Philippa Carr - Saraband for Two Sisters

‘How would you know when a toad was a familiar? There’s lots of them round the ponds. I’ve heard ’em croaking at night in the spring when they come out looking for a mate and then they go down to the ponds to lay their eggs.’

‘They’re just ordinary toads … they ain’t familiars.’

‘But toads is nasty things. I suppose it’s because they come out at night.’

‘’Tis so, but don’t do to mistake them all. There’s some as just goes about their business … same as any other creature might. ’Tis only when a witch do take one up and to her bed maybe and in him comes the spawn of the Devil who lives and shelters in the toad.’

‘Like in the toad they saw with Jenny Keys?’

‘Maybe so, and when it was known that Jenny Keys harboured a toad and took him to her close like, the trouble started. They said she carried him in her bosom and that he crawled over her body and was familiar like.’

Mab burst into giggles and Ginny reproved her. ‘You laugh now but you wouldn’t be laughing if witches heard you.’

‘Jenny Keys be dead, though.’

‘Jenny Keys ain’t the only witch, remember.’

‘Who else is?’

‘You don’t have to look far.’

There was an awed silence.

‘You mean … her … ’

‘Why not? Her grandmother were. Powers be passed down, I reckon.’

‘I reckon we ought to keep our eyes open.’

I rose, and went swiftly and silently up the staircase to my room.

Angelet—with that special feeling that was between us—began to sense that I wanted to be alone. She had guessed of course that this was concerned with Bastian, and I had seen her look at Carlotta with something like distaste, for she was very loyal to me.

When we lay in bed at night, it was our custom to talk over the events of the day, and although since I had heard of Bastian’s perfidy I had had no wish to talk to her, I could not suddenly break the habit.

She said to me one night after the conversation at the dinner-table had been particularly sparkling and Carlotta with Senara and Gervaise had discussed the Courts of Spain and England at great length—thus making it very difficult for the rest of us to participate: ‘Has it occurred to you, Bersaba, that Sir Gervaise and Carlotta are getting very friendly?’

‘I think Carlotta is of a nature to pay attention always to the male members of the company.’

‘You are right. Of course she is beautiful. One has to grant her that, and having been at Court, I suppose does something to one. I wonder if we shall ever go to Court?’

‘Do you want to?’ I asked.

‘It would be amusing. Besides, we shall have to marry some time, shan’t we? Mother obviously meant something like that when she said our next birthday party would be different.’

I yawned. ‘It’s a long way away.’

‘There are the Trent men and the Krolls and the Lamp tons. One of them, I suppose. Oh, isn’t it dull living in the country! I would like never to have known my husband and then the next day he is there. Do you feel like that?’

I felt the anger surge up in me. No, I had expected Bastian to be my husband and I’ve known him all my life … and yet I never really knew him. I used to think he was quiet and steady and that I could tease him about this. Then I found that that wasn’t true at all. He had only to see Carlotta and he forgot all his vows to me. How little we knew people whom we thought we understood so well.

‘Do you?’ urged Angelet. ‘You’re not asleep, are you?’

‘What’s that?’ I cried, pretending to be starting out of a doze.

‘Oh, go to sleep,’ she said. ‘You never want to talk these days.’

It was better to be alone, for if I talked to Angelet I might betray something of my feelings. I was afraid that I might let fall some little comment which would betray me when the time came.

So I rode out alone doing the forbidden thing. Down the blackberry track, past the smithy. I glanced in the direction of the cottages and thought of poor Phoebe, wondering how she was faring. I could visualize clearly the misery she must be enduring with a heavy burden of guilt upon her. I wondered what Thomas Gast would do if my surmise was correct.

It was a misty evening and darker than usual when I took my mare to the stables. I wandered down by the garden to the pond on which the water-lilies were growing, and as I did so I heard the croaking of a toad and as I came nearer I saw him.

He was seated there by the pool—drowsy, I imagine, after a good feed of insects, and I suddenly felt my heart begin to beat wildly as memories of the conversation I had heard between the servants came back to me.

On impulse I took a large kerchief from my pocket and, stooping, wrapped it round the toad and carried him into the Priory. I went straight up to our room and was thankful that Angelet was not there.

I was excited. I knew what I was going to do with the toad. It was part of my plan, and seeing him there, waiting for me, as it were, had forced me to act before I had meant to.

But why not? There was no point in delay.

In the evening the servants went into the bedrooms to prepare the beds for the night, to turn back the quilt and, if it were cold, put in hot bricks wrapped up in flannel.

Ana did not turn down the beds for Carlotta and Senara any more than she cleaned their rooms. That was a housemaid’s task and Ana, as lady’s maid, would consider it beneath her. It was Mab who did the beds and I was particularly amused because she was the one whom I had heard talking to Ginny. When I considered that it seemed as though I was being guided by fate, for I knew what Mab would find when she turned down Carlotta’s bed. There was a tall livery chest in the corridor outside the bedroom door, and when I heard Mab going up to the rooms I followed at a discreet distance and hid myself behind the chest.

It happened just as I knew it would. It was not long before I heard Mab’s piercing scream and she came running out of the bedroom, her face white as a lily petal. She didn’t see me because her one thought was to get away from that room as fast as she could.

