The Witch’s Daughter (10 page)

Bess got to her feet. ‘I will not let her die. I will not!’ she said. She swung the kettle over the heat, then fetched honey from the dairy. She poured hot water into a bowl and stirred in the amber syrup. She took it to Margaret. Propping the child up on bolsters, she spoke to her softly.

‘Come now, little Meg, see what I have for thee. Here.’ She lifted a spoonful of the warm liquid to her sister’s cracked lips. Margaret’s eyelids fluttered but did not open. Her neck was disfigured and swollen by the buboes on it. And those hideous lumps in turn bore a mass of red spots. Her skin was beginning to darken with the bleeding beneath the surface that gave the disease its nickname of the Black Death. Bess pushed such thoughts from her mind and gently prized open her sister’s lips, tipping a tiny sip of the honey-water into her mouth. It dribbled back out. She tried again. This time Margaret spluttered, but the taste stirred her a little so that she opened her reddened eyes.

‘Bess?’ Her voice was a dry whisper.

‘I am here, little one.’

‘Bess…’ She struggled to focus, a hand reaching out for Bess’s face. ‘You can make me better … I know you can … use your magic, Bess. Your
magic.’
The child’s eyes met Bess’s now, imploring, entreating, begging, filled with fear and yet with hope. With expectation.

Bess fought back tears of grief and frustration. Her tricks were no use to her now. The small conjurings and illusions with which she had secretly so delighted Margaret all her life were powerless against the ferocity of the plague and Bess knew it. She shook her head, not wanting to admit to her beloved sister that the magic was not going to help her.

‘Later, dear one. For now you must drink some more. There, that’s good.’ Bess dipped the spoon into the bowl again. ‘Here, now. A little more. It will make you strong again.’ She continued to feed her sister, the little girl’s gaze all the while upon her until she thought she would not be able to stop herself weeping again. Once the bowl was empty, she laid Margaret down and made her comfortable. She sat on the floor next to the low bed, her arms around the child, willing her to be well. Willing her to live.

The next morning Bess woke where she had fallen beside her sister. The cockerel crowed hoarsely from the roof of the barn. A gray dawn suggested another night had been endured, another day lay ahead. Bess raised herself to her feet stiffly and moved to the fire to stoke the embers.

‘Bess.’ Her mother stood behind her.

‘Morning, Mother. Do not disturb yourself. I will see to the fire and fetch Margaret some more honey-water. She liked it, I think. I know it will help her.’

‘Bess.’ Anne stepped forward and placed a hand on Bess’s arm. ‘Your sister is dead.’

All the blood drained from Bess’s head so that she felt she might fall into the fire. She opened her mouth to scream but found she could not. She ran to Margaret and flung herself on the child’s cold body. Now Bess’s voice returned to her.

‘No! No, no, no, no! Not Margaret. Not my little Meg.’ She grabbed the lifeless girl. ‘Sit up, Meg, come on, now. You must wake up. Wake up!’ She shook her roughly, beyond knowing what she was doing.

Anne pulled her away. ‘Leave her be, Bess.’

‘I should have stayed awake! I should have saved her!’

‘There was nothing to be done.’

‘But I did it! O dear Lord, I killed her. I went in to Thomas when you told me not to, and I brought the plague to poor sweet Margaret and now she is dead! Let me die too! Let me go with them!’

Bess glimpsed her mother’s hand only briefly as she raised it and brought it with great force down upon her cheek. The power of the blow knocked Bess to the floor. Shocked, she wiped blood from her mouth with her fingers. She looked up at her mother, stunned by what had happened.

Anne’s voice was level as she spoke through closed teeth.

‘Listen to me, Bess. Listen well. You no more killed your sister than did I. She fell ill with too much speed for you to have taken the sickness to her from Thomas. Do you understand? Do you?’

Bess nodded.

‘You must be strong now. You must reach deep inside your heart and find a strength you never knew dwelled there, Bess. You must show courage. As must I.’ She helped her daughter to her feet. She held her arms firmly as she continued to speak. ‘Fetch your cloak, child, we have work to do outside.’

‘But one of us should stay with Father.’ Bess sniffed, still trying to stem the trickle of blood from her lip.

Now she felt Anne’s hands tremble, though her grip did not loosen and her eyes did not waver in their steady gaze.

