Tidelands Page 45
“Egg money! There was more than forty pounds in there!” Mrs. Miller exclaimed.
“My dowry!” Jane reminded everyone.
Alinor shrugged, as contemptuous as a lady of court. “I don’t know. I never saw what was inside the purse. I never held the purse. I don’t know the weight or how much you had saved. I only ever saw it in your hand as you gave me money to buy your lace. I never even touched it, did I?”
Alinor’s disdain was more than Mrs. Miller could bear. “I don’t doubt you changed the money into faerie gold without touching it! Without taking the purse from its hiding place!” she shouted. “I don’t doubt it for a moment! I don’t doubt you never touched it; but did it all at midnight from the mire, where you’re always alone, walking in moonlight, on paths that no one else follows, talking to yourself.”
Alinor swayed back a little from the venom in the woman’s voice.
“She didn’t take it!” Alys suddenly spoke up, cutting through the rising noise, stepping forward, pulling away from her new husband. “I know she did not!”
Alinor raised her head and met her daughter’s eyes. “Alys, you say nothing,” she ordered. She looked past her to Richard’s strained face. “Take her away,” she said quietly. “It’s her wedding day. She shouldn’t be here. Take her home. Take her to her new home.”
He nodded, his young face shocked, and tried to guide Alys to the door, but she resisted him.
“I won’t go,” she told him.
“Then stay silent,” Richard said. “As your mother tells you.”
Alys turned to her mother. “Ma,” she said desperately. “You know. . . .”
“Yes, I know.” Alinor nodded. “I know. Just go, Alys.”
“Plotting!” Mrs. Miller exclaimed. “So there’s two of them!”
With relief, James saw Ned enter the kitchen and look around, bewildered. Rob came in behind him. “What’s all this?” Ned asked. “What’s going on?”
“Mrs. Reekie has been accused of stealing Mrs. Miller’s savings by witchcraft and leaving faerie gold in its place,” James said.
Ned walked up to the table, brushing through the crowd. “Lord, you people,” he said scornfully. “Can’t you even go to a wedding feast without stopping for a quarrel?” He went to his sister’s side and she turned to him, her hands filled with the coins, and at once he checked, frozen at the sight of them. “What’s this?” he said in a quite different voice. “What’re you doing with your coins, Alinor?”
“Are these her coins? Her own coins? D’you know them?” Mrs. Miller demanded, her voice sharp with excitement.
“Do you recognize them?” Mr. Miller asked.
“Yes,” Ned said simply. “I’d think so. But one looks the same as another to me. I take no interest in them. Alinor—what’s happening?”
Rob came to his mother’s side and she tried to smile reassuringly, her hands filled with the damning evidence.
Everyone turned to James. Nobody had any doubts about the accusation now. Ned had given absolute confirmation of his sister’s guilt.
“Mrs. Reekie, how did your coins get into Mrs. Miller’s purse?” James asked quietly.
Mutely, Alinor shook her head. Ned took his hat off his head and she tipped the coins into it. Two of them were such light scraps of silver that they stuck to her sweating palms and she brushed them off. There was a little gasp of horror as if she were peeling faerie gold from her own skin. Ned put his hat down on the table before James as if it were evidence, and he did not want to touch it.
“I don’t know,” Alinor said steadily. “I have no idea.”
“I think we should wait for Sir William’s coming,” James said.
Alys shot him a desperate look. “You’re sitting there, you decide,” she said. “This is a mistake, obviously. Let my mother go home. Let’s all go on to the wedding.”
“Hush, Alys,” Alinor whispered to her.
“My mother is innocent of anything, sir,” Rob said awkwardly. “Please clear her name.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mrs. Wheatley said under her breath. “These poor children.”
“It’s her own faerie gold,” Mrs. Miller said flatly. “As her brother says. Transformed from my good coin. Like alchemy. Gold to dross. What could this be but enchantment? She must be a witch.”
“Prick her,” someone said from the back of the room and at once everyone spoke.
