by Non Bramley
Woodsmoke. I could smell woodsmoke. So could Meg. She turned under me and I let her guide us. Woodsmoke meant fire and heat, maybe people.
We walked through a strange landscape of ridges and hollows, and came to a homestead. Smoke drifted from the roof. Someone was home. It was a prosperous-looking place surrounded by a wooden palisade that had been newly repaired. There must be people there, and a fire, and maybe fodder for Meg. I sent up a heartfelt prayer of thanks.
First I had to find a way in. I hammered on the palisade wall, the wood deadening the sound. Nothing. I called out, kicking the rough timber and nearly fell from the saddle when the hidden gate swung open under my boot.
Nothing stirred inside the walls. No one came to greet me. The last thing I saw as I closed the gate made my heart hammer in my chest. The sick wolf was sitting patiently not one hundred yards away.
It was not surprising that there was no one outside on a day as bitter as this. I had a moment’s hesitation, wondering if I’d just barred the gate on the owner of this place who would come back from gathering firewood to find a waiting hungry wolf.
I led Meg quickly into the barn, breaking the ice on a bucket of water and throwing my own cloak over her shoulders as she sank her nose into a manger of fusty hay.
Then I ran, the cold biting and my legs slipping from under me to the timbered hall.
I knocked and lifted the latch.
It was like stepping into heaven.
Chapter Fourteen
It wasn’t a large room, but its brick floor shone and reflected flames from the hearth. The air was warm and my frozen fingers began to ache and complain. There was real glass in the windows and pictures on the walls. Books, their spines the colours of faded jewels lined one wall from floor to ceiling. A table held a bowl filled with apples that were only a little wrinkled. Two chairs sat either side of the fireplace. Someone must be home, you wouldn’t leave such a roaring fire unattended, it would need to be banked up or raked out.
A stairway led from this room up to another floor, its steps polished by hundreds of years of soft leather boots. The air was cold and smelt of lavender and applewood. The single bedchamber was just as well kept. I opened a wooden trunk at the foot of the bed and found shirts embroidered with coloured threads. A fur pelt covered the floor. There was even a mirror.
It was the first time I’d seen myself reflected so clearly for many months, possibly years. I’d grown very thin, my cheekbones sharp. My eyes looked unusually green and red rimmed.
A reflected flash of copper – someone had passed the open door while my back was turned.
I heard quiet footsteps on the stairs, and I followed.
Then, there was Tom. He was sitting by the fire and smiled at me as if I was the thing he most wanted in the world.
‘Why did you take so long?’ he said. ‘I’ve missed you.’
Tom had changed. He looked older, more potent. His hair had grown, framing a face that was as perfect an example of male beauty as I have ever seen. It was hard not be swayed by it, to imagine that nothing this fine could be base.
‘Come and sit with me, Jude. I’ve so much to tell you.’
I told him to stand, and ran my hands down his body, checking for a concealed knife. I found nothing but hard, warm skin, and his smile. For the first time in my life I felt ugly and brutish.
It was like witchcraft. Eventually, I sat cautiously.
‘Is your name Thomas Tavener?’
‘Of course not. I thought you’d know that.’
He looked disappointed, the perfect lips parted in a small grimace of distaste.
‘Your name is Simon. You’re the same Brother Simon that was at Banfield when the women went missing.’
‘They didn’t go missing. I know exactly where they are.’
‘Where are they?’
‘In your mortuary I imagine.’
‘Did you kill them?’
‘Not in the way you mean. Nothing is ever truly dead.’
‘Magdela looked dead to me. Dead and rotting in a shitty little hole. Did you put her there?’
‘She put herself there. I never force anyone. They like to please me.’
I bet they do, I thought. You’re a snake, beautiful and sleek and merciless.
‘You’re struggling,’ he said. ‘You need to find the right question. You’re like your horse – big, beautiful and a little stupid.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘If you like.’
He stretched his legs out to stroke the inside of my thigh with his foot. I kicked his chair leg then. It broke, and he rolled to the floor. I stood over him.
‘You can stay there, bastard. What’s your name?’
‘Let me get up.’
‘Get up and I’ll break your jaw. What’s your name?’
‘Simon.’
‘Simon what?’
‘Simon Wright.’
‘Where were you born?’
‘You know this – I told you. I’ve never lied to you, my bright belovèd. I love the very bones of you.’ He lay back and put his hands behind his head.
‘Did you kill the whore known as Magdela?’
He didn’t answer. A cold draught made the fire roar in the grate.
‘Let me up,’ he said.
‘Did you kill the whore known as Magdela? Answer and you can sit on this.’ I kicked a low stool towards him.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘I killed the whore but not the Magdalene.’
He got up on to his knees and then sat on the low stool, where he still managed to look more comfortable than I have ever been.
‘You really don’t know anything, do you? My name is Simon Wright. I was born in Berwyn. I spent two years at Banfield working with that harridan Lollis. I saw the pointlessness of what we do. You’ve seen it to now too. I made sure of that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Every single pilgrim who comes through those gates is a sin-raddled pile of human shit. They drink and fight and kill and whore out their children. Then they say a little prayer at the shrine of a saint and promise to be good, and they are good, for a little, little while, and then it’s back to being a pile of shit again. So what do they need, Jude? How do we make this world a better place?’
