10

Outside the courthouse, the day had turned bitter, and it was spitting heavy hail. Looking through the window, it was hard to believe this was the same day I had arrived home. The cold, dry night spent beneath the ash tree felt like weeks ago, yet it had only been this morning that I had ridden up to our farmhouse, expecting to find peace.

Against the cold, Manyon offered a warmed, spiced wine and an extra cloak for Esther, who sat shaking beside me. I accepted the wine – Manyon must have seen my hands trembling as I took it – but after a few moments forgot I was holding it. I closed my eyes to banish the images that rushed up at me, but they had sunk their livid roots straight down into the deepest places of my mind. Death I had seen – eviscerated men holding in their guts, calling for their mothers, begging for the mercy of a sword thrust – but I had never seen anything as terrible as the deaths I saw that day.

Yet my conscience pinched me like a vice. What had taken place was unthinkable, but even as I laboured to force it from my mind, I fretted. It was getting late. We should have been on the road home by now. My thoughts returned again and again to my father – whether he knew anything of our presence or absence beyond shadows flitting in and out of his sight, whether he was afraid, wondering whether we would come back at all, or driven mad by thirst or hunger. Whether he knew I was sorry, so sorry…

The atmosphere in the small office was less collegiate than before. The magistrate seemed to have stepped back into his official role, and sat straight-faced behind his desk. For himself, Manyon took no wine. He had dismissed the hapless Timothy and was taking down information with his own hand, questioning Esther, me, Rutherford and Dillon in turn. I heard nothing out of place from any of the other witnesses, nothing that would provide satisfactory explanation of the deaths of Joan and Goodwife Gedge.

Both women had been dead when Dillon pulled them from the cell. The constable had undertaken a perfunctory examination; then, dissatisfied with what he could see, carried them up the spiral stairs. Even in my distress, I had marvelled at the man’s strength as he shouldered the matronly form of Goodwife Gedge, then watched from the bottom of what felt like an abyss of sadness as he carried Joan. She seemed to weigh no more than a newborn lamb and her fawn-coloured hair dangled limply over his shoulder. He might have been carrying home a kill from the hunt.

Dillon had set both women down in a window annexe, as far from the public gaze as he could manage. But people still saw. The shocked cries from those loitering on the courthouse floor had not deterred him as he had pulled back their eyelids and checked their mouths and tongues for blackness or swelling. He had bent low and sniffed inside their dead mouths. They had a blue cast to their faces, but there were no other obvious signs to indicate the cause of death, at least as far as my untrained eye could tell. Dillon said they were still warm, so death must have occurred recently.

‘Hemlock,’ Dillon said now, in response to Manyon’s enquiry.

‘You’re certain?’

‘As eggs are eggs,’ the constable answered, stolidly. ‘The smell of the stuff is unlike anything else. Check for yourself, sir, if you’re in any doubt that I have the right of it.’

‘No,’ said Manyon, absently. ‘I’m sure you know your business, Constable. But how? How?’ He drummed his fingers against the table. ‘The Moore girl was locked up, in her cell, the whole time?’

Dillon nodded. ‘She was brought in before the Gedge women and she’s right there now. Not a shadow of a chance of her getting out.’

‘And their cells were not adjacent to one another?’

Dillon shook his head.

‘The women were searched when they were brought in?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the constable said, robustly.

Manyon had no further questions, so sent Dillon to call on the coroner. He scribbled a few further notes before sitting back, thoughtful, in his seat.

I offered Esther a handkerchief and she took it, gratefully. I sat, not knowing whether Manyon waited for me to say something. I had already decided to say nothing of Chrissa Moore’s words in the gaol. Something about them – her talk of chaos, perhaps, which I feared more than anything – had discomforted me. I wanted nothing other than to take my sister and return to the farm and my father by the shortest road. The less I said now, I was certain, the more quickly we would be away from this place and its horrors.

To my surprise, Manyon nodded to Rutherford, who had been, until now, a silent observer. Rutherford leant forward in his seat towards Esther, and steepled his fingers. ‘Miss Treadwater, if I might ask you some questions about your exchange with Joan Gedge and her mother…’

This bewildered me. ‘You were there, Mr Rutherford – what can my sister tell you that you do not know first-hand?’

Rutherford’s face contorted in an awkward expression, then he offered an ingratiating smile. ‘That is true of the first few moments but, as your sister will testify, there was a short time when she was unaccompanied in the presence of the two women. A short time only,’ he added, as if that made it better.

I stared at Rutherford, unsure whether to laugh or to leap up and box his head off. I spoke slowly, as if to a fool. ‘You left my sister in that dungeon – alone?’

