Read an extract from Rapture by Emily Maguire.
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A rich, musky scent accompanies her for some minutes before its meaning arrives and the hair on her limbs bristles as though she, too, is a boar preparing to charge. Before she fully understands that the dark cluster of shrubs in front of her has transformed into muscle, bone and tusks, her body reacts, turns and runs along the just-trodden path.
Poor frightened animal body that does what it can while the knowing mind takes its time. Stand your ground and shout with authority, her mind says as the back of her thigh bursts open and the rest of her flips in the air and comes down hard. Play dead, her clever, too-slow mind instructs as her body scrambles for the nearest tree. The boar backs up, lowers its monstrous head. Her hands cling heroically to the branch as a tusk slides through her guts, then out again. The boar moves away, hooves the dirt. Its next charge will gore her all the way to heaven.
At last God takes her side, allays the pain for as long as it takes to hoist herself fully onto the branch. She lies like a hunting cat as the boar grunts its frustration at having lost its prey. Soon it lumbers away through the bushes and Agnes breathes deeply of air that no longer carries its musk.
Was her impaler one of the darlings who snuffled her belly as she lay in the leaf litter beneath this very tree? Was this punishment for abandoning them once they were no longer babes? If not that, what? Something must have caused this astonishing violence.
Her mind stops searching as her body stops trying to be anything other than still. Her blood keeps moving, though, painting the bough and feeding the soil well into the night, when the search party her father raises finds what they think is a murdered child hidden in the thick middle branches of the forest’s oldest oak.
Awake but somehow not. Pain that cannot be real. Days and nights like this, knowing and unknowing. Father murmuring and ladies praying, hot stones pressing her down and the overwhelming smell of salt brine as though she is being preserved for the season along with the excess radish crop.
Clarity returns little by little over the coldest months. Each time her father leaves her side he presses her hand to his lips and promises he will return at speed. Women come and go. Strangers treat her body as if it were their most precious possession. She does not like being lifted, turned, handled. Does not like being bathed like a babe or having potions painted over her middle and held in place with stones for hours.
When her wounds are at last dry and hard, and she can sit by herself and spoon pottage into her own mouth, she hears her father in furious discussion with some visiting men and she understands that a marriage contracted mere weeks before her injury has been cancelled.
She pretends to sleep and learns from the women attending her that people think the English Priest quite mad. The lengths the man has gone to in order to save his daughter and for what? All knew she was a wild and undisciplined child, leaf- and twig-littered, solitary and often heard speaking to herself. All knew her mother was a pagan until death. Now the child’s flesh matches her blood. What parents would knowingly invite such a cursed creature into their family? What future could a motherless, maimed and unmarriageable girl have? What use could she be to anyone, even a mad old Englishman?
With full heart and lifted spirit Agnes thanks God, who had, of course, been with her all along in the forest. He knew the depth of her suffering and fear and sent a beast to do the only thing that could save her. She will live and die unwanted by men; that is, free. And one day people will kneel at the tree that held her, will press their foreheads to the bloodstained trunk and give thanks for the day their beloved saint was spared.
Extracted from Rapture by Emily Maguire.
Rapture
by Emily Maguire
An imaginative and audacious historical novel from the best-selling author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident.