Foxlowe
Foxlowe
Eleanor Wasserberg
A compulsive and chilling debut about a girl growing up in a cultWHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE?Green and Blue are sisters.Foxlowe is home. Outside is Bad.Green understands.Why can’t Blue?
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Copyright (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2016
Copyright © Eleanor Wasserberg 2016
Eleanor Wasserberg asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008164089
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008164119
Version: 2017-01-04
Dedication (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
For my parents
Contents
Cover (#ub73ddedb-30d5-59a4-abca-7a01ecb6d728)
Title Page (#ulink_9e4e9bf3-cc6d-5e98-8e1d-70c0b82a19f6)
Copyright (#ulink_4cd7f8b8-3e71-5f60-a58f-cd29ce1f9630)
Dedication (#ulink_7f4249c1-b7da-5b8b-8c9d-19cd91cd1423)
Prologue (#ulink_d886b358-95cc-5677-8435-f4cf46c9ee58)
PART ONE: Green (#ulink_41e97c61-2706-5936-942a-44c5274397a8)
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PART TWO: Jess (#litres_trial_promo)
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PART THREE: Green (#litres_trial_promo)
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Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
At Foxlowe everyone has two names. One is a secret, meant to be lost. For most, it worked like this: first they had the one they came to Foxlowe with peeled away like sunburnt skin. Then a new name, for a new life.
I used to get jealous of the Family with their secret outside names, while I only had the one, like half a person. Sometimes an old name would slip, strangled at a syllable with a blush. This was a sign to watch for, in case someone might wish to become a Leaver.
Now I am doubled that way, named twice, but for me, it’s worked in reverse: my new name came later, on the outside, like putting on that crusty old skin that should be lying on the floor.
My one name was Green, but no one calls me that any more. I had no old name to peel away, because I was born at Foxlowe. Freya named me first, of course. She named all of us, except for one. There’s a power in naming. Green was strange even for home — most of the women had flowers, or pretty ideas, like Liberty.
If I could speak to Freya, I’d tell her not to worry, because I hold my new name ever so lightly, ready to shrug it off, if ever Foxlowe could start up again.
Of course I wasn’t Green all the time. With Toby, it was the ungrown; once Blue came, it was the girls, too.
Since this is a story for Blue, first here is the little bit I remember of the world before Blue was in it. I knew that it’s not only names that double: time was split in two, between two Solstices. The winter one falls when the year is dying and you have to be careful then, because the Bad is strong in the dark. The summer one is when the sun sets twice at the Standing Stones, and the Bad is weakest. I don’t remember when I learned these things, only that I knew them by the time Blue existed. I knew Freya and Richard and Libby were the Founders and that the others were the Family and I even remembered that there was a time when I was the only ungrown, before Toby came. I knew that when I was born, it brought the Time of the Crisis, and that everything Freya did, even the things that hurt, were to keep the Family together and safe ever afterwards.
I am meant to tell Blue’s story, but it doesn’t flow as it should: there are broken and jagged edges to it, and some pieces are too sharp for the tongue to tell. I could begin with Blue’s naming, the first little thing I did to love and to hurt Blue all at once. Or I could tell the moment Foxlowe began crumbling all around us, with the front doorbell ringing. But wherever I begin, it all leads to the same place. To the sweet rotting smells, and the warm, slick blood.
PART ONE
Green (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
1 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Tiny red beads came from the lines on my arm. Those soft scars give way like wet paper. There’s a game that helps: footsteps in the dust, twisting to match the old strides without taking the skin away from the Spike Walk. Another: name steps all the way to the yellow room end of the Spike Walk. Freya, Toby, Green, Egg, Pet, the Bad. I made it to the final nail and squinted at the arm. Red tears and the lines swollen hot; a crying face. I turned to Freya, her long arms wrapped around herself at the ballroom end of the Walk. She nodded, so I breathed deeper and licked some of the salt and coins taste to make it clean.
Freya spoke. —And back again, Green.
Her voice was low, but even softened there was broken glass in it.
I lifted my other arm to the nails that had once hung pictures on these walls in Foxlowe’s old life.
—No, same arm, Freya said, smothering a smile. —Until it bleeds, is the rule.
—It is bleeding.
I held up my arm for her to see. Freya gave a slow blink.
—And back again, Green.
I put the torn skin back to the first nail. By the time I stumbled into Freya’s embrace there were flames under my skin, and I knew the Bad was burning away. I pleaded silently into the wood smoke scent of Freya’s dress. She twined her fingers in my hair, tight at the roots, pulled to search my face. I tried to look pure and good, fixed on her dark eyes and sharp, veined cheeks. Freya nodded, uncurled to her full height, and led me out to the ballroom, where Libby knelt on the huge red rug.
Libby wrapped me in the cardigan with the daisy shaped buttons and left me for the kitchen. The curve of a broken button fitted snug around the tip of my little finger.
It wasn’t Freya who returned but Libby with the poultice of lavender and honey.
—Why’re you doing it? I asked, as Libby wrapped the warm cloth below my elbow. Freya did this for me, while telling the story of the Crisis, then she’d bring her forehead to mine, and pour her thick, black hair around us, making a little world for us away from the rest of the Family. This was her way of forgiving me. A little ritual of our own, an always.
—What did you do for the Spike Walk? Libby asked.
She liked to answer questions with questions. Her full name was Liberty, but only Freya ever called her that. Her hair was greasy with egg yolk, ready to wash out when the water came on after sunset.
I shrugged. It was between Freya and me. That morning I’d tried to pierce my ears with a needle and ice snapped from the attic window frame. It wasn’t for that I was punished, but because Freya, who could read all my secrets just by looking at my face or the way I moved my hands, knew it was because I wanted to look like Libby.
Libby’s earrings were blue hoops with little gold birds perched on them. They were special. Richard had brought them for her from the outside, and they never went into Jumble. She let me play with them now that my arm was bandaged, pressing one against my ear, while she held up the back of a spoon for me to see the blurry image. My hair didn’t move like her curls but like the knotted hair of a wet dog left out in the rain.
After a while the Family came in from the gardens, their arms full of holly, or branches of white and red berries. I looked for Toby, but only the grown had been outside collecting for the Solstice decorations. They were flushed from the cold and the carrying, but it was almost festival time, and they filled the huge room with whistles and snatches of song and bits of stories. I threw my head back to see if the sounds bouncing around the ceiling beams were visible. Richard dragged a crate of wine and raised his eyebrows at Libby as he passed. She gave him a wide smile and shifted her hips on the floor, touched her sticky yolked hair. His eyes slid to my arm, then away, and he left towards the kitchen. The Family started to pull out vine and branch, strangling them into wreaths.
I was finding deeper breaths now, my heart settling.
—That’s it, breathe into it, Libby soothed. —Imagine the pain like a ball that’s moving to your hands.
I always tried but my pain ran in lines, so I made it into a track to be walked across the moor, leading to my fingers. Libby had me make a fist and release it. She told me I could watch the ball float up and away like a bubble. Instead, behind my eyelids were threads spooling out from the new cuts, unravelling, unpicked bad stitches.
—Have you heard the secret? Libby asked me.
—Secret? Is it new family? New clothes? I said. —Can I have a—
—No. It’s something really good, she said, giggling so her snaggle tooth showed.
—New … animals? More dogs, are there going to be puppies?
Libby shook her head, plaiting the tassels at the edge of the ballroom rug.
—I know, I lied.
—You’ve guessed! And I’m not supposed to tell, Freya wants to!
—Why hasn’t Freya come? I said. —Is she to do with it, the secret?
Libby held out her earring. —Try it on your other ear.
But I didn’t care about the earrings any more. I tried to think of all the secrets there had ever been, but it wasn’t new family or animals and I knew it couldn’t be a Leaver, because Libby said something good. I begged Libby to tell me, hung from her shoulders, kissed her then kicked her, and eventually she said, —Green! Enough, go and find Toby and play, and she shoved me away.
He wasn’t far, on the middle landing, eating berries from the new wreath that hung there. His woolly blond hair stuck out from his head in untidy curls; a layer of dirt crusted around his knees. I stole some berries and for a while we showed each other our red-stained tongues.
—D’you know there’s a secret happening, something good? I asked Toby.
—Like what?
—Something to do with me.
He frowned. —You have to clean, is all. We all have to before Solstice.
—Stupid, that’s not a good thing.
—Stupid, of course they aren’t going to tell you it’s a bad thing, stupid!
—Libby said something good. Are you calling Libby a liar?
My palm made red shapes on the skin of his back, where the safety pin left his t-shirt gaping. He kicked me away and twisted my arm, right where the fresh blood was. I spat in his face, foam on his cheeks. That settled it. Spit wins. Besides, Toby might be older, taller, but he was still newer than me: I remembered the day he came, in Valentina’s arms, and was dumped next to me on the ballroom rug. Play, they said. You can’t remember that, he always said, you were only a baby. I do, I said: the strange plastic on his jacket, and the outside smell. He’d been named October; Freya said it was right. She told me that outside Foxlowe it was a name for the time when leaves turned to fire.
Sitting on the step, we picked at things. Toby peeled away a huge scab on his knee I’d given him a day or two before. I plucked at rotten wood, and we drew on the fresh wood underneath with the berry juice. I loved to sit on the middle landing. From there you had a view right down into the main house. You could see the front entrance hall, and the ballroom ceilings stretched out of sight. The hallway leading to the kitchen was below too, so you could watch as people rushed in and out, carrying tea or fruit back to the studios. If you looked up, you could follow the staircase right up to the attic, making your stomach ripple with the height. Best of all, the stained glass window had a panel of clear glass with a view over the back lawns and the moor beyond, so you could peer out, bathing your feet in the blue light. The middle landing was the heart of everything.
Toby looked up from his bleeding knee and tugged at my poultice.
—Spike Walk?
I nodded.
—Valentina won’t let Freya take me any more, Toby said.
This was a lie. From Toby or Valentina, I couldn’t tell which.
—Freya didn’t properly forgive me after, I said. —I might have to do the Walk again.
—What did you do?
—A Libby thing.
Toby nodded. The tides between Freya and Libby were always.
—Where is she then? Toby said. After a pause he said, —Maybe she’s a Leaver! and laughed.
I pulled my cardigan closer around my waist. Freya had made it for me. The daisy buttons were from a shop she told me about that had them in jars, like sweets, she said, and I didn’t understand her, sweets are in rows from the oven or from chilling in the goat shed, ready to cut into brittle pieces and suck. Freya laughed, pulled me to her and nuzzled my neck, saying Imagine it, talking about the outside for a while. Then we’d played All The Ways Home Is Better.
There had been a Leaving that year, just as the Summer Solstice was coming, a strange time to go, when the house was aglow and everyone was happy. She’d been pretty, the Leaver had, and liked to sit on the back steps sewing patchwork quilts. We were already forgetting her. After a Leaving, there was always a slump, and careful watching of each other, lots of Meetings and the reshuffle of chores, and if people were gone for longer than expected, on shop runs or disappearing over the moor, things went quiet until they came back.
I slipped the hard edge of a daisy petal under my thumbnail, and tried to think of Freya as a Leaver, outside, in one of the box-houses she told me about. Foxlowe without her, like a hungry stomach.
—Don’t be stupid, I said.
We stared each other out, until my stomach complained, a guttering sound, and we went off to find food.
In the kitchen, bread smell swelled up the room. Toby tripped down the steps and leapt onto the table, upsetting the wine. The Family cheered and slow-clapped. Pooling around my fingers, the red stream was sticky and cool.
The Foxlowe kitchen was a cave, a stone mouth with a cold floor that made an easy game of trying to jump from slab to slab, just as we did out on the moor. There was a long gutter, where blood used to run, Freya said, when they killed animals down there in Foxlowe’s old life. Windows along one wall looked out on the back lawns. A table stretched along the centre, sticky with fruit juice and oil. Everywhere paint and brushes, lumps of curdled milk, crusty teabags. Dogs huddled the huge aga stove. The Family had come from the ballroom, following the smell of fresh bread.
When the Family was together like that, grown and ungrown, we got loud, shouting over each other, calling names, throwing arms wide. Libby looped around the table, kissing cheeks, her fresh-washed hair spilling over faces. I looked around for Freya, who liked to complain about the waste and vanity of Libby using the yolks, but she wasn’t there. Once, she’d tricked Libby by leaving old eggs out, long after they floated in still water, and Libby’s hair reeked for days, Freya laughing so hard I thought she would be sick. Now, Libby looped her arms around Richard’s neck, and he breathed in her newly softened curls.
Richard wore different clothes to the rest of us. There were paintings that looked like him in the upper rooms, the same fox faces with narrow noses and narrow eyes, and some of the clothes were the same: waistcoats and long black coats, white shirts full of moth holes. He never hugged us or swept us into a dance or pulled us onto his knee, so I didn’t know the smell and feel of him like the other grown, but he was all bone, strong in Freya’s way. His beard grew patchy and he was always scratching around his jaw. Sometimes the Family called him boy as a joke, but he was, Freya said, not that much younger than she was, if you were counting, and anyway older than Libby, who had airs of a grown but could have only just bled to look at her. Richard was one of the Founders, so there was little chance of him being a Leaver. Sometimes I secretly wished he would, didn’t like his eyes following me around the house or the way they would flick away from me if I tried to catch them. He eyed the blood on Toby’s knee.
—Still fighting, October, he said.
His voice faded at the end of words, like he got bored of them.
—This is supposed to be a place of peace, he said, circling his hands, his roll up making a smoky trail. —But you two … always bring … a kind of endless nasty fight, into our midst.
Toby licked the wine from his hands and pointed to the centre of the table.
—Butter, is that the secret thing? That’s shit, he said.
—What secret? Libby said, smiling.
—Is it just cleaning? I said. —Where’s Freya?
Richard frowned, and Libby looked away, and the Family chewed and swallowed.
I crawled under the table. Libby lifted Toby down. He nudged me with a fist and I hit him away.
—Try again, Toby said. —Say her name and see what they do.
—She can’t be a Leaver, I whispered.
—Ask again, he said.
But I was too afraid to name her to the Family and have them look away. Thing was sometimes Leavers slipped away like that, quick and silent.
Libby passed some cake dipped in honey to us. —An undertable picnic! she said. I glared at her.
The shuffle of feet and laughter faded as the Family moved to the ballroom. The mulled wine steamed on the stove.
—Thought Freya would have taken you, Toby said. —You must have done something really bad. What did you do to make her a Leaver?
I lay down on the icy stone.
—What was her name, that last Leaver? I whispered.
Toby scowled at me. Getting each other into trouble was our favourite game.
—Really, I said. —I forgot. I won’t tell.
—Brida, he said.
Her Foxlowe name. When she came, it was something long, an E name, I tried to remember.
Toby dug a bogey out of his nose and wiped it on the stone. —Valentina didn’t like her, he added.
—Freya neither.
—Maybe Freya went to tell her off.
—Yes, I said.
—Let’s get some clothes and food and stuff and go after her! he said.
—Shut up! She’ll come back!
Toby pinched me hard. It was to say Sorry and There, because you shouted at me and I was trying to be nice to you, and It might be true what I said, so get ready, all in one red nip of the skin, his favourite place on my wrist, all my scars there not from Freya but from him. We talked that way, when it was something important. I didn’t squeal or fight, just watched the blood flow into the skin, grateful for the sharpness of it, then Toby went back to the grown, leaving me lying under the table.
Candles on the table made a ring of light around the wooden curled feet. Freya would say, Here’s a fairy ring, safe or dangerous, depending on the story.
Freya’s fingers, greasy and rough on my cheek, her bitten skin coated in vaseline. Her hair around her shoulders like black straw. Dark eyes narrowed, squinting back at me. In the weak light Freya’s crooked teeth were hidden, and she looked pale, almost pretty like Libby. She hunched her tall figure further under the table.
—What have we here? A fairy crawled under my table looking for milk.
She made look sound like luke.
—And still asleep, she doesn’t want to talk.
I shot under her arm, and she held my head against her wool coat. She smelled of the outside: leather and plastic, and petrol from the old car we used for the shop runs.
—You came back, I said.
I tried to burrow further into her but she held her side away from me. In the crook of her elbow was a bundle of clothes. She’d brought new things! I grasped for it, but Freya sucked air through her teeth and cuffed my arm away. The bundle made wet sounds.
Freya knelt next to me and shifted it high onto her chest.
—This is our new baby, she said.
2 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Wisps of red hair stuck out from a striped scarf. I reached out to touch the tip of an ear. Pink skin and tiny gold hairs. It was cold.
I thought of the cool flesh of the baby goats we’d found lying stiff in the shed.
—Is it dead? I said.
Freya frowned and ducked from under the table and I followed her, pulling the hem of my dress, wanting at once to wrench the baby out of Freya’s arms, where I belonged, and to hold it myself, look at it.
—She’s ours, Freya said. —She’s our new little sister.
—It’s family?
—She is, said Freya. —She’s going to live with us.
—Oh.
My Freya’s hands, the bitten nails and blackened tips, scent of soil and sometimes blood — they were wrapped around this new thing’s body, the head cupped in her palm.
—It’s staying? I said.
Freya turned her eyes on me. —Something Bad moving? she said.
—No.
—Seems like a nastiness there. Seems like a little Bad there, she said.
—No, I said. —The Family’s in the ballroom, I added.
—We’ll show them in a while.
This was strange, but I loved when it was me and Freya alone, without all the Family in the way, so I just smiled, until she turned her back to me, shushing as the new thing wriggled and kicked.
I thought of the goats again. —Does it need milk? I asked.
—Well, Freya said.
She brought out a bottle from a new bag, covered in pictures of sheep. She tipped it so I could see it was frozen. She held the new thing higher on her chest, and fetched a lit candle from the table, handed it to me. The gas hissed when Freya turned the dial. I waved the lit candle towards the sound. The ring sparked with a tiny roar.
I loved the blue lights when the gas was on. I breathed on the flames, watching them bow and stretch, while Freya put the bottle into a pan of water. After a while she brought it out with the tongs she used for taking potatoes out of the bonfire.
—Lift your sleeve up, she said. I gave her my good arm. She pressed the bottle to my skin and I yelped, jumping back. She held the bottle in place another long few seconds. I breathed into the pain the way Libby had taught me but just as I was about to thrash Freya released me.
She kissed my hair. —Now your arms are in balance, she said. —Feel how they speak to each other now?
The flashes of fresh burn answered the throbs in my cuts like music. I nodded. Freya put the milk aside to cool. —That’s how you test it, she said. —That same place on your arm. If it burns, you leave it a while.
We took new little sister to the Family, and they asked questions, Libby asking lots of times, —Did she say it was all right? Did you ask her? Are you sure she knows she’s welcome? As though she didn’t know it was only a baby, and couldn’t answer. Toby asked, —Is that it, the secret? I realised it was, and he only said, —That’s shit.
