The Lady's Slipper (33 page)

She manhandled him out of his coat and vest, cursing the stiff buttons, and rolled him over onto his side to force his limp arms through the sleeves. By the time she had done this, she was out of breath. She removed his sodden breeches, discovering with repulsion that he had soiled himself too. She left him with his breeches round his knees whilst she went for water and soap, exposing his white legs, bristling with gingery hairs like a hog’s back.

When he was passably clean she dragged the counterpane from under him and threw it over his chest, then she deposited his wet clothes in the pot under the bed. All this she did in a daze; her arms and legs moved, her body bent at the waist to the task, but she could not force her thoughts to arrange themselves in any logical order.

‘Sleep now,’ she said woodenly, unsure whether she was addressing Thomas or herself. ‘Happen you will feel better the morrow.’

But if Thomas heard her he made no reply, except his breath, a hoarse irregular sound, like the gushing of water from the village pump. She watched him dispassionately for a moment before she went to the linen press and took out some freshly laundered sheets and fetched a feather palliasse from the trunk in the hall. Then she made up the truckle bed in the room where the child Flora used to sleep. It was clear she would not be needed in Thomas’s bed tonight.

She did not sleep well. She thought of the mistress sleeping her last few nights on this earth. Soon she would be swinging like a sack of grain, her thoughts silenced, her heart cold and still as a river rock, and it was she, Ella, who had made it happen. She marvelled at her own power, but trembled, for she knew it was wickedness. Yet why did it not feel wicked? She ought to feel something, suffer some sort of remorse for what she had done.

Ella tossed in the sheets, listening to Thomas’s breath rising and falling in the next room, praying he would recover quickly. For what would become of her if he were to die? She would have nowhere to go, and no position. She thought of her father and the dark attic where her sister still slept in soot-stained sheets, imagined her cowering in the blanket when she heard Da’s footsteps. She smelt again the drink on him, dreaded the thwack of his leather belt. A swell of compassion for her sister filled her eyes with tears. She must find a way to get Sadie out of there, away from Da, to find her a place somehow.

When the faint light of morning came, she heard the clunk of the key in the back door and knew it would be April, the scullery maid, come to light the fires ready for the day’s cooking. Betty the cook had resigned. ‘I would not lift a finger for you if you were the last human being on this earth,’ she had said after the trial. ‘You are a lying, thieving bitch, and by rights it should be you strung up on the gallows. I hope you rot in hell.’

Ella had tossed her head, defiant, and said, ‘Cooks are two a penny. And your food stinks. Master wanted rid of you, anyways.’

Betty’s face had grown red and hot then, and she had slapped Ella sharply across the cheek. It stung like blazes, but Ella stayed fast, like a statue, watching Betty hobble painfully away on her bad leg.

So today there would be nobody to cook, except herself and April. Ella roused herself and dressed hastily, running down the back stairs. April was fiddling with the coals, for the fire had gone out and needed relighting. She jumped up guiltily as Ella entered. Ella ordered her to get a move on. She would have April make Master some tea and a tempting breakfast. Thomas loved his food–a platter of bacon and eggs would soon get him up and about.

The fire took a long time to get going. They had to huff and puff at it with the bellows, and twice start afresh with new kindling. By the time it was going, they were both hot with the effort and covered in smuts. When the breakfast was ready Ella hurried up the stairs with the tray, leaving April eating downstairs at the kitchen table.

‘Breakfast, Thomas,’ called Ella cheerily.

There was no answer so she pushed the door open with her foot and took the tray in. She set it on the half-moon table by the window and threw open the shutters to let in the day. The heavy tapestry curtains around the bed were still drawn, and when she pulled them back she could see the humped figure of Thomas lying on his side, still in his shirt the way she had left him. His beard had started to grow and showed as a stain around his jaw; his shaved head appeared incongruously pasty and freckled without his wig.

She called him gently and he opened his eyes, trying to sit up and speak. One side of him seemed to be lifeless, as if drained. With difficulty she heaved him semi-upright onto the pillows, shoving a thick bolster behind him to stop his head lolling back. Realizing he would not be able to cut up the bacon for himself, she began to cut it for him. A stream of angry noises came from the bed, grunts and groans and mumblings. When she fetched over the platter and made an effort to feed him, he nearly knocked her over trying to take hold of it. He had no control over his one threshing arm and she had to snatch away the plate before it ended up on the floor. After several such frustrating attempts, she held the plate aloft away from him.

