Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Cosmopolitan Book Awards 2025: Best historical fiction to take you back in time Summer in Worcestershire, 1577. Eliza Litton, a talented artist, is in love with childhood friend, Francis. But her tyrannical father, who rules the household with insults and fists, has other ideas. As summer comes to an end, Francis vanishes after a drunken night at the inn and Eliza's father forces her to marry a gentleman, Edmund. Thrown into a new, unfamiliar life with her husband who appears distant and cold, Eliza cannot tear herself from the memory of Francis. Yet her feelings for Edmund soften with time; he presents a life to her better than she ever dreamed. He provides her a safety she never had beneath her father's roof and encourages her to paint, to pursue the things she loves. As she begins to fall for Edmund, Francis is adrift on his own voyage, doing all he can to survive, fixated on returning to Eliza. But as Eliza grows closer to Edmund, she uncovers a deceit she never imagined, causing her to question her own loyalties and commit her own betrayals. After everything, who will Eliza be? And what choices will she make? The Marriage Contract vividly portrays life in the precarious and unforgiving Elizabethan era, exploring love's many forms; how we can betray the ones we love, and how we can find forgiveness; and explores a woman's fight to follow her desires and find her autonomy.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 486
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Praise for the Marriage Contract
‘The Marriage Contract is a beautifully-written portrait of Elizabethan England and the lives, trials, and subtle powers of the women who existed – and found unconventional ways to thrive – within its rigid social constraints. Butler’s sentences are exquisite, her research is impeccable, and the world she conjures is wonderfully evocative. A must-read for historical fiction lovers.’
—Katie Bishop, author of The Girls of Summer and High Season
‘Poignant and insightful both in its understanding of the human soul and its examination of love in its different forms – it’s a book that challenged me, made me think and stayed with me, in all the best possible ways.’
—Nicola Cornick, author of The Secrets of the Rose
‘A richly detailed historical novel, beautifully written with descriptions that conjure such vivid images for the reader that you feel as though you are there, treading in the characters’ footsteps. The story is stark and raw, real in a way that has you holding your breath, showing all of life’s joys and cruelties without sugar-coating. Love, painful and wonderful in turn, as well as the devastation of loss and grief. And a woman’s struggle for some measure of freedom at a time when females had no autonomy. There is very little in the way of Tudor politics, which is great – I much prefer a story that vifocuses on the characters and their daily, ordinary lives at the time. Also, although the heroine marries a gentleman, she doesn’t inhabit the claustrophobic world of the Tudor court. Instead, apart from a brief visit to London, the setting is the countryside in all its glory. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction.’
—Christina Courtenay, author of Echoes of the Runes
‘An elegant debut: Butler writes skillfully about the complexities of love and its many guises.’
—Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark
‘The Marriage Contract is a beautifully atmospheric, searingly romantic novel that is ultimately a celebration of female empowerment and self-discovery. This book broke my heart over and over again, and I loved every word. Eliza, Francis and Edmund will haunt me for some time.’
—Elizabeth Lee, author of Cunning Women
‘An immersive and luminous debut; I was swept away by Butler’s exquisite storytelling and the complexities of Eliza Litton, at once defiant and vulnerable, sensitive and fierce.’
—Elizabeth O’Connor, author of Whale Fall
viiviii
ixFor Mum and Dad where would I be without youx
Contents
PART I
1577 A TOWN IN WORCESTERSHIRE 2
Chapter 1
He comes running across the fields in the early light. Eliza would know him anywhere, a smudge against the green through the diamond panes. She is up at once, legs carrying her towards the front door. Francis Marshall rests a hand against the doorframe, swallowing hard, words thick and unsteady: ‘It’s Arthur again.’
She turns, quick as a hare, feet slipping on stone. The rising sun casts strips of light amongst the shadows as she darts through the house, past the great hall and the parlour, through the kitchen and into the still room, with its smell of rosemary and lavender and thyme. She shouts for Ma, and together they rummage the shelves to the clatter of pottery, searching for the herbs, the tinctures, the something, the anything that could save a child’s life.
When they leave, Francis runs ahead. Shirt catching in the wind, hair so dark it is almost black whipping behind him, strong legs pitching him onwards, worn soles of his boots kicking up behind him to greet the sky. It is always him they send: he is the fastest of his siblings, he is the one the family worry about the least. Francis can get himself into trouble, but he will always find his way out again. That’s what they say. They follow him through the streets, where the houses become cramped and the lanes narrow. A man with a cartload of cloth swears as they dash past. The Marshall’s front door is ajar, and they rush up the stairs to a symphony of creaks and groans, to the room where the brothers sleep.
Arthur is on a pallet. A kind, sickly child, always struck with fevers. This one is ferocious; his thin limbs are slick with sweat, 4the sheets askew about his feet. Margaret kneels beside him and her hands, as sweaty as her son’s, reach for Eliza and Ma.
Ma feels the child’s forehead and lists ingredients in a low murmur as Eliza mixes them together. She senses Francis’s eyes on her hands as she works, as though she is a conjuror who can pull someone back from the brink. Her breath is shallow and quick, but her hands are steady. They spoon the medicine into the boy’s mouth and watch as he grimaces at the inevitable burn in his throat. In times before he had spat it back out, but not today: he swallows it all, eyes half-closed.
Downstairs in the dark kitchen, Eliza mixes more. ‘Every few hours he needs to take this,’ she says to Francis, her eyes on the phial.
He leans against the kitchen table, his face taut. ‘He was up all night.’
‘You should’ve come sooner.’
‘We thought it would pass.’ Fear stalks his voice. ‘Do you think he’ll …’
She knows the question. Children are pulled from their mother’s clutches every day; squalling and vibrant one morning, limp and gone the next.
‘Arthur is strong. A cat with nine lives.’ She tries to smile.
