BONE HOUSE (14 page)

After a minute he suddenly spewed up blood and with a strange gurgling sound he collapsed facedown upon the earth. This was too much for me and I gave a little scream and jumped to my feet. But in the next instant I was struck by the complete stillness of his body: death had taken him as I watched. I remained motionless for several moments, and then I crept up to his side and settled myself next to him, hoping that perhaps his soul would rise up in front of me so I could follow it. I sat and watched as two big horseflies landed on his tunic, and slowly made their way across the carpet of blood. And then I was startled by sounds of shouting in the distance. After a moment a man came running toward me, followed closely by two others. The first man was also bleeding in the face, though not as badly, and when he reached me he stopped short and stared down at the body,
nudging it slightly with the toe of his boot. When he was satisfied that the man was dead he turned to his companions, who arrived huffing and puffing. All three wore the ragged clothes of vagabonds and their faces were rough and reddened from the sun.

“It’s done then, is it?” said the second man, who was short and barrel-chested.

“Good as near,” said the first, wiping the blood from his face with his sleeve.

“He went easy like,” said the third with a snort of disgust. This man then placed the heel of his boot against the dead man’s side and with one swift push, flipped him over like a pancake. I had never seen a corpse at such close hand, and the sight of his rolled-back eyes made me gasp. For the first time the three men looked at me, and we stared at each other for a long moment, until one of them, the one whose face was bleeding, spoke to me.

“Fell off his mount,” he said, indicating the dead man. The others nodded slowly, and then the barrel-chested man knelt down by the body. He took a knife out from under his tunic and cut loose the dead man’s purse. It held almost nothing, even I could tell this at my age, and when the fat man held it up to his companions they spat and shook their heads. Then they turned and scampered off, leaving me alone with my lost soul.

When I returned home I found my mother spinning wool in front of the cottage.

“I’ve seen one,” I said excitedly. “In the graveyard.” Her eyes narrowed.

“You’ve seen what?” she asked warily.

“A lost soul,” I said. “He was dead,” I added. She looked at me a long moment, then shook her head.

“You’ve seen naught,” she said with a sigh, before returning to her spinning. I watched her work for a moment, knew that the force of her truth would outweigh mine, and then I turned on my heels and left.

Some time later I returned to the graveyard. By then the body
had been removed, though I could still see the smear of blood upon the grass. My mother must have learned of the dead man in the days that followed, for news of a killing would have spread hastily about the village. But she never came to me with it—never offered her knowledge in exchange for my own.

Later that day my mistress falls into a deep sleep, and I take the opportunity to go into the village. At some point I must face my mother, but first I journey to the alehouse to discover what has happened. I enter through the kitchen door, hoping to find Mary alone, but instead find her and Samuell by the fire, their heads bowed closely in conference. They turn to me, and I see at once in their startled faces that something is amiss. Samuell nods to me and hurries from the room.

“What is it?” I ask. Mary takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Her face is a map of concern. “Where is the magistrate?” She puts a finger to her lips, and nods toward the other room.

“Within,” she says. “Interviewing half the village.”

“And?”

“He believes there is a witch among us,” she continues. “And has asked for a list of suspects.” She pauses then, looks into the fire. “Your mother’s name was mentioned more than once,” she says finally. I stare at her uncomprehendingly, and think of my mother’s unabiding loyalty to Dora.

“It is ridiculous,” I say. “She was her closest friend.” Mary nods.

“I told him so,” she says.

“He interviewed you?”

She shrugs and nods.

“And Samuell?”

“Him as well,” she says.

I think for a moment. “Who else is on the list?”

“The Widow Locke,” she says. “And old Jack Fry.” At this I laugh in disbelief. The Widow Locke is mad with age, and old
Jack Fry a drunkard. Neither are in possession of their senses, let alone capable of such misdeeds.

“Why my mother?” I ask.

“I do not know. There is talk of a familiar.”

I cannot believe my ears, for the familiar that she speaks of could be none other than my mother’s beastly cat.

“That cat has been with her less than two months,” I say angrily. “And I know for certain she regrets the day it ever crossed her path!”

“They do not know this,” says Mary quietly.

“She has even tried to bar it from the house, but each time it screams so loudly she is forced to let it in.”

Mary purses her lips but says nothing.

I stare into the fire, see the gray cat leap within its flames, taunting me.

“Truly he is a demon of an animal,” I continue. “And holds my mother somewhat hostage to his whims. But he is no familiar, and my mother is no witch!”

“It is not
me
you must convince,” Mary says placatingly. She lays a hand on my arm.

“What motive could she possibly have?” I say, thinking aloud.

Mary shakes her head. “None. But there were very few who knew of her condition. And your mother was one of them.” She looks at me and I see that she is right. “And too, she would know how to accomplish such a thing,” adds Mary.