‘Thomas,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘you must let me feed you, or you won’t get any breakfast at all.’

She saw then how he slumped back, passive. She spooned the egg and bacon into his mouth like feeding a baby. He could not even chew so she had to push it down his throat with the spoon, and even then most of it dribbled down his chin. The egg was cold and congealed into clots before she had managed to get even a half of it down his throat, and as she reached to mop his chin with a napkin, she saw his loins heave and heard the splutter as his bowels voided into the bed. The stench filled her nostrils and made her gag. She put the napkin over her nose and fled, dropping the greasy plate on the counterpane. When she got halfway down the stairs, the napkin still over her face, she met April coming up.

‘Is he better? Has he finished his breakfast?’ asked April.

Ella pushed past her, her voice cracking.

‘Go up and see for yourself,’ she said.

For the second night Ella did not sleep. The doctor had been and bled him but it had made no difference. In the cold dark, Thomas bellowed incomprehensible sounds like a man possessed of unquiet spirits. He howled the same word over and over. It could have been her own name, ‘Ella’, but lurking in the back of her mind was the insidious thought that he was really saying another name. Ella shivered in the thin light of her candle, unsure whether he was calling for her or for his wife, and unable to go in and face him. When she had ventured in with his lunch, his eyes had throbbed with accusation, and it was the intensity of his look that made her baulk at going back into his room.

She paced up and down the kitchen with her hands pressed over her ears, her heart hammering in her chest. What was to become of her? It had all been for nothing. She had sent a woman to her death, and it had all been for nothing. Or rather for this man, who instead of supporting her had turned into a blabbering baby. A vision of her future life swirled before her eyes and with it came the stink of sweat and urine. It must be her punishment. She had sent a woman to hang, and this was her reward.

The ghastly sounds continued until she could stand it no more. She flung open the door and reached the bed in two strides. She grabbed hold of his collar and shook him.

‘Stop it,’ she said, ‘for God’s sake, be quiet.’

He opened his mouth to let out another sound, but she was weeping now, tears that came from nowhere, dripping onto the sheets. ‘Why can’t you just be quiet?’

The sound came from his lips again like the cry of a harpooned seal. This time Ella was sure of the name. In a fury she caught up the bolster on the end of the bed and raised it above his head. Thomas’s eyes followed her and his mouth stayed open in a small ‘o’ of surprise. Ella felt her world crumble into small pieces, each piece infinitely slow. She saw her hand, dark against the pillow, its fingers hooked like claws around the white linen. But before she could bring it down, the creases in Thomas’s forehead unaccountably dropped away. She watched his lips part to make a small grunt and she paused, mid-movement. She leaned over and put her cheek next to his mouth. There was not a whisper of air. Faintly, in the distance, a cock crowed, though it was still dark, marking the beginning of a new day.

Still clutching the bolster to her chest, as if holding it would somehow hold her together, Ella moved to the window. Outside there was a glow on the horizon. Dawn. She felt nothing. It surprised her. No sorrow for his passing. But she knew there would be a hue and cry as soon as they knew he was dead, and that there would be no place for her when his brother arrived, except as the butt of his boot.

She must get away from here. She started for the door, but then turned back. She would need some things to sell. In a panic she lunged for the silver candlesticks on the dressing table, but in the dark she knocked one over and it clattered to the ground.

The noise of it startled her and she realized she was trembling. ‘Get a grip, girl,’ she said under her breath. ‘Think. Just think.’ It was as if her thoughts were tangled like brambles; she couldn’t unravel them. She plucked the one thought that made sense. She had to go somewhere far away, where they could never catch up with her. The Devil was on her heels, searching for her soul, and he already had hold of her skirts.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ she groaned. ‘Sadie.’ Her heart heaved.

She could not leave her sister behind.