My hands dangled, lost at my sides as I followed Freya to the back rooms. Usually she held my hand tight in hers and stroked the back of my palm with her thumb, but now New Thing filled her arms, wailing a thin cry that cracked at the edges. It was late, the latest I had ever stayed up without falling asleep in the kitchen or the ballroom, waking up cold and finding my way to an empty mattress.
We took the Spike Walk. The spikes were rows of nails that stuck out of the panelled wood. They used to have paintings hanging on them. The story goes that when Richard first came to Foxlowe he sold them all, to pay for the first meals and clothes. I ran my hands lightly over the nails as we walked, followed my hours-old steps.
The end of the Spike Walk widened into the yellow room. It was smaller than the ballroom, but prettier, I thought. There was still some wallpaper left, turning brown, and a bed with a broken frame and thick pillows that had spat out some of their feathers, drifting across the room. White shapes crouched in the shadows, ghosts of wood and cotton.
Freya kicked a ghost out of her way and it groaned across the floor. She shook a sheet away from something and I went in to see. It was an old chest, carved oak like the table in the kitchen. Freya opened a drawer. There were mouldy towels in there; she shook them out and a stiff mouse dropped, rolled across the floor. She held the drawer up.
—Here’s your bed, baby girl, she said.
Freya took off her coat, and patted down the pockets. She took out some sprigs of dry lavender. We lined the drawer with the coat so that New Thing would know her the way pups sleep on the bellies of their mothers. She tucked the lavender around the edges.
—Now it’ll smell nice.
Freya corrected me. —Help her sleep. She’ll be quieter now.
Freya was wrong: that first night New Thing screamed so high, so endless, that the Family came up to the attic, to help shush and rock, and I whispered to Toby, —New Thing hates us. It hates it here. It should go away again.
—I like it, he said. —It’s nice to hold.
It was true it was warm, and though the weight of it pulled at my arms I liked to balance it on my knees on the bed in the attic, blow on its eyelids, see if I could wake it up and make the big cheeks flush with red and the whole face collapse in wailing.
—New Thing’ll be bad for us here, I said to Toby. —It’ll be bad for you. Valentina might love her.
—Looks like she’s Freya’s to me, Toby hissed back.
Until New Thing came Freya’s love for me was like the bricks in the walls and the roots of the oaks at the edge of the moor. Now all the Family were circled around New Thing in Freya’s arms, stretched towards it like a bonfire, and I tried to make Freya see me, worried at my scars, hung over the back of chairs, but she didn’t look up.
It didn’t take long for Freya to see how I hated new little sister almost from the beginning. It was in the faces I gave her and the way I held her a little too rough. Then she overheard my name for her. I thought it would be the Spike Walk but instead I was Edged. Freya told the Family this one morning by tossing me the burnt part of the bread and making sure they all saw. They all had to look away when I spoke and no one was allowed to touch me. I was alone, edging around the circles the Family made around New Thing. I snatched eye contact and accidental touch when I could, watching and listening, haunting rooms.
The rest of the Family loved New Thing. The sounds it made they repeated, called to each other like a new language. After that first night, its crying wasn’t so frightening. The Family worked out what it liked: the jingle-jangle sounds of Libby’s bracelets, shaken above it, Freya’s knuckles in its mouth, the powdery milk not too hot. And what it didn’t like: the sun streaming through the kitchen windows, the dogs panting over it, and the damp orange blanket made it cry. They spent hours just lying on the kitchen floor, next to the aga, staring at it.
Aside from Freya, Ellen loved New Thing best. Her full name was Ellensia, but we’d all forgotten to use it. Her flesh spilled out of her clothes like filling from a pie, and she liked to wear kaftans she made herself, bad stitching pulling at the seams. She’d take New Thing into her arms and rest her on her vast stomach, singing bits of songs I didn’t know, cooing, until Freya took her back. Once, Ellen dared fight Freya on how to make little sister sleep, and she said, —I have done this before, you know, and we all looked away, sad for her at the mistake, and Freya only nodded, and said softly, —Yes, and where is that baby now? and Ellen left the kitchen with spilling eyes.
Meeting came. At the bay windows, Dylan and Ellen lay on their backs, drawing pictures in the frosted glass with their nails. Dylan was huge and strong, the bulk of him like an oak tree, and he gave bear hugs and wet kisses. He liked to spin us around, even Freya, even Ellen, who liked him, she said, because he make her feel dinky. Dancing to Richard’s guitar were Pet and Egg. Egg, Eglantine, was tall and thin. Through his vest, bones pushed out like they were trying to pierce the skin. He had thick black hair and a moustache he liked to grease with cooking fat and twist into curls. Egg was always with Petal, Pet for short, a boy with a girl’s name. Pet wore blusher on his cheekbones, so he looked like the broken dolls in the attic. He and Egg were always snaked around each other, Pet’s fingers in Egg’s hair.
A burning oil lamp sent jasmine puffs into the air. Candles burned everywhere, in old jars, stuck into wine bottles and cluttered along the mantelpieces. Someone had even put tea lights in the old chandelier, balancing them against the crystal. Toby lay with his head on Valentina’s stomach. I pulled at him to come sit with me, for the Naming, but he shook me off. I crouched next to him, Valentina giving me a weak smile. She was Toby’s mum; he’d called her that, Mum, for a while before he lost the habit, while she never seemed to name him at all. Her long blonde hair was so thin you could see the pink scalp underneath. Freya and Libby called her Sweetheart; behind her back, they called her Bitter Bambi, and in one of their strange truces they could make each other laugh by widening their eyes and snarling all at once. In the coldest days after Winter Solstice, Libby gave Valentina the down quilt that she’d taken from Jumble so long ago it was considered hers, and on the days Valentina went quiet and sad, Libby took Toby on long walks, or taught him dance steps in the ballroom. So I knew Bitter Bambi was something unkind: Libby liked life to be in balance.
—We’re naming her now, Valentina whispered to me. —Then she’ll be family and you’ll have to love her, Green, or everything will be very hard for you.
Freya stood up with New Thing in her arms and we all fell silent. She’d chant the new name and we’d watch it soak into new little sister like rainwater into grass. There was no outside name to peel away, not that she’d ever remember. Freya spoke for a while about the Family and Foxlowe and we all recited All The Ways Home Is Better.
—Now, I have a name for new little sister, said Freya.
I thought of the worst things: the rusted nails in the Spike Walk, the hunger of a starve day, the Bad. New Thing was hooked over Freya’s shoulder, so when she turned, the little face peered over, still wrapped in that striped scarf. Her eyes caught on the chandelier. The tiny wet mouth twitched into a smile and she made a small sound of joy. The best things came: jewels on cobwebs, Libby’s little birds. The flames glowing the night I watched Freya heating the milk.
—Blue, I whispered, too quiet for Freya to hear. —Call her Blue.
—Green has a name for her, Toby called.
Everyone looked at me. I kicked Toby hard and said, —No I don’t.
—She does, she just whispered it!
I dug my nails into his arm, and he howled. Valentina sat up and pulled him to her, glaring at me.
Freya bounced the baby in her arms, not looking at me. —Green is Edged, she said.
—It was the first name called, said Libby. —Isn’t that the rule?
—Freya always does the naming, said Richard, and Libby rolled her eyes, lay back on the floor like she was sunbathing in the cold air.
—Well, said Dylan. —It might be nice to—
—A nice way to end the Edging, Ellen jumped in.
Libby sat up. —What is the name, Green?
—Nothing, I said.
—Nothing? Freya crowed.
—Blue, I croaked. Libby caught it and repeated it louder. It sank into Blue and took her and we all knew that was her name.
—There’s a power in naming, Freya said to the Family, continuing to Edge me. —I hope Green knows what she’s given her. Blue can be many things.
—It’s the lights on the cooker, I said.
—It’s cold, Freya said to the Family.
—And she’s a colour like Green, Richard said.
—Yes, and you know she’s on the tape, said Freya. —With you and Green. Her song is all about sadness.
—Oh, I said.
—I love it, Libby said.
Above us in Freya’s arms, Blue squirmed and opened and closed her mouth.
—There’s a power in naming, Freya said again.
—She’s Green’s now, you know. She should do the calling, said Libby.
So I took Blue into my arms, and gave her the name cold and sad. That was the first little thing I did to hurt her.
3 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Life ever after that is full of Blue, and all the trouble she made. It was Blue who made the end of Foxlowe, and Freya and me and all the Family. That wasn’t her fault, but mine. When Blue was a baby everything was already ruined, it only took a long time to happen. Let me tell you about the Bad first, so you understand. We had lots of stories about it, so we didn’t forget. You need to hear them countless times before you can follow the words in your own head, and then tell your own version. Mine is part Freya’s, part Libby’s, knotted together voices.
The Bad is everywhere on the outside. There, it is ignored, and because it has been forgotten, it can move in new ways: it does not creep, or skulk around the edges of shadow, but soars in the open. Listen, and believe it: on the outside, the Bad can force a helpless one to do anything. Imagine the worst you can. Outside, people will twist knives into flesh, pull off one another’s skin. Eat each other.
Now, it is harder for the Bad to take one of us, as it can so easily for outside people, because we have the protection of the Stones and the rituals. And we know the Bad and call it by name.
Never think that safer than the outside means safe.
You have to learn for yourself what the Bad feels like; everyone feels it differently. In the Time of the Crisis, when the Bad got into Foxlowe, it crouched on Freya like a giant fly, and made her world dark, so when the sun shone in, it couldn’t reach her. It made her limbs weak and everything hollow and hopeless. But others speak of the Bad as a voice, inside their own heads, or pain scratching around from inside the skin. Others perceive the Bad as a ghost, a figure you can glimpse in the corner of the eye; it can move things, and kneels on your chest at night. The Bad can twist your mouth to speech, or curl your hands into fists to strike something weaker than you. The Bad can kill. Once, when the Scattering was not done properly, it found and killed the baby goats. It causes illness and pain, infection and fever.
Listen to the things we know, to protect yourself. The Bad thrives on the dark and the cold; it is a winter force. So be careful when the sun is weak and the air bites you. Stay off the moor, where the Bad is strong. If the Bad catches you there, run to the Standing Stones. Even in the winter the Stones hum with a thousand ancient blessings. If you are closer to Foxlowe, run so you are inside the Scattering Salt.
If, despite all our care, you feel the Bad has taken you, you must tell the Founders. They will take you to the Stones, if the sun is strong enough, and Solstice is close. In winter, you will be given candle flame on the skin to try to force the Bad out. It hates heat. If the infection is deep, you may be bled. Summer Solstice will heal you, if nothing else works, and you may have to wait for the double sunset.
The children are the easiest for the Bad to slip into. They must be watched.
The Scattering is something we learned from the Time of the Crisis. Remember that the Bad had come inside the walls. One of those mornings, Freya felt the Bad in the kitchen, scratching across the floor, and twitching her fingers. On the flagstones lay the baby Green, where the Bad had taken full root. The Bad filled the kitchen until it was as black as night and spread cold through the air. In the gloom, Freya watched the tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and the Bad pressed on her, urged the pillow into her hands. As she took it she knocked the salt jar from the table and it smashed, scattered salt across the floor. The room immediately lightened, the air warmed, and although the Bad was too deep in the baby to force out, the skulking Bad pressing on Freya was gone. This is what we commemorate in the Scattering, that Freya was stronger than the Bad in the end, that we have ways of keeping it out.
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Only a handful of sunsets after Blue’s Naming, it was Winter Solstice, my breath clouding in the attic. I woke to a new dress at the bottom of the bed, and shivered into it under the covers. Freya bounced Blue in her arms. It was still dark. Her face was lit by a torch, gaping shadows around her cheeks and mouth.
She spoke to me. —You’ll be cold. Come on then, she said, so soft, and I went to her and sobbed as she stroked my hair and shushed me. —All right, all right, it’s over now, you know I hate it too, she said.
I wiped my nose on the new dress. Freya had used the material from an old apron of hers I loved: thick cotton, flower print. It had a full skirt that came down to my feet. On it were new white buttons, that she must have got when she fetched Blue, and hidden. I wished I had a mirror, like the big one in the ballroom, too high to catch my reflection in.
We came out into the colder air of the landing, me clutching Freya’s hips, bowing my head into her warm stomach.
—It’s good that it’s so cold. It means the year’s ready to go. Cold and hard like a dead thing, Freya said.
The staircase glowed with candlelight and led down to scented air and an inside forest: ivy curled around the banisters, holly in the doorways, dried herbs scattered on the floors. The rooms smoked with hot wine and the glowing ash from roll ups, and lamps burning oils that we’d saved all year: jasmine and lavender. In the hallway, incense smoke made it hard to see. Ellen and Dylan’s voices drifted over tinny sound: one of the tapes, dug out of their box in the yellow room.
As much as anything was anyone’s at Foxlowe, the tapes were Freya’s: she’d brought them with her from her old life, and they were all one voice, the same woman singing every time. The song I’m named for played all the time before the tape got too wobbly to play, but Freya could remember the words anyway, mine and Richard’s song too, on the same tape. She’d sing snatches of her favourite song while she made the bread: I’m afraid of the devil, I’m drawn to people who ain’t afraid … We didn’t call it the devil, but we knew who she meant, all right. Ellen and Dylan’s laughter was the sound of festival days and nights, as they sang along, wishing for rivers, and Freya picked up the tune, changing the words how she pleased.
Freya brushed Blue’s head with her fingertips. —This is where you live and belong now, she said to her. —Take her, she said.
I tried to lift my arms, but my hands were stuck to my new dress.
Freya crouched, so the baby was level with me, only a small gap between the red hair, the pink skin, and my arms. —Come on, Green, it’s all right. You won’t drop her.
Then Blue was in my arms. Freya let the baby’s head drop against my chest. I didn’t like the sour smell of her, or how her spit bubbled in the corner of her mouth. But I moved how I had seen Freya move, rock shush rock.
In the kitchen, there was honey and jam saved from the summer, gritty and thick, and goats’ milk, still warm. We were the last to come down, and the Family threw smiles and nods my way when they saw Blue in my arms. The aga roared and torches swung from beams. Libby waved to me as I put Blue into one of her drawers by the food stores. Toby opened his mouth wide to show me the mush inside and I caught him perfect on the back of the head, so his jaw clamped down on his tongue. Freya and Libby laughed, but Libby passed Toby some warm milk. He poured half out for me.
Libby wrapped me in the heavy red coat from Jumble. In the pockets, rotting roll up stubs and soil. Freya pulled my hands out to peel two pairs of gloves over my fingers. Fingers froze quickly during the Scattering.
Outside the animals stirred, the chickens rustling and crowing, the goats beginning to bleat. The Family rushed all the light of Foxlowe to the kitchen door, like blood to a new cut. We held the candles from around the house, some just balancing tea lights on their hands, and the torches swung and flashed, illuminating faces, beams, the glinting eyes of dogs.
Freya wound her dark hair around her neck and opened the door to the black of Winter Solstice morning. We poured out with cheering and snatches of stories of the Bad, The salt keeps it out, This is why we, You must remember to, This is important, my feet slipping in too-large boots.
We streamed down the back steps and onto the gravel, across to the fountain, down the ice coated marble steps beyond. The stars were still out, but a weak glow was beginning from the Standing Stones. I collected iced cobwebs that sparkled in our torchlight, and other treasures: frozen leaves, an icicle hanging from a marble finial, a snail shell.
Toby pulled me to the frozen fountain to watch the fish twist and dive together under the ice. We knocked on the sheets, like glass, to bring their white and orange forms ghosting to the surface in the torchlight. If one came, the others would turn and follow, like one giant creature. The grown had a name for them: the shoal. How is the shoal getting on? Should we eat one of the shoal?
Pet and Egg did star jumps to keep warm. The dogs panted clouds and snuffled ice onto their muzzles. Richard came over and laid a hand on Blue’s forehead.
—Take her back in, he said.
—She’s fine, Freya said.
He opened his mouth to say more, but Libby clapped her hands together.
—Richard! Come on, it’s bloody freezing!
He bent his face closer to Blue, his face stretched to one side as he bit his cheek. Freya stared over the top of his head, far out to the horizon. He tried to catch her eye when he raised his head but she ignored him. After a few seconds her half smile twitched up one side of her face and she returned the gaze. Behind us, Libby called Richard’s name, sing-song, then louder, until she broke off the rhythm and called out hoarsely to all of us.
—Right! Let’s go! You know how this works. A whole circle around the house, it must be unbroken. If you run out of salt, make sure someone fills in the line for you. Let’s go.
Richard grinned apologetically as he loped back to Libby. Freya’s hand on my shoulder turned me to the moor.
—Look out there. That’s where the Bad is coming from. The salt keeps it out, she said.
It was buried under the dark, but I knew the moor rolled out, cut through with stone wall and the dots of sheep. In daylight the hill called the Cloud would sit stark against the sky, its rocks jutting. The Standing Stones lay just behind the house, hidden by the drop and roll of the moor, and I began to feel the itch of being away too long: we’d stayed off the moor for most of the winter.
White dropped on white and showed it grey: the early frost had lost its glitter under our boots. My bag brought us to the edge of the lawns where Egg took over, wiggling his hips and casting his salt from side to side in a wave. Pet took us up to the house. We carried on like that until Freya’s salt met Richard’s in a pile outside the front door. She’d passed Blue to me and as the salt piled up I whispered into my arms, We’re safe now. The Bad is strongest today but it doesn’t like salt.
We made Foxlowe full of light and music. Some stories say this is to help keep the Bad away, others to celebrate the new Scattering and it is only the salt that matters. I loved the house full of fire and sound, played chase games with Toby in the usually dark places: the back corridors with the old bells and cobwebs, the cellars full of paint and sacks of flour, our shadows ballooning with the rarely lit torches hanging from every doorway. The grown ups chased each other too, squealing and slamming doors, or danced or lay with their heads on each other’s stomachs, drinking and smoking far into the night, their lips and chins red.
It was easy to take Blue.
Someone had tucked her into her drawer on the middle landing, where she lay swaddled and open-eyed. The Family had been carrying her and swinging her over shoulders, rocking her while they danced, but she got heavy, and the Family could get bored of the ungrown on Solstice days when the moonshine flowed, and so here she was, alone. Toby was with Valentina; she’d grabbed him as we ran through the front hall, swept him up and kissed him, and they had gone to the yellow room, where I knew she’d be tearfully clinging to him and telling him stories about their old life that he’d try to retell to me later, but wouldn’t quite remember the details. He just liked the way she held him close those nights, and let her words wash over him.
Blue’s mouth blew kisses at the air as she gazed at the beams. When I leaned over her, her eyes refocused, the little black dots blooming, and I thought how I might be a strange moon to her, so big. I knelt and pulled my hair around her drawer, in Freya’s way, so my face made the world. She started to cry.
I thought about Freya’s face turned away from me and how I couldn’t get into her arms any more, then scooped Blue out of the drawer. Above me, the grown’s footsteps and slamming doors echoed, and the ballroom rang with music.
