Chapter One

It was three years since she’d last felt him. He had let go of her hand and moved slowly down the steps away from their house. His pack was gripped in a fist, his hat planted squarely on his head, the back of his jacket pressed and straight. He called to the driver, then opened the door, looked back, kissed two fingers as he always did, smiled and was gone.

She remembered this often, wondering if some pieces were wrong or if she had remembered them correctly. Did she let go of him? Did he seem eager to leave? He smiled at her, why?

Some days this made her angry, some it comforted her, but everyday she mourned the moment he left and never returned.

Two years ago, she’d received word that he’d been captured. The news shook her to the ground and she struck at the porch floor, her little child cried out from inside the door but her mother didn’t hear it. She let the messenger leave and then she moved slowly into the house. The nanny was there to take her arm but she cast it away and moved slowly up the stairs, then into her room and closed the door.

The nanny, Abigale, held the child to her chest, a frilly ball of pink and white, and whispered softly to the baby girl. She told her that her mother was OK and that her daddy would be home soon. She told her that she was sure of it as he loved them all very much.

Abigale set down the baby and plodded softly up the stairs towards the mistress’ room and waited outside her door. The wooden slats had bowed with age and some light leaked out around the door’s edge from the candles inside, carrying with it the whimpers of Isabelle, the child’s mother. Abi knocked softly and asked if she was OK. There was no reply, so she pressed down the handle latch and began to ease open the door when it was grabbed from the other side and slammed in front of her. She gasped with the surprise of it. The crack of light broke and her mistress’ eye filled it and scowled. The bolt slid through its loop and the mistress moved backwards, then the candle went out and she disappeared.

It was autumn and the mud seemed to be everywhere. The nanny was outside wrapped in what looked like an entire wardrobe of Green and Brown blankets. The child was bundled in the entrance hall in front of the fire. She was surrounded by fine white blankets and contently unable to move. The fire simmered, red mouths in the black wood breathed slowly and gently blew out their heat.

Outside, the nanny was doing her best to maintain her blanket bundle around her, treading lightly through the grass, each foot step squelched and pushed the brown filthy mud up around her shoe and soaked rank water into her socks. It was cold. She plunged onwards towards the woodshed. There, she picked up an axe, pinned the loose blanket bundle under her arms and placed a short log (they were trunk segments a village boy had chopped for them in the Summer) on a severed tree stump. She was deft with the axe; she raised it, grimaced and swung down with surprising power to split the log in two. She left those on the ground and placed another. By now, leaves of all colors had been blown up her side and were stuck to her round toweled body, making her look like an old brown conker shell. An hour passed and her core was wet with sweat, her shell with rain; she’d loaded a barrow and wheeled the logs to the kitchen service door. The black doors which ran the house cut dark holes in its facade in the winter months. The mistress had had them tarred when the paint was chipping and the water bulging them. Cheap, ugly, but effective.

The child, as always, made little sound, its eyes shot gently around the room like she was following a wasp. Her crying had always gone unheard until Abi was allowed to care for her, but by that time, her little screams were few and far between. Abi launched two logs onto the fire which knocked the lit logs to the sides. She seemed pleased with it none the less. She touched the baby’s cheek and its wet blue eyes stopped their wandering for a moment and she smiled happily up at her nanny.

The mistress, Isabelle, removed herself less and less from her room. She’d spend her time weeping, begging for her husband’s return. The nanny would tell her that there was still hope, that he ain’t dead, and Isabelle would cast her out, flames pouring from her mouth and hissing insults. One time, she even rushed at Abi with her arms stretched out for her throat; Abi had swung the door closed and felt Isabelle strike the other side of it.

Another autumn came and they’d still had no word. The mistress was silent much of the time now. The nanny would catch her looking out from her window, set above the grand entrance to the aging yellow stone house. If Abi was in the garden with the child, she’d take her little hand and wave it to her mother. The child always complied in it’s tiny wrap of blankets, but her mother would turn away, her view spoilt.

