We were all staring at him. Incongruously, Randall laughed, but the laughter died on his lips. “Well, I wasn’t born under a brick, was I? My grandmother taught me a useful thing or two. I’m no cunning man, but I can cast a circle of protection as well as the next fellow. The one I laid down at our wedding has held up pretty well.”
I backed away. “You cast a spell on me?”
He followed, drawing me back in. “Shh. No. I put my arms around you, like this, and promised to protect you. I swore no harm would come to you. I’ve seen you do it, too—to everyone you love. You have amazing strength, you know, when you put your mind to it.”
“No,” I said. “No, no, no…” But as I whispered that one word, I knew he spoke the truth. I had felt it, all these months. That sense of peace, that overwhelming security—the strong wall that pushed all my troubles back a few paces. It was real. And it was at work on me, now. I held his arms tightly and let myself draw in just a bit of that Randall calm.
“I did William, too—we both did,” he was saying. “But sometimes when you have forces working against you even before you’re born…” He shook his head. “You seemed so worried about it all; that’s why I hung the charms in his room. But when you reacted the way you did…I know I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t think you’d want to hear it. I’ve been trying to tell you, Charlotte—I’m pretty handy to have around.”
It was too much. “You are my husband, and a banker from Harrowgate. You can’t be a—a—” Not thinking of the word I wanted, I gave up.
Randall held me tighter. “I am the man you married,” he said. “I’m William’s father. I’m not anything else. But I can help, if you let me.”
I still had hold of his arms, and was afraid I might fall if I let go. I closed my eyes, and felt Randall lay his chin atop my head. The warmth from the hollow of his neck was almost enough to chase away the chill of the night and the day and the night before. All the chills, forever.
“I’d move quick if I were you, Miss Charlotte,” Harte said. “It’s after eleven.”
I drew in a shaky breath. “We must go,” I said, pulling away from Randall at last. The four of us stepped out into the yard together.
Straight into a crowd. Well, not so much a crowd, exactly, but a smallish gathering of Shearing folk and millfolk, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an arc around the millhouse. They looked like a makeshift chorus.
“Mrs. Lamb? Rachel? What is this?”
Biddy Tom stepped out from where she’d stood among them. “We heard there was a bit o’ trouble up at the mill, lass.”
I shook my head. “How?”
A sharp bark answered me. “That dog o’ yourn,” came Mr. Mordant’s voice from out of the group. “Right strange creature, that-a-one.”
“Ah, she’s a good pup,” said Nathan Smith, his hand on Pilot’s head.
Janet Lamb came up to me and put her arm round my shoulders. “Woke up the last lot of us, she did,” she said. “My Dan’ll have words to say about it on the morning, that’s sure. But for now, I think we’re needed here.”
“Aye, what are the Friendlies for, then?”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and then I saw that pinned to every collar and cloak was a small badge, monogrammed in blue: the letters FS, twining together. The Friendly Society. Of course.
“It’s about time someone took on to break that old curse,” said Jon Graves, the undertaker.
“Ah, and we knew you’d be just the one to do it, too,” Mrs. Lamb added.
“But it concerns us all, too, then, don’t it?” And that, believe it, was Lonnie Clayborn.
“An’ we just thought you could use what help you could get.”
I shook my head. “I must do this alone. I can’t ask you to involve yourselves. This is a Miller matter—Miller and Stirwaters.”
“Aye, and ain’t we Stirwaters, then? That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you, Ma’am.”
“Charlotte.” That was Randall, come up behind me. His strong hand was on my shoulder.
“Good, ye made it, lad. Stand between me and Dag, there,” said Mrs. Tom, maneuvering my husband into the circle beside the dyer. Pilot skirted the group, eyeing them with satisfaction.
I stared at them a long moment, all the circle of my acquaintance—my friends and neighbors and workers—my husband!—come forth to protect and defend me and mine. I wanted to say something, thank them for standing by me all the while, but the words wouldn’t come. As I looked helplessly at them all, Biddy Tom gave me one curt nod.
