Strange Star (3 page)

It didn’t work.

The girl’s body stayed lifeless. Finally, Mrs Shelley sat back exhausted. The only noise was the crackle of the fire and outside, the storm grumbling around the mountains. Through the windows lightning flickered blue, then white. Heavy with despair, Felix tried to rouse himself to fetch brandy for the shock, a sheet to cover the body. But he’d fallen into a sort of trance.

How mad to think a dead girl could be brought back to life! What on earth were those scientists thinking of, making people hope like that, making Mrs Shelley believe? For a moment there, he’d almost fallen for it himself.

‘Let’s lay her on the chaise longue,’ Mrs Shelley said.

‘Yes, Mrs Shelley.’

‘For heaven’s sake stop calling me Mrs Shelley!’

Felix blinked. But he was the servant – he
always
called her by her proper title.

‘Don’t look so put out,’ she muttered. ‘Percy and I are not married. So really I’m Miss Godwin. Mary Godwin.’

‘But on the invitation it said Mrs Shelley.’

‘That’s just for appearances.’

‘Oh.’ He was still confused. So the Shelleys weren’t husband and wife but two people who lived together and had children. He’d not realised people did that. So many rules were being broken tonight, he was struggling to keep up.

‘Please, call me Mary,’ she said.

‘Mary.’
Felix nodded. It sounded daring, and he liked it.

Together they lifted the girl onto the chaise longue. In the candlelight, she looked about fourteen, he guessed. Her eyelashes were stupidly long, and she’d a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. It was a nice face, the sort that would be missed, and it vaguely reminded him of someone.

‘Shouldn’t we fold her arms over her chest?’ Felix asked, because that’s what he’d done when Mother died.

‘Would you do it?’ Mary said. ‘I don’t think I can touch her again.’

‘Very well.’

Lifting her right arm, Felix laid it across her body,
then did the same with her left. The muscles hadn’t yet set. Nor had her skin cooled, which he supposed was due to heat from the fire. She still wore a pair of clogs that had rubbed her heels raw. He slipped them off gently, and seeing her toes so grimy with dirt made him sad.

‘I’m going to fetch water to wash her feet.’ Then he saw the look on Mary’s face. ‘What’s wrong?’

Mary pressed her hands to her mouth.

‘My goodness. I think I know her!’ Forgetting her desire not to touch, Mary reached forward to smooth the girl’s hair from her neck. In doing so, she again revealed the scar. ‘I’m sure it is … I know that mark … and yet it’s hardly possible she should come all this way!’

All this way?

So the girl wasn’t local, then. This much Felix understood, for she wasn’t dark like the Italians or flaxen-haired like the Swiss and both lived up here in the mountains. No, this girl was as freckled as a hen’s egg. Yet still she felt familiar, somehow.

‘Why would she come here?’ Felix asked.

Mary didn’t answer. Her mouth fell open.

‘Goodness!’ she cried. ‘Look!’

The girl’s arms had dropped to her sides. Felix
frowned. Now he’d have to arrange her all over again, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to, not when she felt so unexpectedly warm.

Then he realised. Something was happening.

The girl’s feet twitched. The lump in her throat bobbed up and down. Her eyelids trembled, then opened. Felix felt his own jaw drop. Mary cried out, sinking to her knees to take the girl’s hand.

‘She’s alive!’ Mary cried. ‘Felix, look! She’s alive!’

Felix
was
looking. Not just at the poor dazed girl, but at Mary herself. It made him catch his breath.

‘We saved her,’ Mary said.

Tears ran down her cheeks. She was thinking of her baby, Felix thought, who she’d lost then dreamed of warming by the fire. In the confusion of feelings that tore through him, his eyes misted over. There would always be those who couldn’t be saved.

The girl revived quickly, though she was very weak; she’d clearly not eaten for days. Once they’d propped her up against cushions and tucked a blanket over her legs, Felix warmed brandy and milk at the hearth.