Twenty minutes later Ella ran down the lane, her petticoats flying, followed by a smaller figure, stumbling, trying to keep up. They disappeared into the Ibbetsons’ house but emerged fifteen minutes later as the church clock’s sonorous tone struck six. The mule’s bridle jingled as it was harnessed. They loaded the trap with trunks and cases, baskets and bags, like a rag and bone cart, talking in urgent whispers. Ella helped Sadie into the front seat, clucked her tongue and slapped the reins against the mule’s neck so it was set trotting down the lane in a great hurry. And all the while, the Ibbetsons’ front door creaked back and forth in the breeze, the draught blowing cold into the empty hallway.

The crowds outside the courthouse had waited hours to see a glimpse of the witch as she was brought back up the hill to the castle gaol. But they were to be disappointed, for Alice was transported under escort in a covered wagon that rattled on uneven rickety wheels through the crowded streets. She was closeted along with two others who were to hang, both of them men. So this was English justice. She was not so quick now to condemn the bedraggled men in front of her; rather she looked upon their downcast eyes with sad empathy.

She smiled at the young man, who could not have been more than sixteen years old and was shivering uncontrollably so that his thin shirt fluttered on his chest. She did not know what their crimes were and she did not ask, but she was glad all three of them were protected from the jeering crowd that ran alongside, battering on the sides of the lath walls.

‘Lord have mercy,’ she said under her breath as the hammering threatened to turn them deaf. The young man crouched into the corner like a wounded dog. At the gaol they were separated from her and she was thrust, still looking back over her shoulder at them, into another cell.

Foolishly she had thought she would be returned to Hannah, to the familiar cell with its jutting ledge for her hidden candle, the candle she had left with the flint and the worn buckskin-covered Bible. The new cell was of course no different to the first–it still stank like a latrine, the walls still oozed with damp. But the fact that it was a different cell, and the prospect of spending her last two nights alone, propelled her into deep despair and caused her to weep with frustration. She had assumed Hannah would be given another custodial sentence, that she would be there for comfort in the last hours. But the cell was empty, just four sets of leg-irons rusting against the wall.

Surprisingly, they had not manacled her, and there was a slot window projecting a thin sliver of light. She stood on tiptoe to peer out through the narrowing aperture of the stone wall. It looked out directly into the yard where the towering silhouette of the ramparts was partly visible against the grey sky. Perched on the crenellated but crumbling tower were a couple of crows, nodding their heads in a macabre dance. The cast-aside, dismembered remains of some poor man, who had been quartered and left to rot in the yard, lay in full view. His head was missing–presumably on the pike above the gates, and his legs were set at an odd angle, the sole of one foot visible, white as wax beneath a blood-soaked cuff.

She shuddered and withdrew into the cell. She remembered the faces of the two men from the wagon. After the trial they had measured them all for coffins before putting them in the cart, and she had heard tell that the condemned had to walk past the line of cheap dealwood boxes on the way to the gibbet.

She surprised herself by hoping she would be the first to hang. She did not want to witness the sounds of her companions’ last moments, their pleas for mercy. But then again, she desired not to give them more cause for fear either. What if she were to break down or cry out? It would terrify that young man. Would she be able to step up to the scaffold calmly, or would fear overtake her on the journey and would she have to be dragged? She knelt down on the damp stone, a weight of dread about her shoulders. She must prepare herself.

Her lips moved reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but it was an empty prayer. The words seemed ridiculous. She would have no more need of daily bread, though her trespasses certainly needed forgiveness. And if there was a paradise, she knew she did not deserve to enter it. She realized that her life before had been a kind of earthly paradise.

Alice took out the little chapbook from her waistband. It was dog-eared now, but it reminded her of Hannah. She smelt it. Wondered if it might retain the scent of Richard’s tobacco. But it smelt only of damp paper. She took it to the window to read.

He should examine whether he is really worthy of the high title of Christian; he should examine his whole Life, how he has spent his Time
, said Boehme.

She had lived her life like a blinkered horse, only seeing her own view, all other views invisible to her. Small wonder then that Thomas had so little affection left for her, that he could not even bring himself to appear at the courthouse.

She recalled coming out of the summerhouse one morning to find Thomas on the doorstep about to come in, and she had immediately turned and locked the door behind her as if to shut him out. His face turned from open and smiling to hurt and closed, but she had ignored it and brushed past him on the path as if he were of no more account than the butcher boy.