I felt the warmth of Esther’s hand, and realised how tightly I had been gripping the carved arm of my seat. Her small fingers unfurled mine from the wood and held them. ‘Please don’t blame Mr Rutherford,’ she said, gently. ‘I asked him to let me pray with them, and to leave us – only for a few moments, as he says.’

Manyon had drawn forward. ‘So, you were the last person with the two women? The last to see them living, I mean?’ His voice was still smooth, but there was a new layer of doubt beneath the courtesy.

Esther nodded miserably. ‘That’s correct,’ she said, pressing the cloth to her lips to contain a sob.

‘Did you exchange a few words with them? Perhaps a prayer?’ he suggested, with ready tact.

‘No. That is, I spoke to them, and I prayed, but they made no answer.’ At this, I started. Had they been affected by the poison already when Esther went down to see them? It had been so dark; it would have been easy for Esther to think she spoke to listening ears, when in truth the women were dead or dying there before her unseeing eyes? I relayed this grotesque thought to the magistrate, and he made a careful note.

Then, he said, ‘And you handed them nothing?’

Her eyes widened. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I would not…’ She stopped, looking to me for reassurance. I nodded. ‘I would have nothing to hand them, and why would they take anything from me if I did? After all, I am the reason they are here… that they were here…’ At these words, she broke down again, weeping helplessly. I patted her hand, feeling utterly useless.

Manyon spoke almost to himself. ‘Very well. I can see no explanation for how the women took hold of the substance, but there seems no doubt that they administered it to themselves, or to one another, and it makes little sense that they would do so at the behest of the person whose testimony saw them incarcerated here. Unless…’ He drummed his quill on the wooden desk, rat tat tat. We waited on his words with drawn breath. ‘No,’ he pronounced, finally, to my deepest relief. ‘Mistress Treadwater is right in that.’

‘Then my sister and I can leave?’ I asked.

The magistrate paused a moment, then agreed. ‘You may be needed again. If the examination of the Moore girl this afternoon yields anything further, or if it becomes plain that she is with child as she says, I may call on you. In the meantime, yes, you may go. And thank you, both, for your assistance.’

Rutherford stood to see us to the door. He placed his hand on my shirtsleeve, and I resisted the urge to pull away. ‘The searchers will still need to examine the house,’ he said. ‘I will call on you tomorrow; in the meanwhile, the room Chrissa Moore slept in is not to be altered in any way.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll find another spot in which to sleep.’ I tipped my hat at Rutherford. ‘Until tomorrow, then.’

Before leaving town, I sought out a farrier for Ben. This gave me the small comfort that, if I had accomplished nothing more, I was at least attending to my duty to the horse.

My wound ached all the way home. Temperance was fractious, Esther silent, and my own mind was heavily preoccupied.

I tried again, holding Father’s face off the mattress as I spooned a second lump of Esther’s thickened oat pottage into his gaping mouth. The task nauseated me: the too-red, wet lips, the lolling tongue, the half-aware look in the one of his eyes that would open fully. Using the spoon, I attempted to push some of the food over the mound of his tongue and past his teeth, hoping he would swallow it, but it simply caused him to choke, and I ended up swabbing the regurgitated mess off his chin. Eventually, I gave up and sat for a few moments in silence.

I was still sweating, pain surging through me like a spear. Every joint and muscle ached. When I lowered my forehead to the back of my hand, it was clammy, but still I shivered, and my belly cramped tight and sour. An infection was setting in.

I sniffed at the pottage, a richer imitation of what I had eaten in the army. I could easily recall the taste: cabbage and onion, always past their best; meat juice if we were lucky, tough bits of sinew and heavy seasoning to disguise its origins if we weren’t. The frequent slop had interfered with our stomachs, and we often joked it had been better on the way out than on the way in. I remembered how I had complained so hard even Jack Trelawney had tired of it, and told me, as an enlisted soldier, I was lucky I was fed better than a beggar, and blessed if I was paid at all.

‘I hated you, Father,’ I said, realising that my father wouldn’t have known my train of thought even if he had been able to hear me. ‘For such a long time, I hated you for sending me there.’ I closed my eyes, conjuring up the mortification that had flooded my father’s face as he waved Milton’s final letter in front of me. ‘I thought you so harsh.’

My father’s voice had rung out with anger. ‘Once again, you shame me in your inability to master yourself. You dishonour the name of Treadwater. I give you a choice: join the Bands, and defend Parliament and God against the King’s ministers, thereby reclaiming something of our dignity and the values I taught you, or –’ and here he held up his hand against my protests ‘– no longer call yourself my son.’