‘Ta very much.’ Speaking huskily after she’d downed
the drink, the girl held out her cup for Felix to refill. This time she gulped greedily.

‘Slow down!’ Mary said. ‘Or you’ll be sick.’

On hearing Mary’s voice, the girl froze. Very slowly, she lowered the cup from her mouth. A line of milk clung to her top lip, yet she looked deadly serious.

‘I found you, miss,’ she said.

Outside, the thunder grew loud again. A fresh squall of rain rattled the windows, making the room feel darker and colder.

Mary peered closely at the girl. ‘I
do
know you, don’t I?’

‘You do, miss. You know my sister too,’ she said, growing agitated. ‘I’ve come all this way to find her. It’s taken me weeks, but I’m here now and if you’ve so much as harmed a hair on her head, I’ll …’

‘What
is
this nonsense?’ Mary interrupted. ‘For goodness’ sake calm yourself, child!’

Glancing between them, Felix was suddenly confused. So Mary really did know the visitor. And the girl just mentioned a
sister
?

The girl wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked nervous, unable to meet Mary’s gaze.

‘You came to Somersetshire in England, miss, to a
place called Eden Court, you’ll remember?’ she said.

As she talked, Felix heard the strangeness in her voice, the ‘r’ sound lingering on her tongue. He didn’t know these places she spoke of, but Mary obviously did, for she stiffened.

‘Of course!’ Mary said. ‘We visited Eden Court a few weeks ago, before we left for Europe. Francesca Stine is an old friend. There are so few women scientists in practice. She’s quite incredible. So many ideas! Such a brilliant mind!’

The girl recoiled. ‘That’s not all she is, either.’

‘Yes, I remember you being there,’ Mary said, as if she hadn’t heard. ‘It was the night of that big storm, wasn’t it? We had to leave suddenly because …’

‘Your father came looking for you, miss.’ Now it was the girl’s turn to interrupt. ‘And I was mighty glad he did, let me tell you.’

Mary’s smile faded. ‘I don’t believe we need speak of that now.’

‘Maybe not of that, miss,’ the girl said. She’d grown pale again. Her fingers fidgeted against the sides of the cup. ‘But there’s plenty else that needs saying concerning my sister. Please, tell me she’s safe.’

Felix frowned: this was getting more intriguing by the minute.

Mary seemed confused too. ‘I don’t understand. At Eden Court, you were a servant, weren’t you?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

She didn’t look like a servant, not to Felix. She wasn’t coarse-featured like Agatha. Her hands weren’t chapped either, but her nails were dirty and her arms, though thin, looked strong. Her frock was a size or two too big. And those clogs that didn’t fit might once have belonged to someone else.

‘My name is Lizzie Appleby,’ the girl said, taking a long nervous breath. ‘I live in Sweepfield, the village near to Eden Court, and …’ Her voice trembled. ‘I had to come after you! I couldn’t bear to think of what you might do!’

‘But how did you find us?’

‘That night at Eden Court you were talking amongst yourselves, of this place called Diodati. I remembered the name – I don’t reckon I’ll ever forget it.’

A great flash of lightning silenced her. The girl called Lizzie buried her face in her arms. She seemed suddenly terrified.

Felix shuffled his feet. He wanted to help but didn’t know how. In the end he crossed to the table, piling bread and meat onto a plate. He didn’t suppose Lizzie Appleby would eat much with her head in her arms. But at least he could try.

Once the thunder and lightning passed, she lifted her head and wiped her face in her hands.

‘Here, Lizzie.’ Felix offered her the plate of food. She didn’t take it, so he placed it gently in her lap. She looked up. Just once. Then her gaze slid away again. He wondered if there was something wrong with her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said. ‘’Tis the lightning. It scares me so.’

His gaze flickered briefly over the blemish on her neck. Again, he wondered how she’d got the strange mark. But he knew better than to ask; scars sometimes meant there was a story too private and painful to share. Mary cleared her throat. ‘Now, what’s this about a sister?’