“She is no surgeon!” I say sharply.

“I am only repeating what others have said,” she says emphatically.

“Besides, she is growing older by the day,” I continue. “And her health is poor. She would not be capable of moving the body.”

Mary looks at me for a long moment, and her face is grimly set.

“Not without the devil’s help,” she says finally.

*        *        *

I see at once how quickly fate can alter the course of things. Mary is right: in the absence of any real evidence, my mother is as likely a suspect as anyone. It does not help that she is close-lipped and keeps to herself. Her silence will only serve to fuel their speculation. As I make my way toward her cottage I curse the cat for ever falling in her path. That he should be the principal source of her undoing seems ludicrous.

When I enter the cottage, I find her bent over the boy, applying a poultice to his forehead. She straightens and I see at once that though he sleeps, his face is once again flushed with fever.

“He is worse,” I say. She nods, and puts a finger to her lips.

“It happened in the night,” she says. “After I returned.” She purses her lips and turns back to him. Her reference to last night’s events hovers between us like a cloud of flies.

“I am sorry for last night,” I say finally. “It was not meant for anyone to know.”

“What you do with others is your own affair,” she says curtly. “But the dead are sacred. And should be treated thus.” She squeezes out the poultice in a wooden bowl. The smell of dried goldenrod rises and wafts across the room. Watching her, I do not know which angers her more: seeing me embrace the painter, or allowing him to look upon Dora’s corpse.

“I did not think it would do any harm,” I say, referring to the latter. “I did not think that
she
would object,” I add. My mother turns to me with a look of incredulity.

“How could you know this?” she demands.

There is little point to this discussion. When I meet her anger I am catapulted back in time. I stand before her, five years old, and the sins of my childhood lay heaped in front of me, so large a pile that I am dwarfed by my own misdemeanors. She makes me feel this now: that last night’s misdeeds tower over me to such an extent that I could spend a lifetime in atonement and still fail to account for them. I watch her move about the room in solitary determination. As a child I thought that her anger was
due to the very fact of my existence—that somehow she never forgave my bastard birth. But now it occurs to me that my worst sin is not that I was born, but that I do not share her celibate soul.

She rises again from the boy, leaving the poultice upon his forehead, and moves to the table where she takes up a knife and begins chopping herbs. Suddenly I remember the business of the magistrate. “There is something else,” I say. She stops and looks at me. “The magistrate has arrived and is conducting interviews. He believes there is some sorcery involved.” She looks at me, her face a mask, and I continue. “He has compiled a list of suspects, and your name is on it.” She blinks, then lowers her head and resumes chopping.

“They will think what they will,” she says grimly.

“You cannot ignore them,” I say. She continues chopping, disregards me just as she will them. I move closer to the table, reach out to halt her hand.

“It is dangerous to do so,” I say emphatically. She looks at me.

“Neither can I stop them,” she replies.

T
wilight falls as I return, and the atmosphere in the Great House seems taut with apprehension. I enter my mistress’s bedchamber and she is lying in the stillness with her eyes wide open. She swivels her head round toward me.

“Who is it?” she asks, her voice laced with fear.

“It is only me,” I reply gently.

“You are shadow,” she murmurs. “Nothing more than shadow.”

“Is this better?” I ask, moving closer to her side.

“It is so dark,” she says after a moment.

“Let me light a lamp.” I move to do so.

“No,” she says quickly. I stop and turn to her.

“You prefer to be in darkness?” She stares into the dusk.

“It is not for me to decide,” she says.

“Shall I bring your supper?”

She shakes her head slowly no.

“But you must eat,” I urge. She turns to me with an inquiring look. “To keep your strength,” I say.

“I have no need for strength.”

“At least let me bring some broth.”

“Do what you will,” she says finally, echoing Cook’s words.

Later that evening, the painter has slept and looks renewed. He paces back and forth in front of me in a state of almost feverish
intensity. “Tell me more of her,” he says, his eyes alight. I stare at him, still irritated.

“Why?” I say.

“It will help me to see,” he replies.

“What is it you wish to hear?”

“Stories. Of her. I need to know more.” He leans forward urgently.

I say nothing; can think of nothing I wish to say. He waits patiently for me to begin, but I do not.

“Whom did she favor?” he says finally.

“She favored no one,” I reply.

“Herself?” he asks.

“No.”

“Her son then,” he says.

“She loved him as a mother does.”

“The men who came to see her?” He presses me further. Is this what he really wishes to know?

“No,” I say definitely. But I am moving in the dark, for there is no way I can be certain of this. Was she capable of passion, of ardor, of obsessive love? I do not think so. Somehow she seemed removed from these things. Romantic love implies a degree of dependence that, to my mind, was truly foreign to her. But perhaps I did not know her.

