Snow had gathered in pregnant clouds to the east, and the first flurries began to fall as Manyon and I parted ways at Walsham. The magistrate, if he was annoyed by the events of the previous night, didn’t show it, and shook my hand heartily. ‘You’ll be expected today in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘The business of trying to prise open the jaws of that tight-lipped creature awaits us.’
His words reminded me: I was part of this, now. Aligned with the magistrate, and with more zealous men like Rutherford and Huxley, men who would scorch their own ground barren in their quest to root out Satan. How far would they go? How far would I go along with them?
The snow was bucketing down by the time I forded the river on to our land. Ben didn’t like it, and was fractious. As we mounted the grassy bank to the road, he pulled against the wind that drove the swirling flakes into our faces. He was a young horse; perhaps he had not seen snow before. But I was thinking of easier days, endlessly white, with Esther and I bundled tight against the chill. As Father took us to church we would beg to stop along the way and he, before the reforming zeal truly came to him and he began to frown upon interruptions to the journey to God, would agree. The handfuls of feather-light, new-fallen snow turned my fingers blue as I pelted Esther with soft spheres, then we allied to build snowmen with outsized heads and misshapen, twiggy scarves. I remembered, though it could have been a different year, how Father once rested his capotain on the snowman’s head and forgot to retrieve it, so he arrived bareheaded at church. The congregation had stared, but Father had never given much weight to what others thought, only to the call of his own conscience. In full hearing of the reverend, he said, ‘God is forging a new Heaven, and a new Earth, and these are more important things than hats.’
He wished the snowman luck of it.
Returning to my current problems, I delayed thought of the afternoon. I knew what was coming, and didn’t want to dwell on it. Instead, my mind wandered to Rutherford, who would surely be the right hand of the magistrate in this. Why hadn’t he attended the dinner at Huxley’s? My lip twitched in a smile; perhaps Rutherford had eaten there before and knew he would sleep on a half-full stomach. Still, it did not show him in a good light. I decided I had to speak to him, if only to reinforce our imminent family connection. I couldn’t have his faults reflecting on Esther, if their marriage went ahead. I realised, with surprise, that I had started to think of the union as something that would probably happen, and felt guilt that I had failed to speak to my sister of it.
By now the weather had me tightly in its clutches. There was little wind beneath the weeping mantle of grey cloud, and the snow fell like a curtain. My cloak, boots and hat offered thin protection against a mournful cold that took residence in my marrow. Snowflakes mingled with tears plucked from my eyes by the biting air, and together they hardened into crystals on my cheeks. A raw-boned leveret caught out too far from its nest, half-buried beneath a light drapery of white, was an unwelcome sight as I approached the gate.
I was surprised to see no spiral of smoke from the chimney. No lights either. I drew Ben to a halt and made to start up the path, but the horse whinnied and dragged his hoofs, so I had to dig in my spurs. Still, even with as much force as I wished to exert, he refused. ‘Come on, boy,’ I muttered. ‘Too cold for this, isn’t it?’ Finally, Ben acquiesced, and we rode up towards the house. I noted again the darkness at the windows and, as we drew closer, that they were all open. My thoughts turned to intruders. There were soldiers and vagrants enough on the roads for that. ‘God’s teeth,’ I muttered, knowing I never should have left.
But the path was a pristine, undisturbed white. No thieving feet had trodden here. And what sort of intruder opened the windows? Even as I dismounted and reached for the hilt of my sword, I felt there was something more amiss. A thief would have entered, taken what was valuable – not much – and fled, not occupied the building he had just fleeced.
I did not call out to Esther or Henry. If there was someone inside who had no right to be here, I had no intention of alerting them to my presence. I walked with the cautious step of a soldier sent often out in scouting parties; I had always been able to tread noiselessly. I was tense, but kept my muscles loose and ready – men lose their lives because, wound by their nerves to tightness, they jump back in fright when they ought to strike out.
I crept through into the kitchen. The hearth stood cold, with no sign a fire had been lit that morning. The expected smells of warmed bread, smoke and lye were quite absent. In their place was a faint odour of stale ash, salt and, underlying that, something else I did not recognise, something foul, like the remnants of a bird half-chewed by the stable cat that once I had found beneath the kitchen table.
