A New Darkness (13 page)

This seemed to me like an old wives’ tale, something told before a winter fire to wide-eyed children while the shadows of the night deepened. But I was certainly intrigued; I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the face of the woman who claimed me as her daughter.

“There are many possible gifts, but it is different with a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,” she continued. “One is empathy—the ability to feel what others feel, to share both their sorrow and their joy, and thus to respond and counsel them if necessary. That is one of the basic talents, but sometimes it can be more than that. . . .”

I’d certainly never experienced anything like this—but I was still only twelve. Could such a big change suddenly take place in me when I turned thirteen? “You told me that these gifts came to you as a surprise and made you believe you were going insane,” I said to her. “Why didn’t your own mother explain what would happen?”

“She was just a seventh daughter, and had neither the power nor the knowledge. She didn’t know what was wrong with me. Finally, after years of torment, another found me—using one of her gifts, she sensed my anguish—and told me what I was.”

“What name did you give me?” I asked.

The woman—my mother—leaned forward and whispered my true name into my left ear but warned again that I must never reveal it to others: some who served the dark could gain power over a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter by knowing her true name.

So I have not written it down here. I will keep it to myself. Tom Ward told me that my notebooks should eventually go into the library. They are a legacy of experience and knowledge that we leave to future spooks. So I’ll not write anything down here that I am not prepared for others to read.

We talked for almost an hour that day, my mother and I, and she told me of the other possible gifts that I might inherit. After this, we agreed that, if she was well enough, we would meet at the market the following week.

As we parted, we embraced, tears trickling down our cheeks.

Then I ran home with my basket—but I ran in vain.

My false father took off his belt and, for the first time in over a year, thrashed me.

The pain was excruciating, but I did not allow myself to cry. I think that angered him even more.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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15

A Girl Like You

M
Y
mother did not come to the market the following week.

I never saw her again.

No doubt her illness had become worse, preventing her from returning. I imagined her slowly dying but still able to speak. I was desperate to talk to her and find out more about what I would become. I knew now that she was indeed my true mother, and all my bitterness at having been abandoned melted away. I understood why she had acted as she did. I needed to see her just one more time before we were parted forever.

That was the beginning of my wanderings. I searched for her in the surrounding villages, starting with the Long Ridge. After that I tried the towns, and ventured as far south as Priestown and as far north as Caster. Sometimes I was away for days; each time I returned to receive a fresh beating.

Gradually I was forced to accept that I would never see my mother again, but still I wandered. Even in winter, it was better to be abroad in the cold than home in that hateful cottage with a violent foster father and a foster mother who was terrified of her husband.

I didn’t fully understand why he was doing it. As I spent more time away, he reacted ever more fiercely, trying to beat me into submission. Did he beat me because he felt I was disobedient and beyond his control? I wondered. If so, the beatings just made me worse. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was like a dumb animal, acting without thinking. It frightened me but didn’t change the way I behaved. And still I would not cry.

Then, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, everything changed. I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and saw my first ghost. It was the night of the full moon, and a bright shaft of yellow light illuminated the foot of my bed. There was a fat old lady sitting across my legs, squashing me. She was so heavy that I felt as if the bed might collapse at any moment. She looked at me, opened her mouth, and gave a cackle. She had no teeth, just slobbery gums, and she was blind in one eye—it was all milky white.

As I screamed in shock and fear, the weight left my legs. The ghost floated upward and disappeared through the ceiling, drool dibbling from her open mouth.

My frantic scream woke up my father, and I received another beating.

That was the last time he ever hit me.

Before the week was out, another gift had emerged—the first one my true mother had spoken of: that of empathy. I will never forget the moment when it came to me.

I’d been walking through the center of the village when I saw a youth slouched on a bench opposite the greengrocer’s. He was staring at the shop doorway. His face was blank and expressionless, but I had to stop, suddenly deeply aware of the sadness that filled him. He was fighting to hold back tears.

What radiated from him was overpowering; it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my own eyes. It was much more than just a feeling: I knew what he was
thinking
. He was remembering how, as a young child, he’d once sat on that very bench waiting for his mother to come out of that shop. She’d come out and smiled at him, put down her shopping bag, and opened her arms wide. He’d run straight into them.

But now he was almost fully grown; his mother had died the previous winter. He was concentrating hard, trying to see that moment of happiness again, seeking to re-create the past.

I could almost read his thoughts—and it was painful to share them, so I moved on quickly.

This gift wasn’t something I’d be telling other people about. Nobody would like the idea of someone probing inside their head.

Once the new gift was known to me, I could read my father’s moods—and my mother’s, too. As newlyweds they had been happy; had remained happy while raising their own children. But when my two sisters had married and gone off to have families of their own, there’d been nothing left between them: no love, just boredom and emptiness. Finding and adopting me had made them feel better for a while, but it hadn’t lasted.

Now at last I knew why my father beat me. I felt his pain. He’d been beaten by his own father and was scarred by that experience, and angry because he himself had never become a man of any consequence. He had dreamed of owning some land, but he worked for farmers who paid him a pittance. He felt bitter knowing that he would never be able to realize that dream.