“Off ye go, then, Charlotte Miller. Put that curse to rest with the past.”
And I went.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Clutching my jar, I stood outside the yard doors to Stirwaters. I put key to lock before noticing that the latch was undone already. Uncle Wheeler must have broken in.
The door wouldn’t open. Rosie was right—unlocked and shut tight. I gave it an almighty tug, but it was stuck fast.
“Help her!” I think that was Randall’s voice. The crowd pressed closer.
I turned to them. “No,” I said. “Please, you all must stand back. I think—ahem, I think it’s a little frightened.” When I turned back to the door, I slipped the jar into my bag and put both hands on the door latch.
“This is Charlotte Miller Woodstone,” I said. “Let me enter.”
Nothing happened. I gave a little cough, self-conscious, and tried again. I had to repeat my name three times; finally, the whole mill shook with a gasp and a shudder like a hard wind blowing through, and the door creaked open.
“Wait here,” I told my Friendly Society. “Do—whatever you were going to do.” I sought the crowd, for Rosie, for Harte and Randall, and seeing strength reflected in all those blue eyes, I stepped over my threshold.
A second hard shudder nearly knocked me to the floor. I had to grab a corner post to keep from falling, and a handful of items crashed off tables. An awl rolled past my feet.
“Charlotte Miller,” I said again, pulling myself back to standing as a third jolt shook through.
I crept across the finishing room, past the machine shop and the stacked-up dyevats, toward the stair at the back. As I passed the fulling stocks I heard the squeal of a tight lever being shoved into place. I jumped just as the great fulling hammers banged down into the dry stocks, the collision like thunder through my bones. My heart still hammering in echo, I edged past, wishing I’d thought to bring a light.
The strange wavering glow we had seen from the windows did not reach the lower floors, and I picked my way through the mill in almost total darkness. My hands out to guide me, I still managed to trip over something and crash hiplong into the hard corner of a table. Bruised and cursing, I found the opening to the stairwell at last.
Just as the never-used door to the stairs slammed shut in my face. I jumped back in time to spare my fingers. I forced myself to breathe easily and laid my hand very gently on the knob.
“Charlotte Miller,” I said reasonably, and felt the knob turn under my hand.
The stairs are always dim, so the lack of light was no impediment there, and the spinning room’s windows gave depth and texture to the shadows. I could see the great hulking bodies of the machines, could make out the spindles and frames and the long tracks they rode along. I looked away. How could we say “jackspinner” casually in Stirwaters after this?
As if driven by some mad brutal wind, all the bobbins came flying off the near jack, hailing down on me. One struck the side of my head and I cried out.
“Charlotte Miller,” I whimpered, crouching in the lee of the jack, my arms up over my face. The bobbins clattered to the floor and rolled around crazily, trailing thread everywhere. I rose again and kicked them out of my path. The last stairs seemed impossibly far away.
But I reached the attic soon enough. My stomach gave a cold lurch as I stepped up into the grey glow of the room, and I couldn’t move any farther.
William lay not ten feet from wh
ere I stood. In his basket, on a heap of snow-white carded wool, he cooed and twitched and kicked his bare feet against the wicker. His eyes—those enormous changing-color eyes he gets from Randall—were wide with delight, and his chubby hands waved in the air above his face, reaching for—I took a deep breath. Reaching for a gleaming spindle, dangled above his face. Jack Spinner knelt beside him, his clever hands bouncing and bobbing the spindle by a length of red thread.
I stood in the doorway, icy cold all through and shaking. I did not know what to make of the expression on Spinner’s face. I had expected bitterness, or triumph, but this—this gentleness stopped me dead in my tracks, and seemed the most horrifying thing of all. Suddenly, realization hit me so hard I had to grab the doorframe for support. I understood at last why our curse had taken the form it did. Why generations of Millers had lost their sons to Stirwaters. The young one, the angry one…drown’d in Pit. The evidence was all around me. Something dark and terrible had happened here, all those years ago: Jack Spinner had lost his son.
