Foxlowe

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

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

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.