20

What do you remember about your youth?’ I asked.

I had not secured her to the chair again. I hated to see how the rope chafed her skin, leaving angry red welts that had now faded to purple. Esther didn’t seem to mind whether she was bound or not. I suspected it was a small matter to whatever consciousness now held sway inside her. Her eyes were shut, and she gave no sign she had even heard my question. The evening light played pink upon her cheeks. She did not seem tired; but I was so exhausted I questioned whether I was in a dream, thinking I might wake up on the eve of Newbury, terrified of battle, but with an enemy I could fight.

I said, ‘I remember little of your babyhood. I have clearer memories of you as a girl of five or six, but before that… Is there anything you can tell me? Anything that does not seem to you as it should have been?’

This was useless. It was the third time of asking, but it felt like talking to a statue. Nothing I said, if addressed to Esther and not to the thing inside her, seemed to have any effect at all.

Yet I did not wish to talk to it. Its words were lies. Its voice was a claxon sounding damnation. To engage it was to fall.

I thought of the events of the day just passed. I had woken early, knowing a neglected errand awaited me, and could not be left longer. Once the usual jobs of the morning were completed, I mounted Ben and took my leave of Mary and Henry. After explaining the importance of what I had to do, I chose an eastward path, riding into the sun. The journey over the fields on the hard-ridged soil felt like a release. There were raptors on the wing over the hedgerows, the fleeing tails of rabbits in the distance, and a wide pale sky above, with the clouds barely stirring.

I traced a route through Honing, where John Rutherford’s small house stood near the blacksmith’s forge. I knocked on the door and waited. When no answer came, I walked around to the back and found the door unlocked. After hesitating a few moments, I entered, calling Rutherford’s name.

Several hours later, I picked my weary way back across the fields. I knew now why Rutherford had not attended the dinner at Huxley’s, why he had been absent from Mary’s ordeal outside St Nicholas’s. I wished I could hand back the knowledge, for it was a poisoned chalice.

Before I reached home, I stopped at the church.

This was not our church. My father preferred the bigger congregation of Walsham, and he detected here, he had said, a whiff of the old ways, something left over from the corrupt days of monks and pardoners. It might have been something to do with rumours of a tiny priest’s hole, a storm shelter carved into the thick walls of the squat, square tower. I had always loved the idea of this secret feature, and, as a child, often imagined myself having the run of it, laying my head beneath its whispering stones. Not that I was ever allowed to.

As I approached the little, walled graveyard, I reflected that I had always preferred it to the elegance of the greater churches at Worstead and Walsham. It was little to do with holiness. I liked the quiet, the peace.

The church was never heated, and the plain, colourless panes allowed in only a partial light, overshadowed by the ancient quatrefoils. I felt a chill as I opened the door, but it was nothing compared to the cold which had already set in my bones since visiting Honing. I came to my knees before the table in the tiny Lady Chapel. There was no statue of the Virgin, now, of course. According to my father, there had been a lavish side altar in the days of his grandfather, but that had long been replaced by a simple communion table, its inscription carved in gold on green, speaking of its purpose: a place at which all could partake in the Body and the Blood of Christ.

I had never felt spiritual, not though my father had told me we were blessed by God, not though Esther had tried to persuade me, and not though Milton had done his best to extract some proper sentiment from me through means of rote repetition and hour upon hour of Bible study, until the words lived of their own accord in my head, whether I wanted them there or not. The mysteries of the service had eluded me. Occasionally, I had wondered whether I would have felt differently, had I been born a century earlier, hearing on Sundays, through the rood screen, the melodious chanting in Latin, the whispered appeals to the community of saints, and pleas to the Virgin for her compassion, giving access to the mercy of God. I did not think so.

But now, as I knelt before the wooden table and closed my eyes, inexplicably, my burden lightened. I was able to lift my shoulders a little higher, to chase away some of the stiffness in my limbs. I knew there was a prayer to Mary that some Catholics still liked to recite in secret, a prayer of expiation, but I did not know all of the words. Instead, I allowed the pristine solitude of this place to wash over me, cleansing me. I felt the weight of sin leave me and strength flow in, from I knew not where.

I left the church with knowledge of what I had to do.

With the events of the day behind me, sitting before my sister, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Esther. I have failed you. Failed to keep you safe. I am the architect of my own sorrows, and now of yours.’ I stood to leave.

‘You have seen,’ Not-Esther said. ‘And you are afraid.’

I stopped, turning, and closed my eyes, tried to shut out the image that leapt in, but it was indelible, as I had known it would be. John Rutherford had hung from the rafters of his own cottage, his jaw and neck swollen, his skin purple, with his eyes protruding from his disfigured face. His tongue had rested like a greyish slug against his bottom lip and, at some point in that macabre dance, he had kicked off his shoes. His bare feet and lower legs were black where his blood had succumbed to the earth’s force, then pooled inside him so they had the look of cuts of flyblown meat.