The night sounds: a sniffing, the air rustling. They smothered the feet on flagstones and voices as I closed the kitchen door behind me, and stepped out. I glanced back to the house where glowing balls of candles and torches bobbed up and down as the grown carried them about. Blue thrashed in the freezing air. My throat was tight. Any moment the Family would catch me outside on Winter Solstice night and I’d be Edged, sent to the yellow room, put on a starve day, or worse.
The lawns were frosty and quiet, the steps and the fountain white against the black sky. The oaks swayed in the distance. The moor rolled out behind them, the Stones waiting for us and for summer. I held Blue to me, suddenly excited. Everyone was inside but us. I could race across the deserted gardens, under the stars, in the strange midnight green laced with ice, as long as I stayed inside the salt line.
Something shifted in the gloom. I held Blue’s warmth to my chest, and wobbled towards the salt line. The Bad hung there in the quiet, and a kind of pause, a deeper black in the air behind the line, like spilled ink. Freya had told me how the smallest gap in the salt would let it through. It could flow and squeeze and drip like the tiniest raindrop, then swell into a flood and wash us all away.
Blue began to mewl. Behind me I heard the goats bleating softly. I thought how I would do anything in the world to keep Freya for mine. But perhaps it wasn’t that so much. Perhaps I just wanted Blue to be one of us, the ungrown. She would take the Spike Walks with us and we could soothe her afterwards and teach her how we imagined the pain leaving. We’d show her how to hide the Bad if you thought it was bubbling up. And I thought about how now she’d be more like me than like Toby. Freya just didn’t like him all that much. But she knew the Bad was in me for sure because of the Crisis. This would put Blue in the same place. Make us more Family.
Whatever the reason, here’s the truth: I took that baby and I laid her out in the cold outside the salt line for the Bad to take.
Inside, Toby and Valentina were at the kitchen table. My heart quickened, but Valentina’s head was in her arms, and she barely looked up. Toby was sucking on the cloth that had been wrapped around the boiling sugar. He let it drop from his mouth when he saw me.
—You never, he said.
—It was only for a second.
—Not like you weren’t safe inside the salt, he said, and shrugged, but I could tell he was impressed.
—Come and look, I said.
I pulled him to the window in the studios, half-finished canvases and sculptures all around us. We cupped our hands to the glass.
Somewhere, Blue’s wails carried.
It took Toby a while to see her. I waited, breathing white against the glass.
—Is that new little … is that Blue?
—Yes, I said.
—She’s outside the salt line!
—Yes.
I thought he wouldn’t want to go outside but he wriggled right out of the studio window, the torch swinging wildly as he kicked it on the way out. I thought he might yell for the grown, but he only glared at me through the glass, and beckoned. I followed him, running to the edge of the safe places. The air had lost its crisp chill from before. I felt dizzy with a heat that roared in my head.
Toby stopped just where he should and I stood silent beside him. I gripped his hand and he didn’t shake me off. Blue was screaming now and we watched her, counted in names, clutching hands, not bothering to pretend we weren’t afraid. Then Blue’s cries moved to a higher pitch and my panic lunged me forward. The Bad let me pass right through it, swirled around in the air and kissed at our skin as I brought her back over. I stood with her in my arms, staring at Toby. A rush of violence came from the Bad and I imagined throwing Blue to the ground, drawing blood, until it ebbed away.
—Sorry, I whispered in a rush of horror. —Sorry Blue, sorry Blue, sorry.
—Maybe it didn’t get her, Toby whispered.
—It got her, I saw it.
—Me too, Toby said. —You’ll have to … Green, this is so, I think you’ll have to be a Leaver.
I started to cry then and held Blue to me and kissed her and begged Toby and said sorry so many times that he fetched dried long grass from the sheds and bound our hands together. We swore we would never tell the Family what I’d done.
5 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
See, Blue would understand what I did, because like all of us, once she was old enough she’d learn about the Time of the Crisis. The Time of the Crisis isn’t Blue’s story, but mine. Freya would tell it to me after a Spike Walk. She’d be lying next to me, stroking my hair, kissing the broken skin. Freya’s breath in my ear was just soothing sounds like the wind over the roof tiles, but slowly she formed words that wrapped themselves around me like a familiar blanket. I could tell it off by heart even before I knew what the words meant. It’s Freya’s voice, not mine, but I can’t help that: the Time of the Crisis was her story first.
The Time of the Crisis must always be remembered, so we are vigilant, and learn from our mistakes. This was the time before the rituals became solid and clear, and we were trying to decide how to live best.
It began with Green. Green came to Foxlowe very early one morning, while the stars were still out, and the dogs, the goats, even the chickens were still sleeping. It was the Bad’s favourite hour, black and cold as stone. So when Green came, it latched onto her easily, red and slimy, like organs ripped out. Freya knew it by the glisten of the blood and the way it screamed. It filled the house, and we all shrank from it, driving some to pack and become Leavers, the cries so full of spite that they ran away into the night.
Freya hoped that the Bad would leave once the sun became stronger, but instead it screamed and howled and scratched at her, it gnawed at her breast, it made her bleed. No one wanted to hold it, no one wanted to touch it. It was shut away in the attic until we could decide what to do. Freya knew it was the Bad, but the others were too afraid to say it. We survived it by wrapping it tight so it couldn’t rage too hard, and not looking it in the eye, or touching it too much.
Freya felt the Bad all over the house. It made her weak. It made her cry and feel tired even when she hadn’t done any work. The others tried to help, with food, and chores, and making things for baby Green, like shadows on the walls with their hands.
Things got worse. The rush of Leavers after Green’s birth had weakened us. Freya was seeing things that could not be real: her mother standing at the foot of the bed, her father holding a small child’s hand. There were whispers in corners. Secrecy. The Bad began to swell and grow in potency, inside the walls.
It was Richard who suggested we take baby Green out to the Standing Stones for Solstice. The group gathered up blankets and bottles of moonshine and set out with the baby wrapped in a quilt. Freya followed, hoping the air and light would deliver her strength. At this time, we would spend Summer Solstice at the Stones and meditate, feel the Stones at our backs, and watch the double sunset, a gift only we can see. So we sat around the Stones, and talked, and ate, and tried to ignore the Bad in Richard’s arms. It was screaming, feeling the power of the Stones, but was holding on.
As we watched from the Stones, the sun dipped behind the hill called the Cloud, and shadows stretched across the moor. The Bad crowed in triumph, and we were afraid. Freya was cast down by the tiny hope that had flared in her, only to be extinguished again. Then the sun was reborn. It reappeared between the peaks of the Cloud, before sinking again. This is too much for the Bad, light renewed just as darkness sets in. It fled.
Freya held Green and kissed her, and loved her. This was the end of the Crisis, and Foxlowe became stronger and happier. We understood how the Solstice could help us.
But the Bad will always remember it lived in Green. It’s still there, little traces inside the veins, little worms in the stomach. This is why the rituals are so important. Summer Solstice to drive the Bad away, and the Scattering to protect us when the sun is weak.
6 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
After we brought her back into the kitchen, muddy and cold, I never had a bad word or look for Blue again. In the years that followed we expanded, me and Toby, to let Blue in, and she became another Foxlowe ungrown. We taught her the best places in the house: the middle landing with its blue pool, the yellow room, the back stairs and corridors full of mice and cobwebs, and the empty rooms that sat decaying there, with their treasures of broken furniture and walls on which to draw in charcoal and chalk. By the time she could run, she made a good chaser with quick dodges and a hard grip, and wasn’t afraid to slide down the banister or jump from the windows. When she was very little, she bit and kicked like we did, but me and Toby would attack each other if she was hurt by one of us, and because we rarely touched her, she stopped raging that way. When me and Toby fought, Blue took the side of whoever was left with the reddest skin, the deepest scratch.
We didn’t need to teach her the way she had to live, like other new people who came. She was almost like me, almost a born Foxlowe girl. She learned our language and the rituals, Freya said, as new. It was how it should be for everyone, Freya said. We didn’t have to explain that blood family didn’t matter, because we were the only family she knew. We didn’t have to warn her about the outside, because she couldn’t remember it. I think she remembered her first Solstice somehow, because Blue always had ice fingers and toes. Freya would rub her feet under the sheets before she went to sleep. Gooseflesh, even in the summer. She could never get warm. Sometimes I watched her holding her hands in her armpits, or curling her fingers around a steaming mug, and wondered if her skin remembered lying on the icy ground, that night, with the scarf unravelled and the Bad all around her.
One day around five summers after Freya brought her to us, Blue disappeared. She’d slept in the attic with me like always; her drawer was too small for her now, and she lay with me on the mattress, and Freya sometimes slept on the rug, wrapped in her coat. I woke up alone, and when I found Freya in the kitchen, we both thought Blue had been with the other.
—Why don’t you take better care of her? She’s not a doll, Freya said.
She was sketching at the table, brushes and paints in a jar. Ellen and Libby were brewing tea and they looked around.
—What’s that, said Ellen. —Little one lost?
—She’ll be around, said Freya, but she swiped her brush in the jar, making black clouds there, and got up.
We searched the downstairs first, and the obvious places: the ballroom, where Egg and Pet were ripping up sheets for rags, the yellow room, where Libby said Blue liked to nap in the afternoons. —No she doesn’t, said Freya, but Libby showed us the chair Blue curled up in, how it was out of the draughts. The back corridors with their empty rooms were quiet, and the staircases. In the big upstairs rooms, peeling wallpaper and rotting books, we found Valentina lying on her stomach and writing in a notebook, wrapped in a blanket.
—Not seen her, she said.
—October gone too? asked Libby. —Maybe they’re together.
—No, we’re playing hide-and-seek, said Valentina, turning over a page.
We tried the studios, and found Richard hauling sacks of clay, new delivered, ready for the pottery wheel, his tweeds covered in dust.
—Oh, he said, —I saw her in the gardens this morning.
—On her own? said Libby.
—Well, yes, he said.
Freya went to the window and cupped her hands around her face. —Green used to wander around all the time, she said.
—No, Libby said. —Toby was always with her, or you.
—She’s fine, said Ellen, —I’m sure she’s fine, but she went to the window too, and cupped her hands there, so she and Freya looked like they were speaking to someone, silently, on the other side of the glass.
It started to rain, and we went out onto the back lawns to search for her, calling her name, tripping over the leaping dogs. Raindrops turned into sheets. Toby showed up, in a thick red jumper that stretched in the drench, the sleeves flopping down to his knees. Valentina twisted one of them, splattering the grass, and said, —Inside, kiddo, don’t want you catching cold. And Toby smiled his smile that was just for her when she noticed him, not half and crooked like the ones he gave to me, and obeyed.
—She must have gone back in, said Richard.
—We’ll stay out and look here, Freya said, squeezing my hand. The others waded back to the house, some giggling and shrieking, others glancing back at the gardens and the moor beyond, brows creased.
Blue’s name got lost in the rain when we called her.
—She’ll be fine, said Freya. —Sure she’s back in the house, drying that hair of hers.
Something about Blue’s hair — the bright red had faded as she grew, but it lived in glints and streaks in the brown, and it was glossy, lovely like Libby’s was — irritated Freya, and for her Blue’s hair was always that hair of hers. All of her worry seemed to have drained away, and she stood smiling, cupping her hands to catch the rain.
—My Green, haven’t you noticed?
—What?
—It’s just you and me! First time in ages!
She gripped my wrists and we spun around, throwing our heads back so our mouths filled up with rain, and spouting the water out like fountains. Screaming happily in the wet gusts, we slid around on the muddy grass, throwing clods at each other and for the dogs to catch. Numb skinned, we gasped and pushed streaming water out of our eyes, ran and whooped across the back lawns, through walls of nettles, not feeling the stings in the wet. We darted straight into the copse and stood panting under the cover of a clutch of trees. I called for Blue again.
—Let’s race, Freya said, and sprinted out towards the Standing Stones. The rain plunged in bursts when we rushed into spaces not covered by the trees, the soil churned under our feet, released its scent, making me hungry. Freya caught me and scooped me into a hug. I breathed in her skin, knowing I might not get her all to myself again, perhaps for years or ever.
—Well, she’s not here, said Freya, panting.
—She might be at the Stones, I said. I didn’t want to go back to the house yet, to the Family.
—Past the stone wall? Freya said.
—She might, I said.
Blue wasn’t allowed past the stone wall alone. But she loved to clamber onto the Standing Stones, or try to loosen them with all her weight. Once, leaning down so his hair brushed her cheek, Toby had told her that he could move the Stones around like empty boxes, arrange them in patterns, that she could do the same when she was big and strong. Then we lay against the biggest stone, me and Toby, our feet resting atop one another, shuddering with laughter, watching Blue’s toes slide on the grass, trying to shift the ancient markers, their stone roots running deep.
We were both quiet for a while, thinking about Blue getting bigger. Then we headed for the stone wall, made long before the Founders’ time, spilling rocks onto the moor like broken teeth. From there we looked back at Foxlowe, lying under the rain like something glimpsed at the bottom of the fountain. Candles were lit in the storm-gloom, and the small shapes of dogs huddled against the back walls, shaking out their fur.
—Looks just like when I came, Freya said. —It was raining then, and I came this way, over the moor. She smiled at me, a full, open smile, and squeezed out my hair for me. —Come on, tramp, she said, and we set out towards the Stones.
—What’s a tramp? I said. I had to shout over the rain and the rumble of the sky.
—An outside thing.
—Why am I one?
—You’re not really, she said. —You have a lovely big home and everything you’ll ever need. You’re a scruff, that’s all. Sometimes, Freya said, —sometimes I wonder how you’d look, if we, if you were outside, all scrubbed and dressed like them.
Then Freya was quiet, so I asked if we could play All The Ways Home Is Better, and I remembered them all, in the correct order:
1. We are FREE
2. We are a NEW BETTER KIND OF FAMILY
3. We have a NEW BETTER KIND OF EDUCATION
4. We are CONNECTED to the ANCIENT WAY OF LIVING and to the ANCIENT LANDSCAPE
5. We are SAFER because we know THE BAD and call it by name.
Beyond the stone wall, our copse merged with the moor and turned into a steep climb. You could hear the outside roar from here: a strip of road, the edge of the world. Today the rain cloaked the sound, and we climbed in silence, tugging at grasses.
The Standing Stones were eight stones, green with algae and moss, so they seemed to grow out of the grass. The Stones were as tall as Dylan, broad and solid, immovable. From here we could see the double peak of the Cloud, and the moor rolling down in valleys all the way to the road. We ducked under the barbed wire — disgusting, illegal, Freya called it. And there was Blue, sitting on the centre stone, with a man and a woman on either side of her.
I wrenched free of Freya’s hand and ran, kicking up clods of earth, slipping into the Stones. I knew Freya would overtake me so I wouldn’t have to speak to the outsiders.
The man smiled at me. He had a shaved face, his skin shiny where his beard should be, and wore a bright plastic jacket. I looked back for Freya, but she was walking slowly, her hands rammed into her skirt pockets, and then I lost her behind one of the Stones. The outside woman had lifted Blue into her arms. They’d wrapped something plastic around her, a brutal zip cutting under her chin.
—She was out alone, the woman said. Her hair was done in a way I’d seen before, an old Leaver had it like that, in sausages. Dreads. —In the rain, she said. —We were here taking photos and—
Blue stretched her arms out to me, and the woman put her down.
—She doesn’t like to be carried, I mumbled. Blue was chattering. —It’s raining, I got wet, my legs are all covered in mud, look—
The man was staring at my feet, so I looked there too, mud-caked in my socks. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t known we were coming to the moor. A pair of boots from Jumble fitted me almost perfect.
—Is that your mum? the woman asked, and I looked to see Freya coming, shook my head.
Freya’s cheeks were red, and her hands, released from the pockets, fluttered between her hair, her skirts, and wiping the rain from her forehead. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t see what I’d done. It was right, wasn’t it, to run to Blue, and I hadn’t spoken to them, just answered questions. Freya ducked her head as she came close, and tugged at Blue.
—All right, the man said. —You from the big house, are you? That commune place?
—Are these your kids? the woman said.
When Freya spoke her voice was different, soft and sorry. —Thank you, she said.
—She was out all by herself, the woman said, angry.
I waited for Freya to tell them she was a Founder, you can’t speak to her like that, but she was looking at the ground, so I said, —She ran away. We live just behind that rise. Foxlowe.
—Foxlowe, the man repeated.
And then the three of us were striding, breaking into a run, catching glimpses behind of the outside people, who were calling after us, hands held up to their eyes, still calling to us, until their voices faded. I grazed a Standing Stone as we rushed away, sharp pain in my elbow. When we reached our stone wall, Freya lifted Blue over roughly, knocking her bare legs against the rock. She tossed the plastic zipped thing into a bed of nettles in the copse.
We didn’t speak the whole way up the back lawns to the house. The rain had drained away into drizzle. Blue’s hand was sticky in mine, and I wondered if they’d given her outside food, like the chocolate we’d had once, brought by Ellen from a shop run. I lifted Blue’s palm to my lips and licked, but I couldn’t taste anything. I scrambled to make sense of all the details, assembled questions to ask her when we were alone. I’d seen outside people before, out on the moor, knew some of them by sight, the people who lived on the farms, and yelled at us if we jumped their fences. I’d never spoken to one though, or seen Freya with one so close, seen her turn into someone else, someone afraid. I tightened my grip on Blue’s hand. On the other side of her, Freya strode, her face closed. Blue knew not to speak — we’d taught her, me and Toby, to be quiet when our nails dug into her skin, for times like this. I drew blood this time, spooked by Freya’s lost voice and stooped back.
Meeting that night dragged on for hours. Cocooned together in the patchwork blanket, the warm weight of a dog across our laps, Toby, Blue and me nodded asleep, woke to more words and circling arguments, or were pulled awake by our own names spoken, calling us back to listen. The smell of coffee and smoke and, later, that day’s leftovers, potatoes and leeks, reheated and passed around in mugs, floated over us.
Libby was speaking. —Never formalised things, about the children—
—But that’s the point, Ellen’s voice. —A new, better kind of education, a real childhood, no formalising—
—But when it comes to safety, to custody—
—But as far as the outsiders are concerned, it is all official. Richard’s voice, faster than I was used to hearing it, less bored. —Everything is in order, but we want the children’s experience to be that—
—They’ll come here, Freya said. The glass in her throat was back, and anger thrilled through every word. —They were worried, they had that look. He knew us, knew the house. They’re going to interfere.
—But they were right, Libby said.
Raised voices to this. Words that came up frequently at Meeting were thrown. Freedom. Safe. Outside.
—Should be more careful, Libby shouted over them. —The road is right there, the town is right there, there are walkers—
—Better to be more remote. Egg’s voice, this.
—We can’t help where Foxlowe is, Richard answered.
Freya’s voice moved closer, as she joined Richard on the floor.
—We need to be near the Stones, she said. —This is where we should be, and need to be. It can be remote, if we block out as much as we can.
