The Raven's Head

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Only just risen, you lazy squab?’ Gaspard said.

  But for once he didn’t accompany these words with a thwack from his stick, or even a sharp prod. He looked remarkably cheerful. I was so unaccustomed to seeing a smile on his face that for a moment I thought he was having some sort of fit. ‘You’re out early, Master.’

  ‘There’s much to be done,’ he said. He rapped a pile of document cases, which promptly tumbled to the floor with a clatter. ‘There’s all these to be put away, and tidily, too. You can start by taking the old books up to the roof space. But I want them stored neatly, mind, and in order. Don’t just fling them up there.’

  I’d been so startled by his buoyant humour that it wasn’t until he mentioned books that I registered his hands were empty, save his staff. He had not brought the church records back with him.

  ‘Did you find what Monsieur le Comte wanted, then?’

  He smiled again, showing a row of crooked brown teeth. ‘Indeed I did, and the master was most gratified. That is the art of being a good librarian. You must always be able to lay hands on anything your master requires. Keep everything, chiot, throw away nothing, however insignificant or old. You never know when it might be needed. “The cornerstone which the builders rejected”, that is what an ancient book is, Vincent, a cornerstone. Many might consider it worthless, but one day it may prove to be the very stone upon which the whole house stands. Words, Vincent, always hoard the written words as if they were royal jewels.’

  Gaspard so seldom called me by my name that I often thought he’d forgotten I’d ever had one, but to hear it uttered twice made me think it was I whose wits were wandering. But the old man’s fit of affability could not last long, and with his very next breath he was back to his usual curmudgeonly self.

  ‘Up that ladder with you, petit bâtard,’ he said, banging his staff on the wooden boards. ‘Do you expect me to go climbing through trapdoors at my age?’

  I pushed the rickety ladder into position and, seizing as many books as I could carry in one arm without turning the ladder over, pushed my way up into the dusty space beneath the eaves. It was only when I got in there that I realised I had forgotten to bring a candle – the feeble grey light wandering up through the trapdoor was not enough to distinguish a bat from a rat, never mind to try to set the books in any kind of order.

  I knelt and poked my head down through the trapdoor. Given the ancient one’s unaccustomed good humour, I hoped for once he would pass me a candle instead of making me climb down to fetch it. But as I peered down, I saw Gaspard pulling a money bag from under his robe. He lifted the lid on the small chest where he kept his few possessions and slid the purse right to the very bottom beneath his summer robe, locking it with a key he took from around his neck. I hadn’t even known he had a key for that chest, for there had certainly been nothing worth locking into it before and, believe me, I’d checked. The one thing I did know was that the money bag looked extremely heavy. Philippe must have been more than gratified by whatever the old crow had discovered for him.

  For once, I was not bored witless by carrying the endless stacks of books and documents up that ladder and setting them in some kind of order. Not that I bothered much with the latter: I knew the old man could never climb into the loft to inspect my work. But pretending to sort the books gave me ample time to think.

  What did I actually know? Well, first, someone was threatening to expose Philippe and ruin him. Philippe had said he needed proof that would silence them, but proof of what exactly? Gaspard had clearly found whatever he was looking for in those church records, but most of the entries had concerned the day-to-day affairs of the church and the parish. Save the lists of gifts to the church, there was little mention of Philippe’s ancestors until that last entry – the story of Estienne’s courtship and marriage. And not just his marriage, but the birth of his heir, Tristan, which, if I remembered correctly, just happened to be the name of Philippe’s grandfather.

  I began to smile as the truth slowly took shape in my head. Gaspard hadn’t found that entry. He’d written it. That was why the story was crammed into such a small space. Yet the ink on the page was ancient, faded. If he’d written it only the evening before, it would have been a deep black. I should know. It was one of my many irksome tasks to spend hours and hours hunting for oak apples and collecting them before the insects emerged, in order to turn them into dried slabs of iron-gall ink ready for Gaspard to wet and use. Fresh iron-gall ink was as black as Beelzebub’s beard.

  Unless . . . I turned to the pile of books beside me. I was sure in my searching I had seen something . . . I riffled through the books and scrolls, cursing myself for not having put them in order after all. It took me a long time to find what I was looking for, but finally I had it in my hand – Diverse and useful recipes.