‘Your father has no more need of us here,’ she said. ‘Come, we must make haste before the bearers return.’ So saying, she strode across the room, snatching up her shawl. At the door she waited. Silent tears washed the blood from Bess’s face now. She went to where her father lay motionless and cold as a slab of butter. His face looked peaceful, despite its livid color. She fancied he still wore a trace of his impish smile. She stroked his cheek with a shaking hand and then followed her mother out of the cottage.

4

It was not until two days after they had buried John and Margaret that the merciless rain stopped. Bess went to the edge of Batchombe Woods and gathered what few wildflowers there were to be had. The air was still heavy with water, but the sun shone boldly down. From the woodland came the scent of damp moss and fungus spores. Bess stared into the gloom between the close trees and found herself thinking of Gideon Masters. Had he escaped the plague? His cottage was well apart from any other, and his solitary habits meant he may well have not come into contact with a person carrying the sickness. It would be terrible, she thought, to be so alone. She imagined falling ill with no one to notice. But then, if Gideon had no one to love, that meant he had no one to lose. Not for him the dull ache that haunted the empty chambers of Bess’s heart now or the brutal clutch of pain that assailed her in unguarded moments, such as when she came upon Thomas’s walking stick or spied her father’s pipe or caught herself muttering Margaret’s favorite nursery rhyme. At those times she would be brought to her knees by grief, the breath knocked from her body as if by a physical blow. She saw her mother suffering in the same way, and both of them knew that no remedy existed. Nothing would ever make them whole again. Bess walked back to the cottage and took the flowers to the graves. The mounds of earth were still wet and would not grass over for many months. There was no money for headstones. Instead, Bess and her mother would fashion something from wood on a distant day in the future, when they could risk doing so without fear of collapse. Bess felt Anne’s presence beside her.

‘Come inside, Bess. It does you no good to stand here so long.’

‘Have I stood a while? I didn’t know it. Look, I fetched flowers.’

‘They are very pretty. Margaret would like them.’

‘She should be here to see them.’

‘I do believe she is still here, Bess. Do you not?’

‘I mean here.’ Bess wrapped her arms around herself as if still hugging her little sister. ‘Warm and alive and full of joy and sweetness, so that I might hold her … not cold and quiet in her muddy grave.’

‘We have to keep her alive in our hearts, Bess. That is where she truly dwells now, not in the earth, in our hearts. In us.’ Anne’s gaze fell upon John’s grave. ‘They are all safe in our hearts.’

‘I thought they were supposed to be with God.’ Bess could not keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘In his loving arms—isn’t that what we are taught to believe? Do you believe it, Mother? Do you?’

‘Bess…’

‘Do you?’ Bess began to weep.

‘Hush, child. No more tears. No more.’ Anne reached out and wiped her daughter’s cheek with her finger. Her expression changed to one of alarm. ‘Bess…’

‘You don’t believe it any more than I. Where was the Good Shepherd when Thomas’s face swelled up like the belly of a dead sheep? Where was our Lord when Father cursed us all from his deathbed?’

‘Bess! You are hot.’

‘Where was our loving God when Meg clawed the air for breath?’

‘Bess!’ Anne took hold of Bess by the shoulders and spoke earnestly. ‘You are not well—you must come inside.’

‘What?’ Bess tried to take in her mother’s words. ‘Not well?’

Time froze in that moment. The two women stood leaning against each other, fear and grief threatening to overwhelm them. Somewhere in the orchard a magpie fought with a crow. A thin wind began to tug at the flowers Bess had laid at the graves.

Anne drew in a deep breath and turned her only living daughter toward the cottage. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘let us go in.’

Fever quickly robbed Bess of all sense of time or knowledge of reality. She was aware of her mother’s presence, of being washed with rose water and stroked with fragrant oils. She registered a spoon being held to her lips or a cup tipping liquid into her mouth. Beyond that, the world did not exist for her. All that she knew was pain and delirium. She felt at once such heat that she imagined the thatch of the cottage had caught fire, and yet such cold that she believed she must be already dead. Her body became somehow separate from herself, as if she had neither control over it nor use for it. It was a conduit of agony, nothing more. She heard a ragged rasping sound. Was it wind down the chimney? Or wood being sawn. No, she came to realize it was the sound of her own breathing. The air was dragged in and out of her body as if from a worn set of blacksmith’s bellows fanning the flames of her fever. At moments she felt a calmness, an acceptance that she was going to die. It was right that she should. Why should she be the one to live on? Hadn’t she hastened poor Margaret’s death? She would be with the others soon. Once, in the darkness, she heard her mother’s voice. She fancied she spoke of living, not dying, though her words made little sense. Then, strangely, Anne was gone. Bess had no real way of knowing she was not in the house, but she was quite certain she was alone. Not alone for ten minutes while her mother fetched wood or water, but alone for a great, empty, silent stretch of time.

