As my mother discussed when the book was released, Sins of the Blood is a collection of three Frevisse short stories — “The Witch’s Tale”, “The Midwife’s Tale”, and “The Stone-Worker’s Tale” — available through the Amazon Kindle store. It also includes the exclusive Guided Tour of St. Frideswide and, perhaps most importantly, an extensive preview of the first ten chapters of The Novice’s Tale.

Many of you may already own a copy of the book, but if you don’t this is a great opportunity to snag it. (Remember, even if you don’t own a Kindle you can still read it through your smartphone, tablet, or PC.) It’s also a great opportunity to share Frevisse with your friends and family. Throw ‘em a link and tell them to grab it quick before it goes back to full price!

- Justin

During her memorial service, many of the comments posted here and on her Facebook fan page were read aloud over the music of “Non nobis, Domine” by Patrick Doyle (from Branagh’s Henry V). I would have liked to have read them all, but there were simply too many of them. But although many of you could not be there in the flesh, I wanted you to know that your thoughts were in the room with all of us and they moved us to tears. Thank you.

FEATURED ARTICLES

Star Tribune

Post Bulletin

Pioneer Press

Sharon Kay Penman: “Margaret Frazer, In Memoriam”

(Please note that all of the newspaper articles contain errors of fact. Most notably, my mother died on February 4th, not January 28th. Oddly that error occurred despite the article being written in direct response to an obituary which correctly listed the date. This sort of thing reminds one, as my 6th grade teacher Joe Stannich would have said, to read other news reports with a skeptical and critical eye.)

OBITUARIES & GUEST BOOKS

Obituary at Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)

Obituary at the Post Bulletin (Rochester, MN)

Obituary at the Star Courier (Kewanee, IL)

Obituary at Crescent Tide Funeral Services

OTHER SITES

Richard III Society of NSW

Mystery Fanfare Announcement

Galleycat Announcement

Minnpost Announcement

- Justin

I’m afraid there is no easy way to say this: Gail Frazer, who most of you knew as Margaret Frazer, passed in her sleep last night. I would like you to know that she was comfortable and at peace, and that she was among family and friends until the end.

In the days to come, I will be attempting to communicate additional information through both her Facebook page and here at her website about her life, her literary legacies, and her final messages. For the moment, however, all I can offer is her obituary.

GAIL LYNN FRAZER

who wrote under the pen name of “Margaret Frazer”, passed away on Monday night at the age of 66. She is survived by her two sons (Justin Alexander and Seth Gupton), her loving daughters-in-law, and the enduring legacy of her award-winning and nationally bestselling novels and stories.

Twenty years ago, Frazer’s first novel – The Novice’s Tale – was published the same summer that she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. She published her twenty-fifth novel – The Circle of Witches – last December at a time when she was struggling with the fifth recurrence of the cancer. She fought long, she fought stubbornly, and she refused to be defined by the disease which ultimately claimed her life. In her work, she sought the unique pleasure of thoroughly exploring the otherwhen and otherwhere.

Frazer grew up in Kewanee, IL, the daughter of Fred and Grace Brown. Her father was a labor attorney and later mayor; her mother was a proud homemaker. Frazer discovered a love of theater and her future husband with the Genesius Guild in Rock Island, IL. She appeared in theatrical productions throughout her life, including essentials roles on the Guthrie Stage and most recently as part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare with the American Shakespeare Repertory.

She will be interred at Prairie Oaks Memorial Eco Gardens in Inver Grove Heights, MN, amidst the nature and vast open vistas that she loved so dearly during her life. On February 8^th there will be a Visitation at 11 AM and a memorial service at 12 PM at the Fort Snelling Memorial Chapel (1 Federal Drive, Minneapolis). Donations in memorial to Heifer International. For further information, contact Crescent Tide Funeral Services (www.crescenttide.com, 651-315-8214).

Link to obituary at the Star Tribune’s website, including online guestbook.

- Justin

At some point within the next two weeks, it will also be available through the distribution system. Unfortunately, because it’s being offered through a small imprint it’s quite likely that your local bookstore won’t automatically carry a copy of it. But you will be able to have them order a copy for you. (And you should ask them to order an extra copy to put on their shelves at the same time!)

A GOTHIC ROMANCE. MISTY MOORS. ANCIENT SECRETS. FORBIDDEN PASSIONS. Her mother had always been afraid. That’s what Damaris remembered. From the time she was a little girl until the day her mother died, she had seen the fear in her eyes. But now she understood. Now she was afraid, too. Young Damaris wanted more than anything to be happy at Thornoak, the ancient manor owned by her aunt and uncle. Adventuring through the wide, open beauty of the Dale in the company of her rambunctious cousins she rediscovered a joy she had thought lost with the death of her parents. And in the deep, storm-tossed eyes of Lauran Ashbrigg she was surprised to find an entirely new emotion. But even under the warm and inviting sun, Damaris is chilled by the undeniable fact that the family which claims to welcome and love her is hiding truths from her: The truth of the Lady Stone. The truth of the Old Ways. The truth of moon and star and witchcraft. The truth of her mother’s death. Kindle Edition - Kindle UK - Nook Edition - SmashwordsTrade Paperback

- Margaret

I have very little to add to that except that once upon a time, in the interest of research, I lived by candlelight every evening after supper for quite a few evenings.  I had the advantage of good candles, which many ordinary medieval people did not have, but the experience was still extremely useful.  The room became full of soft shadows beyond the gentle, rich, golden glow of the candles.  As few as three slender candles provided enough light by which to read, and – here is a point I came to cherish – I found myself relaxing in the candlelight, easing out of the day’s tensions far more easily than usual, so that I went to bed much earlier than was my wont and sleeping very well.

Added to that, I am now far more appreciative when I flip a switch and simply get all the electric light I want.  There is nothing like research to help you enjoy the commonplaces of the 21^st century.

- Margaret

After an almost interminable wait, The Novice’s Tale and The Servant’s Tale are both available as e-books in the United States! They can be purchased from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore, Kobo, and the like!

Unlike the other e-books I’ve announced here on the site, these are being offered from my publisher. That means I don’t control the price and I don’t know if they’re being sold with DRM or not. If you have any problems, please let me know. But you might also be better served contacting Berkley directly about these titles.

UNHOLY PASSIONS AND DEMONIC DEATH...In the fair autumn of Our Lord’s grace 1431, the nuns of England’s St. Frideswide’s prepare for the simply ceremonies in which the saintly novice Thomasine will take her holy vows. But their quiet lives of beauty and prayer are thrown into chaos by the merciless arrival of Lady Ermentrude Fenner and her retinue of lusty men, sinful women, and baying hounds. The hard-drinking dowager even keeps a pet monkey for her amusement. She demands wine, a feast… And her niece, the angelic Thomasine. The lady desires to enrich herself and her reputation by arranging a marriage for the devout novice. She cares nothing for the panic and despair she leaves behind her. But all her cruel and cunning schemes are brought to a sudden end with strange and most unnatural murder. As suspicious eyes turn on the pious Thomasine, it falls to Sister Frevisse, hosteler of the priory and amateur detective, to unravel the webs of unholy passion and dark intrigue that entangle the novice and prove her innocence… or condemn her. The first volume in the award-winning Sister Frevisse novels! Paperback - Kindle U.S. - Kindle UK - Nook Edition British Hardcover - Large Print Edition French Edition - German Edition

THE PLAY'S THE THING, TO CATCH THE CONSCIENCE OF A KILLER...The Christmas season brings strange guests to the medieval nunnery of St. Frideswide’s when a troupe of penniless players comes knocking at the gate. They bear with them the badly mangled body of a villager, swearing they found the drunken fool lying in a ditch. But Meg, the victim’s wife and a scullery maid of the cloister, thinks there are far fouler deeds afoot. As the players rehearse for the nativity, ancient scandals lick at their heels and dark desperation haunts Meg’s steps as she finds cruel feudal laws threatening to strip away the lands that would support both her and her sons in the wake of her husband’s death. Dame Frevisse must thrust herself between these violent feuds, awakening dreams of her youth that she had believed long buried. Her very faith may be threatened, but Frevisse knows she must unravel a path to true salvation… before false raptures of lust bring ruination upon them all. EDGAR-AWARD NOMINEEPaperback - Kindle U.S. - Kindle UK - Nook Edition British Hardcover - Large Print Edition French Edition - German Edition

- Margaret

The winter solstice has arrived and, with it, the end of the Midwinter Blog Tour! But before we bring things to a close, we do have one last special event planned to celebrate the release of Circle of Witches: The Great Midwinter Blog Tour Quiz.

Here’s how it’s going to work: Below you’ll find a list of twelve questions. They can all be found within either the guest posts, interviews, or sample chapters of Circle of Witches which have been posted during the Midwinter Blog Tour. (And you can find links to all those posts on the blog tour’s home page.)

1. Answer the questions.

2. Send your answers to contest@margaretfrazer.com by December 31st, 2012.

3. A winner will be drawn at random from among those who answered the most questions correctly.

4. PRIZE: A signed copy of Circle of Witches + 1 e-book of your choice.

Wait… how am I going to sign an e-book?

I’m not. Surprise! Circle of Witches will be getting released as a trade paperback! (It was actually supposed to happen during the blog tour, but we’ve had some quality issues with the initial round of proofs and it’s been held up until we can make sure it gets printed the way it’s supposed to.) I’ll be posting more information as soon as I have it!

THE GREAT MIDWINTER BLOG TOUR QUIZ

1. How many novels have I written including Circle of Witches?

2. What were the two books I wrote while taking chemotherapy for the first time?

3. What are the names of Damaris’ cousins?

4. Where did I work as an assistant matron?

5. How old was I when I wrote my first story?

6. If there was a fire, what’s the one book I would save from my shelves?

7. What are the names of BOTH of Damaris’ uncles?

8. If I wrote a memoir, what would be its title?

9. What’s the book I said I found most useful as an author?

10. How long did I live in the Yorkshire dales?

11. How old was I when I read Shakespeare for the first time?

12. What is herb named “lily of the valley” used for according to Aunt Elspeth?

- Margaret

For the eleventh day of the Midwinter Blog Tour, the Hopeful Heroine takes us on a guided tour through the Yorkshire dales — the beauty-ridden countryside in which Circle of Witches is set. I had a truly wonderful time with this interview, wandering through places and memories that I love in an exploration of how those experiences shaped both my life and the novel. Please join us with a few joyful laughs.

- Margaret

Today’s pit stop for the Midwinter Blog Tour is Tiffany’s Bookshelf, where Tiffany is offering up a fresh review of Circle of Witches for you. If you’re still wondering whether or not the book is for you, check out what Tiffany has to say about it!

Meanwhile, the cover remake contest at the Authoress continues apace. We’ve also been seeing some really great discussions at our other stops and over on my Facebook page, so please click around and feel free to join in! Looking ahead, the blog tour will be wrapping up in a couple of days with the Great Midwinter Blog Tour Quiz, featuring questions about the tour and the book with another prize package give-away!

- Margaret

Let’s pop over to the Alexandrian, where Justin Alexander is Designing a Cover. Justin has been designing the covers for the e-books releases of my short stories and Dame Frevisse Mysteries, and he threw himself into the task of designing the cover for Circle of Witches. He created more than a dozen unique drafts of different covers for me to consider, slowly working through a dual process of elimination and refinement until we finally ended up with the very handsome and very dramatic piece which blesses the front cover of the book today.

- Margaret

Start with Chapter 1!

CHAPTER SIX

Autumn dwindled into early winter, with the last ploughing done and the sheep and cattle driven down from the farthest hill pastures. The weather continued wet and chill, and Damaris came down with the fevered cold and cough she had helped treat in others with her aunt all autumn. It took deeper hold with her than it had with most. She was moved from her high room to one near her aunt’s and uncle’s. There she was nursed through the nights, turn and turn about, by Aunt Elspeth, old Agnes, and Betty, for more than week. Even when the worst was past, she remained weak, only too happy to lie abed or – when she was stronger – sit at a window for hours, first in the bedchamber, then in the parlor, watching cloud-shadows shift along the winter-grayed dale or, in worse weather, the rain falling in icy sheets.

Her body’s exhaustion as it struggled to heal had exhausted her mind, too, but when she was well enough for visitors, she was stirred a little more aware by Irene’s company a few afternoons and even several visits from Lauran. Irene brought fashion magazines and chattered on about nothing in particular, requiring only slight answers from Damaris in response. Lauran, unexpectedly more thoughtful, came his first time with a book of ballads and read aloud to her – strong, stirring ballads of danger and daring; of desperate battles won or heroically lost; of perilous loves and fatal sword fights and wild rides to safety.

“Irene says I should be reading you softer stuff,” he told Damaris as he settled into a chair. “That these aren’t for ladies. Are you become a lady, Damaris?”

“No,” she said. She might be presently too weak to do even embroidery, but she was quite sure of that. So he had read to her by the hour, and when he was done she was no stronger in body, but her mind was stirred more awake than it had been since she fell ill.

He came twice more, the last time bringing not the ballads but a novel of dire doings in Scotland’s past. This he left with her after having read from it. “To keep your mind from having nothing but Irene’s fashions to think on,” he teased before giving her a surprising kiss on the cheek and leaving while she was still too startled by that to say anything.

Damaris sat with her hand to that cheek for several bemused moments after he was gone, but the book beckoned – he had left off at a particularly exciting moment – and she was still reading when Aunt Elspeth came in a time later to see how she was. Pleased to find her doing more than gazing out the window, hands limp in her lap, her aunt said as much and added, teasingly, “How good to know that Lauran can be at least a little useful once in a while.”

Almost, Damaris rose to Lauran’s defense but heard the teasing and stopped herself in time, at the same time hoping her aunt did not notice the sudden pinkness of her cheeks. If Aunt Elspeth did, she did not say so, but left the parlor smiling.

The November full moon had passed while Damaris was at her sickest, and when the December one came she was still being given medicinal draughts to strengthen her and was too prone to falling asleep early and sleeping late to have any idea whether or not there was anything different about that night.

She refused to admit to herself how glad she was of that.

Then, at last, the Christmas holidays brought Nevin and Kellan home from school. An end to the dire, damp weather came with them by way of a light freeze and the winter’s first light snowfall. Uncle Russell, Aunt Elspeth, and Damaris were waiting in the parlor for them, but the snow had muffled the carriage wheels, so that the first warning they were there came from them entering the hall with merry shouts that they had arrived and where was the hot spiced wine and all the rest of their expected welcome? Damaris was first from the parlor and flung herself in a great hug at Kellan, who left off shaking his cloak clear of a snow flurry that had caught them between the carriage and the door long enough to return her embrace before she left him to his parents and flung herself at Nevin. Nevin met her hug with his own, then caught her by the waist and swung her around, exclaiming, “Well met, little cousin!”