I took a shaky breath. One hundred years ago, perhaps, this same scene had played out many times. Somewhere on this property—a sunlit room in a tidy farmhouse, or a dewswept meadow beside the river—John Simple had played with his infant son. I had known Jack Spinner but a little—had seen his cleverness and cunning and his power, but this was a different man: younger, tender, as if the cold unnatural light had burned away the years to show the father who had lost so much.
A flicker in the light showed up the older Simple, then, and I thought my heart might split apart with a sudden desperate longing. I could almost see—and, oh! How I wanted to—my own father in his place, there with his grandchild. What would I have paid to have that, even for the merest breath of a moment? I could have wept for all of us.
And then I saw where the light was coming from.
In the far corner, back under the cobwebbed rafters, the old loom my father had tinkered with still stood. And there, as if held to the bench by unseen straps, was my uncle. His slim hands worked the loom—but madly, threads twining round his fingers, his feet beating at the treadles with a wild unnatural rhythm. Slumped like a broken marionette left to dangle in the wind, he wove frantically as the threads in his glittering topcoat unwound themselves and reworked into the crazy tapestry before him. He was bound up in a web of gold and silver, his bare head bobbing and jerking like something—like someone hanged. The flickering light surrounded him, shone through him. A will-o’-the-wisp.
“Let him go.” I barely recognized my own low voice.
Spinner looked up and calmly twisted the red thread onto the spindle. William watched with wide solemn eyes.
“Ah, Miss Miller. Have you made your choice, then? You see your son is unharmed. I will take those keys you carry now, if you don’t mind.”
“Let him go,” I repeated, gesturing toward Uncle Wheeler. “He has no part in this.”
Spinner rose. “No part? No part? Nay, Mistress—he has the finer part in this!” With a wave of his hand, the greying light burst into brilliance and, as if with a sudden rush of water over the millwheel, Uncle Wheeler’s weaving took on a frenzied pace. The shuttle banged back and forth across the shed as his arms stretched and scrabbled over the workings.
“He didn’t pay you,” I whispered, understanding. “For getting him out of prison.”
Spinner smiled, all tenderness gone. “Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Enoch Lowman has spent his life skirting his debts, as I’m sure you know well enough. But you see, he finally did come through, with a deposit of sorts.”
I closed my eyes before I could see him point to my son.
“What was the fee?” I barely heard myself speak the words, but perhaps he could read even my thoughts.
“The fee? Oh, the littlest thing; he never would have missed it.” Spinner laughed, and tonight it was the sound of a cold wind through dead trees. “Just his name.”
Impossible bargains. Unimaginable costs. No wonder Uncle Wheeler had run away, before Spinner could strip him of the very identity he’d worked so hard to possess. I’d seen it last night; he never would have—never could have—gone back to life as Enoch Lowman, stable boy.
“What have you done to him?”
“Done? Why, nothing! Merely supposed it was time our dear Ellison Wheeler, Esquire, learned a trade of his own. This seemed fitting, don’t you agree, as he has such a fondness for clothes. They make the man, or so I’ve heard.”
Oh, indeed, all the tenderness was gone. Turned to madness and—who knows how else such pain may twist itself, so many years beyond the grave? Before I could utter a single word, Jack Spinner swept down with a too-quick motion and scooped William up in his arms.
William crowed with delight. I positively stopped breathing altogether.
“Don’t hurt him,” I prayed, and it seems I said those words aloud.
Spinner’s smile twisted in his lined face. “I’m not the one who harms defenseless children. Millers do that,” he said, clutching William to his chest. Wildly, I thought of poor baby Thomas, dead at seven days. Oh, mercy. What had we done to this man? We were all bound together, by loss and grief and vengeance. It was time to end this. But if Spinner had no tenderness, I must find some of my own to spare.
“What happened to your son?” Very quietly, almost a breath.
“My boy,” Spinner—Simple—murmured to William. “My Robin.”
I took a tiny step closer. “What happened to Robin?”
