ELLIE LANGE’S COTTAGE was on the edges of Stanton, a final outpost before the village gave way to dark hills. The landscape around the cottage was weird, with huge gouges, and places where things were bare and dead. Even the garden was weird, thought Elizabeth, parts of it overgrown, and others sloughed black rock and earth.
Walking up the path with Polly and Visander, Elizabeth was nervous, not a feeling she was used to, at least not this jittery, nauseous feeling. She had never met anyone who had known her mother. She didn’t count Will, who lied about everything. She wished Katherine were here, so that she could hold her hand. She made her hands into two fists instead.
Polly knocked on the blue-painted door with its brass knocker, and a stern-faced housekeeper in black appeared, her greying hair pinned back in a severe bun.
‘Mrs Thomas.’ Polly greeted the housekeeper, and held up the basket she had brought, with its homespun cloth cover. ‘We’re here to see Aunt. We’ve brought a hamper.’
Mrs Thomas gave no glance down at the basket with its offering of baked goods. ‘Mrs Lange isn’t well today.’
‘She might have one of her good spells.’ Polly wasn’t deterred. ‘We can wait and see.’
Mrs Thomas didn’t look like she agreed, but she stepped back from the doorway. ‘It’s your time to waste.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Thomas,’ said Polly, and Elizabeth followed her to the drawing room.
The room had a fireplace with a hob grate, green wallpaper, a cornice coving and skirting boards. A scattering of chairs with footstools and a couch filled the space, heavy velvet curtains drawn over its large windows.
Visander stalked in first, and checked the door and windows, securing the room with the sort of economy of movement that Elizabeth associated with Cyprian. Then he stood as if on alert by the sofa, watching both exits.
Elizabeth sat gingerly on the sofa next to him. Polly gave her a smile. ‘It doesn’t look so different from when your mother stayed here.’
Elizabeth’s eyes flew to her face. ‘She stayed here?’
‘In that room across the hall,’ said Polly. ‘The last time was about ten years ago. She gave birth here, in this house.’
Elizabeth didn’t need to be a mathematical genius to do those figures. ‘And then she gave me away. Like my sister.’
To her surprise, Polly nodded. ‘It was my brother who helped find you both a home. He worked in the household of a gentleman. Mr Kent. He and his wife wanted children. Someone to raise. They were too old to pretend you were their own, so they agreed to say you were their niece.’
Elizabeth looked around at the room. She felt like she should remember this place, but she didn’t. She thought of her aunt and uncle, and their cosy house in Hertfordshire. They had never taken the title of parent, staying at the more remote level of guardian. Her real family had been her sister.
Katherine had played at mama with dolls sometimes when they were little. Had Katherine remembered their mother? How old had she been when they had been parted? Old enough for some dim recollections? Would she have remembered this house? Elizabeth looked at the soldier from the old world, standing at alert in her sister’s stolen body, and felt a bright burn of anger, because Katherine should be here with her.
‘I’m going to check on Mrs Lange,’ said Polly. ‘You two wait here.’
Elizabeth sprang up from the threadbare sofa at once. She didn’t want to sit alone here with Visander. Feeling almost repelled by his presence, she found herself in the hallway, outside the room where her mother had stayed.
The door was open.
Having grown up without one, she had never really wanted a mother. Her early life in Hertfordshire had been spent clambering over sties and running about in the little woods, meeting frogs and crickets and rabbits and otters, which had kept her entirely busy.
Her aunt and uncle had told her no stories about her mother. They had said only that she was a gentlewoman who had died giving birth. The slight mystery had been cause for talk; the prettier Katherine had grown, the more persistently the talk had followed them. Defensively, Elizabeth had always insisted that her mother was a gentlewoman, thinking from whispers and gossip that maybe she wasn’t.
Now she imagined her real mother. Running from Simon, she had come here to give birth, and then handed the child to someone else. To protect her, Will had said. It suddenly occurred to Elizabeth that she was that child. She had been here before, as a red-faced infant. She had been held in her mother’s arms, then handed into the arms of another.
This was her birthplace, this house half-hidden in the hills.