‘You tell me.’
‘You’d think they need faith, wouldn’t you? But it’s not faith, its proof. If we can prove that God’s power exists then Hell exists too. That was always the problem with the divine plan. People want jam today not jam tomorrow. I found a way for jam today. I didn’t know it at first but I was always on the right path.’
That phrase, jam today, I’d heard it before, months back, but where?
‘I thought at first that I could be a great example to the world. God has made me beautiful, I could be a living saint and the world would know me, love me and follow me, follow my example. That was no good. I’m not a saint. Men shouldn’t be beautiful.
‘I met Magdela. Her name means of the Magdalene you know. She was the penitent whore … after I fucked her that is. She washed my feet with her tears and anointed them with oil.’
‘We found the remnants of it in her hair,’ I said.
‘I thought she’d be more though, she was just a whore in the end. I couldn’t have her telling the world about our union … not for me, you understand, but for the great purpose, to inspire the world to be better. She grew less beautiful not more, as time went on. I sent her to God. Afterwards, I felt different. Not immediately, it grew … a feeling that I could see through the veil between our world and the next.’
‘Tell me about Rebecca.’
‘Later. She doesn’t come next.’
‘Where’s Artemisia Cohen?’
Simon looked amused, perplexed. ‘Who?’
‘The child you took.’
‘I’m not a monster, Jude. I’d never harm a child. Stop interrupting. Next comes the greatest miracle this world has ever seen and it’s all down to me.
I brought God back into the world. Even the thought of it makes me want to fall to my knees.’ He glowed, sitting there in the firelight, eyes, skin, glittering like they were scattered with diamonds. A living icon.
‘I met Anne Mercer, and she was a pure soul, Jude. I tried to tempt her but she was never interested in me as a man. She just wanted to talk, and her words were gentle and full of love. I miss her too.’
‘You met her when she started work at the infirmary.’
‘Yes.’ Thomas looked annoyed and his eye teeth glinted.
I got a brief glimpse of the devil sitting there by the fire and calling me by name.
‘You know, you were the catalyst for all this,’ he said. ‘Anne told me you were coming, that Prior Johanna had asked for a Reeve and you were formidable. That worried me. I didn’t want you to misunderstand the work and I knew you would. If I’d just left it would have raised suspicion, I didn’t know if you could track me down and I couldn’t have that, so I soaked my shirt in blood and told Lollis I had the red water. I knew enough to fake the symptoms well. She took one look and sent me home to die.’
‘You’d need fresh blood to fake that disease. Did you kill David’s pet fox to get it?’
‘There’s the clever mind I heard of! Yes, I killed it. No one should love an animal more than people.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was a Godsend, meeting Anne that morning. She was so kind, so sweet, and I thought, why not let her do it? Why not let her come home with me and nurse me back to health? She was the right match for me, you see. You could see God in every curve of her face. I didn’t mean to hurt her.’
‘You went away with her.’
‘She followed me, packed her bags secretly, didn’t want to say goodbye to her cloying father. We spent the night in the old guild church. She was meek as a lamb, knew I wasn’t really sick. She was so gentle. And she understood, Reeve, she really understood. I told her about the Magdalene and I could see the happiness wash right over her, but she wasn’t what I thought she was. She was something else.’
‘In what way?’
‘That night, she woke me up, she seduced me, told me how she’d been living, what she’d done with men. She stripped herself naked and got on top of me and ground her hips and sucked me dry, and she covered me in her blood when I slit her throat.’
‘In God’s name, why?’
‘Because she understood! She was the true Magdalene reborn and I needed her bones.’
—I will believe till the day I die, Levi that Anne put herself under his knife on purpose.
Bones, the love of bones, the power of scraps of holy bodies to change a man’s behaviour and scrub his soul clean … this was his reason. Simon believed that he had ushered into the world a saint potent enough to make free will a thing of the past. Powerful enough to make himself the head of a faith that would scour heresy from the world.
He got up and beckoned me through to his workroom, where a scattering of human teeth and fingerbones were in the process of being polished and gilded.
‘You think I’m insane, don’t you?’ he said, as I looked over this grisly little collection of remnants.
‘I know you are. You’re still going to die though, under my knife in fact.’ I said, picking up one of the small chisels he used for this profanity.
‘You’d like to rip me apart. Split me like a ripe fig, my love.’
He was standing too close, and I pushed him back roughly.
‘She won’t let you harm me, she’s been my guardian all this time and you’re weak and feeble against the power of God,’ he said.
‘Stop with all this. You have a taste for fucking and killing young women and keeping their bones. You are not a prophet or a maker of saints. There’s no magic, just you and your sickness.’
‘You’re wrong. The morning after, I only took her hands, I didn’t know what she was then. I was giddy with joy, too full to take more of her. I was covered in her blood, it was a cloak and a shield. The wolves found me and I was bitten, I thought my time had ended on this earth but the beast stopped, like my blood burned, and I walked through them unharmed. They were afraid of me. I can walk in the night, I can walk among wolves and fiends and demons and I am never harmed.’
