Cranky Ladies of History Read online

  Lady Godiva stood and raised her voice, speaking not just to the crowd, but to the world beyond and the ancient magic that she knew awaited her call.

  “I summon the Norman called Ralph, steward to my husband. Ralph, come to the stone to answer for your misdeeds!”

  There was silence then, unbroken by any sound. In that stillness, women flinched at the sudden sound of heavy footsteps, boots upon the cobbles. Ralph emerged from the shadows between two houses, and advanced towards the Bargain Stone. But this was not Ralph as he was usually seen, simply a cold and remote man. The shadows companioned him now, and the sunshine itself flinched away. Even the bold laundresses stepped back, and Mother Halfgrim herself took only one of the three steps she intended to interpose herself between him and the countess.

  “I come,” said Ralph. His voice was angry, tinged with fire, no longer the passionless tone of a bailiff on his master’s business. “Not because of your petty magic, your foolish ritual. It is time all was made clear to you, Lady, and to all you women. The earl does as I command, and so must you all. None can gainsay me.”

  “I summoned you to a law-giving,” said Godiva, though the words were hard to find, and her teeth were inclined to want to chatter. But she knew if she faltered, all would falter, and everything would be lost. “And this is my rede. You shall recant all your works of darkness, and give up whatever you wear against your chest, so it may be destroyed.”

  “Recant?” asked Ralph scornfully. “Give up my amulet? No, rather I shall use it once again. I have not bothered to capture the soul of a woman before, it seems hardly worthwhile. But you…you are a thorn in my flesh that must be dealt with lest it fester.”

  He reached into his tunic, and lifted up the links of an iron necklace. A pendant hung from the chain, a small tablet of some dull red mineral. Though it was no larger than a thumbnail and seemed unremarkable, as Ralph held it high Godiva’s eyes were immediately drawn to it, and then she could not look away, nor move her head or limbs.

  Whatever power was in the amulet, it held her fast. Dread filled her, and her breath grew fast and shallowed, all her instincts demanding she flee, muscles rippling but failing to instigate any movement.

  “You see,” said Ralph with a sneer. “I command a greater magic than anything you think to conjure.”

  Ceolwen alone of all the women moved forward, bending to pick up a loose cobblestone. But even as she rose to throw it, Ralph made a negligent gesture with his left hand, and the stone ran through her fingers like water, while others gave way beneath her feet. Ceolwen was suddenly knee-deep in what had been a solidly paved surface, held fast by the ferromantic magic Ralph also had at his command.

  “So,” said Ralph. He brought the pendant closer to his lips, and spoke to it, in a language vanished from the world for five thousand years or more. With each word, Godiva felt as if chill, insubstantial claws were reaching inside her, going past skin and bone to pull at something she didn’t even know she possessed, drawing it out of her body.

  Her soul was being taken, Godiva realised, and there was nothing she could do.

  She cried out, and in that same moment, some deep instinct told her there was still something she could do, a faint last chance. She still commanded her voice.

  In that instant of realisation, Godiva transformed her cry of pain and anguish into the beginning of the bee-song.

  For several long seconds, she sang alone, but then the women closest to her began to also sing, even as they were held fast in all other ways, made as steady and unmoving as the buried stones of the hill by the meadow. More and more women joined the song, and as their voices rose in unison, Godiva knew that more than their voices were joined. She felt suddenly anchored, that the bright shadow that Ralph sought to draw from her body was no longer alone and easy prey, but linked to all the women around her, and those around them, and so on and on through all the many circles.

  Thousands of bright shadows joined, so many the weight of them was too great for the amulet to move, and now her own soul was coming back to her, and Ralph’s hand was coming down as if the pendant had grown heavy, weighted down by the connection with more souls than it could ever drink. As it slowly fell, the oppressive force that had held Godiva ebbed as well, but she did not move. The song had to be completed first, and it was not yet done.

  “No, no,” growled Ralph. He fumbled at his side with his free hand, trying to draw the thin, sharp dagger scabbarded at his waist. But still the amulet was dragging him down, so that he could not balance and he tumbled forward to land sprawling at Godiva’s feet.

