The Blood List (29 page)

Barnaby shivered and drew the blanket across his shoulders. The room had grown very cold, but he didn’t dare put any more dung on. There wasn’t much left and he was
still too weak from the sickness he had contracted in prison to go looking for more. He’d been lucky not to die. It had run through the place like wildfire and those wretches who didn’t
have sponsors died within days. As much as he had tried to reject the financial assistance offered by the Nightingales, it ensured he had a cell to himself with blankets and a bed, hot food, a
plentiful supply of ale, and his own lantern. As a consequence of which he had been strong enough to survive. For which he did not thank them.

The one good thing about the tiny cottage was that everything was close by. He leaned forwards and ladled out another cup of warm ale to fill his empty stomach. Though Frances Nightingale
brought pies and cakes to his door, he usually left them to be eaten by animals and birds. Sometimes he succumbed. Evidently starvation was a very painful way to die.

She’d had nothing, his mother: barely a stick of furniture, a single pan with a bottom worn thin as paper, a straw mattress in a cubbyhole in the wall. There must once have been another,
for Luke, but the spare had probably been used for fuel after her death.

It had taken a lot to get Luke out of here. Legally the place was Barnaby’s now that he’d turned sixteen; just as legally the Nightingale fortune would go to Luke. The deaf boy had
fought though. Refused to leave, stating rights of ‘adverse possession’, but when it was established that he would have had to have held the land for thirty years before this law came
into effect, Luke finally allowed the bailiffs to evict him, taking just his paints and brushes.

Barnaby had moved straight in, having spent the intervening time following his release from prison at the Boar. He had at least agreed to let the Nightingales pay for that. Luke refused to live
with them and, after accepting an annuity from these, his blood parents, left the village to apprentice himself to a painter in London.

He and Barnaby had not said goodbye. They did not speak again after the trial. Barnaby hadn’t spoken to anyone much. Only the landlady of the Boar, the Grimston merchant who bought his
fine clothes and sold him some more fitting to a furrier’s orphan, and the baker who had taken his last pennies for a loaf of bread three days ago. He would have to try and earn some more,
but he had no idea how. When spring finally came he might be able to get work as a farmhand, although if he performed as badly as he had the previous year he wouldn’t make much: for now he
was destitute. He had considered begging, but at the moment he felt too ill to go out. It was March and still the bitter cold showed no signs of abating.

There was a knock at the door.

Richard again.

He closed his eyes and let his head thunk against the rickety chair back.

After the first few rebuffs Griff had given up, but strangely Richard, his former enemy, persisted: waiting outside the locked door, or peering through the windows, cajoling, scolding,
threatening, before eventually going home to warm up before coming back the next day. Idiot. He had always known Barnaby for the fraud he was, and now he was acting like all the creeping sycophants
of Barnaby’s illusory past.

Another knock, louder.

Needless to say, Flora had not visited. She had been in such a hurry to return Frances’s ring she sent her maid down to the cells with it. Barnaby wore it for two and a half months to stop
it being stolen, before selling it to the first gold merchant he saw upon his release.

The knock again. A voice called his name. The voice was not Richard’s.

He stared at the pulsating embers.

‘Barnaby?’

Predictably enough Henry had turned to drink. Once or twice he had staggered round to the hut, sobbing and begging forgiveness, but after receiving no response he’d staggered off again.
Frances had written him a letter. He had fed it page by page into the fire unread.

‘Barnaby?’

Abel was gone. He had slipped away during all the commotion that followed the trial. No-one was quite sure where, according to Richard, but he would certainly have to stay away for a decade or
two if he didn’t want to be torn apart by a mob led by Farmer Waters. The man had brought Barnaby a butchered and salted lamb the first week he’d been here, and of all the gifts this
was the only one Barnaby could bear to accept. Waters said that Naomi had been ill following her own trial, which had ended in acquittal seeing as there was no-one left to give evidence against
her. Barnaby had heard nothing of her since then.

Until now.

‘Let me in!’ she snapped. ‘It’s freezing.’

He stared at the embers, his fingers loose around the cup of now cold ale.