Set on her feet again but still gripping his arms, Damaris looked up at him and said, astonished, “You’re taller.” And accusingly, “You’ve grown!”

Nevin grinned down at her. “It happens. Look at Kellan.”

She spun toward Kellan, just finished shaking hands with his father, and indeed instead of the half-head shorter than his brother he had been, he now matched Nevin’s greater height. “You’ve both grown!” she declared, offended.

Kellan reached a forefinger to tap her on the nose. “And you haven’t, small one. Which means that when we can’t find any ball, you’ll be useful to toss back and forth between us.”

“You wouldn’t,” Damaris protested.

Nevin and Kellan looked at each other, nodded once, then made to grab her from either side. With a protesting half-shriek of laughter, she darted to safety behind Uncle Russell as Aunt Elspeth said, “The warmed wine you were shouting for and Betty’s cakes are waiting for you in the parlor. No, give me a hug before I let you go,” she ordered both sons, and it was with her arm around Nevin’s waist and Uncle Russell’s hand on Kellan’s shoulder that they went into the parlor with Damaris following after, well content that school had not changed her cousins at all, no matter they were grown too much taller. And in the double pleasure of her returning strength and them being home, with the last full moon well behind her and most of a month before another one, she gave herself up to simply being glad with all the readying for the holidays.

But the fourth morning after her cousins’ return, only a few days before Christmas, she awoke knowing she had slept the Sleep again. The Taste had not been in the evening tea. Of that she was sure, but was equally sure the strengthening draught she was still taking in the evenings was bitter enough to cover anything beyond what she knew was in the mixture she had helped her aunt make; and she lay quietly in her bed – she was returned to her high room now – surprised that what she felt more than anything was disappointed. That forced her to try sorting through her feelings to find out why, of all things, “disappointed” was what she felt. Had she truly hoped that with Virna gone out of her life, the problem of the Taste and the Sleep would be gone, too?

Because she had been spared the full moon nights in November and December, she had slipped to the safety of telling herself, as she had told herself before, that, after all, it – and she never let herself look deeply at what “it” in its vagueness truly covered – probably did not matter, that very possibly she was only imagining it because Virna had put the thought into her head, and since it was Virna’s doing, the best thing to do was to ignore it altogether.

Yes.  Ignore it altogether.

But now…

She threw back the covers. The cold morning air instantly cut through her nightdress, chilling to the bones, so that she willingly let go all thought except the urgent need to dress in her undergarments and warm wool gown as quickly as might be.

And yet, before she left the room, she took out her loathed list and scribbled yesterday’s date in stiff-fingered haste, before thrusting the offending paper deep into the drawer.

After that, she determinedly forgot about it and all else she did not want to think on; instead gave herself up to enjoying the holidays and her cousins as completely as she could. That was not hard, even though the weather returned to dreary. On Christmas Day umbrellas were needed when going from the carriage into church and back again, but once home the fires in all Thornoak’s fireplaces and the greenery everywhere and holiday good things to eat and laughter-ridden games with Nevin, Kellan, Aunt Elspeth, and Uncle Russell brightened the day past any dreariness, and on Boxing Day the Ashbriggs came to visit. Lauran was in particular high humor, mercilessly teasing Irene over the impractical size of her beaver-furred Christmas bonnet and his mother about the number of her petticoats. He even managed to catch Damaris under the mistletoe in the front hall and kissed her soundly on the mouth before she realized what he was doing. That set Kellan and Nevin in pursuit of Irene who dodged around her brother, squealing in delighted protest. Lauran, still holding to Damaris, treacherously put out a leg, slowing her flight so that Nevin caught her and kissed her cheek. Kellan, having lost her, all unexpectedly swung away and grabbed Damaris around the waist just as Lauran let her go. She was still under the mistletoe but, startled, she ducked Kellan’s kiss so that it landed somewhere near her ear.

“Cheat!” Kellan cried. “I’m taking another one.”

“You’ve had your one!”  Damaris laughed, fending him away.

“I’ll help hold her if I can have another,” Lauran offered.

Aunt Elspeth, appearing from the parlor, deftly removed Damaris from both of them, saying with mock sternness, “You’ve both had all the kisses you’re going to have. Nevin, stop tickling Irene’s ear. You’re making her shriek. Off with all of you to the punch bowl and see what cakes Cook has graced us with this time.”

Cakes being apparently an acceptable alternative to kissing, they all obeyed, and all in all the day went by in merriment until the Ashbriggs went home in the drenching twilight.

Six days later, with the weather turned to cold again, the hospitality was returned on New Year’s Eve at Ashbrigg Manor, the festive evening only imperiled by the number of mistletoe sprigs Lauran had hung around the house. Damaris avoided them despite Lauran and Kellan both laughingly trying to chivvy her to them.  Irene, for her part, ended up under them noticeably often, usually when Nevin was near enough to take advantage despite her supposedly protesting squeals, until at Mistress Ashbrigg’s beseeching Uncle Russell used his height to take all the sprigs down.

Irene turned then to talk of how the frozen roads would make it easy now for her brother and Nevin and Kellan to escort her and Damaris to Skelfeld town’s Twelfth Night dance in a few days time. She pointed out that, “If only we could become friends with people our age there, we might be invited to parties there in Skelfeld, and have them come to parties here, too.”

“But I don’t want to go to their parties or have parties here,” Lauran said with brotherly callousness.

“Yes, you do!” Irene protested.

“No, I don’t.”

“You do!  Stop saying you don’t!”

“But I don’t.”

Lauran went on teasing her long enough that finally Damaris told him to stop or she would box his ears for him. “Especially,” she challenged him, “since I can tell by the way you’re grinning that you mean to take her anyway.”

“Not if you and Nevin and Kellan don’t come, too,” Lauran returned.

Taking for a certainty that Damaris wanted to go as much as she did, Irene immediately turned all her pleading on Nevin and Kellan. Kellan stepped back, hands raised in what could have been either denial or surrender, while Nevin looked with a silent question toward his father, received a nod in silent reply, and promptly gave in to Irene’s imploring.

The plan quickly formed for them to travel all together in the Ashbrigg carriage with Mistress Ashbrigg for chaperone and stay the night at Skelfeld’s largest inn. Mistress Ashbrigg invited Aunt Elspeth to come with them, but Aunt Elspeth said firmly that while she had no objections to anyone else going, she had no desire at all to go herself. Irene pointed out later that it worked out quite well that way, with three and three, rather than three and four.

“There’ll be nobody left over,” she said happily. “Lauran can escort Mother. Nevin can escort me. Kellan can escort you, Damaris.”

Behind his mother’s back, Lauran said at Kellan, “Trade?”

Kellan laughed and shook his head.

* * * * *

The Ashbrigg carriage rolled into Skelfeld’s marketplace as the last sunset light was fading from under the low-riding clouds. There had been rain rather than snow here at the milder end of the dale. The wet cobbles were sheened with yellow lantern light as the carriage stopped in front of the Skelfeld Arms and the young gentlemen (as Mistress Ashbrigg was determinedly calling them today) jumped out first, to turn and help the ladies descend, then lend their arms to see them safely the few yards to the inn’s broad front door. Three floors tall and stone-built right up to its dark slate roof, the inn stood flat-fronted to the marketplace, making no bid to be noticed save by its size and the sign above its door of the long-extinguished Skelfeld family’s heraldic arms, but warm light streamed from all its windows tonight, beckoning all to enter its wide front hall. The clerk behind the counter greeted them, assured them their rooms were ready, gave them their keys, and turned to help the mother with two daughters crowding in behind them. Two sturdy lads in servants’ garb came forward, offering to carry their luggage up the two flights of stairs to their rooms, and in very short order all were arranged and settled, with Nevin, Kellan, and Lauran sharing a room across the corridor from the one that Mistress Ashbrigg, Irene, and Damaris had together. Supposing the “young gentlemen” could fare for themselves regarding supper, Mistress Ashbrigg sent an order for only a light tea with bread and butter for herself, Irene, and Damaris by way of the lad who had brought their bags.

“We don’t want to be over-fed,” she assured Irene and Damaris. “We have our waistlines and gowns to consider. There will be simple drinks and cakes at the dance. They will suffice, so long as you remember not to indulge too much.”

By now Irene was in what her brother unkindly called “a high twitter”, hardly interested in food at all, but Damaris, letting Irene’s excited chatter flow over her, regretted the lack of a better supper. Dancing was all very well, but she was hungry. Knowing nothing of all this, however, it was not for her to gainsay Mistress Ashbrigg, and she submitted to everything asked of her, including allowing Mistress Ashbrigg to do as she wanted to with her hair, while Irene mourned that it was such a pity Damaris was too young to have her hair put up and had to wear it loose down her back.

“Nonsense,” said Mistress Ashbrigg, deft with pins around Damaris’ head. “I’ve gathered the sides into very pretty wings. You’ll do quite well, Damaris.”

Damaris, looking into the mirror, thought she looked nothing like herself, but liked what she saw and thanked Mistress Ashbrigg while trying to smile. The truth was that she was feeling overwhelmed. She had not left the dale since her parents’ deaths and never been to a dance at all, nor would she have been to this one except it was, “More or less a public one,” Mistress Ashbrigg lamented. “For all the tradesmen and common farmers and their families in Skelfeld and all the neighboring country around. But you would come, Irene.”

“Well, there weren’t any others, Mother. It was this or nothing.”  And Irene was not about to settle for nothing if something could be had.

Damaris found herself almost glad of that when the time came that they all gathered in the inn’s upper hallway, ready to go down and to join other brightly dressed holiday folk Damaris had seen from her room’s window, streaming into the town hall across the marketplace. Nevin, Kellan, and Lauran were resplendent in their best suits, with ruffled shirt fronts and smoothly-combed hair, hardly like themselves at all. But then she hardly felt herself either, with extra petticoats under the holiday dress borrowed from among Irene’s many gowns and her hair loose instead of in its usual plait, with a silk flower behind one ear. This last was insisted on by Irene. Irene had even had her practice her curtsy and taught her some dances, humming the music and dragging her around the sitting room at Ashbrigg. Despite knowing she was as ready as she might be, she was nonetheless a little frightened under her excitement, but thought she was hiding it as she put her hand on Kellan’s offered arm for him to lead her down the stairs to the inn’s front hall behind Lauran with his mother and Irene with Nevin; but at the stairfoot, as the others went ahead, toward the outer door with a wide sway of  the ladies’ skirts, Kellan paused, looked down at her, and said, quite kindly, “You’re going to enjoy yourself. Don’t worry. You won’t have to spend the evening standing in a corner.”

That had been among her secret fears, and despite Kellan being as great a tease as Lauran, Damaris believed him and was suddenly able to smile at him and be glad she was there as he led her out the door into the lantern-lighted evening, mild for January and mercifully dry, so that they hurried without either shivers or splashes across the marketplace to the town hall. There, in the crowd of people she did not know, Damaris’ shyness came back on her, even while she was being surprised at how charmingly well-mannered her cousins and Lauran could be when they tried. Rather than disappearing, as she had half-expected they might, they took turns to dance the first set of dances with Mistress Ashbrigg, Irene, and Damaris.  After that, though, Mistress Ashbrigg had seen some friends among the women, claimed she was ready to sit, and went aside to join them. Irene meanwhile had begun to draw various young men around her, drawing her heed away from Damaris, who took the chance to retreat to the shelter of a potted palm near a corner, clutching a cup of punch and willing to spend a time simply watching everyone.

After her months at Thornoak, so many people and so much happening at once were daunting, and she was thinking that maybe Virna was right – she was only a silly little girl, unlike Irene talking so happily and readily to those young men. But Kellan shortly found her, teased her for trying to hide from her doom, and drew her out to dance again. To her surprise, after that there were other young men who wanted to dance with her, even some who had been with Irene earlier. Between all of  them and her cousins and even Lauran, she hardly sat down again and at the evening’s end found herself surprised at how much she had enjoyed herself.

The next morning brought rain again, and Mistress Ashbrigg made haste to leave, to be home before the roads returned too far to mud. A few miles beyond the second village, though, they found it was snow, not rain, they had to worry over. Fattening flakes swirled down the wind under heavy gray clouds, with no telling if it was only a flurry or the beginning of a storm. With the Ashbriggs set down at their front door, the coachman set the horses at a sharper pace the last few miles to Thornoak and was probably as glad as Damaris was when she and her cousins and their baggage were delivered there and he could turn back down the dale for Ashbrigg.

Scurrying with the cold, Agnes and Betty helped bring their baggage into the front hall while Aunt Elspeth welcomed them gladly with hugs all around before urging them into the parlor where a fire burning high on the hearth and hot chocolate in deep mugs was waiting for them.

“Home,” Kellan said with great satisfaction as he drew a cushioned stool near to the flames. “The only place really worth being.”

Damaris, her chilled hands wrapped around a satisfyingly hot mug, agreed silently and whole-heartedly. Here was better than anywhere else.

Yet she awoke in the morning with a single warm tear trickling down her cheek, as if she had been grieving in her sleep. Whatever she might have been dreaming was already gone from her, though, except for a lingering, formless sense of something being lost; but she had learned after her parents died that crying cured nothing, so she wiped the tear away, realized she was hearing rain on the roof close above her head, and huddled deeper into the feather mattress and her blankets, unwilling to leave her bed’s warm comfort for the room’s chill.

She maybe even slept a little, or at least drifted along the edges of it, neither sleeping nor awake, not rousing again until Agnes came with the morning’s hot water, warned her not to linger in bed until the water cooled – “I don’t come tramping up those stairs to have that hot water go to waste, you know.” – and left her to rise and dress as she would. Usually, indeed mindful of the hot water, Damaris rose promptly. This morning she did not. Instead, she went on lying deep in her bed, her body motionless while her mind quested after a thought that had almost come with her out of sleep but was now trying to escape into forgetfulness again.

She caught it before it fled, lay still a few moments longer, making sure of her hold on it, then forced herself out of bed into the chill air, did the morning’s necessities as quickly as might be, and dressed with matching haste.  But rather than hurrying downstairs to the warmth of the dining room and breakfast, she went to her worktable and rummaged through the drawer until she found the hated list, shoved as usual to the back among stray other papers. She gave the confusion of dates a quick look before putting it in her pocket. She would need it when she followed her new-come thought and did not want to have to come back upstairs to fetch it.