  “You cannot harm me!” he spat out. “I am no mere ironmaster, I am the Favoured of Urakazaar! No weapon wielded by man, woman or child can harm me, I cannot be slain and I will—”

  His words choked off as the first great cloud of bees swarmed into his open mouth and cascaded down his throat, closely followed by the second and third that slammed into his eyes and ears.

  More and more bees flew to their deaths as the song continued, thousands and thousands of them descending upon the toppled body of Ralph. As the last note slowly faded into breathlessness there was no longer an identifiable man there at all, just a lump on the ground that looked like a fallen log covered in a thick carpet of dead and dying bees.

  Ceolwen stepped out of the holes in the paving and prised up a cobblestone. Very gently, she brushed back a layer of bees from Ralph’s hand to reveal the chain his lifeless fingers touched, and the tiny amulet that hung from the chain. Lifting the stone high, she brought it down with all her might.

  The blow bounced off what seemed only oven-baked clay, which should have been easily crushed to dust. Ceolwen gritted her teeth and raised her hand again, but stopped as she felt Godiva’s fingers wrap around her own.

  “We must do it together, I think,” said Godiva. Other women drew close, and many hands gripped the stone.

  This time, when it came down, there was a great crack, as if some mighty door had been burst asunder. The tablet exploded in a waft of reddish dust. There was the brief, sickening smell of something ancient and decayed, but both dust and stench were borne away by the fresh wind, and the shadows that had defied the sunlight shrank and were likewise gone.

  A single bee alighted on Godiva’s hand as she straightened up. She raised it close to her face, and breathed upon it gently.

  “Thank the mothers, sister,” she said. “For all they have given us.”

  The bee flew up, and circled Godiva’s head to take its bearing from the sun, before heading unerringly towards the bee meadow and the queens in their conical huts.

  “They have given much,” said Ceolwen. “There will be little honey this season, and perhaps the next.”

  “Yes,” said Godiva. She felt very tired, and very dirty, and very naked. “But it is done.”

  “For now,” said Ceolwen.

  “For now?” asked Godiva quietly.

  “Seasons turn, there is birth and death and rebirth,” said Ceolwen. “For everything, even an ancient evil. Perhaps not in our time, but it will come.”

  “So,” said Godiva. She looked around at the crowded market full of naked, determined women.

  Her mouth settled in a grim line. This host needed no armour, no weapons, no boasts and shouting. But if she were the enemy, she would be greatly afraid.

  “The Company of Women” by Garth Nix

  MARY, MARY

  Kirstyn McDermott

  The woman in the bed makes a soft, parched sound that might be a groan, that might be a name long carried, never forgotten, or else a name more recently brought in careful, eager hands to the heart-shaped cage in her breast. Fanny, she might be saying, or William. Or perhaps she merely moans as thin rivers of fire course beneath her skin and her throat closes dry around each breath. A minute passes, or several, sickroom time stretched far beyond compassion, before her eyelids rasp open once more.

  “Patience,” she mutters. “A little patience.”

  In a chair near
the door, a man sleeps slumped against the curl of his fist. Carlisle, the woman remembers, her husband’s surgeon-friend with his large, kindly hands and eyes that fail altogether to mask his dismay, no matter the words of comfort he proffers. Carlisle, the good doctor, not the one who came before: those brusque and brutal fingers scraping at her womb, tearing the reluctant placenta loose piece by grisly piece; eighteen hours of labour and she would have suffered that pain tenfold in trade for its bloody aftermath.

  Bear up, Mrs Godwin. We must have the whole of it out.

  The woman has crafted her life in words; she can find none with which to approach such an agony.

  A movement by the window on the other side of the room snares her attention and she rolls her head on the pillow. At first she surmises that a witching-hour breeze has billowed the drapes—though they have been drawn close now for days, the glass behind them a shield against the noxious vapours of London’s air—but now a tall, dark shape frees itself from the shadows and moves towards the bed. Tallow-light flickers across a familiar countenance; narrow hands clasp and unclasp.

  “I cannot help you this time,” the Grey Lady says. “This is not a mouthful of laudanum. It is not the foul waters of the Thames with boatmen ready at hand. This is…beyond me.”

  The woman in the bed swallows. “I have never asked it of you.”

  “And yet.”

  “And yet.”

  The Grey Lady leans forward, nostrils flaring. Perhaps she smiles.

  “I apologise.” The woman in the bed averts her gaze. “The…odours are unpleasant.” Sweat and blood, the stench of putrid flesh; she is rotting from the inside out and knows it, catches the smell of herself whenever she moves: arms lifted to steady a glass against her lips; the anguish of negotiating the chamber pot. Her body tells more truths than a priest—ah, how William’s jaw would clench at such superstitious fancies. I feel in heaven, she recalls confessing, words floating on the tincture Carlisle had administered. A turn of her husband’s mouth, his hand swaddling her own: I suppose, my dear, that is a form for saying you are in less pain. Her own dear Horatio.

  “Mrs Godwin?” The good doctor himself, as though stirred by these recollections, rises from his chair. “How do you feel, may I enquire?”

  “No worse,” she says. “I fear, no better.”

  “There’s naught to be gained from such conjecture, Mrs Godwin.” He crosses to the bed and presses a hand first to her brow, then to her left cheek. The coolness of his skin is welcome; the accompanying concern that pinches at his face, less so. “I shall rouse your husband. He wished to be fetched when next you woke.” Carlisle leaves the room in hurried strides, sparing not a glance for the tall figure standing opposite.

  “He did not see you,” the woman in the bed remarks. Her tone is one of confirmation rather than surprise. “Good men would see angels, would they not?”

  “I am not an angel,” the Grey Lady says. “We have traversed this ground many times.”

  “A devil then. A demon.”

  “I know of no such creatures.”

  “Nor of heaven, nor hell.”

  “I cannot say such places do not exist, only that I know nothing of them.”

  “Yet, if shades such as yourself exist, might not angels? Might not heaven?” After so many years, the conversation is rote; it has worn grooves in her tongue.

  The Grey Lady smiles. “I cannot say otherwise.”

  “I—” The woman in the bed grimaces against a sudden spike of pain. “I am dying.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are the first to speak it.”

  “There have never been untruths between us. There should be none now.” Again, she leans close. Again, her nose twitches. “Mary Wollstonecraft, you smell of burnt sugar, and hyacinth, and…” Those colourless eyes widen. “And hope? Even at this juncture?”

  “I am frightened,” the woman in the bed whispers. Within her, a renewed heat builds and she can feel sweat beading fresh on her skin. The pain worsens. “I am very frightened.”

  The Grey Lady smooths a place in the rumpled bedclothes and sits. “I will not leave.” A small yellow wasp emerges from the collar of her blouse to crawl over her clavicle and along her throat. She moves as though to swat it, then pauses, hand hovering by her face. The insect takes flight and describes a slow, buzzing circle before alighting on the Grey Lady’s knee. Its segmented body twitches. “She, too, will stay.”

  The woman in the bed closes her eyes. Blood simmers in her veins. This is not her end.

  “This is not my end.”

  “There is always an end,” the Grey Lady reminds her. “What fascinates is the beginning.”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Rehearsing the words of aggrieved indignation she would consign to paper the very moment she returned home, Mary Wollstonecraft stalked across Westwood Common. How bitterly disappointing to have believed Miss Arden worthy of the highest friendship, only to find herself scorned once again in favour of other girls. Those whose better circumstances, no doubt, saw them placed unforgivably higher in Miss Arden’s affections.

  Mary could scarcely be blamed for her family’s diminishing standing, or her father’s foul temper and weakness for gambling. She suspected the whole of Beverley made barbed sport of Edward Wollstonecraft, yet it wasn’t a single one of them who slept sentry on the landing outside her mother’s door those nights he staggered home with pockets barren and fists full of drunken rage. On brash, abrasive Mary, he would not dare to lay a finger, and often she found herself regarding a new bruise on her mother’s face with seething, unexpected contempt.

