12
Closer
Agnes closed the door to her mother’s room and leant against the door frame for a moment, her eyes shut, running her hand through her hair. She had lost count of how many times she had been in to check on her through the day, and now the evening was thickening and the long night lay ahead. All day she had been trying to make some sense of her late father’s business. People had come to collect orders that she knew nothing about; there had been arguments. She was exhausted.
She was still furious with Peter, but deep down she knew that was unfair. He had been trying to help. But he was tactless and certainly not as bold as she would have liked him to be. As she would have liked her future husband to be.
She blushed as she considered what she had told no one else, not even Peter himself. And he was poor too, she would never have dared tell her father of her desires. A draper’s daughter does not marry a woodcutter’s son.
Father, however, was gone. Though that was not what her mother said.
Agnes tried to push that thought away as she busied herself for bed. She slipped out of her clothes and into a nightdress, and began to brush her hair, but her fears would not stay away. Her hands began to tremble. She dropped the hairbrush clumsily on a table by the window, backing away from it uneasily. She knew the window was protected, but that didn’t quell her fear.
What if Father had been coming back? To Mother, in the night? She did not doubt for a second that it was possible; everyone knew it. Cattle and sheep had been attacked in recent days too. And it was true that her mother did seem to be getting weaker with every night that passed. Weaker, and paler.
But he would not come in the house tonight, no one and nothing would; she had taken further precautions. There was still tar from St. Andrew’s Eve on each window and door, and earlier in the day she had crushed five whole bulbs of garlic and smeared the paste on every window frame and doorsill.
There was no way in now. Or so she hoped.
She climbed into her own little bed and listened to the noises of the night.
In the street, outside Agnes’s house, beneath her window, a large and bloated figure wavered, trying to come nearer. The figure, dressed in muddy, slightly torn clothes, sniffed the night air, which reeked of garlic.