‘You sold her hands, joined our community at Saint Ivo’s under a new name and travelled back to Banfield to collect the rest of her body, with me as your guard.’
‘I didn’t sell her – that would be a sin. I took her hands far away where no one knew me, they believed when I showed them my bite mark,’ Simon lifted the hair at the back of his neck and I saw the scar. It was a wolf bite, the pattern of its teeth looking so like our own. It was a killing bite too but the wolf had let go as soon as it broke the skin.
‘The miracles started. She healed, and I had left most of her mouldering in that church. I had to get back, gather her up and reverence her, but you were a problem.’
Jam today not jam tomorrow. That stupid little phrase kept nagging at me until it came to me and I knew where I’d heard it before.
And where I had seen an older, less perfect version of his smile.
‘Your mother’s Pippa, the sacristan at Saint Ivo’s.’
‘Right again. She had no idea where I’d been, of the great work I’d carried out. She was just happy to see me, as long as I didn’t claim any kinship and put a spanner in her sordid little love affair. I watched you every day. When she told me you were leaving for Banfield I asked her to get me work in the lazar house. No one knew me there. Lepers see no one and never leave. I thought I’d kill you on the road.’
I remembered the day he tried to burn hemlock on our cooking fire and knew it hadn’t been a mistake.
‘You’re hard to kill,’ he said. ‘I tried. I even led a wolf into your room when you were sick. It did nothing but leave a few scratches.’
‘You could just have slit my throat while I slept.’
He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t do it with my own hand. Anne didn’t want it. She scolded me, even from heaven, said the work was complete. She saw what you did with that dammer you found and knew the world was better with you in it. She was right. I’m glad you’re alive.’
I looked down at the workbench. Some of the bones were small, delicate, childlike.
‘It’s getting dark,’ Simon said. ‘Come to bed?’
Shadows twisted in the corners of the room and I could taste the madness in the air. So what did I do? If it’s true that thoughts are sometimes as damning as words I did one of two things: I tied him silently and dragged him through to the fire, where part of me wanted to just kick him into the flames, watch him writhe and scream. My body craved and pleaded and I felt things I couldn’t identify and will never name.
Or I let it in, that darkness, and rode it.
His whispers were silken and I looked up into the face of a fair-haired woman, who opened her palm and blew dust into my face. I heard Simon wailing, and after that I don’t remember much for a while.
That’s not completely true. I remember choking as my throat closed, and the pain in my eyes that blinded me. I remember a coldness that burned and the sensation that the blood in my veins was hooked and barbed. I remember the absolute conviction that I was going to die.
Then I was alone, lying in the snow, trying to pull breath into lungs that were filled with rot. I hardly felt the jaws of the wolf as it tore a chunk of flesh from my thigh, but I could still hear its satisfied gruntings and gobblings. I must have kicked it away. It was sick enough to fall back then come again. My blood looked so beautiful. I would look up to the darkening sky and dissolve.
When I saw the lost child I knew she was dead and had come to greet me. She placed a brown hand on the wolf’s head and it stopped its burrowings in my flesh, looked at her and smiled.
‘Swa Ælfgifu haligan,’ she said, and I was healed.
Chapter Fifteen
First came heat that poured down like water, heat that went from soothing to searing. Then the pain cam
e as broken bones, compelled by a force they couldn’t resist ground into place, splintered fragments dragging across marrow. My skin moved and pulsed as organs span into being from nothing and I howled and shrieked, watched by a tiny dark eyed child and a wolf that was still licking my blood from its face. Old scars, toughened to ropes of tissue were peeled away leaving pink, new flesh. I was made whole and it was terrible.
Second came strength, hissing up through the frozen ground and wrapping around my sinews.
When it was done, Artemisia held out her arms to me and I picked her up. I had no desire for revenge, in fact I had no desires at all. I was empty.
She curled her fingers into my hair and whispered in a language I didn’t understand.
Artemisia was blind but she knew her way. She pointed the direction, her cheek pressed against mine and I thought that I had the whole world in my arms.
She took me to a church, long abandoned and surrounded by the ridges and pits that were all that was left of a medieval village, its people killed by another great plague.
The child babbled away but I didn’t understand a word.
‘Hwæt hātest þū? Ic hate Artemisia. Hwanan cymst þū? Sprece þū Englisc?’
I had no idea what she wanted.
‘Ealdcýðð,’ she said, wiggling out of my arms and opening the church door.
It was warm and dark. A blind child needs no light. The altar was covered with bread, strange fruits and a jug of milk. There were wooden toys on the floor and half-hidden behind a curtain a fur-lined nest where she must have slept. Artie was chattering and laughing, but she wasn’t talking to me. She spoke to the air and bent her head as if an invisible hand had stroked her hair. Then she poured milk into a bowl and left it outside the door where the wolf sat. It lapped at it like a dog.
The church was ancient, its walls covered in images that time had made ghostly. I ran my hand over the peeling paint and wondered.
‘The Lady says I must speak to you like this,’ Artie said. ‘You don’t understand our words.’ She gave me a cup of milk. It was unlike anything I have ever tasted, like liquid summer.