I had never seen the contents of Milton’s letter, and never wanted to see them, but I could imagine well enough what was in it.

The last day I spent under Milton’s tutelage in Chalfonte started in the dark hours of the morning. Waking, I heard the warbling of a treecreeper through the window, and toyed with rising from the bed and returning Elizabeth to her own chilly room before the servants began to light the fires and collect the chamber pots. But, as I envisioned cold draughts of winter air hitting my feet, the blanket being withdrawn, I drowsily dismissed the thought. What would a few more minutes hurt?

Beneath my hand, Elizabeth’s slender thigh was as warm and soft as sable. Her leg encircled mine, and she slept peacefully. I, too, had slept, though not so well, constantly stirred by her unclothed limbs. I hadn’t wanted to let her sleep at all, but to pull her atop me again, to draw her down so that her breasts touched my body and I might kiss her gentle mouth. While she dreamt, I lay restless and aflame, fondly imagining the little room at the top of my tutor’s house as a haven, a place outside time, where the two of us might live out our years in halcyon bliss.

These things, we always think, when we are young.

My reverie was interrupted by the sound of booted feet striking wood, stair after stair taken in angry succession. My room was the topmost in the house, an attic, a tiny, cramped space with nowhere I might stash the rousing form of Elizabeth, who raised her head from my chest as I started upright and said, ‘What is it, Tom?’ I rolled, cat-like, from the bed and cast about beneath it for my breeches and boots. I found her nightdress bunched on the floor and threw it up to her.

‘Quick, put it on!’ I said, urgently. The door flew open, and a voice, stern and censorious, demanded she rise and dress herself. I started to speak in her defence, blundering, talking of marriage, but her uncle cut me dead and I desisted. We had made no such promises, in truth. I wasn’t even certain she loved me. We had spoken of the future, but lightly, and she had skipped prettily to other subjects.

In some ways, this scene had been inevitable. I had known deep down we could not continue to escape detection as we kissed behind rose bushes and joined hands under the dinner table. Sooner or later, beneath Milton’s irascible eye, we would have been discovered, and so we were. Perhaps I welcomed the chance to return home, even in disgrace. In any case, now each of us would have to look to our own reputation. But I couldn’t escape the guilty thought that hers might turn out to be rather the more brittle of the two.

Now, over a year later, I continued my address to my father. ‘I was in the wrong,’ I said. ‘I know that now. I let you down so badly and I have deserved all that has come after.’ I watched my father’s trembling lips, wishing my words might be heard, but knowing in my heart that I spoke aloud to myself. ‘I was a foolish boy, but you look upon a man now,’ I said. ‘I will not fail you again.’

I thought of Elizabeth: returned to London in disgrace, dead of the plague just five months later, lying in disputed ground south of the River Thames. For many months, while on the march with the army, I had comforted myself with how I had done my duty and offered to marry her – an offer refused with accompanying venom by her uncle – and I had ached for her, but in truth, if I closed my eyes and tried – I did this now – to conjure her before me, I couldn’t remember her face, only the vanishing impression of youth and sweetness. My regret, unlike my love, was deeper now, my abiding sense of my own error an indelible mark upon my conscience.

But back then, packed off to Norfolk with the command never to darken my tutor’s door again, preceded by a letter to my father setting out the whole business, I nursed in my heart a cuckoo of misplaced rage, blaming Milton, blaming whichever of the servants had betrayed us, blaming even Elizabeth, for tempting me with her loveliness. I had marched on town after town and fought and killed, all the while believing myself to be the wronged one. Now, with Elizabeth gone, my father helpless, the farm probably ruined, I hung my head in abject shame, wondering how much pain might have been avoided, if only I had behaved with greater propriety, and thought of anybody except myself.

‘Brother, the physician is here. In the parlour.’ The door opened, and Esther’s meek voice interrupted my thoughts; her news was infinitely more welcome than these memories. I rose wearily and placed the pottage on the trunk at the foot of the bed.

‘We’ll get help for you,’ I said to my father, turning away.

I took the stairs slowly, feeling every contact with the wood as a searing jolt. I was light-headed, which did not surprise me; I had eaten little in recent days. As I reached for the rail to steady myself, my hand missed, I slipped; then, crashing down the stairs and only half-aware that I had fallen, I lost consciousness before I hit the bottom.

Once high, now fallen, chained forever within the circles of the world, yet within the boundless deep, it glides free, twisting in folds, never ceasing. To give liberty to its appetites, grown greater than the sulfuric cracks in which it is concealed, it labours without cessation, enduring plague and flood, locusts and salt, awaiting world’s ending in ice and fire. Awake! Awake and arise. He who cast us down is abandoned. The colossal round of the world is discovered. The distant stars are mapped, christened, charted. The waves are parted. I am upon the wing, for Chaos reigns once again, and the march of time has begun anew.

