Besides, I had too many questions.
Mrs. Tom brought the tray, a sturdy, workaday display of plain china and warm biscuits. I offered to pour out, but she waved my hand away. I nibbled my biscuit in silence, a silence that grew as the afternoon light waned, and Mrs. Tom made no move to light lamps. Finally, she arranged her hands in her apron and looked at me across the tea table.
“Well,” she said. “Say your piece.”
I meant to protest, but those clear pale eyes were too intense. I set my cup down and met her gaze. “What causes a curse?”
She frowned slightly, as if to bat my question aside as gently as she had my hand. But a moment passed and she seemed to change her mind. “Anger,” she said, and the word rolled over me like low thunder. “Dark, fearful anger—jealousy, resentment, pain. And, usually,” here she shifted in her chair, like a cat tucking and settling in, “violent death.”
“And bad luck?”
“Ah,” she said. “Now, that’s different. A curse you can’t do much about, but find way to break it. Luck, though—lass, you make your own luck. Bad things happen in life, misfortunes fall to everyone in turn. Just a part of the changing years, and nowt to worrit over. You just decide how to face it, is all.”
I frowned. Easily said. But an image rose up in my mind: a picture of a mill on a small brown dish. “Great courage breaks ill luck,” I whispered.
Mrs. Tom smiled. “Aye, lass. That it does.”
I bit my lip. “What breaks a curse, then?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment. The sunny parlor was deep in slanted shadows now, golden light chasing the tracery of lace against the faded floor. Finally, Mrs. Tom began a slow, rhythmic nodding, as if to herself. “Well, now,” she said quietly. “That’s another thing entirely.” She rose from her straight-backed chair and crossed the room to a cabinet set into the wall. Opening it, she drew her hand along a row of books, her fingers hanging scant inches from a selection. “First,” she said. “You must know who set the curse. That story’s been trailing around Stirwaters a long, long time. Any notion why? What dark dealings in Miller past are hidden in those stones?”
“None!” I said, but too quick, too sharply. What did I truly know? Miller or not, my father had been a stranger here, and the miller before him. Stirwaters had changed hands too many times to keep all her memories alive. But what had I told Randall? Stirwaters calls its keepers…
The name Wheeler had been on the millwheel, on the very heart of Stirwaters, all these years. My uncle’s name. Was that simple coincidence? Was Uncle Wheeler’s presence here part of some old, old design? And if the turning of the great wheel had brought us all back together again, Miller and Wheeler, then for what purpose?
Anger, pain. Violent death.
Scarcely aware I did so, I clutched a hand to my belly. Mrs. Tom noticed, and came back to sit beside me, the book she sought forgotten.
“Lass,” she said gently, “put talk of curses out of your head. If there’s one thing bad for wee babes, it’s worry. Forget an old woman’s nonsense, forget the gossip and the foolish stories. Go home to that husband of yourn and raise up a big brood of Woodstone babies. Forget you ever heard the word curse.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t afford to.”
I rose to my feet and thanked her for the tea. She shook her head but followed me to the door. “You come back in a month or two, hear me? Or any time. My door’s open to you, Charlotte. If you need a friend.”
I felt those strange pale eyes on my back all the way to my own doorstep, but I was halfway home before I realized something: My mother had been a Wheeler, which made me one, too.
And so was my baby.
Chapter Nineteen
Finally, in the middle of March, the millwheel was ready. It arrived by cart from the joiner’s, led by Rosie and Harte, the rest of the village trailing behind like a parade. It was the work of two days to set it into place—and the event of the season. Like a barn-raising among country neighbors, everyone pitched in to help, millhand or not. Even Uncle Wheeler strutted about like a squire, overseeing the proceedings with an air of administrative authority.
Taking advantage of a day that was almost pleasant, we closed the sluice and emptied the spillway, draining the water from the wheelpit. It was a job we should have done every year, to clear debris and silt from the pit, but like everything else it had been neglected. I hadn’t seen the wheelpit empty since I was a little girl. It was a great half-barrel carved out of the earth, lined with grey stone caked with mud. As the water drained away, the pit was overrun by scampering, bare-legged boys eager to burrow through the silt in search of treasures washed into the headrace.
