The Good Wife

by Eleanor Porter

  She looked at me more closely. ‘Before he’s hanged, you mean? No wonder the song caught at your eyes. That’s a long road, even for a ready youth like you, you’d best find company if you don’t want to fall prey to some ruffler or wild rogue.’

  ‘You’ve seen men like that?’

  ‘There’s one, an upright man, notorious, my father said, came in bold as brass, sat picking the blood from his nails before he ate. We’d have called the constables if we hadn’t been afraid. But it’s not what I’ve seen, it’s what I’ve heard too. Less than a week back there was a party snared at Bringsty, stripped of everything they owned and one, a draper, John Norris, stabbed through the heart.’

  I was fully alert now, the singing seemed far off, in another country. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I leaned further back from the candle. ‘They were travelling at night?’

  ‘No, no, broad day it was, just before that storm that washed out the bridge at Bransford. A lawyer of Coventry – Overbury? Overton? – walked as far as Sapey Bridge in his underclothes like a dripping ghost. Before he left town he said he’d give two pounds to the poor for every man who swung for it, five for the youth who seized his horse. They’ve mustered men.’

  I swallowed. ‘Some good may come of it then,’ I said, ‘the common will be cleaned and the poor assisted.’

  She stood up and leant forward, kissing me lightly on the lips, ‘Oh you are a woodcock,’ she said. ‘I like you. It’s not likely, is it, unless they find a lad whose neck will do as well as the other. They’ll be long gone, halfway to Wales before the lawyer had new hose on his legs. They’ll not be caught. An’ if they were, he’d forget his promise in a wink, though the mayor himself had signed it.’

  I got up to go then and thanking her I pressed my way through the tables to the street and all its stars.

  18

  The next morning I woke with a sore head, cursing myself for malingering. Days had been wasted. If, once I had climbed on the mare’s back, I had simply turned her nose to the north perhaps I should be almost at Lancaster by now. Over breakfast I became more forgiving. I was only half newborn. Across the table the apprentice boys ribbed and railed; one pushed his neighbour playfully in the chest, another rubbed at his hair with the heel of his hand. From the corner of my eye I watched them. They were talking of a merchant’s wife, who had lost a gold ring and had it found.

  ‘It was that scryer, Talbot. Him that’s come down from Oxford.’

  ‘Scryer …’ I almost started; it was as though I were being given a message. In our first years in Hope there’d been a famous scryer who lived alone in the hills above Wormsley. He had a great water bowl whose still surface, at his incantations, offered up revelations. Whatever had been lost was called on to appear and had no choice but to show itself. There was no evil in it, for he took no payment but prayers and the gifts people left at his door. There were others too, of course, less holy; Jacob said you’d see them any market day in Hereford; men who’d profess to find a vision in a pond, a puddle, in a cup of ale. Mountebanks abounded, but that didn’t make the practice false – we don’t lose faith in music because a piper cannot play true. It was a kind of natural magic, a tuning in to Nature herself. My grandam told me she had dabbled a little in the way of it, till she became afraid, being a woman, how it might be used against her.

  The boys were excited. I listened more carefully.

  ‘Come down from Oxford? Came back more like. He’s no more a Talbot than I am. He was born in Doldey Lane, plain Edward Kelley. John Kelley’s youngest son. My master says how he doubts he was ever at the University at all. Says last he knew he was grinding poultices for old Sterton, till they threw him out for dealing with magic.’

  ‘Well he talks like a University man. Got the devil’s own wit. Fred Bains says he’s after learning how to talk to angels in their own tongue.’

  ‘He’s learned sommat that’s for sure. I heard Mistress Tusser was so frantic for that ring she’d have let him swive her daughter to get it back.’

  ‘And have a go with her while he was about it.’

  ‘He don’t look like he’s particular.’

  ‘“Well, Mistress Tusser, if I’m to find your ring I must be shown your jewel.”’

  ‘“Oh but sir, why don’t you try it on?”’

  They were rising to go. I broke into their foolishness. ‘He found the ring?’

  At once they stopped laughing and looked at me, as though surprised that I could speak.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the first one said. ‘He looked into her mirror and said the words and it appeared to him straight. There ain’t nothing hid from him.’