  I thumbed through the pages, which covered everything a man would ever wish to know and quite a few things he wouldn’t, from how to make pastes that would clean stained leather to physic for horses with colic. There it was! I kissed the crumbling binding. What was it the ancient one had said? Keep everything, chiot, throw away nothing, however insignificant or old.

  I hugged the book to me, rocking back and forth. It was all I could do not to let out a whoop of delight. If Philippe would pay handsomely for the forgery Gaspard had created for him, then what might he pay to someone who had the knowledge to expose that fake?

  Chapter 8

  Then the swan roasted will become food for the king.

  Gisa’s uncle holds the swan brooch close to the candle and examines it from all sides. The light from the flame undulates over the golden beak so that it looks as if it is opening and closing in a silent and desperate plea for mercy.

  ‘It’s a costly gift, my child,’ her uncle says at last. ‘Lord Sylvain thinks highly of you.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with the girl,’ his wife says.

  Aunt Ebba lies propped on a mountain of pillows in the bed, which she seldom leaves and which Uncle Thomas never enters, unlike the fat ginger cat that lolls on the bed beside his mistress. Strangers, when they learn that the apothecary’s wife has not left her chamber for five years, remark that her husband cannot be much good at his trade if he can’t find a cure for his own wife. Neighbours are more charitable, at least towards Master Thomas, for they remember that, in the beginning, Ebba had taken to her bed with a head cold, but found being waited on so pleasant that she is more than content to have her husband and niece dance daily attendance on her and on that indolent cat.

  ‘The baron plainly intended the brooch as a token of the esteem in which he holds you, Thomas,’ Aunt Ebba says. ‘Who would give such a jewel to a child?’

  ‘A child no longer,’ Thomas reminds her. ‘Gisa is fifteen now, my dear, and by my reckoning Lord Sylvain has been a widower these twenty-five years, maybe more.’

  Ebba snorts. ‘A man of his wealth and position is hardly going to pay court to an apothecary’s niece, especially a girl who’s as plain as a kitchen mouse and whose father . . .’

  Aunt Ebba folds her lips tightly in case the words should defy her and escape. They do not talk about Gisa’s father. They never mention his name. It is one of the many rules the girl has been forced to learn since her uncle and aunt have, of their great Christian charity, taken her into their home. Something for which, as Aunt Ebba daily reminds her, she should be eternally grateful.

  And at this moment, Gisa is grateful to the great white sow as, in her more shameful moments, she dubs her aunt, though always under her breath. Yesterday she believed herself miserable here, but now she knows she’d rather spend the rest of her life emptying her aunt’s piss pot and rubbing her sweaty yellow feet than one night under Sylvain’s roof.

  Ebba makes a grasping movement with her sausage fingers and Thomas hands her the brooch, which she examines with as much care as he did. The cat stirs itself and sits up. It has never in its life bothered to hunt a real bird, but now its green eyes fasten on the white swan. It
leans forward and sniffs. Then, with a yowl as if it has been pecked on the nose, it shoots off the bed, its tail bushed, and flees to the door, scratching frantically to be let out.

  ‘Did I prick you, Apricot, did I?’ Ebba is distraught. ‘I’m so sorry. Here, my poor sweeting, here. See what I have for you.’

  She dangles a strip of dried mutton from the jar she keeps by the bed in case Apricot should require a treat, but the cat continues to wail and scratch until Gisa is forced to open the door and release it.

  Ebba turns the brooch over. The golden pin on the back is covered with a little leather sheath to prevent just such an accident. She cannot imagine what could have hurt her poor baby.

  Thomas takes the brooch from his wife and returns it to Gisa. ‘You’d best wear this on your cloak when you take the delivery up to Lord Sylvain.’

  Gisa jerks as if she has been struck. ‘I can’t go, Uncle. Please, send the boy.’

  A young lad comes daily to the shop to run errands and deliver physic to wealthier customers.

  Aunt Ebba leans forward. ‘She certainly can’t go. I need her here and, besides, who will mind the shop?’

  ‘He specifically asked that Gisa deliver it,’ Thomas said. ‘The ingredients are costly and fragile. He doesn’t trust the boy.’