He folds his arms. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, forearms corded from daily work. His hands are fists, and she sees a finger worrying at a piece of skin by his thumb. Her gaze lingers upon him a moment too long, and he catches her. He watches her, watching him.
‘You did the right thing,’ she says.
Ma calls, and Eliza turns to the door. But then she hesitates. Reaches for him, rests her hand on his bare arm, feels the coolness of his skin. He puts his hand over hers. And then she is away, hurrying up the stairs, thoughts tugged back to saving a boy’s life.
5A week passes. Eliza watches Francis finish for the day with the rest of the farm labourers, the sun beginning to fall from the sky. They have been working her father’s land, bodies bent low amongst the wheat, the rustle and crack as they cut it from the earth, grime and dust on their skin. The harvest has begun.
She joins Francis in the front yard, just as the men are shouting their goodbyes, spilling off down the lanes towards squat thatched homes and suppers made by their women – wives, mothers, daughters. She checks the contents of her bag again, the clink of the medicines Ma had advised. Ma had advised other things too, as though Eliza had not heard them before, as though she were not a woman grown: don’t let your father see you, come straight home after.
She glances back at the house, but it is silent. They walk as though they are strangers – Francis a little in front as she keeps close to the thickets of brambles that soon will be heavy with blackberries – until the lane bends and they lose sight of the house. It is only then that she reaches up and wipes away the smear of clay on Francis’s neck with the pad of her thumb and loops her arm through his.
His home is busy tonight; his siblings are barefoot and everywhere, squeezed into the corners of the house: the two rooms upstairs, the two downstairs, the yard out the back where the pig lives and his father’s workshop stands. The space is full and round with giggles and squeals, rattling and banging, the sow’s soft snorts.
‘The mad house,’ Francis says, raising an eyebrow.
‘I love it,’ Eliza says. Francis’s younger sisters love her too. They gather about Eliza, admiring her thick hair, the colour of rich soil after rain, and her soft features, asking her questions: who made her kirtle, can they plait her hair, who will walk her home?
‘I’ll be walking her home.’ Francis manoeuvres himself around his youngest brother, who clutches a wooden doll in his hand. The girls look at each other and giggle. From his stool in the corner of the room Philip, one of the middle brothers, a few years younger than Francis, raises an almost imperceptible eyebrow and continues to adjust the strings of his lute. 6
Up the stairs and Arthur sits in his bed, propped up by two pillows, his eyes shiny and alert. The fever stutters on but his small fingers cling to life’s rough edges. Eliza gently rubs hartshorn and bay salt onto his wrists, suppressing a laugh as he wrinkles his nose at the stink of piss and sweat. ‘Sorry,’ she says. She pulls out a small mincemeat pie wrapped in linen, watching as Arthur’s eyes widen. She places the pie in his palm.
‘All for me?’ he says, the smell forgotten.
She does laugh then. ‘All for you.’
She gives Margaret more medicine for Arthur, and the woman reaches for her purse, finding a few scant coins. Eliza shakes her head and closes her hand over the woman’s outstretched palm.
‘You’re an angel,’ Margaret smiles.
When they are at the fringes of the town, where the houses peter out and the lane snakes towards the fields, Francis throws an arm about her shoulder. She fits easily, the space familiar, body bumping gently against his torso, her head leant back upon his shoulder. They walk slowly, holding onto the moment like a butterfly caught in a jar.
‘Saviour,’ he says.
‘Don’t mock.’
‘I’d never.’
‘Be quiet,’ Eliza laughs, but she feels a pleasure, a relief. No lost children under her watch. He squeezes her shoulders all the same.
‘I’m sorry about my sisters.’
She flicks her eyes to the lilac sky. ‘They’re lovely. And they make me feel very important.’
‘Vanity isn’t attractive.’
‘Neither are your boorish ways.’
They grin. If they were younger he might’ve prodded her in the ribs and burst into a run, and she would’ve chased him, wheat whipping at their waists, stitches crawling at their sides. But they are older now. He retaliates with a lazy flick of his finger. She flicks 7him back as her family home spills into view. A sprawl of a building, intricately half-timbered.
She doesn’t see him at first. Doesn’t think to check, when the air is drunk with summer and life seems miraculous, when Francis’s arm still holds her, warming her against the chill of dusk.
They separate at the gatehouse beneath the wooden eaves where the sparrows make their nests. ‘Until tomorrow.’ He winks, but exhaustion pulls beneath his eyes. The summer is relentless. Winter too.
She doesn’t like it when he leaves, although she doesn’t say it. Instead she laughs and says, ‘Be gone,’ and throws her hand out to him as though he may kiss it. But she snatches it away, her attention caught by the shifting of shadows at a window in the house. Francis follows her gaze and steps back, but it is too late.
‘Go,’ she mutters.
Inside, the scent of lavender and wheat and smoke and dry earth hangs in the air. The kind of smell that lulls you into a false sense of safety. The hall leads to closed doors and the stairs are silent and expectant, waiting for her to take them two at a time and shut herself in her bedchamber. She removes her cloak as quietly as possible, doesn’t fumble as she hangs her bag on a crude nail that juts from the wall. Yet still there is a clip of boots on stone. Footsteps, coming for her.
Her father finds her in an instant. Like a spark on gunpowder, an explosion ignites.
‘What were you doing?’
He closes in behind her as she faces the wall. There is a deep crack in the daub, the bones of the house peeping through. Fear rises within her, as familiar as the cycle of the seasons on her father’s land. The door to the kitchen squeals open and Ma rushes into the hall, Thomas’s voice drawing her in like a siren.
‘She was taking some remedies to Arthur Marshall.’ Ma speaks with an authority that has never been hers. One that Thomas can crush as easily as squeezing a beetle between two fingers. 8
‘Is that so, Ruth.’ He says his wife’s name like an insult.
‘She is learning skills that will make her, make her most useful as a wife.’
