The Shadowing
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Synopsis
When well-to-do Hester learns of her sister Mercy's death at a Nottinghamshire workhouse, she travels to Southwell to find out how her sister ended up at such a place.
Haunted by her sister's ghost, Hester sets out to uncover the truth, when the official story reported by the workhouse master proves to be untrue. Mercy was pregnant - both her and the baby are said to be dead of cholera, but the workhouse hasn't had an outbreak for years.
Hester discovers a strange trend in the workhouse of children going missing. One woman tells her about the Pale Lady, a ghostly figure that steals babies in the night. Is this lady a myth or is something more sinister afoot at the Southwell poorhouse?
As Hester investigates, she uncovers a conspiracy, one that someone is determined to keep a secret, no matter the cost...
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'A creepy, evocative mystery' Heat
'An historical novel dripping with menace' Shari Lapena
'If you like gothic mystery, buckle up! This atmospheric read has it all' Woman magazine
Release date: September 16, 2021
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 320
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The Shadowing
Rhiannon Ward
Those unfamiliar with the pocket-sized town of Southwell were often surprised at how sound carried once dusk fell. Even the smallest of noises bounced off the respectable brick houses and shuttered shopfronts, weaving along narrow alleys and cobbled streets, seeping through cracks in poorly fitted windows. It was a phenomenon that previous clerics of the decaying minster knew well. The order to speak in hushed voices when discussing Church business after dark was as much to ensure that gossip and idle chat wasn’t overheard as any act of piety.
The first week of September had brought night after night of torrential downpours. They reminded Matthew Alban of the Bible stories his mother had read to him as a child. Unlike the relief Elijah felt at the rain on his back, however, Matthew had been assaulted every evening by shards of needles on his shoulders, causing his arm to tremble as he extinguished the flame of the large lantern hanging outside the coaching inn.
It was his favourite time of day: Annie, the servant girl in her bed, and the ostlers and pot-boy asleep above the stable. Once the midnight coach departed, it was just him in the night air and he liked to make sure all was secure against the encompassing dark.
He had long given up leaving a light on for strangers looking for an honest bed for the night. It didn’t matter if they were on horse or foot – he wouldn’t answer the door to them. It made a mockery of him calling his establishment a coaching inn, but he preferred strangers to pass by and seek shelter in other hostelries, leaving him and his regular guests, the ones he knew and trusted, to sleep in peace. He wouldn’t forget the last time he’d opened the door to a stranger banging on the heavy wood as the moon hung swollen in the sky.
When he was satisfied that all the shutters were secured, Matthew climbed up to his room at the top of the inn and lay on the bed without undressing. He could feel dampness seeping from his underclothes through the rough cotton sheets into the mattress below. He tried to empty his mind to induce sleep, but the uneasy night air made for a suffocating rest. He’d just heard the distant chime of the grandfather clock striking the quarter-hour, when the night was punctured by a shriek of distress. Matthew, against his will, sat bolt upright, his stomach groaning at the effort after a late-night supper of pease porridge. The rain had stopped, he realised, and the silence was enough for the town to give up its secrets. Sure enough, another cry came – this time not of anguish, but of primeval pain.
This was no animal cry. The farmer at the edge of town had sent his pigs to market on the Saturday of last week and, in any case, Matthew knew it was the sound of a woman in pain. He lifted the damp blanket and, folding it in three, crossed the room to open the window and push it in the space where the shutter met rotten wood and pitted glass. Another cry came – softer this time – but he couldn’t tell if it was the work of his makeshift wadding or that the wounded thing had run out of breath. It didn’t matter either way. Some hurts refuse to heal.
As he returned to his bed, Matthew was sorry that his father had lost at cards the bullwhip that had been in the family for generations. He knew of a few people he’d like to use it on.