  If only Elizabeth Wollstonecraft would refuse to yield to her husband. If only she would not succumb.

  If that soulless bond was marriage, Mary wanted no part of it.

  Nor friendship either, certainly not friendship with Jane Arden, who deigned to offer tea and lemoncake to Mary merely as an afterthought, it seemed, having first seen to the care and comfort of the evidently superior Miss Jacobs. Even Jane’s mama had behaved with more politeness towards the girl, complimenting her pretty muslin petticoats and the stylish manner in which her blonde hair had been curled and cleverly pinned.

  Mary fumed. She would demand the letters she had written Jane Arden be returned forthwith, lest her words pass between vulgar hands and be made the subject of gossip and scorn. The very notion of enduring such slights from a person she loved—and which affection she had supposed returned!—was too much to bear.

  Her foot splashed the edge of a puddle and she recoiled, breath hissing sharp through her teeth at her own carelessness before a bright scrap of yellow attracted her eye: a bee struggled on the surface of the murky water, damp wings aquiver in their valiant effort to attain the sky. Sympathies aroused, Mary bent closer. Not a bee, she realised, but a wood wasp. Autumn winds had shed the surrounding oak trees of most of their foliage and it took Mary scarcely a moment to find a suitable leaf, brown and curled at the edges like a small boat. Gathering her skirts about her, she crouched by the puddle and extended the makeshift vessel.

  “Do you suppose that a wise course of action?”

  The voice was unexpected and Mary started, dropping the leaf in the puddle and almost toppling backwards. Regaining her balance, she looked up to see a tall, elegant lady in a grey silk redingote and matching gloves standing but a few yards from where she herself crouched, undignified as a washerwoman.

  “That is a wasp, child,” the lady said. “Rescue it and you’ll likely be stung for your trouble.”

  “I am not a child,” Mary retorted. “Nor do I see why the poor creature would have any reason to do me harm.”

  “It is a wasp. What greater reason would it seek?”

  Ignoring her unwelcome interlocutor, Mary retrieved the leaf and positioned it beneath the creature in question, which was now clearly tiring. Carefully, she raised the leaf up, allowing the water to drain over an edge while the wasp remained safe, albeit sodden, within.

/>   “There,” Mary said, gaining her feet as she brandished her trophy for closer inspection. “She merely needs to dry her wings.”

  The lady stepped closer, right to the edge of the puddle. She bent forward as if to study the proffered leaf but her gaze never shifted from Mary’s. Her irises were a pale, watery grey and strangely flat, without hint of sparkle or sheen, as though they drew light into themselves yet, covetous, hoarded all outward reflection. After too long a moment, her eyelids shuttered and she sniffed; a subtle, delicate motion that reminded Mary of nothing so much as the family’s tabby cat taking scent of the kitchen while supper was being prepared.

  At last, the lady opened her eyes. “Ah,” she said. “You see?”

  The wasp had crawled from the leaf and was making cautious progress along Mary’s palm. Mary held her breath as spindly yellow legs tickled her skin. “If I remain still, she shall not sting me.”

  “But is that within your nature, Mary Wollstonecraft? To remain still?”

  Startled, Mary glanced up. “I did not give you my name.”

  Without warning, a gloved hand snaked out and plucked the wasp from Mary’s wrist. Wings pinned together, the insect twitched furiously between gentle fingers, its black-barbed abdomen seeking a target. “You smell of rising dough and jonquils and, ah, such wilful ambition,” the lady in grey said. Then she thrust the wasp into her mouth as though it were nothing more than a boiled sweet and began to chew.

  Mary looked on in horror. And with no small amount of curiosity. “But does it not sting?” she asked.

  The lady’s thin lips spread into something resembling a smile. Scraps of semi-chewed wasp blackened the gaps between her teeth. “I intend to keep a watch on you, Mary Wollstonecraft. I believe there will be much of interest to observe.”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  William Godwin, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, encloses her hand within his own. “Mary, my dear, it is necessary to talk of the children. Respecting their care while you are ill, as you may be for…for some time to come. Are there especial instructions you would leave me? For the children?”