‘Such as flirting with that labourer on my own land?’
‘I wasn’t –’ Eliza says.
‘Don’t lie—’
‘We’re friends—’
His hand closes around the back of Eliza’s neck and her words stop. His fingers are hot and his nails indent tiny archways across her skin. Ma’s breath catches in the quiet. He pushes her forwards, forcing her neck down and she stumbles, making no sound, her hand reaching up to steady herself, fingertips catching the crack in the wall.
Chapter 2
The candle burns low, the fat rolling down to pool upon the bedside table. Eliza pushes harder upon the paper and the chalk in her hand snaps. She curses under her breath. She chooses the larger half and continues, hunching lower. The lines come with ease, the curve of an eye, the dive of a neck, people real and imagined in her mind’s eye. She is a magician, making the transient permanent. It calms her. The control, the focus. A distance grows between her and the man who sits downstairs, his palms still warm from their weight on her neck.
It was her brother who first pilfered a stick of chalk from school and gleefully gave it to her. Henry who taught her how to cut a goose feather, how to make quill and ink work to her will. And so she started drawing in secret, her eyes growing keener for colours and art, her ears for talk of paintings and artists. It surprised her that what she saw in her head could be translated so effortlessly onto her page.
She remembers being a small child, staring into a mesmerising bonfire for so long that she could still see it, silhouetted, when she closed her eyes. That bonfire became the stuff of community legend, the tale brought out to entertain those cradling a cup at the inn, a story intended to be handed down the generations. Once, they said, churches had been filled with biblical paintings, naves crammed with crucifixes and books and censers. But all of it had been reduced to kindling for the bonfire, rendered into ash. The paintings had contorted, bubbled and shrivelled like something possessed in the heat. Eliza recalls the way her clothes had smelt afterwards, of scorching nights, of pig roasting on a spit, of Midsummer, and how Mama had hung them outside to air. 10
That bonfire, they said, along with countless others across the country, was a farewell to the old religion. Eliza imagined night fires being lit to mirror the starry constellations above, both land and sky turned to blue and gold. And as the fire cackled outside, inside the church’s murals were daubed over with the plain chalk and lime of Protestantism – the religion of Eliza’s family, reinstated by the new queen with whom Eliza shares a name.
When they tell this story at the inn, the Protestants can’t help but smile, sigh, sink back into their chairs and shout for another cup of beer. Under the old, mad, bloody queen they’d known of hundreds of their number bound to stakes and martyred, charred to death, on bonfires more sinister, more deadly than the ones that licked up the relics of the Catholic church. No longer.
Eliza remembers a few years after the bonfire, sitting in church, unhearing of the pastor’s ministrations, rubbing her finger on the wall, white chalk softly coming away on the pad of her fingertip, and wondering if beneath lay a frisson of colour, biblical scenes, the Garden of Eden. She’d imagined the artists, moving from church to church, through parishes and hamlets and towns, brushes in hands, painting the walls, standing back to look at their days’ work, nodding, pleased with themselves.
The stories, the lost paintings, that initial stub of chalk between her thumb and forefinger birthed a dream within her, planted the first seeds of being an artist. They sprouted roots in her mind and began to grow.
‘You’ve a talent,’ Ma says, walking into Eliza’s bedchamber. She is always so light on her feet, slipping in and out of rooms like a wraith. She places a cool press on Eliza’s neck, easing the bloom of purple finger marks which are as bright and full as plums.
‘There’s nothing more you could have done,’ Eliza says, answering Ma’s apologetic eyes. She hides the drawing beneath her pillow and gently kisses the scar that reaches across her mother’s cheekbone. A tight, puckered, warning line. ‘You’ve done enough Mama.’
The older woman’s mouth moves as though to say something, 11but the sound of footsteps rises from below, so she merely shakes her head. Silent as a stone, thrown to the will of a raging river.
The shadow of the house falls over her. The thatched roof sags, the wood pigeons coo restlessly in the eaves. She glances out across her father’s land. It’s a place where Thomas has banished the wild, replacing it with a steady expanse of yellow wheat. But nature creeps and claws its way through the cracks, trying to reclaim what has been stolen from it. She sees it in the foxes that dart through his fields, the forget-me-nots that hem the crops in spring, the starlings that settle like dust on the trees, only to take flight in one joint motion at the sound of a harsh voice – Thomas shouting at a farm labourer.
Eliza prunes the herb garden in quiet anger; the bruises at the base of her skull pulse to the beat of a warning drum. She squats low, stems straining and breaking beneath her fingers, sap oozing green. Her knife moves dangerously, expertly, deadheads coming away. It takes her a moment to register that someone is standing above her, boots amongst the thyme and rosemary.
Francis rocks back and forth on his heels like a boy, a sickle in his hand, the blade hanging by his side like a crescent moon fallen from the sky. He knows immediately. ‘What happened?’
‘Same as usual.’ She lifts her hair from the back of her neck. His eyes are narrow when she turns to look at him.
‘Why?’
‘He saw us together,’ she says, hesitating. It will change them. But she says it because she must, because she has delayed long enough. Because spending time together is a risk, now that her father has set his motive. Because anything she does to obstruct him will come at a cost; Thomas works only in transactions. Refute his will and get a scar on your face like Mama’s. Spend time with Francis and receive a cluster of bruises. 12
What they cannot know, not now, is that the greatest cost will fall to Francis to pay.
‘He’s arranging my betrothal.’
It was midsummer when Thomas had told her, and the supper in her belly had threatened to heave back out of her. She recalls how his eyes had fixed on her as though daring her to react. How he had said he would make arrangements. She had known about his little network of men, who acquaint themselves with the best people, the best places to trade, who keep their ears to the ground for gossip and news from other towns. Who, even now, as she stands with dirt beneath her fingernails and frustration in her throat, could be casting their nets wide in search of the best catch.