It was mid-morning before she found a chance to go unnoticed to her uncle’s study.  Everyone in the household was busy somewhere else and she was supposedly going to sew a while by the parlor fire, but no one would think anything in particular if they found her, as she so often was, curled up on the sofa with a book. Uncle Russell shared his library freely and she had explored its shelves thoroughly through last winter’s months and lately. It was memory of something seen in a book that had brought her here now. She did not remember exactly what it was she had seen, but her vague morning thought had told her there had been something… something that went with something about her list. Unfortunately she did not remember the book’s name, either, only that it had dark binding – black or maybe very dark green – and was on the bottom shelf farthest from the window.

The books had no stringent organization. The most that anyone ever did was put them back more or less where they had come from, and so she sat herself down on the floor in front of the shelf, her skirts spread around her, her list lying ready beside her, undismayed that so many of her uncle’s books were black-bound. She never minded spending time with books, for whatever reason. Still, she began with the two green-bound books there in hopes her hunt would after all be brief.

The first was a treatise on the benefits of marling one’s fields for a better yield of crops. A single glance told her it was most definitely not the book she sought. The second, entitled Travels in Strange Corners of the Continent, seemed far more promising, and she settled down to ruffling through its pages in a first hopeful look, although still unsure exactly what she sought.

From the front hallway, Kellan called, “Damaris!  Where are you?”

Bent over the book, Damaris jerked upright and, as if guilty of something, grabbed the list, slapped it into book, slammed the volume shut, and was shoving it back onto the shelves as Kellan opened the door and thrust his head into the room. Sounding deeply aggrieved, he said, “I was looking for you. You’re supposed to be in the parlor. The rain has stopped. Nevin and I are going riding. Want to come?”

Damaris scrambled up. Against expectation, there was indeed thin, moist sunshine outside the window, and she found herself more than willing to put off whatever she had hoped – feared? – to find in the book. It would wait, while weather clear enough for riding very likely would not.

By common consent they took the main road toward Ashbrigg and were unsurprised to meet Lauran riding toward Thornoak. “Great minds think alike,” he observed cheerfully. “You’ll notice Irene isn’t out here. Whatever happened to white Christmases?”

“Variety is the spice of life.” Kellan looked down at their already deeply muddied horses. “Or something.”

They left the main road in favor of riding up to the moors where the thin turf and rocky soil made drier going. The clouds cleared and the sunlight strengthened.  By the time they had ridden up to a high crest of the moors and were circling back toward Thornoak there was blue sky overhead. At The Place – Damaris’ name for the open, grassy space around the Lady Stone where she and her cousins had gone her first time to the moors – they all drew rein and dismounted to let their horses rest and crop the grass while they stood in companionable silence, looking out over the dale stretched winter-barren below them, etched gray and black by leafless trees, the river silver-glinting down its heart. Familiar and yet – depending on the day, the time, the season, the weather – always different; always beautiful to Damaris.

For a while the only sound among them was the rip of their horses’ grazing and the wind soughing the bracken surrounding The Place. Then Lauran stirred and said, “I think Resme was starting to limp before we stopped. Come hold him, Nevin, while I see if there’s a stone.”

As Nevin and Lauran walked away, Kellan sank down on his heels, still looking out over the dale, still silent. Damaris, as she always did when she came here, went to the Lady Stone and laid her hand against it in a kind of greeting. She never thought about why; it simply seemed right. But afterward she went to crouch on her own heels beside Kellan, companionably silent before she said, “I’ve wanted to ask you something.”

“Of course you have,” he agreed. “I’m brilliant.”

Damaris poked him with her elbow and pointed to their left where the moor track slanted away down the slope through Thornoak Scar. It was one of a series of gray limestone cliffs running along the hillsides above the pastures and below the moor along both sides of the dale. Of steep, bare rock, the scars could only be passed by going around their ends or where a path had weathered through, as one had near The Place. “There,” she said. “When you stand at the Lady Stone, you can see right through the gap in the scar to St. Cuthbert’s church tower.”

Kellan looked. “I don’t see St. Cuthbert’s.”

Damaris poked her elbow into his ribs again. “You’re not standing by the Lady Stone.  Pay attention. If you stand by the Lady Stone, you can see St. Cuthbert’s. Now I’ve followed a Way from St. Cuthbert’s through Ellerbee farmyard and some other places eastward down the dale…”

“I thought you’d given up the Ways.”

“I gave up telling anyone about them. I can go riding without you or Nevin or anyone else if I want to.”  Damaris did not try to hide her satisfaction at telling him he did not know everything about her. “Sometimes I like to follow a Way when I go riding.”

She waited, but Kellan did not say anything. His face was turned from her, eastward toward the scar so that she could not clearly read his expression, although suddenly she wanted to as she went on, “I thought St. Cuthbert’s was the end of that Way because you can’t see the Lady Stone from the church. But just now I’ve thought to wonder if, even if you can’t see the Lady Stone–” she turned from the dale back toward the moor behind her, “–you can see the Old Woman from the church.”

“The Old Woman?” Kellan asked.

“There.”  Damaris swiveled enough to point over her shoulder toward the crest of the moor some fifty yards and more above them where another stone stood, black like the Lady Stone but not so tall, hardly Damaris’ own height, and with no Place around it, only the rough heather sweeping up to crowd around its base where it stood sharp against the sky.

“Who told you it was called that?” Kellan asked.

Damaris shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody. I made it up. This is the Lady Stone, and on the hill is her elder. The Old Woman.” She looked at Kellan, curious. “Why?”

He shrugged in his turn. “No reason. Just wondering.”

“So, do you think maybe you can see it from St. Cuthbert’s?”

“Maybe,” said Kellan, not sounding much interested.

Disappointed, Damaris let the game drop. A little gap of silence followed, before she asked, “Kellan, why doesn’t Virna like me?”

“Virna?”  Kellan looked at her. “Why care whether Virna likes you or not?”

She pretended to be interested in poking at the grass in front of her with her forefinger while she said, “I don’t care if she likes me or not. I’ve just wondered why she doesn’t. She’s said things–”

“What things?” Kellan asked sharply.

Startled, Damaris stammered, “Just… things. One thing really. The full moon… that I should pay attention to it. Or… something like that. I didn’t really listen to her. She just… said it and… it was odd.”

“Have you paid attention to the full moon?”

“Not really. No. It seemed so… silly.”

It was the first real lie she had ever told him. She did not think she did it very well but Kellan seemed to accept it because after a moment all he said in answer was, “I shouldn’t give any heed at all to anything that Virna says. She’s too fond of hurting people.”

Damaris nodded ready agreement to that last and was glad that Nevin called then that everything was all right, they could ride on. They all mounted again and, once they were below the scar, swung to ride along the bare, dripping woods below the cliff, taking the longer way back to Thornoak. The path was wide enough that they were riding by twos, Damaris beside Lauran who was teasing her that now that there was hardly enough sun to worry over, she was wearing a hat.

“To hide my disastrous hair. It goes all straight in damp weather,” Damaris said.

“Don’t you know you’re never supposed to admit to having disastrous hair?  Hasn’t Irene taught you anything about womanly vanities?”

“Lauran can teach you all about vanities,” Kellan said from ahead of them. “Vanity was his particular interest at school.”  He looked back over his shoulder. “Didn’t you know?”

At that moment Nevin’s horse shied away from the trees, thudding his shoulder sideways into Kellan’s horse and Nevin’s knee into Kellan’s. Kellan cried out in startled pain, and Lauran’s and Damaris’ horses flung up their heads and tried to shy aside with Nevin’s. Lauran and Damaris both gathered their reins and steadied them, while Nevin, who rarely swore, cursed not at his horse as he wrenched it straight again but at the gray-cloaked figure who had stepped out nearly under its nose from behind a tree. “Damn you, Virna!  You know better than to do that!  Kellan, are you all right?”

“Only bruised, I think,” said Kellan, rubbing his knee.

“What are you thinking?” Nevin demanded, still angry, at Virna. “You don’t come out like that under a horse’s nose!”

One hand pressed against her breast and her eyes wide with distress, Virna dropped a deep curtsy and answered in apparently intense dismay, “I didn’t see you coming. I’m sorry!  Are you both all right?”

As her gaze swept them all, imploring them to be undamaged, she was a picture of frightened, apologetic girl. Too much a picture, Damaris suddenly thought.  Virna was almost always a picture of something, rather than being… whoever she really was. Besides, even if she had somehow not heard the clopping of the horses as they came, the tree she had been behind was too narrow to have hidden them from view – or her from theirs unless she had been standing very still, to seem part of the gray shadows among the trees.

Whether or not Nevin thought any of that, he accepted her apology curtly and they rode on, Kellan still rubbing his knee and Lauran not even looking aside at her as he passed. It was Damaris who briefly turned her head and met Virna’s eyes and saw the white, taut anger in them and knew as certainly as if she had done it herself that Virna had not stepped out by accident. She had meant what she did and now meant for Damaris to know it. Only with difficulty did Damaris wrench her eyes away, yet still felt Virna’s angry gaze on her back as she rode on.

And then, without warning, her throat closed, cutting off her breath so suddenly she had no time for any sound. In a panicked need for air, she dropped her reins and grabbed her throat with both hands.

Lauran turned toward her. “What’s wrong?”

She could not tell him. Desperate blood roared in her ears and there was no air for her lungs. Horribly no air. Darkness swirled up into her mind. She tried to fight clear of it, fought to breathe.

Failed.

And then knew nothing. Not even the darkness.

PART II

Four years later…

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CHAPTER FIVE

For the next few weeks, however, Damaris found that her best chance of seeing Lauran again was not by way of visiting Irene, but by being out and about with Nevin and Kellan, since her cousins and Lauran were together more days than not.

“Making up for lost time,” Kellan told Damaris.

“And avoiding his mother,” Nevin added.

“And you two having no more sense when you’re around him than you ever had,” Aunt Elspeth said the evening her sons came to supper late and damp from climbing near a waterfall farther up the dale with Lauran who was going to be even later to his supper, having farther to go to home. “Let you be glad you weren’t with them today, Damaris.”

Uncle Russell shared a grin with both boys and said, “They’re sensible enough under it all. Lauran has been talking to me, and my guess is he’ll steady to his duties at Ashbrigg by autumn’s end, once these two are off to school again and stop bringing him into ill ways. There are brains in that handsome head of his, no matter what he pretends. Which is more than I’m willing to say about these two oafs of ours,” he added with a dire look at them that no one, including them, took seriously.

The trouble for Damaris was that when Lauran grew used to her sometimes being with Nevin and Kellan, he was the same toward her as they were, and it was impossible for her to remember he was handsome and think him charming while he and Kellan were trying to put a frog down the back of her dress and she was both avoiding it and throwing stream water at them. As the summer went through July, Lauran became less the handsome youth from the next manor and more like simply another cousin.

But she could not be always with her cousins and him. Instead, she often kept company with Irene, a kind of friendship growing between them. Their talk – mostly Irene’s talk – was of clothing and of all she had seen and the admirers she had had while traveling with her mother. Damaris could not quite understand how she could have had so very many admirers, being only two years older than Damaris and not even come out yet. Irene talked much of her coming out. “Not that it can be here in Glavedale,” she said more than once. “There’s simply no society here, just friends. It will have to be in York, with my aunt and uncle. They’ve a very fine house that will suit perfectly. I might even be able to use their carriage instead our shabby old one. Surely I will. They won’t want to be embarrassed by their niece!”

She also confessed to Damaris in absolute and utter confidence that she had romantic hopes of both Nevin and Kellan. “I’m awfully used to them, of course, but they are handsome and there’s no one else nearby at all.”

As nearly as Damaris could tell, Irene was not particular which of their hearts she captured so long as she captured one of them. Unfortunately, Nevin and Kellan seemed never home, or else just leaving, when Irene came to Thornoak, and were as adept as Lauran at avoiding teatime at Ashbrigg, leaving Irene mostly reduced to fluttering at them in the churchyard after service each Sunday. And that, she said, was hardly satisfactory, with Father Gedney there to hear and see everything, making Nevin and Kellan shy of talking with her.

Damaris kept to herself her doubt that kind old Father Gedney was the trouble, and tried to help, but her best suggestion – that Irene join her in riding with them – Irene scorned as altogether too hopeless, protesting, “Have you ever ridden with them?  They’re all hopelessly thoughtless. As if I went riding for the sake of breaking my neck!”

Since Damaris had never ridden with anyone else, she hadn’t known there was anything amiss with how her cousins rode and forbore to tell of the race she had won yesterday across the river meadows, Nevin, Kellan, and Lauran all having to pay her a shilling apiece afterward. Without being told, she was fairly sure Irene would be appalled at both the racing and her winnings.

Along with all of that, hours were still happily spent learning with Aunt Elspeth in the garden and making visits with her to elderly and ill folk, taking them medicines and – to the poorer ones without family – sometimes food. The weather held bright and dry, perfect for the haying; the sweet smell of the freshly cut grasses laid in their swathes across meadow after meadow, drying in the sun, filled the air.

Toward the end of haying, though, there came a morning when Damaris, sitting with the household mending at the parlor window, saw one of the field workers running up the drive toward the front door with an urgency that made her throw the mending aside and start for the hall, calling for Aunt Elspeth. Her aunt was there before her, come from somewhere else in the house and already opening the door to the man, who gasped out, “It’s Ted Higgins. Cut with a scythe. They’re bringing him.” Without hesitation, Aunt Elspeth ordered, “Damaris. My box. Rags. Bandages. Hot water. Agnes.” Damaris ran to obey, met Agnes already hurrying from the kitchen but exclaimed her message anyway as Agnes passed her, put her head in the kitchen to order Betty to begin heating water, then fled to the herb room to gather up a pile of folded linen bandages, another of clean rags, and her aunt’s box of medicines and instruments. As she returned quickly along the hall a cluster of men were laying a woven field hurdle bearing a groaning man on the drive in front of the doorstep, the hurdle being too wide to come through the door. She thought they would lift Ted Higgins then and bring him in, but they all stepped back for Aunt Elspeth to come to him there, and Damaris had horrified sight of why they did not want to lift him: his trousers were soaking with dark blood flowing far too freely from what must be a deep cut on his right thigh. Until then, Damaris had never seen more blood than came from a small cut nor a man so badly hurt he was fighting not to writhe with his pain, but Aunt Elspeth, with her sleeves shoved up, was already on her knees beside him, saying, “This has to be stopped before he’s lost enough to kill him,” with such steady certainty that Damaris steadied too, understanding that paralyzing dismay would not be forgiven.