She walked in further, looking for ghosts. The room wasn’t a birthing room, or even a bedroom. It was a morning room, a rather bare one, with a single table and four chairs. It had a window with an unnerving view of one of those bare strips of land outside. There was nowhere that a bed had stood. Elizabeth looked for any signs of her mother. There were none.
‘If you ask me, you’re lucky she gave you up.’
Elizabeth startled and turned to see Mrs Thomas in the doorway, her hard, lined face inscrutable.
‘What do you mean?’
At first it didn’t seem as if Mrs Thomas would answer. And then: ‘She had an abnormal relationship to that boy.’
‘Boy?’ Will. Will had been here? Elizabeth felt the hairs on her arms prickle.
‘Kept him locked up. Six or seven, he would have been,’ said Mrs Thomas. ‘A well-behaved little lad. She treated him like a criminal. Tied him up to the bedpost. And the way she’d look at him, like …’
‘Like?’
‘He got free when she was sleeping. He came out to see the baby. It’s natural for a child to be interested in a sister. She went wild when she woke and saw him with the infant. She … well, the less said about that the better.’
It wasn’t the story she’d hoped to hear about a mother she’d never met. It gave her that jangly feeling again. Elizabeth put her hand around the medallion. How had Will described her? She remembered Will saying, She raised me as best she could.
‘I brought him a bit of kidney pie, and it was like I’d won a friend for life. He followed me around chatting away, helping me with the chores. Never once complained about his bruises, poor mite. And I’ll tell you this.
‘Around that time, a man of means was staying here with his wife. He was a terror to the staff, put his hands on the maids. Put his hands on me. Well, a lamp got knocked over in his rooms, set his clothes and his belongings on fire. He left the next day. The boy never said anything, but I knew it was him. He done it for me. A smart lad. And loyal.’ The housekeeper said, ‘She looked at him like she’d kill him, if she’d only had the courage.’
A sound from the doorway made Elizabeth turn. Polly stood with a hand on the wooden jamb, expectantly.
‘Mrs Lange has come around,’ said Polly. ‘If you’re going to speak with her, you had best come now.’
The room was dark, with the stifled stillness of a sickroom. A heavy velvet curtain was drawn on the room’s only window, swathing and muffling it.
‘She doesn’t like the light,’ said Polly, the words a murmur. She kept the small lamp she held half-covered by her hand, and rested it on the cabinet by the door, as far away from the bed as possible. The room was dim shadows.
‘Mrs Lange,’ said Polly. ‘It’s Eleanor’s girls, come to see you like we talked about.’
‘Who?’ said Mrs Lange.
‘She forgets,’ said Polly. ‘Faces. People. You can’t take it personal. She thinks it’s Monday when it’s Friday. She thinks it’s seventeen years ago, sometimes.’ She motioned for Elizabeth and Visander to join her by the bed.
‘Eleanor’s girls. I told you,’ she said to the old woman.
Mrs Lange was a woman of perhaps sixty-five, with rheumy eyes, a face full of wrinkles, and grey hair falling from a white cloth cap. She lay in the centre of the bed, with her head on its single pillow. She looked up at Elizabeth and Visander.
‘Eleanor,’ Mrs Lange said to Visander. Elizabeth felt a ghostly sensation, as if her mother were in the room, when it was just Visander with the candlelight on his face.
On Katherine’s face.
‘It’s a boy,’ said Mrs Lange.
‘What?’ said Visander, frowning.
‘Your child,’ said Mrs Lange to Visander. ‘It’s going to be a boy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Polly to Visander. ‘She gets confused. She lives mostly in the past. And you’re the spitting image of Eleanor.’
‘He’s strong, and healthy,’ said Mrs Lange. ‘And you’re so far along. Eight months.’
Will, thought Elizabeth again. She’s talking about Will. She looked at the old lady who was reliving the past.
‘It will be hard to kill it,’ said Mrs Lange. ‘But you’ve come to me just in time.’
Elizabeth felt cold water run down her spine.
‘Kill it?’ she said.
Mrs Lange started thrashing on the bed, her head whipping from side to side and her limbs moving strangely.
