The Misbegotten (42 page)

‘It’ll be a hard frost tonight,’ said Starling, her words causing pale shreds of mist to obscure her face. She was sitting cross-legged, her face half lit by the lamp on the prow, fiddling with a loose thread that trailed from her mittens.
She is half a young lady, half a tavern wench.

‘How old are you, Starling?’

‘Possibly four and twenty.’ Starling shrugged.

‘Possibly?’

‘I’ve never known for sure. We always used my height to guess, but I was tall as a child and am not so tall now. So perhaps all our guesses were wrong.’

‘Doesn’t your mother know?’ said Rachel, confused.

‘I daresay she does, but since I’ve never known her, that doesn’t help much.’

‘You’re an orphan?’

‘I don’t know.’ Starling tipped her head to one side to look at Rachel, and continued. ‘I walked into the farmyard one winter’s day, wearing only rags. I was small – six or seven years old. Alice took me in, and cared for me.’

‘But if you were six or seven, you must remember your life before that, surely?’

‘I do not.’ Starling shrugged again. ‘I think I chose to forget; and forget I have. I sometimes have odd feelings, like warnings. Intuitions, you could call them. About people, or happenings. I think they might be lessons I took from that life before, but that’s all I’ve kept. The intuitions, and the scars.’

‘The scars?’

‘It seems I was beaten a good deal.’

‘Oh. That’s terrible.’

‘I have no memory of it, so it’s no trouble to me.’

‘And Alice decided to keep you? Did she try to find out where you came from?’

‘Not very hard, if she did.’ Starling smiled briefly. ‘Not when she saw how I’d been treated. If they’d wanted me back, they’d have come looking, wouldn’t they? I was only small. I couldn’t have walked so very far in the winter, with no shoes on my feet. They must have been nearby, and as happy to be rid of me as I was to stumble into Alice’s care.’

‘So that’s why you have such a singular name?’

‘Alice used to say that the starlings had brought me to her. They were making a row, coming in to roost, and then there I was, barefoot on the muddy yard with feathers in my hair.’ Starling smiled as she spoke, and Rachel saw how much she enjoyed this legend about her beginnings.

‘So she raised you as her own?’

‘As a sister, more or less. Alice was only seventeen or so herself when I appeared. It was a funny kind of upbringing – Alice treated me as her kin, and Bridget taught me how to be a good servant.’

‘Who is Bridget?’

‘She was Alice’s housekeeper, but also her guardian, and her gaoler. She was employed by Lord Faukes . . .’ Starling paused, swallowing. ‘She was employed by Alice’s benefactor to serve her, but also to keep her confined to the house and village of Bathampton. Alice never went further than the edge of it her whole life.’ Starling turned her face away sadly, as a vixen’s harsh shriek echoed across the water. ‘Apart from one time,’ she added, so softly that Rachel almost didn’t hear her. ‘It’s Bridget we go to see tonight; she’s old now, and infirm, and much reduced from when I first knew her.’

The cold was making Rachel wheeze; biting her hands and feet. Her teeth rattled together. Sudden movement in the lamplight startled her but it was only a barn owl. It ghosted along in front of them for a while, as noiselessly white as snowflakes, then vanished into the darkness like a secret. Rachel looked over and found Starling watching her with eyes gone huge in the lack-light.

‘It’s not much further,’ she said, as the yellow shapes of lit windows came into view up ahead. ‘Can you see the house?’ She pointed, and Rachel made out some tall chimneys and the straight line of a roof, perhaps three hundred feet back from the canal. ‘That’s the house I grew up in. That was the house where we lived, the three of us. Child, maid and crone.’

‘Is Bridget a housekeeper, still?’

‘No, she’s too ill to work; she lives on charity. She has no family of her own left. Only me.’

‘She is lucky, then, that you take the time to visit her.’

‘What else should I do? At times there’s been little love lost between us but . . . she is there in my earliest memories, and she was kind, in her own way. She is my family, too. All the family I have now.’

‘You could wed, and make your own family,’ said Rachel.

‘Perhaps I will, one day.’ Starling looked down and picked at her glove again. ‘The beard-splitters I meet aren’t the kind of men I’d care to wed.’ She glanced up apologetically, and Rachel was glad of the darkness to hide in.

When they arrived, Rachel disembarked more deftly than she’d boarded, and followed Starling onto a bridge across the canal. As the barge slipped away eastwards its lamps looked like tiny will-o’-the-wisps, dancing over the dark water.