Her aunt looked around, nodded for her to put the box, bandages, and rags beside her, and ordered again, “Hot water.” Damaris set everything down, then ran to the kitchen where Betty was putting a fresh kettle of water to heat on the stove. Not waiting for that, Damaris filled a wide metal basin from the tea kettle always warming at the back of the stove and went with it as quickly as sloshing allowed. By then Aunt Elspeth had cut Ted Higgen’s pant leg away from the wound and was taking things from her box, readying to do more while Agnes on her knees beside her was pressing a wad of rags to his leg, hoping to slow the flowing blood. Damaris set down the basin beside her aunt who did not look around but ordered, “The syrup. You know the one. Bring it.”

Damaris knew which she meant. It would ease Ted Higgins’ pain and quiet him while Aunt Elspeth did what had to be done. But all the while she was fetching it, she was thinking how he was to be married at the end of harvest to pretty Ellen Sawyer and must not – must not – die. And yet she knew how easily he could with a wound like that.

Giving the syrup to Agnes, she went for another basin of hot water from the kitchen, dumped the bloodied water in the first basin into the flower bed beside the front door, and was sent then by Aunt Elspeth to make a poultice, her aunt saying which herbs she wanted in it without looking up from her work on the groaning man. Damaris left the emptied basin with Betty in the kitchen, telling her to fill it and take it to Aunt Elspeth, and then went fearfully to the herb room. Until now, she had never worked there alone and at first her hands shook as she mixed and ground the herbs in the mortar. But as she found she knew what she was doing, she steadied. By the time she returned to the front door carrying the readied poultice, the drug had taken hold on Ted Higgins; he lay quietly, eyes shut, no longer groaning or trying not to writhe with the pain; and Agnes took the poultice from her with, “Best you help your aunt now. My hands haven’t the strength they used to,” so that Damaris found herself kneeling beside Aunt Elspeth, holding Ted Higgin’s leg to keep the wound closed instead of gaping while her aunt carefully sewed it shut with small, neat stitches, explaining to Damaris how and why as she did it. After that she bandaged the poultice in place over the wound, sat back on her heels, and said to the men gathered in a tight knot close by, “He’ll do for now. Take him home before his mother and Ellen hear of it and fly to pieces. Put him to bed. Tell his mother he’s to stay there, that I’ll send some strengthening broth he must drink when his wits come back to him, and that I’ll come tomorrow to see how he does.”

The men all gave hearty nods. Aunt Elspeth rose and stepped back, and they took up the hurdle again and left, careful with their carrying. Watching them go, with Agnes and Damaris standing on either side of her, Aunt Elspeth said, “His mother will see to him. He’ll do well enough.” She looked down at her bloodied apron and Agnes’ and Damaris’ skirt. “And so shall we, once we’ve changed and had a cup of tea.”

Damaris looked down, surprised to find blood on her. Surprised, too, to find it did not matter. What mattered was what they had done and that Ted Higgins, while he might limp down the aisle to his wedding, would be alive to do it.

* * * * *

Other than that single alarum, the summer days passed mostly easily. More easily than even last summer’s, since the shadow of her parents’ deaths was not wrapped so close around her, and there were Lauran and Irene, too.

But there was also Virna.

Damaris, left to herself, might well have let herself forget about the full moon, both the one past and the one coming nearer with every night, but Virna was there too much, with her watching eyes and tight, mocking smile. Damaris was careful never to be alone with her, but there was no way to avoid Virna’s sly, sidewise looks at her behind Aunt Elspeth’s back. Those had been questioning at first, until Virna seemed to guess that Damaris had failed her dare. Then they became challenging, reminding her that time was passing, that another night was coming when the moon would be full, and goading her to dare better this time.

And inevitably the night of the next full moon came. Sharply aware of it all day, Damaris saw no sign that anyone else at Thornoak was, the ordinary day slipping into an ordinary evening. It being summer, the daylight lingered long, with twilight still blue outside the parlor windows when Betty brought in the tea. As usual, Aunt Elspeth poured and Damaris handed the cups around, taking her own from the table last and going to sit on the cushioned stool. The tea was a familiar one, a strong Indian blend that Uncle Russell favored and she had drunk uncounted times. But tonight…

After her first long sip, Damaris paused, set down her cup in its saucer and avoided staring into it while she ate a biscuit.  There could not truly be a difference in the taste, she told herself. It was only her imagination, worked on by Virna, making her think something was there that was not. Sure of that, she drank again, slowly. But with every sip, trying to convince herself there was nothing different, she became more certain there was a very subtle herbal savor, almost lost under the strong Indian taste but there.

And yet she drank her cup empty, made her good nights, and left the parlor. Agnes was waiting for her in the hallway just as always, and just as always, Damaris went up the stairs ahead of her, and by the time they reached her room was so suddenly sleepy she could hardly move through readying for bed.

Clinging to the fading edge of awake, she thought: Just as I was when the moon was full last time. And on Midsummer’s Eve, she thought distantly but only in the last moment before she slid over into sleep, with no dreams that she remembered afterward.

* * * * *

The morning’s early sunshine was slanting up the wall beside her bed when she awoke. She lay looking at it, clear-headed and rested but with no urge to rise, finding she had awakened with the same thoughts she had gone to sleep with. Now, whether she wanted to or not, she was sorting through them, accepting that twice that sudden sleep had come on her, and that last night there had been a strange taste in the tea, subtle but there. Did that taste and the sleep go together?  If they did, did the strange sleep happen only to her, or to the others, too?  Surely not, because if it came on them the way it came on her, they would never make it to bed at all. But if that were the way of it, why her and no one else?

Or was this all something she was only imagining, lured to it by Virna?

That would be best.

And all she need do was simply ask Aunt Elspeth if it was real or not. Or Uncle Russell. Or Nevin or Kellan. Or even Agnes. Surely none of them would lie to her.

Even as she had the thought, she knew she would ask none of them. How could she?  Aside from how she could ask such a thing without sounding witless, how could she let any of them think she had such a thought at all?  How could she let any of them think she doubted them?   It was Virna she distrusted, not Aunt Elspeth or Uncle Russell or anyone else. All this was Virna’s poisoned words working in her, she told herself fiercely. Virna’s poisoned words and Virna’s lies!

And yet… and yet…

She slipped from bed and rummaged in her worktable’s drawer where weeks ago she had put her notes on the Old Ways and given them no more heed, too taken up with the garden and all else that came with summer. Finding a blank sheet of paper among them, she noted down Midsummer Eve’s date and under it the date of the last full moon and under that yesterday’s date.

She sat for a time, looking at what she had written, but no new thoughts came to her and finally she shoved the paper in among the others and closed the drawer.

* * * * *

In the following days, Damaris no longer tried to hide how she was avoiding Virna. Aunt Elspeth must have noticed, but said nothing. Virna surely noticed, but did nothing except to smile at her, hard-eyed and mocking, behind Aunt Elspeth’s back.  She needed to do nothing more: Damaris was all too aware of the days slipping away, ever nearer to the next full moon.

But the moon was not yet full when, yet again, the sudden sleep came on her one night. Because she had not thought to be wary of her tea that evening, she could not say whether there had been any subtle added taste to it or not, but in the morning she had no doubt about the sleep, and even while keeping a tight, denying hold on her thoughts, she rummaged the list of dates out of her drawer and added another.

Time came when there was little more than a week left until the moon would be full, but only five days until Nevin and Kellan would return to school, to be gone until the Christmas holidays, and for their last few days at home, they and Damaris were released from almost all their duties, to roam and wander as they would. Together they spent the time making the boys’ farewells to folk and places up and down and back and forth across the dale. On the next to last day they rode far east along the top of Ashbrigg Scar, where the stone bones of the high hills broke through the turf in a mile-long cliff between the moors and pastures. At the scar’s far end, as the hill smoothed out from cliff to slope, they turned down into the dale through a stand of trees and passed through a gateway in the stone wall that kept the moor’s rough heather and bracken back from the fields. From there they followed a farm track that wound between the fields down to the main road beyond Ashbrigg Manor, where they turned westward, back toward Thornoak. It was the long way home but they were in no hurry, and when they came on Lauran leaning on the wall beside the gate into one of his manor’s great fields where his workers were cutting the last rows of the barley harvest, they drew rein, with the two hounds who had come with them flinging down full length on the grassy edge of the road, panting and content to stop.

“How goes it?” Nevin asked with a nod toward the field.

“The best harvest we’ve had in years,” Lauran answered. “How is it at Thornoak?”

“A little behind here. We’re beginning tomorrow.”

Lauran glanced at the sky. “The weather will probably hold?”

“Mother says so.”

“Then it will,” said Lauran.

A companionable silence settled among them while they watched the last of the barley go down. When all but the last handsworth had been cut, the last reaper straightened and stood aside, his sickle slack in his hand. The other reapers gathered toward him into a circle and Lauran said, “Here we are then.  Time to go out.”

As if something had belatedly occurred to him, Nevin began, “I don’t think we…”

But Lauran had already moved to lift Damaris down from her saddle, saying mockingly at Nevin and Kellan as he set her on her feet, “Afraid of a doll and some shouting?”

Damaris understood neither that nor why Nevin flushed deeply red and Kellan went quite still. But as Lauran swung the gate open, Kellan shrugged and said with a light half-laugh, “Come on, Nevin. There’s nothing much. It isn’t anything that’s not done elsewhere.”

Nevin’s expression seemed to say otherwise, but he held silent and followed his brother in dismounting and going with Damaris and Lauran into the field. The circle of men and women around the last standing barley opened to let Lauran come among them. He took Damaris’ hand and took her forward with him. “So you can see better,” he said, glancing at Nevin and Kellan as if daring them to protest that. Neither of them did, and Damaris would not have heeded them if they had. She liked the feel of her hand in Lauran’s and went with him willingly among the circled workers to the edge of the open space they had made around the last standing barley. All their light talk had dropped away. Except for a crow making demands from the top of an oak at the field’s edge, a silence deep as the moment before Father Gedney began a prayer in church now held the gathering.

Into the silence and the space, an old man, surely the oldest person there, stepped forward. In their midst, alone with the barley, he began patiently and skillfully to plait the uncut grain on itself. His hands were ridged, veined, spotted with age and none too steady, but steadily, surely, he formed the long stalks into the crude shape of a woman in full skirts, her arms outstretched.  When he had finished and stepped back, someone still in deepest silence handed a sickle to Lauran. In equal silence he turned and held it out to Damaris. For a moment, with everyone’s gaze on her, she did not know what was wanted of her, what she was supposed to do. Then quite suddenly and clearly, looking into Lauran’s eyes as he looked into hers, she understood and with a confident smile, took the sickle from him, went forward, and a little awkwardly, unfamiliar with a sickle but cleanly enough at the last, cut off the barley close to the ground, holding it with her other hand to keep it from falling over. When she had finished, she straightened up, lifted the barley woman above her head and turned all around in a circle for everyone to see, warm with a sense of triumph out of proportion to what she had done, but a triumph everyone seemingly shared because they all – from Lauran to the old man who had woven the barley, to the men and women still in the strength of their years, to girls no older than herself – shouted out, “The Maiden!  The Maiden!”, and the men tossed their sickles up glittering into the air, to deftly catch them above their heads while the women and girls pushed forward, crowding around Damaris to take the barley woman from her. They suddenly had ribbons in their hands, and as they began tying the ribbons to the figure, Lauran took her arm and drew her away through the crowd, toward Nevin and Kellan who had stayed apart from it all, explaining in her ear as they went, “It’s an old custom. Old as can be. Even here no one thinks harvest would be rightly done without it. At Thornoak…”

They had reached Nevin and Kellan at the gate, and more abruptly than need be, Nevin interrupted with, “We have to be off home. Come on, Damaris.”

Lauran immediately let loose her hand without finishing what he was about to say and stepped back, making a slight and almost formal bow to Nevin, his smile gone. The afternoon was late enough that, yes, they should be going home, but there was something else – something in Nevin’s abruptness and the mischief still in Lauran’s eyes – that made her look from one to the other and then at Kellan, wanting someone to say why. But Kellan was staring at the ground and Lauran and Nevin at each other. Annoyed at the moment’s pleasure being spoiled and no one likely to tell her why, she shoved between her cousins and away from Lauran, went to Fansome and mounted. From that greater height she said down at them, “Thank you, Lauran,” and, “Come on then, Nevin. Kellan.”

She was turning Fansome away as Nevin and Kellan swung into their saddles. Lauran, as easily as if nothing beyond the ordinary had just passed among them, said, teasing, “You have a wonderful time back at school, my lads. I’ll be thinking of you penned up while I’m not.”

Nevin made a rude, albeit friendly, sound, and Kellan said, “At least we’ll learn something while we’re at it. That’s more than you ever bothered to do, oh ignorant one.”

“There’s learning and learning,” Lauran called after them.

Looking back as they rode away, Damaris saw him going to rejoin the workers now gathering to follow the last laden harvest cart out of the field, singing on their way toward the barns.

“Ah, alas,” said Kellan beside her. “Are you pining after him? Has Lauran won another lady’s heart?”

Damaris disparaged that with a huffing sound.

“That makes two hundred and twenty-four, doesn’t it?” Nevin asked.

“At least,” Kellan agreed. “If not more. And that’s only here in Glavedale.”

Too used to her cousins’ teasing to rise to that bait, Damaris said loftily, “Pray, don’t include me in that count. I gave up adoring him months ago.”

Kellan placed a hand on his chest as if in shock and cried, “How could that be?  How could you alone deny his charms?”

“Easily,” Damaris returned, laughing. “All I had to do was realize he’s no better than the two of you!”  And giving them no chance to answer that, she heeled Fansome into a gallop for home, leaving Nevin, Kellan, and the dogs to try to catch her.

* * * * *

Two days later her cousins departed for school with much complaining and protest, leaving Thornoak feeling very empty without them.

As if they had taken the last of summer with them, the weather turned to chill rain under thick clouds for days on end. The night of the full moon came, but there was nothing strange about it – no taste in the tea or sudden sleep, and Damaris awoke in the morning with a vague sense of disappointment. Still nestled into her covers, she wondered if she had been wrong about the moon having anything to do with anything. But then she sat up, smiling at a different thought. Maybe nothing was happening at all! Maybe it was simply her imagining something that wasn’t there!