He looks at me, weighing up my answer, judging its accuracy—or possibly my honesty.

“Was she beautiful?” he asks after a moment.

“She was striking.”

“In what way?” I think for a moment.

“She was luminous,” I say. “Like . . . fire seen through water.”

“Was there fire in her?”

“There was strength. And confidence. It drew them to her. She was like the bough of some great tree: something they could cling to.”

“Did you?” he asks.

I stare at him. “I admired her.”

“And you were drawn to her,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Like the others.”

I shake my head in irritation. “No.”

“How then? How were you different?” I stare at him. Perhaps I wasn’t.

“We’ve discussed this before,” I say.

“I need to hear it again,” he replies.

“Why?” He pauses then, looks at me as if I am forcing the words from him.

“To cleanse the image from my mind,” he says finally. He speaks of her death-face, though he does not wish to say it. It haunts him.

“She is dead,” I say flatly. He stares at me.

“Why are you so angry?” he says quietly.

“Because none of you will let her go,” I reply sharply. And all at once I feel exposed.

The painter turns away and crosses to the window. “There is a story I must tell you,” he says, his tone distant and measured. “Perhaps I should have told it before.” As I stare at his back his voice floats across the room. “When I was a young apprentice, not long before my teacher died, a young woman came to stay in his household. She was some years older than I, perhaps five or six, and it was clear that she was in trouble of some kind, for she arrived in the dead of night without warning. At this time, I had lived with them for five years. I had my own room in the attic of the house, and took my meals together with them. The house was not very large, so when the girl arrived I moved to the studio so she could have my bed in the attic.

“My teacher would not say what trouble she was in. He told me only that she was the daughter of a friend, that both her parents were dead, and that it was his obligation to help her. She
stayed with us for three weeks, awaiting passage on a ship that had been delayed by bad weather. But her presence proved a strain on the household. She was not difficult in any way: on the contrary, she went out of her way to be obliging, but my teacher became increasingly uneasy in her presence, and would leave the room on any pretext as soon as she would enter. His wife, too, seemed to resent the situation, and more than once I heard them quarrel late at night after the young woman had gone to bed.

“My teacher contrived to be away a great deal during those few weeks, and I was left to my own tasks in the studio, preparing canvases and filling in the backgrounds of his portraits. The young woman often came and watched me while I worked. Because of her circumstances, she was confined to the house, and I think that she was restless and perhaps a little lonely. At first I was in awe of her. I was barely seventeen and had never known the company of women—and although she was older than me and clearly better off, I did not feel unequal in her eyes. She enjoyed watching me work, and I taught her how to mix pigments, and we talked a great deal, though she did not disclose the nature of her plight. She spoke only sparingly of her family. Like me, her parents were both dead and she had no other relations to speak of. Her mother had died the previous year of consumption, and her father had drowned in an accident some time after. She spoke a little French and German, and had inherited some means, and planned to travel to England to seek a new life.

“I was very . . . affected by her presence. I had never known anyone so bold . . . and so incapable of artfulness or deceit. Even her appearance was exceptional—perhaps especially her appearance, for although she was larger than most men, she carried herself with uncommon grace.”

The painter pauses and exhales, as if suddenly relieved of a burden. He turns to face me, and as he does his meaning becomes clear, for Dora has been with him all this time.

I shake my head in disbelief. “You knew her.”

He nods. “Yes.”

For a moment I am speechless.

He holds up a hand, as if to still my thoughts, and continues speaking.

“At the end of three weeks we had news that the ship she’d been expecting had foundered off the coast. By then it was apparent that she was fleeing persecution of some kind, but the arguments between my master and his wife had worsened, and it became clear that she could not remain under our roof.

“I made inquiries on her behalf but there were no other ships bound for London, so she had no recourse but to travel overland to Amsterdam, where she could be confident of securing a passage.” The painter hesitates, glancing up at me uncertainly. “I offered to accompany her. It would have proved difficult otherwise: a young woman of her means traveling alone would have raised suspicion. Together, we could travel as man and wife, and her identity could remain a secret. We hired horses and reached the port in four days, and as luck would have it, she had only three days to wait for passage on a ship bound for England, so the matter was settled swiftly.”

He pauses then. The words “man and wife” ring like bells within my head: try as I might I cannot quell them.

“Why did you not go with her?” I say finally.

The painter drops his head. “Because she would not let me.”

Suddenly I see him as a boy of seventeen: vulnerable, innocent, adoring.

“What happened then?” I ask.

“She said that she would write,” he continues. “But if she did, her letters did not reach me. Eight years later, when I came to England, I made some inquiries, but they came to nothing. London is a big city and it is easy enough to lose oneself if one desires. But I did not realize she would seek a place as far away as this.”

