The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

How good it felt, how safe and enfolding, walking shoulder to shoulder towards a shared enemy.

All he wanted was some sign from them that they acknowledged him. That they saw him for what he knew himself to be: a man, a strong man, in the prime of health. A good man, God-fearing, who had been visited by an angel. Not someone to be ignored. He didn’t like the way they looked at each other. It was as though they spoke a silent language he couldn’t understand; it unsettled him. It made him feel less strong, less good. All he wanted was to be seen.

He had not done anything wrong, and yet here he was, ashamed. That was the cunning power of girls, he thought. They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.

“Grandfather,” Elizabeth said. “The boy has arrived.” Thomas flinched at this—he was no boy. But perhaps in this place, inhabited by girls, the language of manhood was rarely spoken. He didn’t consider Mansfield a real man, not enough to teach these girls what true manliness was.

Elizabeth’s prettiness had made him awkward, but in the presence of Anne he became something much worse. He forgot how to move. The air encasing his body became thick like mud, binding him. He could barely breathe, yet while his limbs became sluggish and slow, his thoughts quickened. Something happened to him when he saw her. A feeling came to him that he had only experienced twice before. (Once when the farmer in his village had let him rescue the runt of a litter, destined for drowning; the other when the local pond had frozen over during a bitter winter frost and he’d skated clean across it.)

The feeling was of triumph, and brilliance, and total, blissful possession. It felt like ruling and serving simultaneously.

He couldn’t explain it. He saw before him a plain girl, unexceptional in almost every way, but when his eyes met hers his insides leapt like a salmon and his body stopped working. H...

Of all of them, Thomas thought, surveying them with burgeoning connoisseurship, Anne was probably the ugliest. But she was the one he kept looking at.

He drank. The beer had been prescribed to help with dryness in his brain, believed to be affecting his sight. He could feel the liquid lubricating his mind.

Like her father, she had always been more solemn than other children. She contained experience beyond her years. She seemed to know about hardship, how it crept into one’s life like a cuckoo, casting out happiness forever. Happiness was frail and flimsy: a petal, a whisper. Hardship was constant. It was muscular and loud. Only fools forgot this vital fact, her face explained. Only fools failed to let it guide their every waking thought and deed.

“Your line is clear, Elizabeth.” She drew a breath. “You’ll marry a pauper, but you’ll be very happy together and will have six charming children.” Joseph heard Elizabeth huff and stand. “Grace, yours is a little harder to read. It looks as though you’ll have renown in your lifetime. People will hear all about your goodness and travel for miles to see you.”

“Mary’s going to see the world. She’ll sail on a large ship, a galleon with big white sails, and she’ll go absolutely everywhere. All the way up the Thames to London. Even across to France!” Joseph listened to Mary wriggling with delight and smiled. “But Anne,” Hester continued, her voice serious, “yours is a different story.” She stopped. “You’ll fall in love,” she said at last, “but the love will be brief.” She paused again. “There’s something else here. Something…” She cleared her throat. “You’re going to be hunted. You’re going to be afraid.”

I wonder if Hester will die or disappear, being the only one without a future told

The shape of her had vanished; it was as though she had disappeared into the walls.

He worried constantly about his granddaughters, in a way that he’d never worried about his son. Were they happy? Were they safe? His wife had left him with an impossible task: to protect the girls from the hazardous world, a ravenous world, a world with teeth. Joseph alone was no match for it, and the girls had no interest in helping him. They wanted to live—loudly, freely.

So he tried instead to trust the girls, and every day he awaited misfortune.

Drunkenness was his most frequent sin, but it wasn’t the worst. Every man in England was guilty of drunkenness. He felt guiltier about the hatred, and about the uncleanness. These were sins he had never confessed to, that no one else knew about; they polluted his mind in private. The uncleanness had crept up on him in his youth—a suggestion, an idea. He buried it, ashamed, but the idea kept returning to him. It involved his body, and another’s. It involved—no, he wouldn’t even think it. It flourished like river weed when he gave it his attention. Much better to suppress it until his nuptials next month. Then he wouldn’t need to worry. Everyone knew that marriage was like laundering—it made the unclean clean.

Hatred presented a bigger problem. There was no solution for the hatred which tormented him every day. He hated anything weaker than himself—women, children, sometimes even animals. Soft men troubled him too. But really, it was women he hated the most. He hated how slow they were, how physically incapable, how stupid. He hated their incompleteness, their cunning, and their lust. He saw the way they looked at him. They tempted him into uncleanness.

The worst type of women were the ones who didn’t know their place in the order of things. There seemed to be a lot of them around nowadays, women who thought themselves superior, who’d forsaken nice, feminine qualities like meekness and humility. Something terrible happened to him in the presence of such women. A rage descended, a desire to punish. He remembered the feeling of keeping the Mansfield sisters captive on his ferry for that fleeting moment, before Anne lowered herself into the river. How pleasing it had been to control their fate, however briefly. Sometimes he convinced himself that it wasn’t really a sin at all, this punishing urge, that in fact he was acting according to God’s will,...

The Mansfield sisters had taken possession of his mind, turning him away from God, towards hatred and uncleanness.

Pete wondered with a gleeful kind of curiosity if the old man would know where the bank ended and the river began or if he’d watch him stride straight into the water. He was almost disappointed when Mansfield stopped just short of the river’s edge. It was impossible to know how much he could see.

His thoughts about Anne Mansfield were as hot as hellfire; he could feel them burning inside him. It would take a lot of drink to put that burning out.

Robin Wildgoose was not like other men: this was made plain to him early in life, and he had been reminded of it most days since. He did not have the appetites that they had. Others believed they had the God-given right for their demands to be met, their greed satisfied, but Robin didn’t share this view. He made no claims on the world; it owed him nothing.