Cheered by that, she got up and wrote yesterday’s date on her list, then drew a line through it, to show that nothing had happened.

A west wind rose that afternoon, driving the clouds and their rain away, leaving the sky crisply clear to mirror her cheer. The day passed and the evening came and…

She tasted nothing wrong with the tea, but then she had not been looking for it, and even if she had been, the strongly flavored anise-seeded cake Agnes brought with the tea would have masked the lesser taste. The morning after that, though, she had no doubt about the sleep that had swept over her.

Almost angrily, she took the now-hated list from her drawer and added yesterday’s date to it.

Then, less than a week later, there was another night of that sudden sleep. Because that made no sense at all to Damaris, she left the list untouched in her drawer the next morning, telling herself that since the sleeps were so random, they meant nothing and the list was pointless. But at mid-day she gave way and went all the way up to her room to add yesterday’s date. “For what it’s worth,” she told herself rebelliously and afterwards refused to think about it.

The last signs of summer were gone, faded into deep autumn. The days drew in to darkness sooner; the nights lengthened. Sieges of drizzling rain set in, bringing coughs and chills and rheums. The hours that had been spent in the garden were now spent in Aunt Elspeth’s herb room as she worked to supply remedies and eases for all the complaints that came to her. Damaris had far more share this year than last in the making of poultices, concoctions, and brews, and was glad for it; she loved her aunt’s herb room, with its baskets and hanging bunches of dried herbs, the labeled small boxes and sealed jars of readied medicines, the jars of creams and lotions for weather-hurt hands and faces, the sweet or spicy potpourris to freshen sick rooms. The mingled smells and the warmth from the small fireplace made the room a pleasant haven in the drear autumn-into-early-winter days, even with Virna too often there, with her sideways looks and crooked, mocking smiles at Damaris that Aunt Elspeth never seemed to notice.

Damaris could endure Virna because making a poultice for Mrs. Calvert’s chest or a healing cream for a shepherd’s cold-cracked hands or whatever else Aunt Elspeth set her to, kept her mind from wandering where she did not want it to go. There was also her friendship with Irene to distract her. Even as the weather worsened, there were days when she could ride to Ashbrigg, or Irene come to Thornoak. Lauran showed up surprisingly often, too, coming to talk with Uncle Russell about some manor matters or wanting advice, then often staying to supper and sometimes for part of an evening before riding home in the dark.

The next full moon came – they seemed to come so often now that they were in her mind  – in the middle of a week of constant, drizzling rain. This time, despite herself, Damaris stayed aware of the evening tea not only on the full moon night but each night to either side of it, but neither the strange, faint taste nor the strange sleep came. Not on those nights or any near to them. That had to mean it was the weather that made the difference, Damaris thought. But why?

She did not know, could not imagine, and so – yet again – deliberately turned away from thinking about it.

Not thinking about it proved a useless refuge. Hardly a week later, at October’s end, the sleep came again. This time it was a spice cake rich with cinnamon that concealed any slight difference there might have been in the taste of the tea, but again Damaris awoke in the morning from the strange sleep unable to deny it had happened but seemingly farther than ever from understanding it. Last night had been clear, but there had been several other clear nights since the last full moon had passed in rain. So did the weather matter or didn’t it?  Did the sleep have to do with the full moon or didn’t it?  Or – and this she was very ready to believe – was it all no more than her imagination, a lie started in her mind by Virna?

Damaris liked that last answer best and took it with her downstairs to breakfast and afterward into the stillroom for her morning work with her aunt and – unfortunately – Virna, who seemed unusually sullen today. Or maybe it was simply that she was hiding her ill temper less well than usual.

Whichever way it was, there came a time when Aunt Elspeth was called away to settle some matter in the kitchen, leaving Damaris weighing out the herbs for a mixture to ease coughs while Virna was sorting small boxes on one of the shelves. But with Aunt Elspeth gone, she turned on Damaris and said in a harsh whisper, “You haven’t done anything, have you?  You haven’t heeded my warning at all. About the full moon or anything.”

Damaris froze, knew how that betrayed her, and returned to her weighing, saying without looking at Virna, “There’s nothing to do anything about. You’re making it all up.”

“Am I?”  Virna left the shelf, came far too close for Damaris’ comfort, and hissed in her ear, “Did you sleep well last night?  Deeply and dreamless?  The way you have other nights?”

Damaris stiffened but went on with the herbs, refusing to look at her or make any answer.

Virna drew back a step, and now there were taunting and mockery in her voice as she said, “You don’t understand anything at all, do you? And you don’t want to. You’re just a silly little girl.”

Angry with her fear, Damaris finally looked at her, furious, and whispered fiercely back at her, “So if you think it so important that I know, why don’t you tell me about it?”

Virna’s mouth twisted, losing its loveliness, going ugly as she seemed to fight herself over answering or not. The hard fury in her eyes said she very much wanted to, while some even stronger urge held her back.

Having come unheard along the passage, Aunt Elspeth appeared in the doorway at Virna’s back. Even before the flinch of Damaris’ eyes past her shoulder could have warned her, Virna went rigid, then smoothed the fury and mockery from her face and said as she turned around, her voice gone smooth to match her face, “My lady, we were just about to…”

“You will come with me, Virna.”

Aunt Elspeth said it evenly and turned away in seeming expectation that Virna would follow her. Virna did, sending a last venomous look at Damaris as she went out.

Damaris, her throat tight and a knot in her stomach, set the small bag of herbs she had been weighing on the scale again, having lost all idea of what they weighed while she was resisting Virna’s taunting.

In a while her aunt came back without Virna, returned to her place at the worktable, and said in an even voice as she took up the pestle with which she had been grinding dried thyme leaves in a mortar, “Virna will not be coming here again.”

Startled, Damaris opened her mouth to ask why, but Aunt Elspeth said, without looking at her, “Do you remember what goes with thyme to make a chest rub against congestion?”

Given how often Damaris had made the rub these past weeks, the question was an easy one, and she answered automatically, at the same time understanding that not only did her aunt mean to say no more about Virna, no questions were to be asked either. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

Still, there was likely to be no better time to ask about Virna’s taunting, to simply begin, “Virna said…” giving Aunt Elspeth chance to answer with something that would make everything all right.

Yet the words would not come. Partly Damaris could not make them because any question that way seemed somehow a betrayal, as if she were willing to set Virna’s words against Aunt Elspeth. But also, treacherously, she was afraid of what her aunt might answer. That was Virna’s poison in her, she knew, but still she could not help it. There was too much right in her life; she was afraid to find there was something direly wrong.

So she did not ask, but let the moment slide away, willing to settle for being glad Virna was gone, willing to bury her unease under the familiarities of everyday where she would not have to look at it unless she chose to.

Until the next time the moon came on to full.

Continue with Chapter 6 tomorrow!

Or click here and read now:

Sharon Kay Penman started as one of my very favorite authors and has become a very dear friend. For the Midwinter Blog Tour, we had a very long discussion of where the ideas that lay at the heart of Circle of Witches came from… and what the book means to me. Please join us for a thoughtful lingering as the blog tour marches on.

- Margaret

Start with Chapter 1!

CHAPTER FOUR

Damaris went to breakfast the next morning embarrassed by how promptly she had fallen to sleep and expecting to be teased, but her cousins and uncle were deep in talk of the sheep-shearing and the likely price of wool this season. They gave her smiles and nods as she joined them but nothing else. Damaris supposed they might be trying to be kind, but she thought resentfully they could have done that better by letting her go to the bonfire last night.

Aunt Elspeth was not there, and Damaris asked Betty, coming in with a plate of fresh-baked muffins, where she was.

“Already gone out to the garden,” Betty said, setting the muffins closer to Damaris than to her cousins, giving her first chance before their quick hands.  “Says you’re to come out when you’re done, Miss.”

With nothing to say about sheep or wool and refusing to ask about last night – especially whether Nevin or Kellan had danced with Virna – Damaris ate in silence, left the men still talking sheep, and went out to the garden that was now in the full-leaved richness of late June, the flowers of high summer blooming in their scarlets and yellows and a few blues among the varied greens of other plants that had finished their year’s glories or were still to come to them. Aunt Elspeth, in the far corner from the gate, looked around as Damaris entered and raised a dirtied hand in greeting.

Damaris joined her, scooped her skirts around herself, and sat down on the grass. She thought maybe her aunt would say something about last night, but rather than that and as if yesterday hadn’t happened at all, Aunt Elspeth began to talk about the herbs she was weeding, just as usual. Damaris still felt wronged, but being wronged did not lessen her pleasure in learning; she leaned close and listened.

“You see how it spreads by its root along the surface,” Aunt Elspeth said, holding aside the spear-pointed leaves of a thick-grown bed of lily of the valley. “It grows abundantly, given the chance, and is useful…”  She paused and looked at Damaris.

Pleased she remembered what her aunt had told her in the spring when the plants were flowering, Damaris said, “It’s useful against inflammation of the eyes, palsy, and apoplexy. It comforts the heart and vital spirits, and in quieting disorders of the head and nerves. It need be used in only very small amounts for any of those.”

“Do you know why?”

Damaris paused, then shook her head. “Why what?”

“Do you know why it should be used in only very small amounts?”

“Oh.  Because that’s all that’s needed and enough is better than too much. Waste not, want not.”

Damaris stated that with assurance. It was something her mother had often said about almost everything, from a serving of dessert to rising early rather than late in the morning.

“Yes,” Aunt Elspeth agreed, but then added, “And also because the entire plant is deadly poison if too much is taken.”

Damaris looked at the quiet green leaves, remembering the tiny, bell-like, delicately scented, cream-white flowers, and wondering how there could be any danger in anything so lovely.

Aunt Elspeth went on talking of how the poison showed itself and what could be done against it, then went on to the tall monkshood. Damaris already knew it was serviceable in a decoction to wash venomous bites and against plant poisons.  Now Aunt Elspeth told how it was also deadly if taken in too great a quantity.

Damaris sat listening hard but also puzzled. Her aunt had never talked of anything but the good qualities of the plants she grew and used. Now, in the same quiet voice she had taught those, she detailed their dangers; and just as Damaris had learned the first, she now worked to learn these, disquieted though she was to find that plants that could be used to the good could likewise be used to the bad.

That brought a question to her mind, but she kept it to herself until, lessons done for a while, she and Aunt Elspeth were digging out the encroaching grass along the rose bed’s edge. The sun was warm, the quiet pleasant between them, and only after a while did Damaris ask, “Is Virna coming today?”  Because it was odd for Aunt Elspeth not to teach both of them together.

Aunt Elspeth went on working a stubbornly long grass root from the soil while answering, “No. Not today. Nor for several days.”

“Why?”

“Because I told her not to.”

Something final in her aunt’s voice stopped Damaris from asking anything else. They went on digging and pulling out the grass in the pleasant quiet, until finally Damaris said softly, “She doesn’t like me.”

Aunt Elspeth paused, sat back, and said, looking at a half-opened red rose in front of her, “I sometimes think that Virna doesn’t like anyone. Even herself.”

“She likes Nevin,” Damaris said, watching her aunt. “She said she meant to dance with him at the bonfire last night.”  And then, needing to know, she asked, “Does he like her?”

“No, Nevin does not,” Aunt Elspeth said sharply. She bent to her work again, wrenching out a long strand of ambitious root with unusual vigor. “Did I show you last year how to make a compress of roses to ease aching eyes?”

Damaris let herself be led away into talk of the various virtues of rosebuds, roses, and rose hips, keeping her wondering about Virna and Nevin to herself.

Still feeling wronged about the Midsummer bonfire, she kept that and much else to herself the next few days, until one morning, while Aunt Elspeth was still in talk with Cook over a kitchen matter, she went out to the garden before her and found Virna waiting beside the lavender bed as if she had never been away a single day. Her dress was simple; her hair was gathered back into a neatly fitted cap; her hands were folded demurely over her apron’s waist. Standing there gazing down at the budding lavender, she looked everything she was supposed to be. But seeing her, Damaris paused. And Virna, without raising her head, returned her look, staring from under her brows as if they would hide her face’s white anger.

Unbidden, Damaris suddenly thought:  She more than doesn’t like me. She hates me.

But that was so unreasonable a thought that she made herself smile and go forward and, trying to sound glad of it, said, “You’re back!”

“I’m back,” Virna agreed flatly. “What has your aunt been teaching you while I was away?”

Damaris turned aside, pretending a sudden need for a long look at the pink-flowered soapwort – used externally, it cured itching – while saying, “Just things. About rose decoctions and suchlike.”  Which was the truth but far from all the truth. Every day that Virna had not been there, Aunt Elspeth had gone on telling Damaris the ill things that plants could do as well as the good, things she had never said for Virna to hear.

“She said nothing about Midsummer night?” Virna demanded. “Has she told you anything about that?”

Stung and incautious, Damaris said back at her, “For all you said you’d dance with Nevin, you didn’t, did you?”

A flush darkened Virna’s face, unpleasant over her paleness. “If she told you that, she lied. Nevin danced with me and Kellan would have, too, if I’d wanted it.”  She moved toward Damaris with the tense grace of an angered cat. “Why do you think your aunt forbade me here this while except I made too bold with her Nevin?  He’d have made bold with me, too, if he’d had the chance, but she stopped him. She’s afraid of me, your aunt is. She’s afraid of me and a great many other things and you’re too simple-witted to see it.  The bonfire isn’t all you haven’t gone to. Stay awake at the next full moon until everyone should be asleep and mark what happens then.”

Damaris took a step back from the sudden lash of anger, but just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone, and Virna smiled as if they were friends and said, “You just remember that. Two nights from now when the moon is full and everyone should be a-bed, you watch out a window toward the stables and see what happens.”  Virna’s smile vanished. Voice low, hissing the words, she added, “Only best not tell your aunt. She won’t like it.”

Then, with a satisfied swish of her skirts, she turned away and went back to gazing at the lavender bed.

* * * * *

The rest of that day and through the next, Damaris kept as far from Virna as she could. She also tried to forget everything Virna had said, because someone who disliked her as much Virna disliked her would say anything to hurt her. Still, she found herself watching Nevin, looking for something about him to be different but seeing nothing. He seemed the same as always. So did everyone else.

Everyone but me, Damaris thought unhappily as she faced that something had seeped into her from Virna’s poisoned words, knowing that however much she told herself she wouldn’t, she would watch the stableyard when the moon was full and everyone should be asleep.