I almost didn’t see Esther. She was in Father’s chair. She sat in the shadow of its tall back, motionless, like a figure in a painting. Her pale hair was loose around her face and shone against the drabness of her dress. She wore no coif.
‘Esther,’ I said. ‘Why are you sitting in the—’ Her expression stopped me dead as I came about the chair and faced her. It was flat and leeched, somehow callous. Not like my sister at all.
When she spoke, it was in a brittle, clear voice. ‘A baptised child lives in Kent, who will become learned. He will become the keeper of a great trove of knowledge, and will configure such debates as whether the shapes of bones found in the earth were brought there by flood, earthquake or God. He will explore the hidden affinities of the external world with the world of His creation, and from the rocks at the base of this island, his friends will draw a great bone, elephantine in its proportions, and petrified, and at first he will think it the remains of a great war beast of the Empire of the Romans, and then he will conclude that it is the thigh bone of a giant – man or woman – that has lain there since the beginning of time.
‘But he will be tricked, ignorant as all men are; the learned ones, too. Two hundred years from now, they will exhume the jawbone of a great lizard, and name it, and set it on display so that men may marvel at it, but still they will live in the darkness of want of knowledge. And then a time will come when there is no darkness, and all will live in ceaseless, unblinking light. Do you think they will like that, Thomas?’
I couldn’t speak. I stared. Esther’s face was like chalk, my name on her lips a foreign thing. As the words ran from her like an undammed stream, her face moved with an animation I had never seen in her, her eyes settled on me so directly that I wanted to move back, to escape, quickly, into the open air. She was everything unknown and unknowable: the blurred face at the window, the whisper of a breath in an empty room, the dawning realisation of a world beyond the one we know.
‘And later, much later – in the puny minds of men – when the monsters that live in the sea have disappeared from your maps, will come a time of reckoning. Like the times that have come before. And before. And will come again. A time when the gods sleep. A time of formless ashes. No sun, no fires, no earthquakes. A time of Judas. A time of Cain. An endless winter. And they will rise again, from fathomless waters.’
‘Esther, stop! Stop talking!’
She stopped. She was relaxed in the chair, her palms resting lightly on the arms. I moved forward, sinking to one knee by her side and taking up her hand. I gasped to feel her icy skin. How long has she been sitting here? ‘Sister, what is this nonsense? Why do you sit here in the cold, with no fire to warm you? Are you ill?’
I could not process the words she had uttered. It was as if she had been speaking in tongues.
I stood and began to close the windows, but even as I did so, Esther rose to open them again. She was beside me, pulling at the frame, and our mingled breath clouded the glass as we wrestled. ‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘This… this is madness!’ I seized her arm, hardly knowing myself, just wanting to stop her, and pulled her back to her seat. She didn’t struggle, and instead laughed; a high, maniacal sound. I resisted the urge to shake her, to silence her. I drew back, but still she laughed.
‘Why are you laughing? Do you need a doctor?’
‘Oh, a physician would make a pretty addition to this picture,’ she said, still cackling.
I looked about the room, realising it had not been cleaned, and food lay in dishes from the previous night: half-eaten meat and oily, stagnant gravy. ‘Can I get you anything?’ I said, helplessly. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I have eaten much,’ she said, her laughter abating, although one further giggle escaped her, like a hiccough.
The gnawing feeling deep in my stomach intensified. I could not ignore what every part of my body was screaming: leave, move away from her. A visceral need to put distance between us was swelling inside me.
‘This…’ I could not say it, but the words drummed on the inside of my skull: This is not Esther.
My sister’s sweet features hadn’t changed. Her eyes were just as blue, her chin as pointed, her lips formed the same bow they always had.
But it was not Esther.
Thoughts whipped through my mind in chaotic flurries. Esther’s letter, its voice desperate and lost. My father dead, his reputation hanging by a thread. Chrissa Moore, her otherworldly face turned up to mine from behind the bars of her cell. Henry running away, his steps dogged by a terror I had not understood. And Joan Gedge and her mother, curled together in poisonous, untimely death.
