The Stolen One

I know what I saw that day in Humblebee Wood, aye, I do, and it was no dream. There was a fog that morning—devil’s cover they call it, for you never know what lies beneath. I was running to meet Christian when I tripped and fell over a root, ripping my only kirtle. I was looking at the tear, deciding on what stitch I’d use to hide it from Grace, when I saw her. A ghost, dressed regally in red, floating through the swirling fog. She looked at me, her eyes piercing and sad. She wore a crown. I will never forget her.

CHAPTER 1

T
he wolf is sitting on his haunches under our ancient chestnut tree, his eyes boring straight through me. Grace Bab always said he would come to Blackchurch Cottage, and I never believed her.

I never knew my mother, the mother that birthed me. Nor my father, for that matter. And it’s by God’s good sense, Grace says, I never knew
him
, for he was the greatest scoundrel the world has yet seen. Still, though, I inherited his high spirit, and my mother’s red hair, red as the good Queen Elizabeth’s, and if Grace didn’t lock the door at night, she fears I’d wander off in the darkness as I did as a child. Wolf’s bait, she calls it, my hair.

Grace has always feared the wolves of Humblebee
Wood. They howled in the night like ghosts, making mischief under the cover of darkness.
When a wolf appears at Blackchurch Cottage, we must prepare the winding sheets, for a death is near
. Grace has always been full of dire predictions and tales of omens, loose of her senses some say.

But it was Anna, not Grace, who first sensed something was wrong. Anna who knew when a storm was to come hours before it actually arrived, or the exact hour a babe in the village was to be born, and Grace would appear before ever being summoned, another sign, the villagers said, of the evil doings of Blackchurch Cottage.

Our morning had started out as usual—a breakfast of pottage and crusty bread, then Grace and I washed our clothes in the creek, where I liked to run my fingers through the river stones pretending they were rich jewels, and then straight to our needlework—our livelihood. Grace left the door open, as it was an unusually cool day for the end of August, and the sweet smell of druid’s honeysuckle from nearby Cleeve Hill came to us on a light breeze.

God’s me, oh how I wanted to jump up and run. Although I love the needle (I’m told it’s in my blood, from my mother), I had a hard time sitting still. When I was a child, Grace had to tie me to a baby minder,
for fear I’d fall into the fire. And even now she still threatened to tie me to my chair, for it’s my stitches and unusual designs that kept us alive. The most beautiful she has ever seen, and the merchant who Grace brought them to on market days at Stow-on-the-Wold agreed. He gave us measurements for customers in London, the rich and wealthy, and who knows, maybe a lofty lord or two.

We sat in our keeping room, which was where we spent our lives, stitching near the fire. I was working on a lady’s cloak of sky blue satin, tufted with silver spangles. Along the dark blue collar I’d stitched twining leaves, gillyflowers, and hummingbirds in gold and black. I ran my fingers tenderly over the creamy, soft fabric. I loved my embroidery, aye, I did. And I mourned my creations when they went off into the world. What I would do to own such a garment instead of my one dull-as-day woolen kirtle! But Grace made sure we didn’t linger over our finished pieces. They went straight to the wooden chest at the end of our bed. At least till it was market time again, and Grace would leave us for a few days and come back with a pocketful of coins and a not-often-seen serene smile upon her somber face.

But I knew where she kept the key. “There are no
secrets in a house of girls,” Grace Bab said, although she was quite good at it herself. Sometimes when Grace went to the village, I’d wear the finery around the house and pretend I was a great lady, strumming the small prized lute Grace kept on a peg near the door, an elegant remnant from her London days that we were never allowed to touch. Anna would watch with worried eyes, fearful I’d be caught. She was too nervous to join in. I was always the naughty one—always.

“I smell wolf’s juniper,” Grace said suddenly, looking up from her needle. “Do you smell it?” She spoke of a rare, wild weed that was said to guard a wolf’s den. A weed she sometimes used to stop the bleeding when a babe came too early.

I could only smell the honeysuckle, which still lingered in the air, sweet and beckoning. Grace looked around, inhaling a bit more, like a rat in the larder. Then she shook her head and mumbled that she had imagined it.

I glanced at my sister Anna, who was twining the thread. She had missed the exchange. Sweet Anna—Deaf Anna, she’s known in the village, for Anna is nearly deaf and has been since she was born. Grace taught her to speak, only to you it might sound like a pond frog’s croak. Grace and I knew her speech very well—every
inflection, every strain for the right pronunciation. No one else did, though. She was a mute to all others, for it was only us she trusted. She hardly ever left the cottage. She was quite content to never leave, you see. She said our valley was the last place God made and it was here she would die, while I plotted escapes of every kind each little minute of the day.