“And search her for marks.”
“Strip her.”
“Get the women to look . . .”
“Devil’s teats . . .”
“Test her with a Bible!”
“Moles on her skin . . .”
“The devil leaves his marks.”
Alinor was as white as her collar, frozen into stillness.
“Sir,” Rob said urgently to his tutor, “they’ve no right. Don’t let them get hold of her. Don’t let them . . .”
James tried to assert himself over the rising noise. “I am still taking evidence here,” he claimed. “And I will take a decision.”
“In writing,” Mr. Miller supported him. “Decision in writing.”
“Swim her!” someone said, and there was immediate agreement. “Swim her.”
“That’s the only way!”
“Search her, and then swim her.”
For the first time Alinor looked towards James. Her eyes were black with terror. “I can’t,” she said flatly. “That, I can’t.”
“She’s very afraid of water.” Ned spoke rapidly to James. “Very afraid. She’s afraid even on my ferry. She can’t be swum.”
“Stop this!” Alys demanded, her voice high with panic. “Stop this!”
“Sir?” Rob’s young face was anguished. “Mr. Summer?”
James rose to his feet. “This is not the time or the place,” he ruled. “I am going to order her arrest—”
“She’s already arrested!” someone shouted from the back. “We want her tested!”
“Tested now!”
“In water!”
The crowd surged forward and Ned and Rob found they were pushing against grasping hands and a mass of bodies. Ned tried to get his arms around Alinor and pull her towards him, Rob faced out towards the people, who were crowding more and more closely. He slapped their hands away from his mother, trying to get between her and them, but they were coming from every side of the room and he could not block them all. Richard Stoney had hold of Alys, dragging her back from her mother, pulling her away, following his own mother and father, who were leaving, thrusting their way through the crowd, out to the yard to the wedding cart, fearful of what was happening.
“Stop this!” James shouted, but his authority was melting away in the crowd’s rising heat. “I order you to stand still!”
Ned got Alinor around the waist and was pulling her away from the crowd in the kitchen, taking her into the house, towards the parlor door. Alinor, with people pulling at her gown, dragging at her apron, snatching off her cap so her hair tumbled down around her frightened white face, was fighting to go with him, pushing as hard as she could to stay in his arms and make their way towards the parlor. James, seeing what they were doing, came out from behind the table and opened the parlor door, got hold of Ned’s jacket, and hauled him backwards, the three of them head-to-head when he felt Ned suddenly flinch and recoil: “You’ve a belly on you!”
Alinor, white as skimmed milk, her jacket ripped from her shoulders, her cap lost, her apron pulled aside so everyone could see the swell of her pregnancy, looked her brother in the face amid all the noise and said: “Yes, God forgive me.”
“A belly?”
“Not now,” James said quickly, but it was too late: someone in the forefront of the crowd had overheard.
“The witch’s whelping,” someone exclaimed.
“No!” Mrs. Wheatley exclaimed. She pushed through the crowd to Alinor’s side. One glance at her blanched face and her curving body confirmed her guilt. “Oh! Alinor! God forgive you. What’ve you done?”
“With child?” Mr. Miller asked, disbelievingly. “Alinor Reekie?”
Everyone was stunned into silence and stillness. Alinor turned to face shocked and hostile gazes. Rob was looking at his mother in complete bewilderment. “What? Ma?”
“Whose child?” Mrs. Miller demanded, her voice sharp with renewed fear. “That’s what I want to know? Who’s the father? What’s the father? What has she done now?”
In the frightened silence, they heard Sir William ride into the yard and the clatter as he dismounted and came to the kitchen door.
He took in the scene in one swift glance: Alinor held between her brother and James Summer, her cap off, her hair falling down, her apron torn, and her rounded belly straining against her gown. Nobody said anything.
“Mr. Summer,” said his lordship icily. “Come out here, and tell me what the devil is going on.”
Everyone spoke at once, but Sir William threw up a hand to silence them. “Mr. Summer, if you please.”