The child was now two, born only months after her father left. Abi would tell her, Cynthia, about her father and how he was a strong man, how he loved her mother, and how she loved him. She told her that she wished she had known her mother as she was before. How she would have loved her so much. Cynthia still didn’t speak, only mumbled, and her eyes wouldn’t meet hers as she spoke to her as if the world before her eyes was just too large to comprehend, like she would lose herself in the vastness of it all. Isabelle hated it. She thought her child broken or rotten, cursed somehow from the loss of her father. Abigale would tell her that it’d pass.

Abi asked little Cynthia if she’d finally like to see the swing her daddy made for her, for her mother. If they were quick, her mother wouldn’t know. The two of them, baby in her arms, walked to the line of trees separating the grounds from a small woodland within the boundary walls. The nanny took one more nervous look back at her mistress’ window and then stepped behind the first tree. She told the child that they need to be careful, that her mother was very precious of the swing. Not far in, they found it, damp and soft and hung like an extension of the branch it was supported by, dark ropes like the vines that slung low from amazonian trees in books she’d seen as a child. Abi placed Cynthia on some leaves beside the seat and some small sticks snapped beneath her body or Abi’s foot. She reached out her hand and held the coarse rope. It swayed softly, a breeze lifted up its base and she remembered him, Alexander, Cynthia’s father, pushing Isabelle on it. His hand on her back and her reaching her long neck to meet his mouth with hers. She thought how much he’d have loved his daughter.

‘Your father wanted this for the both of you.’ She told the child, her back to her as she spoke.

Behind her, a dark figure swept across the lawn. Black robes flew out like wings from behind it. The mistress had seen them and was burning her way towards poor Abi and the child. She slid up behind the nanny and gripped her by the throat. She spoke through her teeth and asked Abi, how dare she. How dare she.

Abi dug her nails into the mistresses forearm and she let go.

‘Don’t you dare touch me like that!’ Abi screamed.

‘This place isn’t for you, it’s for me. You understand, it’s for me!’

‘And for her’ Abi was pointing at the child. The rain started to fall and she began to cry loudly.

‘Nothing is for that child. She’s nothing but a nuisance.’

‘She’s all you have left of him!’

‘She’s a constant reminder of how I don’t have him here. Why would I want her - I want my husband back. I want him here with me. Not her. Why don’t you understand that?’

‘How could I? It’s, it’s monstrous the way you treat her. She’s your daughter. She is the master. At least half of him. And this is as much her swing as it is yours.’

Abi’s hand was back on the rope. The soft wood of the seat dark with the rain. The women were soaked to the bone. The mistress’ dark hair ran in dank curls to her chest. Her green eyes a little softer than before they started to run with tears and her mouth pursed and her chin dropped to her chest. Abi reached out her free hand to her but Isabelle turned quickly and fled back to the house. Abi exhaled. Steam rose from the little bundle on the floor. She could smell the child’s mess. She muttered exactly was she was about to have to clean up.

Abi left another warm plate of broth outside her mistress’ door. It had been days since she’d seen her. She took the breakfast plate, which was half eaten, and returned down stairs. She sat on the bottom step and started to eat what was left of Isabelle’s food, there was little to go around then and she wasn’t to be wasteful. She watched the child’s little arms she loved so much reach out from her basket and fly through the flames which framed them from behind.

The shelves in the cupboards and the pantry were all but empty and the bread had stopped being delivered each day. Abi hadn’t been paid that week and wondered how she’d bring it up with Isabelle. She knew something was wrong: one evening, she fell asleep on the sofa and when she woke up, paintings were stacked against the wall in the great entrance where she sat. Isabelle was no where to be seen.