He gave a sigh and stroked William’s downy temple with a cracked and grimy finger. A working man’s hand; I had thought it before, but his memory of his own hands was stronger now. As he was.
“It were a dirty spring, we called it then,” he began. I watched William carefully. We say that, too. “One freeze after another, melting into mud and muck under the sun. ‘Twouldn’t rain, and won’t dry out neither. But Old Man Harlan, he would have his mill. Dug that pit too deep and too close to the river. Oh, he were warned, weren’t he? But that one paid no mind to anyone. My Robin were just a lad then—no bigger’n your rosy sister. Fourteen…” The word slipped out in a sigh. Spinner jostled William to bring up that jolly toothless grin, and began again. “He would work the mill site. Said ‘twere our land and our duty to see it used proper. Wanted so to be a man, my Robin. I were proud of him, and proud he were, too, to be workin’ a man’s job day and day over.
“He thought to do a mason’s work, a real builder. Trained alongside men who worked but for money—never for love. Followed Old Miller’s say-so to the letter, and my Robin didn’t know no better. When they bricked in the pit it were too cold, too wet. It never set up right. A hard rain at last, and those men kep’ right on working.”
“The wall collapsed.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, but I could see it all so clearly as he spoke. The pit was too close to the river; it had plagued Stirwaters forever with cracks and seepage. Poor workmanship and unlucky weather—it had surely been a disaster in the asking.
Spinner nodded. “The wall collapsed, with my Robin at the bottom. Buried under a half ton of mud and sludge and brick, he were. Not even a proper burial, and no one to mourn him but me. My boy, my only child…”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. It was a mistake.
“Save your apologies!” he cried. “Keep your sympathy! We don’t need them. I have what I need!” He spasmed with laughter as William reached a wavering hand toward his twisted face. “You’ll pay, too,” Spinner said. “As all Millers have paid.”
“Please,” I whispered.
“Please?” He echoed. “Did your Harlan yield when I begged him please? Please return my son’s body to me? Please clear off my land and let us be? Please let me see the magistrate? Please don’t string me up to yonder tree?”
His words rang out like claps of thunder—sparked through with lightning as my uncle thrashed against his bonds. The loom banged and shuddered like a mad thing, deafening. Suddenly, another great gasp heaved through the mill, spilli
ng me to the floor. Spinner stumbled and William nearly fell from his arms.
“Charlotte Miller!” I screamed it to the rafters. “Stop it!” I smacked my hands hard against the floorboards. As I struggled to my feet, my skirts bunched up round my ankles, I saw the floor at Spinner’s feet peel apart like a raw wound. The boards cracked and splintered, a nail prized free. Oh, please, Lord—don’t drop him.
Righted now, Spinner clutched William still tighter. “Make your choice!” he shrilled.
“Let my uncle go!” I yelled back.
“No! He is not part of our bargain!”
“You made him part! And he did, himself, by bringing William here. A third party. The terms have changed. I’ll not leave without him.” I gripped my poor abused apron with trembling hands and stood firm.
Spinner stared at me, his shadowed eyes wild. “What care you?” he cried. “He’s betrayed you every step of the way. He cares nothing for you!”
I nodded and dared a step closer. “He has,” I agreed. “But he is my uncle, and…and family is precious. Life is precious. I think you know that better than anyone.”
He stepped back from me, his tattered sleeve curved round William’s white nightie. He looked so small, then—not William, who is a positively huge baby—Spinner. I have said before, he was little above my own height; now, whether from remembered years or grief or defeat, he diminished before me. The colors in his motley clothing faded, the texture of that tweedy topcoat blurred. The flickering light and mad clatter from the loom overwhelmed him; I lost him for a moment in the shadows.
“Sir—” I stepped toward him, uncertain. He reappeared, the crack in the floor a hair’s-breadth from his feet. He had changed in that brief instant. The scarecrow’s clothing had vanished, replaced by simpler garb—brownish trousers, tucked into stockings, a linen shirt and bracers. Bareheaded now, his ruddy hair damp with sweat and streaked with grey, he seemed a different man.