Murkmere
Authors: Patricia Elliott
Copyright © 2006 by Patricia Elliott
All rights reserved.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
First eBook Edition: October 2009
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
The superstitions in this novel are found in British folklore.
ISBN: 978-0-316-08876-3
The text was set in Carre Noir, and the display type is ITC Blackadder.
Contents
F
or my nieces, Charlotte, Vanessa, Samantha, and
Gerry, because I hope this is your sort of story,
and to the memory of my
mother
W
ith thanks to Chris Powling and Bob Hull for their
encouragement when this novel was first conceived
P
erhaps there is a Leah at some time in everyone’s life: unpredictable, demanding, most generous best friend, cruelest enemy.
But the Leah in this story came later. When I first began thinking about
Murkmere
, it was because I had a single vivid image in my mind, and had to make sense of it. Meanwhile, I’d often driven past Murkmere
Hall on the A12 in Suffolk. It hadn’t become Murkmere to me then, but was a vast slab of a house set in lumpy parkland. I
imagined a girl wandering beneath the dark oak trees — a girl, half-wild, shut away and bored, who was waiting for her story
to begin.
The girl became Leah, and Leah’s story begins when Aggie comes to Murkmere.
— Patricia Elliott
I
The Rooks’ Omen
C
louds hang low in the sky where I live. They seem to touch the flat brown fields around our village, and to shadow the broad
backs of the horses pulling the plow. They drift across the wide sky like swans’ feathers
.
There were swans on the mere when I first went to Murkmere Hall, the first time I met Leah. There are still swans there today,
but everything else has changed. All I knew then was what I saw around me: the village, the fields, and, behind its iron gates
on the Wasteland road, the great shadowy expanse of the Murkmere estate. In those days I knew nothing of corruption and betrayal,
and the evil of ambitious men
.
But you can’t wipe away the past like chalk from a slate. I can never be that innocent girl again. I am someone else now
.
The year had only recently turned when I rode in Jethro’s wagon to take up my new position at Murkmere Hall, and
though the mist wasn’t drifting in from the sea that morning, it was bitterly cold. As the wagon jerked over the frozen ruts
in the road, the Wasteland on either side of us was thickly spread with a gray frost, the leafless trees glistening like sucked
bones.
“Will you wish me luck, Jethro?” I said, trying to steady myself against a pile of sacks, while the bag that contained my
few spare clothes rolled softly against me.
From my position high up in the wagon, I could see only the back of Jethro’s curly head, and I studied it anxiously, waiting.
It always took a long time for him to speak. Jethro Sim, our neighbor’s son, was a boy who chose his words carefully.
Jethro didn’t turn from leading Tansy, though the reins lay slack in his hands. The old mare blew warm clouds of mist around
him; little puffs rose each time she placed her heavy hooves on the frozen road.
“Murkmere’s no place for you, Aggie. You shouldn’t be going.”
“I’ve no choice, and you know that,” I said, provoked. Who was Jethro to say what I should do? He was only a few years older
than I. “It’s the Master’s command. Besides, my mother fared well enough at Murkmere when she was lady’s maid there long ago.
So shall I.”
Then excitement got the better of me. I leaned forward, so I could see Jethro’s profile. He was scowling.
“Aren’t you pleased for me at all, Jethro?” I said, trying to coax a smile from him. “Think of all the things I’ll learn,
the clothes I’ll wear! I’m to be a companion, not a servant.”
“Aye, to the Master’s ward,” he retorted. “A lunatic girl. They say Mr. Tunstall hides her away deliberately.”
“Oh, gossip! I’ve heard that too,” I said. “I don’t see why Murkmere should be a bad place. Why, you’ve never been inside
the gates!”
“I have indeed. I was once late with my dues and took them in myself. I had to give them to the steward, Silas Seed. I saw
… enough.”
Words died between us. I slumped back against the sacks, clutching the sides of the wagon with numb fingers as it swayed on.
Ahead, the walls of the Murkmere estate smudged the horizon.
I didn’t remember my parents. Since their death from the spitting sickness when I was three, I’d lived with my Aunt Jennet.
I’d always thought I’d have to spend my life at the spinning wheel as the other village girls did after leaving school. I
loathed spinning with a deep and awful loathing, and knew my clumsy fingers would never support my aunt and me. Now the Master
of Murkmere had offered me the opportunity to escape a spinster’s life, and my wages would keep us both. All my childhood
I’d longed to know more about Murkmere Hall, where my mother had worked before she’d married. I thought if I knew more about
Murkmere, I’d know more about my mother.
Why, then, did I feel such dread now?
The high walls of the estate loomed on our left. Jethro halted Tansy before the gates, and came to lift me down as the mare
stood blowing placidly.
“Careful, Aggie! You’ll spoil your finery!”