Abi looked around what had been her home for the last few years, it was a strange layout: as you opened the door, you were greeted by a vast and cavernous reception which the mistress loved to call the great entrance or grand hall, it varied on her mood. Instead of having a traditional reception, hallway and functional rooms, like further reception rooms, there was only a single large room wrapped with the most wondrous staircase you’d have ever seen. Its thick dark wooden stairs sprawled across the west wall, plateaued across the north and finished their climb on an eastern landing. When visitors arrived, the master and his wife would greet guests from the center of the north section, raised up 10 feet. Above them, a vast image in oils of the Great Duke, the master’s grandfather, rearing up on a thickly set grey horse.

The painting was missing today, it’s shadow still clung to the wall.

In the heart of the great entrance, along the east wall and below the stairs, an inglenook fireplace, linteled by what could only be the entire trunk of an oak tree, which writhed across the wall like a black snake, tarred to protect it from the fire. When she looked at this, it reminded her of the day that Cynthia’s grandparents came for her. A horrid day. She could picture the master’s father, Patrick, drying himself before the fire, red and black light cutting into his body. He was a horrible man, very harsh and cold to Isabelle. He and his wife believed she was too low of a class for their son. He wore a thick black handle bar mustache across his lip, parted by one of his servants perfectly beneath his septum. Abi thought of cutting off one side. Or saving up enough money to pay his servant to bleach it with spots.

She had wondered why they were in the house, why they’d come. She hadn’t seen them for many years, and certainly not after Alexander, the master, left for the war. She moved through the great entrance with Patrick’s head turning like a cat’s, following, inspecting her, as she moved. She stopped. She built up her courage and turned to him, opened her mouth, and he was stood there with his finger against his lips. He told her it’d be best if she saved his ears from whatever morose rubbish she was about to vomit.

Abi felt her eyes moving sharply around him for somewhere to rest. There was no where and she didn’t want him to see that what he had said had hurt her so she walked into the kitchen through a door beside the fireplace and near the front entrance.

Upstairs, she could hear screams. Cynthia cried and moaned but no one went to see to her. She paced up and down the kitchen but it didn’t stop. She stamped her thick shoes across the flag stones and opened the kitchen door into the entrance again. Patrick called her ‘you’ and told her to stop this instant. She scuttled past him and hitched up her dress, then stomped up each stair as quickly as she could. The child’s room was next to Isabelle’s and the door was open and the sound deafening. She surged into the room and the two women stopped their screaming and turned to her in shock. Abi moved to Cynthia’s crib and swept her up into her arms and rocked her. In a few moments, the child calmed and Isabelle told Abi to take the child and lock themselves in her room.

The woman with her, the master Alexander’s mother, Viviane, told her that she most certainly will not and stretched out her rotund arms for the child. Abi told her that if she brought those chubby digits any closer, she’d have Cynthia bite them off.

Viviane wasn’t a silly woman. Her demeanor changed immediately on these words, like the facade had been shattered and she could now truly be herself. Her face darkened and the extremities protruding from her dress; her hands, her neck and face; felt like they were being lost into the shadows around them, the candle light not hitting her eyes which were only black sockets.

Viviane turned to Isabelle and spoke:

‘This is how you’d raise all that was left of my son?’ There was silence ‘A tramp and a commoner? I won’t have it. I shall not have it. That child is to be with me. Do you understand? Do you both understand?’ The black sockets turned to Abi and she shrunk her face into Cynthia’s swaddle. ‘If I leave now, women, harlots, rubbish. If I leave now, I will make you destitute. I will take everything you have away. And when it’s gone. When they hand the keys to this house to me. I will take the child, because you will surely have no home for her, and I will see to it that you have no other, and when you sit there before my door, I will close it and have my groundsman will set his dogs loose, and they will tear your filthy clothes, and pull out your ragged hair, and sink their teeth into your naked, shameful flesh, and your daughter and I will look upon you as you’re meant to be. Shameful, putrid beasts.’