Chapter One
It was the dream of the pit. Hester had two nightmares and each would wake her in a pool of sweat, crying out in terror. She’d got as far as the earth being shovelled onto her face – hard clods of soil which, had she been able to move, she’d have torn away with her hands. But she was dead, or near it, and she had to lie there until, as a blow crushed her cheek, she woke, gasping for breath. She sat up, aware of an ache in her belly, and groaned as she caught sight of the stained bed sheets. The night had brought her monthly bleed and with it spasms of pain radiating down her legs.
She rang the bell and Susanna appeared, looking surprised at the summons.
‘Is anything the matter?’
Hester swung her legs onto the floor and nodded at the sheets.
‘Will you help me, Susanna? I’d do it myself, but my insides are on fire.’
Susanna took charge, stripping linen away from the mattress and bundling it in the corner of the room. She disappeared to fetch clean sheets from the pine chest at the top of the staircase and returned, deftly making up the bed.
‘You climb back in. Do you have your rags?’
Hester groaned. ‘I’m all prepared.’
‘I’ll bring you a hot stone for your back. The pain will ease with heat.’
‘Amos won’t approve of me idling in bed.’
Hester felt the thud of apprehension in her chest. Her father wouldn’t enter her chamber – climbing the steep staircase was beyond his ability since his stroke – but his words would be as sour as lemons when she next saw him. Susanna, however, was unimpressed.
‘I’ll tell him you’re indisposed with women’s problems. That usually shuts men up. What do they know of what we suffer?’
Nothing, thought Hester. But her father despised weakness in anyone. Pain was to be acknowledged and overcome with the right attitude.
‘You won’t tell him that you helped with my bed, will you? He’ll be angry if he thinks I’ve relied on you.’
Servants, in Amos’s opinion, were for attending to the house, not helping out family members encouraged to self-sufficiency at an early age.
‘Leave him to me.’
Susanna hurried out at the sound of Amos’s call. The pain continued to radiate from Hester’s abdomen until, hearing her moans, Susanna reappeared with a stick of cinnamon bark for her to chew on. The old remedy worked. After an hour, the agony had subsided to a dull ache and Hester hauled herself up to face the long, dismal day.
It was an odd chance that she was thinking of her sister, Mercy, while she dressed. Hester had been given the only gown Mercy discarded during her leaving but, as it was a little tight, she’d left it hanging in the wardrobe. She was conscious of showing off her figure a little too improperly, especially in front of her father. However, a bout of vomiting sickness that summer had thinned her and, standing in front of her armoire, she was drawn to the blue wool dress. She pulled it over her, closing her eyes at the scent of her sister’s skin. It was enough to push away the barriers that Hester had erected to anchor herself in the real world. When she opened her eyes again, Mercy was standing in front of her, smiling in the gentle way Hester loved.
‘Go away,’ she whispered, aghast, and her sister obliged.
Susanna came in while Hester was dressing, bearing another hot stone.
‘Oh, you’re up. I told the master that you’d be in bed all morning.’
‘Then he’ll be pleasantly surprised to see me.’ Hester fumbled at the buttons on her bodice, refusing to acknowledge the thud of dread at the thought of seeing her father when she went downstairs. ‘How is he?’
‘As usual,’ said Susanna in a lowered voice. ‘What’s the matter with you? Your hand is shaking.’
‘I saw something, that’s all.’
‘What?’
Hester shook her head. She would not mention Mercy to Susanna. The maid knew of the spirits who appeared to Hester, but they were always shadows of the departed. Mercy, surely, couldn’t be dead. The thought was too shocking. Her appearance to Hester just now must simply have been conjured by the act of putting on her sister’s dress.
Susanna gave her a look. ‘Keep your secrets, then.’
Susanna was sensitive when it came to Mercy, perhaps because it was she who’d uncovered her original vanishing. They’d breakfasted together as a family in those days, assembling around the table at eight o’clock prompt. There was no reason for the maid to be in Mercy’s room. No one had a morning cup of tea in bed or required help with their dressing. They were all adept at readying themselves for the day.
Although she’d never admitted to it, Hester suspected that their clever maid must have had an inkling that something was afoot. Servants gossip with those from other families and Susanna certainly liked intrigue. Perhaps she’d also picked up on a new heightened mood in the house. For, instead of sweeping the downstairs floors and brushing out the fires on that cool autumn morning, Susanna had pushed open the door of Mercy’s bed chamber to find the bed unspoiled with a note lying on the pillow.