‘I’m just out of bed from fever, Barnaby Nightingale, and if you don’t let me in immediately you will be responsible for my death.’

‘Don’t call me that.’ His voice cracked from lack of use.

‘Fine. Armitage then. I don’t care. Just let me in.’

He didn’t move. She rattled the door a few times and cursed him, but eventually she gave in.

It was getting too cold now. He would have to go to bed. Wrapping the blanket around himself he got up and shuffled towards the cubbyhole. As he did so he caught sight of himself in the tiny
window by the door. In those three months he had become a different person. He had lost weight, and his hair fell in lank curls on his bony shoulders. His eye sockets were dark and his cheekbones
jutted out. The weight loss had made the bridge of his nose more prominent, like a bird of prey. How could he have ever thought himself a Nightingale? At least he didn’t look like the Lucifer
of Luke’s mural any more. More like John the Baptist after years in the desert eating locusts.

An ear-splitting thud made him jump out of his skin.

Something hit the door with such force the thing nearly came off its hinges: a line of splintered wood now scarred it right through the centre.

She had got the axe from the outhouse.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Coming in.’

CRASH
– the axe struck again, and this time the blade broke through.

‘Stop! You’re destroying my door!’

‘Are you going to let me in?’

For a moment he stood his ground, his fists clenched at his sides, but then the axe was wrenched out and she began to count down:
five . . . four . . . three . . .
His shoulders slumped
and he trudged to the door.

She looked better than he did. A lot better.

Where before she had been plump and pretty as a cat she was now lean and elegant. Her hair had started to grow and curled in glossy ringlets about her temples, framing her green eyes with their
jet-black lashes. The cold had reddened her cheeks and nose, and the hands that clutched a bundle of blankets in her arms.

The snow was still falling, speckling her hair like stars in a clear night sky. All the warmth in the room rushed out and was swallowed by the night.

When he made no move to usher her in she pushed past him and kicked the door shut with her foot.

They regarded each other silently for a moment.

‘It’s cold in here,’ she said.

He gave no reply and went back to sit by the fire.

‘You have done a very good job of hiding from the world. It has almost forgotten your existence.’

He heard her walking around the room: it didn’t take more than a few seconds.

‘It’s a sturdy little place,’ she said. ‘The floor is solid. And the thatch looks good from outside.’

He stared into the greying embers. The cold air was creeping through every hole in his shirt.

‘Where shall I put this?’ she said, coming to stand between him and the fire.

‘I have enough blankets.’

‘It’s not just blankets,’ she said.

He sighed and looked up at her. She regarded him steadily with those glittering eyes.

‘What, then?’

‘Rushes from the lake and shoots of willow,’ she said. ‘My parents helped me harvest them from the forest. I was always a better basket-weaver than I was a maid, and Juliet
used to tell me what fine rabbit-skin muffs and hoods you made for her. Perhaps you have your father’s skill as a furrier.’

The embers stopped hissing, the mice in the thatch stopped rustling.

‘Go home,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Please, Barnaby. It’s all over, now. The things that are lost can’t be brought back. All we can do is go on, as best we can.’

‘I killed my own mother,’ he said.

‘You saved my life,’ she said. ‘You saved my family from a lifetime of fear and shame. You saved Beltane Ridge from turning on its daughters and mothers and
grandmothers.’

‘That wasn’t me, that was Luke Nightingale.’

She said nothing to this but a moment later placed four willow stalks and a paring knife onto his lap.

He stared at them for a moment. The knife was a stubby thing, only three or four inches long, but strong and sharp. He picked it up and pressed it to the pad of his thumb. A ball of blood
swelled up around the tip. It was too sharp to hurt.

Naomi breathed quietly beside him.

The willow stalks were deep conker brown, with gentle swellings, like knuckles, along their length. He picked one up and bent it almost in half. It did not break, although when he allowed it to
spring straight again there were wrinkles in the papery bark.

The fire guttered. Still it clung on though there was nothing left to feed on. Even at the very last it would fight for its life, like a coney in a snare, like a man on the gallows clutching the
rope above his head to try and lift himself from the pit. Like the blanket on the bed he slept in: so patched and darned that there was barely anything of the original left. In the Nightingale
house it would have been thrown away with the vegetable peelings, but here it had been preserved and cherished.

How had she felt, lying on that blanket, with another woman’s child slumbering beside her, and her own gone forever? Was life so precious that it should be preserved at any cost?

Barnaby closed his eyes and a single tear whispered down through the dirt on his cheek. When he opened them again the flames were bright flares in his blurred vision: a last dance at the very
point of death.

Death was so easy to come by, life so hard to cling to.

What would Juliet think of him simply throwing it away?

He picked up the knife again and, with one swift movement, plunged it into the heart of the willow stalk.

Naomi had brought cinnamon biscuits and salt beef and he attacked them ravenously, while she lit rushlights and fed the fire with some of the willow stalks. It sprang up at
once, crackling and dancing, stretching its fingers up the chimney.

Her father’s ale tasted ten times better than he remembered and next time he met Farmer Waters he would ask again about the yeast and this time pay attention to his explanation. Perhaps
the farmer might even lend him a little to get his own batch started.

‘You will need more straw for your bed,’ she said. ‘This stuff is mouldy. It will hurt your chest.’

He grunted, his mouth packed with salt beef.

‘You can have some of ours,’ she went on. ‘But you ought not to sleep here another night, especially in your weakened condition.’

‘I’m not weak,’ he said, through his mouthful.

‘No,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘Perhaps, after all, you are not. Have you finished?’

‘Well, the
food
is finished, if that’s what you mean, but I could eat the same again.’

‘Oh, and I suppose you would like me to go and fetch it for you, Master Barnaby?’

He smiled. ‘If you like.’

‘I have a better idea. Come and dine with us, then sleep with Benjamin this night, and tomorrow I will help you bring some fresh straw and maybe something a little sweeter for your fire
than cattle dung.’

‘I have nothing to pay you with,’ he said quietly.

Already the rushlights were burning low and the last of the willow stalks spat and hissed on the fire as they died. It would be a cold night here all alone.

‘You have already paid us,’ she said, pulling on her cloak. ‘But if you set the price of my life so low then you may assist me in making some basket chairs for children, like
the one I made for Benjamin. Henry Nightingale believes they may fetch some money in Grimston market.’

He flinched at the name and his face hardened, but she held his gaze with her clear cool eyes.

‘Pride is expensive, Barnaby, and remember, you are a pauper now.’

The rushlights guttered and started to go out one by one. As they did so the reflections in the black windows melted away to be replaced by the deep blue of the night sky. Suddenly he wanted to
be out in it: walking through silver pastures beneath the cold moon: up the path that led to the lake, the farm, and beyond it, the forest. It held no fear for him now. Juliet had been right, the
spirit of the forest never forgot him. She watched over him with love, and perhaps a little shame: a little disappointment. The Son of the Morning had fallen into darkness. Now he must climb back
up into the light.

He stood up and gave a little bow. ‘Mistress Waters, I am at your service.’

The night air was bitterly cold, like a rush of lake water down his throat. He remembered the day he had fought her off as she tried to rescue him from drowning. He remembered the Widow
Moone.

He took her hand as they climbed over the ditch that divided the Nightingale lands from the common land. The ploughing and muck-spreading had already begun and the rich smell of cold earth and
manure rose up as they tramped through the mud. Bats flew overhead and from somewhere in the distance came the churring call of a nightjar. The forest was just visible on the brow of the hill.

She stopped abruptly beside him and her hand slipped from his grasp.

‘There’s a light in the forest,’ she whispered.

She was right. A cool glow radiated from the trees, pulsing silently.

‘It’s only marsh gas,’ he said.

‘The Widow Moone said the devil had promised her eternal life,’ Naomi murmured. ‘I hope he kept to it. I hope that light is the devil’s fire and they are there now,
dancing infernal jigs with him and his imps, drinking wine and making spells to give boils to the mayor and gout to the aldermen. The Widow Moone, and Juliet and all of them.’ Her voice
cracked.