Raven's Bride

Chapter One

Norfolk, England, 1661

Anna pulled her thin cape closer about her shoulders and stared blindly down into the open grave. The surface of the coffin at the bottom of the pit was rough and scarred. One of the top planks was warped out of shape, pulling away from its fellows, as if it were ready to leap up and let in the light of the cold spring morning on to the body of the man who lay inside the crude wooden box.

Papa would like that,
Anna thought to herself with a small smile. He had always loved the spring, when the days were getting longer, when little white lambs were born on the hills, and when daffy-down-dillies pushed their yellow and orange heads out of the earth to drink up the early sun. He would not like to be shut up in a dark coffin and then buried under the earth.

But Papa did not know that he was being buried. He was dead now. Dead.

A small lump of earth thudded against the top of the coffin. Little pieces of it broke off and skittered away to the sides of the grave. Anna looked up, startled. Beside her, her mother brushed her hands together to dislodge the sticky pieces of earth that still clung to the frayed fabric of her gloves. She had thrown the first clod on top of the coffin. She motioned to Anna, wordlessly indicating that Anna should follow her example.

Anna bent down and took a handful of the damp clay that lay heaped beside the grave. She tossed it down onto the coffin, where it stuck in an unsightly blob on a corner of the warped plank. The clay had stuck to her hands also. She clapped them together to rid herself of the dirt.

The gravediggers took this as their signal to begin to fill in the grave. As Anna and her mother stood by, they loaded shovelful after shovelful of wet earth into the pit. The first shovelfuls landed with a hollow thud on the lid of the coffin. Soon the wooden top was covered, and the rest of the earth fell almost noiselessly into the grave, until it was heaped up higher than the surrounding grass.

Beside her, Anna could hear her mother coughing. She reached out and took her mother’s hand. It was as cold as ice, despite the thin gloves that covered it.

She tugged gently on her mother’s hand. “Come, Mother,” she said. “Papa is buried now. You must not linger in the cold. You are still not well.” She paused for a moment while her mother coughed again, then added softly, “We lost Papa to a chill on the chest. I would not lose you, too.”

Her mother resisted the slight pressure of Anna’s hand. “Just a moment more,” she said softly, as she stood looking at the place in which her husband of twenty-five years had just been buried. Anna could see her mother’s eyes fill with tears. “I loved your father dearly.”

“Papa loved you, too,” Anna replied, brushing away, with the back of her hand, the tears that insisted on creeping down her cheeks. She took a well-worn linen handkerchief from her pocket, dabbed at her brimming eyes and handed it to her mother. “He would surely scold me if he were to see you out here. ‘Take your mother inside,’ he would say. ‘This chill wind will do the cold on her chest no good. You must look after her, now that I cannot.’”

Anna pulled her mother gently again, and this time her mother allowed Anna to lead her away from the grave to where the other mourners were gathered by the entrance to the churchyard.

The first to greet Anna and her mother was Squire Grantley. He clapped his heels together and held out a red-veined hand to Anna’s mother. “My dear Mrs. Woodleigh,” he said. “My commiserations on your loss. But—” And he turned his eyes up to Heaven and let out a pious sigh. “—it was the will of God, against which no mortal man may stand.”

“The will of God, indeed,” Mrs. Woodleigh murmured politely.

“And the lack of a warm coat,” Anna muttered under her breath, as she gazed with disgust at the baubles decorating the front of the squire’s jacket. When King Charles II had been restored to the throne the year before, Squire Grantley had cast off his customary black coats, and ever since he had been dressing in increasingly outlandish garb. A yard of the fine lace on the jacket he wore now would have cost more than the woolen coat that would have saved her father’s life.

The squire dropped Mrs. Woodleigh’s hand and turned to Anna. “And my dear young Anna,” he said, and gave her a smile which Anna thought must be meant to be reassuring. Instead, it made her think of a sly and vicious fox. She wanted to turn her back on him and run.

“Your servant, sir.”

The squire stepped towards her, his arms outstretched as if he meant to take her hands and embrace her, but Anna put her own hands behind her back and quickly moved backwards to avoid him. His face was thin and pointed, and his hair was the same reddish brown as a fox’s coat. He wore a decidedly vulpine mustache, of the same color as his hair. Even the smile on his face was just like the look on a fox’s face when it has discovered that the chicken coop is open and the farmer with his gun is nowhere in sight.

The smile on the squire’s face faded slightly as Anna recoiled from him. “My dear young Anna,” he repeated, letting his hands drop down to his sides. “A poor fatherless girl now. I am sorry for it.”

He didn’t sound in the least bit sorry. He sounded as if he were licking his lips in anticipation of snapping up a delicate morsel for his supper. Anna bowed her head, trying not to show her distaste.

“Come, Mrs. Woodleigh, you and your daughter must take tea with us now that this unhappy affair has been concluded.”

Mrs. Woodleigh took one of the squire’s arms. Anna could not refuse the other without obvious rudeness. As lightly as she could, she placed her hand on the deep cuff of his jacket.

He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and arranged his thick wool cloak so it covered both of them. “Snug and warm now?”

Anna shivered and was silent.

“
My wife and I have been most concerned about your situation,” the squire said, as he sipped a glass of port in front of the blazing fire. “Mr. Woodleigh, may he rest in peace, may have been a sainted man, but he was not rich. His death has deprived you of the income from his living in the church. You can have barely enough to subsist on.” He stopped for a moment before adding, “And the new church is no longer so kind to the widows and children of the old Reformers.”