Mercy’s last act as a daughter of the Goodwin household was to embrace the Quaker principle of thriftiness. Rather than put an envelope to waste, she’d simply written her message of farewell and folded the paper in half. Amos had never employed illiterate maids. He considered it an affront to the commitment to the education of women. Susanna was perfectly capable of reading a message, even in Mercy’s hasty scrawl, so she was first in the house to discover the secret. Susanna carried the note to Hester’s mother, Ruth, handing it to her and standing respectfully to one side as her mistress read the contents.
Afterwards, Hester had tried to discover the exact wording of the message, but Ruth wasn’t telling and Susanna chose to deny that she knew. The details emerged soon enough, in any case. Mercy, aged twenty and betrothed to the son of family friends, had eloped with John Philips, tutor to the two young Goodwin sons.
Hester couldn’t be sure what had shocked her more when her stunned mother told her the news. That Mercy had eloped, an act she’d only read of in thrilling tales smuggled to her by her school friends, or that the object of Mercy’s affections had been Mr Philips, a man with a blemished face and thinning pale hair plastered to his scalp with a stinking lotion. How Mercy and he had managed to speak, let alone form an attachment, no one knew. Hester, alone at night and desperate not to submit to sleep, supposed that love found a way of overcoming obstacles.
Mercy’s elopement had been the outrage of three years earlier. A scandal, like most scandals, which ignited and died. Hester had loved her sister but mourned her in private. Amos decreed that Mercy’s name was never again to be mentioned within those four walls and they’d obeyed him. Mercy had faded from family history as surely as ink on blotting paper. Hester’s brothers, Asa and Peter, were despatched to school a few minutes’ walk from their house, Amos forever repenting that he hadn’t chosen this form of education at the outset.
Hester, shaking off thoughts of Mercy, descended the stairs while listening for her father’s call. Sure enough, it came. His strength might have diminished, but his hearing was as sharp as ever. She heard his muffled words.
‘Is it thee, Hester? Have my letters arrived? The mail is late this morning.’
‘I’ll check.’
Hester saw a single envelope sitting on the tin plate. Once, it would have been filled with correspondence addressed not only to the head of the family, but also their mother and occasionally Mercy, too. Now, with her father’s business in decline along with his health, acquaintances had moved their attention to other more prosperous families.
Hester picked up the envelope and walked the short staircase into the back sitting room, which also doubled as her father’s study since his illness. The house was still, only the ticking of the wall clock and the humming of Susanna upstairs in one of the bedrooms cutting through the silence. Amos was sitting, as usual, in the chair by the window, his broad back to her as she entered the room. He moved his head only slightly to acknowledge another presence. Rather than his habitual anger, this time Hester could sense his fury.
‘Is it thee, Hester?’
‘It’s me, Amos.’
Her father still kept to the old ways, using only ‘thee’ to address his audience – a mannerism that encouraged ridicule from those outside their faith. There were also no distinctions made for familial ties, nor between master and servant. Hester called him Amos, as did Susanna. He’d have it no other way.
‘Lying abed this morning, Susanna tells me.’
‘The pain was so great I couldn’t move, Amos.’
Her father didn’t reply. Hester swallowed, aware that she was still frightened of this man.
‘I’ve brought you a letter. Just the one arrived this morning.’
She moved forwards so that he could see her, placing the envelope in his hand. On the climb upstairs, she’d already examined the envelope, noting that the paper was of poor quality, almost translucent in texture, although the writing was confident enough, its bold strokes scoring the surface. Amos studied it for a moment, hesitated, then took a paperknife from his desk and deftly slit the top of the envelope.
Hester watched him scan the contents. His face, uneven after the stroke that nearly killed him, became waxen in front of her eyes. The lines grooved into the side of his face deepened. Hester, despite her fear, moved towards her father.
