But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t and heaved great breaths in my frenzy. If only we had been here sooner! But by the time I returned home from keeping watch over Lord Barlow’s daughter at Dartington Hall, where Father kept his lordship’s beehives, the local tinker had come to our house to fetch us. While seagulls wheeled and shrieked overhead as if in warning, Father and I hied ourselves across the cattle field, toward the river.
Now, my cheeks slick with tears, I finally sat in sullen silence. He patted Maud’s shoulder, then squeezed her hand before he let it go and stood, looking away, head down, leaning stiff-armed against a tree. Why did he seem only resigned, not more shaken? His wife, Cecily Champernowne, aged twenty-eight years, had hit the back of her head and bled into her brown hair. Her entire body was bruised and blackened, even her face mine so resembled.
[Years later, time and again, I tried to tell myself that stoic mourning was just the way with men, but even cruel King Henry piteously grieved the death of his third wife, Queen Jane, and William Cecil sobbed when his second son—not even his heir—died.]
“I—I am overthrown by it all,” Maud said, talking to me as much as to Father. “She must have caught her skirts in the hearth fire.” Sitting on her heels, several feet away, she wrung her hands. Gray soot and brown river mud smeared her sopped petticoats. Tears from her long-lashed blue eyes speckled her rosy cheeks. “I was drawing nigh the house for a visit and heard her screams. She rushed out willy-nilly. I—I believe she struck her head on the hearth stones, trying to get the fire out. God as my judge, I tried to roll her on the ground to smother the flames. But in her pain and panic, she ran toward the river. The winds—they made it worse. But I—She jumped in the water. I think she died of drowning, not the flames, though I tried to pull her out in time, God rest her soul.”
Father muttered something about God’s will. I swore silently that, if I’d been there, I’d have put those flames out fast.
That day a part of me died, too—my entire girlhood, truth be told. I was ten years old. I was angry with God’s will and even more furious that Father kept comforting Maud Wicker more than he did me.
In four months’ time, Mistress Wicker became my stepmother. She was but eighteen, one of six daughters of the man who wove my father’s beehives from stout wicker that he soaked in the river to get it to bend. Maud had always brought the finished hives to Father in a cart and had laughed at his silly stories, which Mother only rolled her eyes at. The only good thing for me about their marriage was that the arguing my parents had done now became all honeyed words. Father never raised a hand to his second wife, though she had a temper hotter than my mother’s.
And Maud had a shrewish side she only showed to me. As I grew older, festering under her orders—and pinches and slaps, when Father wasn’t about the house—I sometimes took to wondering if my stepmother had been with my mother when her skirts caught the flames, instead of just coming toward the house, as she’d said. That day two new hives had been left out back, and fresh cart tracks marred the mud. But the cart had also left tracks as it was trundled across the field toward the river. When I asked her once why, since it was not the way she went home, she told me she was just dawdling about the area so her father would not give her another task. As I oft did such myself, I let it go. But I’d found a willow green ribbon when I swept the hearth the night Mother died, and Maud Wicker loved such fripperies for her yellow curls.
I kept that ribbon buried in my secret box of dried flowers, along with a sweet bag given me by Lady Barlow of Dartington Hall, else Maud would have taken it for her own. The sweet bag was a gift, Lady Barlow said, for my helping to care for her Sarah during tutoring sessions with her older brother, Percy. Poor Sarah went about in a wheeled chair at times, her tongue lolling from her mouth, her body shaking when she had her fits. I used to help hold her quill and form her words on paper. I held her book for her so she could read from it. But there was a keen brain inside her, too, and—like me—she loved learning.
Also in the box, which I kept hidden in the thick hedge out back, were two smooth stones from the River Dart, near where Mother died, and clover from a pixie circle on the moors before they were chased off by one of the ghostly hellhounds. Everyone roundabout knew not to go out on the moors at night. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the cries of gulls in the creeping fogs weren’t the shrieks of lost souls out on the moors. The box also used to hold my mother’s garnet necklace, but Maud had wheedled it from my father when she bore their second child, a daughter this time. Her little Simon and Amelia were the loves of my life then, so innocent and angelic, until they began to act like their mother, throwing tantrums for things they must have.
Yet I did not mislike my half siblings as I did Maud. Things she did were not their fault. Rather, I pitied them even as I did my own father, who, like a dumb, rutting ram, had made his bed and obviously liked well to lie in it. Maud—whom I called Mistress instead of Mother, no matter how she fussed at me—would no doubt have made me toil for her all day had not the Barlows paid Father for my services to Sarah. They never knew I would have happily helped their child for nothing, as I learned to read and write while tending her.
Most important of all in my hidden treasure box, now that my necklace had as good as been stolen from me, I kept these pages of my story. Once I learned to write well, from the time I was about twelve years of age, when Sarah was taking her naps in her chamber, I borrowed pen and paper from her writing table and began this record of my life, hoping I would someday amount to something. Over the years, from time to time, I went back and amended it from a far wiser point of view. And, oh yes, in my treasure box, I also kept a list of hints I brooded over, hoping to prove Maud had something to do with my mother’s accident, but who would credit it since it would be my word against hers?
Without my tasks at Dartington Hall and my walks to and from that fine gray stone manor each day, I would never have had time to hide these pages or to seize a moment to myself—carpe diem, my first snippet of Latin. Without the kindly Barlows, I would not have learned about the other world beyond our thatched longhouse built of moorstone with the attached shippon, which housed our six cattle. I never would have known about fine needlework or Turkey carpets or tapestries, or delicacies like squab pie instead of fat bacon, or Latin, let alone English sentences. I never would have heard of the other English shires beyond remote Devon, a distant world where a king ruled his people from great palaces. Without my times at Dartington Hall, I would never have learned such or yearned much. But still, it was not enough, and I longed to escape to—to I knew not where.
ALSO BY KAREN HARPER
Mistress Shakespeare
The First Princess of Wales
The Last Boleyn
THE QUEEN ELIZABETH I MYSTERY SERIES
The Hooded Hawke
The Fatal Fashione
The Fyre Mirror
The Queene’s Christmas
The Thorne Maze
The Queene’s Cure
The Twylight Tower
The Tidal Poole
The Poyson Garden