Oh, but she’s beautiful, Anna, so very beautiful, except for her ears, which she hides under her glorious yellow-golden hair, hair she inherited from Grace, whose own hair is as white as a Dunn’s Hill ghost now. “Happened overnight,” Grace claims. “God took it from me for saving them.” My cousin Christian and Uncle Godfrey from the plague, she means. Together Anna and I were known as the “vexed twins,” meaning we were to be pitied—me with my hair and Anna with her crippled ears. It was often said that neither of us, Anna and I, had a good future in hand, that an unlucky star shone upon us. But I always said fa, the future was ours for taking—I’d seize it for the both of us. Someday I’d leave this place, I knew it deep down in my soul. I’d leave.

Suddenly Anna got up and walked to the door, her eyes wide and wild. Her back stiffened strangely. When I saw the pale hair on her neck rise, I jumped up and
joined her, my hand on her shoulder. At first I did not see him, as one does not see something that cannot be. I blinked. Yes, but he was there. A wolf sitting under our chestnut tree, strong limbed and fierce—a ghost in daylight.
When a wolf appears at Blackchurch Cottage, we must prepare the winding sheets, for a death is near
.

We seemed to lock eyes for a moment, the wolf and I, for we had known each other before, I think, and then he turned and trotted away. I watched him run along the hawthorn hedgerows that quilt the hills beyond our tiny village.

“What is it?” Grace called from behind us.

I gripped Anna’s shoulder and tilted her face to me. “Just a little golden bird,” I lied. We’d never hear the end of it, if she knew. And she’d tired so easily of late, her nerves raw. “Must have come all the way from London.” Anna dropped the black thread she still held, and it rolled across the floor. I slipped my arm around Anna and pulled her to me. She was shaking.

“Come away from the doorway, girls,” Grace said quietly as she continued to stitch. I slowly turned my head back to her as she muttered, “Golden birds foretell an omen.”

I tilted my head for Anna to sit back down, which she did. “Did not Kat’s mother have a golden bird in a
gilded cage, Mama?” Anna said, her voice cracking more than usual. I smiled at her, thanking her for continuing the lie. I quickly turned to Grace, hoping beyond hope that she would answer.

But Grace gently raised her hand, admonishing Anna to hush, as she always did when my mother was mentioned. “Come away from the door, Kat,” she said quietly. She never looked up from her needle. She needn’t have. She knew what lay beneath my beating heart. And that’s why she worried about me so. And for a brief, fleeting moment, I thought I smelled wolf’s juniper too; it stung my nose like fire smoke before floating away from our cottage. I narrowed my eyes and looked out at the hills, but the wolf was gone.

“Come back to your work, Wren,” Grace murmured behind me. Grace called Anna this in her rare affectionate moments. “And you too, Kat. Quit dawdling in the doorway.”

“Work, work, work,” I mimicked, rolling my eyes as I stepped back from the threshold. “Morning, day, and night—can we never be free of it?”

“Sit down, Kat,” she said as she drew up another stitch and plunged the needle back down in her cloth. “No more prattle from you.”

I plopped back down on my stool and picked up the cloak and my needle. I looked out the window again and then narrowed my eyes at Grace. Why had our whole lives been tainted with fear and admonitions? And mysteries? Why should she always be so full of worry and short of temper like a stonemason hag? Still, though, I knew she loved me dearly. When she was close to falling asleep at night in her chair by the fire (I hardly ever saw her abed, so afraid of falling asleep was she), I’d try and thief answers from her.

“Where do I come from? Why me?” I’d asked her one cold winter night.

“I’d do anything for you, my little Kat,” she’d answered, her eyes fluttering shut. “No one wanted you. But I did.”

When I was a child, Grace hid my hair under a child’s coif, hoping by taming it, she’d tame me. “Spirit” she called me, for I was like the wild heather on Woeful Downs. I was only allowed to remove the linen when bathing at the creek. One morning someone saw my hair released from its binding, and soon it was known in the village that I had the hair of a she-demon. “Who shall have you, girl?” Grace had proclaimed then.

And even now, I must hide it under an ugly matron’s coif, although I am sixteen years and it is quite proper for a girl to wear her hair down. “How else is the maid to catch a husband if he cannot see what he is to get,” Frances Pea, who owns the Pea & Cock, asks when we come to town. “And with that tongue of hers?”