Later, Freya, Blue and me were in the attic, getting ready for bed. I plaited Blue’s hair into thick braids, and asked her why she’d gone out on the moor alone, but she had shrunk into herself, smoothing her thumbnail over her top lip. Freya was sloughing dried mud from her boots with a knife.
—Blood will out, she said, a phrase of hers she often threw at Blue, never at me. We didn’t know what it meant, but Toby thought it was a threat to cut her.
Then, Freya asked me, lightly, —Have you talked to Toby?
—Course, I said.
—About those outsiders?
I had told Toby all about Freya’s sudden shrinking. He hadn’t said anything, just raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
—No, I said.
—Good, Freya said. —It’s not good to talk about outsiders. It pollutes the atmosphere.
Blue’s hair was still damp and I sucked my fingers to take away the clammy chill.
—So, Freya said. —What shall we do with this girl?
I took my fingers out of my mouth and hid them in Blue’s hair. She had started to twist into my lap.
—It’s up to you, really, said Freya. —You were responsible for her this morning.
—I don’t know, I said.
—Now, Freya said. —You do know, don’t you?
—We can ask at Meeting, I said, thinking of Libby and how she would talk Richard around, away from Freya’s suggested punishments.
—This is just about us, the three of us, our little family, said Freya.
Blue was burying her face in my neck now. Freya put down her boots.
—We could cut off her hair, I said.
Painless, and Freya would like it. That hair of hers.
Blue shook her head into my throat. Freya smiled, and shook hers too.
—I see, she said. —Clever girl. You’re kind to her. But pain, you see, it’s important, to drive the Bad out.
—Blue doesn’t have the Bad, I said. —She was just exploring.
—Can’t take any chances, can we? Freya said.
I was silent.
—I think it will have to be the Spike Walk, Freya said.
Of course I knew it would be the Spike Walk straight away, but Freya liked to tease it out. When it was me, she’d come and sit on the bed and ask me how I thought I should be punished, and I’d suggest ways, but it was always the Spike Walk in the end. Somehow it was worse to play the same game for Blue. It was her first time.
It was still a damp night, and the others would have taken their work into the kitchen, sewing and sketching by the aga, with the dogs lying over their feet. So we took her down there, crying now and clinging to my waist, and I stood at the yellow room end, whispering Just think about tomorrow there’ll be honey coming from the shop run we’ll have honey cakes Blue just think about that, and Freya stood at the ballroom side, pushing Blue back to the Spikes whenever she had done one Walk, telling her, —Now, run the nail along the same scratch, that’s it, until it bleeds.
The next morning, Freya wrapped Blue’s arm in a clean rag with wild garlic and lavender packed into the cuts. At breakfast I gave Blue my share of the new honey, and the Family stroked her arm or her back as they passed. Ellen clanged pots around, until Richard said, —Is there a problem? and Freya said, —No, no problem, and the others drifted out of the kitchen, touching Blue’s shoulder or her other arm as they passed, while she nibbled on the honeyed bread, and snatched her head away when I reached to smooth her hair.
I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t have to do any more Spike Walks. They would all be for Blue.
7 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Once I asked Freya about the Spike Walk, and she said there was a story for it, only we didn’t tell it often, because it was clear as a summer sky what the Spike Walk was for. She told me the story anyway, and I told it to Toby, then to Blue when she asked, so it wouldn’t be lost.
Foxlowe existed before the Family did. Many years ago, before long Solstice days, before the house brimmed with the smell of wine and candlewax, before home, Foxlowe stood alone. The Standing Stones slept on the moor with no one to imagine what they meant or to care for them. Every Summer Solstice the sun path lit up through the Stones, all the way up to Foxlowe’s walls, and the sun set twice. No one saw it, or cared, or did things in the proper way. Freya was carrying her old name, and living in far away, concrete places, and only just beginning to understand how very wrong things were. It would be a long time before she and Foxlowe found one another.
Then Richard came, and Liberty, carrying their old names, and others with their old names too, people who lived at Foxlowe before the home we know. Foxlowe welcomed them with warm light and the blue stained glass made puddles on the wood for them to play in, and sunlit dust flurried in abandoned rooms. Richard knew the house from a long time before. He said the garden was full of things to eat but they had rotted away, swollen and burst, because no one had been there to enjoy them. They had to live for a little bit like the outside, paying money for all the food. But soon the paintings were taken down, and the furniture hauled away, and Foxlowe began to look like itself: the chickens, the vegetable patches, the fruit trees.
Most of the paintings were high up, and left squares of dark wood behind, in the way covered skin stays white in summer. In the Spike Walk, though, the nails stuck out low, and when you walked past them, they bit at you, snagging clothes and skin. In the first years, talk was of taking the nails down, and smoothing the wood with sandpaper and fresh varnish, but other jobs were more important, and everything had to be learned.
When Freya came, she said, —Leave them up. We’ll call it the Spike Walk. No one knew why, but as in all things, they did as Freya said. Then many Solstices later, the children came. They were afraid of the Spike Walk and the ghosts at the end of the corridor. Freya understood that if the children got the Bad in them, you could get it out by making them walk up and down the Spike Walk until the skin bled a little. And then the others understood why Freya had told them to leave the nails where they were. Sometimes Freya’s wisdom wasn’t revealed for a long time.
8 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
As she got older, Blue would be punished again and again for disappearing alone, walking out onto the moor, talking to outsiders. Her arms would be streaked with scars, etchings of Spike Walk nights, and we got used to seeing her bandages. After that first time, she never cried in the Spike Walk. She held her arms out as though spinning on the moor for fun, holding Freya’s eye. It was always me, in the end, who looked away. At Meeting, it was agreed that me and Toby were to keep watching her, and never let her out alone. But so often we lost her, slipping away over the stone wall and running so fast we could only wait for her to come back, a sickness rising, waiting for the night, for Freya to balance things again.
We knew, me and Toby, deep down, what it was that called her away again and again, and leached away when she bled in the Spike Walk, only to build again, because it was so old and rooted so deep; it had touched her when she was so very tiny, grown around her like a vine around a tree. We never betrayed her. Even she didn’t know. When Freya would scream at her Why do you do it? Blue could only shake her head, and me and Toby held each other’s eye.
Around a Solstice after her first Spike Walk, Blue had a bad run of them, her skin never seeming to heal by the time the next Walk came. So me and Toby taught her maze-making, one of our favourite games, to try to keep her attention with us, to hold her for a while. She’d kept watch while we stole the cogs of thread from the sewing box, fiddling with the fresh bandage on her arm. Toby showed her how to snap the line with her teeth, running the tongue over the tender parts of the mouth, avoiding the rot.
—Where do you chew? Show me, he said. Blue arched her head back and pointed.
—That one then, Toby said, and flicked at a tooth on the top of her jaw.
I remembered, briefly, those teeth coming through: the screaming, the sudden sharpness of her bite on my fingers. She’d lost many by then, sat twisting the loose ones in Meeting. Freya kept them in an old jar, with mine.
—Wrap the thread like this, Toby said, —and cut, and you have to be quick, because the chasers are coming for you through the grass!
Maze-making was best played on the sloping moorland near the Standing Stones. You had to catch the right time of the year: when the grasses were grown over our heads. A couple of dogs had followed us down, and flopped in the sun where the grass was lower.
Toby was the best maze-maker. He went in first, trailing a bright red thread, and disappeared into the green. The end was tied around the stile post, and the knot bounced and slipped as Toby made his path. The grasses crashed and snapped. Then a yell, —Now! and we plunged into the maze, following the thread line, the ground marshy beneath our feet, the crushed grasses like a carpet, and stones tipping us off course. Blue was faster than me, pivoting and making the quick turns with ease, leaving me squeezing through the grasses behind, trying to follow Toby’s path. His counts carried over the air, and my very skin strained to get to him before the seconds disappeared, then suddenly Blue parted a wall of grass and fell upon him, as he yelled Fifteen!
—You did it! he yelled, rolling Blue onto his stomach, the thread still hanging from his thumb; she’d got to him before he could cut the thread on his teeth.
—Too slow, too slow! she cried. —My turn!
Toby solemnly gave the thread over to her with a little bow. He was tall now, so his jeans stopped at his shins, and it had made a kind of gap between us, as though it was him alone, then me and Blue lumped together, the smaller ones. Teaching Blue our game was another small ending of the world of us, of me and Toby.
Blue curled Toby’s thread around her thumb as she collected it from the grass and we picked our way out of the maze, ready to start again. Through the green, I glimpsed a figure hovering near the stile.
The man was wearing a brown suit and his white hair was short, his face shaved. A smile played around his mouth as he took us in.
—Hello, he said.
Toby put his hand on my shoulder.
Blue tilted her head and waved. He copied her, making her laugh, then she danced, and so did he, waving his briefcase in the air.
—Playing a game? the man said.
Toby found his voice. —Are you lost? he said.
—Ah, no, just arrived, the man said, taking off his shoes. He perched on the old wooden gate, rolled off his socks, wiggled his toes in the sun.
—So nice here, the man said.
Toby looked at me, silently saying, What now?
The man had closed his eyes and was holding his face to the sun. I wondered if he’d forgotten we were there.
I shrugged back to Toby, and mouthed, Just keep playing?
There were no rules for outsiders who popped up on the moorland like spirits. We knew most of the locals by sight, and avoided them if we could. The thought that held me and Toby still and kept our hands on Blue’s wrists to stop her shooting to this new plaything was that the man could even be a moor spirit, or the Bad, dressed up in a suit.
The man opened his eyes and his smile faded. —Oh, he said, —don’t be frightened.
A dog bounded over and the man welcomed it with a kiss on its muzzle. She was Toby’s favourite, a bitch with soft brown fur turning grey around the eyes. We both remembered her as a puppy, but Toby would play with her and try to teach her tricks, gave her a few different names that never stuck. When he saw the dog licking the man’s face, Toby’s grip on Blue relaxed and she rushed over to sit next to him.
—Why are you here? Do you have a name yet? We’re playing a new game, she said. —It’s with threads and you have to catch the maze-maker before he cuts the thread and I just won, how old are you?
—How old do you think I am? he said. He held up his chin and pushed back his hair, so she could look at his face. Toby and I went over to crouch in the grass.
—Old, she said. —Eighty Solstices.
—No, older, I said to her. —Look at his white hair.
The man laughed. Up close he was very real, with mud on his trousers, brown spots on the back of his hands.
—Do you live outside? Blue said. —We live at Foxlowe.
The man smiled. —I wondered if you might, he said.
I felt better. He wasn’t a real outsider at all, but knew home.
—We should take you up to the house, said Toby, like it was a question.
The man gestured for him to lead the way.
We almost broke into a run, taking him back over the stone wall. We three had a huge secret, a gift, maybe even new family, and we’d met him first. The man kept stopping along the way to look behind us, to where the Cloud sat on the horizon.
When we reached the stone wall behind Foxlowe, the man’s scalp under his white hair had burned red. He stood for a while gazing at the house, windows flashing in the sun. The garden was in full summer bloom; the sweet pea were bright, the fruit trees swollen. We three waited for the man to say something, about how he knew our home, but he only stared, then vaulted over the stone wall and dropped into the gardens, so we had to scramble to follow him.
Toby flung the kitchen door open and yelled into the house, —Everyone! Hey!
Egg and Pet were already in the kitchen, their arms around each other, Egg kissing Pet’s forehead. They were always fighting and making up in Freya—Richard seasons, which this was. Mostly, it made life easy when Freya and Richard were together: Blue and I had the attic to ourselves, could whisper into the night. We’d find Freya every morning in the kitchen, where she’d kiss us both, though Blue would duck her head away, and give us pancakes soaked in apple syrup. She even laughed when Toby dropped a case of eggs when he tripped on the steps near the fountain. Toby had gone white, but Freya just made sketches of the mess, foamy yellow and the raw white like spit on the marble. But Libby spent her days with Egg in the ballroom, playing the tapes on the tinny stereo, and slept wrapped in his arms, making Pet’s eyes raw.
They broke apart, stunned. I grinned; it was hard to surprise the grown. It took a second for Egg to recover. He strode forward, holding out a hand to the stranger.
—Hi, he said. —Are you lost?
—We found him out by the Stones, I said.
—He was just there, said Toby.
—We thought he was a moor spirit, I said to Pet, who’d told us stories about them, how they led you to bogs and marshes, told you riddles, made promises with hidden stings.
Noise drifted down from the house as the others caught the scent of gossip and clattered towards the kitchen.
—If only I were so magical, said the man. —I’m parked over at Ipstones.
Richard, Freya and Dylan burst in, followed by the others. Freya stood for a second, her eyes flicking from the outsider, to us, and then settling on Blue. She had her by the hair before me and Toby could move, and dragged her out of sight, towards the goat shed. The man’s smile disappeared. Richard bounded over next to Egg.
—Hi, he said. —Welcome. Glass of water?
Pet filled a jar.
—We don’t usually sell from the house, said Richard. —We have some goats’ milk, jam and wine, if you’re—
—Unless you’re from a gallery, Dylan said. —We have some new craft pieces ready for market that you’re welcome to look at, and our higher end stuff is in the back.
—Sculpture and pottery mostly, Richard said. —Some paintings.
—Are you lost? Egg asked again.
—Is the girl all right? said the man. —What’s going on?
Folded arms and silence to this. Ellen and Libby were whispering to each other. Toby and I moved closer together. Valentina mouthed Okay? to Toby and he nodded.
—It’s all right, I said.
The man studied Richard’s face. —You’re the owner, he said, not like a question.
—We live as a commune, said Egg, so who owns what doesn’t really —
The man spoke to Richard again. —You’re Ralph’s boy, aren’t you? Same nose, and the clothes—
—Oh, said Richard, and straightened up, grew taller. —You knew—
—I lived here for a while, when I was very young, the man replied.
A ripple went through us. Someone who knew old Foxlowe, before us — not an outsider, but something else, like an old friend we’d forgotten.
The man held up his briefcase.
—I’m supposed to mark them, he said. —Papers. I was on the train. I’ve kept on working, you know. Never wanted to retire.
He looked at the briefcase and down at himself. In the silence Freya’s voice floated, No more said about it. It was her soft voice and so we parted a little as she came back with Blue at her side, hiding her hands in her sleeves, where the new scratches were. I pulled gently at her earlobe, and Toby squeezed her hand.
I found Blue’s ear. —So, how old, do you think? Guess, I whispered.
She sniffed. —A hundred Solstices.
It was the oldest we could imagine. Freya was our eldest grown and she’d lived eighty-two Solstices, summer and winter.
The outside man spoke. —And then. I just, I don’t want to, and I thought, it’s so simple, and I realised I wasn’t far from, well the train was coming through, and I just thought. I always wanted to come back and visit. Silly, really.
He trailed off and looked up at the archway and the old stone there, then looked back, smiling, like he was pleased to find something there. —I always meant to, he went on. — I was ill when it was Ralph’s funeral, and then, well, I didn’t know. You never know, do you, if you should go back, you know, to places you’ve … He spoke to Richard again, —Oh, you’re so like, he said.
Richard pulled at his shirt sleeves.
—Then it just kept playing on my mind, kept thinking about it, on the train, how much I loved it here. Your granddad and me … He nodded at Richard. —Oh we had some laughs, when I was sent up here —
—Maybe more, I whispered to Blue.
—Um, said Richard, —well, I suppose, if you want to look around—
—I heard everything went to you, the man said. —I remember hearing about all that, and it’s Ralph too, isn’t it?
—Richard, Freya corrected him.
—How old are you? asked Blue.
—I am three hundred and fifty-seven today, said the man.
She laughed.
—Aren’t you going to wish me happy birthday? he said.
—You say, Happy birthday, said Richard.
We did, copying the way his voice flew up and down on the words.
On his first day we didn’t talk to Kai much. He told us his old name, and we tried to forget it, in case he stayed. He took a t-shirt from Jumble and wore overalls over it, leaving the brown suit folded in a carrier bag on the back of the kitchen door, ready to be cut up for patches. His first evening with us, he sang with Libby and Dylan; he was good at guitar. He found a mattress in one of the back corridors and Richard said he could have that room, if he wanted.
Days passed. Richard came into our attic and pulled out cobwebbed boxes from the eaves, things we didn’t know were there. He and the man spread out photographs on the kitchen table, and the man found himself, so he said, a boy standing on the back lawns, wearing shorts, his hair cut short, squinting into the camera. He and Richard stayed up late together talking and sifting through pictures, writing things in pencil on the backs. Richard called us to look at them, Blue and me, pointed at dead faces, told us names, but they were like Leavers, just ghosts, and I said so, said, —But they aren’t like us, they just used to live here, and Richard snapped the box of photographs shut. Freya packed them away again, put them back into the eaves. I didn’t like them there, watching us sleep.
The man taught Toby how to play a game with an old ball he’d found in the sheds. He asked Valentina if she minded, and she shrugged and said she didn’t care, then watched them from the kitchen windows. He told me and Blue stories about where he’d come from, Oxford, where there were books buried under the streets, and buildings made out of yellow stone, and Freya let him even though usually we weren’t to talk about old lives, but she said his voice was nice, and she liked listening to it lilt and fall while she worked.
At the end of his first week the weather turned cool, and we made a hot dinner. I dipped bread in egg, pushing it under to make it soggy. Freya took the eggshells and smashed them in her fists.
—So witches can’t use them, she said, and winked at me.
—Can’t we have tomatoes? Ellen said.
—Yeah, no veg all week, said Dylan.
—We’ll all get scurvy, said Pet.
There was a murmur of agreement from Libby and Egg, painting their toenails with tippex.
While we ate, Kai held the conversation. When others spoke, adding anecdotes, we all listened, but when Kai took up the thread again we leaned forward with our forks hanging. He didn’t talk about the outside much but kept coming back to Foxlowe’s old life, and how there had been fires lit in every room, and books covering the walls, and people who brought you things, who just lived there to bring you things, and how he and the man called Ralph had played games on the stairs that sounded like ours, using sacks to race to the bottom. Freya leaned on her hand and watched all this, chewing her eggs, smiling.
—Thing is, Freya said, as she took Kai’s plate.
—Yes, yes, I know, Kai said, smiling. —I’m not an artist, I can’t draw! Not at all! he added, cheerfully. —I heard in one of the villages that’s what it is here now, an artists’ place. Ralph used to paint, you know, he said.
—That’s really not the point, said Freya. —We all contribute something. Richard and I, we can sell our paintings and sculptures, Dylan too, he just got a big commission from Liverpool — here everyone cheered —And I do most of the cooking and sell the wine and the jam and so on, and Valentina sews, Ellen brings in her contribution from the markets down in Leek, and Egg does lots of the goats work, and the garden …
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Eleanor Wasserberg
A compulsive and chilling debut about a girl growing up in a cultWHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE?Green and Blue are sisters.Foxlowe is home. Outside is Bad.Green understands.Why can’t Blue?