She sat silent over supper that evening, letting everyone else’s talk go on around her, not rousing to interest until over the pudding Aunt Elspeth said she had heard through Agnes from one of the maids that the Ashbriggs were said to have come home today.

“They’ve taken their time,” Uncle Russell said without surprise. “Where do you suppose Lauran persuaded his mother to go instead of coming straight home?”

“We’ll know soon enough, and all about it,” Aunt Elspeth said serenely.

“Things will be lively now,” Kellan grinned. “Lauran could always think of more things to do than ought to be done.”

“And you two always went along with him if you had the chance,” Uncle Russell said.

“Not always,” Nevin protested. “We’re not completely crazy.”

“It wasn’t so much the times they went along,” Aunt Elspeth said musingly, “as the times they thought of things and dragged him into them.”

“Dragged him?” Kellan exclaimed indignantly. “Lauran never needed dragging!”

“Remember the time–” Nevin began, and the talk went off into happy reminiscences that meant nothing to Damaris but distracted her until supper was over and they all settled as usual into the parlor. By the late-lingering midsummer light, Aunt Elspeth took up her embroidery. Nevin and Uncle Russell brought out two of the farm ledgers to check past records and discuss what best could be done with the high meadow above Headrow Farm. Damaris and Kellan settled to their usual happy arguing over a game of chequers.  For them arguing was part of playing, made easy by Kellan’s creative, one-sided, ever-changing of the rules.  Uncle Russell had once suggested that chess would provide even more opportunities for changing rules and arguing, but Kellan had claimed there would be no challenge in quarreling over something that was easy to quarrel over anyway.

“Besides,” he had added, “I can hold my own at chequers. Damaris is clever enough she might win at chess.”

“You only hold your own because you cheat,” Damaris had said, and they had set to quarreling about that, laughing while they did.

This evening, though – too aware of the deepening twilight and that tonight the moon would be full – she could not keep her mind to the game or quarreling, until Kellan quarreled at her for not quarreling, and that made her laugh and almost things were as usual.

Still, it was a relief when Betty brought the tea and biscuits that always ended an evening. That meant they would go up to bed now, and nothing would happen when the moon rose, and Damaris would know Virna was a liar.  Dry-throated from arguing with Kellan, she took the cup Aunt Elspeth passed to her and drank deeply. The biscuits were shared around, and when they were done and the cups and saucers returned to the tray for Betty to clear away, Aunt Elspeth said as always, “Are you for bed now, Damaris?”

Used to being the first sent off upstairs, Damaris made her good nights, kissed her aunt and uncle, and went out to find Agnes waiting as always for her in the hall to see her to bed. There seemed to be an idea that she would scant on washing if she were not supervised and tonight she might have, so sleepy by the time she reached her room that she only wanted to fall onto her bed and into sleep, but Agnes saw her through washing and into her nightgown, saying as she drew up the covers to Damaris’ chin, “Sleep well, child.”

Damaris nodded, turned on her side, and curled comfortably into sleep.

She awoke to the dim light of a cloudy morning that promised rain. Stretching out from under the covers, she lay for a while looking at the gray sky beyond her open curtains, not thinking of anything in particular, simply savoring being awake with a untouched day ahead of her all uncomplicated yet by any need to move. And then, unbidden and unsought, the thought came, “I’ve fallen asleep like that before.”

She sat up, trying to follow where that thought had come from and what it meant, her ease gone. What had been enough different about last night’s falling to sleep to make her think that?  She remembered she had been all awake downstairs, not sleepy in the least, but between the parlor and her room she had grown so heavy-tired she had hardly been able to keep to her feet while Agnes readied her for bed, and when she lay down, there had been no pause while her mind and body let go of the day and relaxed to sleep. Instead she had pitched into a black unknowing almost on the instant she had sunk into her pillow.

Exactly as she had on Midsummer’s Eve.

And hadn’t there been other times?

When?  When had she fallen asleep that way before?

She did not know, but was suddenly sure it had been more than once.

Slowly she dressed and went downstairs to breakfast. She was late, the last to arrive. Aunt Elspeth was just going out and kissed her lightly on the cheek in passing. “Join me in the garden when you’re ready, dear.”

Damaris nodded but lingered over her porridge and toast until her uncle and cousins had gone out, then slipped upstairs to look out an upper window into the garden.  As she had feared, Virna was there, working near Aunt Elspeth. Not ready to bear Virna’s knowing look and thin-cornered smile, she ran back down the stairs and out the front door, crossed the yard to the gateway onto the road and crossed the road to the stile in the stone field wall there that led to the path down to the river. She would rather spend the morning on her own and tell Aunt Elspeth why later – when she had thought of a why she could tell – instead of facing Virna now.

As it happened, even the feeble reason she finally chose was unneeded. She came home at mid-day with barely time to wash her hands before they all sat down to dinner, and all Aunt Elspeth said then was, quite kindly, “You enjoyed your walk?  Agnes said she saw you leave,” and returned to listening to Uncle Russell’s talk about sheep. Only later, in the garden together, with Virna not yet returned from her own dinner in the village, did Aunt Elspeth smile at her and say, “You like Virna less all the time, don’t you?”

It was a near guess to why she had stayed away, but enough of a miss that Damaris was gratefully able to answer, “I don’t think I like her at all anymore.”  Then, because the question had been in her too long to keep, she asked, “Why is she here? Why do you let her come here?”

Aunt Elspeth went on gathering together a sprawl of sage to see if it might do better tied into a tidier clump while she answered, her words considered and slow. ”There’s no need for me to be the only healer here. She has a deep skill with herbs and healing. I’d hoped – I still hope a little – she would learn to use well what knowledge I gave her.”

“But she’s angry at you. If you’re teaching her, why is she angry at you?”

Aunt Elspeth let go of the sage and looked around to meet Damaris’ gaze with her own. Quietly, seriously, as if this was a lesson she particularly wanted Damaris to learn, she said, “She’s angry at me because I’ve not taught her what she wants most to know. I’ve hoped she would turn what I teach her to more good than her mother and grandmother ever did, but – too much like them – what Virna most wants is to have power over people. She’s angry at me because I won’t teach her that. She thought I would, but I won’t.”

Confused, Damaris looked around the garden. Everything here was for medicines or soothing teas or sweet-scented potpourries. She knew some could be harmful as well, so that care had to be taken, but nothing here was for the sake of having power over anyone.

As if understanding what Damaris did not say, Aunt Elspeth answered, “You see it that way and so do I. Virna does not. If nothing else, she wants the sick to come to her so she can show her power over them by making them well. She would make money at it if she could. She thinks I’m a fool because I do what I do out of love and for nothing else.”

Fierce with sudden anger, Damaris said, “She’s the fool!  I wouldn’t go to her for anything even if I were dying, whether I had to pay or not!”

Aunt Elspeth smiled. “If you were actually dying, you might feel differently.  But, yes, I feel that way about her, too.”

“Then why are you teaching her?”

Aunt Elspeth’s smile saddened. “I had hope that she’d change. That she’d learn more than herbs from me. But she hasn’t. She’s set her mind and her heart too much to one thing, and I doubt anything but her desire is very real to her anymore.”

“What desire?” Damaris asked, wondering if her aunt meant Nevin.

Aunt Elspeth looked startled, as if she had not meant to say that last thing aloud, then shook her head and said, “Let’s see to the thyme. It wants to creep anywhere but where I meant it to.”

Damaris accepted that talk of Virna was over. In a way she was glad; even that much to do with Virna made her uncomfortable. It maybe made her aunt uncomfortable, too, for when Virna came a little later, Aunt Elspeth set her to working alone at the far end of the garden while she and Damaris worked on together at edging the thyme, the sunshine warm on their shoulders now that the morning’s possibility of rain had ended, their silence companionable until Betty came out to tell them, “Mistress Ashbrigg, Master Ashbrigg, and Miss Irene are on their way here. Albert was washing the carriage in the stableyard and saw them coming along the road. Cook’s been warned to start tea.”

Aunt Elspeth rose, unwillingly distracted from her work. “They only came home yesterday. I didn’t expect them to come calling so soon. Meant to visit them first. And who knows where Russell and the boys are, so there’ll be only Damaris and I to see them. And no time to change.”  She looked down ruefully at her gown. It was one of her plain work dresses, and though she gardened neatly enough that she was not dirty except for her hands, the dress was old and certainly not meant for receiving guests. Damaris was dressed much the same, though not quite so cleanly anymore. Aunt Elspeth looked herself and Damaris over and shrugged with a little laugh. “Ah well, Ellen Ashbrigg is used to me. Thank Cook for starting the tea. Come, Damaris, we must at least wash our hands and faces for them. Virna, you may as well go home. We won’t do more today.”

Virna rose and curtsied, the very blankness of her face betraying that she was feeling something she did not mean to show as she said, “Yes, mistress.” Damaris felt her eyes burning at their backs as they left the garden.

She and her aunt had scrubbed their nails free of any hint of dirt and tidied themselves a little before Agnes came to say she had seen the Ashbriggs into the parlor. Damaris had grown used to meeting people in her aunt’s company, but was always glad it was her aunt to whom people wanted to talk, letting her stay shyly and contentedly in the background as much as possible. She was hoping for the same now, as Mistress Ashbrigg rose from the parlor sofa to greet Aunt Elspeth with a wide embrace sufficiently distant not to disturb the ample lace emboldening the front of her gown. The next few moments were a flurry of Mistress Ashbrigg’s greetings and exclaims over how everything and everyone had so changed while they were gone and how wonderful it was that Elspeth looked the same as always and this grown young lady must be the poor, dear niece, how delightful to meet her, and surely she and Irene would be the best of friends, wouldn’t they.

Damaris and Irene came obediently forward to be properly introduced, Irene smiling readily, Damaris somewhat less willingly, immediately aware that although Irene looked to be much her own age, she had the advantage of town-bought gown and bonnet and school-bred poise over Damaris’ home-made gown and uncertainty. But Irene, rather than noticing that, seemed honestly delighted to meet Damaris, giving Damaris hope of warming to friendliness, although they had chance of no more than, “Hello,” and “Good afternoon,” between them before Mistress Ashbrigg was going on, “And Lauran of course. The best to last. Hasn’t he grown, Elspeth?”

Lauran Ashbrigg had placed himself the other side of the parlor from his mother and sister, well apart from the opening flurry of greetings, so only now, turning toward him with her aunt, Damaris saw him straight on. Since all she knew of him was that he was a few years older than Nevin and had been in mischief with them all the time they were growing up together, she was not ready for the tall, gracefully built gentleman with golden brown hair who came forward to bow to Aunt Elspeth with a murmured greeting, then bent his head silently to Damaris who made a slight and silent curtsy back to him.

He had nothing of his mother’s softness and flutter about him, nor anything of the scapegrace of her cousins’ tales, and when he had finished his greetings, he moved aside to lean on the mantle of the fireplace, looking as at ease as if all the world were his and he was greatly pleased by it, while Aunt Elspeth was agreeing with Mistress Ashbrigg on how wonderful it was they were back and persuading her to sit again, the two of them together on the sofa, Damaris with Irene on the settee across from them. Damaris wanted to look at Lauran again, hoped he would say something so she could hear his voice more than the murmured greeting he had given Aunt Elspeth, but Irene was claiming her attention, saying, “It’s going to be such fun having you for a neighbor when there have been only boys all this while. And you’re pretty, too. We’ll make my brother and Kellan and Nevin take us to the dances in Skelfeld, and we’ll make all the men there swoon, we’ll be so lovely. They have balls there, you know.”

Damaris had not known and was momentarily distracted by the thought of Nevin and Kellan being made to do anything they did not want to do, while Irene burbled on, “Mother and I shopped profoundly all over France and Italy and Germany. You must come see what I have.” She touched delicately at the brim of her flowered straw bonnet. “But can you believe I got this when we paused in York, of all places? The new fashion in hats sets off one’s face so amazingly well, I think.”

“Yes,” Damaris agreed, while still resisting the urge to look at Lauran’s face. But under the flow of Irene’s happy talk, and her own answers, she heard him respond to one thing and another his mother occasionally said to him. Otherwise he held his silence, giving nothing of his own to the general talk, and Damaris wondered if she were the only one who felt his hidden laughter at them all. Certainly Irene did not, happily declaring, “We must become great friends. We can take walks together. I’ll show you all my favorite ones. There are some lovely ones along the river. And when the weather won’t let us walk, we can sit snug inside by the fire and look through all the fashion magazines I’ve brought home with me.”

“I shall very much like that,” Damaris said, and meant it. Both the shared walks in Irene’s delightful company and the fashion magazines. She remembered her mother and she had used to do that on rainy days – sit by the parlor fire looking through magazines together.

Tea came. Aunt Elspeth poured and Damaris handed the cups around, very aware of nearly touching Lauran’s hand as she gave him his. Irene took her cup with thanks and barely a pause in explaining her plans. “I don’t mean to be dull, even if we have come back to the country. At least now that we’re all home, we can have parties at Ashbrigg again. Lauran says he hates parties–”

“Because I do,” Lauran put in.

Damaris looked at him. There were irony and laughter at his sister in his face and in the glance he turned on Damaris. She quickly looked back to Irene who went on, unheeding his words, “–but he looks so wonderful in evening clothes that I can’t believe he means it. We simply have to have parties. I have this pale peach dress from Paris. It’s a year old now, but that hardly matters here and…”

Talk of clothes and of parties past and future saw out the rest of the visit. Only as they were in the hallway on their way to leaving did Aunt Elspeth say, momentarily aside to Lauran, “Nevin and Kellan are looking forward to times with you again.”

“So am I,” Lauran answered. “I’ve missed them.”  For once there was none of the hidden laughter under his voice. “And Thornoak. The only sanity in an otherwise quite mad world.”

Then his mother claimed his attention to help her down the step to the drive and into the carriage. He handed her in, then had to wait while Irene and Damaris exchanged a quick hug before helping his sister in, too, following her himself with a lithe leap and a flourish of his coat tails as he sat facing them, his back to the horses. Damaris stood beside her aunt on the doorstep to wave them all farewell, Aunt Elspeth asking as the carriage rattled away down the drive and out the gateway, “Will you be friends with Irene, do you think?”

Thinking that being friends with Irene, which promised to be a pleasure in itself, would also surely be a way to see more of Lauran, Damaris answered readily, “Oh, yes. I’m sure to be.”

Continue with Chapter 5 tomorrow!

