Bleeding Night
Outer London, Winter 1665
At some strange hour, when the night bleeds into morning, Carlisle finally decides to acknowledge Grace's existence. He bursts into her room, candlestick in hand. His face is wild, the panicked expression of an animal seizing his mouth and eyes. Grace squints at him from her bed but cannot make sense of the situation: why he is here and why he is looking at her like that.
"Godfrey, what have you done?"
He rushes to her bedside, moving with the quick ease of a shadow in the night, melting into the black, jumping from dark spot to dark spot.
She sits up, clutching the blanket to her torso to hide her chest. "What do you mean?"
"You're bleeding."
Grace's eyes widen, her gaze darting to her lap. Surely she has not…
Oh no.
"I'm fine," she says. "Don't worry 'bout me."
He ignores her, reaches out and grabs the edge of her bedsheet. Grace wrestles with him for a moment, trying to tug the blanket away from him.
"Let me see. If you are injured, you must let me help you."
She shakes her head. "Leave it. I'm fine."
"You are not." He yanks the bedsheet, his strength incomparable to her own. The blanket falls away and pools by her feet.
She sleeps only in a shirt, exposing her feminine legs, her soft thighs. But worse than that is the spot of blood staining the mattress cover.
Carlisle freezes. He stares at that abnormal burgundy mark, silent.
Mortified, Grace throws herself forward, chasing after her blanket. She pulls it up to her chin, hiding herself from him.
Slowly, his eyes roll up from the sheet and to her face. His stare is like burnt butter, something now spoilt. "You have deceived me! You are no boy."
Grace shakes her head. Suddenly, her mouth is dry. Her tongue feels like a wad of cotton, and her throat sticks shut when she swallows. "Please," she says. "Please, you gotta-"
"Stand."
"I-"
"Stand," he says. "A man stands when he is addressed in dialogues such as these."
"You know I'm not a man, sir."
Carlisle is quiet, but his stare is enough. Hardened.
Grace, still gripping her sheet to her chest, slinks out of bed and stands by the window. She presses herself against the wall and lowers her gaze. She imagines, for a second, that her blanket is a shield of some sort. That, if she tries hard enough, she can hide behind it for an eternity.
"Look me in the eye."
Grace takes a steadying breath. She raises her head and meets his eyes.
"Good," he says. "What is your name?"
"Grace," she breathes. She clears her throat, lifts her chin, speaks louder. "Grace, sir."
A smile. Tiny, barely perceivable. "A pleasure to meet you, Grace. Now I would like to ask you a favour."
"A favour?"
"That you try to explain all of this to me," he says. "I am struggling to make sense of your behaviour."
She shifts her weight, glances away. "An explanation is not gonna much illuminate the situation."
His brows lift slightly. "Do you not think I deserve one? You have lied to me without hesitation for weeks."
"I don't know where to start."
"Start at the beginning," he says, "and we shall progress a single word at a time."
She hesitates, biting her lip. "I am bein' hunted, sir."
His brows shoot upwards. "Hunted?"
"The town wants me dead. I dressed like a man to get away. I was going to go to a dock or find a way up north, but…"
"I discovered you before you could escape?"
Grace nods.
A moment of quiet.
Carlisle asks, "Why do they wish to kill you?"
"I'm sick, sir."
He tilts his head, frowning. Bows his head to peer at her face. Takes a step closer to her. He touches the back of his hand to her forehead. "Is it the Pestilence?"
Strange, that he doesn't keep away, given his suspicion.
"No," she says. "The Falling Sickness."
"Ah." He nods, leaning back. "I have heard of it."
"They think I'm possessed by a demon," she says. "I fell during the burning of a witch. They think the thing inside me is causing all this death."
"And when you say they, you are referring to the Church, yes?"
"Well, I don't know about the bishop and all that," she says, "but the Pastor's definitely looking for me."
"Which Pastor?"
"The one with the silver beard, sir," she says. "He preaches in that little chapel out west, just before the farmland."
His expression darkens. He turns away from her and faces the wall. Grace watches as his face shifts, as his eyes trace over the shapes of possibilities. He is doing scholarly work now, Grace believes. He is thinking.
After a moment, he looks back at her.
"Thank you for sharing all of this with me. I appreciate your honesty."
Grace frowns. Carlisle speaks very strangely sometimes.
"I shall not cast you from my home," he says. "You needn't fear that. And for as long as you are under my roof, you need not fear that man either, nor his supporters."
"You will let me stay?"
"Of course, Grace."
"Why?"
He smiles. "You are my apprentice. I can hardly turn you out onto the street."
"Women can't be scholars."
A heavy sigh. "It is unfortunate," he says, "that our society endorses only the enlightenment of men. But that is not to say that you should be barred from intellectual pursuit simply because you are a woman."
"Nobody's gonna take me serious."
"Seriously," he corrects. Then, "Some men are discomforted by knowledgeable women, that is true. It is why they burn them at the stake."