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Copyright (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2016
Copyright © Eleanor Wasserberg 2016
Eleanor Wasserberg asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008164089
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008164119
Version: 2017-01-04
Dedication (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
For my parents
Contents
Cover (#ub73ddedb-30d5-59a4-abca-7a01ecb6d728)
Title Page (#ulink_9e4e9bf3-cc6d-5e98-8e1d-70c0b82a19f6)
Copyright (#ulink_4cd7f8b8-3e71-5f60-a58f-cd29ce1f9630)
Dedication (#ulink_7f4249c1-b7da-5b8b-8c9d-19cd91cd1423)
Prologue (#ulink_d886b358-95cc-5677-8435-f4cf46c9ee58)
PART ONE: Green (#ulink_41e97c61-2706-5936-942a-44c5274397a8)
1 (#ulink_e88f45a1-8f7c-52fd-9736-a83dd237b52a)
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PART TWO: Jess (#litres_trial_promo)
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PART THREE: Green (#litres_trial_promo)
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Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
At Foxlowe everyone has two names. One is a secret, meant to be lost. For most, it worked like this: first they had the one they came to Foxlowe with peeled away like sunburnt skin. Then a new name, for a new life.
I used to get jealous of the Family with their secret outside names, while I only had the one, like half a person. Sometimes an old name would slip, strangled at a syllable with a blush. This was a sign to watch for, in case someone might wish to become a Leaver.
Now I am doubled that way, named twice, but for me, it’s worked in reverse: my new name came later, on the outside, like putting on that crusty old skin that should be lying on the floor.
My one name was Green, but no one calls me that any more. I had no old name to peel away, because I was born at Foxlowe. Freya named me first, of course. She named all of us, except for one. There’s a power in naming. Green was strange even for home — most of the women had flowers, or pretty ideas, like Liberty.
If I could speak to Freya, I’d tell her not to worry, because I hold my new name ever so lightly, ready to shrug it off, if ever Foxlowe could start up again.
Of course I wasn’t Green all the time. With Toby, it was the ungrown; once Blue came, it was the girls, too.
Since this is a story for Blue, first here is the little bit I remember of the world before Blue was in it. I knew that it’s not only names that double: time was split in two, between two Solstices. The winter one falls when the year is dying and you have to be careful then, because the Bad is strong in the dark. The summer one is when the sun sets twice at the Standing Stones, and the Bad is weakest. I don’t remember when I learned these things, only that I knew them by the time Blue existed. I knew Freya and Richard and Libby were the Founders and that the others were the Family and I even remembered that there was a time when I was the only ungrown, before Toby came. I knew that when I was born, it brought the Time of the Crisis, and that everything Freya did, even the things that hurt, were to keep the Family together and safe ever afterwards.
I am meant to tell Blue’s story, but it doesn’t flow as it should: there are broken and jagged edges to it, and some pieces are too sharp for the tongue to tell. I could begin with Blue’s naming, the first little thing I did to love and to hurt Blue all at once. Or I could tell the moment Foxlowe began crumbling all around us, with the front doorbell ringing. But wherever I begin, it all leads to the same place. To the sweet rotting smells, and the warm, slick blood.
PART ONE
Green (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
1 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Tiny red beads came from the lines on my arm. Those soft scars give way like wet paper. There’s a game that helps: footsteps in the dust, twisting to match the old strides without taking the skin away from the Spike Walk. Another: name steps all the way to the yellow room end of the Spike Walk. Freya, Toby, Green, Egg, Pet, the Bad. I made it to the final nail and squinted at the arm. Red tears and the lines swollen hot; a crying face. I turned to Freya, her long arms wrapped around herself at the ballroom end of the Walk. She nodded, so I breathed deeper and licked some of the salt and coins taste to make it clean.
Freya spoke. —And back again, Green.
Her voice was low, but even softened there was broken glass in it.
I lifted my other arm to the nails that had once hung pictures on these walls in Foxlowe’s old life.
—No, same arm, Freya said, smothering a smile. —Until it bleeds, is the rule.
—It is bleeding.
I held up my arm for her to see. Freya gave a slow blink.
—And back again, Green.
I put the torn skin back to the first nail. By the time I stumbled into Freya’s embrace there were flames under my skin, and I knew the Bad was burning away. I pleaded silently into the wood smoke scent of Freya’s dress. She twined her fingers in my hair, tight at the roots, pulled to search my face. I tried to look pure and good, fixed on her dark eyes and sharp, veined cheeks. Freya nodded, uncurled to her full height, and led me out to the ballroom, where Libby knelt on the huge red rug.
Libby wrapped me in the cardigan with the daisy shaped buttons and left me for the kitchen. The curve of a broken button fitted snug around the tip of my little finger.
It wasn’t Freya who returned but Libby with the poultice of lavender and honey.
—Why’re you doing it? I asked, as Libby wrapped the warm cloth below my elbow. Freya did this for me, while telling the story of the Crisis, then she’d bring her forehead to mine, and pour her thick, black hair around us, making a little world for us away from the rest of the Family. This was her way of forgiving me. A little ritual of our own, an always.
—What did you do for the Spike Walk? Libby asked.
She liked to answer questions with questions. Her full name was Liberty, but only Freya ever called her that. Her hair was greasy with egg yolk, ready to wash out when the water came on after sunset.
I shrugged. It was between Freya and me. That morning I’d tried to pierce my ears with a needle and ice snapped from the attic window frame. It wasn’t for that I was punished, but because Freya, who could read all my secrets just by looking at my face or the way I moved my hands, knew it was because I wanted to look like Libby.
Libby’s earrings were blue hoops with little gold birds perched on them. They were special. Richard had brought them for her from the outside, and they never went into Jumble. She let me play with them now that my arm was bandaged, pressing one against my ear, while she held up the back of a spoon for me to see the blurry image. My hair didn’t move like her curls but like the knotted hair of a wet dog left out in the rain.
After a while the Family came in from the gardens, their arms full of holly, or branches of white and red berries. I looked for Toby, but only the grown had been outside collecting for the Solstice decorations. They were flushed from the cold and the carrying, but it was almost festival time, and they filled the huge room with whistles and snatches of song and bits of stories. I threw my head back to see if the sounds bouncing around the ceiling beams were visible. Richard dragged a crate of wine and raised his eyebrows at Libby as he passed. She gave him a wide smile and shifted her hips on the floor, touched her sticky yolked hair. His eyes slid to my arm, then away, and he left towards the kitchen. The Family started to pull out vine and branch, strangling them into wreaths.
I was finding deeper breaths now, my heart settling.
—That’s it, breathe into it, Libby soothed. —Imagine the pain like a ball that’s moving to your hands.
I always tried but my pain ran in lines, so I made it into a track to be walked across the moor, leading to my fingers. Libby had me make a fist and release it. She told me I could watch the ball float up and away like a bubble. Instead, behind my eyelids were threads spooling out from the new cuts, unravelling, unpicked bad stitches.
—Have you heard the secret? Libby asked me.
—Secret? Is it new family? New clothes? I said. —Can I have a—
—No. It’s something really good, she said, giggling so her snaggle tooth showed.
—New … animals? More dogs, are there going to be puppies?
Libby shook her head, plaiting the tassels at the edge of the ballroom rug.
—I know, I lied.
—You’ve guessed! And I’m not supposed to tell, Freya wants to!
—Why hasn’t Freya come? I said. —Is she to do with it, the secret?
Libby held out her earring. —Try it on your other ear.
But I didn’t care about the earrings any more. I tried to think of all the secrets there had ever been, but it wasn’t new family or animals and I knew it couldn’t be a Leaver, because Libby said something good. I begged Libby to tell me, hung from her shoulders, kissed her then kicked her, and eventually she said, —Green! Enough, go and find Toby and play, and she shoved me away.
He wasn’t far, on the middle landing, eating berries from the new wreath that hung there. His woolly blond hair stuck out from his head in untidy curls; a layer of dirt crusted around his knees. I stole some berries and for a while we showed each other our red-stained tongues.
—D’you know there’s a secret happening, something good? I asked Toby.
—Like what?
—Something to do with me.
He frowned. —You have to clean, is all. We all have to before Solstice.
—Stupid, that’s not a good thing.
—Stupid, of course they aren’t going to tell you it’s a bad thing, stupid!
—Libby said something good. Are you calling Libby a liar?
My palm made red shapes on the skin of his back, where the safety pin left his t-shirt gaping. He kicked me away and twisted my arm, right where the fresh blood was. I spat in his face, foam on his cheeks. That settled it. Spit wins. Besides, Toby might be older, taller, but he was still newer than me: I remembered the day he came, in Valentina’s arms, and was dumped next to me on the ballroom rug. Play, they said. You can’t remember that, he always said, you were only a baby. I do, I said: the strange plastic on his jacket, and the outside smell. He’d been named October; Freya said it was right. She told me that outside Foxlowe it was a name for the time when leaves turned to fire.
Sitting on the step, we picked at things. Toby peeled away a huge scab on his knee I’d given him a day or two before. I plucked at rotten wood, and we drew on the fresh wood underneath with the berry juice. I loved to sit on the middle landing. From there you had a view right down into the main house. You could see the front entrance hall, and the ballroom ceilings stretched out of sight. The hallway leading to the kitchen was below too, so you could watch as people rushed in and out, carrying tea or fruit back to the studios. If you looked up, you could follow the staircase right up to the attic, making your stomach ripple with the height. Best of all, the stained glass window had a panel of clear glass with a view over the back lawns and the moor beyond, so you could peer out, bathing your feet in the blue light. The middle landing was the heart of everything.
Toby looked up from his bleeding knee and tugged at my poultice.
—Spike Walk?
I nodded.
—Valentina won’t let Freya take me any more, Toby said.
This was a lie. From Toby or Valentina, I couldn’t tell which.
—Freya didn’t properly forgive me after, I said. —I might have to do the Walk again.
—What did you do?
—A Libby thing.
Toby nodded. The tides between Freya and Libby were always.
—Where is she then? Toby said. After a pause he said, —Maybe she’s a Leaver! and laughed.
I pulled my cardigan closer around my waist. Freya had made it for me. The daisy buttons were from a shop she told me about that had them in jars, like sweets, she said, and I didn’t understand her, sweets are in rows from the oven or from chilling in the goat shed, ready to cut into brittle pieces and suck. Freya laughed, pulled me to her and nuzzled my neck, saying Imagine it, talking about the outside for a while. Then we’d played All The Ways Home Is Better.
There had been a Leaving that year, just as the Summer Solstice was coming, a strange time to go, when the house was aglow and everyone was happy. She’d been pretty, the Leaver had, and liked to sit on the back steps sewing patchwork quilts. We were already forgetting her. After a Leaving, there was always a slump, and careful watching of each other, lots of Meetings and the reshuffle of chores, and if people were gone for longer than expected, on shop runs or disappearing over the moor, things went quiet until they came back.
I slipped the hard edge of a daisy petal under my thumbnail, and tried to think of Freya as a Leaver, outside, in one of the box-houses she told me about. Foxlowe without her, like a hungry stomach.
—Don’t be stupid, I said.
We stared each other out, until my stomach complained, a guttering sound, and we went off to find food.
In the kitchen, bread smell swelled up the room. Toby tripped down the steps and leapt onto the table, upsetting the wine. The Family cheered and slow-clapped. Pooling around my fingers, the red stream was sticky and cool.
The Foxlowe kitchen was a cave, a stone mouth with a cold floor that made an easy game of trying to jump from slab to slab, just as we did out on the moor. There was a long gutter, where blood used to run, Freya said, when they killed animals down there in Foxlowe’s old life. Windows along one wall looked out on the back lawns. A table stretched along the centre, sticky with fruit juice and oil. Everywhere paint and brushes, lumps of curdled milk, crusty teabags. Dogs huddled the huge aga stove. The Family had come from the ballroom, following the smell of fresh bread.
When the Family was together like that, grown and ungrown, we got loud, shouting over each other, calling names, throwing arms wide. Libby looped around the table, kissing cheeks, her fresh-washed hair spilling over faces. I looked around for Freya, who liked to complain about the waste and vanity of Libby using the yolks, but she wasn’t there. Once, she’d tricked Libby by leaving old eggs out, long after they floated in still water, and Libby’s hair reeked for days, Freya laughing so hard I thought she would be sick. Now, Libby looped her arms around Richard’s neck, and he breathed in her newly softened curls.
Richard wore different clothes to the rest of us. There were paintings that looked like him in the upper rooms, the same fox faces with narrow noses and narrow eyes, and some of the clothes were the same: waistcoats and long black coats, white shirts full of moth holes. He never hugged us or swept us into a dance or pulled us onto his knee, so I didn’t know the smell and feel of him like the other grown, but he was all bone, strong in Freya’s way. His beard grew patchy and he was always scratching around his jaw. Sometimes the Family called him boy as a joke, but he was, Freya said, not that much younger than she was, if you were counting, and anyway older than Libby, who had airs of a grown but could have only just bled to look at her. Richard was one of the Founders, so there was little chance of him being a Leaver. Sometimes I secretly wished he would, didn’t like his eyes following me around the house or the way they would flick away from me if I tried to catch them. He eyed the blood on Toby’s knee.
—Still fighting, October, he said.
His voice faded at the end of words, like he got bored of them.
—This is supposed to be a place of peace, he said, circling his hands, his roll up making a smoky trail. —But you two … always bring … a kind of endless nasty fight, into our midst.
Toby licked the wine from his hands and pointed to the centre of the table.
—Butter, is that the secret thing? That’s shit, he said.
—What secret? Libby said, smiling.
—Is it just cleaning? I said. —Where’s Freya?
Richard frowned, and Libby looked away, and the Family chewed and swallowed.
I crawled under the table. Libby lifted Toby down. He nudged me with a fist and I hit him away.
—Try again, Toby said. —Say her name and see what they do.
—She can’t be a Leaver, I whispered.
—Ask again, he said.
But I was too afraid to name her to the Family and have them look away. Thing was sometimes Leavers slipped away like that, quick and silent.
Libby passed some cake dipped in honey to us. —An undertable picnic! she said. I glared at her.
The shuffle of feet and laughter faded as the Family moved to the ballroom. The mulled wine steamed on the stove.
—Thought Freya would have taken you, Toby said. —You must have done something really bad. What did you do to make her a Leaver?
I lay down on the icy stone.
—What was her name, that last Leaver? I whispered.
Toby scowled at me. Getting each other into trouble was our favourite game.
—Really, I said. —I forgot. I won’t tell.
—Brida, he said.
Her Foxlowe name. When she came, it was something long, an E name, I tried to remember.
Toby dug a bogey out of his nose and wiped it on the stone. —Valentina didn’t like her, he added.
—Freya neither.
—Maybe Freya went to tell her off.
—Yes, I said.
—Let’s get some clothes and food and stuff and go after her! he said.
—Shut up! She’ll come back!
Toby pinched me hard. It was to say Sorry and There, because you shouted at me and I was trying to be nice to you, and It might be true what I said, so get ready, all in one red nip of the skin, his favourite place on my wrist, all my scars there not from Freya but from him. We talked that way, when it was something important. I didn’t squeal or fight, just watched the blood flow into the skin, grateful for the sharpness of it, then Toby went back to the grown, leaving me lying under the table.
Candles on the table made a ring of light around the wooden curled feet. Freya would say, Here’s a fairy ring, safe or dangerous, depending on the story.
Freya’s fingers, greasy and rough on my cheek, her bitten skin coated in vaseline. Her hair around her shoulders like black straw. Dark eyes narrowed, squinting back at me. In the weak light Freya’s crooked teeth were hidden, and she looked pale, almost pretty like Libby. She hunched her tall figure further under the table.
—What have we here? A fairy crawled under my table looking for milk.
She made look sound like luke.
—And still asleep, she doesn’t want to talk.
I shot under her arm, and she held my head against her wool coat. She smelled of the outside: leather and plastic, and petrol from the old car we used for the shop runs.
—You came back, I said.
I tried to burrow further into her but she held her side away from me. In the crook of her elbow was a bundle of clothes. She’d brought new things! I grasped for it, but Freya sucked air through her teeth and cuffed my arm away. The bundle made wet sounds.
Freya knelt next to me and shifted it high onto her chest.
—This is our new baby, she said.
2 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Wisps of red hair stuck out from a striped scarf. I reached out to touch the tip of an ear. Pink skin and tiny gold hairs. It was cold.
I thought of the cool flesh of the baby goats we’d found lying stiff in the shed.
—Is it dead? I said.
Freya frowned and ducked from under the table and I followed her, pulling the hem of my dress, wanting at once to wrench the baby out of Freya’s arms, where I belonged, and to hold it myself, look at it.
—She’s ours, Freya said. —She’s our new little sister.
—It’s family?
—She is, said Freya. —She’s going to live with us.
—Oh.
My Freya’s hands, the bitten nails and blackened tips, scent of soil and sometimes blood — they were wrapped around this new thing’s body, the head cupped in her palm.
—It’s staying? I said.
Freya turned her eyes on me. —Something Bad moving? she said.
—No.
—Seems like a nastiness there. Seems like a little Bad there, she said.
—No, I said. —The Family’s in the ballroom, I added.
—We’ll show them in a while.
This was strange, but I loved when it was me and Freya alone, without all the Family in the way, so I just smiled, until she turned her back to me, shushing as the new thing wriggled and kicked.
I thought of the goats again. —Does it need milk? I asked.
—Well, Freya said.
She brought out a bottle from a new bag, covered in pictures of sheep. She tipped it so I could see it was frozen. She held the new thing higher on her chest, and fetched a lit candle from the table, handed it to me. The gas hissed when Freya turned the dial. I waved the lit candle towards the sound. The ring sparked with a tiny roar.
I loved the blue lights when the gas was on. I breathed on the flames, watching them bow and stretch, while Freya put the bottle into a pan of water. After a while she brought it out with the tongs she used for taking potatoes out of the bonfire.
—Lift your sleeve up, she said. I gave her my good arm. She pressed the bottle to my skin and I yelped, jumping back. She held the bottle in place another long few seconds. I breathed into the pain the way Libby had taught me but just as I was about to thrash Freya released me.
She kissed my hair. —Now your arms are in balance, she said. —Feel how they speak to each other now?
The flashes of fresh burn answered the throbs in my cuts like music. I nodded. Freya put the milk aside to cool. —That’s how you test it, she said. —That same place on your arm. If it burns, you leave it a while.
We took new little sister to the Family, and they asked questions, Libby asking lots of times, —Did she say it was all right? Did you ask her? Are you sure she knows she’s welcome? As though she didn’t know it was only a baby, and couldn’t answer. Toby asked, —Is that it, the secret? I realised it was, and he only said, —That’s shit.
My hands dangled, lost at my sides as I followed Freya to the back rooms. Usually she held my hand tight in hers and stroked the back of my palm with her thumb, but now New Thing filled her arms, wailing a thin cry that cracked at the edges. It was late, the latest I had ever stayed up without falling asleep in the kitchen or the ballroom, waking up cold and finding my way to an empty mattress.