As the final vile letter rolled from her painted lips, a thick grey gob of spit slapped across her cheek and into her eye. Abi stood rocking on the balls of her feet, not sure what to do next, sickness in the pit of her stomach at how the woman may react to her action.

‘You savage, you animal!’ Viviane called out. The light caught her eyes within the black recesses as she drove forward towards Abi who was still clutching the baby to her chest. Isabelle intercepted her step-mother by grabbing her by her hair and pulling her back into the wall. Outside the room, Patrick had heard the commotion and bounded up the stairs and was soon at the door. He saw his wife breathing heavily and her hair disheveled against the wall. He didn’t speak, only followed the direction of his wife’s raised arm which pointed toward Abigale. He was tall and broad, it took him two paces to make it across the room. Abi’s eyes were at his chest. He looked down at her and drew back his arm, then he brought it back across her cheek and blood sprang into her eye and from her mouth. Her body left the ground and her head struck the wall, then she slumped down to the ground. The baby cried out as her grip softened and Cynthia rolled onto the hard floorboards. Isabelle darted across the room and wrapped her arms over them both. She screamed for the grandparents to leave, she screamed that she would call the police. She wailed out in sadness and her tears fell onto Abi’s closed eyelids.

Viviane touched her husband’s arm and he turned with her and they left.

Abi came back to her senses, the memory fading into the hot flames which seemed to exist and then not, her eyes dry and tacky from the heat. She wondered how they’d drifted so far apart, the mistress and her. In those times of violence and fear, they always had each other. She moved to the window and thought perhaps things had been too hard for them both, if they were now only treading water in the perpetual darkness which enshrouded this home, each of them looking into one another's eyes as they tried to stay afloat. Which of them would be the first to sink.

 *

Abi was still sat with her left over breakfast when she heard the mistress’ door open above. Isabelle cut a dark silhouette. There hadn’t been money for candle’s along the landing for some time now. Slowly, she began to walk down the stairs and past Abigale into the center of the room. Abi stood and asked her if she was OK. She nodded her head and cleared her thoughts:

‘Today, I’ll begin to sell the things I’ve stacked against the walls. This will be the first, but by no means the last of it. I have no money. I’m aware I haven’t paid you what I owe you this week, but I shall. Soon though, it would be best that you prepare yourself for such an eventuality that I can no longer afford to keep you on at this house. Alexander’s father has managed to stop the payments to our account and has had him declared dead, despite there be no evidence to support it, or him really believing so.’ Her eyes were in the fire. ‘My only fear now, is that perhaps he’ll find a way to take my home, as there are payments I owe and the bank will surely come for it one day. Then, perhaps, I’ll be on the streets.’

‘It won’t come to that, we’ll make sure of it. I’d never let that happen to Cynthia.’

At this, Isabelle was trembling, she finally looked into Abigale’s eyes.

‘And what would you do about it? What could you do to help anything? If they want to take her, they shall, and you won’t be able to stop it. I will be destitute and that child will have another home, who knows where.’

‘With me.’

‘Never. I’d never allow it.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘You’re not fit. You’re a peasant and an ignoramus. I’d rather she died of the typhus than be raised by you!’

‘You old cow. After all I’ve done for you, how dare you!’

Abi stormed into the kitchen, took up Cynthia and headed out into the gardens. She sat there for close to an hour before a small wooden coach arrived and two men stepped out. She watched them through the beds of dead roses and leafless bushes. They walked into the house and brought out the paintings Isabelle had stacked. Isabelle followed them to their coach and they paid her some money and left.

Abi, scowling, told Cynthia that she’d make a far better mother than the one she had. That perhaps she should just take her away now and they could go to her mother’s and help her harvest her potatoes and carrots, milk the cow and eat all the food she loved as a child. She’d teach her how to knit, and how to churn, and how to sow seeds. All the things a country woman needs to know to survive. All the things a woman needs in this world. Cynthia laughed up at Abi’s chin but Abi just stared at Isabelle who was now glaring maniacally at them from the porch.

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