Foxlowe. Eleanor Wasserberg
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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.
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