We took the Spike Walk. The spikes were rows of nails that stuck out of the panelled wood. They used to have paintings hanging on them. The story goes that when Richard first came to Foxlowe he sold them all, to pay for the first meals and clothes. I ran my hands lightly over the nails as we walked, followed my hours-old steps.
The end of the Spike Walk widened into the yellow room. It was smaller than the ballroom, but prettier, I thought. There was still some wallpaper left, turning brown, and a bed with a broken frame and thick pillows that had spat out some of their feathers, drifting across the room. White shapes crouched in the shadows, ghosts of wood and cotton.
Freya kicked a ghost out of her way and it groaned across the floor. She shook a sheet away from something and I went in to see. It was an old chest, carved oak like the table in the kitchen. Freya opened a drawer. There were mouldy towels in there; she shook them out and a stiff mouse dropped, rolled across the floor. She held the drawer up.
—Here’s your bed, baby girl, she said.
Freya took off her coat, and patted down the pockets. She took out some sprigs of dry lavender. We lined the drawer with the coat so that New Thing would know her the way pups sleep on the bellies of their mothers. She tucked the lavender around the edges.
—Now it’ll smell nice.
Freya corrected me. —Help her sleep. She’ll be quieter now.
Freya was wrong: that first night New Thing screamed so high, so endless, that the Family came up to the attic, to help shush and rock, and I whispered to Toby, —New Thing hates us. It hates it here. It should go away again.
—I like it, he said. —It’s nice to hold.
It was true it was warm, and though the weight of it pulled at my arms I liked to balance it on my knees on the bed in the attic, blow on its eyelids, see if I could wake it up and make the big cheeks flush with red and the whole face collapse in wailing.
—New Thing’ll be bad for us here, I said to Toby. —It’ll be bad for you. Valentina might love her.
—Looks like she’s Freya’s to me, Toby hissed back.
Until New Thing came Freya’s love for me was like the bricks in the walls and the roots of the oaks at the edge of the moor. Now all the Family were circled around New Thing in Freya’s arms, stretched towards it like a bonfire, and I tried to make Freya see me, worried at my scars, hung over the back of chairs, but she didn’t look up.
It didn’t take long for Freya to see how I hated new little sister almost from the beginning. It was in the faces I gave her and the way I held her a little too rough. Then she overheard my name for her. I thought it would be the Spike Walk but instead I was Edged. Freya told the Family this one morning by tossing me the burnt part of the bread and making sure they all saw. They all had to look away when I spoke and no one was allowed to touch me. I was alone, edging around the circles the Family made around New Thing. I snatched eye contact and accidental touch when I could, watching and listening, haunting rooms.
The rest of the Family loved New Thing. The sounds it made they repeated, called to each other like a new language. After that first night, its crying wasn’t so frightening. The Family worked out what it liked: the jingle-jangle sounds of Libby’s bracelets, shaken above it, Freya’s knuckles in its mouth, the powdery milk not too hot. And what it didn’t like: the sun streaming through the kitchen windows, the dogs panting over it, and the damp orange blanket made it cry. They spent hours just lying on the kitchen floor, next to the aga, staring at it.
Aside from Freya, Ellen loved New Thing best. Her full name was Ellensia, but we’d all forgotten to use it. Her flesh spilled out of her clothes like filling from a pie, and she liked to wear kaftans she made herself, bad stitching pulling at the seams. She’d take New Thing into her arms and rest her on her vast stomach, singing bits of songs I didn’t know, cooing, until Freya took her back. Once, Ellen dared fight Freya on how to make little sister sleep, and she said, —I have done this before, you know, and we all looked away, sad for her at the mistake, and Freya only nodded, and said softly, —Yes, and where is that baby now? and Ellen left the kitchen with spilling eyes.
Meeting came. At the bay windows, Dylan and Ellen lay on their backs, drawing pictures in the frosted glass with their nails. Dylan was huge and strong, the bulk of him like an oak tree, and he gave bear hugs and wet kisses. He liked to spin us around, even Freya, even Ellen, who liked him, she said, because he make her feel dinky. Dancing to Richard’s guitar were Pet and Egg. Egg, Eglantine, was tall and thin. Through his vest, bones pushed out like they were trying to pierce the skin. He had thick black hair and a moustache he liked to grease with cooking fat and twist into curls. Egg was always with Petal, Pet for short, a boy with a girl’s name. Pet wore blusher on his cheekbones, so he looked like the broken dolls in the attic. He and Egg were always snaked around each other, Pet’s fingers in Egg’s hair.
A burning oil lamp sent jasmine puffs into the air. Candles burned everywhere, in old jars, stuck into wine bottles and cluttered along the mantelpieces. Someone had even put tea lights in the old chandelier, balancing them against the crystal. Toby lay with his head on Valentina’s stomach. I pulled at him to come sit with me, for the Naming, but he shook me off. I crouched next to him, Valentina giving me a weak smile. She was Toby’s mum; he’d called her that, Mum, for a while before he lost the habit, while she never seemed to name him at all. Her long blonde hair was so thin you could see the pink scalp underneath. Freya and Libby called her Sweetheart; behind her back, they called her Bitter Bambi, and in one of their strange truces they could make each other laugh by widening their eyes and snarling all at once. In the coldest days after Winter Solstice, Libby gave Valentina the down quilt that she’d taken from Jumble so long ago it was considered hers, and on the days Valentina went quiet and sad, Libby took Toby on long walks, or taught him dance steps in the ballroom. So I knew Bitter Bambi was something unkind: Libby liked life to be in balance.
—We’re naming her now, Valentina whispered to me. —Then she’ll be family and you’ll have to love her, Green, or everything will be very hard for you.
Freya stood up with New Thing in her arms and we all fell silent. She’d chant the new name and we’d watch it soak into new little sister like rainwater into grass. There was no outside name to peel away, not that she’d ever remember. Freya spoke for a while about the Family and Foxlowe and we all recited All The Ways Home Is Better.
—Now, I have a name for new little sister, said Freya.
I thought of the worst things: the rusted nails in the Spike Walk, the hunger of a starve day, the Bad. New Thing was hooked over Freya’s shoulder, so when she turned, the little face peered over, still wrapped in that striped scarf. Her eyes caught on the chandelier. The tiny wet mouth twitched into a smile and she made a small sound of joy. The best things came: jewels on cobwebs, Libby’s little birds. The flames glowing the night I watched Freya heating the milk.
—Blue, I whispered, too quiet for Freya to hear. —Call her Blue.
—Green has a name for her, Toby called.
Everyone looked at me. I kicked Toby hard and said, —No I don’t.
—She does, she just whispered it!
I dug my nails into his arm, and he howled. Valentina sat up and pulled him to her, glaring at me.
Freya bounced the baby in her arms, not looking at me. —Green is Edged, she said.
—It was the first name called, said Libby. —Isn’t that the rule?
—Freya always does the naming, said Richard, and Libby rolled her eyes, lay back on the floor like she was sunbathing in the cold air.
—Well, said Dylan. —It might be nice to—
—A nice way to end the Edging, Ellen jumped in.
Libby sat up. —What is the name, Green?
—Nothing, I said.
—Nothing? Freya crowed.
—Blue, I croaked. Libby caught it and repeated it louder. It sank into Blue and took her and we all knew that was her name.
—There’s a power in naming, Freya said to the Family, continuing to Edge me. —I hope Green knows what she’s given her. Blue can be many things.
—It’s the lights on the cooker, I said.
—It’s cold, Freya said to the Family.
—And she’s a colour like Green, Richard said.
—Yes, and you know she’s on the tape, said Freya. —With you and Green. Her song is all about sadness.
—Oh, I said.
—I love it, Libby said.
Above us in Freya’s arms, Blue squirmed and opened and closed her mouth.
—There’s a power in naming, Freya said again.
—She’s Green’s now, you know. She should do the calling, said Libby.
So I took Blue into my arms, and gave her the name cold and sad. That was the first little thing I did to hurt her.
3 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Life ever after that is full of Blue, and all the trouble she made. It was Blue who made the end of Foxlowe, and Freya and me and all the Family. That wasn’t her fault, but mine. When Blue was a baby everything was already ruined, it only took a long time to happen. Let me tell you about the Bad first, so you understand. We had lots of stories about it, so we didn’t forget. You need to hear them countless times before you can follow the words in your own head, and then tell your own version. Mine is part Freya’s, part Libby’s, knotted together voices.
The Bad is everywhere on the outside. There, it is ignored, and because it has been forgotten, it can move in new ways: it does not creep, or skulk around the edges of shadow, but soars in the open. Listen, and believe it: on the outside, the Bad can force a helpless one to do anything. Imagine the worst you can. Outside, people will twist knives into flesh, pull off one another’s skin. Eat each other.
Now, it is harder for the Bad to take one of us, as it can so easily for outside people, because we have the protection of the Stones and the rituals. And we know the Bad and call it by name.
Never think that safer than the outside means safe.
You have to learn for yourself what the Bad feels like; everyone feels it differently. In the Time of the Crisis, when the Bad got into Foxlowe, it crouched on Freya like a giant fly, and made her world dark, so when the sun shone in, it couldn’t reach her. It made her limbs weak and everything hollow and hopeless. But others speak of the Bad as a voice, inside their own heads, or pain scratching around from inside the skin. Others perceive the Bad as a ghost, a figure you can glimpse in the corner of the eye; it can move things, and kneels on your chest at night. The Bad can twist your mouth to speech, or curl your hands into fists to strike something weaker than you. The Bad can kill. Once, when the Scattering was not done properly, it found and killed the baby goats. It causes illness and pain, infection and fever.
Listen to the things we know, to protect yourself. The Bad thrives on the dark and the cold; it is a winter force. So be careful when the sun is weak and the air bites you. Stay off the moor, where the Bad is strong. If the Bad catches you there, run to the Standing Stones. Even in the winter the Stones hum with a thousand ancient blessings. If you are closer to Foxlowe, run so you are inside the Scattering Salt.
If, despite all our care, you feel the Bad has taken you, you must tell the Founders. They will take you to the Stones, if the sun is strong enough, and Solstice is close. In winter, you will be given candle flame on the skin to try to force the Bad out. It hates heat. If the infection is deep, you may be bled. Summer Solstice will heal you, if nothing else works, and you may have to wait for the double sunset.
The children are the easiest for the Bad to slip into. They must be watched.
The Scattering is something we learned from the Time of the Crisis. Remember that the Bad had come inside the walls. One of those mornings, Freya felt the Bad in the kitchen, scratching across the floor, and twitching her fingers. On the flagstones lay the baby Green, where the Bad had taken full root. The Bad filled the kitchen until it was as black as night and spread cold through the air. In the gloom, Freya watched the tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and the Bad pressed on her, urged the pillow into her hands. As she took it she knocked the salt jar from the table and it smashed, scattered salt across the floor. The room immediately lightened, the air warmed, and although the Bad was too deep in the baby to force out, the skulking Bad pressing on Freya was gone. This is what we commemorate in the Scattering, that Freya was stronger than the Bad in the end, that we have ways of keeping it out.
4 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Only a handful of sunsets after Blue’s Naming, it was Winter Solstice, my breath clouding in the attic. I woke to a new dress at the bottom of the bed, and shivered into it under the covers. Freya bounced Blue in her arms. It was still dark. Her face was lit by a torch, gaping shadows around her cheeks and mouth.
She spoke to me. —You’ll be cold. Come on then, she said, so soft, and I went to her and sobbed as she stroked my hair and shushed me. —All right, all right, it’s over now, you know I hate it too, she said.
I wiped my nose on the new dress. Freya had used the material from an old apron of hers I loved: thick cotton, flower print. It had a full skirt that came down to my feet. On it were new white buttons, that she must have got when she fetched Blue, and hidden. I wished I had a mirror, like the big one in the ballroom, too high to catch my reflection in.
We came out into the colder air of the landing, me clutching Freya’s hips, bowing my head into her warm stomach.
—It’s good that it’s so cold. It means the year’s ready to go. Cold and hard like a dead thing, Freya said.
The staircase glowed with candlelight and led down to scented air and an inside forest: ivy curled around the banisters, holly in the doorways, dried herbs scattered on the floors. The rooms smoked with hot wine and the glowing ash from roll ups, and lamps burning oils that we’d saved all year: jasmine and lavender. In the hallway, incense smoke made it hard to see. Ellen and Dylan’s voices drifted over tinny sound: one of the tapes, dug out of their box in the yellow room.
As much as anything was anyone’s at Foxlowe, the tapes were Freya’s: she’d brought them with her from her old life, and they were all one voice, the same woman singing every time. The song I’m named for played all the time before the tape got too wobbly to play, but Freya could remember the words anyway, mine and Richard’s song too, on the same tape. She’d sing snatches of her favourite song while she made the bread: I’m afraid of the devil, I’m drawn to people who ain’t afraid … We didn’t call it the devil, but we knew who she meant, all right. Ellen and Dylan’s laughter was the sound of festival days and nights, as they sang along, wishing for rivers, and Freya picked up the tune, changing the words how she pleased.
Freya brushed Blue’s head with her fingertips. —This is where you live and belong now, she said to her. —Take her, she said.
I tried to lift my arms, but my hands were stuck to my new dress.
Freya crouched, so the baby was level with me, only a small gap between the red hair, the pink skin, and my arms. —Come on, Green, it’s all right. You won’t drop her.
Then Blue was in my arms. Freya let the baby’s head drop against my chest. I didn’t like the sour smell of her, or how her spit bubbled in the corner of her mouth. But I moved how I had seen Freya move, rock shush rock.
In the kitchen, there was honey and jam saved from the summer, gritty and thick, and goats’ milk, still warm. We were the last to come down, and the Family threw smiles and nods my way when they saw Blue in my arms. The aga roared and torches swung from beams. Libby waved to me as I put Blue into one of her drawers by the food stores. Toby opened his mouth wide to show me the mush inside and I caught him perfect on the back of the head, so his jaw clamped down on his tongue. Freya and Libby laughed, but Libby passed Toby some warm milk. He poured half out for me.
Libby wrapped me in the heavy red coat from Jumble. In the pockets, rotting roll up stubs and soil. Freya pulled my hands out to peel two pairs of gloves over my fingers. Fingers froze quickly during the Scattering.
Outside the animals stirred, the chickens rustling and crowing, the goats beginning to bleat. The Family rushed all the light of Foxlowe to the kitchen door, like blood to a new cut. We held the candles from around the house, some just balancing tea lights on their hands, and the torches swung and flashed, illuminating faces, beams, the glinting eyes of dogs.
Freya wound her dark hair around her neck and opened the door to the black of Winter Solstice morning. We poured out with cheering and snatches of stories of the Bad, The salt keeps it out, This is why we, You must remember to, This is important, my feet slipping in too-large boots.
We streamed down the back steps and onto the gravel, across to the fountain, down the ice coated marble steps beyond. The stars were still out, but a weak glow was beginning from the Standing Stones. I collected iced cobwebs that sparkled in our torchlight, and other treasures: frozen leaves, an icicle hanging from a marble finial, a snail shell.
Toby pulled me to the frozen fountain to watch the fish twist and dive together under the ice. We knocked on the sheets, like glass, to bring their white and orange forms ghosting to the surface in the torchlight. If one came, the others would turn and follow, like one giant creature. The grown had a name for them: the shoal. How is the shoal getting on? Should we eat one of the shoal?
Pet and Egg did star jumps to keep warm. The dogs panted clouds and snuffled ice onto their muzzles. Richard came over and laid a hand on Blue’s forehead.
—Take her back in, he said.
—She’s fine, Freya said.
He opened his mouth to say more, but Libby clapped her hands together.
—Richard! Come on, it’s bloody freezing!
He bent his face closer to Blue, his face stretched to one side as he bit his cheek. Freya stared over the top of his head, far out to the horizon. He tried to catch her eye when he raised his head but she ignored him. After a few seconds her half smile twitched up one side of her face and she returned the gaze. Behind us, Libby called Richard’s name, sing-song, then louder, until she broke off the rhythm and called out hoarsely to all of us.
—Right! Let’s go! You know how this works. A whole circle around the house, it must be unbroken. If you run out of salt, make sure someone fills in the line for you. Let’s go.
Richard grinned apologetically as he loped back to Libby. Freya’s hand on my shoulder turned me to the moor.
—Look out there. That’s where the Bad is coming from. The salt keeps it out, she said.
It was buried under the dark, but I knew the moor rolled out, cut through with stone wall and the dots of sheep. In daylight the hill called the Cloud would sit stark against the sky, its rocks jutting. The Standing Stones lay just behind the house, hidden by the drop and roll of the moor, and I began to feel the itch of being away too long: we’d stayed off the moor for most of the winter.
White dropped on white and showed it grey: the early frost had lost its glitter under our boots. My bag brought us to the edge of the lawns where Egg took over, wiggling his hips and casting his salt from side to side in a wave. Pet took us up to the house. We carried on like that until Freya’s salt met Richard’s in a pile outside the front door. She’d passed Blue to me and as the salt piled up I whispered into my arms, We’re safe now. The Bad is strongest today but it doesn’t like salt.
We made Foxlowe full of light and music. Some stories say this is to help keep the Bad away, others to celebrate the new Scattering and it is only the salt that matters. I loved the house full of fire and sound, played chase games with Toby in the usually dark places: the back corridors with the old bells and cobwebs, the cellars full of paint and sacks of flour, our shadows ballooning with the rarely lit torches hanging from every doorway. The grown ups chased each other too, squealing and slamming doors, or danced or lay with their heads on each other’s stomachs, drinking and smoking far into the night, their lips and chins red.
It was easy to take Blue.
Someone had tucked her into her drawer on the middle landing, where she lay swaddled and open-eyed. The Family had been carrying her and swinging her over shoulders, rocking her while they danced, but she got heavy, and the Family could get bored of the ungrown on Solstice days when the moonshine flowed, and so here she was, alone. Toby was with Valentina; she’d grabbed him as we ran through the front hall, swept him up and kissed him, and they had gone to the yellow room, where I knew she’d be tearfully clinging to him and telling him stories about their old life that he’d try to retell to me later, but wouldn’t quite remember the details. He just liked the way she held him close those nights, and let her words wash over him.
Blue’s mouth blew kisses at the air as she gazed at the beams. When I leaned over her, her eyes refocused, the little black dots blooming, and I thought how I might be a strange moon to her, so big. I knelt and pulled my hair around her drawer, in Freya’s way, so my face made the world. She started to cry.
I thought about Freya’s face turned away from me and how I couldn’t get into her arms any more, then scooped Blue out of the drawer. Above me, the grown’s footsteps and slamming doors echoed, and the ballroom rang with music.