Maybe there was already a shadow over her even then. As soon as she had stolen the flower. She shuddered. Her preoccupation with the lady’s slipper had taken hold of her, setting in its wake a train of events that had led her here to this cell.

She looked anew at her surroundings. She had thought herself observant, but she had never really seen anything before. The stones were laid so precisely overlapping, the evidence of someone’s neat labour. She wished she had her paintbrush now. Where there was light near the window moss was growing, vibrant green, soft, with spindly tufts like antennae poking out from the rounded cushion. She put out her hand to the wall and felt the cold stone and the place where it gave into the velvety moss, grateful to be alive, for each moment of presence.

For when she was dead, even these stones would cease to exist.

‘Move along now.’ Paucett’s loud voice outside the cell interrupted her contemplation. She heard the clanking of leg-irons and coughing. She stood up and went to the barred hatch in the door to see what might be happening outside. She was just in time to see another bunch of prisoners bundled and bullied along the narrow corridor–four or five men, none of them wigged, some greying and some younger with thick heads of hair. Their bodies blocked the light from the doorway but they went in quietly enough, the only voices being Bubb and Paucett the gaolers, who prodded them in the back with muskets and made the sort of noises drovers usually made when shifting recalcitrant cattle. There was a strange smell in the air, like smoke; it reminded her of her garden bonfires but there was an undertone of the branding iron’s singe about this particular scent, like burnt wool.

The gaolers released the men from the leg-irons, clapped the cell doors shut and locked them, the sounds echoing along the hollow corridors. Alice could no longer see anything so she returned to the window to look out at the sky’s darkening hue, to catch a glimpse of her last sunset skies, to hear the sweet trill of birdsong. She was aware of men’s voices talking, a soft hum of polite conversation. A familiar enough sound in a withdrawing room after dinner, but almighty strange to hear it now, where it was inconsonant with the surroundings. She moved back to the door to hear what they might be saying but the muffled voices were too low. It was clear to Alice they were not ruffians or footpads from the tone and cadences of their voices, so she called out to them through the door.

‘Hoy there! Is there anyone there?’ Of course she knew there was, but even in these bizarre circumstances she thought it might appear disrespectful to have been listening.

‘Hoy!’ she shouted louder.

A man’s eager face appeared at the window opposite. She saw him turn back to the others, hissing, ‘’Tis a woman.’

‘Is it one of ours?’ said a voice.

The man looked back at her, scrutinized her a moment, then turned back. ‘No.’ He called out to Alice, ‘Art thou all alone, miss?’

‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘But I was with my friend Hannah Fleetwood. She was tried this afternoon–I was hoping for news of her.’

The man half disappeared from the aperture and she could hear him saying, ‘She talks of Hannah, she’s asking after her.’

A broad hand wrested him away and another face filled the window.

‘Alice,’ said a familiar voice, ‘is it thee?’

‘Richard,’ said Alice faintly. ‘What has happened?’

His eyes glinted in the darkness, searching her face.

‘The trial,’ he said, ‘what of—?’

‘Guilty,’ she said before he could finish.

‘When?’

‘The day after tomorrow.’

He was silent then a while. They looked at each other through the bars, their faces searching to say what no words could fathom. ‘I would have come,’ he said finally. ‘We all would. But we were arrested by Fisk and his men…’

‘I know,’ she said, although she hadn’t, but her words told some other truth. ‘But what could you have done? They had it decided beforehand.’

‘I would have vouched for thee—’ Someone from behind interrupted him, and she heard him say, ‘’Tis Alice, Mistress Ibbetson from Netherbarrow, the woman I told you about.’ And she felt a warm glow spread through her–she had not been forgotten, he had told his friends after all.

‘You promised to rescue me, Richard Wheeler,’ she said loudly, until his face reappeared, ‘and what use are you to me now?’

His face was serious, until he saw that hers was smiling. ‘I suppose I am not much of a hero,’ he said, ‘arriving too late to save thee.’

‘But you are here now,’ she said, ‘though I doubt there is much you can do for me in there.’ She looked into his brown eyes, saying softly, ‘The time for recriminations is done. We must be gentle with each other. We neither of us want cause for regret when my time comes.’