‘Ar ventas. Ar ventas, fermaran!’ said Mrs Lange.
Beside her, Visander took a step back, his eyes wide. ‘How do you know that language?’
‘Fermaran, katara thalion!’ said Mrs Lange.
‘What’s she saying?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Eleanor,’ said Mrs Lange. ‘He’s fighting me. He’s fighting.’
‘Who’s fighting?’ said Elizabeth.
‘The child! Oh God, Eleanor! What have you brought to me?’ And then, ‘He’s too strong. He’s too strong, I can’t—’
She broke out into old-world language again.
‘You said she was a midwife,’ said Visander.
‘She is. She was,’ Polly said. ‘I told you, she has these turns. I don’t know why.’ After your brother’s birth, my aunt, she grew sick, Elizabeth remembered her saying.
‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ said Visander. ‘This woman cannot help you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Elizabeth. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘She tried to kill the child. But his magic was too powerful. Nothing could stop him from being born, and the attempt broke her mind.’ Visander said, ‘Its effects are carved into the land. You can see it outside.’
The great gouges on the landscape, sloughed rock like the ground had melted, and nothing growing there even after seventeen years.
‘She can’t help you. Her mind is fractured. Her natural healing staved some of it off, but she is caught between past and present, and she cannot speak truth.’
‘Polly?’ said Mrs Lange, looking up, her eyes clear. For a moment it was as if a fever had broken. She looked up as if she was herself.
‘That’s right, Mrs Lange. It’s me. I’m here with Eleanor’s daughters.’
‘Eleanor’s daughters,’ she said.
‘Show her the medallion,’ said Polly.
After the thrashing fit, Elizabeth was nervous to show her anything that might set her off again. She came forward hesitantly. Fishing the medallion from the front of her dress, she held it out, thinking as it swung on its tie that the room was almost too dim to see.
‘Redlan George said to come to you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘After he saw this.’
‘The hawthorn medallion!’ said Mrs Lange. ‘The Lady’s symbol!’
‘He said you could help me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘That you’d know what to do.’
Mrs Lange’s eyes opened full on hers. A second later, Mrs Lange’s clawed old hand reached out from the bedclothes and clasped her own urgently.
‘You must go to the Stewards,’ said Mrs Lange. ‘You are the only one who can stop him … You must go to the Stewards before he finds you. Or darkness will come for us all.’
Elizabeth thought of all the dead Stewards she had never met. She couldn’t go to the Stewards when they didn’t exist anymore. She supposed Grace and Cyprian were still alive, but they weren’t Stewards exactly, and they talked all the time about how they didn’t know what to do. Mrs Lange’s words were too late.
This whole journey was a dead end. Mrs Lange didn’t know the answers. She didn’t even know what was happening outside her room.
Elizabeth looked down at her, patting the hand that gripping her arm hard. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to worry. We already stopped the Dark King coming.’
Mrs Lange let out a peal of crazy laughter too loud in the small room.
‘Stop him coming?’ said Mrs Lange. ‘Weren’t you listening? He’s already here!’
The window shattered, and Elizabeth turned to a sudden view of a black muzzle opening on razor teeth in snarling jaws, and felt hot canine breath almost on her.
Polly screamed, as Elizabeth saw a whirl of darkness. A shadow hound. It had burst through the window, glass scattering everywhere. In the next moment, Visander yanked down the heavy curtains and threw them over the creature. Pushing up from the ground, Elizabeth saw him rolling with the writhing blanket, until he snatched up a glass shard, and stabbed it downward. There was a terrible wail, then stillness.
Polly and Mrs Thomas were staring in shock at Visander. He stood and brushed off his dress in front of the howling open window, with the lumpen shape in front of him. To confirm the kill, he pulled back the curtain that wrapped it. The shadow hound lay dead, a hideous creature, part nightmare, part dog. From outside the window came the howling of other beasts, as though they were connected to their lost companion.
‘They’ll come for this house, unless we lead them away,’ Visander said.
Polly shook herself. ‘There’s a cellar where your mother went out last time,’ she said. ‘The tunnel will take you out to the hill ridge.’
‘Take us there,’ Visander said.