I slipped out and went into Carlotta’s room. There on the pillow was the toad. He seemed to glare at me with baleful eyes, so I smothered him in the kerchief and hurried from the room. As I did so I felt my blood run cold, and my heart began to beat so wildly that it was like a drum beating against my bodice. I was standing there by the bed when I had a strange feeling that I was not alone. I looked round the room. No one was there. The door of the communicating room where Senara slept was open a little but I could see no one.

What was it—this sudden fear? It had seemed so easy. All I had to do was put the toad in her bed, leave it there for Mab to find when she came to do the beds, then when she ran out, as I was sure she would, I was to go in and remove the toad so that when she brought the others to see it, it would have disappeared, which I felt was just the sort of thing a familiar would do.

As I stood there in that room and I could feel the toad moving in the kerchief, I had an impulse to drop it and run. I thought to myself: Suppose she is truly a witch. She bewitched Bastian. Suppose the toad is her familiar! Suppose it is a devil in toad form! But I had found him—a perfectly harmless toad—by the pond in the garden and it was I who had placed him in her bed.

It was just a feeling that eyes were watching me. Why? I went swiftly to the door between the two rooms. I looked inside. No one was there. Then I ran from the room, out into the corridor. I could hear Mab’s voice as she explained what she had seen.

In the corridor I could hear Ginny’s voice: ‘’Tis nothing. You dreamed it. ’Twas because we was talking of toads.’

And Mab: ‘I can’t go in there. I’d die rather.’

I waited in one of the rooms while they went up to Carlotta’s room, then I came swiftly along the gallery and down the stairs, praying I should meet no one. I went out through a side door and across a courtyard to the gardens.

I sped across to the pool and laid down the kerchief. The toad remained still for several seconds. I watched him fearfully, half expecting him to turn into some horrible shape, but seeming to realize that he was free and on his home ground he made his cautious way to the edge of the pool and hid himself under a large stone.

I picked up the kerchief and went into the house.

On the way I met several of the maids, who were chattering wildly together.

‘What’s happened?’ I said.

‘Oh, ’twas Mab, Miss Bersaba. Her be well nigh in hysterics.’

‘Why?’

‘’Tis what her have seen in the lady Carlotta’s bed.’

‘In her bed?’

Ginny said: ‘Mab could have fancied it. There were no toad there when I went up.’

The maids were silent, their eyes on my face.

‘Whatever made Mab imagine such a thing?’ I asked.

‘’Tis talk, Miss Bersaba,’ said Ginny.

‘I did see it,’ Mab insisted. ‘It were there … on her pillow. The way it looked at me … ’twere terrible. It was like no other toad I seen.’

‘Well, where is it now?’ I asked with a hint of impatience.

‘It have clean disappeared,’ said Ginny.

‘Well, that’s a blessing,’ I answered, infusing scepticism into my voice.

And I passed on.

I knew that that night the great topic of conversation among the servants would be the toad Mab had seen in Carlotta’s bed. I knew too that the story of the toad would not be confined to the Priory. It would spread to the village. I wondered what Thomas Gast would say when he heard it. The habits of witches would be great sin in his eyes.

I dreamed of him that night standing by his furnace with his wild eyes gloating on the flames.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON and I was in our orchard, lying beneath my favourite apple tree and thinking of Bastian and wondering what he was doing at that time. He had looked so unhappy when he had left, and although I had pretended to be unaware of him I was far from that. I hoped he was unhappy. He should be. He had deceived me and now he was parted from Carlotta, for she was undecided whether or not she would marry him, and when one considered her growing friendship with Sir Gervaise, the wealthy courtier, it seemed unlikely that she would take Bastian, the country squire.

So I hated her on two counts—one for taking my lover and the other for finding him not good enough for her. When I considered that I could gloat over the toad incident. I knew the servants talked of little else because I eavesdropped continuously. Often I would come upon them in a room, on the stairs or in the gardens whispering together. They would stop when I approached, but not before I had discovered the subject of their conversation.

Sometimes I would grow impatient. What if Carlotta decided to go back to Castle Paling? She would then go away … back to Bastian … and when she was out of sight people here would forget their suspicions.

While I was brooding in this way Ginny came out to the orchard.

She said: ‘I saw ’ee come out here, Miss Bersaba, so I knew where you were to. There’s someone as wants a word with you … and in secret.’

Ginny spoke in a quiet voice with a tremor of excitement in it which made her seem conspiratorial. My feelings of guilt were growing very strong. I would start when anyone spoke to me because I suppose I felt that someone had watched me put the toad in the bed and remove it and understood what I was doing—so that … when the time came they would know what part I had played in the drama.

Ginny’s next words quashed my fears in that direction but startled me nevertheless. ‘It’s Phoebe Gast,’ she said.

‘What does she want?’

‘She wants to see you, Miss Bersaba. She be in the barn. She have asked me to come for you and ask you if you’d talk to her like.’

The barn was a stone-walled building in which corn was stored. It was apart from the other outbuildings and one had to cross a small field after leaving the gardens to reach it.

‘Does anyone know she’s there?’

‘Oh no, mistress. She be scared out of her wits, I do tell ’ee. She waited in the lane for me, for she knows I come along that way, and she darted out and said to me, “Tell Mistress Bersaba. Tell her I must see her.” Then she told me she was going to the barn.’

‘I’ll go and see what’s wrong,’ I said; but I knew, and I felt exultant in a way because she had come to me.