STACEY HALLS The Familiars. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley.
Stacey Halls plunges into the witch craze of 17th-century England in her new novel.
In Lancashire, England, it’s 1612. Fleetwood Shuttleworth, Mistress of Gawthorpe, is 17 years old and pregnant for the fourth time after three dreadful miscarriages. Without an heir for her husband Richard, and with a strange distance growing between them, Fleetwood’s position feels tenuous. She fears for her marriage and also her very life when she discovers an old letter that Richard has kept secret from her. In it, a doctor states that Fleetwood will not survive another pregnancy. Fleetwood’s constant nausea, lack of appetite and deathly pallor all reinforce this assertion:
Perhaps death was right behind me, stepping with me, moving in my shadow, and at any moment it would gather me in its cloak.
Before she can work up the courage to confront her husband, in the woods Fleetwood meets Alice Gray, a strange young midwife. Alice promises that there is hope – both for her and the baby:
There was something fiercely intelligent, almost masculine, in her gaze, and though she was crouched down and I standing, for a moment I felt afraid, as though I was the one who had been discovered.
When Alice is the latest of many northern women to be accused of witchcraft, Fleetwood risks everything to try and clear her midwife’s name. In this political climate, any woman with a dog, a cat and/or an unfortunate enemy could be a witch. Fleetwood suspects the witchcraft ‘trials’ are a farce; one last hurrah for a retiring sheriff who somehow manages to find Devil worshippers everywhere he looks:
I hated him more than ever in that moment. He was like a cat placing a powerful paw on a mouse’s tail before letting it go and catching it again. [He] enjoyed letting people wheedle, and persuade, and beg, letting them think they were in with a chance, when his decision was already made.
It becomes a race against time. Fleetwood trusts no one else to deliver her baby and treads a fine line between simply being seen as a wild runaway wife, interfering with the King’s justice, and being arrested as a witch herself. While she doesn’t believe the particular accusation levelled against Alice, Fleetwood is left to wonder: Is Alice a witch? Are any of the accused women really witches? Does it matter?
This book is thoroughly enjoyable and intriguing, with a few revelations along the way and a mystery that is more satisfying for not being fully resolved at the end. There’s a lot of historical detail in how people talk, what words are used and how Fleetwood thinks, which definitely adds a lot to the story.
Descriptions aren’t overly detailed, though without sacrificing imagery. Much of the language is fairly simple but also poetic:
… the door to the dungeon clanged open and the shrieking grew louder.
‘She’s dead! She’s dead! She’s dead!’
The words flew out like crows from a forest, echoing around the walls with nowhere to land.
What I like most about this novel is that it surprised me. There is an extra depth to it that I wasn’t expecting at the start. Some characters are more complicated than they first appear.
Stacey Halls The Familiars Bonnier 2019 PB pp432 RRP $29.99
Amelia Dudley is currently taking a break from a Master’s degree focussing on plant biology. She is the proud aunt of many nieces and nephews. In her spare time she reads, gardens, draws, paints and doesn’t get to do enough writing.
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