‘Is everything well?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Everything is not well. What have I done to deserve such a wayward girl as thy sister Mercy?’
Hester reached out to grip the back of a wooden chair.
‘Mercy?’
Her speaking infuriated him more. With a sweep of his hand, he knocked the inkstand flying, the liquid spraying across the carpet. She bent to retrieve the pot and felt a cuff on the side of her head.
‘Amos, please.’ She put a hand to her temple, trying to ignore the ringing in her ear.
He turned his attention away from her and back to the letter, reading through the contents another time. When he’d finished, he replaced the paper in the envelope and fixed his gaze away from her as she climbed to her feet.
‘Thy sister is dead.’
The news took her breath away. It explained the morning’s shadowing, as she’d come to call her visions. Mercy who, like her parents, had refused to believe in Hester’s visions, had herself appeared briefly to her from the afterlife as a portent of the news she was about to receive. Feeling her father’s eyes on her, Hester made an effort to compose herself. She must, for the moment, ignore the tingle in her spine at the thought of her shadowings, so long suppressed by Amos’s beatings, beginning again.
‘Dead? How?’
She gripped the chair tighter, feeling a splinter slide into her finger. She gasped at the pain but held on to steady herself at the news.
‘That’s no matter. Where’s Ruth?’
Hester hadn’t given her mother any thought all morning.
‘Visiting, I suppose. I’m not sure where she’s gone – she left before I dressed. Susanna might know.’
‘Find her for me.’
It was an order from this man who still ruled the house with his iron will.
‘Of course,’ she replied, desperate to get away from him.
She climbed the narrow stairs to the first floor, following the sound of Susanna’s humming. At the entrance to the boys’ bedroom, she paused to watch the maid make up one of the small single beds. She stopped when she saw Hester, her lips forming a small circle of surprise.
‘What’s the matter? Is it Amos?’
‘Mercy is dead.’ Saying the name gave her courage and she stood firmer in the doorway. ‘A letter came and it says that Mercy has died.’
‘Never.’ Susanna stared at Hester in shock. ‘Is that who you saw this morning?’
Hester hesitated. ‘For a moment, yes.’
‘Oh, Hester. Don’t tell Amos.’
Little chance of that, thought Hester. ‘Do you know where Ruth is?’
‘Visiting Mrs Perry. She took worse overnight and your mother was out before breakfast. What happened to Mercy?’
‘I don’t know. Amos won’t tell me. He only said that Mercy was dead and asked what he’d done to deserve such a child.’
Susanna crossed the room. ‘You stay here. I can run faster than you.’ She peered closer. ‘Did he strike you? I see a mark on your face.’
‘Yes.’ Hester’s voice cracked at the unfairness of the blow that stung her scalp. ‘Will you tell Ruth what’s happened? She’ll want to know. You tell her.’
The permission was, of course, unnecessary. Hester knew Susanna would spill the beans anyway. She was full of repressed excitement as she untied her apron.
‘I’ll go now.’
Hester heard the clack of her shoes down the stairs followed by the door shutting. She took a deep breath. She would need to go in to see her father, even though she’d rather have sat to digest the news in the bedroom she and Mercy had once shared. In that small, bare room they’d been confidantes, first of childish fancies but then, as they’d got older, allies in the face of Amos’s brutality and Ruth’s preoccupation with her charity work. Only in the last weeks before her elopement had Mercy withdrawn into herself, hugging her secret tightly. Now, Mercy was dead, the news foreshadowed by the dream of the pit and the vision of Mercy in her altered form. The shadowing had returned.
But no, she mustn’t think of that. Amos thought he’d beaten out of her the nightmares that had haunted Hester from childhood and the tales of the spirits who disappeared when she tried to speak. According to him, there was only this life and where they went to beyond. No phantoms who flitted between the two. It was the Quaker belief and yet, from her first vision at the age of three, these shadows had appeared to her at times of crisis or when she was sick. Often they were faint outlines, other times recognisable forms like Mercy that morning. For a moment, Hester felt the presence of her sister – a tiny, faint breath against her cheek.
