with such a villain. It would be terrible indeed if Lizzie’s attempt to unburden herself of her cares and anxieties within these mean pages led to Jem Higgs’ escape. Such a thing must never happen. My cousin must have justice and he must pay for his actions. The journal must never fall into the wrong hands or be made the instrument of his release.
I flicked through the pages, the words blurring before me, catching only a word here, a phrase there:
He said I were a fairy, but I think he was only angry at me. He . . .
I hid my new bonnet. I think perhaps I should not keep it, but then why should I not have such a thing . . .
And then:
He filled up every cranny and crevice in the house, even the keyhole.
I blinked and read more.
He filled up every cranny and crevice in the house, even the keyhole. He said Mother Crow had told him he would not see owt because he were blinded, but he might be able to hear summat if he filled up every last chink and listened. He said fairies would come then and tell him owt he wanted to know. And then he said it would be all up with me, and I would not hide nowt from him ever again. I followed him when he stuffed rags under the door and round the windows, up stairs and down, and I laughed at him all the while and told him he was being ignorant.
I closed the book and held it closed, as if it should open of its own accord and accuse me. I was justly chastised, I knew that, and yet knowing did not lessen its sting. I pressed my eyes closed and heard the echo of a woman’s mocking laughter, though I could no longer be sure it came from Mother Draycross.
It impressed upon me further that her husband, that wicked brutish creature, had at least not been so dull as to forget the upstairs windows. I told myself it did not signify; it was only that I had possessed greater sense than he; yet somehow, it merely served to drive deeper how stupid I had been, how lost in the mire of superstition.
Another thought came swift upon it, this time a more rational observation. They, she had written, and I had not been oblivious to the word when Constable Barraclough had used it. He says they tried to cure her before the night she was burned—aye, and not just once either, but several times. I had thought then that he had meant my cousin’s husband and some medical man; of course I saw now that he had not.
They would not even say nowt to me nor look at me.
I wondered what Jem Higgs was thinking of at this very moment. I hoped he felt despair. I hoped he felt isolated. I hoped he believed the whole world was ranked against him. He had acted cruelly; he had killed his wife—but he had not been alone, not the way my poor Lizzie had been. Not the way that I felt now.
But I was more determined than ever: I would have the truth. Lizzie would have it. And everybody would know who had helped to send a poor innocent creature to her terrible death.