‘
My
sister, miss. She’s mine. And you took her against her will.’

Felix stared, appalled.

‘What do you mean? I did no such thing!’ Mary said, indignantly.

‘What makes you think she’s here with Mary?’ Felix asked.

‘I took no one without permission,’ Mary said.

Felix glanced at her. She looked like she always did: cool. Thoughtful. Only this time her jaw was set tight.

‘I was told she was an orphan, with nowhere to go – I thought we were being kind …’

‘Kind?’
Lizzie laughed in disbelief.

Mary breathed deeply again. A red flush was creeping up her throat.

‘Felix! Do stop hovering and sit,’ she snapped.

But he’d never sat in an above-stairs room before. This was another rule about to crumble to dust. ‘Sit
where
?’

Mary clicked her fingers at a nearby chair. Awkward though it was, Felix did as he was bid, and prayed Frau Moritz wouldn’t walk in and see.

‘This sister you speak of,’ Mary said, her composure regained. ‘I was told she had no proper relatives. No one cared for her. The locals had shunned her.’

‘Who told you this?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Why, Miss Stine, and the girl herself.’

‘My sister doesn’t always tell the honest truth, miss.’

Mary blinked. ‘Well, I believed her. She was distraught. She needed a fresh start away from Sweepfield. I’ll admit she took some persuading to come with us at first, but she’s seen sense now and we’re happy together …’

‘So she’s safe?’ Lizzie cut in. ‘She’s all right?’

‘Of course she’s all right! Why wouldn’t she be?’
Mary said, irritably. And yet Felix saw the huge relief on Lizzie’s face. ‘If this is a case of your word against mine, then your journey has been wasted.’

There was a long, tense, fidgety silence. It was Lizzie who broke it. ‘In order to decide that, you’ll need to
hear
my word.’

Mary twitched uneasily. ‘Very well.’

‘Felix?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Will you listen too?’

‘Yes … yes, all right,’ he said, taken aback to be included. He decided he rather liked her for it.

She gave a nod of thanks. Yet she still didn’t look at either of them, staring instead at the plate of food in her lap.

‘Eden Court is not all you think it to be,’ Lizzie said. ‘That night you came I wasn’t a servant. I was a prisoner.’

Mary gave a gasp. Felix sat forward in his seat.

‘What went on in that house wasn’t wonderful or …’ Lizzie took a shaky breath, ‘… exciting. It was proper awful. I need to tell you everything, miss, and quickly, because I’ve a suspicion someone else is on their way here too, someone I don’t ever wish to meet again.’

Felix glanced at the windows with their shutters still open. This mysterious
someone
might be out there right now.

‘I’ll bolt the front door,’ he said.

On returning, Felix closed the shutters. Not seeing those huge dark windows helped a little, though his heart still beat surprisingly fast.

‘I beg that you’ll believe me – both of you,’ Lizzie said.

Felix nodded in earnest. Her filthy skirt hems and poor, raw feet spoke of the miles she’d travelled to be here. Of the mountains she’d crossed and sea she’d sailed. It took courage to do so. It also took fear. However bad the journey, it was better than what was left behind.

Felix knew how that felt.

Something terrible had happened to Lizzie Appleby, and whatever she was about to tell them, a big part of him already believed her.

Change was coming. You could smell it in the air, all sharp and peppery like radishes. Even our little village of Sweepfield felt restless. Every week brought talk of new discoveries: a lamp lit by electricity, a steam-powered engine, a needle that went in your arm to stop the pox. Down in the valleys villages grew into towns, and towns grew into cities, getting bigger and busier by the day. One morning we’d wake up and find Bristol on our doorstep, folks said. These were uneasy, exciting times.

