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.
Journey through the Rain
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.
When we reached the barn, I pushed open the door and looked in. The creak of the door brought Phoebe to her feet and as soon as she saw who it was relief flooded over her poor sad face.
I felt adult, in charge of the situation, as Angelet, who lacked my experience, could never have been.
I said: ‘Ginny, go back to the house. Don’t tell anyone that Phoebe is here. I will see you when I get back.’
Ginny ran off and I shut the barn door.
‘Oh mistress,’ cried Phoebe, ‘I had nowhere to go. And I thought of you. You was terrible kind to me the other day.’
‘I did nothing, Phoebe.’
‘’Twas the way you looked at me. As though you understood like.’
‘Now, Phoebe,’ I said. ‘You have been with a man and you are going to have a child. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘You be terrible sharp, mistress. How did ’ee know?’
‘I did know,’ I said. ‘I am … perceptive.’ I think she thought I meant I had special powers, and she was so desperate, poor girl, that she seemed to look upon me as some goddess who could drag her out of her trouble. A great pleasure swept over me to be so regarded. It was strange to have been thinking of bringing disaster, possibly death, to one woman so recently and then to feel gratified because I was going to save another. It was a sort of expiation, placating the angels. Moreover, I felt a sense of power which was very gratifying—and like a balm laid on the wounds which Bastian had inflicted.
I sat down beside her. ‘How did it happen?’ I asked.
‘He said I were pretty and he did like the look of me. He said he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. I hadn’t thought I could be pretty to anyone before that. It just made me soft like, I reckon.’
‘Poor Phoebe,’ I said, ‘it must have been hard living in that cottage with a father like yours.’
At the mention of her father Phoebe began to tremble.
‘I fear him, Mistress Bersaba.’ She unbuttoned the shapeless black gown and showed me the marks of a lash on her shoulder. ‘He gave me that for singing a song about spring on the sabbath day,’ she said. ‘What he’d give me for this I don’t dare think. He’d kill me, I reckon. I deserve it, I don’t doubt. I’ve been so wicked.’