‘What? Are you simple? No, as I said, I only-’
The blow caught her off guard; it came backhanded, across her right cheek, and it knocked her to the ground. The world spun around her again; she tasted blood in her mouth. She grazed the heels of her hands against the filthy flagstones of the abbey square, and could feel grit in the cuts, stinging. Fury made her forget her fear and she glared up at Richard, baring her teeth as she struggled to rise.
‘Stay, or I will knock you down again.’ Richard held his knuckles in front of her face in warning, so Starling sank back to her knees, chest heaving, eyes snapping with rage. ‘Now hear this – you will not approach my wife. You will not speak to my wife. You will mind your business and your tongue, and you will say nothing of Alice Beckwith to her. If she learns about it, then I will know where she got it from. I will not have you infect her with your madness, Starling.’ He stepped back and looked down at her coldly. For a second, Starling thought he would kick her. She braced herself to dodge it but he only turned and walked away, boot heels pounding the stones.
Just then a party of young people walked into the square, chattering and laughing, and Starling silently thanked them for driving him off. She began to rise but her legs were watery and weak. So she stayed there, and wrapped her arms around her knees, feeling the freezing ground numb her skin through her skirts. Her head was throbbing from the knock he’d given her, and she found one of her back teeth loose, wobbling in the bloody gum. She laid her left cheek against her hands, and stared into the shadows at the foot of the abbey. But Rachel Weekes already knows about Alice. She resolved to avoid Richard Weekes from then on. It would mean no more visits to the Moor’s Head, or to Sadie. Where then shall I go? Silent stone faces stared down at her from the abbey walls, and gave her no answers. Her breath steamed in the moonlight. This ladder is too tall for me. She stayed a long time, and lost herself in reverie. She thought of sunshine and soft hands; she thought of the lovers’ tree.
1808
It was during the last summer of Alice’s life that Starling discovered the lovers’ tree. She was out with Bridget, running errands in Bathampton on a warm, lazy sort of day in July; soft white clouds sat sedately in a powder-blue sky. The housekeeper was getting leaner and wirier with each season that passed; she carried her basket over an arm that was nothing but bone and sinew beneath freckled, weathered skin. There was more grey than brown in her hair, and her face had started to sink inwards, hollowing out between the bones of cheek and jaw. But this paring down only seemed to make Bridget tougher, and quicker. She walked with smart steps, and was terse with all the shopkeepers and craftsmen they dealt with, not stopping to gossip when Starling wanted to dawdle and look around her.
She especially wanted to dawdle around the butcher’s shop, in spite of the iron stink of blood and offal, because Pip Blayton, the butcher’s son, was just a year older than her at thirteen, and she found herself curious about him. Pip was tall for his age, and his shoulders were starting to widen. He looked like he’d been stretched; his body was long and clumsy, but his face was nice, in spite of the pimples that scattered his forehead. He had sandy hair that he hid behind whenever Starling looked at him, dipping his chin so that it fell over his forehead as heat torched his cheeks. Even though Starling was still small she had tiny, budding breasts and a slight curve in her hips that hadn’t been there before. Her face was still her face, but it was subtly different, changing in tiny ways that made it more of a woman’s face, less of a child’s. Starling liked to see Pip blush; she liked to watch him trying to ignore her. And when she smiled at him, Bridget gave her such a censorious look that it made her smile wider.
‘Who are you, Grinagog, the cat’s uncle? You mind where you flash that rantipole smile of yours, Starling. You’ll get yourself in trouble, soon enough,’ Bridget said, as they carried on away from the shop.
‘What kind of trouble?’ Starling was deeply curious about this.
‘Never you mind.’
‘If I knew what kind, maybe I would know how to stay out of it?’ she pointed out.
‘If you knew what kind, you’d rush into it ever the quicker. I know you too well, my girl,’ said Bridget, which only made Starling even more curious.
After five years with Alice and Bridget, there was a good deal Starling was curious about. The farmhouse and the village of Bathampton were her whole world, and however much she loved that world, it had begun to seem a little small. She often thought wistfully of Corsham, and the fair Jonathan had taken them to the year before. She wanted to feel that excitement again, that sense of belonging to a loud and colourful throng of people. Sometimes, Starling walked the other way along the canal – west, towards Bath. It was only two miles to the edge of the city. She walked until she could see its rooftops and crescents, and there she would stop and stare, watching ribbons of smoke rise from a thousand chimneys; seagulls wheeling around the markets and middens; church spires thrusting up towards heaven here and there; and the huge towers of the abbey. On days when a soft west wind was blowing, it carried the faint rattle of hooves and cartwheels on cobbled streets, and the yell of men’s voices along the wharf. The city seemed like a huge and wonderful mêlée after the sedate, ordered pace of things in Bathampton. It was almost frightening, but at the same time deeply compelling.
But when Starling asked Alice if they could go into Bath on a visit, Alice’s face always fell. She tried again, one spring day when they had both walked far to the west, along the river, and were gazing at the clustered buildings of the city together.
‘I should like to, Starling. But Lord Faukes says we should not,’ Alice said.
‘But… why not?’
‘I cannot say, dearest. He says he thinks it would be too great a strain on me. On my heart.’ Alice looked down at her hands, at her fingers, which were slowly shredding a posy of bluebells. ‘And that the city is no place for innocent young girls. So perhaps because it’s more that we would have no escort, no acquaintances…’
‘But… couldn’t he take us with him one day? Or Mr Alleyn?’
‘I have asked.’ For a moment impatience made her words clipped, but then Alice hung her head and her voice lowered to almost nothing. She looked ashamed. ‘But I’m afraid the answer is no.’ She took Starling’s hand and squeezed it apologetically, and Starling didn’t understand what Alice could possibly have to be ashamed of. They stood in silence for a while, and Starling thought hard about what she would say next.
‘Well, we need not tell them. It’s an easy enough distance to walk – it wouldn’t take long. We could go, you and I, and explore, and say nothing to Lord Faukes, or to Jonathan, though I’m sure Jonathan would not betray us.’ Alice smiled slightly, but then her face fell serious.
‘Of course Jonathan would not betray us. But you would have us deliberately disobey the man who keeps us? The man who let me take you in, when he had no cause to other than kind indulgence?’
‘But… we went to Corsham fair last year, and that we kept a secret from him. Wasn’t that disobedient too?’
‘Yes, perhaps it was, but he had never specifically said to me that I should not go to Corsham, as he has with Bath.’
‘But he would never hear of it, Alice-’
‘But we would have done it, nevertheless. We would be the betrayers, don’t you see? And we would always know it. And besides… the chickens always come home to roost, as our good Bridget would say. A lie will always come back to haunt you. If somebody should see us, and word of our disobedience reach Lord Faukes… well then, how kindly do you think he would feel towards us? We who owe him our home and our food and our well-being?’ She smiled faintly at the look of sullen disappointment on Starling’s face; leant over to kiss her forehead. ‘Don’t pull such a cross-patch face, Starling! What is there in Bath that we do not have here, in Bathampton?’