A Skinful of Shadows Read online

  Bear was not happy with the nearness of the dogs, but at least he seemed used to the smell. Dogs had loud mouths, cruel mouths, but they were a fact of life. Dog-smell in the markets, dog-smell at night by the campfires.

  In the dead of night, Makepeace was jolted awake by a long, rumbling growl, close to her head. One of the great dogs was awake. For a moment she was afraid that it had smelt her and decided that she was a trespasser. Then she heard a faint scuff of footsteps, too light and cautious to be those of the old cook. Someone was coming.

  ‘Come on out!’ murmured James’s voice. ‘Nero won’t bite now – unless I tell him to.’ He grinned as Makepeace wriggled out. ‘I told you I would get you out of there!’

  ‘Thank you,’ Makepeace said hesitantly, still maintaining her distance. She was starting to get a sense of how far Bear liked to keep from people when he was not used to them. Even now she could feel his unease, his desire to pull himself up to his full height and snort a threat to scare off the stranger. But she was already standing as tall as she could, and had no more height in reserve.

  ‘You did well getting a job in the kitchen,’ said James, settling cross-legged on the great table. ‘It’s perfect. We can help each other now. I’ll keep an eye out for you, and teach you how everything works. And you can tell me anything you overhear. Fetch me things from the kitchen when nobody’s looking—’

  ‘You want me to steal for you?’ Makepeace glared at him, wondering if this was why he had helped her in the first place. ‘If anything goes missing, they’ll know it’s me! I’ll be thrown out of Grizehayes!’

  James looked at her for a long moment, then very slowly shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You won’t.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I mean it. They’d punish you. They’d beat you. Maybe they’d even chain you up in the Bird Chamber again. But they wouldn’t throw you out. Not even if you begged them to.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to run away for five years,’ said James. ‘Over and over again. And they chase me down and bring me back here, every time.’

  Makepeace stared at him. Was it unusual for rich men to chase down runaway servants? She had heard of rewards put out for runaway apprentices, but she guessed that was different.

  ‘You had nightmares, didn’t you?’ asked James suddenly, throwing Makepeace off balance. ‘Dreams so bad you woke up screaming. Ghosts clawing their way into your head . . .’

  Makepeace shuffled away from him a few inches, and watched him with a seethe of distrust and uncertainty.

  ‘I had dreams like that too,’ James continued. ‘They started five years ago, when I was nine. And not long after that, the Fellmottes sent men to collect me. My mother argued at first. Then they paid her, and she stopped arguing.’ He gave a small, bitter smile. ‘The Fellmottes don’t care about wild oats like us, unless we start having those nightmares. Then they care. Then they harvest us, and bring us here. They heard about your dreams, and fetched you here too, didn’t they?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Makepeace, intrigued. It was true, Obadiah had seemed more interested in her nightmares than anything else about her. ‘Why would they care about our dreams?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted James. ‘But we’re not the only ones. Lord Fellmotte’s cousins visit sometimes, and all of them seem to have a servant or two with that Fellmotte look. I think all the Fellmottes collect their by-blows when they turn out to be dreamers.

  ‘They collect us, and they don’t let us go again. I found that out when I tried to run off home. I wouldn’t try to go back there now – that woman would just sell me to the Fellmottes again.’ He scowled, evidently embarrassed.

  ‘By night,’ he continued, ‘the main doors are made fast with a great bar and chains, and the hall-boy sleeps in front of them. The gate is locked and there are dogs loose in the courtyard. So I slipped out by daylight. But there are bare fields beyond the walls for three miles – I stood out like blood on snow.

  ‘On my second try I got farther – right out on to the moorland. Bitter bleak it was out there, miles of moors and woods. Winds so cold my fingers started to turn black. I stumbled into a village half frozen, and little good it did me. The farmers there took one look at this –’ he tapped his chin – ‘then collared me, and brought me back here. They knew what I was, and who wanted me, and they looked frightened.