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CHAPTER THREE

An outgrown pair of Kellan’s boots solved the problem of shoes, though it was three days before Damaris’ sore and swollen feet would fit into anything at all. The wrought iron bench in Aunt Elspeth’s garden was cushioned with pillows for her the first day, but then the weather turned rainy and she and her cousins spent the time in Uncle Russell’s study, building towns and fortresses and palaces with his books and the boys’ set of wooden blocks that Nevin and Kellan resurrected from an abandoned toy chest to amuse their cousin – and themselves, if they would have admitted it.

Nevin was a little too grown to lose himself in the game, though he was the best at structuring books into improbable towers; and twice he was called away to manor work with his father, a reminder that he was growing into other duties. But Kellan willingly let loose what dignity his fourteen years might have had.  When Damaris protested – because the edge of the study carpet was the shore, the bare stone floor the gray sea – “You can’t put a secret passage there. It’ll be under the harbor. They’ll drown,” Kellan easily answered, “They won’t. The tunnel is stone, beautifully mortared and sealed with magic against the sea coming in.”

“But you can’t build under the water.”

“They drained the harbor, built the secret passage, and let the water back in.”

“You can’t drain a harbor!  There’s a whole ocean outside of it!”

Kellan brooded over his creation briefly, then answered cheerfully, “They drain acres and acres of ocean out of Holland all the time. It was like that. Only here they let the water come back in. To hide the tunnel.”

He always had an answer that made sense, if she insisted on it, and their game went on, through the rise and fall of kingdoms and natural disasters – earthquakes were particularly satisfying, bringing all the book-built towers down in tumbled chaos – but on the fourth day after her first adventuring out beyond the safety of Thornoak’s walls, both the weather and Damaris’ feet were well, freeing her to go out into the plans her cousins had for her, and under the dark edge of her parents’ deaths, the summer turned to gold for her. Never once did Aunt Elspeth protest at her coming home torn or muddied or tired after hours of roaming with her cousins on foot and even more often on horseback, because Uncle Russell gave her a horse of her own, a pretty bay mare named Fansome, and gave her her first lessons in riding.

Agnes was heard to grumble, “First, she was forever under foot and now I can never find her except by the trail of dirt she leaves coming in.”

Aunt Elspeth only laughed at that, nor did Agnes truly mind. As Agnes herself told Damaris, she simply enjoyed a good grumble.

There were still rainy days, but Damaris soon learned only the worst weather was reason to stay in. A mere “thickening” of the air with misty rain soft against the face, or a chancy day, when rain and sun chased each other down the dale so fast it was a waste of time to heed them, were treated much the same as sunny days, so she was out and about in all manner of weathers. Down by the river they cheered stick boats past shoals and brushfalls or tried for trout that rarely cooperated with being caught. On the moors they followed the sheep-tracks under the huge sky. Along uncounted farm lanes and through the village, they met folk who all knew the boys and were cheerfully introduced to Damaris, with Nevin and Kellan adding comments on everyone they met when safely away from being overheard.

“Old Biggins, yes, don’t mind that he frowned at you. He’s the sort who complains when the sun shines because it makes everything so bright.”

“And gripes when it rains because it makes everything so wet.”

Or – “There’s Mrs. Thwaite of Laver Meadow Farm. She always wants to feed us whenever we go past her place.”

“And we let her because we don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“And because she bakes to a faretheewell. Even her bread is better than bread.”

They were not left completely to themselves. There were frequent days when their father claimed both boys. Then Damaris would return to Aunt Elspeth, but now the gardens and the house were no longer her hiding place. When her aunt went out about her visiting and nursing, Damaris as often as not went with her and learned of the dale folk in a different way from her cousins’, coming to know something of their sicknesses and hurts and sorrows, because her aunt seemed to administer to sad hearts as much as hurt bodies – Damaris’ own among them, though Damaris hardly knew it at the time.

What Damaris did realize was that Virna was not pleased with the change. Though there was nothing out of place in anything that Virna said or did around her, and though Aunt Elspeth seemed to notice nothing, Damaris was as sure of Virna’s anger at her as if Virna had slapped her face. She felt it without understanding it and kept away from Virna as much as might be. Aunt Elspeth seemed not to notice that, either, but Virna did and was pleased; Damaris felt her mocking pleasure as clearly as her covered anger and took care to avoid her even more.

In late autumn, at harvest’s end, the boys went grudgingly back to school, leaving Thornoak vastly empty without them. A few weeks later the first snowstorm swirled through the dale, and that night Damaris roused from sleep with one of her old nightmares. Sobbing, she made her way through the darkened house to her aunt’s and uncle’s bedroom, where Aunt Elspeth answered her uncertain tap at the door with, “Come, Damaris,” and Damaris ran to her, choking on fears and tears. Aunt Elspeth held up the covers for Damaris to scramble into bed beside her, tucked Damaris close to her and the blankets over them both, and held her, stroking her hair, until Damaris wore from her crying back into sleep again.

In the morning, Damaris tried to say how sorry she was, both for crying and for disturbing her aunt’s and uncle’s sleep, but Aunt Elspeth said kindly to her, “The grief will never go away. You’ll weep with it more than once, no matter how old you grow. All I can promise you is that the hurt lessens with time, but never deny yourself tears when you need them, or be ashamed of them.  Tears wash wounds clean.”

“And I can be woken in the night without taking offence,” Uncle Russell said lightly. “So long as I don’t have to get out of my warm bed.”

As he meant her to do, Damaris laughed a little at that and felt better; and not that snowy morning but the next, Uncle Russell set her behind him on his own tall horse and took her with him as he rode out about his business around the manor, so that the snow became only snow instead of a curtain opening on memories raw with pain, and in a while she slept in her own room again with no more nightmares.

The year went around, and her cousins came home from school for summer again. Last year, closed in by her fears and grieving, Damaris had mostly missed the spring and early summer, but this year, with the dale in a glory of green and the days streaked with sunlight and rain-shadows and winds off the moors, she and Nevin and Kellan were out and about together as much as might be.

For Nevin, that was not as often, his father wanting more and more of his time.  “It’s all right, though,” he told Damaris one morning as they crossed the stableyard together, he to fetch a ledger for his father from the stables, Damaris to go riding. “It’s called growing up and I have to do it.”  He had indeed gone on growing up while at school and now took advantage of his height to smile loftily down at her as he added, “I suppose you’ll grow up someday, too, for all you’re such a crayfish of a little girl now.”

That was an old teasing between them, and Damaris, only pretending offence, said back at him, her nose in the air, “I’ll grow up when I’m good and ready and not before,” and went her way to Fansome’s stall, leaving him to collect the ledger and go back to the house. Her mother had let her be friends with only a few other little girls because one caught colds and worse things from other children, even girls, so Damaris felt no lack in having only her cousins for companions and never wondered if they did. Surely they never seemed to. They talked sometimes of the Ashbriggs at the next manor down the dale, but Lauran, the son there, was just enough older he had gone off to university two years ago, and his widowed mother had promptly taken the chance to travel abroad with Lauran’s young sister Irene in tow and still no word of when they might be home.

“For Irene to see the world while she’s young enough to enjoy it. That’s what Mistress Ashbrigg said,” Nevin had explained one time.

“Whether Irene wanted to go or not,” Kellan had said. “And she didn’t, because she knew what her mother really wanted was to shop and gossip in new circles with hapless relations who can’t refuse her guest-room.”

“But Lauran will finish with university this year,” Nevin had said. “That means that come next summer they’ll likely all be home again.”

But this summer they were not, and because Nevin was so much with his father, Damaris mostly kept company with only Kellan when she was not with her aunt, until she caught a summer’s rheum that wanted to settle to her chest. Despite her protests, she was put to bed and kept there, with Agnes grumbling up the stairs to keep an eye on her and Aunt Elspeth bringing various potions to ease her cough and running nose. It seemed the only amusement she had, besides reading, was guessing what herbs were in the various drinks that came, and being told by Aunt Elspeth how right or wrong she had guessed.

By the third morning of her imprisonment she was mortally bored as well as rheum-ridden and greeted even Kellan with a scowl when he thumped up the stairs, shoved her door open, and came in with an armload of folded papers and a deal board that he dumped down on the edge of her bed with great satisfaction.

Ignoring all of that, Damaris declared with all the ill-temper she presently harbored against everyone not kept in bed the way she was, “I want out of here. I hate taking medicines and I hate being fussed over. I want out.”

“Maps,” said Kellan cheerfully, sorting through what he had brought, scattering them across her bed. “Here. You’ll like this.”  He laid the deal board across her lap and spread one of the maps open on it.

“I won’t,” Damaris said for form’s sake but was already bending forward to peer at the myriad lines and tiny writing.

“It’s Glavedale,” Kellan explained. “Look. Here’s Thornoak. And here’s Ashbrigg House. Did you hear they’re coming home soon, instead of next year?  Lauran has been shoved out of his college for reasons we probably will never be told, and his mother has sent orders to the servants to open the house and ready it for when they arrive. Whenever that will be. He’s gone to meet them somewhere on the continent. Italy, I think. Or Germany.”

That caught Damaris’ interest more than the map did. “Irene is my age, isn’t she?  Will we be friends, do you think?”

“If you can bear her chatter,” Kellan said callously. He pointed at something on the map. “Now here–”

“And Lauran. Will I like him?”

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Now look here. Ashbrigg House is new, hardly a hundred years old or so. See the way its name is written?  But Thornoak is old, built in the 1500s on the foundations of a house that was here before it for no one knows how long. And this–” he pointed to a spidery gothic script that said ‘St. Cedd’s Chapel, ruined’, “–is really old.  Maybe almost as old as whatever house was here before. And here.”  He pointed at a crossroads that was marked in the same fine script as having an ancient cross. “This is really old, too. And this.”  He pointed to the word `tumulus’ marked in the middle of what was probably someone’s pasture.

“Well, a tumulus would have to be old,” Damaris said, indignant he thought she might not know that. “Nobody has buried anyone in mounds for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Tumuluses have to be old.”

“Exactly.  So that’s what you have to look for. Things that have been where they are for hundreds and hundreds of years. Now look here.”  Kellan rummaged a ruler from under the maps and laid it on the map across her lap. The ruler’s straight edge ran neatly through the tumulus, the ancient cross at the crossroads, and St. Cedd’s ruined chapel. “See how they all line up with each other?”

“And so do that and that.”  Damaris pointed to a farm and another crossroads lying along the ruler’s edge.

“Exactly!” Kellan said with great approval. “Good. That’s what you’re supposed to see. But mind you, any old place on a line you think you’ve found has to be in sight of the other old places to either side of it. They have to be close enough together you can see from one to the next one. Otherwise it doesn’t count.”

“Doesn’t count?  What doesn’t count?  Why?”

“Because these are supposed to be markers on Old Ways. Those are ancient paths across the countryside marked by special places. It’s no good having markers if you can’t see from one marker to the next.”

“But why not just make a road?  Or a path. That would be easier to follow than places. And you wouldn’t have to worry about hills in the way.”  Damaris stared at the map, seeing the difficulties. “In fact a Way going straight across country is going to make an awful lot of trouble for itself.”

“So what do you think that means?” Kellan asked in the tone he used when he was challenging her to think her way out of something.

Damaris liked these challenges from him and sometimes gave him ones in return, so she took the trouble to think and finally said, “It means, I suppose, that if these are real and not just something you’ve made up, they were meant to be something more than just a road to travel on.”

He nodded and said, “That’s right. Only they were made so long ago we don’t know the why of them any more. But they’re there. It’s a game, you see.  Finding them. I’m supposed to be at the stables now, but see what you can find before I come back. But keep it our secret, all right?”

Damaris did not mind keeping secrets. The two of them and Nevin had had some good ones among themselves now and again, and she answered his grin with her own. He left her to it, and she spent a happy day with the maps. True to her promise, whenever Agnes came to see how she did and when lunch was brought and again when Aunt Elspeth came to see how she did at supper time, she hid the ruler and the scraps of paper she had begun to scribble notes on under the blankets, but she supposed the maps did not matter. She left them out, and Aunt Elspeth said, seeing them all over the bed, “Kellan said he’d find something for you to do. How clever of him.”

Damaris was allowed downstairs the next day. Her aunt’s firm ruling that she stay indoors and quiet was no trouble. The day was chill and uninviting with rain, but Uncle Russell’s study was warm with a fire on the hearth, and Damaris settled there happily, searching through his books for anything they could tell her about the places she had found on the maps. She did not always find answers, but was led on to other things that led her on to other books and others beyond those, until her mind was full of legends and old tales and ancient places; and when Kellan came in the late afternoon to see how she did, she looked up at him from where she sat on the study carpet surrounded by open books and demanded he take her out to follow Old Ways across the countryside.

Kellan pushed a large volume out of his way, making room for him to sit on the carpet near the fire. “I don’t think so,” he said easily. “You found them on the maps. Let it go at that.”

“Don’t you want to see if they can really be followed, see if they’re real and really there?” she protested, not believing for a moment he would not go with her.

But he said flatly, cheerfully, “No. I don’t.”

“Yes, you do!”  Damaris grabbed his arm in her two hands and squeezed hard, twisting while she did. “You do, too!”

“Stop it!” Kellan protested. “I don’t!”

From the doorway Nevin said, “If you bruise him, you’ll have to explain it to Mother.”  He nodded at Damaris’ piles of books. “What have you been doing?”

Forgetting it was supposed to be a secret between her and Kellan – secrets had always included the three of them, never just two – Damaris said, “I want to follow some of the Old Ways I found on the maps. I want to see if they’re really there, and I want him to come with me. And you, too.”

The laughter went out of Nevin before she had finished. “You idiot,” he said at Kellan.

As if he had actually done something wrong, Kellan answered uneasily, “It was a game to keep her quiet in bed with her cold. I just gave her the maps and showed her the game. That’s all.”

Not understanding what was the matter, Damaris put in, “That’s all he did.  Really. He gave me the maps and showed me what to look for and I did and now I want to see some of the places.”

Nevin looked from one to the other of them, grave doubt harbored in his face.  “That’s all?” he asked.

“That’s all,” Kellan said. Damaris nodded emphatic agreement.

“It better be.”  Nevin shook off his annoyance with a visible effort and grinned. “It’s geography for idiots. That’s why Kellan likes it. We can find better things to do. Want us to help you put these books away?”

As easily as that, he shoved the matter aside and, because of the look on Kellan’s face, Damaris let it go. But she remembered.