As I was released from my dream-state, the pictures in my mind, of something turbulent and muscular, something that writhed and grew in the deepest of shadows, faded, and I was returned to the real world.

My mouth tasted like rotten eggs. I licked my lips, wincing as they cracked, and forced my eyes open. Desperately thirsty, I propped myself up, and recognised the stink of a poultice somewhere on my lower body. I stretched out my leg, expecting to feel the familiar flood through the site of my wound, and felt a dull ache in reply, but that was all – the pain that had streaked through me like a hot poker was much relieved. How long had I been in bed? I strained to rise and fell back, weak, but no longer sweating or dizzy.

The room was dark, but moonlight pooled through the window. A rime of frost had grown against the pane, and tendrils of frozen water crept up the edges. I guessed it was the blackest part of the night, the witching hour, as far from midnight as it was from dawn, with not a soul moving anywhere. In this uncertain moment, I experienced an unsettled readiness, like being on the wrong end of a sword thrust, in that quarter-second before your enemy makes up his mind to move. My first impulse was to lie still, to conceal myself, if I could, from a threat I could not identify, that hadn’t yet sliced into the silence around me.

But then it was not quite silent. There was something – faint and foreign – on the edge of my hearing. Forcing myself upright, I rubbed my face and eyes. As I drew my legs around and placed my feet on the floor, I tested how much weight I was able to put on the leg before the pain attacked again, and found I could stand easily. But I was wearing a nightgown, not the clothes in which I had last dressed myself. I touched my chin and felt rough, scratchy hair – at least three days of growth.

Where was the sound coming from?

I had no time to seek out a candle. I padded to the door. The upper floor was in darkness. The bedchamber doors were closed. But the noise came from Esther’s room.

Feeling my way, conscious that it had been years since I had stumbled across the boards to my sister’s room, I reached for the handle.

As I stepped into the room, adjusting my sight to the blackness, I realised the rumbling sound had been the scraping and thumping of Esther’s bed against the bare boards. The convulsions of her body moved the bed, her back arched towards the ceiling, with her head and upper limbs thrashing. From her mouth were torn incomprehensible utterances, rapid and confused, hardly words at all, like the cries of tormented souls. I was terribly afraid, but resisted the urge to sink to my knees, remembering my promise to my father – you look upon a man now – and went forward. She had to be caught in the throes of some evil dream.

‘Esther!’ I cried. ‘Wake, Esther!’ I reached past the violence of her arms and shook her by the shoulders. Her feet kicked out and her torso pushed against mine with shocking force. I couldn’t still her spasms. Long seconds passed. As I started to panic, her struggle abated, and she weakened in my arms. I couldn’t see whether she had opened her eyes, but heard her voice. ‘Brother, release me.’ She still sounded only partly in the room, somnolent and groggy.

‘By God, you frightened me,’ I said, releasing her with a half-laugh. My heart still raced in my chest.

She came to a sitting position, and said, weakly, ‘I am glad to see you well, Thomas.’

‘How… How long has it been?’

‘Four days.’

‘Four days?’ I repeated, stupidly. So it was New Year’s Day.

‘Yes. It was a blessing that the physician was already with us when you fell because he was able to clean and dress your wound straight away. Then he induced sleep with a tincture. You improved quickly, with proper attention to your leg.’

There was something wrong with her voice. Something forced and unnaturally calm. She didn’t sound like Esther at all. I reached for her hand. It was cold. I said, ‘What are you not telling me?’

The pause before her words was ages long. But she spoke steadily. ‘After you fell, the physician examined Father. He concluded that the cause of his ailment was a sideration. I did not understand the entirety of what he said, but there seems to be no doubt that he was struck down by… by God.’

I felt a surge of irritation at the talk of Providence. ‘That was the physician’s diagnosis?’ I said.

‘Well, no. He called it an apoplexy. But…’ Esther placed her hand over mine. ‘With everything that has happened, I am finding it difficult to…’ She took a deep breath. ‘After the physician examined Father and left for the night, Father was smitten by a second, almighty attack. And this time he did not recover.’

I stared. I did not know how to ask the only question that mattered. ‘Is he…?’

‘Father died. The same night.’

With tears in my eyes, I squeezed her hand, lowered my head, and thought of the compendium of my losses. Elizabeth, my youth, my strength, now my father. Again, words came unbidden: But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.