“You lads be careful now,” Harte yelled as Jamie Handy shoved little Dan Fuller facedown into the muck. Danny howled with rage and grappled for Jamie’s feet with clay-caked fists. Eventually he made contact, and spilled Jamie’s legs right out from under him. Everyone laughed, even those of us who knew better.
“Sixpence!” one of the boys shouted. “A real silver sixpence!”
“Ain’t that Tansy’s shoe, what she lost last summer?”
And so the account rang up, all the detritus of the years, collected in the bowels of Stirwaters. Coins were the property of their finders, but anything whose ownership might be determined was strewn in a filthy strip along the bank. I fell into the column filing past to study the items, amazed at their variety. For a frugal people, we certainly managed to lose our share of things.
Among the battered shoes, broken crockery, and odd bit of harness, there was another sort of booty entirely. I collected no fewer than five straw figures, crudely formed and rather the worse for wear for their dunking in the pond. Stuck with pins or dressed in rags, they had the appearance of sad little victims of sacrifice. One of the wet figures in my hand, I glanced round at my neighbors. Who had flung these manikins into the water, and for what purpose? Was this the “tribute” paid by the Friendly Society? Toss a corn dolly into the Stowe every spring, and the capricious river will spare you and yourn?
I shook off a shiver and gathered up the corn dollies from the bank. I found Mr. Mordant across the pond, watching the to-do from a respectable distance. He was leaning against the fence, whittling a chunk of wood with a blade no longer than his thumb.
“Mornin,’ missie.” He nodded to me. “What you got there?”
I showed him. “I found these,” I said. “I—I’m not sure what we should do with them.”
Mr. Mordant gave me a long, appraising look, his pipe dangling from his lip. “Good girl,” he said finally. “Tha’ done right. Seems to me we can go two ways: cast ‘em back into the wash, for there they were meant to stay—or toss ‘em onto the fire, for they done their job already.”
“Have they?” I found myself asking. Didn’t Annie Penny attest to their failing?
The old dye master glared at me. “You know better’n ask a question like that.”
Biting my lip, I shoved the figures toward him. “Here, you decide how they should be…dealt with.” I was happier not knowing. I did hear from Rosie, though, several months later, that she had seen them in the dyeshed, all lined up along the windowsill.
As Mr. Mordant collected the dollies from me, I heard the squish-slap of wet boy’s feet against the shale and looked up to see the youngest Lamb running toward us.
“Mistress, Mistress!” he cried, catching me up. His soaked knee breeches dripped onto my skirts. “Ain’t this your mam’s ring?” To my astonishment, he held out a tiny circle of tarnished tin, all the silver gone, topped by a begrimed paste pearl. “Mam says it were yours.” Before I could speak, he scampered away again.
Mr. Mordant grinned at me, dark gaps in his smile. “Now, how ‘bout that?”
I showed the ring to Rosie later that afternoon as we were washing up in the butt.
“What do you think it means?”
Rosie held the ring over the water for a long moment, as if watching waves and eddies t
hrough the circle. “That it’s probably too much to hope your watch will turn up?”
Helplessly, hysterically, I began to laugh.
The following day we hoisted the new wheel into place. Less a spectacle than the empty wheelpit, today’s work drew a smaller audience, and a more idle one. Anxious to begin work anew, the Stirwaters folk hung round the wheelhouse, getting underfoot, in case some task might present itself promptly once the new wheel was turning freely.
I stood in the lee of the wheelhouse, watching Rosie and Harte work side by side. Like two parts of one machine, they were well matched, moving easily in one another’s rhythm. Rosie would reach out a hand blindly, and Harte would fill it with whatever tool she needed. I wondered what it might be like to have that connection with Randall.
“Fine piece of work, ain’t it, Mistress?” I turned to see young Ian Lamb beside me, his mother, Janet, with him. “Still, wouldn’t it have been grand to see a great new wheel runnin’ the old place?”