  They began to file out. I gazed vaguely after them. It was an answer to my prayers. If this Talbot could show where Jacob was, how much time could be saved, how much mischance averted! ‘Where can I find him, this Talbot?’ I called after them.

  They paused in the doorway. One shrugged. ‘Show a bit of gold in the street,’ he laughed, ‘an he’ll find you.’

  ‘Oh, he’s been forgiven,’ another said, ‘he’s back on Angel Lane at the drugger’s. Sterton married his mother, you know.’

  It was barely a five-minute walk. The shop was tiny, squeezed between a milliner’s and a fulker’s. The shelves were lined with neatly labelled jars and at the back a grizzled man stood over a mortar. He narrowed his eyes when I asked for Talbot, looking me up and down till I began to shift from foot to foot.

  ‘I don’t know any Talbots.’

  ‘Edward Kelley, then.’

  ‘And you’d be wanting him for?’

  ‘There’s someone I’m seeking,’ I said. ‘My brother.’

  The man pressed his fingers together; the tips were stained brown; he continued to survey me.

  ‘You have a tidy shop, sir,’ I said. ‘My poor mother was something of a herbalist, she would have relished the use of an establishment such as yours, but being buried, as we were, in the country, she had to make do. Do you have, by chance, any ointment of lesser celandine? She swore it could heal the King’s evil.’

  ‘She was right,’ he said, lifting down a pot, ‘If caught early. I have the roots. I could make an ointment up.’

  When I came back a little later to collect it and pay, his manner, though still wary, was more forthcoming. ‘And if I were to cross paths with young Master Talbot, whom shall I say was asking after him?’

  Jabez, I said, realising I had only half a name. ‘Jabez Foxe. I am lodging at the widow’s house next the Bull and Bear.’

  On my way back I weighed up how long to wait. If this man Talbot could, by some good magic, show me where Jacob was, and in what state – oh how it would ease my mind! For the first time since miscarrying our child I felt hope stir. All would yet be well. An afternoon returned to me, a summer’s day, a year or more ago. We had begun to believe I had conceived, my courses had not come in months, but then returning early he found me washing out some bloody clouts. He’d said nothing, but turned and headed back to the stables and I’d waited, till the stew was spoiled and the ragged sun had sunk. When he came home he held me tenderly and kissed the tears from my cheeks and we did not talk of it. The words formed in my mouth, but I did not dare utter them. ‘Jacob,’ I said now, ‘I am not barren. I lost a child, by God’s grace we can have another.’

  I spent a fruitless afternoon tramping the city. Talbot’s reputation grew or crashed from street to street. He had found a pig, a stolen gown, a truant boy, a baby. He spoke with angels, they whispered in his ear; he had conversations with the dead. He was a swindler, a brawler, a gambler, a forger and a thief. A tavern owner on the Sudbury road asked if I was the foreign gentleman come to pay his bill. All were agreed on one thing – he’d not been seen these two days past. I turned back to the widow’s and flung myself on the narrow bed to count the flies. A headache hammered at my temples like an iron bolt. I should have asked the apothecary for willow bark and yarrow. It came of too much loitering. Tomorrow I would rouse myself at dawn and leave.
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  For an hour or more I lay on the bed, with half-made plans drifting in and out of my head, all the while berating myself that I couldn’t seem to stir. Just as the bell for supper rang up the stairs I heard the cry of a pedlar outside my window. My bones were stiff with walking but I wrenched myself up and seized the bundle of my women’s things. He was already turning past St Martin’s Church when I halloed him. They were good clothes, but as he held them up to the evening light the line the blood had left showed up like a tearstain on paper and he gave me only a shilling. Returning, I felt strangely lightheaded and desolate, and my cheeks burned as though my honesty were tied up in my skirts.