  ‘Last year, I thought I’d got clean away. Fifty miles, across three rivers, all the way to Braybridge in the next county.’ James shook his head again, and grimaced. ‘They sent White Crowe after me. You met him, he brought you here. The family use him for important things they need done quietly. He’s their shadow hand. And everybody fell over themselves to help him find me – even powerful men. The Fellmottes aren’t just a great family. Everybody’s afraid of them.’

  Makepeace bit her cheek and said nothing. He was probably boasting like the Poplar apprentices did, making much of his adventures, but his words opened up little cracks of unease in her mind.

  ‘But don’t you see, now you can help!’ James continued. ‘They’re wise to me, but they won’t suspect you. You can act as lookout! Or put aside things that we’ll need for our escape – provisions, beer, candles—’

  ‘I can’t run away!’ exclaimed Makepeace. ‘I don’t have anywhere else to go! If I lose my place here, I’ll be starved or frozen to death before Whit Sunday! Or murdered!’

  ‘I’ll protect you!’ insisted James.

  ‘How? The country is going all to pieces – everyone says so, and I’ve seen it! You can’t protect me from . . . from mobs gone mad, or bullets! Or ghosts that want to eat my brain! Here I have a bed and food, and that’s more than I’ll get on the moors! I even ate white bread today!’

  ‘Our father’s blood buys a few blessings,’ James admitted. ‘My food’s always been a touch better than what the rest of the servants get. I even have lessons sometimes, in between my duties. Reading. Languages. Riding. Maybe you will too. The other servants don’t raise an eyebrow. They know whose bastard I am, even if they don’t say so.’

  ‘Then why are you trying to run away?’

  ‘Have you seen old Obadiah?’ James asked sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ said Makepeace slowly, and could not quite keep a wobble out of the word. ‘He’s . . .’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘You can see it too, can’t you?’ whispered James. He looked stunned but relieved.

  Makepeace hesitated, peering into his face. She suddenly wondered whether all of this was a test set up by Obadiah. If she said something disrespectful now, perhaps James would report it, and maybe then she would be turned out of the house or chained up in the Bird Chamber again.

  You couldn’t trust people. Dogs snarled before they bit you, but people often smiled.

  James had a sunburnt face and far-apart eyes. However, it was his scab-knuckled hands that Makepeace noticed most of all. They were the hands of someone reckless, a scuffler and scrapper, but they were also honest hands. The sight of them made a difference somehow. Makepeace allowed herself a grain of trust.

  ‘I don’t know what it means!’ she whispered. ‘But there’s something . . .’

  ‘. . . wrong with him,’ finished James.

  ‘It feels . . . when I look into his eyes . . . it’s like when the dead things in my nightmares . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But he’s alive!’

  ‘Yes! And yet he makes your skin crawl and your thumbs prick? Nobody else sees it but us, or if they do they don’t talk about it. And –’ James leaned forward to whisper in her ear – ‘Obadiah’s not the only one. The older Fellmottes are all like that.’

  ‘Sir Thomas is not!’ Makepeace remembered the heir’s bright brown eyes.

  ‘No, not yet,’ James said earnestly. ‘They don’t start that way. It’s only when they inherit and come into their land and titles that something happens. They change. It’s as if thei
r blood turns cold overnight. Even other folks know there’s something different about them. The servants call them the “Elders and Betters”. They’re too fast. Too clever. They know too much that they shouldn’t. And you can’t lie to them. They see right through you.

  ‘That’s why we must leave! This house is a . . . roost for devils! We’re not servants, we’re prisoners! They won’t even tell us why!’

  Makepeace chewed her lip, tormented by indecision. There was something wrong with Obadiah, all her instincts said so. Mother had fled Grizehayes, and taken every pain to make sure that the Fellmottes could not find her. And there was Bear to consider – Bear who might be torn out of her and destroyed if Obadiah worked out that he was there.

  But these were all uncertain terrors. The fear of being chained up and beaten again, or cast out to become a starving, ghost-maddened vagrant, was so solid she could touch it. There was also the tormenting thought that perhaps Mother’s crazed, tattered ghost was still out there somewhere beyond Grizehayes’s protective walls, roaming and looking for Makepeace. The very thought was white-hot with hope and dread, and her mind flinched from it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Makepeace said quietly. ‘I can’t run with you. I need a home, even if it’s this one.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for being frightened,’ said James, gently enough. ‘But I’ll wager my neck we have more to fear here than anywhere else. I hope you change your mind. I hope you change it soon enough to come with me.’