And in that time Bess dreamed. It was a dream as real as any living memory. She found herself back in Thomas’s empty grave, rain washing down the steep sides so that a pool of liquid mud rose up to her knees. She clawed at the slippery soil, struggling to pull herself out but never able to gain a sure foothold. She slithered down, falling onto her back in the mire, submerged for an instant. She sat up choking, spitting out mud, rubbing the gritty water from her eyes. When she did so, she saw Thomas, as he had been during the worst ravages of the plague, sitting up opposite her. He stared at her with his grotesquely bulging eyes and blackened face. She screamed and started climbing again, but this time she was knocked down by Margaret’s body as it was thrown into the pit. The child turned an angry face to Bess, shouting at her, ‘You did this to me, Bess! You killed me!’ Bess shook her head, scrambling backward, screaming until she had no voice left. Beaten, she cowered in the corner, her arms over her head, and awaited death.

The first indication Bess had that she was in fact alive was the sound of singing. It was such a curious and unlikely noise that it took some time for her to believe she was awake and listening to a real sound, not a product of her fevered mind. She opened her eyes. It was day. The fire in the hearth burned quietly. Winter sun fell through the unshuttered window. She glimpsed the shadows of movement and found she was able to turn her head a little. She saw then that the song came from her mother. Anne had her back to Bess and wore her shawl up over her head as she stood at the kitchen table. She was entirely focused on a solitary candle burning in front of her. There were unfamiliar objects positioned around the candle. Her arms were raised as if in supplication, and her body rocked slightly from side to side as she continued to sing the low monotonous notes over and over again. Bess could not discern the words. They seemed strange, as if of some foreign tongue. It was certainly not a song she had ever heard her mother sing before. The melody, if such it could be called, was eerie and discordant yet strangely hypnotic. Suddenly, as if sensing she was being observed, her mother dropped her arms to her sides and was silent. She stood still for a moment longer, then blew out the candle and turned around.

Bess gasped as she saw now that her mother’s hair had turned completely white. Not a strand of gold remained. The effect was to make Anne appear a decade older than she had only days before. Bess struggled to raise herself onto an elbow, but her mother hurried forward.

‘Bess! There, be still, my little one. All is well,’ she said, kneeling by the low bed. She touched Bess’s cheek and smiled, the first smile Bess had seen on her mother’s face since the day of the apple harvest.

‘Mother, what has happened to you? Your hair…’

‘It is of no importance. What matters is that you are well, Bess. You are well.’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand.

‘But how?’ Bess sat up, examining her arms and hands, feeling her face for lumps or swellings, for signs of the disfigurement the rest of her family had borne. There were none.

‘Be assured,’ her mother said, ‘you are just as you were. The plague has left no mark upon you.’

‘Oh, Mother!’ Bess flung herself into Anne’s arms and wept tears of relief and of grief. For a short time she had felt close to Margaret and been convinced she would see her again soon. Now the news that she was to live was tainted by the pain of being torn away from her sister anew.

Anne dried her daughter’s tears. ‘Come now, this is not a moment for weeping. I will make you some pottage. You will be strong once more very soon. You will see.’

As Bess watched her mother moving about the room, preparing the food, she struggled to make sense of what had happened. She had been afflicted by the plague, yet she and she alone had survived. Had her mother effected the cure? What had she tried with Bess that she had not given to the others? What powerful remedy had she concocted, and if it were so efficacious, why had she not used it sooner? She saw now that her mother’s hair was not the only thing to have altered so dramatically. She seemed to move differently, to inhabit the room in an entirely new way. A way that was strange and unsettling. Something profound had changed in her mother while Bess had lain on her sickbed. Some transformation had occurred at the root of her being, Bess believed, something had changed forever in her very soul.