‘Mercy,’ she whispered. ‘What happened?’
She listened for a reply but heard only a distant swishing sound followed by a thud. The atmosphere in the house took on a more menacing edge, causing Hester to hurry downstairs to her father’s study. He was slumped over the table, his head turned to one side.
‘Amos?’
Hester shook his shoulder, causing him to slide to the floor, his mouth working as he tried to speak. Amos was in the throes of a second stroke. As she kneeled beside him, trying to loosen the neckerchief at his throat, she caught sight of the letter sitting on top of his desk. It had been removed once more from the envelope. Perhaps her father had wanted to reassure himself of the message. Whatever the reason, Hester could see the address written in the same confident scrawl at the top of the letter. It had come from a place called Southwell Union Workhouse. Mercy had died a pauper.
Chapter Two
‘It’ll have to be you, Hester. There isn’t anyone else who can go.’
Ruth twisted the fringe of her shawl as she sat at the oak table. The ledger where she recorded the family finances was open and Hester saw that a note had been made of the sum of coins handed over to the physician. Amos was confined to his bed after taking a draught of strong-smelling brew to induce sleep. It had done the trick. Her father was in a deep slumber and looked as if he’d already departed this world. Before leaving, the physician had warned that this second stroke might mark a significant deterioration in his faculties. Mercy, by her dying, had done something that her original disappearance had failed to do. It had mortally wounded their father.
‘Hester, stop daydreaming. It’s always the same. I talk to you and your mind is elsewhere.’
Hester saw that her mother had dropped the old-fashioned form of address. She’d been brought up in a more enlightened Quaker family but had adopted her husband’s style of language in public. In private, she easily slipped into her old ways.
‘I was saying, Hester, that it’ll have to be you who sorts this matter out.’
‘You want me to travel to Nottinghamshire?’
Hester was struggling to absorb the proposal. She was to be given the duty of representing the family on the long trek north – an unimaginable responsibility while Amos had been fit and well.
‘You must.’ Ruth picked up the ledger and closed it. ‘I need to know what happened to Mercy. The letter tells us nothing more than that your sister has died.’
Hester watched her mother closely. She’d always been aware that Ruth had a small part of herself that she didn’t allow anyone in her family to see. Even now, in the throes of her grief, she was holding herself back from Hester.
‘You could write and ask for more information. The mail arrives quickly these days. We might have more news before the week is out.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ Ruth’s voice was calm. ‘The workhouses may be new but they’re well governed. There will be a board of guardians, which the clerk will have to apply to for permission to reveal any details about Mercy.’
‘There’s no hurry, is there? Even if any reply goes through official channels, we can surely wait.’
A spasm of pain twisted Hester’s insides, but she stood upright in front of her mother, years of training coming to the rescue.
‘I don’t want to be fobbed off with a few lines. They might condescend to tell me the cause of death, but they’re under no obligation to tell me how she ended up in such a place. Our best chance to discover what’s happened is to call on them in person and for that, I need you, Hester.’
Despite her misgivings, Hester’s heart leaped in anticipation. The mission was a brief chance of escaping this house and seeing something of the world beyond the confines of Bristol.
‘Will you tell Amos I’m going?’
Ruth turned her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. He might not notice your absence in his present state.’
‘And what do I do when I get there? Arrange Mercy’s funeral?’
‘Of course not.’ Ruth’s voice was exasperated. ‘Sometimes I forget how young you are, Hester. You’ll find your sister already buried. The letter makes no mention of a funeral, but they don’t wait around with their dead in the workhouses. Mercy will already be in the ground.’
Hester had no doubt Ruth was right. She was under no illusions how paupers were buried. There wasn’t a poorhouse, school of correction or infirmary she hadn’t entered as part of her visits with Ruth to the needy around the city. Once dead, the destitute were piled together in communal pits. For a moment, her dream flashed into her mind and her legs buckled.
‘What is it, Hester?’
Hester hesitated, a lie ready on her lips. But Amos was in the twilight world and c. . .
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