Foxlowe. Eleanor Wasserberg
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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.
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.
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