James threw one anguished look at Alinor, released her, and went out, the crowd silently parting to let him go. Ned stood between his sister and their neighbors but now there was no need to protect her; nobody wanted to touch her. Nobody moved, or even spoke. They were all straining their ears to hear the low-voiced conversation between the two men on the threshold, and then the snap of Sir William’s fingers summoning the miller’s lad, and the clip-clop of Sir William’s horse being led away to a stable. Alinor fixed her gaze on the floor. Long moments passed, an unseasonal bee buzzed against the parlor window. Alinor, distracted by the noise, turned her head and made a little gesture as if she would release it.
“Leave it,” Ned ordered tersely.
Sir William appeared in the doorway. “Good people, don’t crush yourselves, now. No need to be all squashed in here. You’d better all come out into the yard,” he said generally.
Everyone jostled out into the harsh winter sunshine of the yard. The tide was on the ebb and seagulls were crying over the mire. The millpond gates were bumping closed, pushed together by the deep water in the millpond. There was a trickle of water, overflowing the top of the gates.
“Mrs. Reekie, these good women will have to examine you, you know that,” Sir William ruled.
Alinor bowed her head to her landlord.
“Mrs. Wheatley, would you choose three women to take Mrs. Reekie into the house privately, and examine her closely for witch’s marks, ask her to name the father of her child, and when she expects to be confined.”
Mrs. Wheatley, her lips compressed, looked around the crowd of neighbors, old friends, and some old enemies. Mrs. Stoney flinched back against their wagon. Blandly, Mrs. Wheatley ignored her. “Mrs. Jaden, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Huntley,” she said, naming her cousin, her friend, and a woman who worked as a midwife in the south of the island. Sir William waved them towards the house, and the four women went back inside with Alinor walking slowly between them.
“I won’t have her in my house!” Mrs. Miller said furiously. “You should do it in the yard. Strip her naked out here!”
“You will oblige me, Mrs. Miller, I am sure,” said his lordship. “We’re not complete heathens.” He turned aside and spoke quietly with James. Alys tried to edge closer to hear, but Richard Stoney held her tightly. He held to her as if he would save her from drowning, as his mother and his father stood at a little distance, looking at the white face of the daughter-in-law they had never thought good enough.
Mrs. Stoney turned to her husband, put her mouth to his ear. “The dowry,” she said quietly. “I have it in my pocket. Should we—”
“Be still,” he whispered. “We’ll look at it when we get home and this is all over. They’re wed, it’s the dowry she brought. You saw it, it was good coin. Leave it be for now.”
She nodded and waited in silence like all the other neighbors. After a quarter of an hour the searcher women came out of the house again, Alinor walking with them, her cap off, her golden hair tumbled as if they had run their fingers through it, hunting for signs. There was a thin raw scratch on the side of Alinor’s neck, and a trickle of blood from her ear to her white collar, which was torn. Rob exclaimed: “Ma!” and she gave him a weary glance. “It’s nothing,” she tried to reassure him. “Nothing.”
Mrs. Wheatley walked up to her employer and stood before him.
“Have you examined Mrs. Reekie?” he asked her.
“We have.”
“Is she with child?”
“Yes, sir. She believes that she will be brought to bed in the month of May.”
There was a muttered exclamation from the Stoneys. Richard looked at Alys as if he would ask her something, but met such a glare from her blue eyes that he said nothing.
“So the child was conceived . . . ?”
“In August or September, sir.”
“Did she name the father of her child?”
James cleared his throat as if to speak; but Mrs. Wheatley continued with her report. “No, sir, she is incorrigible. When we begged her, for the sake of God and for her own good reputation, to give his name she said nothing.”
Sir William nodded. “Is it her missing husband’s child?” he suggested.
Mrs. Wheatley was quick. “Nobody has seen Zachary the fisherman for over a year, sir. But, of course, he could have come back and visited her secretly.”