I was unable to turn from Esther. She met my eyes calmly. My sister’s usual expression – uncertain, seeking approval – was absent. I quailed, knowing I looked on something I did not understand. When I spoke, I almost whispered. ‘Where is she?’ When no answer came, my voice rose as I said again, ‘Where is she?’
‘There is no “where”,’ Esther – or what was not Esther – said, again in that terrible composed voice.
I was shaking. To hear her speak of herself in that way was the most horrible thing I had ever known. I tried to form another question, but my mouth would not say the words. What are you?
My thoughts were turning back to the words of the letter in which she had first written of Chrissa Moore: a great and ungodly evil.
There is no such thing as evil.
Not-Esther was watching with keen eyes. I was reminded of the way I had once examined things collected from pools by the sea, when my father had taken us to wade in the shallow water off Snettisham Beach: baby sea scorpions, shore crabs and dog whelks. She was looking at me with interest. As if I were something she might study.
‘Where is the boy? Where’s Henry?’
‘He is the son of nine mothers. He is known by many names. He protects against the wind. His horn is aloft. He saw me. Where is he?’ The voice was sing-song, each bit of each obscure word rising and falling in discordant musicality.
‘Stop it!’ I wanted my father. I wanted to run. ‘Stay here,’ I said, uselessly, and saw Esther’s lips part in another laugh.
I was mired in doubt and fear, but had to find Henry.
There was a snake, he had said. What had he meant?
I hesitated in the doorway. She was no longer staring in my direction. Instead, she looked ahead, at the wall, or at nothing. I wondered what she could be seeing. Where was Esther if her form was occupied by someone – something – else? Where had she gone?
I knew what I had to do. In the hall there was a large oak chest of useful things: boots, hats, thick-bristled brushes for removing dirt from the stone floor. And rope. I staggered towards the chest, fumbling with the catch. I dug, desperately. It was here somewhere. It had to be here. I found it right at the bottom and dragged it out, letting its coils burn my hands in my haste. Then I baulked. The thought of restraining her, of pinioning her slender arms, was beyond anything I had done as a soldier. It was unthinkable.
It’s not her. The voice inside was quiet but insistent. Esther is somewhere else.
Was she dead? I stood with the rope between my hands and a cry rose in my throat. She could not be gone. I had lost too much. Mother, father, and now…
I shook myself. I had to fight now, fight for Esther. But I was so afraid. Every step towards her was harder than the most savage battle charge.
‘Sister,’ I said, approaching her seat, finding myself once more the subject of her gaze – she saw the rope but did not move – and wanting more than I had ever wanted anything to be far away. ‘I do this for your safety.’
She did not resist. If anything, she seemed amused, and watched as I tied figure-of-eight knots, securing her forearms to the solid arms of the chair. It was anathema to me to touch her skin, though she did nothing in response.
When finished, I stood back, half-expecting her to vanish the knots. She spoke again instead. ‘The first man you killed, the shock was such that you lost control of your functions.’ I started, remembering. ‘You kicked your man down, and he dropped his sword. You kept kicking him until he did not rise again. You had lost your own sword, and you picked up his, a Prussian-made blade with a fish-skin grip, which was not originally his either. It belonged to his officer, who had died earlier in the battle from a flintlock shot to the face. His nose came off, leaving a bloody hole. Your man, though, was not an officer, but you thought he was because of the sword. You bungled the first blow, striking at his breastplate, then ran him through at the armpit. As you withdrew the stolen blade, blood sprayed from the wound, and some of it struck your face. It tasted like copper in your mouth. And the hot piss ran down your legs. Does not the Lord go out before you?’
I lurched to the side and emptied my stomach, my sparse breakfast biting like hot vinegar at my throat. As I wiped the reeking bile from my mouth, her laughter sounded in my ears again. I stood, and stumbled from the room on shaky legs.