  I had thought to leave the ointment for Mercy in the morning, explaining it was for the swellings I had noted on her neck; but as I climbed back up the narrow stairs I decided to take it to the tavern tonight. It would be better to give it into her hands – to do otherwise would invite questions of her. Also, I realised suddenly I could not bear to be alone. It would be good to talk to my ale wench and to dull the ache in my head in thick sweet beer. I felt a hollow, empty thing. I missed Jacob, it was a wound I fretted at, that would not close, but I missed the others too, little Meg most of all. Did it cause her pain when people spoke of me, or worse, when they avoided my name? I thought of the dampness of her hair in the morning on the bed, the way her gaze had not yet learned to swerve and dodge as adults’ did, but held you, moment on moment in serious study.

  When I found the tavern open and Mercy not there I thought I would go home. My head beat so that I could barely think, but the landlord set a cup before me and it worked as well as willow bark. I drank it off; he set another. Before long I found I had companions and there was Mercy sitting on my knee. I was losing at dice.

  ‘This is Jabez,’ she said to the big bearded man next to me. ‘He’s in quest of his brother who I think must be a rascal and not worth saving, to leave such a pretty youth as this.’

  ‘At your service sir,’ the big man said.

  ‘I think he should stay here and get himself a sweetheart,’ Mercy said, pouring me more beer. The room was a rocking boat; I held tight to her to keep from falling.

  ‘You’ll be needing a guide,’ the big man said.

  ‘You will,’ a scrawny grog-nosed man put in as he scooped up the ha’pennies I’d laid out.

  ‘I must go to bed,’ I said, but the words would not form properly in my mouth.

  ‘Shush,’ Mercy said, tipping the cup to my lips and kissing the drops that dribbled down my chin. ‘Such smooth skin – I think a maid passed dough across your face and now you’ll never grow whiskers.’

  I patted her face away but it came back, with her eyes swimming in her head. ‘Don’t, I beg you,’ I said.

  The dice spattered over the table. With a great effort I pushed Mercy from my knee and scraped my chair back. The room was full of eyes turning towards us. I’m drunk, I thought, glancing from Mercy – wobbling in and out of view, laughing like a tumbler’s bell – to the two men across the table. They seemed to have two heads apiece; it was very funny.

  ‘You owe us money,’ the scrawny one said. ‘A groat.’

  ‘A shilling,’ the fat one put in.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘He’ll pay you, he’ll set you right, won’t you Jabez?’ she said; then her voice cooed at my ear, ‘you better pay, dear, Hugh’s friend here sliced off a man’s ear that crossed him in a game.’ Somewhere, I saw that the big one was balling his fists and I was afraid, but they seemed so like players on a cart and poor ones too – rogues aping menace with their masks all loose and the doltish audience mooning round. What did it matter anyway? The pain in my head was returning, like a rope twisting at my eyes. I squinted a grin.

  ‘You’re a pair of piss-hosed cozeners,’ I said, reeling back against Mercy.

  ‘And you sir? I know what you are,’ Hugh, the scrawny one, began, poking my chest. I looked down at the finger, so giddily pleased it was not a little lower that I began to laugh.

  ‘I know what you are,’ he repeated, putting his hand on his knife. But I had begun to laugh, I could not stop; they took me for a fool and they were right, but no worse than they, we were a ship of fools deceiving one another into hell.

  I would have undone myself quite, for the big man lumbered forward, and seized my doublet and I still laughing. Then all at once one of the listeners came into the light and seized him by the ear so that he yelped and hopped.

  Scrawny Hugh stepped back. ‘Let him go, Ned,’ he said. ‘This en’t your quarrel.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the stranger, ‘but you see I’ve decided that it is.’

  A moment later I found myself outside, with my head thrust under a pump and a cold stream of water rinsing my brain clear. The sun had not quite finished going down.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, as the stranger pulled my head up between thrusts, ‘please let me go, now. I am not feeling well.’

  For answer he lowered his head to mine and grinned, then held me under the flow just a moment longer before he released me.

  ‘You need another name young Foxe,’ he said. ‘The hounds would have you in a minute. I think you are more a cock pheasant – easy game, and not a little pretty.’

  I looked at him. His saving me gave him the right to condescend, but for all that he was barely older than I was, and not a great deal taller, although thickset as a bear. His bulk sat oddly with his voice; he spoke like an educated man. ‘It was my good fortune that you were by, sir,’ I said, forming the words carefully in my mouth, as though speaking were new to me.