“Is that what happened?” Sir William asked Alinor, giving her a way out from the accusation of whoring. “Think before you speak, Mrs. Reekie. Think very carefully. Is that what happened?”
“No,” she said shortly.
His lordship looked at her for a moment. “Are you sure?”
Alys whispered “Ma!”
Alinor looked towards her. “No,” she said again.
Sir William returned his attention to the searcher women. “Did you scratch her for a witch?”
“We did,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “With the darning needle that we found in the sewing case in the parlor.” She turned politely to Mrs. Miller. “We left it on the table if you want to throw it away.”
Mrs. Miller gave an exaggerated shudder. “You take it away. It’ll be cursed.”
“And did she bleed?” Sir William pursued his inquiry.
“She bled like a mortal woman and she felt the pain. Not very much, but red blood, like any woman.” She pointed to the scratch on Alinor’s neck. Alinor stood like a statue, her eyes on the ground.
“And did you examine her for witch’s marks?”
“We did,” Mrs. Smith answered. “She has no extra teats that we could see; but she has a mole in the shape of a moon, very uncommon and very suspicious, on her ribs.”
“In the shape of a moon?”
“A new moon. A sickle moon. A witch’s moon.”
There was a deep satisfied sigh from the listening crowd, and Sir William fell silent at this incriminating evidence. The crowd, staring at Alinor, waited for him to speak, content to wait for his decision, since there could be only one decision from him. It was as if they were enjoying the pause before the final act of a mystery play, the chance to savor the sentence that would come, waiting for the violence that would break out.
“The purse,” Sir William said quietly to Alinor. “Did you steal the money? Did you put the old coins in place of Mrs. Miller’s savings?”
“I did not,” Alinor said.
“These old coins and chips of coins. Are they yours?”
Alinor looked at her brother’s hat, which one of the searcher women handed to Mr. Miller, who held it out at arm’s length, as if the little silver tokens would burn him.
“They look like my coins.”
“You keep them at Ferry-house?”
Alinor glanced at Ned.
“She does,” he said miserably.
“Then how did they get from there to here?”
Alinor choked on her answer. She looked at the sky over Sir William’s flinty face, she looked at the ground beneath his polished boots. There was a long silence.
“I did it,” Alinor interrupted her daughter.
“Witchcraft!” Mrs. Miller exclaimed. “Just as I said. Witchcraft.”
“Oh, Alinor, God forgive you!” Mr. Miller joined in.
“Was she going to pass off her baby as ours?” Richard clamped Alys to his side, his eyes burning. “Are you truly with child? Our baby? Were you going to make me a cuckold twice over—put a faerie child in my cradle, and my wife not the mother?”
“What?” demanded Mr. Stoney.
Sir William and James exchanged shocked glances, but events were moving too fast for them.
“No, no!” said Alys, her hand twisting in his grip, but he held her tightly. “For God’s sake, no!”
“But you knew that your mother was with child too? Conceived at the same time? How’s that possible?”
Alys looked despairingly towards her white-faced mother. “It’s nothing to do with us, Richard. And the money—”
“You hush,” Alinor said firmly to her daughter. She was calm now, as if the needle scratch had bled away all shame. She nodded to Richard. “Take her away,” she said. “I told you before. Take her to your home. I don’t want her here.”
“Ma! I have to tell them—”
“Never,” Alinor said firmly. “You have nothing to say that can help me. Just go.”
“We don’t have to do what you say!” Mr. Stoney blustered.
“For pity’s sake, take her away,” Alinor said simply to him, and Richard nodded and half dragged and half lifted Alys towards the wagon. His father and mother followed, torn between their desire to join their neighbors in the trial of a witch, and the horror that the witch was now related to their family.
They were climbing in the wagon and setting the horses going when someone spoke up from the back of the crowd: “Swim her!”
“I didn’t do it with witchcraft, I did it as an exchange,” Alinor said rapidly to Sir William. “It was a loan. That’s why I left everything that I have, to show that I would pay it back. As a token that it was me and I would repay.”