“You searched for her?” I ask, incredulous. “After
eight years?
”

“I thought perhaps to renew the acquaintance . . . that is all,” he says defensively.

I stare at him. “You were in love with her.”

He shakes his head no. “I admired her, yes. I was . . . in awe of her—” He breaks off, groping for words. “It was almost as if, when she left, some part of her stayed with me.”

“It was the other way round,” I say. “She held you captive. Just as she did with the others.”

“No,” he says, his voice taking on a sense of urgency. “Until I met her I had not the confidence to pursue my own path. She taught me to have faith in my own vision of the world. She taught me that the hand of God is there to guide us, but that it will not spare us from peril, for in the end each of us must save ourselves.” He speaks with such intensity that the force of his words buffets me like some great wind. I grip the handles of my chair.

“Then why could she not save herself?” I say.

He pauses. “I do not know. Perhaps she did not wish to.”

We sit in silence for a time, for we cannot move beyond this point of ignorance.

“You knew from the beginning it was her?” I ask finally.

He shakes his head no. “Something struck me that night in her cottage, when I first saw the boy. Perhaps a part of me knew then, but it was only a suspicion. Later, when I saw the body, I was certain, even though she was so very changed . . .” The painter’s voice trails off.

“You should have told me,” I say accusingly.

“I never meant to deceive you,” says the painter.

I think of that night in the barn and of our chance embrace. Perhaps it was her he reached for in the darkness. And once this thought occurs to me, I cannot rid myself of it: it lodges somewhere deep within my gut.

“So why have you come to me again for help?” I demand. “You knew her just as well as I.”

He shakes his head slowly no. “I thought I did. But I realize
now that it is not
her
I remember: but how she made me feel.” He does not look at me when he says this, for it reveals too much of him. “That is why I need you,” he continues, his voice barely above a whisper. “Your words help me to remember.”

“But they are only words,” I say, my voice as hard as flint. “They will not raise her from the dead.”

And with that I rise from my chair and push past him out the door, nearly stumbling as I scramble down the stairs. I run along the corridors of the Great House to my room, where I collapse upon the bed. By now I am fully clad in anger: I feel it swirl around me, wash across my limbs, surround me until little else remains. I close my eyes and she is there: luminous, strong, proud, a great-bellied glory. And suddenly I wish to purge myself of her, wipe her from me like the residue of ash left from a fire.

Is it mere envy that I feel? Such a small emotion, for such a deep well of feeling. I lie immobile on my bed for what seems like hours, empty my mind of all thought, concentrate on nothing. Sleep finally arrives. But as I drift into slumber, I know that she will be there in the shadows of my dreams.

Sometime after, I do not know if it is minutes or hours, I wake. A noise reaches into my sleep, pulls me forth unwillingly. When I open my eyes, it is the dead of night, and I see the door to my bedchamber close slowly from without. I hear the trace of footsteps in the hall, but in an instant they are gone. Moonlight streams in through my window, casting an eerie light upon my bed. I know that I should rise and follow, but the weight of sleep is still heavy upon me. I cannot fight it, so I close my eyes and slip away.

The following morning there is no sign of disturbance in my room, nor any indication of a foreign presence, and I wonder whether the event occurred in my dreams. My mistress seems somewhat improved, though she complains at length of shadows
in her eyes. I sit with her for most of the morning, reading Scripture of her choosing. Twice she dozes off but as soon as I stop she wakes and urges me to continue. Today the task of reading is onerous. I rarely pay attention to the content—I let the sounds wash over me, and find the rise and fall of my own voice comforting. But now my words sound strange and harsh. I feel as if I must spit them out into the room, where they taunt and mock me with their falsity. For today I have no certainty. My world does not conform to the one contained within these pages.

Finally she sleeps and I am free to end my recitation. The last words crackle in the silence of the room, then settle on the floor like dead leaves. I close the passage I am reading and shut my eyes. My head aches from the effort of reading and my throat is parched and rough. When I am certain she will not wake I slip silently from the room. I have heard nothing from the village and am anxious to learn news of the magistrate.

But first I go to see my mother, for the sense of duty weighs heavily upon me. When I arrive at Long Boy’s cottage I am surprised to see Anne Wycombe, the ironmonger’s wife, outside the door. She is bent over a washtub filled with bedclothes, and as I approach she pauses and rocks back on her heels, wiping a reddened forearm across her brow. Her hair is pulled severely back and covered by a kerchief, and the sleeves of her dark dress are rolled up to the elbows. She is a small, wiry woman of somewhat nervous disposition who has never borne children. Some years back it was rumored she would stop at nothing in the quest to end her barrenness, seeking out healers and soothsayers, quacksalvers and even white witches, all to no avail. There is something harsh and arid about her person, as if she herself was conceived and borne of desert dryness. And too, age and disappointment have curdled her expression.