She steadily meets Francis’s eyes, and she sees a tightening at his jaw and temple. Clenching.
She could tell him that she doesn’t want this, that she’s afraid, that she knows, unquestioningly, who she would choose if she were given the choice. All of it would be true. Yet her words dry in her throat like the great drought of years before. Francis’s mouth parts slightly as though urging her to speak, and in the midst of this, as something is passing silently between them, Ma calls for Eliza, her voice carrying from the washhouse.
Eliza wipes her hands on her apron, the earth smearing. She reaches for him, brushing her hand on his, a whisper of skin on skin. His fingers move to catch the tips of hers.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says as she walks away.
They say dogs go wild in the heat. So do men.
There are disturbances in the house, when the hot and sweated August days are filled with men in the fields, working all the hours God sends to bring the harvest home. Thomas and Henry argue, rage flickering up to crackle and roar. Sometimes she only hears it, through the walls or the floor. Sometimes she finds her mother 13lying in bed – eyes squeezed shut, pillow damp – and she will climb in next to her.
One evening, when the midges huff upon the breeze, she sees them in the parlour through the crack of the door. She lingers, catching their fast, jagged words.
‘It’s your duty.’ Thomas has his back to her, but his words are as crisp as if he was saying them into the shell of her ear.
‘The world is changing –’ Henry starts.
‘You’ll stay here and you’ll inherit.’
‘I don’t want to work these fields for the rest of my life.’
‘You’re a spoilt fool who doesn’t deserve anything.’ Thomas’s voice swells, surging into the hall where the stairs sigh and Eliza shifts in the shadows. ‘Think of what men would give to be in your position.’
‘I would give it to them gladly.’
Faster than the thrum of an archer’s bow, Thomas reaches to cuff Henry, but Henry is faster. He holds his father’s forearm in his grip. They are surprisingly well matched: Thomas is larger, filling the space, strong beneath a layer of flesh, but Henry, although of slighter build, is younger, smarter, nimbler. He can duck a belt as it comes walloping towards him, has been able to do so since childhood. It was Henry who taught Eliza how.
Thomas prises his son’s hand from his arm and pushes him and Henry stumbles, hits his chin upon the mantel. Blood comes instantly, streaming through his neat beard.
Thomas rubs his forearm. ‘Get out.’
Eliza slips unseen through the murk of the hall into the kitchen. She knows of wives in the town who are beaten, has even heard the whispered tales of women, murdered by their husbands, who come back for a haunting; has seen young boys with bruises on the backs of their legs that can only mean one thing. She knows her father is wedded to violence. She grew up thinking all men were.
‘You heard us?’ Henry asks, the two of them sitting in his bedchamber. Eliza hands him a salve – of yarrow or marigold or comfrey, 14she isn’t sure, it is one of Ma’s concoctions – to heal the cuts that regularly nick and cross their bodies.
‘I saw.’
Henry shakes his head, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
She considers her brother, his shoulders hunched slightly. His room is full of papers and a few books, ends of quills litter his desk. An outward display of his sharp mind, head full of calculations, logic, ideas. A memory that forgets nothing. He is not meant for the monotony of the land; the life Thomas is moulding him to.
‘Will you stay?’
‘If I’d a choice, I’d already be on my way to London,’ he says, rubbing the salve onto his chin. He has told her of the city before, he had read about it at school: thousands upon thousands of people, young men arriving to work and make their fortune; opportunity and goods sailing in from Europe upon the glittering Thames. She knows too, of another reason for his desire for the capital. A longing he cannot quench here.
She had seen it, a few years before. The two of them, her brother and his lover. In a quiet lane, hands on each other’s faces, nose touching nose, eyes closed. As though breathing in the scent and feel of each other, imprinting it to memory.
She had wanted to confront Henry as soon as he returned home some hours after, demand he tell her of his private life whilst disguising her hurt that he had kept it from her. Yet as soon as she saw his wretched expression in the gloomy light of the kitchen, her anger had dissipated and she only asked, Brother, what is it? What has happened?
What he had told her then has lodged in her mind, like a precious stone set into metal, never to come out.
Now she squeezes his arm. ‘You always have a choice.’
‘Do you?’
Eliza snorts. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Father will guide me and then it’ll fall to my husband. And if they both die, which I’m hopeful of,’ she smiles wickedly, ‘then it’ll fall to you.’ 15
Her lightness doesn’t catch on. Henry is serious when he says, ‘I’ll never control you.’
She nods, trusts he will stay true to his word.
The linen sheet falls slowly, caught on a draught. She pulls it tightly over her parent’s mattress, feathers escaping to lie upon the floor as though just plucked from a goose’s breast. The dirty sheets are heaped in a pile; later she will scrub them until her hands are sore and cracked. She seldom comes in here, keen to avoid her father’s rooms as much as possible. But today there is a freeness to the household, even amongst the labourers, because the master is away. Eliza had watched Thomas leave, wearing his best cloak, which he kept smoothing against his chest. He had taken the horse, brushed it so tenderly and carefully that its coat shone like buffed pewter.
But still it is bold, dangerous even, when Francis walks into the chamber, finding Eliza adjusting the coverlet, Ma’s delicate embroidery beneath her fingers. A labourer in his master’s bedchamber, alone with the master’s daughter. It’s a scandal at the best of times; a vicious kicking, a cracking of ribs at the worst.
She starts, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Your father’s away.’
His eyes are on the sheets, trailing her hand, which still rests upon them, and for a heart-stopping moment she wonders what he is asking. She presses her tongue against the back of her teeth.
He glances up. ‘Walk with me later?’
‘The men could’ve seen you.’ The other farm labourers, the ones Thomas pays to keep an eye when he’s absent. It means he knows things even when he shouldn’t, even when you think you won’t get caught.
‘Nobody did, trust me.’ He moves his weight from foot to foot, ‘So?’ 16
‘Is that all you wanted to ask?’