"You mean witches aren't real?"
"Perhaps only a small number of women executed for witchcraft are truly guilty," he says. "In anycase, you are a woman who has happened upon an unhappy circumstance, and the universe is asking for you to make something positive of it."
"Even if I do, even if I write one of them big books like the ones out there-" Grace points to the door leading to the main room- "no man will read it."
He crosses the room, and takes her hands in his. Cold seeps through her palms. He leans over to look her in the eye.
"Listen to me, Grace," he says. "If you have the ability to compete in a sphere overpopulated by men despite the circumstances you were born into, despite their advantages, their prejudices, then by all means you deserve your place in it."
A lump forms in her throat. She swallows it.
"And if a man won't listen to you," he says, "then you must find a way to make him."
When he is home, Carlisle makes Grace read aloud. He always chooses the book, sits, and requests that she read. While she stumbles over long words, the scratch of a quill against paper sings through the air. Every so often, Grace stops mid-sentence, and the room tumbles into silence.
"What does sublunary mean?"
She reads about religion and history. She flicks through books on human anatomy, music, and arithmetic. She learns rules about shapes, cartography, and architecture. In the late afternoon, she sifts through texts on the stars, and the way the universe arranges itself.
Sometimes, Carlisle lights a candle and allows her to continue into the night. He loses track of time. The sun begins to rise, the sky the purplish hue of daybreak, and he ushers her to bed. But when she glimpses his golden face illuminated by the flickering candle, just before she closes her door, he looks as well-rested as he did that morning.
She closes the door. Frowns. She lives with a mystery. She knows it, can feel the whisper of a secret shivering in the house's bones.
She sleeps on it. Rises. Repeats.
Eventually, she reads with a fluency she never could have imagined. The words spill from her mouth without effort, like water passing between parted lips.
"It is time," Carlisle says, "to choose your area of interest."
You, she thinks. You and your strangeness. Your cold hands and your tireless gaze. Your weird preference for the remote, for living on the edges, for deer in place of wild boar. I want to know what it is that makes it feel like you are a myth.
She doesn't say that.
"The planets," she says in a rushed breath. "The stars."
He leaves that day. Returns in the afternoon, arms loaded with goods: a loaf of warm bread, a parcel of herb butter, a bottle of ink, a handful of goose feathers, and an empty leather bound book.
"What was your father like?"
Carlisle looks at Grace over his book. "Why are you asking so suddenly?"
She shrugs. Butters a piece of bread. "I thought I heard a ghost the other day."
"Revenants do not linger in homes," he says. "They wander the streets in search of closure."
"Closure?"
"Their burial rites to be observed. To say their last farewells to friends and family." He pauses, glancing out the window. "Or forgiveness through confession."
"Which do you think your father wants?"
"None." The corners of his mouth lift just a fraction, pulling his lips into a contemptuous smile. "I am quite sure he is more than happy terrorising townspeople."
"You didn't like him then?"
"Many men have difficult relationships with their fathers, Grace," he says. "It is almost like a rite of passage."
"But why?" She leans forwards. "I mean, in your case."
"My father… like many fathers… believed entirely that he was doing the right thing." He shakes his head. "He couldn't see the suffering he caused."
"To you?"
"To many people," he says. "Innocent people who did not choose their circumstances, and yet suffer for them."
"I don't understand."
"It is not easy to understand people's cruelty," he tells her. "One might feel obliged to reduce the chaos he causes to the work of the Devil. Such is the nature of anything which cannot be logically deduced."
Graces frowns at him. "The chaos he causes?"
"Caused," he amends. "I misspoke."
She stares at him a moment longer, and is quite convinced he didn't misspeak at all. Panic swirls in the honey of his eyes. He holds a secret in his mouth; it rests on his tongue. His Adam's apple bobs. He swallows it.
Carlisle sits straighter in his chair. "Come, let us not speak of him now. Tell me about your family."
"My mother died delivering me."
"I empathise," he says. "The same is true of mine. What of your father?"
"He died some years ago of bad blood."
"I am sorry to hear that. Were you alone then before we met?"
"I have a brother, John." She pauses, looks at Carlisle. "Sir, would you help me write him a letter? I know how to write, of course, but I've never written a letter before, or had one sent to me. I don't know-"
"Of course." He stands, and crosses the room to stand beside her at the desk. "Can he read?"
"No." She finds a piece of paper and quill among the mess of books. "I thought he might ask someone at the Parish to help him."
He smiles. "It sounds like a wonderful idea."
She dips a quill into her inkpot, and looks up at Carlisle. "What should I write?"
"Decide what you wish to say, and we shall write exactly that."
Carlisle pays a messenger to deliver the letter to John. Grace awaits eagerly for him to write back. Days pass. Melt into weeks. Something inside of her turns into water, sloshing around when she moves, freezing when she slips outside and into the winter air.
She waits.
Nothing arrives.