I couldn’t tell whether Jethro was teasing me or not. He always looked serious, did Jethro, but sometimes his eyes had a smile
hiding in them as if he laughed secretly at me.
I knew I looked ridiculous now. Aunt Jennet had done my hair herself, in her anxiety braiding the springing copper clumps
of it so tightly that it pulled my eyebrows up in surprise under my hat. Beneath my cloak, the bodice of my ancient best dress
was tight as a sausage skin, and I’d so many layers on against the cold I was sure I looked as fat as one as well. I was fifteen
years old and bursting out in all directions, except upward. Maybe that was why Jethro still treated me like a child, though
he hadn’t been grown to a man long himself, for all his new beard and solemn air.
I was sick to my belly with fear as he set me down. “Jethro,” I wailed. “The birds have given me no signs. They hide away
in this cold. I can’t tell what’s to become of me, whether it be bad or good.”
My life, like the lives of everyone else, was bound by watching the signs. It was the birds that gave us the signs, the birds
that showed us what was to come, for each bird had its own significance. But in the dead heart of winter few birds are active.
They might have flown away entirely from the bare face of the earth, so deathly silent was the land.
Jethro set my hat straight as he might a small girl’s, and his brown eyes looked into mine, bright as a robin’s. “You have
nothing to fear if you wear your amulet, Aggie.” As he spoke
he touched his own amulet, a simple bunch of dried rose-mary sticking from the pocket of his old tweed jacket.
I felt feverishly round my neck for the strip of leather; the golden amber that hung from it, warm from lying against my skin,
slotted smoothly into my palm like a new-laid egg. It had been my mother’s once, but she had no need of protection now. It
was only the living whose souls were in danger from the Birds of Night.
Jethro looked awkward. “I should go, Aggie. I’ve no desire to meet Silas Seed again.”
Silas Seed, the steward of Murkmere, had come to the village himself a fortnight ago to search me out and give me the Master’s
message. I’d thought him an exceedingly handsome young man when I met him, but I thought it best not to let Jethro know this.
I nodded, biting my lip now that the moment had come to say goodbye, and drawing my thin red cloak around me. “Watch over
Aunt Jennet for me, Jethro. Don’t let her do too much.”
“Can’t stop her,” he grunted, but I knew he’d milk our cow himself and carry the pail to our cottage.
The mention of my aunt nearly had me in tears. “Thank you for bringing me here,” I said stiffly, turning my face away.
Jethro didn’t reply, and next I heard the jingle of the harness and the clomp of Tansy’s hooves on the hard ground as she
began to move away. When I turned at last, the wagon had blurred with the horizon.
Beyond the gates a straight drive, as rutted as the road, ran over flat, lumpy parkland until it reached the gray stone bulk
of the Hall in the distance. Among the forest of chimneys few were smoking; below them were rows of shuttered windows. Huge
oaks shadowed the empty grass before the house, their bare branches scratching at the lowering sky.
A frightened homesickness caught in my throat. I thought of our two-room cottage, cramped and dark, but cozy under its thatch
and furnished with Aunt Jennet’s treasured possessions; and of the common nearby, busy with villagers and their animals. Now
I was alone, completely alone, for the first time in my life, and the thick silence of mid-winter was all around me.
But this was my chance, and I had to take it.
There was a rusty bell hanging by one of the gateposts; a frayed rope trailed down, furled with ivy. Perhaps if I pulled it,
a servant — a footman, perhaps — would come and open the gates for me. I straightened my back, plumped out my skirts, and
gave a determined tug.
The jangle from the bell was unexpectedly loud and harsh in the silence, and it awoke a raucous echo: the cawing of what seemed
to be hundreds of rooks. In the distance I saw an undulating black cloud rise above the cluster of beeches that must hold
their nest-homes. My head full of the clamor, I sank trembling against the gatepost and clutched my amber as if my life depended
on it. I knew the deadly significance of rooks. Everyone did.
“Miss Agnes, Agnes Cotter. You’re welcome to Murkmere. But you look as white as bleached bed linen. Are we such ogres here?”
A man’s voice roused me. It was a charming voice, the vowels musical and the tone full of concern. I’d heard it before. It
was the voice of Silas Seed.
“I’m well, Sir,” I moaned, my head down. “But I can’t come through. The rooks have given me the sign. Death is waiting if
I step inside the gates!”
Calmly, Silas Seed took off his glove and unlocked the gate with a key from his waistcoat pocket. Then he put his hand out
to me. It was a white hand, very clean, the nails manicured to show the half-moons, the fingers long and elegant. My head
still bent, I hid my own stubby, rough ones in my skirt. Peering under my lashes, I saw another pair of legs, this one clad
in darned breeches, standing next to Silas’s gleaming boots.