  Makepeace was not used to kindness, and it was almost more than she could bear. Since Mother’s death, there had been a vast, aching hole in her world, and she was desperate for somebody to fill it. For a moment, Makepeace hovered on the brink of telling James about Bear.

  But she bit her tongue and the moment passed. It was too big a secret for somebody she knew so slightly. James might betray her. He might not understand. He might be frightened of her, or decide she was mad after all. Her friendship with him was too new and fragile, and she needed it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Weeks passed, and Makepeace won the under-cook’s grudging approval by being a hard worker and quick learner. She was bottom of the pecking order, so she was always first out of bed, the early morning water-fetcher, ember-carrier, chicken-feeder and kindling-bringer. The work was exhausting, and the heat and smoke still alarmed Bear, but she was starting to learn the tricks of the turnspit wheel, the beehive oven, the dripping pans and the chimney crane for the kettle. She no longer panicked when told to run to the saltbox, the sugar loaf or the meat safe.

  Mistress Gotely sometimes saw Makepeace sneaking scraps to the dogs who slept in the kitchen, or letting them lick gravy from her hands.

  ‘Soft-headed little doddypoll,’ she muttered, and shook her head. ‘They’ll eat you bones and all if you let them.’ But the gravy had already begun to cast its slow, savoury spell over the dogs’ loyalties. None of them growled at her in the night now. In fact, sometimes she slept in a heap with them, their breathing and warmth soothing her dreamless mind, the ugly little turnspit dog nestled in her arms.

  As Makepeace hoped, the dogs’ friendliness lowered Bear’s hackles too. In his head, all beasts, whether human or otherwise, seemed to be divided into ‘safe’ and ‘probably dangerous’. Familiar, safe animals were allowed to get close to him. Unfamiliar, suspicious creatures needed to be scared off with coughs and menaces.

  What a frightened cub you are, thought Makepeace.

  She had far more trouble with her writing lessons. Once a week, late at night after a long day’s work, she was tutored alongside James by Young Crowe, her jailer during her time in the Bird Chamber. To judge by his self-congratulatory smirk, he considered his ‘treatments’ to have cured her so-called madness.

  Makepeace now knew that there was a whole family of Crowes serving the Fellmottes. The other servants, in their blunt, practical way, gave them nicknames to tell them apart. Young Crowe’s father, the steward of Grizehayes, was Old Crowe. As James had already told her, the white-haired man who had fetched Makepeace to Grizehayes was White Crowe.

  Makepeace had only ever learned to make an ‘M’ as her ‘mark’. She had seen people read, their gaze floating down the lines like a leaf on a stream-current. But when she stared at the letters, they stared back, insect-splats of bulges and splayed legs. Her untrained hand could not shape them. It made her feel stupid. It did not help that she was usually too tired at the end of the day to think straight.

  Young Crowe was condescendingly philosophical about Makepeace’s lack of learning.

  ‘Do you know what a young bear looks like, when it is fresh out of its mother’s womb?’ he said. ‘Naught but a shapeless mass. She has to lick it for hours until it is cub-shaped, gives it a snout, ears, dainty paws, everything it will need for the rest of its life.

  ‘You are sadly unformed, for one of your years. Like a blob of fat. But we will lick you into shape.’

  Makepeace smiled despite herself. She wondered whether Bear had been licked into shape by his mother, in some happy time before all the cruelty. She was charmed by the idea of the little cub gaining its eyes, and blinking up at a big, maternal bear-tongue. Young Crowe noticed the smile, and dug out bestiaries, so that she could read and copy the words. Makepeace was a lot happier writing about animals.

  The Toad and Spider are most poisonous enemies and will fight each other to Destruction, she learned. The Pelican suckles her Young with her Heart’s Blood. The Badger’s Legs are longer on one side than the other so that it runs faster on Sloping Ground.