I am known for my outspokenness, and privately Grace sometimes pops my mouth when I prattle too long or say something too sharp. But Grace is also well served in talking out of both sides of her mouth. To Frances Pea, who is hard as a crumpet stone, and who was thrown by her first husband in Old Simon’s duck pond for her scolding and unquiet ways, she responds, “Yes, perhaps she will, for a sweet maid who possesses both wit and sense will surprise her husband with daily miracles.”

Which is very funny, for neither is the God’s truth (I have the sense of Perceval’s mare, Grace says, and am prone to rash impulses like my mother), and even more, there is no hope of finding a husband here in Winchcombe except for old Mr. Dar, who is nigh near forty
and
poxed, and the Widower Beachum, who has eight stout girls and only one cow amongst them.

There is Christian. Yes indeed, there is always Christian Dawe. Grace has been singing his high praises
from noon to nightfall of late. But I have to laugh, for he is barely a boy, really, and like a brother to me. Ha! And when I remind Grace of her admonition to never buy a horse with a curly mane—for you see, Christian is possessed of the most unruly mess of locks—Grace tells me to shush.

But Grace says I will someday soon have to take a husband, before I lose the sweet blossom of youth that disguises one’s imperfections. And it must be someone who can bear me and my meager dowry, and take Anna, too—and for that we can’t be choosy. A woman must have a husband; this is her all-abiding goal in life—a husband good or bad. Without a husband, a woman is left to the mercies of this cruel world. Such is a poor woman’s lot, and such was mine. I didn’t like to think of husbands. And I would not, no matter how much Grace harangued me. I’d dreamed only of what lay beyond our lovely vale, past Postlip Hill, past Nutmeg Farm to the dusty roads that lead to better things.

But it consumed her, Grace, this hope of finding us settled. For some reason she thought God would take her soon, even though she was not of an age to expect it and was always of a strong constitution, just tired of life now, that’s all. She’d even escaped the sweating sickness the
year before, when it hit nearby Corndean and Grace was called upon to help at Nutmeg Farm. Poor Christian’s mother, Agnes Dawe, was taken to the lord on the day of All Souls, only a few hours after falling sick.

Uncle Godfrey and Christian lay near death too, but God spared them, through Grace’s magical hands.

Grace did not catch their sickness, which was as virulent as a great flood. Nor did she bring it home to us. Grace is skilled of the hands, you see. Both of needle and healing. It’s one of my few early memories of her, those long, tender hands stroking my wolf’s bait hair at night and telling me all would be well as long as I stayed with her. They were her crowning glory, those hands.

Something troubled Grace. I’d spot it in her eyes, a devil worry, a worry of the heart. Once as we sat by the hearth fire, she said of a sudden, “They will take my hands.” Everyone knew of the old tale of the witch Comfort Woodhouse from Wolfhames Hill, whose hands were taken from her newly sown grave. Years later a one-eyed shepherd plucked a bony fingertip from the River Severn.

But Grace would not say what troubled her or why she might meet an early grave. She told me once when I was very young—too young to know—that she would never
lie to me, but she could not tell me the truth. Not yet. Someday. She would know when. Was someday soon, I wondered? What secrets did she keep from me?

We had another visitor that morning. Christian came at noon with a bundle of bane pears, smiling at me as he laid the basket on the end of our trestle table. It was our signal, you see, to meet later at the barrow of Belas Knap. If he had placed the pears in the middle, we would meet at the ruins of Puck’s Well. I looked up slyly at him as I worked on a pair of gloves fit for royalty—of soft green kid, with pansies and swans in gold, and glass pearls ruched along the ruffled edge. I tried one on and admired its beauty, then pulled it off before Grace could see.

Christian said hello to her, and she nodded back from the other end of our keeping room. She was making us a crusty tartlet. “Those will do nicely,” she said, nodding at his bundle. Even though we seemed to eat pears noon and night, I never tired of them, so delicious were they. Uncle Godfrey had expanded the pear grove, and the pears always sold well at market. According to Grace, Christian was very lucky that he would someday inherit such a good farm. And a year or two before, an old
shepherd had left Christian seven little lambs, which he adored and coddled over day and night. And this showed he was an enterprising young man, an additional feather in his cap. But I was irritated by those flea-bitten beasts, who loved to nip at my bottom whenever I visited.

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