‘How will we get back again?’ Rachel asked, suddenly afraid.

‘If we’re lucky, there’ll be a boat heading west that’ll let us ride. If not, it’s a brisk walk back, not much more than an hour. We might even feel warmer if we walk. What time must you be back?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes my husband . . .’ Rachel paused. It was too easy to forget that Starling knew her husband well; perhaps better than she did herself. ‘Mr Weekes usually stays out late,’ she finished, in a stunted voice.

‘Yes. That sounds like Dick Weekes. Always off caterwauling,’ said Starling, tonelessly. They made their way along the deserted village street. There were lights on in windows but no sounds of music or voices from within; Rachel found the stillness eerie.

‘Where is everybody?’ she whispered.

‘Those that aren’t in the pub will be tucked up indoors. It is All-Hallows’ Eve, after all. They’ve no wish to see their dead walking.’ In the borrowed light of a doorway Rachel saw the flash of Starling’s feral grin.

‘I should quite like to see some of mine again. Even if they were in spirit form,’ Rachel said softly. Starling’s grin evaporated.

‘Yes. So would I.’

At the top of the street they turned off onto a muddy track, pitted with frozen puddles and tunnelling between overgrown yew hedges. At the end of it huddled a row of three tiny cottages, single-storeyed, each with two small, square windows to either side of a narrow doorway, and a squat chimney poking up through the centre of the roof. They caught a whiff of the cesspit, and the reek of old ashes. Starling strode purposefully to the middle cottage and rapped her knuckles against the wood. She lifted the latch without waiting for an answer.

‘Bridget, it’s me! And I bring a friend with me.’ She glanced briefly at Rachel as she stepped inside, as if embarrassed to have used the word
friend
. Rachel followed close behind her, hoping for warmth, but, like at Duncan Weekes’s lodgings, the temperature barely rose inside the cottage. The air was stagnant; the only light came from a single candle on the mantelpiece, above a stove in which the last embers of a fire were dying.

‘Bridget?’ Starling called again, passing through a doorway on the right. Rachel waited in the first small room. The floor was bare, and the only furniture a crooked table with a stool tucked under it, a wooden cupboard, and a rocking chair which sat facing the stove. Everything felt stiff with cold, from the bones of the house to the very air itself. From the other room she heard the rustle of a straw mattress, and murmured words. ‘You can come in now – and bring the candle,’ Starling called.

Holding the candle before her made everything else recede into shadow, but Rachel saw Starling perched on a three-legged stool by a narrow cot bed, and in that bed lay a shrunken figure with cheekbones like knife edges and deep rings under its eyes; wrapped in so many layers of blankets and shawls it was hard to tell where the bed ended and the person began. ‘Bridget, this is Rachel Weekes, lately married to Dick Weekes, the wine man. Mrs Weekes, this is Bridget Barnes. Come closer so she can see you.’ Rachel did as she was told, noting how keenly Starling watched Bridget’s face.
Of course. She waits to see her reaction to me. To this face which is only half mine.
But if Starling had been hoping for anything as dramatic as Mr Alleyn’s response, she was disappointed. Bridget simply stared, without blinking, for such a length of time that Rachel found herself staring back, deep into the old woman’s sunken eyes. They registered recognition, but no surprise; only a deep, slow-turning sadness.

‘Well. I suppose there were only so many faces God could create. Sooner or later he had to make the same one twice,’ said Bridget. She sounded breathless; her voice was thin and the air seemed to only penetrate the topmost portion of her lungs, so that she had to take constant small snatches of it. ‘You’re welcome here, Mrs Weekes. Though your presence might cause a stir, on this of all nights.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Barnes,’ said Rachel.

‘We saw nobody, as we came to you. Nobody who might think her a ghost,’ said Starling.

‘It’s Miss Barnes,’ Bridget pointed out. ‘I never did marry. Perhaps if I had I would be tucked up warm in the house of my son or daughter now, instead of in this sty; though I shouldn’t complain of having the almshouse when there are plenty that haven’t.’ She stopped and took several breaths to catch up, coughing wheezily. ‘The damp in the walls plays havoc with my chest,’ she said, to nobody in particular.

‘Well, I may not have a warm and comfortable house I can take you to, but I do have some things for you. Look here – some candle stubs, more beer, a ham bone, some dried fish and peas and . . .’ Starling pulled an earthenware jar from her sack with a slight flourish. ‘Honey! I didn’t even steal it. I bought it for you, Bridget,’ she told the old woman proudly.

‘Well, now, I’m sure you didn’t need to go and spend your money on me, girl,’ Bridget muttered, but Rachel could see how pleased she was.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Starling said haughtily. ‘So be happy that I did, eh?’ For want of somewhere to put it down, Starling sat cradling the honey in her lap. She reached out with one hand to twitch the bedclothes straighter, and as she turned her face away, Rachel saw it was etched with worry.
This woman is her only family, and she is a frail and expectant thing.

Under Starling’s direction, Rachel helped to carry in more wood from a pile behind the cottages. The eerie stillness in the shadows beneath the frozen trees made them hurry back inside.

‘Is there no coal?’ said Rachel, and Starling shook her head.

‘There never is. I thought about bilking some from Dan Smithers, but though he’s my friend he’ll not carry me if he thinks I’m stealing from him.’

‘I have some money. We should have bought some from him,’ Rachel pointed out, opening the stove and feeding in some smaller twigs to get it started again.

‘Open both vents on that stove, or it’ll take an hour or more to light!’ Bridget called from the bedroom. There was no water in the kettle, and with a sigh Starling went back out into the darkness, to the pump on the street, and Rachel was left alone with Bridget, feeling suddenly awkward.

She hovered in the front room for a while, until Bridget called her back to the bedside.

‘Lord, I hate this darkness,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s early evening, but could be the dead of night. My eyes can see to do nothing past four in the afternoon! And shan’t now until April next.’ Rachel took Starling’s place on the three-legged stool.

‘Spring does seem a long way ahead,’ she said. Bridget grunted.

‘You must forgive me for not rising. I’m not so much the invalid I seem, but today my chest is heavy and I have no strength. It comes and goes, some days better than others. Perhaps this will be my last winter; perhaps not.’ She spoke matter-of-factly; without fear or self-pity. ‘Your face wakes old pain. Old grief. Why have you come?’

‘I am . . . employed at the Alleyns’ household, on Lansdown Crescent. As reader and . . . companion to Mr Jonathan Alleyn . . .’

‘To Jonathan Alleyn? So, Starling hasn’t poisoned him yet, then, or slipped an adder into his bedclothes.’ Bridget spoke scathingly.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Well. I’m not surprised. For all her bluster and spite, she’s a sensible girl. She has a good job there, and she knows it. Where else would she go, for heaven’s sake, if she left the Alleyns?’

‘I . . . do not know. She seems to hate him, though. Her master. And to hate the mistress a little as well.’

‘She has to hate him; what else can she do? She blames him for Alice leaving us. Easier to think him a murderer than to accept the other idea.’

‘You do not think he did it?’

‘No. But who can know, especially after all this time? There were so many secrets, so many meetings that I knew nothing about. I turned a blind eye as much as I could. Who was I to thwart their plans? Lord Faukes would have cast us all out if he’d found it out, but Alice loved Jonathan so keen – loved him like breath. And I loved Alice.’ She shrugged; coughed a little.

‘It seems most who knew Alice loved her. All but Josephine Alleyn.’

‘All who knew Alice loved her. Josephine Alleyn met her only once; her hatred was for what Alice
was
, for what she represented, not for Alice herself.’

‘And what was Alice to her?’

‘A scandal, of course. A rich man’s by-blow with no name of her own, born in shame.’ Rachel’s heart squeezed in her chest.

‘You know of Alice’s birth?’ she said, her throat going tight with nameless fear.

‘It doesn’t take a genius to fathom it. She was placed into my arms one day, a little girl with a sunny smile and hair like silk. Lord Faukes brought her, and put her into my arms, and I saw the way he favoured her. What man has tenderness for a child, unless it is his own blood?’

‘You say Alice was Lord Faukes’s child?’

‘I cannot prove it, and it was never spoken of. But why else do rich and powerful men sponsor nameless young children? And keep them tucked away, out of sight and mind?’

‘How old was she when he brought her to you? How old was Alice when you saw her first?’ Rachel pressed, leaning forward and pinning Bridget with her gaze. The old woman frowned in thought.

‘Small, still. Not more than three years of age. I never knew where she’d been before that – I knew better than to ask.’ Suddenly, Bridget’s eyes swam and her mouth twisted up, and when she spoke tears misshaped the words. ‘I was as much of a mother to that girl as whoever it was that birthed her. Mother and nurse and servant. Does Starling ever think of that? She goes on like she’s the only one that misses her.’