Janet gave him a look to curdle cream. “Tweren’t nowt wrong with the old design,” she said stoutly. “No need to go meddlin’ with what’s been fine enough all these years. And ain’t no call to go diggin’ up parts what’s been sealed off for good and all. Buried is buried, if you ask me.”
“Buried!” I said. “What’s buried?”
“Nowt’s buried,” Janet said, shoving her hands into her apron pockets. “Just talkin’ about the past, is all.”
“Yes, but you said buried,” I insisted. “Is there something buried under Stirwaters?”
“‘Course not. Where did you hear that fool notion! You’re gettin’ as queer as your pa, then, I daresay, Mistress. Buried under Stirwaters!” She laughed—a bit too heartily.
Something I’d tried to bury sprang up vividly in my memory. “Do you know anything about a drowning at Stirwaters?”
“A drowning!” Ian’s attention snapped back quickly enough.
Janet cuffed him hard on the shoulder. “No, I do not,” she said, her voice firm. “I have never heard such a thing, and I’ve been here thirty-four years this spring. Ah, Mistress.” She gave me a firm smile, as if to close the matter. “Don’t pay no mind to the spoutin’ of a fool woman plenty old enough to learn when to keep her fat mouth shut.”
I frowned at her in silence a moment longer, meeting her stubborn gaze. She turned away before I did, giving her son a shove.
I had little time to reflect on that conversation, for Randall drove into town just in time to see the new wheel hauled into place. I watched him park the buggy in the yard and toss a coin to one of the lads, who led the horses away.
“Haul away, lads, easy there!” bellowed Harte, and I looked away for a moment, to watch the men heave hard on great levers and lift the wheel enough to slide the blocks beneath. When I looked back, Randall was jogging over the slick wet grass.
Suddenly, I saw him fall.
I saw his boots hit a slippery patch, watched him lose his footing, gasped as he pitched headlong into the pit. I heard the great painful crack of the rotted sluice gates giving way, sending the pent-up water racing down the channel like a burst of storm tide.
I stifled a scream and grappled against the wall for a handhold. I squeezed my eyes closed for a count of five and then looked up again, and all was as it should be. The work continued—Randall had paused to chat with one of the hands—and up the race, the sluice gates still held fast. No one else had seen it—yet it had seemed so real! I pressed a hand to my waist and took several ragged breaths. Ten feet below me, the cold damp stones of the wheelpit lay smooth and worn beneath the curve of the wheel.
Fighting vertigo, I stared back at them, waiting. What is it? I asked them silently. What are you trying to show me? Was it a message—or a threat? I was still staring at the pit when Randall slipped in beside me, circling my waist with his arms.
“It’s freezing out here. Here.” He draped his frock coat round my shoulders, and I stood stiff and still, smiling and pretending I was glad to see him there.
I could not stand to watch them all crawling around the empty pit much longer. Pleading a chill, I retreated inside the mill, with Randall’s overwhelming approval. At first I just sat, listening to the clamor of the work outside. Harte’s voice hollering, the creak of the ropes…but as I listened, the sounds seemed to shift, subtly—a shout, in a strange voice, thickly accented—a sound of hammer on stone. I could not hear the river, not even a gentle ripple as it flowed past the mill.
I started, as out of a dream. Oh, mercy.
I yanked book after book from the shelves, flipped through pages, tossed them aside again. May Day celebrations, funeral bills, awkward transitions of handwriting as the mill changed hands, over and again through the years. But nothing I sought, nothing near old enough. We had records going back to the days of Stirwaters’s founder, but none at all from the building of the mill. And I could not credit that.
Rosie came in at length and found me pacing the office, the ledger from Edmund Miller’s day in my arms. “We’re getting ready to open up the sluice,” she said. “Start the water flowing again. We thought you’d want to see.”
I barely heard her. “They dammed the river, didn’t they?”
Rosie paused. “Who?”
“When they built Stirwaters—they had to dam the river. When the water wasn’t running past—that’s the only time a curse could be laid down. Biddy Tom told us, remember? And that’s when someone drowned here—it must be the same person.”
She came in a few steps and pried the volume from my hands. “That’s some trick,” she said, “cursing somebody with your lungs full of the Stowe.”
“I thought you believed all this!”