Mrs. Woodleigh colored.

Anna gave a tight smile. “It is kind of you to be concerned about us,” she said, “but there is no need. Mama and I have sufficient for our wants.”

The squire’s meanness had been why her father had never been able to save any money,
she thought hotly. Every penny he could spare from his own family went to help the villagers who were most in need.

He brushed her words away with the languid wave of a bejeweled hand. “My...ah...wife and I have decided that our three girls are getting too old to be left in the charge of their nurse all day. Dear little Chloe, Persephone and Diana need a governess now. My...ah...wife and I would like to offer you the post of governess, wouldn’t we, Margaret? You would have your room and board, of course, and then two pound a year on top of that.”

Anna’s smile eased. “I would be glad of such a situation.” The pittance she earned would make her mother’s slender purse stretch that much further, and she would have all her food provided. Little as she liked the Grantleys and their spoiled girls, she would suffer much worse to be close to her mother.

Lady Grantley put down her embroidery on the arm of the chaise longue and gave a weak cough. “Indeed,” she said, in a cold tone. “Miss Woodleigh is not exactly what I would have wished for in a governess, but I suppose she will have to do, until I can find someone more to my liking.”

Anna raised her eyebrows. Lady Grantley could certainly find a more accomplished governess for her daughters, but not a one who would work for less than two pound a year plus her board. It was the wages of a chambermaid or a serving woman. “Indeed, ma’am.”

Squire Grantley gave his wife a smile of fat satisfaction. “She can sleep in the little room in the attic next to the upstairs maid. She will be in nobody’s way up there.”

So, she was to rank the same as an upstairs maid. Not a good start.

Lady Grantley ran her eyes up and down Anna’s figure, cloaked in her black wool dress, and pursed her lips into a thin, tight line. “It is as well that you are in mourning, for I do not approve of governesses wearing colors or fancy stuffs and ribbons. And, mind now, you are to make arrangements for your own washing.”

Anna’s heart sank still a little lower. Her washing would cost her at least two pence a week, if not more. Months would go by before she could buy that pair of boots she so badly needed.

She should have realized that the Grantleys’ offer would harbor a sting in its tail. Despite their noisy piety, they had never before shown any charitable leanings.

Squire Grantley downed the rest of his port with a long gulp. “We have two rules in this house: follow the ways of the Lord—” And he looked at Anna with a predatory smirk. “—and do as you are bid by your lawful master.”

Anna knelt in the small room she shared with her mother in their modest lodgings at the edge of the village and began packing her meager belongings into a small traveling case. She had little to take. Two sets of underclothes, three pair of darned stockings, a second black dress and a half-dozen books. The small case was barely half full when she had finished.

She carried it through to the kitchen where her mother and Mistress Weaver, their new landlady, were drinking a cup of warm ale in front of the kitchen fire. Mistress Weaver hurried to her feet and poured Anna a cup.

“So, Anna,” Mistress Weaver began, “you are all for leaving me already to be a governess for those little devils up at the Great House.”

Mrs. Woodleigh’s face was wrinkled in a frown. “You need not go if you do not want to, my love,” she said to Anna. “We have enough for the two of us, if we live cautiously and do not waste what we have.”

Anna kissed her mother. “I want to.”

Mrs. Woodleigh tapped her fingertips on the scarred top of the old kitchen table. “I have noticed the way the squire looks at you, Anna. If I thought for a moment that the situation he was offering you...” Her voice faded and then broke off altogether. When she resumed, her voice was soft and low, as though she were talking to herself. “No, I cannot think of such wickedness.”

She looked steadfastly at Anna. “It is a comfort to me that you are so close. You will be able to walk out to see me every Sunday.”

“And don’t you forget,” added Mistress Weaver, “that that there squire is a no good man who ought to be whipped from one end of the village to the other. His wife is so jealous of him, and with good reason, too, that she doesn’t have a maid in her service that doesn’t have red hair or a squint.” She gave a grim chuckle. “If he tries any of his nasty tricks with you, my dear, just remember that between a man’s legs is where it hurts him most.”

“Mistress Weaver,” Mrs. Woodleigh said in a sharp voice. “That is not fitting for a young girl’s ears.”

Mistress Weaver thumped her tankard on the tabletop. “Stuff and nonsense. If every young girl knew that, then there’d be a lot less of pain and suffering in the world.” She turned to Anna. “Between his legs. Don’t forget, mind.”

It was late afternoon before Anna could tear herself away from the warm, friendly kitchen. She parted from her mother with wet eyes and began her walk to the Great House, her case bumping against her legs with every step she took. She was leaving a warm cottage, where she was loved and cherished, for a cold attic room in a grand house where she must go to work for people who knew her little and liked her less. It was not a comforting thought.

She was met at the servants’ entrance of the Great House by the housekeeper, a thin-faced woman whom Anna had never known to smile.

The housekeeper led Anna up the back stairs to the attic floor. “This is your room,” she said sourly, as she opened a small door at the top of the stairs and showed Anna in.

It was cold up there, right under the eaves of the house. Anna shivered in her shawl. Her room was dank and airless. There was one tiny window set high in the wall, too high for Anna to look out of unless she stood up on a chair. A small, narrow iron bedstead stood in one corner. In the other corner was a rickety table on which stood a chipped earthenware jug and a cracked basin for washing. There was nothing else.

Anna put her case on the bare wooden floor at the foot of the bed. “Thank you, Mrs. Hawkins.”