Makepeace remembered the gleam in the witch-hunter’s eyes when he had heard about the royal charter. It would be better if the King’s spies found it and quietly destroyed it. She could not rid the world of witch-hunters, but there was no need to feed them. From the little she had seen, they were a hungry breed.
Besides, it pleased her to imagine Helen exchanging cool, bland pleasantries with her unsuspecting Parliamentarian husband with Makepeace’s note hidden in her glove, and then sneaking out at night to adventures and espionage in the service of the King.
I would like to write up my studies of ghosts as well, remarked the doctor, if I thought we could do so without being burned as heretics.
I wonder sometimes whether your family had fallen into a colossal error. The more ghosts I see, the less sure I am that we are the same souls that once were living. For all we know, perhaps the real souls pass on happily to the Maker, leaving us behind. I think sometimes that we ghosts are . . . memories. Echoes. Impressions. Oh, we can think and feel. We can regret the past, and fear the future. But are we really the people we think we are?
How does that change anything? It was too late for Makepeace to think of her spectral allies as anything other than friends.
I do not know, said Dr Quick. It is a blow to my vanity to consider the possibility that I am nothing but a bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories, given life by somebody else’s mind. But then again, so is a book. Where is my pen?
Makepeace let him use her hand to write. Not for the first time, she wondered whether the doctor would leave some day too, after he felt he had lived his afterlife to some account.
Not Bear, though. Bear would never be parted from her.
She could find no join, no place where she ended and Bear started. In that first clumsy embrace of the spirit, they had tangled themselves hopelessly, she supposed. Whatever happened, wherever she went, there would always be Bear. Whoever knew her, or liked her, or loved her, would have to accept Bear.
She could even love herself a little now, knowing that she was Bear.
For a good few days after her death, Hannah was very confused.
She had been brought to the front line by love and desperation, in equal measure. It was all very well Tom saying that he must march with the Earl’s army, but if he left her all alone with a baby coming, then how would she pay for food, and where would she go? So she had packed her things and come along to war, even as she started to get thick about the waist.
Hannah was not the only one. The baggage train of the army was full of other women — wives, lovers and the other sort — all pitching in with the cooking, nursing and fetching. She liked them, or a lot of them, anyway. It was muddy trudging, but she was young, and sometimes the whole adventure had a mad, exciting holiday feel. Her singing voice, so often praised in church, sounded even better by the campfire.
But then a cart loaded with gunpowder had exploded, killing Tom. The shock of it caused her to fall down in a fit and lose the baby. Afterwards she had no stomach for returning to her own town without Tom. She had no home now. But where could she go? And without Tom’s wages as a soldier, how would she eat?
Another woman whispered to her that if she dressed as a man and was willing to take the worst watches, she might ‘enlist’ and get a soldier’s wages. There were a couple of others in the camp who did so, and an officer who turned a blind eye.
So Hannah became Harold. She was too slight to hold the line with the pikemen, so she was taught the tricks of the matchlock, and joined the lines of musketeers.
During the great battle, after the musketeer line had broken in disorder, she had heard yells that the enemy were attacking the baggage train. She had run to the rear of the camp, through a fog of gunsmoke and chaos, to see men on horseback chasing the camp womenfolk and hacking them down with swords. She put a bullet in one of them, and wounded another with her sword, before a slice from behind ended her efforts and her life.
No! she thought as she died. No! No! It is too soon. It is not fair. I was discovering a new life and I was good at this!
But that thought was all that kept her company for the next few days. She was in darkness. It was a warm, strange darkness, and she did not think she was alone.
Now and then, somebody tried to talk to her. It was a young man’s voice, and at first she thought it might be Tom trying to guide her to Heaven, but it didn’t sound like him and the accent was wrong.
At last her vision returned. She was so relieved to see blue sky above her that she wanted to sob. However, she found that she could not. She appeared to be walking, but had no control over her own body. When she looked down, she found it was not her own body at all. It was still in male clothing, but now it seemed to be male indeed.
‘Can you see?’ asked the same insistent voice, sounding a little wary. ‘Can you hear me? My name is James.’
What happened? she demanded. Where am I?
‘You’re safe,’ he answered. ‘Well . . . actually you’re dead, but also safe . . . in a sense. Makepeace — can you talk to her? I’m not used to this.’
The person whose eyes Hannah was using turned to look at his companion, a girl a couple of years younger than Hannah. She could have been any market-girl, in her faded wool clothes and linen cap, but there was a knowing, serious look in her eye as if she had already watched the whole of Hannah’s life unfold.
On her cheek, Hannah saw two faint smallpox scars, so small they might have been flecks of rain. They reminded her of the two large freckles that had sat on Tom’s cheek in almost exactly the same place, and Hannah took this as a good omen. Desperate as she was, she would make do with any omen she could find.
‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,’ said the girl called Makepeace. ‘But you’re welcome to travel with us as long as you like. We believe in second chances, for the people who don’t usually get them.
‘You’re among friends, Hannah. You’re home.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my editor, Rachel Petty, for showing superhuman patience and calm while I was half-witted with stress over my own delays, and for helping to lure Bear out of the shadows; Bea, Kat, Catherine and everyone else at Macmillan for being supportive, fun and perpetually on my side; Nancy for wisdom and common sense; Martin for putting up with my most frantic months of writing and editing, and for only mocking me gently when I worked until 4 or 5 a.m.; Plot on the Landscape; Rhiannon; Sandra for taking me to the exhibition on Sir Thomas Browne at the Royal College of Physicians; Amy Greenfield for introducing me to Chastleton and its wonderful secret room; Ham House; Boswell Castle; Old Wardour Castle; The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss; The King’s Smuggler: Jane Whorwood Secret Agent to Charles I by John Fox; The Weaker Vesseclass="underline" Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England by Antonia Fraser; Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House by Miriam Slater; Women in early modern England, 1500–1700 by Jacqueline Eales; Her Own Life: Autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen edited by Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby & Helen Wilcox; 55 Days by Howard Brenton; The History of England Volume III: Civil War by Peter Ackroyd; and Lady Eleanor Davies, the abrasive, self-styled prophetess who managed to annoy virtually everybody, not least with her tendency to be right.