My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also tough and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. ‘There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,’ my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England. ‘That is what Monsieur Cauvin says.’
I didn’t like Monsieur Cauvin. Or Calvin, I should say. Because he seemed to be the source of all our problems. Well, he had been. But I had taken the baton. And our problems were getting worse now, quite quickly, and I knew – when they came and knocked on the door – that there was nowhere for us. Nowhere in the world where we could be safe.
The witchfinder, the ‘pricker’ as his job was known, was called William Manning. He was a tall solid square-faced man, from London. Thinning hair but broad-shouldered and strong, with thick butcher’s hands. He was half blind, or appeared to be, on account of the cataract over his left eye. We never saw him arrive in the village, though I do remember waking to hear two galloping horses heading east past our house.
The rider of the other horse was the Justice of the Peace. I never knew him as anything other than Mr Noah. He was dressed in fine clothes and fancied himself a gentleman. He was also tall, but grey-skinned. Death-like. Cadaverous (a word I wasn’t to pick up for another two hundred years or so).
We were county-level news now, though we had no accurate idea of our importance until the hard quick knock on the door.
William Manning grabbed my wrist. He had a tough grip. He pointed with his free hand to a small pink blotch on my skin, but was careful not to touch it.
‘The devil’s spot!’ Manning said, with grim triumph. ‘Mark there, Mr Noah.’
Mr Noah looked. ‘I see it. Most sinister.’
I laughed. I was scared. ‘No,’ I told them. ‘It’s a flea bite.’
I still looked thirteen. They expected the obedience of a boy, not the insolence of a young man. Manning glowered at me. There was no other verb, then or now. But then his attention turned to my mother.
‘Undress yourself,’ he said, his voice quiet and stern. I hated him. Right then. I had never really known hate before. Only in the abstract, for the men who killed my father. But I had never known what they looked like. Hate needs a face.
‘No,’ I said.
My mother was confused. Then, when she understood, she said no and insulted them in French. Manning was an ignorant man, masquerading as a man of learning, and had no idea of the language she was speaking.
‘Mark her. She speaks like a devil. She is invoking foul spirits.’
It was at this point that he asked for the door to be closed, as an assortment of villagers – including Bess Small herself, her face full of gleeful disapproval, standing next to poor Alice Gifford – were now there on our doorstep, excited by the unfolding drama. Mr Noah closed the door. I stood between Manning and my mother. Manning pulled out a dagger and held it at my throat.
Mother undressed. She cried. I felt my eyes warm up too. Fear and guilt. This was all my fault. The fault of my physical strangeness, of my body’s inability to age.
‘If you say another word, your witchmother will be killed right where she is, before you or Marbas can see it different.’
Marbas. The infernal spirit who could cure all diseases. I was going to hear the name a lot over the coming hours, as that nightmare day unravelled itself.
My mother was naked. There by the table and the tin pottage bowls. And I saw Manning’s eyes feast on her, hating her for his own temptation. He stuck the tip of his dagger against her skin and pricked her, first on her shoulder, then her forearm, then near her navel. Little bulbs of blood.
‘Look at the darkness of the blood, Mr Noah.’
Mr Noah looked.
The blood was blood colour. Because it was ordinary human blood. But Mr Noah saw something else in it, or imagined he did, as he was impressed by Manning’s air of authority. ‘Yes. It is most dark.’
People only see what they have decided to see. I have learned this lesson one hundred times over, but it was still new to me then. My mother winced every time that dagger touched her, but to Manning she was faking it.
‘See her cunning? Mark the counterfeit of pain on her face. She has made some kind of trade, it would appear. The most unusual death of John Gifford appears to be the price of her son’s eternal youth. Quite a malevolent trade.’
‘We have nothing to do with John Gifford’s death. I helped thatch his roof. That is all. My mother never even knew him. She stays in the cottage most of the time. Please, stop doing that!’
I couldn’t watch any more. I grabbed Manning’s arm. He hit the dagger handle against my head, then his other hand grabbed my throat and he repeatedly struck the handle in the same spot as my mother wailed and I thought my skull might smash open. I was on the floor. Dazed and silent and wishing my body was as strong as an eighteen-year-old’s body should have been.
And then he, Manning, spotted another flea bite, this time on my mother, near her belly button, like a little red moon above a planet.
‘The same mark as on the boy.’
My mother trembled. Robbed of her clothes she could no longer speak.
‘It’s a flea!’ I said, my voice pained and desperate and cracked. ‘An ordinary flea bite.’
And I pressed my hands into the stone of the floor, to stand back up. But there came another stamp against the back of the skull.
And after that, everything went dark.
I sometimes repeat this in a dream. If I fall asleep on the sofa I remember that day. I remember the bulbs of blood on my mother’s skin. I remember the people at the doorway. And I remember Manning and his foot, stamping down, jolting me awake through the distance of centuries.
You see, everything changed after that. I am not saying my childhood had been perfect before this point but now I often want to climb back into that time before. Before I knew Rose, before I knew what would happen to my mother, before, before, before . . . To cling to who I was, right at the beginning when I was just a small boy with a long name who responded to time and grew older like everybody else. But there is never a way into the before. All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
London, now
At lunch break I nip to the supermarket down the street and buy myself a pastrami sandwich, some salt and vinegar crisps and a small bottle of cherry juice.