“Well, when you say it, I’ve got to admit it starts to sound a little cockeyed.”
I sighed and leaned against the desk, one hand pressed to my skirts. Rosie came to me and put an arm round my waist.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re not yourself lately.”
And wasn’t that the truth.
Harte and Rosie’s work proved true: In place at last, the new wheel functioned beautifully. As it turned easily in the water, so turned the seasons, and before we knew it wool market days were upon us again. After a year, I should have felt more confident, strolling into the woolshed to face the woolmen, but I didn’t. I bought less wool than last year and paid more for it. I wasn’t pushing my luck.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to buy more wool, and have a cushion?” Rosie protested; but I disagreed: Better to prepare for the worst by having less to risk.
I wanted to check this theory against my husband’s expertise, but Randall was absent more often these days. I knew he was working hard at the bank, in anticipation of our baby’s birth, so he could be here with me more afterward—but I was torn. I wanted him here with me, and yet I didn’t. I couldn’t look at him without seeing him flail and struggle under the rushing water of the millstream. And so I helped him pack, and loaded him onto the carriage or the stage, and said nothing.
With the new wheel up, and the spring wool tucked away in the woolshed, the season got off to a robust start. Porter & Byrd had renewed their confidence in us, sending us a modest commission cheque and placing another hefty order. Halfheartedly, I submitted an application for reinstatement at Worm Hill, but it no longer seemed necessary to pin our fortunes on the Harrowgate market. Mrs. Parmenter sent a cordial letter offering to buy more gold thread, should we find ourselves in possession of more of the same. Hastily, I shoved that note to the back of a desk drawer.
The millhands seemed happy to be back at work, as well. Now that hands were no longer idle, tongues were likewise busy once again. And the chief subject of examination that cold bright spring? The Miller progeny.
I hadn’t expected to keep it a secret long; Shearing gossip is like another tributary of the Stowe, after all. But I was unprepared for how swiftly I became the subject of rapt attention and unbidden advice. I smiled thinly and bore it, fe
eling like the prize heifer at a stock show.
“She’s carrying high, like her mam,” said Mrs. Drover, weeks before anything of the sort was remotely perceptible. “That means a girl.”
“Aye,” concurred Mrs. Hale. “Make sure you drink a lot of milk, now, lassie; and stay clear from too many flowers. You don’t want the wee lass to grow up wandersome.”
“Why is everyone so convinced it’s a girl?” Randall asked, amused, one bright afternoon as we rode home together from fetching the post and restocking the larder. Mrs. Post had just, with utter seriousness, advised a preparation of mole’s feet and spearmint, hung round the neck. I hunched down inside my cloak, not wanting to answer him. Spoken aloud, the notion would sound preposterous, but I knew the truth of it. Millers had no luck with boys; better to hope from the start the baby would be female.
“They’re probably right,” Randall continued. “After all, in seven tries, our mothers only managed to produce one boy. One in seven odds—fairly good in favor of our little foal being a filly!” He reached over to pat me on the belly.
“Two in eight,” I whispered, flinching away.
“What?”
I said it a little louder. “I had a brother once: Thomas. He lived a week. That’s when my mother died.”
Randall slowed the carriage and turned to me. “My God, Charlotte, why didn’t you ever tell me?” He put one strong arm round my shoulders and squeezed tight. “Did Mrs. Tom say there was any cause for concern?”
Hadn’t she? But I shook my head.
He tipped my chin toward his face and kissed my forehead. “There. You’re young and strong; there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I laid my cheek against his chest, straining to hear his heartbeat through his coat, but all I heard was the groan and creak of the old millwheel, spilling Millers down into the raging river one by one.
Things were little better at the mill. As if Stirwaters were determined that I should get no work at all done this year, the millhands would not let me near my spinning jack, citing old Gold Valley superstitions that the babe would grow up to be hanged! Woolwashing, dyeing, and fulling were likewise out. So was standing for too long, climbing too many stairs, or working too near a window. I lost track of which of these precautions were for my protection—and which for theirs. Never mind that pregnant workers had made their way through Stirwaters for generations; this was a Miller baby, and no one would take any chances.