He gazed at her, amazed at her calm demeanour. ‘Thou hast made thy peace with God?’

‘I have made my peace with myself,’ she said firmly.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘tell me everything.’

When he had heard her whole story, Richard told Alice about how he and his friends had tried to make a stand against the payment of tithes, and how some from a neighbouring village had taken it upon themselves to break in and retrieve their goods, and it had turned from a peaceable protest into a nightmare, with old Isaac dead, and many others half choked to death in a blazing barn. He recounted how they had been summarily imprisoned, separated from their wives and families. They were to be tried later in the week at the quarter sessions on a count of treason–a crime punishable by death; the accusation had been made by Sir Geoffrey Fisk and Robert Rawlinson, the Justice of the Peace. Their chances of acquittal were negligible.

He had not told her about Sam’s deception, for he was angry with himself for being taken for a fool and he did not wish Alice to see how unwise he had been. He told her he did not know what had become of Hannah, but suspected she would be held with the other Quaker women in separate quarters, and not with her husband, Jack, of whom they had seen and heard nothing since their arrest. He was unable to comfort Alice; her voice broke with distress when she said she and Hannah had become like sisters.

Alice had listened to him talk, her soft grey eyes never leaving his face. The wall sconce soon failed, and when darkness fell he could just see a faint glint from her irises. When the night was full and black, he had had to ask:

‘Thou art still there?’

And she had answered him, ‘Yes, as long as you are there, for there will be time soon enough for me to sleep.’

Later in the night they had both slept a little, but the cells were cold, and Richard’s friends were also restless, unable to find a comfortable position for their bones and morbidly full of fear. The next day the men organized a meeting for prayer in the cell and Richard asked Alice if she would join with them. She agreed, and he hoped the sound of their voices as they spoke out, and the depth of silence in which they found themselves, might reach her cell and move her, as it moved him.

Strangely, this meeting of the Friends did not bring him any lasting consolation; his thoughts were all with Alice. He chewed the facts of her trial over and over, denouncing the jurors in his head and wondering how such a travesty could have come about. He could not bear to think about the morrow, when Alice would be taken away to have the life squeezed out of her, never to return. He paced back and forth in his cell in frustration, trying to think what to do. It challenged all his convictions that such a thing could happen to an innocent woman. Yet in himself, he was sure that a higher power did exist. Had he not been stricken with it himself?

Those few left at the morning meeting at Lingfell Hall would be remembering them, he was sure, but then he knew what they did not–that no provisions would reach them, and that visitors were only received if they could grease Paucett’s palm with coin, something the Quakers, with their meagre and honest lifestyles, seldom would think to do.

Richard continued to move restlessly about the cell.

‘Sit thee still, Richard,’ said Ned Armitage. ‘Thou art driving us all to the end of our patience, with thy constant shuffling.’

‘I cannot help it. I cannot think how to help her.’

‘Perhaps it is a lesson to thee to accept it, as we must accept our own fates, which are just as surely coming,’ said Ned.

‘I cannot accept it. But I will sit, if my walking offends you all.’ He sat down heavily against the wall. ‘But I just wish I could do something.’

‘Being a friend and a comfort, that is not so little,’ said Ned. ‘Better to help her accept it than to rail against it, so she might have peace in her last moments.’

Richard sat quietly then, seeming to take in his words; it was only his restless drumming fingers that betrayed he was still churned up, the anger boiling in his chest.

It was whilst he was sitting like this that he heard the clang of the gates at the end of the corridor being unlocked, and approaching footsteps. He peered through the barred window and could just see young Bubb, the silhouette of his halo of curly hair, and behind that, the broader, bulkier outline of Paucett’s sleeve as he followed him, and the scuffing sound of his heavy boots, which he hardly bothered to lift off the ground. He could also hear another sound, the tapping of heels behind them. It must be Dorothy. When they got to his door, he saw Paucett’s doughy, moon-shaped face loom in the window. ‘Here it is, sir,’ he said to the person behind him. ‘A visitor,’ he leered through the hatch.

Paucett moved away, and a gentleman in a white powdered wig and three-feathered hat approached.