I edged inside. ‘Hello?’
The splayed ribcage of a doe took up most of the space on the table. I noticed the cleaver, still sandwiched in a hunk of meat.
Another step. My head knocked against a dead bird suspended from the ceiling. I flinched and pushed it off, spitting out feathers. The creature was half soft, half bobbled, as if someone had begun to pluck it but given up. And now that I reflected, there were many chores like that around the house today: the abandoned bucket; the partially chopped herbs.
A carcass creaked as it swayed on its hook.
‘Hello? Cook?’
No answer. Almost frightened now, I walked in the direction of the hooks. I don’t know what I expected – for someone to leap out at me from behind a carcass, perhaps, or for one of the animals to suddenly twitch alive. Focused on these fears, I did not think to look down. My foot slipped on something soft and, in a trice, my body smacked against the stone floor.
It took the wind from me. I lay for a moment, bewildered.
A long, lumpy shape stretched at my side. Revolted by the notion that it might be a dead cow, fallen from its hook, I kicked out a foot to push it away. But the black mass simply rolled over, an arm unfolding.
It was human.
My scream echoed. I levered myself into a sitting position, scrabbling backwards with my arms. I saw the face now: it was Cook.
Pushing down my gorge, I extended a shaking hand and tapped my fingers against her cheek. The skin was as cold as marble. There would be no saving her.
I had to get out of the room. Grabbing the bloody table, I hauled myself to my feet. They shook but they did not give way. Fetch help, my mind screamed. Jane, Mark, anyone.
I hurtled back down the stone passages into the warmth of the kitchen.
Still that musty smell tainted the air.
‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘Somebody help! I am in the kitchen.’
Silence reigned.
Was it then that the sly, terrible thought crawled through my mind? Some part of me must have known, for my feet took me out through the servery passage and into the scullery.
The smell hit me first: vomit and the acrid reek of a midden. In a pool of viscous fluid lay shattered pieces of crockery, stained knives and, beside them, my two young scullery maids.
Bloodshot eyes stared blindly at the ceiling. Dark marks stained their lips and a yellow and red pattern mottled their skin.
‘No,’ I gasped, ‘no.’
Hardly knowing what I did, I ran back to the kitchen. Stopped. The room undulated like water around me. As my eyes cleared, the chopping block loomed into terrible focus. On the half-cut herbs, I saw what I had failed to notice before.
‘No.’ My fingers turned over the wet stems. They were pocked with purple spots.
I grabbed the knife and groped for the door. It could not be true. If I had to run ten miles in the snow with the bitter wind tearing at my gown, I would prove it were not true.
Hetta’s garden lay beneath a dusting of snow and frost. I plunged my bare hands into the herbs. The thistle entangled all. From the corner of my mind, Harris’s words echoed back at me: it creeps. I wielded my knife and hacked my way through.
Scratched and bleeding, I clawed until all the snow fell away. And there, hidden beneath the blue-grey thistle, grew the plants I had failed to see – I, who prided myself on second sight. Poisonous henbane, monkshood and water pennywort. Vervain for sorcery. Last of all, growing at the back, the dark berries of belladonna.
My fingers fell slack; the knife dropped without a sound into the snow.
It was true. And it was worse than I ever imagined.
Memory flooded me with a force that would not be denied. I saw flashing images: the potion; rusted scissors; Hetta’s cold, impassive face; an antimasque of smoke and red lights, and capering through it all, the masked devil of a child’s height.
‘Dear God,’ I whispered. ‘Dear God.’
I do not recall how long I knelt there with the bitter greens my daughter had sown. I barely felt the cold pinching my face, or the ice pooling to water beneath my skirts.
Josiah was right all along. Through my potions and spells, I called forth something wicked. I created her. I am worse than a witch.
My baby. Rotten to the core. Every memory of her childhood takes on a sordid, shameful appearance. Was she a demon from the very womb? But of course she was. What else could she be, at once unnatural and misbegotten?
Now she is nine, her power is full. The ninth hour, the time Christ died. Yet even before that she was plotting. What I mistook for friendship with the gypsy must have been a lure. She set him up to take the blame while she killed the horse. And now she has killed my servants.
I do not know if a child created by human hands possesses a soul. Yet this I do know – the penalty for Hetta’s sins will be required of me on Judgement Day. I murdered those servants when I mixed my brew: it was only a different combination of herbs.
I must have made a mistake. A proportion of a mixture, a word in the spell. I did not create a child. I made a monster.
I wish I could say that I built up the nerve to come inside and face Hetta, but it was the chill that conquered me in the end. The sun set early, powdering the clouds pink and grey like mother-of-pearl. My shaking fingers sought the knife by my side.
My skirts had frozen stiff. It was as though I dragged a chain around my waist as I stumbled back towards the house, and my thoughts crawled too, unable to plot the course I must take. Whatever would I say to my family? Lizzy doted on the girl, she would never believe me.
Then the thought bowled me sideways.
Lizzy.
I ran. Stumbling, tripping, unable to control my limbs, I barrelled through the yard door. The house reeked of death. Coughing against my sleeve, I dragged myself on into the Great Hall.
My skirts threw out shards of ice as I thudded up the stairs. Fear clenched in my chest as I drew nearer to the nursery.
I reached the door. Hetta’s sparrow chirruped from within. Once it was sweet to hear the bird sing, but now it was calling, calling to the dead, calling to their souls that it might carry them away.
I hesitated. Then I pushed the door open.
My eyes did not want to process what they saw. They took in the leaves on the floor, the silent companions ranged about the room like an audience at the play, and Lizzy, laying on her back. Sleeping, my eyes said. Sleeping. But with something draped about her neck. Vines. A rope made of vines and creepers.
I remembered the catches of breath I had heard earlier. It was not Hetta crying, gasping for breath – it was Lizzy.
Hetta turned to me. When her eyes met mine, everything came into focus. I saw my oldest friend, the woman I had loved like a mother, with the life throttled from her body, and standing over her, the goblin I had once called daughter.
There was no apology in her face – only a loathsome, gloating triumph.
I still held the knife in my hand.