Robin fantasised about living one day in a large house filled with the partridges and rabbits and pigs and geese that he’d rescued from the plates of hungry men.

Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was violence.

“Wily creature, wasn’t she?” Pete said, punting them over the black water. “The badger?” Robin said. “Yes. Wanted her liberty, didn’t she? Quite touching, in a way.” Robin looked up at Pete. He heard something scornful in his voice, something that told Robin he would have killed that badger a hundred times over if he could.

He’d been playing, pretending, but the girls didn’t know that, and now they were walking home alone. He wished he hadn’t let them go. He wished he hadn’t kicked the badger.

A noise reached him through the night air. He slowed, then stopped, trying to understand what he was hearing. It sounded like barking. Of all the words in Robin’s reach, barking came the closest to it. It was deep and hacking, a cough that became a howl. It frightened him. He loved dogs deeply, even wild ones, even biting ones, but this sound unsettled him. This was no dog. It was a person barking, a person deranged into believing themself a dog.

He had come from up the road where the girls had been walking, but Robin didn’t want to connect the two things. He wanted to exist in murkiness, in the uncertain summer dusk. In that moment, certainty appalled him; he would hate to know where Pete had been or what he had done.

He liked to lie here, not least because it took some of his fear of death from him.

What lay before Joseph was unknowable, a gape. It scared him. Yet lying here, on this summer afternoon, he soothed himself with a question: How bad could it be to be buried in the warm earth and listen to the world conduct itself around you? That didn’t seem so dreadful.

He didn’t like to accept—though the thought occasionally occurred to him—that he might be the last person they would turn to. They had a whole household of sisters to confide in.

It was the girls. The way the girls lived, the way they spoke and laughed and worked, was a source of endless fascination for Thomas. They were like a rich tapestry, he thought, beautiful to look at but more interesting, more rewarding, on closer observation. He saw how the threads interwove, how one complemented the rest. He saw alliances form and then draw apart. He saw how they braided together, how they were at their strongest when all five threads pulled around each other.

Anne was loved by all in the burning but inattentive way that children love their mothers.

He had been wrong when he thought she wasn’t attractive. It was as though he had first seen her face at night and found it obscured somehow. As the days passed, something changed. She became different, illuminated: dawn had arrived. He realised he had been mistaken before; he had missed something extraordinary in her. Now it was brilliant morning, and he saw her more clearly than ever. He understood that she was beautiful.

The idea that she could be suffering a sleepless night because of him was keeping Thomas alive.

Girls shouldn’t feel sorrow like this—that was Thomas’s first thought. This was the sort of sorrow to be found on the faces of the very old, people who’d seen many deaths, suffered years of hard winters. The sisters looked, he thought, as if something had been stolen from them.

She ate as an untamed animal eats, biting, chewing, the juice bleeding around her lips and down her chin. He was beguiled by her abandon. He wanted to watch her eat forever.

There were scholars at the university in Oxford who knew all manner of things about the earth and the heavens, and she believed herself akin to them. Her field was humbler but no less complex: she was an authority on the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed.

His face acquired a look which she had only seen once or twice before—an expression of outrage and revulsion, generally reserved for women who tried to tell him what to do.

Spending time with Agnes was not always a joy, but it had never occurred to Pete not to marry her. He tried to visit her at least once a week because it seemed to please her; he considered it a duty, and the fulfilment of duties made him feel agreeably pious. The more onerous the duty, the closer it brought him to God.

That was the problem with unearthly things, things sent from heaven or from hell: they made witnesses seem like madmen.

Pete marched past them. These women had no right to complain. What were unwashed clothes to a man whose livelihood depended on the water? They knew nothing of frustration, of suffering. He was the only one who knew.

The pretty one came towards him with her basket of clothes ready for hanging. He saw her face arrange itself into a smirk. Even the tired, labouring women were laughing at him. Something about her expression made him think of Anne Mansfield—it was on this stretch of the bank that he’d seen the girls turn. He knew then that he had done the right thing in telling Agnes what had happened. The Mansfield sisters had meant to scare him. They were mocking him, testing him. In return, they would feel the full, scalding weight of his anger.

even these people, the ones who urged caution as the story spread, looked within their hearts and found there a dark mistrust of the Mans- fields. They were not normal, those girls. The story confirmed for everybody what they had always known: there was something unnatural about the five sisters.

He felt, as he always did with village gossip, that the gossiper not only gave but took; something was required of the listener. Martha wanted him to exclaim, to show disbelief. She wanted the satisfaction of having surprised him.

Maybe she didn’t like her face to represent sickness. Maybe she hoped her face would merely represent itself.

He could just hear it, the sound. Like barking, but full of human feeling; no dog had ever felt so much.

It was impossible, brothering a boy who wanted so much to be a man. Not just any man—a brave man, a strong one, who commanded the respect of other men. Perhaps this should have gladdened Robin, who had after all spent much of his life pretending to be such a man. But he dreaded the loss of his brother; he couldn’t bear to give him up to the drinkers and the brawlers, the Pete Darlings of the world. And he would hate for Richard to cease thinking of him as someone worthy, his shining older sibling. He could see the change happening already—right now, before him, in fact. In the way Richard, facing him, didn’t meet his eye. The embarrassed clenching of his fists.

And it was true, death did trouble her, but it was not for the dead she went to see the funeral procession—it was for the living. It was for the six pregnant girls whom they made carry the coffin, a warning of their possible fate.

This had been a tradition in the village for as long as Temperance could remember. No one knew how it had come about, and no one had ever seriously tried to stop it; the oldest and cruellest traditions were usually the hardest to cast off. And so, with each death in childbirth, the dead woman’s coffin was carried by other women on their way to becoming mothers.