Hex by Jenni Fagan

Author:Jenni Fagan [Fagan, Jenni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polygon

8

Geillis Duncan

5.33 a.m.

Memories (Iris come back/the river flows):

1st August 2021 – cell on High Street, 4th December 1591

Elements: Water + Luna

Whenever I missed my grandmother I took the moon out and looked at it. I rubbed it when I went to sleep every night. Persuaded myself this one act, if repeated enough times, would keep me safe. On the next market day those women walked the streets as they did. All bone and marrow, red-veined, all tooth and claw, opening and closing their beaked faces and their tongues darting out all forked. I kept the shell hidden in my skirt pockets. Touched it when they made me feel scared to be seen by others. My own Luna shell to give me light when I was afraid to show mine – it would reflect its own back at me. It made me so happy. One day I decided to bathe in his tin bath (as if I had the right), and my master stole it. Seaton! He took it. The thing I had that shined. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t even say a word. I just tried even harder to cook his tea exactly how he liked, polished the silver twice, took his boots off for him at the door. Kept turning down the bed just perfectly with the triangle shape he insisted upon and all his shirts twice pressed. I did all of my duties better than I had before. He disliked me even more then. He muttered in other rooms where he knew I would hear him but not loud enough for me to say anything – as if I’d ever have had the courage or idiocy to do so. People would visit, and he would tell them I was doing things that I was not doing. He tried out different stories on varying audiences, to see how they’d react, to gauge what they’d say – to see if he could make them believe him. He didn’t say it in public. Not at first. He told these stories, embellished a little each time, always in private to see if they had the right impact on the listener. He tried it with the butcher and the baker and the vicar and the scribe. That went well, so he said it to the lawmaker and then almost daily to his prize red hen. He was rehearsing, finessing the kind of story that could end in a teenage girl’s death. He began to tell me I was dishonest and mistrustful and lazy. Over time, he taught me to no longer trust what I thought, or said, or even the things that my gut told me. When I walked down a street, people began to straighten their spines when they saw me, as if I might take an inch from their height just by being near them.

Geillis Duncan is cursed with an ability to cure the ill.

So they say.

They said it in a whisper so I wouldn’t hear, and then

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