  Makepeace was gradually getting a better sense of Bear’s ways. He was not always awake in her mind. A lot of the time he was asleep, and then it was as if he were not there at all. He was more likely to be awake and restless during the grey times of early morning and twilight, but he could not be predicted. Sometimes Bear would surface without warning. His emotions would giddily spill into hers. Her senses would be flooded with his. Bear generally seemed to live in the present, but he carried his memories like forgotten bruises. Now and then he would knock against one of them, and tumble bemused into an abyss of pain.

  He was curious and patient, but his fear could whip-crack into rage in an instant. Makepeace lived in fear of that rage. For now the pair of them were safe, but they were one good rampage away from the Fellmottes deciding Makepeace was mad or, worse still, realizing she was haunted.

  She was settling in at Grizehayes, and yet she was always unsettled. Even the little signs of preferment – the lessons, the extra spoonful of pottage at lunch – made her uneasy. It reminded her of the geese and swans she was helping to fatten up for the table, and made her wonder whether some hidden knife was waiting for her too.

  In the early autumn, the household was thrown into enthusiastic confusion when two long-absent members of the Fellmotte family returned to Grizehayes. One was Sir Marmaduke, a well-connected second cousin of Lord Fellmotte, who had his own grand estate in the Welsh marches. The other was Symond, Sir Thomas’s eldest son and heir.

  Symond’s late mother had done her duty and obligingly turned out eight children before dying of a fever. Four of them were still breathing. The two adult daughters had been advantageously married off. Their nine-year-old sister was in the care of a cousin, and had been quietly promised in marriage to a baronet’s son. Symond was the only surviving son.

  Symond and Sir Marmaduke had come straight from the court in London, so the whole household was agog to hear the latest news from the capital. In exchange for a few mugs of beer down in the courtyard, the coachman was glad to satisfy his inquisitive audience.

  ‘Earl of Stafford’s dead,’ he said. ‘Parliament arrested ’im for treason. Now ’is ’ead’s stuck up on Traitor’s Gate.’

  There were gasps of dismay.

  ‘The poor Earl!’ muttered Mistress Gotely. ‘After all he’d done, fighting for the King! What is Parliament playing at?’

  ‘They want more power for themselves, that’s all,’ said Young Crowe.
‘They’re robbing the King of his friends and allies, one by one. Not all of Parliament is rotten, but there’s a poisonous little hive of Puritans in there, stirring the rest up. Those are the real traitors – and frothing mad, every one.’

  ‘All Puritans is mad,’ muttered Long Alys, the red-haired laundry maid. ‘Oh, I mean no harm by that, Makepeace, but it is true!’

  Makepeace had given up trying to tell everyone that she was not a Puritan. Her outlandish, preachy name set her apart. In some respects, she welcomed the distance it put between her and others. It was dangerous to get too close to anyone.

  Besides, Makepeace no longer knew who was right, or which way was up. Listening to the Grizehayes folk discuss the news made her feel as though her brain were being turned inside out. Back in Poplar, everyone had known that the King was being led astray by evil advisers and Catholic plots, and that Parliament was full of brave, honest, clear-sighted men who wanted the best for everybody. It had been so obvious! It had been common sense! Right now, the Poplar folk would probably be celebrating the death of the wicked Earl. Praise the Lord, Black Tom Tyrant is dead!

  But here in Grizehayes, it was just as obvious to everybody that a power-hungry Parliament driven to frenzy by crazy Puritans was trying to steal power from the rightful King. Neither side seemed to be stupid, and both were equally certain.

  Was I raised by Puritans? I believed what they believed back then. Were we all frothing mad? Or was I right then, and am I mad now?

  ‘But this is news the masters could send by a letter!’ said Mistress Gotely. ‘Why have they come here in person, so sudden?’

  ‘They were bringing something home,’ said the coachman, with a mysterious air. ‘I had my eye on it for only a second, but it looked to be a parchment, with a wax seal on it the size of your palm.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper, despite the dozen listening ears arrayed around him. ‘The King’s own seal, if I had to guess.’

  ‘It’s a royal charter,’ James told Makepeace later that day, when they had a chance to talk privately. ‘I had the truth of it from Master Symond.’