There was one night, though, when the Old Ways won out. And that was Midwinter’s Eve in Pilgrim’s Meadow around the bonfire. We gathered to celebrate the end of the year with feasting and music and stomping, swirling dances. It was a time for feeling glad to be alive. For on Midwinter’s Eve, the spirit world came close to ours – so close, some said, you’d see the ghosts of those soon to be dead.

I’d grown up with these superstitions running through my bones. They were part of Midwinter’s Eve. Part of the thrill. Yet this year felt different, and all because of a strange sort of star in the sky.

The night of the festival was cold and full of starlight. One in particular shone brighter than the rest. It had a tail too, which made it look like a very bright tadpole. It had first appeared a week ago. ‘That isn’t a star, Lizzie, that’s a comet. It’s a different thing entirely,’ Mam had said when we’d been rounding up our geese for the night and I spotted it in the sky. ‘Old lore has it that they bring plague and famine and terrible fortune.’ She said it all wide-eyed and splayed-fingered, with laughter in her voice. And I laughed back, or pretended to.

Tonight the comet had grown larger. It sat low and heavy in the sky and felt like a nagging inside my head – of what, I didn’t know. We were here to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve, like our ancestors had done before us. It was a time for fun, and for stamping your feet against the cold,
not
for staring moodily at comets. All down one side of Pilgrim’s Meadow were food stalls selling roast pork, meat pies, hot currant buns. Potatoes baked in a pit dug into the ground. There was a cider stall, spiced wine, a tethered Jersey cow whose
milk cost a penny a cup or nothing if you milked her yourself.

Right in the middle of the field, we’d built the bonfire. It was as tall as a house and as wide as a ship, and now the whole of Sweepfield village – all two hundred and twelve souls – stood around it, their faces glowing yellow in the firelight. It meant that whilst your back parts froze, your front sweated in the heat. My friend Mercy Matthews insisted we keep our distance from the flames.

‘Otherwise my face’ll go awful blotchy,’ she said.

I’d never seen Mercy look
remotely
blotchy. She had inky dark hair that fell below her waist and eyes the colour of blackbirds’ eggs. Even now, freezing cold and miserable, her nose was a lovely frost-nipped pink. She was, by far, the prettiest girl in Sweepfield and beyond. Everyone, but Mercy herself, knew it.

Moving back from the fire didn’t restore her spirits. It simply made us grow colder. My nine-year-old sister Peg tried waving a bag of liquorice in Mercy’s direction; that didn’t work either.

‘I can’t eat,’ she said, glumly.

Peg looked at Mercy, then at me as I raised my eyebrows. Mercy refusing sweets was like a fish refusing water. But I guessed what – or rather
who
– the matter
was. Only one person had this effect on Mercy: Isaac Blake.

‘Come on, cheer up!’ I tried giving her a playful nudge. But the Old Ways also had it that Midwinter’s Eve was a time to discover true love, and it was this, I suspected, that was making Mercy so quiet.

Part of me understood how she felt. Not the true love thing – blimey, no. The boys in our village were a grubby-faced, gangly-limbed bunch, yet still thought themselves to be princes. That included Isaac Blake, the lad Mercy was soft on, and who, in my view, was not good enough to clean her boots. Like Mercy, though, I didn’t feel quite myself tonight, but I was determined to shake it off.

Slipping my arm through Mercy’s, I tried to be cheery for us both. ‘So, what exciting things have been happening in Sweepfield today? Any murders? Any grave-robbing? Anyone’s horse cast a shoe?’ – the latter being the most likely.

Mercy shrugged. Her mam ran the village bakery, where people without ovens took their bread and pies for cooking, or bought from her instead. She knew everyone’s business. A person only had to pick their nose and we’d heard about it by midday.

‘I suppose you know about the scientist?’ she said.

Strangely, I didn’t. ‘Eh? What scientist?’

‘He’s moving down from London it seems, and renting Eden Court for the year.’

‘That’s a big house for one person to live in, isn’t it?’ chipped in Peg.

She was right; it was. Eden Court was a tall, grey, forbidding place with turrets and battlements that made it seem like a castle. It sat two miles west of our village, where its jagged roofline was just visible from the road. A very rich, slightly mad family had once lived there. Nowadays it stood empty. The driveway was choked with weeds and the gates were always locked.

‘Can’t think why anyone would want to live there,’ I said. ‘It gives me the shivers.’

‘Well, he’s hired servants to make it nice again. They’ve been scrubbing floors like mad and airing out all the rooms, ready for when he arrives,’ Mercy said, then added, ‘So I’ve heard,’ which meant her mam had told her, so it was bound to be true.

I caught sight of my own mam, then. She stood nearer the fire than us. It was easy to pick her out in the crowd. No other grown-up had hair like hers – a mass of pale blonde curls that stood out from her head. Peg’s hair was the same. And in the glow of the bonfire, it blazed with light.

Like a comet’s tail.

The thought unnerved me: it didn’t seem right to link Mam with that ominous-looking thing in the sky. So I was glad when Mercy talked of prettiness instead. For that’s what Mam was – pretty – though that description didn’t quite fit either.

‘Your mam’s proper handsome, in’t she?’ Mercy sighed. ‘She in’t plain-faced like all the other mams. She’s got a real magic about her.’

‘Don’t let her hear you saying that,’ I said, though I was a little bit pleased.

It was what you
did
that mattered, Mam always claimed. She didn’t hold much stock with magic and superstitions. While Da was in his workshop making chairs and cabinets, Mam tended the house and our animals. Peg and me had to help out too, so did Da when the need arose. But it was Mam who worked hardest and fastest. It was a job to even try to keep up.

Tonight, she’d woven white winter roses into her and Peg’s hair. She tried to do mine but they wouldn’t stay, my hair being too straight and slippery. Reaching out, I pushed a stray flower back into Peg’s curls.

‘Are the other ones all right?’ said Peg, letting go of my hand to pat her head.

I did a quick check. ‘They’re fine.’

It was then I happened to glance down at her frock, and saw something wriggling inside her pocket.

‘Oh Peg,’ I groaned. ‘What’ve you got in there this time?’

Last week, she’d brought home a shrew. Before that she had a slowworm. And before that, a hedgehog which escaped and hid under the log pile. These pets of hers were becoming a habit.

‘It’s a little field mouse. I’ve called him Acorn. They were moving that hayrick in the top field and I saved him from getting stamped on,’ Peg said.

Now I knew for a fact they moved the hayrick back in September, so this was one of Peg’s little white lies. Not a big, bad lie, just a not-quite-truth, spoken in such a sweet way that folks didn’t think to doubt her.

‘Look at him, Lizzie, he’s such a dear,’ Peg said.

A tiny fawn head popped out of her pocket. Mercy screwed her nose up in disgust. ‘Ugh! And in the same pocket as the liquorice too!’

I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Well, it isn’t coming into our bed this time. Not after that shrew got inside my pillowcase.’

‘Acorn’s going to live outside,’ Peg said. ‘Honestly he is.’

One look at her huge brown eyes and I doubted it,
somehow, not in this weather. It was toe-numbingly cold. And there was no better way to warm up than a spot of dancing, I decided. By now I’d had enough of big-sistering Peg.

‘Come on, let’s find Da,’ I said to her. ‘It’s time he took you home, anyhow.’

We found him at the cider stall in the midst of a rowdy crowd. On seeing us, Da put an arm round Peg’s shoulders and smiled glassily: he’d had more to drink than usual. It didn’t make him louder, though; if anything he looked more gentle, more dreamy-faced.

‘Time for bed, poppet?’ he asked Peg, who grumbled a bit. Then to me: ‘Two dances, Lizzie love, then home, all right?’

In a far corner of the field came the sound of fiddles starting up. Drumbeats wafted towards us on the icy breeze. Mercy caught my eye. We grinned like idiots at each other.

‘All right, Da,’ I said. ‘Two dances. I promise.’