The night sounds: a sniffing, the air rustling. They smothered the feet on flagstones and voices as I closed the kitchen door behind me, and stepped out. I glanced back to the house where glowing balls of candles and torches bobbed up and down as the grown carried them about. Blue thrashed in the freezing air. My throat was tight. Any moment the Family would catch me outside on Winter Solstice night and I’d be Edged, sent to the yellow room, put on a starve day, or worse.
The lawns were frosty and quiet, the steps and the fountain white against the black sky. The oaks swayed in the distance. The moor rolled out behind them, the Stones waiting for us and for summer. I held Blue to me, suddenly excited. Everyone was inside but us. I could race across the deserted gardens, under the stars, in the strange midnight green laced with ice, as long as I stayed inside the salt line.
Something shifted in the gloom. I held Blue’s warmth to my chest, and wobbled towards the salt line. The Bad hung there in the quiet, and a kind of pause, a deeper black in the air behind the line, like spilled ink. Freya had told me how the smallest gap in the salt would let it through. It could flow and squeeze and drip like the tiniest raindrop, then swell into a flood and wash us all away.
Blue began to mewl. Behind me I heard the goats bleating softly. I thought how I would do anything in the world to keep Freya for mine. But perhaps it wasn’t that so much. Perhaps I just wanted Blue to be one of us, the ungrown. She would take the Spike Walks with us and we could soothe her afterwards and teach her how we imagined the pain leaving. We’d show her how to hide the Bad if you thought it was bubbling up. And I thought about how now she’d be more like me than like Toby. Freya just didn’t like him all that much. But she knew the Bad was in me for sure because of the Crisis. This would put Blue in the same place. Make us more Family.
Whatever the reason, here’s the truth: I took that baby and I laid her out in the cold outside the salt line for the Bad to take.
Inside, Toby and Valentina were at the kitchen table. My heart quickened, but Valentina’s head was in her arms, and she barely looked up. Toby was sucking on the cloth that had been wrapped around the boiling sugar. He let it drop from his mouth when he saw me.
—You never, he said.
—It was only for a second.
—Not like you weren’t safe inside the salt, he said, and shrugged, but I could tell he was impressed.
—Come and look, I said.
I pulled him to the window in the studios, half-finished canvases and sculptures all around us. We cupped our hands to the glass.
Somewhere, Blue’s wails carried.
It took Toby a while to see her. I waited, breathing white against the glass.
—Is that new little … is that Blue?
—Yes, I said.
—She’s outside the salt line!
—Yes.
I thought he wouldn’t want to go outside but he wriggled right out of the studio window, the torch swinging wildly as he kicked it on the way out. I thought he might yell for the grown, but he only glared at me through the glass, and beckoned. I followed him, running to the edge of the safe places. The air had lost its crisp chill from before. I felt dizzy with a heat that roared in my head.
Toby stopped just where he should and I stood silent beside him. I gripped his hand and he didn’t shake me off. Blue was screaming now and we watched her, counted in names, clutching hands, not bothering to pretend we weren’t afraid. Then Blue’s cries moved to a higher pitch and my panic lunged me forward. The Bad let me pass right through it, swirled around in the air and kissed at our skin as I brought her back over. I stood with her in my arms, staring at Toby. A rush of violence came from the Bad and I imagined throwing Blue to the ground, drawing blood, until it ebbed away.
—Sorry, I whispered in a rush of horror. —Sorry Blue, sorry Blue, sorry.
—Maybe it didn’t get her, Toby whispered.
—It got her, I saw it.
—Me too, Toby said. —You’ll have to … Green, this is so, I think you’ll have to be a Leaver.
I started to cry then and held Blue to me and kissed her and begged Toby and said sorry so many times that he fetched dried long grass from the sheds and bound our hands together. We swore we would never tell the Family what I’d done.
5 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
See, Blue would understand what I did, because like all of us, once she was old enough she’d learn about the Time of the Crisis. The Time of the Crisis isn’t Blue’s story, but mine. Freya would tell it to me after a Spike Walk. She’d be lying next to me, stroking my hair, kissing the broken skin. Freya’s breath in my ear was just soothing sounds like the wind over the roof tiles, but slowly she formed words that wrapped themselves around me like a familiar blanket. I could tell it off by heart even before I knew what the words meant. It’s Freya’s voice, not mine, but I can’t help that: the Time of the Crisis was her story first.
The Time of the Crisis must always be remembered, so we are vigilant, and learn from our mistakes. This was the time before the rituals became solid and clear, and we were trying to decide how to live best.
It began with Green. Green came to Foxlowe very early one morning, while the stars were still out, and the dogs, the goats, even the chickens were still sleeping. It was the Bad’s favourite hour, black and cold as stone. So when Green came, it latched onto her easily, red and slimy, like organs ripped out. Freya knew it by the glisten of the blood and the way it screamed. It filled the house, and we all shrank from it, driving some to pack and become Leavers, the cries so full of spite that they ran away into the night.
Freya hoped that the Bad would leave once the sun became stronger, but instead it screamed and howled and scratched at her, it gnawed at her breast, it made her bleed. No one wanted to hold it, no one wanted to touch it. It was shut away in the attic until we could decide what to do. Freya knew it was the Bad, but the others were too afraid to say it. We survived it by wrapping it tight so it couldn’t rage too hard, and not looking it in the eye, or touching it too much.
Freya felt the Bad all over the house. It made her weak. It made her cry and feel tired even when she hadn’t done any work. The others tried to help, with food, and chores, and making things for baby Green, like shadows on the walls with their hands.
Things got worse. The rush of Leavers after Green’s birth had weakened us. Freya was seeing things that could not be real: her mother standing at the foot of the bed, her father holding a small child’s hand. There were whispers in corners. Secrecy. The Bad began to swell and grow in potency, inside the walls.
It was Richard who suggested we take baby Green out to the Standing Stones for Solstice. The group gathered up blankets and bottles of moonshine and set out with the baby wrapped in a quilt. Freya followed, hoping the air and light would deliver her strength. At this time, we would spend Summer Solstice at the Stones and meditate, feel the Stones at our backs, and watch the double sunset, a gift only we can see. So we sat around the Stones, and talked, and ate, and tried to ignore the Bad in Richard’s arms. It was screaming, feeling the power of the Stones, but was holding on.
As we watched from the Stones, the sun dipped behind the hill called the Cloud, and shadows stretched across the moor. The Bad crowed in triumph, and we were afraid. Freya was cast down by the tiny hope that had flared in her, only to be extinguished again. Then the sun was reborn. It reappeared between the peaks of the Cloud, before sinking again. This is too much for the Bad, light renewed just as darkness sets in. It fled.
Freya held Green and kissed her, and loved her. This was the end of the Crisis, and Foxlowe became stronger and happier. We understood how the Solstice could help us.
But the Bad will always remember it lived in Green. It’s still there, little traces inside the veins, little worms in the stomach. This is why the rituals are so important. Summer Solstice to drive the Bad away, and the Scattering to protect us when the sun is weak.
6 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
After we brought her back into the kitchen, muddy and cold, I never had a bad word or look for Blue again. In the years that followed we expanded, me and Toby, to let Blue in, and she became another Foxlowe ungrown. We taught her the best places in the house: the middle landing with its blue pool, the yellow room, the back stairs and corridors full of mice and cobwebs, and the empty rooms that sat decaying there, with their treasures of broken furniture and walls on which to draw in charcoal and chalk. By the time she could run, she made a good chaser with quick dodges and a hard grip, and wasn’t afraid to slide down the banister or jump from the windows. When she was very little, she bit and kicked like we did, but me and Toby would attack each other if she was hurt by one of us, and because we rarely touched her, she stopped raging that way. When me and Toby fought, Blue took the side of whoever was left with the reddest skin, the deepest scratch.
We didn’t need to teach her the way she had to live, like other new people who came. She was almost like me, almost a born Foxlowe girl. She learned our language and the rituals, Freya said, as new. It was how it should be for everyone, Freya said. We didn’t have to explain that blood family didn’t matter, because we were the only family she knew. We didn’t have to warn her about the outside, because she couldn’t remember it. I think she remembered her first Solstice somehow, because Blue always had ice fingers and toes. Freya would rub her feet under the sheets before she went to sleep. Gooseflesh, even in the summer. She could never get warm. Sometimes I watched her holding her hands in her armpits, or curling her fingers around a steaming mug, and wondered if her skin remembered lying on the icy ground, that night, with the scarf unravelled and the Bad all around her.
One day around five summers after Freya brought her to us, Blue disappeared. She’d slept in the attic with me like always; her drawer was too small for her now, and she lay with me on the mattress, and Freya sometimes slept on the rug, wrapped in her coat. I woke up alone, and when I found Freya in the kitchen, we both thought Blue had been with the other.
—Why don’t you take better care of her? She’s not a doll, Freya said.
She was sketching at the table, brushes and paints in a jar. Ellen and Libby were brewing tea and they looked around.
—What’s that, said Ellen. —Little one lost?
—She’ll be around, said Freya, but she swiped her brush in the jar, making black clouds there, and got up.
We searched the downstairs first, and the obvious places: the ballroom, where Egg and Pet were ripping up sheets for rags, the yellow room, where Libby said Blue liked to nap in the afternoons. —No she doesn’t, said Freya, but Libby showed us the chair Blue curled up in, how it was out of the draughts. The back corridors with their empty rooms were quiet, and the staircases. In the big upstairs rooms, peeling wallpaper and rotting books, we found Valentina lying on her stomach and writing in a notebook, wrapped in a blanket.
—Not seen her, she said.
—October gone too? asked Libby. —Maybe they’re together.
—No, we’re playing hide-and-seek, said Valentina, turning over a page.
We tried the studios, and found Richard hauling sacks of clay, new delivered, ready for the pottery wheel, his tweeds covered in dust.
—Oh, he said, —I saw her in the gardens this morning.
—On her own? said Libby.
—Well, yes, he said.
Freya went to the window and cupped her hands around her face. —Green used to wander around all the time, she said.
—No, Libby said. —Toby was always with her, or you.
—She’s fine, said Ellen, —I’m sure she’s fine, but she went to the window too, and cupped her hands there, so she and Freya looked like they were speaking to someone, silently, on the other side of the glass.
It started to rain, and we went out onto the back lawns to search for her, calling her name, tripping over the leaping dogs. Raindrops turned into sheets. Toby showed up, in a thick red jumper that stretched in the drench, the sleeves flopping down to his knees. Valentina twisted one of them, splattering the grass, and said, —Inside, kiddo, don’t want you catching cold. And Toby smiled his smile that was just for her when she noticed him, not half and crooked like the ones he gave to me, and obeyed.
—She must have gone back in, said Richard.
—We’ll stay out and look here, Freya said, squeezing my hand. The others waded back to the house, some giggling and shrieking, others glancing back at the gardens and the moor beyond, brows creased.
Blue’s name got lost in the rain when we called her.
—She’ll be fine, said Freya. —Sure she’s back in the house, drying that hair of hers.
Something about Blue’s hair — the bright red had faded as she grew, but it lived in glints and streaks in the brown, and it was glossy, lovely like Libby’s was — irritated Freya, and for her Blue’s hair was always that hair of hers. All of her worry seemed to have drained away, and she stood smiling, cupping her hands to catch the rain.
—My Green, haven’t you noticed?
—What?
—It’s just you and me! First time in ages!
She gripped my wrists and we spun around, throwing our heads back so our mouths filled up with rain, and spouting the water out like fountains. Screaming happily in the wet gusts, we slid around on the muddy grass, throwing clods at each other and for the dogs to catch. Numb skinned, we gasped and pushed streaming water out of our eyes, ran and whooped across the back lawns, through walls of nettles, not feeling the stings in the wet. We darted straight into the copse and stood panting under the cover of a clutch of trees. I called for Blue again.
—Let’s race, Freya said, and sprinted out towards the Standing Stones. The rain plunged in bursts when we rushed into spaces not covered by the trees, the soil churned under our feet, released its scent, making me hungry. Freya caught me and scooped me into a hug. I breathed in her skin, knowing I might not get her all to myself again, perhaps for years or ever.
—Well, she’s not here, said Freya, panting.
—She might be at the Stones, I said. I didn’t want to go back to the house yet, to the Family.
—Past the stone wall? Freya said.
—She might, I said.
Blue wasn’t allowed past the stone wall alone. But she loved to clamber onto the Standing Stones, or try to loosen them with all her weight. Once, leaning down so his hair brushed her cheek, Toby had told her that he could move the Stones around like empty boxes, arrange them in patterns, that she could do the same when she was big and strong. Then we lay against the biggest stone, me and Toby, our feet resting atop one another, shuddering with laughter, watching Blue’s toes slide on the grass, trying to shift the ancient markers, their stone roots running deep.
We were both quiet for a while, thinking about Blue getting bigger. Then we headed for the stone wall, made long before the Founders’ time, spilling rocks onto the moor like broken teeth. From there we looked back at Foxlowe, lying under the rain like something glimpsed at the bottom of the fountain. Candles were lit in the storm-gloom, and the small shapes of dogs huddled against the back walls, shaking out their fur.
—Looks just like when I came, Freya said. —It was raining then, and I came this way, over the moor. She smiled at me, a full, open smile, and squeezed out my hair for me. —Come on, tramp, she said, and we set out towards the Stones.
—What’s a tramp? I said. I had to shout over the rain and the rumble of the sky.
—An outside thing.
—Why am I one?
—You’re not really, she said. —You have a lovely big home and everything you’ll ever need. You’re a scruff, that’s all. Sometimes, Freya said, —sometimes I wonder how you’d look, if we, if you were outside, all scrubbed and dressed like them.
Then Freya was quiet, so I asked if we could play All The Ways Home Is Better, and I remembered them all, in the correct order:
1. We are FREE
2. We are a NEW BETTER KIND OF FAMILY
3. We have a NEW BETTER KIND OF EDUCATION
4. We are CONNECTED to the ANCIENT WAY OF LIVING and to the ANCIENT LANDSCAPE
5. We are SAFER because we know THE BAD and call it by name.
Beyond the stone wall, our copse merged with the moor and turned into a steep climb. You could hear the outside roar from here: a strip of road, the edge of the world. Today the rain cloaked the sound, and we climbed in silence, tugging at grasses.
The Standing Stones were eight stones, green with algae and moss, so they seemed to grow out of the grass. The Stones were as tall as Dylan, broad and solid, immovable. From here we could see the double peak of the Cloud, and the moor rolling down in valleys all the way to the road. We ducked under the barbed wire — disgusting, illegal, Freya called it. And there was Blue, sitting on the centre stone, with a man and a woman on either side of her.
I wrenched free of Freya’s hand and ran, kicking up clods of earth, slipping into the Stones. I knew Freya would overtake me so I wouldn’t have to speak to the outsiders.
The man smiled at me. He had a shaved face, his skin shiny where his beard should be, and wore a bright plastic jacket. I looked back for Freya, but she was walking slowly, her hands rammed into her skirt pockets, and then I lost her behind one of the Stones. The outside woman had lifted Blue into her arms. They’d wrapped something plastic around her, a brutal zip cutting under her chin.
—She was out alone, the woman said. Her hair was done in a way I’d seen before, an old Leaver had it like that, in sausages. Dreads. —In the rain, she said. —We were here taking photos and—
Blue stretched her arms out to me, and the woman put her down.
—She doesn’t like to be carried, I mumbled. Blue was chattering. —It’s raining, I got wet, my legs are all covered in mud, look—
The man was staring at my feet, so I looked there too, mud-caked in my socks. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t known we were coming to the moor. A pair of boots from Jumble fitted me almost perfect.
—Is that your mum? the woman asked, and I looked to see Freya coming, shook my head.
Freya’s cheeks were red, and her hands, released from the pockets, fluttered between her hair, her skirts, and wiping the rain from her forehead. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t see what I’d done. It was right, wasn’t it, to run to Blue, and I hadn’t spoken to them, just answered questions. Freya ducked her head as she came close, and tugged at Blue.
—All right, the man said. —You from the big house, are you? That commune place?
—Are these your kids? the woman said.
When Freya spoke her voice was different, soft and sorry. —Thank you, she said.
—She was out all by herself, the woman said, angry.
I waited for Freya to tell them she was a Founder, you can’t speak to her like that, but she was looking at the ground, so I said, —She ran away. We live just behind that rise. Foxlowe.
—Foxlowe, the man repeated.
And then the three of us were striding, breaking into a run, catching glimpses behind of the outside people, who were calling after us, hands held up to their eyes, still calling to us, until their voices faded. I grazed a Standing Stone as we rushed away, sharp pain in my elbow. When we reached our stone wall, Freya lifted Blue over roughly, knocking her bare legs against the rock. She tossed the plastic zipped thing into a bed of nettles in the copse.
We didn’t speak the whole way up the back lawns to the house. The rain had drained away into drizzle. Blue’s hand was sticky in mine, and I wondered if they’d given her outside food, like the chocolate we’d had once, brought by Ellen from a shop run. I lifted Blue’s palm to my lips and licked, but I couldn’t taste anything. I scrambled to make sense of all the details, assembled questions to ask her when we were alone. I’d seen outside people before, out on the moor, knew some of them by sight, the people who lived on the farms, and yelled at us if we jumped their fences. I’d never spoken to one though, or seen Freya with one so close, seen her turn into someone else, someone afraid. I tightened my grip on Blue’s hand. On the other side of her, Freya strode, her face closed. Blue knew not to speak — we’d taught her, me and Toby, to be quiet when our nails dug into her skin, for times like this. I drew blood this time, spooked by Freya’s lost voice and stooped back.
Meeting that night dragged on for hours. Cocooned together in the patchwork blanket, the warm weight of a dog across our laps, Toby, Blue and me nodded asleep, woke to more words and circling arguments, or were pulled awake by our own names spoken, calling us back to listen. The smell of coffee and smoke and, later, that day’s leftovers, potatoes and leeks, reheated and passed around in mugs, floated over us.
Libby was speaking. —Never formalised things, about the children—
—But that’s the point, Ellen’s voice. —A new, better kind of education, a real childhood, no formalising—
—But when it comes to safety, to custody—
—But as far as the outsiders are concerned, it is all official. Richard’s voice, faster than I was used to hearing it, less bored. —Everything is in order, but we want the children’s experience to be that—
—They’ll come here, Freya said. The glass in her throat was back, and anger thrilled through every word. —They were worried, they had that look. He knew us, knew the house. They’re going to interfere.
—But they were right, Libby said.
Raised voices to this. Words that came up frequently at Meeting were thrown. Freedom. Safe. Outside.
—Should be more careful, Libby shouted over them. —The road is right there, the town is right there, there are walkers—
—Better to be more remote. Egg’s voice, this.
—We can’t help where Foxlowe is, Richard answered.
Freya’s voice moved closer, as she joined Richard on the floor.
—We need to be near the Stones, she said. —This is where we should be, and need to be. It can be remote, if we block out as much as we can.