Outside, I called Henry. The snow was falling even more heavily now, and Ben was stomping and whinnying in the freezing air. The horse had tugged at his rope hard enough to almost dislodge the hook from the wall, and when I reached him, he was trembling from withers to flanks. ‘Hush, boy,’ I said, smoothing my hand over the side of his nose. ‘I’ll get you in.’ He neighed violently, pulling harder. His eyes rolled white in his head. I hauled, he resisted; then, finally, hearing my oaths, he yielded.
I continued to call Henry as I led Ben round to the stables. I was comforted by the horse’s presence and his warmth, and as I rubbed down the thin layer of snow that had accumulated on his coat, I pressed my face into the coarse brown mane. ‘I wish I could stay here with you, boy,’ I whispered.
I looked about the stables for Henry, but saw no unkempt mop of dark hair poking out of the straw. I thought through other places Henry might be, but in this weather… He would not have gone to the house on any account, so if he were not in the stables, the next place to check was the small shed where Father had once nursed plants ready to put them to the soil, and where Esther now kept some of her potted herbs. The thought of her conscientious hands potting and pruning the delicate plants was unbearable as I walked across the garden.
‘Henry!’ I called. ‘Henry, come out!’
I realised the shed was locked. I had never known Father lock it before. It was in poor condition, with a wooden roof partly stripped to allow in the light, set well back from the road, hardly a target for thieves. I peered inside. ‘Henry?’ I shouted before realising, with another stab of worry, that the lock would have prevented him taking shelter here. I nearly turned to leave, but my attention fell on the far wall. I shielded my eyes against the snow again and squinted through the window. The plant was growing in a large clay pot. It had clusters of small, segmented leaves, like carrot tops, but bigger. I hadn’t seen it in the garden before, and couldn’t account for the nagging feeling at my core that said I should inspect it more closely.
I took a loose stone from the edge of the vegetable patch and smashed it against the lock five or six times until it broke. I levered the door open, ducking to enter the cramped space beneath the half-roof, then crouched close to the plant, examining the tiny leaves and the smooth, hairless stems with their darkish purple spots. I rubbed the leaves, put my fingers to my nose. The smell was musky, like urine. I stood, too quickly, thumping my head on wood, ignoring the pain, and backed out, breaking into a run to reach the pond. I plunged my hands through the icy sludge developing on the surface, into the numbing cold of the water below.
The poison that had killed Joan Gedge and her mother was here. Had clearly been growing here for several months. How could that be? I withdrew my burning hands from the water and rubbed them against my thighs. The plant had to be Esther’s. Which made everything I had assumed since receiving her plaintive letter the result of a deception, a deception designed to make me believe Chrissa Moore was responsible for my father’s death, and those of the two Gedge women, when in truth…
I recoiled.
Esther had killed Joan and her mother. In those minutes she had stood alone in the gaol cell, praying, remonstrating with the two women, what, in truth, had she whispered to them? How had that terrible voice I had just heard manifested itself, and to what effect? It was grotesque to think of her funnelling the leaves or seeds of the deadly plant through the bars, exhorting the women to chew, to swallow, watching as their hearts slowed and paralysis set in. An acid taste surged in my stomach, rising to the edges of my tongue.
And Father. Though I still could not be sure what had happened to induce his apoplexy, whether or not he had seen what I had now seen in Esther, it was clear Father was no victim of witches, nor of serving women and their ill-wishes. Chrissa Moore had been maligned. Had she seen the truth of what was happening? Perhaps she had spoken out about it. At least now, her arrest made more sense.
I cursed myself for my words to her in the dingy gaol. I, who had prided myself on my cleverness and worldliness, had been taken in by first appearances, gulled like a simpleton. I, thinking myself sophisticated, with my rejection of superstition and even of God Himself, now looked into the abyss of my lack of faith, and shuddered.
My thoughts were turbulent, tethered only by the knowledge that I had to act. Yet I remained crouched by the pond, staring into the water. Minutes passed, and still I could not summon the will to move. My teeth chattered. I had lost most of the feeling in my fingers.
It was then that I saw it: a head, poking out from beneath the guelder hedge separating the garden from the paddocks, and a tousle of ragged black hair attached to a small, unmoving frame. I skirted the pond, then fell to my knees on the other side.