He felt sorry for himself. He was a selfish pig, wallowing in self-pity, and he hurt others to lessen his own pain. But I saw too that he was a coward at heart. He would never strike a man. I was his easiest victim—along with my adoptive mother, whom he also slapped occasionally. Sometimes I heard raised voices from their bedroom, and in the morning she’d sob while making the breakfast, head bowed to hide her bruises.

Then I discovered my third gift.

I suppose I’d had it quite a while before I became aware of it. I had noticed for years that, on the way to market, when I smiled at people who seemed down in the dumps, they would cheer up. Hours later, on my way home, they still looked far brighter.

After meeting my real mother, I began to wonder. Could it be that I was having some effect on them?

Then I got proof that it was indeed so. At the market there was a stallholder who always looked so sad that I longed to cheer him up—especially as I knew exactly what was wrong with him.

His wife had died suddenly the previous year, and his children had all left home; he had nothing to brighten his life or give him hope. He’d once been a keen gardener, growing both produce and flowers to please his wife. On warm summer evenings, they used to sit in the garden together and watch the sun go down. It had been one of their greatest pleasures.

So I planted a seed of happiness in his mind.

Within days, he was planting his own seeds. By late summer his garden was in bloom, and in the autumn he was selling his own produce at market. He was smiling at everybody.

What I’d achieved with the stallholder had given me an idea. Instead of continuing to meet anger with anger, I would strive to help my false father. I would try to make him feel better inside. Then his attitude toward me might change . . . at least he might leave me alone.

Some weeks later, at dusk, I found him leaning on the wall at the foot of the garden. “It’s a nice evening, Dad,” I said pleasantly.

“What’s nice about it?” he muttered angrily.

I worked away inside his head, trying to improve his mood. As I did so, I put my idea to him.

“This is quite a big garden,” I pointed out. “You could grow vegetables, and Mam could sell them at the market.”

He shook his head dismissively. “There’s not enough land to make it worth the while.”

“Then why don’t you take one of those allotments the village council is offering?” I persisted. “The rents are low. After a few years, you might even have grown and sold enough stuff to buy a small field of your own.”

Recently a farmer had died and bequeathed to the council a large gift of land. They’d decided to parcel it up and make it available to the villagers for a nominal rent.

“That’s pie in the sky.” He snorted. “Do you think I’ve strength left in my body to do that after working my fingers to the bone for others all day long?”

“Mam could help you. I could help you a bit too. There are times when things are slack and there’s no farmwork. That would give you the chance to till your own bit of land, wouldn’t it?”

He snorted again and went inside without a word. But I could sense the change in him. My idea had gotten him thinking. Within the week, he’d taken on an allotment.

As I’d promised, I did help out from time to time. Having the allotment made him a lot happier. He was still a grumpy old devil, but he now had something to work for. He had a dream. He had hope.

That’s all most people need.

He never beat me again.

As my powers developed, I began to wonder what other uses I could put them to. Would it be possible for them to provide me with a living in some way?

Above all, I longed for independence; I wanted to make my own way in the world—not just be married off to some man my adoptive parents deemed suitable.

But I feared that if I used my skills to help people, I might be seen as a witch. They hanged witches at Caster. Even worse, witch finders sometimes visited the County and tortured the witches they found. They swam them in ponds: if the women sank, they were declared innocent; those who floated were considered guilty and were burned at a stake. They died either way. It was too dangerous to sell my skills, I realized.

Then one afternoon, about eighteen months after I met my true mother, I witnessed something that pointed to the answer to my problem.

I had a wanderlust that by now took me all over the County, much farther afield than my first journeys. Sometimes I stayed away from home for over a week at a time. Far to the south of Priestown, I was exploring a small town called Salford when I saw a big man dragging a small skinny woman through the market by her hair. She was shrieking and screaming and it was terrible to watch, but not one person from the busy market interfered.

I asked one of the stallholders why the man was doing that.

“She’s a witch,” the trader replied with a scowl, polishing an apple on his dirty apron. “That’s Spook Johnson. He has at least fifteen witches in pits. He’s got a big garden, but he’s going to run out of space soon. He does a good job keeping us all safe from the evil eye.”

I’d heard of spooks before, but Johnson was the first I’d ever seen. I knew that these men fought the dark and dealt with witches, boggarts, and ghosts, keeping farms and villages safe. My know-it-all foster dad thought they were frauds; he didn’t believe in creatures from the dark. I did. By now I’d seen at least three ghosts and often sensed unseen things in dark, quiet places.

It was horrible to watch Johnson at work, but it also fascinated me, and the seed of an idea started to germinate within my head. I hung around Salford for a few days and managed to find out where he lived. I learned that he had a big house on the edge of town, and I studied it from a distance. It was built of ugly brown stone with rusty iron railings around the garden and a thick hawthorn hedge so that you couldn’t see inside. But I could hear noises—faint groans and the occasional scream.

Then I made a mistake. A big one.

Spook Johnson caught me spying on him.

He ran at me through the trees, roaring like a bull, and grabbed me by the shoulder, spinning me around to face him.

“What you want, girl?” he demanded in a big booming voice. “Been spying on me, have you? Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you watching me!”

I was really scared. He looked hard and cruel, and I don’t think he knew how to smile. To make it worse, he had really big ears with tufts of brown hair sprouting from within them. Some people shudder at spiders. For me, it’s hairy ears. They’re revolting.