Free Wickedness by Deborah White

“Now I wonder what this is… your grandma had so much stuff you wouldn’t believe. Masses and masses of cuttings about plague outbreaks all over the world. And not to mention all the stuff on circuses. I mean, how weird is that?”
    Claire didn’t think it was weird at all. Not now anyway, because it didn’t seem to her that her grandma had ever done anything without a purpose. But Claire had no idea what the purpose was. She could understand all the plague stuff. But circuses, tightrope walkers. Where did they fit in to the puzzle?
    “Can I have these?” Claire unclipped the circus tickets. Held them out for her mum to look at. “Only it IS my birthday soon and Jade says she’ll come with me. If you go early you can join in, do a workshop. Jade would love that.”
    “You hate circuses! Anyway, I don’t want you going Claire. Not now. Not with the flu. You shouldn’t be going to crowded places. And I don’t want to catch it.”
    For a second her mum seemed flustered. SoClaire pocketed the tickets quickly while she wasn’t paying attention.
    “Now…” Claire’s mum had pulled herself together and was clearing a space on the desktop and smoothing out the roll of paper. “Oh… the famous family tree. Well I suppose I’d better keep it. Though why anyone would be interested in a load of dead people is beyond me.”
    But Claire was interested, because at the top of the tree she could see a name. Margrat Jennet. Born 23rd December 1651. She did a quick count in her head. So she would have turned 14 in 1665, the year of the Plague.
    My age , she thought, give or take a few weeks. And was it the same name she’d struggled to read on the manuscript? She knew it was.
    “Can I have it? I’ll look after it.”
    “If you want.”
    But not the box. She couldn’t have that, because it might be valuable. And this wasn’t. Just names.
     
    She left her mum clearing out the rest of the desk drawers and she took the family tree upstairs to Grandma’s bedroom, where there was space to spread it out on the floor in front of the bay window.
    She knelt down and unrolled it, weighting down the corners with four books she pulled off a nearby shelf. Then she bent over to study it.
    There at the top, Margrat Jennet, born in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry. There at the bottom, her own name, with her date of birth, the 7th August. Beside Margrat’s name, Grandma had written ‘red hair’ and underlined it. And beside Claire’s name, she’d written the same. And why was that fact important enough for her to have underlined it? She traced all the names down, noticing with surprise that all the children born who had survived, were girls. All the boys had been still-born or died shortly after birth. And no one else was listed as having red hair. And how on earth did Grandma know that Margrat had? And why was it important enough for her to underline it?
    Claire sat back on her heels and rubbed the palms of her hands dry on her shorts.
    She felt a little quiver of excitement at the thought of a connection made across three hundred and fifty years and ten generations to this Margrat Jennet, who was her direct ancestor! What had she looked like? Anything like me?
    Claire jumped up and ran to look in thedressing-table mirror. Did the face that stared back look anything like Margrat’s? Were Margrat’s eyes that changeable colour too? Sometimes grey. Sometimes green.
    Maybe they were, she thought. Maybe I’m a throwback.
    So many questions and would the sheaf of papers that Grandma had left with the ring hold the answers? All she had to do was be brave. Stop thinking that stupid nonsense about the plague and take the papers and try and decipher the writing. Surely the ring and the papers and the box were all connected? She could go and fetch the papers now. But the thought of it still scared her – she felt stupid – but it did.
    She would move back into Grandma’s bedroom tomorrow and then look at the papers properly. Late