‘Is that a yes?’
They took this path as children, edged with forest on one side and a stream on the other. The sun is unseasonably hot, the September air damp, sweat collecting in the creases of elbows and knees. Eliza paddles in the stream, hose pulled off, skirts hitched up in her hands. Francis follows her, his shadow catching against her body. Shallow water laps their ankles, smooth stones rock beneath toes; their shoes lie forgotten on the bank. He splashes her, water landing in her hair, sprinkling her face and she retaliates, drenching his breeches. The hand he reaches out in a poor attempt to stop her is wet on her waist, and she imagines the water, his touch, seeping through her kirtle, her petticoat, her smock, down to her skin.
They are close to a bend in the stream, where the incessant flow of water has worked away the earth, carved out its place in the land. A sweep of the bank overhangs, held aloft by an ancient knot of root, the tree above grasping for the sky. There the stream deepens, the shingled bed falling away, and the water that swills and collects is deep enough to reach the thigh of a man.
He’s looking at the bend, his hand still on her waist, when he says, ‘I think I could swim in that.’
‘I think it’s unlikely you’ll drown in its depths.’
He rolls his eyes, grin of mischief painting across his lips. His eyes hold hers for a moment, as if daring her to stop him, and then he is wading towards the bank, his back to her as he unfastens his breeches. She feels a thrill, her body stilled in the shallows of the stream. She glances about them – a survival instinct, like a babe crying for its mama’s milk – to check they are truly alone.
‘If someone comes –’ she starts.
‘They won’t,’ he says, gently. As if in agreement, the forest around them sighs, softly. Green light above them, gold shimmering on the water around her calves. ‘No one will find us here.’
He bends to ease his breeches past his knees, shins, ankles and 17steps out of them. His shirt hangs low, so she sees only his legs, the pale strip of skin at the back of his thighs, as he casts his breeches onto the bank.
She looks down at the water, the temperature on her face rising. Nervousness and anticipation and a heightened awareness of her own, clothed body gather within her.
He turns, still smiling, but hesitant. As though he is awaiting her appraisal, standing only in his linen shirt, which he uses to work the fields, to hammer metal in his father’s forge, which has been passed from Marshall brother to brother. Only that shirt shields his skin from the world. He looks at her as if to say, this is me, as you find me. She feels it undeniably; a desire to run her hands along his thighs, stand behind him and rest her cheek between his shoulder blades, slide the back of her hands into his palms.
Perhaps it is because they have, for a moment, stopped smiling and have turned completely serious that he abruptly wades into the deeper part of the stream, towards the sweep of bank where the stream swells, and calls over his shoulder to her, ‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Are you coming?’
‘You’ll be the death of me, Marshall,’ she shouts, moving to the silty edge of the stream, and without pausing to doubt or reconsider, unfastens her kirtle. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she orders, and he snorts with laughter.
‘I’m definitely not looking.’
She undresses until she is in only her smock, feeling the breeze and sun on her arms.
Francis is true to his word, some paces ahead, staring at the contorted roots which overhang the twist in the stream. ‘Lead the way then,’ she laughs, and he bobs his head in assent, mock servant to the yeoman’s daughter.
The ground slopes away and stones roll beneath her, scraping at the soles of her feet. She gasps and reaches ahead for Francis, grasping his wrist. ‘Steady now,’ he says. ‘We’ll take it slowly.’ 18
She isn’t sure when the hand holding his wrist slips into his palm, but she finds their damp fingers interlocked, the pulses at their thumbs overlapping, colliding. They navigate into the deepest part of the water, which laps near her hips. When he looks back at her, his eyes are closed. ‘I’m still not looking.’
‘Wait a moment,’ she says and bends her knees, plunging herself into the water. The cold steals up and around her, solid and heavy where only the air had been. A transparent cloak bobbing at her shoulders. ‘You can look now.’
Their fingers are still threaded together when he opens his eyes. Swift flick of his eyelids. Sunlight on his face. What does he see? She with pearlescent skin, which oscillates around her in the stream’s gentle current. The end of her hair darkening in the water. Sea creature, water baby. He bends to her level, shoulders rising slightly as the cool water envelopes him too. His skin beneath the surface tinges green.
Two underwater beings, staring at each other.
He moves his arm and slowly, so slowly, he places his hand on her neck, his thumb resting along the line of her jaw. There is an eruption in her chest, like buds burgeoning in spring. A squeezing of euphoria. She places her hand over his, observing the easy line of his eyebrows which taper away at the far edge, the deeper brown that rims his irises. He recognises her in a way that nobody else does.
They are inches apart. A moment away.
‘I thought you wanted to swim?’ she murmurs.
He raises his eyebrows: we can play this game, if you want. He moves his hand, and she wants to seize it, keep it there, but he is already leaning into the water, allowing the stream to hold him. He kicks his legs, beats his arms, splashes pockmarking the surface. He thrashes, working to keep himself afloat, his head held aloft, droplets clinging to his stubbled chin.
She tries not to notice how she can see his back through his shirt, could draw a line with her fingertip along the muscled contours that comprise his shoulders. 19
‘You reckon Thomas is meeting someone about your betrothal?’
He is good at pretending to be casual – sitting languidly beside her on the bank, the stream plashing at their feet as they dry themselves in the evening sun – but his question is too direct. Besides, she’d seen the look on his face when she first told him.
‘I suppose.’ She crosses her arms over her chest to hide where her smock has turned transparent, places her kirtle across her upper thighs.
‘Any idea who?’
‘No.’ She has heard names but none she recognises. ‘I think he prefers it that way, keeping me in the dark.’
‘Were your parents the same? Was it arranged?’
She makes a derisive noise in the back of her throat. ‘Arranged like counters on a board.’ She thinks of her mother, crying into the silence of her bedchamber as her husband and son fight in the room below. What choice was her poor mama given?
‘What about yours?’
‘Met at a fair. They went to a few dances together before Pa went to Ma’s father and asked for her hand.’ Eliza can see it: a young man not dissimilar from the one in front of her, shifting from foot to foot, fiddling with his cuffs, wearing his brother’s best shirt, waiting for the answer on whether he could marry his girl, whose smiles had shot straight to the heart of him. Francis smiles, ‘They make it sound so easy.’
‘And that’s what you’ll have?’
‘What?’
‘You know.’ She tries not to sound childish. ‘A love marriage.’
He observes a shoal of fish, each the size of a fingernail, swimming just below the stream’s surface. Any higher and they could suffocate themselves. She watches him, noticing summer’s story writ across his body, skin bronzing beneath the relentless sun.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Anyone caught your eye?’ She’s goading now; she’s going right to the place where it hurts her. It is foolish and pointless, but the words are out before she can stop them. 20
He looks up from the stream and the fish scarper in the jolt of his shadow. ‘Stop it, Eli.’
She bites the inside of her lip and rests her head on his shoulder.
‘Your grandfather worked hard, building this house, establishing the Litton name,’ Thomas says.
Her father returned a few days ago, and since then he has been as bullying and provoking as ever. Yet amid this, she has caught him whistling about the house, watched him laugh with one of the labourers. Even overheard him say to Ma, ‘You should rest more, you’re looking worn out. Perhaps we could hire more men to help.’ Something has pleased him and it makes her uneasy.
It is evening, and the four of them sit about the table in the great hall. Thomas is at the end of the table, and Eliza sits furthest from him, facing an empty space. The configuration is unbalanced, but her father would never sit anywhere but at the head.
‘I will see my father’s work continued,’ her father says. ‘A great man.’
Ma says Thomas took after his father. Says the latter was a brute, a ruffian, had outlived two wives and been an impressive wrestler, taking to the ring at fairs and celebrations, knocking out his opponent’s teeth with his bare knuckles. Eliza rubs the back of her hand at the thought of him. He set the standard, the reputation for the next generation of Litton men; his influence has clung to Thomas like pollen, caused a stain that cannot be scrubbed out. She never met her grandfather; he was six feet deep by the time she was born, for which she is glad.
‘We all have a duty.’ Thomas emphasises the word all, so it is full and resonant in his mouth. He speaks as though he has a dukedom or a knighthood, a man with gold enough to crush giants. He puffs his chest, reaching for the pig whose carcass lies in the centre of the table, and spears a slice with his knife. ‘Isn’t that right, Henry?’ 21
Eliza expects rebuttal from her brother, but the gash on his chin is still healing.
‘As for you,’ Thomas juts his jaw towards her, ‘you’ll strengthen our position with a match to a gentleman.’ He seems almost feverish, like a church minister delivering God’s message. A good marriage for Eliza would place Thomas on the map, would garner him recognition from other gentlemen and might even set him on course for claiming such a title for himself. He reeks of ambition, and she despises him even more.
‘And what gentleman will take the daughter of a yeoman?’ The insult spills from Eliza’s mouth. Sometimes she wonders if she says things just to see what is the worst that could happen.
They, yeoman, country people, in their smaller houses, without silver or silk, for centuries working their land, their lives and livelihoods dictated by the seasons, the rains and frosts and searing sun, paying farm labourers to plough and sow and reap alongside them. Lower than the gentry, who can afford to gad about on horseback, letting their lands, never laying a ringed finger on their fields, never knowing the pain in their joints after a hard day spent tilling the earth. What gentleman would take a lower born wife?
But she knows the answer: she has watched her father rent and buy more land, watched him hire more men, watched the increased yields wheel their way to markets. He’s one of the richest men in town, and now he wants more. He has grown richer, even, than some of the genteel men he seeks to farm her off to. His money can buy her a place at a gentleman’s table. She pinches the skin at her wrist.
‘A gentleman who recognises an offer he can’t refuse. A good dowry and a woman who is obedient.’ Softly now, ‘A woman who knows her place.’
A breath.
‘Do you know your place, Eliza?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good.’ He picks up his knife and, his eyes never leaving hers, 22drops it purposefully on the floor. The metal bounces upon the stone, ringing before falling silent. ‘Pick it up, woman.’
For a moment, nobody moves. The air is charged, like the gap after lightning before thunder, when you know the growl is coming but you’re not sure when, you’re not sure how close the storm lies. It is Ma’s whispering, please Thomas, please, that makes Eliza stand. If Ma begs too much, she will also be punished.
She looks down at the blade, imagines pressing it under her father’s chin, wonders what his reaction would be. The line of blood that would trickle down. She closes her eyes: his violence is contagious. She hesitates then bends low, her fingers finding the handle, the smooth wood fitting easily in her palm. She places it on the table beside him, a clatter.
‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘Now sit down.’
The thunder does not come. Not now. Not this day.
She perches on an upturned bucket and thanks God for the rat. The rat who, a few days prior, had snuck into her father’s barn by gnawing its way through a wooden panel, to discover a towering store of grain. Its currant-black eyes must’ve gleamed with avarice. Anything it didn’t devour, it could shit and piss upon, to ensure that no other creature – human nor beast – would be able to eat it or make use of it. This is the sort of nightmare that will wake Thomas in the night, will make him particularly virulent in the morning.
It is not this that pleases Eliza; she has seen grains spoiled and famine claw communities, the poor rendered starving. No, what pleases her is that her father, on discovering the damage, had set Francis to the urgent task of fixing it.
And now she is with Francis, tucked inside the barn, and no one knows she is here – those inside the house think she is in the washhouse, those outside think she is sewing in the kitchen. Only the cat knows they are together, as he has been granted access to 23root out any vermin still skulking the store. Eliza checks now; in the band of sunlight cast through the outhouse’s open door, her feline friend lolls indolently on the ground, belly rising and falling. As yet, no rats have been caught.