‘I am afraid,’ I admitted. ‘How did you persuade him to such an act?’

‘I spoke of his son to him. His plaintive cries for milk. The shape of his distended stomach, the grotesque parody of his knees, so large against his tiny body. The terror in his eyes as his face began to turn yellow. The piteous noise as he gnawed in hunger on his fists. It was not difficult. The man’s grief was like a heavy cloak he could never take off, woven of the very finest threads.’

I wanted to hit her, to shake the voice out of her, do anything to silence her.

My revulsion seemed to possess me, as the creature had possessed her, until I thought I might erupt in violence; and still the voice would not relent. ‘How did it feel, to bury him with your own hands, to hide the work of mine?’

It’s not Esther. It’s not.

I left the room.

My plan relied upon protecting Mary and Henry. I could not leave them alone for as long as would be needed, not unless I could find a way to quiet the creature’s malice.

‘We can’t lock her up forever,’ I said.

‘No,’ Mary agreed. She was frowning, pacing the kitchen with folded arms. She started a sentence, then withdrew, tapped her fingers on her elbow, and just slightly closed her eyes.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’

But it was something. ‘What were you thinking?’

She came to sit beside me, pouring herself ale. ‘What if we could find something – some drug – that would make her sleep? That would silence it? Then you could…’ She thought again. ‘You could go to Chalfonte, find Mr Milton, and discover what you could, and I could stay here and watch her. We wouldn’t have to restrain her then, just keep the door locked.’

‘You would do that?’ I asked, startled.

She nodded. ‘It’s not only that your father helped me.’ She lowered her gaze, her cheeks reddening. ‘That matters, and I will always be grateful, but in truth, Henry and I have nowhere else to go.’

So we searched the little potting shed together, and sniffed, rubbed or tasted every plant, identifying each – foxglove, bryony, henbane, aloe vera, quince – and investigating the contents of every bottle. Esther had been diligent in labelling her pots and concoctions, and my father’s books on botany helped when we needed further knowledge of the effects of a particular plant.

‘Here,’ Mary said, hefting aside a pot of parsley and showing me a wad of paper on a damp shelf.

‘That’s Esther’s,’ I said. ‘Her recipes.’

We took it back into the house and thumbed through the pages. In it, Esther had carefully recorded the names of the plants she knew and loved, but it took time to read her wayward scribble. Eventually, we found a recipe marked dwale. I quailed when I saw the ingredients – alongside harmless things like sow bile, vinegar and lettuce there stood more ominous names: hemlock juice, henbane, the white poppy.

‘Look,’ Mary said, poring over the page. ‘It says to mix this with wine, induce her to drink, then when we want her to wake, revive her with vinegar and salt. It gives the quantities. This should make her sleep.’

‘Or kill her. I can’t give this to her,’ I said, in despair.

Mary clutched the book, conflict written all over her face. In the end, she put it down in her calm, slow way. ‘She is your sister. I cannot tell you what to do in this.’

In the garden, Henry chased Guppy and allowed himself to be chased by the mastiff in turn. He beamed as they tumbled together on the drifted snow. I said, ‘Can you tell me what you would do, if it were Henry?’

Mary looked away. ‘Would you believe me, if I said so?’

‘I would believe you if you said so,’ I said, steadily.

She was biting her thumbnail, but stopped. ‘I think I would do it. Even given the danger, the risk of someone finding her like this… You’ve said yourself, if she is discovered, they will burn her. And now the danger is even greater, given Rutherford’s fate. She will be accused of his death if he is found.’

Bleakly, I said, ‘Rutherford will not be found.’

I had not liked Rutherford. He had been priggish and vain, but to lay him on his back in a shallow grave and heap clumps of earth over his clumsily wrapped body had been one of the hardest things I had ever done. I had wept for Rutherford, lying, not where he belonged, with his Maker in consecrated ground, beside the family he had lost, but in an unblessed ditch in a copse of oak and birch trees.

And I had wept for Esther. Esther, who had saved the jackdaw’s egg, because she could not bear the pain of helpless things. How I had wept for her.

Mary said, warily, ‘Even if he is not found, Esther is far from being above suspicion. They were known to be acquainted, and now four people have died or disappeared around her. I understand your reluctance – God knows, I fear the drug as you do – but to keep her close and silent while we seek answers elsewhere? It may be the only way to save her.’

I ran my eyes over the smooth oval of her face, first searchingly; then, without meaning to, admiringly. Despite all she had suffered, I did not believe Mary held any grudge against Esther.

I realised that she could see me staring. ‘Mary, I…’

She blushed and stood. It was enough to silence me. ‘I will see to the fire,’ she said. ‘It’s becoming cold.’