  ‘Not fortune at all. You have been calling my name up and down the city all the afternoon. I came to the tavern to decide whether to be found.’

  I turned to him in surprise and opened my mouth to speak, but could think of nothing of sense to say. Beer and pain puddled my vision, and my teeth chattered with a cold that came not from pump water but my bones.

  The man was peering at me beneath his dense eyebrows. ‘God’s death man,’ he said, ‘you are falling. Let’s get you to your bed.’

  19

  I had wit enough left to refuse to let him help me undress. The widow fussed into the room behind him.

  ‘He’s only paid one week,’ she said. ‘I won’t bear the cost of a funeral. And what if it should be plague? I’ve heard the new law, I’ll be boarded up, finished. This is a good clean house, I don’t want sickness in it.’

  ‘Madam,’ Talbot boomed – for though he was a short man he had a voice that could silence a cockfight. ‘There’s no question of plague, or of dying. The boy has a fever, brought on, no doubt, by dirty linen and poor food. I, Edward Talbot shall be his surety.’

  ‘What’s that to me?’ she said, a little quelled nonetheless, ‘Whoever you are, he’s not staying here without I have another week in hand.’

  Talbot told me after that I sweated in and out of sense all night; that I recoiled when he approached, clutching my belly and screaming so loud it brought my fellow boarders to the door. In the morning I felt well enough to send him off – and to button my shirt up to my neck. Then the fever mounted again. For three days I began clear, burning but in sound mind, able to piss and drink, even to eat a little. Then from noon the fever gripped me. By nightfall I felt close to death, babbling and weeping. My limbs ached as though they were slowly turning to stone or clay. They were too heavy to lift. I was the dead boy covered in elderflowers and foxgloves with the turf piling on my chest and face. Or else I was in the cave again with the rain a curtain before me and my belly frayed cloth. My mother came to me with the rope round her neck and cold lips; my father too, and that was better, he was making a doll for me, he would cover it in lace; ‘don’t you worry Meg,’ he said, ‘I will bring you a doll to play with.’ ‘Aye, but can I trust you?’ Jacob said. He was always leaving; I could see his shadow in the doorway; he was loping through the orchard; I heard his voice in the street. I tried to heave myself up to go and reach him. Only once, in the heaped confusion of
my visions did I believe him with me, lying naked with his leg over mine and his head on my chest. I drew my fingers through his hair. We were both sated and weeping. ‘Forgive me,’ he was saying, over and over. And I was answering, ‘No.’

  There were intervals of reason. Sometimes the widow appeared briefly, to empty my piss pot and bring me drink, shaking her head slowly or making the sign of the cross above me as though I could not see. More often Talbot’s ugly face leaned over me with a foul brew and I cowered, thinking him a constable, or sent by Boult, or worse, one of the Bringsty outlaws. Soon the visions shrank and I drifted in and out of sleep, half grateful to give over any thought of action or intent and simply let my body sink into the cot.

  Then one morning I woke to the smell of warm pottage and felt my mouth run with hunger. Talbot was standing by the bed with a steaming bowl in his hand.

  ‘This tick stinks,’ he said. ‘Get up. I’ll make the flint-fisted hag change it while you eat.’

  I felt a little dizzy, but my head was clear. I dressed myself slowly, listening to Talbot bombast the widow. He seemed a man who was either very quiet or very loud. When he returned I looked at him warily. ‘I am in your debt, sir,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Why did you help me?’

  ‘If I said I was prompted by the tender mercy of our Lord, would you believe me? No, I thought not.’ He chewed on a piece of bread and frowned. His eyes were wide-set and watchful as an owl’s and his brows, too, as bushy as a horned owl’s. ‘Well then,’ he went on. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I did it on a whim. You interest me. It’s a sap-brained clown, but a witty one, who falls to laughing at a man about to skewer him. When the fever took you, you wailed I was the Gorgon, petrifying your cold limbs inch by inch. Odd, to find a bumpkin bubbling Ovid. I thought to put you to bed and leave you to get better or to die, but the old woman seemed likely to throw you out to the parish and my conscience got the better of me.’