Francis saws at a log of wood, shaping it into a panel, his crowdark hair falling over his eyes, which he impatiently brushes away. His body, hunched forward, is partly in profile as she sits in a corner. She imagines drawing him, capturing the shadows on his face, the dark barn encroaching around him. The smock she is supposed to be adjusting lies untouched, a linen ghost on the ground.
‘…have heard some of the lads say they won’t be working here next year,’ he continues between breaths over the steady judder of the blade, back and forth, back and forth, carving the wood apart.
‘Where’ll they go?’
‘Rumour is there’s another yeoman who’s been buying up land on the other side of town.’
‘Father won’t like that.’
‘I don’t doubt.’
‘What’ll you do?’
He lifts his shirt and wipes his forehead with it, momentarily displaying his stomach, a trickle of hair from his belly button.
‘I’ll go where the money is best and where the master is good. And wherever you are, of course.’
‘I would expect nothing less.’
He grins and she sticks out her tongue.
‘Don’t let your ma catch you doing that. It doesn’t befit a gentlewoman.’
‘Then thank goodness I’m not one of those.’
Neither of them mention her father’s plans for her, although it dances about them in the barn, a shadow that light cannot diminish. With a final push of his saw, a strip of wood cleaves free. He bends to the gnawed gap in the barn wall, covering it with the newly made panel. ‘Give me a hand?’
‘Am I just a labourer to you?’ 24
‘Obviously. Here, hold the panel still.’
She crouches, adjusting the panel so it is flush to the wall. Francis casts about for his hammer. For a moment it seems as though he will rest his hand on the side of her neck and she will lean into his palm. She knows he wants to. Can feel the flow of his thoughts, as though they are tributaries leading into the same river.
Their arms brush as he leans towards his handiwork, hammer poised above a grey-dull nail. She tries not to move, not to breathe. The heat of his body radiates to hers. He strikes the nail once, twice. The space between them is a force, pulling her in. She gives into it, heart’s rhythm increasing, resting her cheek against his shoulder. The hammer stills, as though he has forgotten how to strike the nail, and then he remembers, a third strike.
‘A few more to go,’ he says, voice as soft as a first kiss. But he doesn’t reach for another nail; instead, he cups her cheek. Warm against her face. She holds his gaze as she tilts her head, touching her lips to his palm. Smells metal on his hand, sees how his dark eyes darken. It thrills and frightens her, this longing. Everything unspoken between them conveyed via action, by touch, hand, mouth.
There are voices outside and instinctively they lurch away. He points silently to the corner of the barn, where the walls are patterned with tools, and she scrambles to it, pressing her back to the rough wood, where splinters stick out, trying to push through her clothes and catch on her skin.
A man stands in the doorway, identity unmistakable. Her thrill tips along its delicate balance to absolute fear. Fear in her throat, spreading through her body like poison. Why does she do this? Why couldn’t she have left Francis to his work and tended to her own?
If Thomas finds her here, the bruises he gifted the back of her neck will be insignificant to those he would bestow her now.
‘Have you finished?’ Thomas asks.
Francis moves deftly to the door to speak to him, innocently standing to one side, blocking where a view of her might be visible if you were to cock your head to the left and seek out the shadowy 25corner. Still, she spies Thomas’s boots, a portion of his face, one cruel eye.
‘Almost, sir.’
‘What is taking so long?’
Her father surveys the wall of the barn and Eliza realises, sickeningly, that the linen smock meant for sewing still lies on the floor, betraying her.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Thomas steps forward and Francis takes a step back, admitting him, but still masking her, as though they are in a dance, and they are, for this is cat and mouse, cat and rat, and Eliza pinches the skin at her wrist so hard it pricks with pain and she closes her eyes and begins to count the moments, before her father will see the linen, and his hands will find her. Onetwothreefour–
‘Hurry up about it, and then after you can chop some more wood and pile it for storing, then set the cat in the other barn for rats,’ he pauses and she opens her eyes, panicked, the barn and all its contents blooming back into focus, including the toe of Thomas’s boot which hooks roughly beneath the cat and nudges it upright. The cat startles, scampering backwards into the shadows, ‘Then you can join the other men.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Five six seven.
Thomas looks at the ceiling of the barn. ‘The roof in here will need fixing too, at some point.’
His visible eye falls to the ground to something crumpled, luminous, out of place.
Eightnineten.Thisisit,thisisit, skin squeezed so tight at her wrist she is sure there will be blood on her fingertips, and he starts towards the smock, and Francis’s back is frozen, and she wishes she were in her bedchamber, the door locked, never to come out again, never to face this fear, and the cat hisses and yowls and batters against the wooden wall, causing the whole barn to shake. Her father’s step falters. The cat shoots back and forth, swipes a paw, darts in and 26out of view amongst the shadows, until it stalks into the sunlight, a rat squirming between its jowls.
Thomas says something like, at least the bugger is good for something, but she isn’t listening, is too busy thanking God for the rat. Her father makes a gruff word to Francis about working faster, then leaves.
They wait until the sound of his tread is overcome by the breeze swaying the fields and the birds chorusing, and she snatches up her sewing and only then do they look at each other. Francis’s hands are at his forehead, pushing his hair upwards. Eliza starts to laugh, exhaling the tension from her lungs with such urgency that it catches; he leans against the side of the barn and laughs too.
‘Shit, piss and bull’s balls,’ he says.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she laughs. And then, ‘By God I hate this.’
He stops laughing as abruptly as he started. ‘And me.’
Chapter 3
The day before Michaelmas is market day. Two women walk together arm in arm, ready to fill their baskets. Even from afar you’d presume they are related, with their identically pointed chins, their heart shaped faces. And as you draw closer, you’d notice that their hands make the same gestures, and if you heard them speak, you’d hear the same intonation, the same accent; these two who have lived so closely that they’ve each shaped the other.
The older woman has known greater hardship. Her gentle face is tired, hunted, worn about the mouth. A thin scar scores the side of her face, from cheekbone to chin. Her hands, which know how to soothe a sick boy to sleep, which have clasped other women in the hardest of times, are patched red and dry and tiny cuts have opened across her knuckles, unable to heal. Her eyes are the same as her daughter’s – brown like the silt and sand of the earth – except hers are dulled, as though someone plucked out the twinkle and tossed it away to the stars instead.
She birthed three children, buried one in the squelching mud, watched her lucky two grow to adulthood. Someday they will leave her – even her son, she knows with an instinct that is marrow-deep, must leave eventually – and the knowledge is a steady thrum in her head.
Yet she wants them to leave; she wants them to escape to something better. She doesn’t mind that her husband is hell-bent on finding a gentleman for their daughter. She clings to the possibility that her daughter will be safer if she is married. That she could be passed into another man’s care; protected by a gentleman, a gentle man. And so the older woman works in the margins, talking with 28other women, discovering the men of marriageable age, ready for the plucking. Don’t you see, this is her only way of protecting her daughter, even if she is sent leagues from here?
She’d heard, in this way, of a young man, born from an established line of gentlemen. Protestant, quiet and polite, they say; the private sort. It was she who secretly slipped a coin to one of her husband’s cronies, asking him to recommend this young man – although her husband must never know it. Pray God he never does.
Her plan had worked. Her husband visited the young man’s father, taking the horse, wearing his best cloak. He made a day of it, journeying to Warwickshire, leaving her and the house and the men working his fields in peace, and returning with uncharacteristic joviality. Evidently, he liked what he saw, for he invited the young man and his father to join them for the feast at Michaelmas.
And Michaelmas has come in a blink; the young man will visit tomorrow night.
Her daughter doesn’t know yet. Tomorrow night may cast the die for her future. Yes, it will break her daughter’s heart; her heart beats, in the way that only young hearts do, for that lad – the farm labourer, the blacksmith’s son, the hard-worker, foot-jigger, sweet-smiler. But he won’t do. Broken hearts can heal. Split lips, cracked ribs can too. But banged heads? Near strangulations? She’s sick of chancing it.
They say you’ll do anything for your babies. And so she would – she’d lie to them, betray them, break their hearts into little bloody pieces if it meant protection. If it meant survival. And if you look about you, at the mess of women at the market, all tell of similar stories. Everyone here is doing the best they can to survive.
And then your eye would fall to her daughter. She has the brightness to her that the fates have not yet extinguished. Of course, she has known pain, she has had many bruisings, but she has never truly known loss. Not quite yet. She contains conflicts and battles within her that she hasn’t yet realised. Not quite yet.
But you would lose sight of them in the chaos of market day: 29there are babes in arms, snot-nosed children, girls whispering and snickering to each other, boys on the cusp of manhood; there are flashes of daggers on hips, youthful anger threatening to transform into drunken brawls at the inn as dusk descends. Men and boys have died at that inn; always have and, the innkeeper reckons, always will. Traders, who have flooded in from neighbouring towns, bellow their wares, whilst townsfolk weave from stall to stall discussing the harvest’s bounty or, rather, gossiping about who was absent from church the previous Sunday, avoiding the chickens pecking about the muddied track. If you follow that track for many days, it will lead south to the capital. And beyond that it will lead you to the sea.
Ma’s arm is clasped against Eliza’s as they scuffle their way through the market to buy food for tomorrow’s feast.
There is a poultry seller with at least two dozen geese waddling around him, honking furiously, yanking on the rope looped about their delicate necks. Ma chooses two geese with feathers white as summer clouds, and shouts above the clamouring wildfowl to haggle the price. They stop at the inn and buy a barrel of sack, and it’s Eliza’s turn to hassle the cost, winking at the innkeeper when he finally relents. She half carries, half rolls the barrel home, as Ma leads the geese, which waddle merrily beside them, rope still tied around their soon-to-be-broken necks.
When Michaelmas dawns, the great hall is scrubbed, the table laid with the best plates for a score of guests. Wreaths of wheat and autumn’s first leaves hang precariously above the hearth, threatening to set the whole house – with its thatch, and timber struts, and mice skittering beneath the floorboards – alight. The geese roast in curls of smoke, the smell of fat oozing through the rooms.
Ma has been anxious all day, fussing over small details, organising the cook and the local girls who have come to help. As the sun wanes, she looks out across the fields, fiddling with a loose thread 30at her sleeve. Thomas is shouting instructions at the near-spent men. Henry is out there too, helping with the final push. ‘I hope the goose is good,’ Ma murmurs.
The farm labourers bring with them the smell of the fields, grain and chaff caught in their clothes, as they crowd the long table in the great hall. Exhaustion and relief make them raucous. Henry is in the thick of it with Francis and the rest, crude jokes spilling from mouth to mouth, excessive amounts of beer pouring into cups. Nothing binds men more than a long hard summer working the land together.
It’s a celebration, but Eliza is on edge, as though the bench beneath her might collapse at any moment. Ma had insisted that Eliza wear her best gown and forced her to tease a comb through her tangled hair; teeth caught on the knots, strands snapped, and Eliza’s eyes pricked from the sting. Ma dabbed excessive amounts of rose water on Eliza’s pulse points with fingers that shook slightly, before handing her kohl for her eyes and red ochre for her cheeks.
‘Who am I trying to impress?’ she asked, but Ma only tutted and made no answer.
Eliza had known then. Had felt a wash of helplessness, as though her father still had his hands clenching the back of her neck. When Ma had left, Eliza scrubbed the kohl and ochre from her face, smearing black and red down her cheeks, as though black bile and blood were leaking from her pores. Then she wiped it all away.
