The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

She thought about what they all went through each day: the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating. To be forced to hold your dead friend aloft because it was thought that you, in your smallness and stupidity, might not realise that this could be your fate. It made her tense and pale with rage.

Walking away, her heart felt heavy. How could she warn them that they needed to be careful? The world was more dangerous than they knew.

“In matters of the inner life,” he said, “of privacy and quiet, I think we can wager that I have more authority than you.” She nodded, chastened, and the vicar walked on. He didn’t invite her to follow. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” he called. “I believe these girls need the help of our Lord.”

She thought about their story as though it were a tale being told at the Swan—she had heard such stories, leavened with ale, so often before. Usually, Temperance knew, there came a moment in the drunken teller’s tale when the story took a sudden turn for the worse. Slam went the teller’s tankard down on the table, and the pink-faced listeners gasped; there was no going back. This was that moment, she felt, as she summoned Pete to ferry her across. She had told the vicar something she shouldn’t have, and now there was no going back.

She gleefully recited her findings as they went: her own spoon was, of course, the finest fire-starter, followed by that of Anne, then Mary, then Elizabeth, and finally Grace.

He and his wife had brought them up as they had brought up their own son, with interests and dreams. Perhaps it had been a mistake, he thought, to let them believe they could reach beyond what the world expected of them. The world expected so little.

“There isn’t anything we can do. We must hope that nothing comes of it.” But Joseph was a farmer, and he knew what was likely to grow. The seed of this story would find fertile ground in the village. He dreaded to think how quickly it would flourish.

little tasks were the foot soldiers in the ongoing battle against despair.

He saw what she was trying to say: that history was round, that all things pass. But she was wrong to think it about this situation. There had never been anyone like the Mansfield sisters; there would never be anyone like them again. Their spiritedness and singularity, the way rumours about them bred. How people grew preoccupied with them, how they dreaded and pursued them and might eventually ruin them. No other girls in history had ever met with such a fate.

things,” he said. She looked up at him. “Yes. They must be busy, those girls.” Opinions had a way of gathering and sticking, Thomas thought, like lines of ants swarming to honey. Every grievance found its way back to the sisters, it seemed.

That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs, they were girls with teeth and claws. Girls had crazy whims and grudges—these ones especially. He didn’t trust them. They made him afraid.

It struck Robin, listening to Richard reel off these questions, that the villagers were more afraid of the girls themselves than they were of the dogs. Girls—normal human girls—people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.

It was the heat, the boy said darkly. It wore people down.

A pair of ravens, vivid against the pale sky, swooped overhead. He stopped abruptly, remembering the supernatural knack these birds had for sensing death. He couldn’t explain it, but he had seen them before, roosting on the homes of those whose time on earth was ending. He bowed his head. Maybe they wouldn’t settle in Little Nettlebed today. He prayed that they were simply passing through.

2 are meant to be lucky, though.

“Please forgive me for asking, Miss Grace. But is there…” “Is there what?” she said. “Anything wrong with us?” He nodded, ashamed. Her face seemed suddenly very old. “Oh,” she said. “So much.”

“Why did you do it?” he whispered in the corridor. She looked at him and smiled.

He didn’t like to think of them as fragile. He searched within his soul and saw a terrible truth: that he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls. Dogs lived ignorantly and happily; they didn’t know the extent of human pain. He wanted to preserve them from all the fears and the threats with which life might present them.

There are people in the village who wish you harm.” “I know that,” she said. She spoke forcefully—she was much closer than he realised. “Do you think I don’t know that?” She stopped and retreated. When she continued, her voice was quiet and low. “If no one wished us any harm we’d be happy right now. We’d be normal. None of this would have happened.”

He didn’t miss his father, who had been rude and rageful, but he missed the idea of him, and sometimes, standing by the Thames, the idea of his father returned to him very strongly.

The girls were confined, and that was good, but he wanted more. He wanted to know for certain that God was smiling down on him.

“We went out when we weren’t supposed to, we were too free, and this—all of this—is our punishment. It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs, and everything to do with the fact of us being girls.”

Something—someone—was barking. The sound had a mocking note. He could picture it coming from the mouths of dogs, or jackdaws, or demons. Not girls, though. Not lovely, gentle girls, waiting in a garden at home. This sound was far too wild, too violent; no girl could contain it.

“What do you want?” Thomas said. Pete gave an enraged croak and threw his bloodied jacket on the ground. “I want to know why these girls, these … bitches, seem intent on ruining my wedding day, and”—he gestured at his hand—“and, and why they bit me, and why they’ve set about plaguing me all summer.”

“I’ve become them,” he said, tears swimming around his nose and gathering in his mouth. “Don’t you see? I’ve become them. I didn’t think twice.” “Who?” Anne said. “Who have you become?” Robin’s face was the picture of fear. He looked at her, horrified. “Them,” he said, and gestured outwards, over the river, the village and the fields, towards the world beyond.

They followed his finger—his juddering, outstretched finger, its bitten-down nail—and Thomas heard a sigh whisper through the group. He looked around and saw all the girls staring at the spot indicated by Robin, their faces intent, as though they had found in the wooded vista something familiar and frightening. They knew what he meant by them. Elizabeth stepped forward. “You are Robin Wildgoose. Nobody else. Nothing will ever change that.”

It was a relief, in a way, to submit to it. To acknowledge to herself that she was weak and the drink was strong. Why did she think she could withstand it, when so many others could not? She loved her father, and now she understood him. It felt binding to share his vice.

Men were like clams, lips sealing in each other’s presence. It was best if she saw him alone.

God was like the vicar: she knew everything about him, but he had never shown any interest in her.

That day, though, standing in the dim passage, she could have sworn she felt something. A presence encompassed her, a warmth. She believed herself capable of anything, whatever she set her mind to, for God was smiling on her.

yeah lady that would be the alcohol

He had seen them. Beautiful dogs, fierce and full of power. Amid his grief and his fear, he found another feeling—gladness. The old thought returned to him, that he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls. He’d rather they were free than confined by him.