And a long while later, when it was too late, she understood.

But that summer all she understood was that Kellan and Nevin did not want to play the Old Ways game and she did, and if they would not go with her, she would go by herself. She still had her scraps of notes, one of them listing an aligning of places slantwise across Glavedale, from the church at Gillingthwaite not far down the dale from Thornoak, through a ford for crossing cattle below the bridge, then along a straight stretch of road – very few stretches of road were straight in Glavedale – to a crossroad that might be where the Old Way ended, because beyond there Lady Hill blocked the way. Or Lady Hill itself might have the next sighting place.

Damaris could see the long, high hump of Lady Hill across the dale from her bedroom window, stretching along the rising side of the valley just where the slope gathered itself and steepened to the moors, and Damaris thought that if she actually went there and indeed found that somehow the Old Way ran further, then she could crow to Kellan about having had an adventure without him. She kept her plan to herself of course and, declared well from her rheum, set out the first pleasant afternoon that came, having let Aunt Elspeth think she was going somewhere with Nevin and Kellan but knowing they were busy on some boy-concern of their own.

In the stable while she saddled Fansome, Albert, who saw to Thornoak’s horses and drove her aunt’s carriage when there was need, leaned on the stall wall to watch her and asked, as he was bound to do, “Where do you mean to be going today?”

He asked the same question of the boys and Uncle Russell when any of them rode out alone, to give him some idea of which way to set the search if they did not come back. Damaris had even heard him ask it when Nevin and Kellan rode out together, as if he had doubts about their good sense altogether. So she was ready and answered, “Toward Gillingthwaite, I think.”

“Not up to the moors then?” Albert asked.

“No. Just the dale today,” she said, and Albert nodded, satisfied with her answer – which at least had the virtue of being true – and she rode away from the manor so pleased with herself, and with the day that was so green and fair with summer, that she sang with quiet pleasure to herself and Fansome as she rode along the two miles of road to Gillingthwaite church. There Reverend Gedney was walking up the path to the church door as she passed the churchyard gate. He was an elderly gentleman who had been at St. Cuthbert’s Church since before her mother’s time, as he had told her when they were first introduced after the morning service one Sunday.

“And I’m very pleased to see her daughter here,” he had added, shaking her hand.

Damaris liked him, but there was little society between him and Thornoak so it was easy enough only to wave to him as she rode past. He waved back with a friendly smile and went on into the church. Damaris rode on, to bring Fansome to a stop at the corner of the churchyard wall. She had no map. They had all disappeared back to wherever Kellan had found them, and although someone would probably have told her where they were if she had asked, Nevin’s displeasure at them had made her wary, so all she had with her was her memory and a final, careful reading of her scrap-paper notes. But her memory was good, and if she was right, she should be able to see the ford across the Glave from this corner of the churchyard.

She found that she could. Even if she had not been on horseback, she could have seen over the low wall that surrounded the churchyard and its graves to the fields beyond and the gap in the trees along the river that told where the ford was.  Better yet, she could see in the far churchyard wall the gap of a stile leading to a field path that ran, straight as could be from the church toward the ford.  And now she found it might have been better to come on foot rather than horseback because she could not ride along that narrow way, could not even come to it except on foot. So she had to circle around to a farm track that went down to the river and follow it to the ford. There, looking back toward the church, she saw that the path and stile were lined up straight to the church’s short tower. With great delight at her success, she faced the other way. How much further could she follow her clues?

When she had ridden across the ford and up the farther bank, she found that the farm track continued as straight as the field path had, though it sliced two fields into strange angles by doing so. Damaris rode along the track, to find that what she had thought from the map was a crossroad was simply the place where the farm track came out on a road… and ended. There was nothing beyond it but a copse of trees along a field wall. Perhaps it had gone farther when the map was made; it did not now.

Disappointed but stubborn, she dismounted and climbed over the wall and pushed her way through the trees to their other side, trying to keep the farm track directly at her back. On the copse’s other side, she was rewarded with a clear view of Lady Hill across the fields. She briefly wondered about its name. It was the width of the dale away from the Lady Stone on its high moor, so they could hardly have anything to do with one another. Long and green, it ran lengthwise with the dale, perhaps two hundred yards long. Beyond it, the daleside rose steeply to another moor, but the Lady Hill itself was smooth with rich pasture grass, never plowed or planted, fringed along its lower edge with ash trees, and, from this side anyway, looking much like a woman stretched out on her side or back, with the high-swelling center of the hill as her hip or belly. Perhaps that was the why of its name.

But excitement pushed curiosity about the name out of her mind. “Even if there’s nothing to see beyond it, the top will be worth reaching,” she said aloud. Of everywhere she and her cousins had gone in the dale, somehow they had never gone there. She hoped Kellan would be envious when he found out that she had.

Since no track or even a field path led on from where she was to Lady Hill, she had to ride around by way of the road until she found a track that went the way she wanted to go. It was not straight, though, instead curved on up through the trees and the slope to only finally bring her to the crest. To her surprise three men were there, unloading dry branches from a cart onto a tall pile of other branches at the center of the clearing. They looked at her with the same surprise she felt, and then one of them came toward her, touching the brim of his hat respectfully. Damaris recognized him as one of the Thwaite sons from Laver Meadow Farm and asked, “What are you doing, Jim?”  It seemed a long way and an odd place for carting brush.

“Making the Midsummer Eve bonfire, miss. Like always.”

“Like always?”

“Like every Midsummer, miss. Bonfires at May Day and Midsummer and Lammas–”

“Jim,” one of the other men called, “don’t you be jawing her ear off. We’ve work here.”

A momentary confusion crossed Jim’s face. Disconcerted, he touched his hat again and said, embarrassed, “If you’ll be excusing me, miss.”

Damaris nodded. She knew better than to come between men and their work and turned Fansome toward home, the Old Way momentarily forgotten. What Midsummer Eve bonfire?

At her other home – and when had she begun to think of Thornoak as home, too? – there had been bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ Day in the autumn, but her mother had always been frightened of so many people crowding together and of the fireworks, and so Damaris had never had a chance to go. Now there was going to be a bonfire here and she had not even heard of it. Or of the other bonfires Jim had mentioned. That was odd, she thought. But she had heard of them now and Midsummer Eve was only two days away, and as soon as she was in the house, she sought out Agnes and asked her about it all. Agnes gave her a sharp look and asked back, “Now where were you hearing that?”, but went on without waiting for answer, saying, “Still, you were bound to, I suppose.  It’s just a bonfire, an old idea folk haven’t let go. Folk go and there’s dancing and foolishness late into the night and that’s the end of it. Put it out of your head.”

“But I want to go!”

“That’s for your aunt to say.”

“Do Nevin and Kellan go?”  And why didn’t she remember this from last summer?

“They’re older than you,” Agnes said as if that finished it.

It did not. Going in search of her cousins, Damaris found them washing up for supper.

“There’s going to be a bonfire on Lady Hill,” she said. “I saw them building it. I want to go.”

Kellan and Nevin looked at each other. Then Kellan said, “You’re the older,” and walked away.

Not looking at all happy, Nevin said in his turn, “You’d best ask Mother, Damaris,” sounding so much like Agnes that Damaris let him walk away, too, without asking him again.

Nor did she ask at supper, only waited for someone to say something about the bonfire, but no one did, not then or through the evening afterwards. She could have asked again, the way Nevin had said she should, but he and Kellan and Agnes had been so odd about her asking that something held her back. The next afternoon, though, after Aunt Elspeth set her and Virna to gathering a basket of vervain and motherwort from the garden and then joined them in weaving the herbs into head-wreaths, with Aunt Elspeth and Virna sitting on the garden bench and Damaris on the grass in front of them, Aunt Elspeth said as they worked, “These are for the bonfire tomorrow.”

Damaris did not look up from her work. She guessed that Nevin, Kellan, or Agnes had told she had asked about the bonfire, and now her aunt was willing to speak of it. Did that mean she was free to ask if she could go?  Shy of being rebuffed, she waited a while before saying without looking up, trying to keep her voice light, “May I weave cornflowers into my wreath?  I’d like to wear cornflowers to the bonfire.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Virna’s hand, reached out to lay a finished wreath into the basket between them, pause. Damaris glanced at her face in time to catch a look of mockery or challenge in the other girl’s glance at Aunt Elspeth, but Aunt Elspeth did not see it and it was gone on the instant as Virna went on to lay the wreath quite carefully into the basket and Aunt Elspeth said gently, “You may make yourself a wreath if you like, Damaris, and put cornflowers in it, too. But I’m afraid you aren’t going to the bonfire. You’re staying home with Agnes.”

Damaris lifted her head and stared at her aunt, her thoughts racing from disbelief to indignation.  ”Are Nevin and Kellan going?”

“They’re older than you.”

“I’m old enough!”

“You’ll stay with Agnes,” Aunt Elspeth said with the cool, complete certainty of being obeyed.

Damaris retreated into hurt silence, too aware of Virna to bring herself to argue more. She hoped, too, that if Aunt Elspeth saw she was old enough not to pester she would realize she was old enough to go where Nevin and Kellan did.

But she went to bed that night with nothing more said, and the next morning she helped Aunt Elspeth and Virna gather handfuls of fennel, rue, thyme, camomile, and geranium from the garden into a covered basket. Leaving that in the stillroom, they went with a smaller basket out the stableyard gate, taking the back lane to the east pasture, through the stile there, and by the field path to the woods where pennyroyal grew spreading across the soft ground along the stream.

As they set to gathering it, Aunt Elspeth said, “Pennyroyal loosens phlegm if taken mixed with honey and salt. Taken in mingled water and vinegar, it curbs vomiting. A compress of it warms the body. Because it’s a mint that spreads like holy war if given the chance, I gather it here rather than grow it in the garden.”

Damaris, still keeping a now-hurt silence, moved away to gather it alone but repeated its virtues to herself, to set them in her mind. She did not notice where Virna was until suddenly they were gathering side by side. To Damaris’ wary sideways look, Virna smiled peaceably and said in a low voice not likely to carry to Aunt Elspeth a good few yards away, “You know what all these herbs are for, don’t you?”

There was a jeer in the words that warned Damaris not to answer. Not that it mattered. Virna went on anyway. “They’re to throw into the fire tonight. When the bonfire has been lighted and begun to grow, the pennyroyal and all the rest will be thrown into the flames.”

She waited, but when Damaris said nothing, refusing to ask anything of her, Virna leaned nearer and whispered, “It’s for magic.”

“It’s for custom,” Aunt Elspeth said behind them suddenly, her voice clear and commonsense. Both Damaris and Virna started. Not seeming to notice, Aunt Elspeth went on, “It’s a custom that goes back so many generations we don’t know where it came from and don’t care to stop it. I think we have enough now, don’t you?”

Smiling, Virna easily agreed with her. But at the house, when Aunt Elspeth went ahead into the stillroom, Virna turned suddenly around on the outside doorstep, blocking Damaris’ way and leaned close to her to say with great, gloating pleasure, “You won’t be at the bonfire tonight. I will. I’m going to dance with Nevin all night, and maybe with Kellan, too. All night, right through to dawn. And you won’t be there.”

Virna clearly meant some special hurt by that, but Damaris did not know what and only said, bewildered, “Oh?” doubting either Nevin or Kellan had any such plan.

Virna stared at her a moment longer, as if willing her to say more, then made a disgusted sound and said, “You’re so stupid you don’t even know you don’t know,” and spun away from her to follow Aunt Elspeth.

Damaris did not follow her, instead went on along the passage, and up to her room. If Aunt Elspeth thought she was sulking it was too bad, but Damaris could not bear to be close to Virna anymore. The day passed and until the very last Damaris hoped someone’s mind would change. But when supper was done and they all rose from the table, Agnes was waiting in the dining room doorway for her. Seeing her, Damaris stayed holding to the back of her chair, head down. Aunt Elspeth in passing kissed the top of her head. Nevin patted her shoulder in silent sympathy as he passed, and Kellan gently poked her in the back. No one said anything, although she wanted to say to both her cousins, “Don’t dance with Virna tonight!”

Then they were gone, Betty came in to clear the table, and there was nothing for it but to follow Agnes upstairs. It was early for bed, but there seemed no point to staying up. If she could not go to the bonfire, bed was as good a place as any to be, she supposed.

“There’s a treat for you in your room,” Agnes said as they went up the last stairs.

Refusing to be comforted by anything as childish as a treat, Damaris said nothing until, goaded by the thought that they thought they could bribe her to be happy, she demanded, “Why does even Virna get to go to the bonfire when I don’t?”

“Virna is neither here nor there. Don’t you go minding Virna one way or the other.”

“Why does Aunt Elspeth like her?”

“I’d not say your aunt likes her at all. Nor would I say she doesn’t. Best say your aunt sees something in the girl that I don’t or she’d not spend the time on her that she does. Probably hopes to make her better than Virna is and that’s all we have to know about it. Can you guess your treat?” Agnes prodded.

“No,” Damaris said and did not mind she sounded as hurt as she felt.  Nonetheless, sight of one of her aunt’s best crystal goblets set on a lace doily on her bedside table momentarily diverted her with unwilling delight.

“It’s lemonade,” Agnes said. “Your aunt made it for you special.”

“But where did she get lemons?” Damaris asked. Sometimes in Hull there had been lemons at the greengrocer, but they had almost always been too costly for her mother to buy.

“They came with yesterday’s order from town. When you’ve readied for bed, you shall have it.”

Torn between being wronged by being left home and the undeniable pleasure of the treat, Damaris obeyed and soon – in her nightgown and curled on her window seat with the lovely goblet in her hands – she almost felt better. But twilight had gathered outside, and from her open window she could see, far off in the blue darkness, the first small brightness of the bonfire. It was barely more than a red star’s glimmer at first but as she watched it grew, spreading through that heap of wood she had seen, until it was a single great flame, towering in the darkness.

Damaris tried to make out the shapes of people silhouetted against flames, but it was all too distant. Beside her, Agnes said, “Drink your lemonade now and come to bed.”

Damaris sipped the lemonade. It was sweet and sharp and good, and she did not hurry it. She had made up her mind that she was not going to sleep until everyone came home. Then they would know she could have gone with them and they’d be sorry, but she had barely finished the lemonade when her bed seemed after all a very good place to be. As Agnes took the goblet from her hand and set it aside, Damaris tried to murmur, “I’m not sleepy,” and yet did not resist as Agnes tucked her in, and then there were only dreams until morning.

Continue with Chapter 4 tomorrow!

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