Later, Freya, Blue and me were in the attic, getting ready for bed. I plaited Blue’s hair into thick braids, and asked her why she’d gone out on the moor alone, but she had shrunk into herself, smoothing her thumbnail over her top lip. Freya was sloughing dried mud from her boots with a knife.
—Blood will out, she said, a phrase of hers she often threw at Blue, never at me. We didn’t know what it meant, but Toby thought it was a threat to cut her.
Then, Freya asked me, lightly, —Have you talked to Toby?
—Course, I said.
—About those outsiders?
I had told Toby all about Freya’s sudden shrinking. He hadn’t said anything, just raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
—No, I said.
—Good, Freya said. —It’s not good to talk about outsiders. It pollutes the atmosphere.
Blue’s hair was still damp and I sucked my fingers to take away the clammy chill.
—So, Freya said. —What shall we do with this girl?
I took my fingers out of my mouth and hid them in Blue’s hair. She had started to twist into my lap.
—It’s up to you, really, said Freya. —You were responsible for her this morning.
—I don’t know, I said.
—Now, Freya said. —You do know, don’t you?
—We can ask at Meeting, I said, thinking of Libby and how she would talk Richard around, away from Freya’s suggested punishments.
—This is just about us, the three of us, our little family, said Freya.
Blue was burying her face in my neck now. Freya put down her boots.
—We could cut off her hair, I said.
Painless, and Freya would like it. That hair of hers.
Blue shook her head into my throat. Freya smiled, and shook hers too.
—I see, she said. —Clever girl. You’re kind to her. But pain, you see, it’s important, to drive the Bad out.
—Blue doesn’t have the Bad, I said. —She was just exploring.
—Can’t take any chances, can we? Freya said.
I was silent.
—I think it will have to be the Spike Walk, Freya said.
Of course I knew it would be the Spike Walk straight away, but Freya liked to tease it out. When it was me, she’d come and sit on the bed and ask me how I thought I should be punished, and I’d suggest ways, but it was always the Spike Walk in the end. Somehow it was worse to play the same game for Blue. It was her first time.
It was still a damp night, and the others would have taken their work into the kitchen, sewing and sketching by the aga, with the dogs lying over their feet. So we took her down there, crying now and clinging to my waist, and I stood at the yellow room end, whispering Just think about tomorrow there’ll be honey coming from the shop run we’ll have honey cakes Blue just think about that, and Freya stood at the ballroom side, pushing Blue back to the Spikes whenever she had done one Walk, telling her, —Now, run the nail along the same scratch, that’s it, until it bleeds.
The next morning, Freya wrapped Blue’s arm in a clean rag with wild garlic and lavender packed into the cuts. At breakfast I gave Blue my share of the new honey, and the Family stroked her arm or her back as they passed. Ellen clanged pots around, until Richard said, —Is there a problem? and Freya said, —No, no problem, and the others drifted out of the kitchen, touching Blue’s shoulder or her other arm as they passed, while she nibbled on the honeyed bread, and snatched her head away when I reached to smooth her hair.
I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t have to do any more Spike Walks. They would all be for Blue.
7 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
Once I asked Freya about the Spike Walk, and she said there was a story for it, only we didn’t tell it often, because it was clear as a summer sky what the Spike Walk was for. She told me the story anyway, and I told it to Toby, then to Blue when she asked, so it wouldn’t be lost.
Foxlowe existed before the Family did. Many years ago, before long Solstice days, before the house brimmed with the smell of wine and candlewax, before home, Foxlowe stood alone. The Standing Stones slept on the moor with no one to imagine what they meant or to care for them. Every Summer Solstice the sun path lit up through the Stones, all the way up to Foxlowe’s walls, and the sun set twice. No one saw it, or cared, or did things in the proper way. Freya was carrying her old name, and living in far away, concrete places, and only just beginning to understand how very wrong things were. It would be a long time before she and Foxlowe found one another.
Then Richard came, and Liberty, carrying their old names, and others with their old names too, people who lived at Foxlowe before the home we know. Foxlowe welcomed them with warm light and the blue stained glass made puddles on the wood for them to play in, and sunlit dust flurried in abandoned rooms. Richard knew the house from a long time before. He said the garden was full of things to eat but they had rotted away, swollen and burst, because no one had been there to enjoy them. They had to live for a little bit like the outside, paying money for all the food. But soon the paintings were taken down, and the furniture hauled away, and Foxlowe began to look like itself: the chickens, the vegetable patches, the fruit trees.
Most of the paintings were high up, and left squares of dark wood behind, in the way covered skin stays white in summer. In the Spike Walk, though, the nails stuck out low, and when you walked past them, they bit at you, snagging clothes and skin. In the first years, talk was of taking the nails down, and smoothing the wood with sandpaper and fresh varnish, but other jobs were more important, and everything had to be learned.
When Freya came, she said, —Leave them up. We’ll call it the Spike Walk. No one knew why, but as in all things, they did as Freya said. Then many Solstices later, the children came. They were afraid of the Spike Walk and the ghosts at the end of the corridor. Freya understood that if the children got the Bad in them, you could get it out by making them walk up and down the Spike Walk until the skin bled a little. And then the others understood why Freya had told them to leave the nails where they were. Sometimes Freya’s wisdom wasn’t revealed for a long time.
8 (#uaface772-81bf-52e8-bcdc-4a49b795cf4d)
As she got older, Blue would be punished again and again for disappearing alone, walking out onto the moor, talking to outsiders. Her arms would be streaked with scars, etchings of Spike Walk nights, and we got used to seeing her bandages. After that first time, she never cried in the Spike Walk. She held her arms out as though spinning on the moor for fun, holding Freya’s eye. It was always me, in the end, who looked away. At Meeting, it was agreed that me and Toby were to keep watching her, and never let her out alone. But so often we lost her, slipping away over the stone wall and running so fast we could only wait for her to come back, a sickness rising, waiting for the night, for Freya to balance things again.
We knew, me and Toby, deep down, what it was that called her away again and again, and leached away when she bled in the Spike Walk, only to build again, because it was so old and rooted so deep; it had touched her when she was so very tiny, grown around her like a vine around a tree. We never betrayed her. Even she didn’t know. When Freya would scream at her Why do you do it? Blue could only shake her head, and me and Toby held each other’s eye.
Around a Solstice after her first Spike Walk, Blue had a bad run of them, her skin never seeming to heal by the time the next Walk came. So me and Toby taught her maze-making, one of our favourite games, to try to keep her attention with us, to hold her for a while. She’d kept watch while we stole the cogs of thread from the sewing box, fiddling with the fresh bandage on her arm. Toby showed her how to snap the line with her teeth, running the tongue over the tender parts of the mouth, avoiding the rot.
—Where do you chew? Show me, he said. Blue arched her head back and pointed.
—That one then, Toby said, and flicked at a tooth on the top of her jaw.
I remembered, briefly, those teeth coming through: the screaming, the sudden sharpness of her bite on my fingers. She’d lost many by then, sat twisting the loose ones in Meeting. Freya kept them in an old jar, with mine.
—Wrap the thread like this, Toby said, —and cut, and you have to be quick, because the chasers are coming for you through the grass!
Maze-making was best played on the sloping moorland near the Standing Stones. You had to catch the right time of the year: when the grasses were grown over our heads. A couple of dogs had followed us down, and flopped in the sun where the grass was lower.
Toby was the best maze-maker. He went in first, trailing a bright red thread, and disappeared into the green. The end was tied around the stile post, and the knot bounced and slipped as Toby made his path. The grasses crashed and snapped. Then a yell, —Now! and we plunged into the maze, following the thread line, the ground marshy beneath our feet, the crushed grasses like a carpet, and stones tipping us off course. Blue was faster than me, pivoting and making the quick turns with ease, leaving me squeezing through the grasses behind, trying to follow Toby’s path. His counts carried over the air, and my very skin strained to get to him before the seconds disappeared, then suddenly Blue parted a wall of grass and fell upon him, as he yelled Fifteen!
—You did it! he yelled, rolling Blue onto his stomach, the thread still hanging from his thumb; she’d got to him before he could cut the thread on his teeth.
—Too slow, too slow! she cried. —My turn!
Toby solemnly gave the thread over to her with a little bow. He was tall now, so his jeans stopped at his shins, and it had made a kind of gap between us, as though it was him alone, then me and Blue lumped together, the smaller ones. Teaching Blue our game was another small ending of the world of us, of me and Toby.
Blue curled Toby’s thread around her thumb as she collected it from the grass and we picked our way out of the maze, ready to start again. Through the green, I glimpsed a figure hovering near the stile.
The man was wearing a brown suit and his white hair was short, his face shaved. A smile played around his mouth as he took us in.
—Hello, he said.
Toby put his hand on my shoulder.
Blue tilted her head and waved. He copied her, making her laugh, then she danced, and so did he, waving his briefcase in the air.
—Playing a game? the man said.
Toby found his voice. —Are you lost? he said.
—Ah, no, just arrived, the man said, taking off his shoes. He perched on the old wooden gate, rolled off his socks, wiggled his toes in the sun.
—So nice here, the man said.
Toby looked at me, silently saying, What now?
The man had closed his eyes and was holding his face to the sun. I wondered if he’d forgotten we were there.
I shrugged back to Toby, and mouthed, Just keep playing?
There were no rules for outsiders who popped up on the moorland like spirits. We knew most of the locals by sight, and avoided them if we could. The thought that held me and Toby still and kept our hands on Blue’s wrists to stop her shooting to this new plaything was that the man could even be a moor spirit, or the Bad, dressed up in a suit.
The man opened his eyes and his smile faded. —Oh, he said, —don’t be frightened.
A dog bounded over and the man welcomed it with a kiss on its muzzle. She was Toby’s favourite, a bitch with soft brown fur turning grey around the eyes. We both remembered her as a puppy, but Toby would play with her and try to teach her tricks, gave her a few different names that never stuck. When he saw the dog licking the man’s face, Toby’s grip on Blue relaxed and she rushed over to sit next to him.
—Why are you here? Do you have a name yet? We’re playing a new game, she said. —It’s with threads and you have to catch the maze-maker before he cuts the thread and I just won, how old are you?
—How old do you think I am? he said. He held up his chin and pushed back his hair, so she could look at his face. Toby and I went over to crouch in the grass.
—Old, she said. —Eighty Solstices.
—No, older, I said to her. —Look at his white hair.
The man laughed. Up close he was very real, with mud on his trousers, brown spots on the back of his hands.
—Do you live outside? Blue said. —We live at Foxlowe.
The man smiled. —I wondered if you might, he said.
I felt better. He wasn’t a real outsider at all, but knew home.
—We should take you up to the house, said Toby, like it was a question.
The man gestured for him to lead the way.
We almost broke into a run, taking him back over the stone wall. We three had a huge secret, a gift, maybe even new family, and we’d met him first. The man kept stopping along the way to look behind us, to where the Cloud sat on the horizon.
When we reached the stone wall behind Foxlowe, the man’s scalp under his white hair had burned red. He stood for a while gazing at the house, windows flashing in the sun. The garden was in full summer bloom; the sweet pea were bright, the fruit trees swollen. We three waited for the man to say something, about how he knew our home, but he only stared, then vaulted over the stone wall and dropped into the gardens, so we had to scramble to follow him.
Toby flung the kitchen door open and yelled into the house, —Everyone! Hey!
Egg and Pet were already in the kitchen, their arms around each other, Egg kissing Pet’s forehead. They were always fighting and making up in Freya—Richard seasons, which this was. Mostly, it made life easy when Freya and Richard were together: Blue and I had the attic to ourselves, could whisper into the night. We’d find Freya every morning in the kitchen, where she’d kiss us both, though Blue would duck her head away, and give us pancakes soaked in apple syrup. She even laughed when Toby dropped a case of eggs when he tripped on the steps near the fountain. Toby had gone white, but Freya just made sketches of the mess, foamy yellow and the raw white like spit on the marble. But Libby spent her days with Egg in the ballroom, playing the tapes on the tinny stereo, and slept wrapped in his arms, making Pet’s eyes raw.
They broke apart, stunned. I grinned; it was hard to surprise the grown. It took a second for Egg to recover. He strode forward, holding out a hand to the stranger.
—Hi, he said. —Are you lost?
—We found him out by the Stones, I said.
—He was just there, said Toby.
—We thought he was a moor spirit, I said to Pet, who’d told us stories about them, how they led you to bogs and marshes, told you riddles, made promises with hidden stings.
Noise drifted down from the house as the others caught the scent of gossip and clattered towards the kitchen.
—If only I were so magical, said the man. —I’m parked over at Ipstones.
Richard, Freya and Dylan burst in, followed by the others. Freya stood for a second, her eyes flicking from the outsider, to us, and then settling on Blue. She had her by the hair before me and Toby could move, and dragged her out of sight, towards the goat shed. The man’s smile disappeared. Richard bounded over next to Egg.
—Hi, he said. —Welcome. Glass of water?
Pet filled a jar.
—We don’t usually sell from the house, said Richard. —We have some goats’ milk, jam and wine, if you’re—
—Unless you’re from a gallery, Dylan said. —We have some new craft pieces ready for market that you’re welcome to look at, and our higher end stuff is in the back.
—Sculpture and pottery mostly, Richard said. —Some paintings.
—Are you lost? Egg asked again.
—Is the girl all right? said the man. —What’s going on?
Folded arms and silence to this. Ellen and Libby were whispering to each other. Toby and I moved closer together. Valentina mouthed Okay? to Toby and he nodded.
—It’s all right, I said.
The man studied Richard’s face. —You’re the owner, he said, not like a question.
—We live as a commune, said Egg, so who owns what doesn’t really —
The man spoke to Richard again. —You’re Ralph’s boy, aren’t you? Same nose, and the clothes—
—Oh, said Richard, and straightened up, grew taller. —You knew—
—I lived here for a while, when I was very young, the man replied.
A ripple went through us. Someone who knew old Foxlowe, before us — not an outsider, but something else, like an old friend we’d forgotten.
The man held up his briefcase.
—I’m supposed to mark them, he said. —Papers. I was on the train. I’ve kept on working, you know. Never wanted to retire.
He looked at the briefcase and down at himself. In the silence Freya’s voice floated, No more said about it. It was her soft voice and so we parted a little as she came back with Blue at her side, hiding her hands in her sleeves, where the new scratches were. I pulled gently at her earlobe, and Toby squeezed her hand.
I found Blue’s ear. —So, how old, do you think? Guess, I whispered.
She sniffed. —A hundred Solstices.
It was the oldest we could imagine. Freya was our eldest grown and she’d lived eighty-two Solstices, summer and winter.
The outside man spoke. —And then. I just, I don’t want to, and I thought, it’s so simple, and I realised I wasn’t far from, well the train was coming through, and I just thought. I always wanted to come back and visit. Silly, really.
He trailed off and looked up at the archway and the old stone there, then looked back, smiling, like he was pleased to find something there. —I always meant to, he went on. — I was ill when it was Ralph’s funeral, and then, well, I didn’t know. You never know, do you, if you should go back, you know, to places you’ve … He spoke to Richard again, —Oh, you’re so like, he said.
Richard pulled at his shirt sleeves.
—Then it just kept playing on my mind, kept thinking about it, on the train, how much I loved it here. Your granddad and me … He nodded at Richard. —Oh we had some laughs, when I was sent up here —
—Maybe more, I whispered to Blue.
—Um, said Richard, —well, I suppose, if you want to look around—
—I heard everything went to you, the man said. —I remember hearing about all that, and it’s Ralph too, isn’t it?
—Richard, Freya corrected him.
—How old are you? asked Blue.
—I am three hundred and fifty-seven today, said the man.
She laughed.
—Aren’t you going to wish me happy birthday? he said.
—You say, Happy birthday, said Richard.
We did, copying the way his voice flew up and down on the words.
On his first day we didn’t talk to Kai much. He told us his old name, and we tried to forget it, in case he stayed. He took a t-shirt from Jumble and wore overalls over it, leaving the brown suit folded in a carrier bag on the back of the kitchen door, ready to be cut up for patches. His first evening with us, he sang with Libby and Dylan; he was good at guitar. He found a mattress in one of the back corridors and Richard said he could have that room, if he wanted.
Days passed. Richard came into our attic and pulled out cobwebbed boxes from the eaves, things we didn’t know were there. He and the man spread out photographs on the kitchen table, and the man found himself, so he said, a boy standing on the back lawns, wearing shorts, his hair cut short, squinting into the camera. He and Richard stayed up late together talking and sifting through pictures, writing things in pencil on the backs. Richard called us to look at them, Blue and me, pointed at dead faces, told us names, but they were like Leavers, just ghosts, and I said so, said, —But they aren’t like us, they just used to live here, and Richard snapped the box of photographs shut. Freya packed them away again, put them back into the eaves. I didn’t like them there, watching us sleep.
The man taught Toby how to play a game with an old ball he’d found in the sheds. He asked Valentina if she minded, and she shrugged and said she didn’t care, then watched them from the kitchen windows. He told me and Blue stories about where he’d come from, Oxford, where there were books buried under the streets, and buildings made out of yellow stone, and Freya let him even though usually we weren’t to talk about old lives, but she said his voice was nice, and she liked listening to it lilt and fall while she worked.
At the end of his first week the weather turned cool, and we made a hot dinner. I dipped bread in egg, pushing it under to make it soggy. Freya took the eggshells and smashed them in her fists.
—So witches can’t use them, she said, and winked at me.
—Can’t we have tomatoes? Ellen said.
—Yeah, no veg all week, said Dylan.
—We’ll all get scurvy, said Pet.
There was a murmur of agreement from Libby and Egg, painting their toenails with tippex.
While we ate, Kai held the conversation. When others spoke, adding anecdotes, we all listened, but when Kai took up the thread again we leaned forward with our forks hanging. He didn’t talk about the outside much but kept coming back to Foxlowe’s old life, and how there had been fires lit in every room, and books covering the walls, and people who brought you things, who just lived there to bring you things, and how he and the man called Ralph had played games on the stairs that sounded like ours, using sacks to race to the bottom. Freya leaned on her hand and watched all this, chewing her eggs, smiling.
—Thing is, Freya said, as she took Kai’s plate.
—Yes, yes, I know, Kai said, smiling. —I’m not an artist, I can’t draw! Not at all! he added, cheerfully. —I heard in one of the villages that’s what it is here now, an artists’ place. Ralph used to paint, you know, he said.
—That’s really not the point, said Freya. —We all contribute something. Richard and I, we can sell our paintings and sculptures, Dylan too, he just got a big commission from Liverpool — here everyone cheered —And I do most of the cooking and sell the wine and the jam and so on, and Valentina sews, Ellen brings in her contribution from the markets down in Leek, and Egg does lots of the goats work, and the garden …
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Eleanor Wasserberg
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Ужасы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A compulsive and chilling debut about a girl growing up in a cultWHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE?Green and Blue are sisters.Foxlowe is home. Outside is Bad.Green understands.Why can’t Blue?