  ‘It isn’t seemly for a young woman to go alone to a man’s house,’ Aunt Ebba says primly, quite forgetting that, only moments before, she had declared Gisa to be a mere child. But, then, Ebba has never known a moment’s embarrassment about contradicting herself when it suits her purpose. ‘Besides, Mistress Anne said she was coming back after dark the other night and saw a ball of blue light crackling over the roof of that tower of his. Like the flames of Hell, she said it was. Goodness knows what he gets up to at the dead of night all alone there.’

  ‘I believe the fires of Hell are red, my dear,’ Thomas says mildly. ‘At least, they appear so in the wall-paintings in the church.’

  Aunt Ebba looks mutinous. She hates to be corrected. ‘What has the baron ordered anyway that’s so special?’ she snaps.

  Thomas hesitates. He finds it difficult to refuse to answer a direct question from his wife. If she is thwarted in any way, she will have one of her attacks, which only adds to his sense of guilt and failure.

  ‘Quicksilver and sulphur as always, also monkshood . . . and dragon’s blood. That is what will take me time to obtain for him.’

  ‘Dragon’s blood?’ Ebba squawks. ‘I hope he’s paid you in advance. The merchants won’t wait for their money and we can’t afford to buy—’

  Thomas holds up his hand in an effort to dam the torrent of objections. ‘I know it, but he has already paid me half, the rest on delivery if the quality is good.’

  ‘Then you must be sure it is, Thomas. You’re too soft with these foreign merchants, too trusting. You must inspect and test every bag they offer before you part with a penny. What does he need it for anyway?’

  Thomas shrugs. ‘Perhaps he has the flux or ulcers of the mouth.’

  Gisa frowns. ‘But we have better herbs to treat those in the shop, Uncle Thomas, much cheaper too, and he could have them at once.’ She blurts out the words and instantly regrets them.

  ‘And what do you know about treating flux, girl?’ Ebba snaps. ‘Do you imagine you are an apothecary now?’

  Gisa flushes and stares at her fingers. She wants to say that, after years of preparing ointments and simples on her uncle’s instructions, listening to folk describe their ailments and hearing what Thomas recommends, she can hardly have failed to learn as much as any apprentice in the trade. But Aunt Ebba, too, served in the shop when she first married and she still can’t tell mouse-ear from mugwort, let alone remember what they cure.

  ‘Cheaper,’ her aunt mutters, with contempt, shrugging up the pillow, like a hen fluffing its feathers. ‘I trust you are not saying that to our customers. We’re not here to sell cheaper. We are here to sell them the most expensive that we can persuade them to buy. How else are we to make a profit? Just you remember who puts a roof over your head, girl, and food in your stomach. If the baron is fool enough to pay for dragon’s blood, then let him. And if he wants you to deliver it, you will go and tell him it is the finest and most potent to be had.’

  Aunt Ebba settles back on the pillows as if this has been her argument from the very beginning.

  Gisa is clutching the swan brooch so hard that her fingers hurt. She drops it into her lap and rubs her palm. The outline of the swan is indented in angry red lines in her flesh. He has already branded her with the mark of a sin she has not yet committed. And it feels like a seal upon her soul.

  Chapter 9

  There once were twins who had great powers. When one twin turned his right side to a locked door, it would immediately fly open, but when the other twin turned his left side to an open door, it would at once slam shut and lock.

  Trust me, if you’ve been born the bastard son of a whoring English nun, and you’ve spent all your life being kicked around like a stray dog until you finally end up as a slave to a wizened old crow, you will discover that your first taste of power is as intoxicating as the finest wine on the king’s table.

  I had sniffed that wine before when I had written notes on behalf of ladies wanting to arrange secret trysts with their lovers, or begging letters for men desperate to settle gambling debts. But those brief tastes of power were nothing, mere wisps of a lingering perfume that merely hints at the pleasures that might be had. Those who dictated the secret letters to me were prepared to pay a few paltry coins for my silence, but no more, for even if the truth came out, what harm would it really do? But now that I finally held the weighty secret of a man of Philippe’s stature in my inky fingers, I felt utter exhilaration. It gives you confidence, does power, confidence to take whatever you want from the world.

  For a start, I no longer paid any heed to old Gaspard. I’d said nothing about my discovery, but knowing that I had a deadly weapon in my hand meant I had nothing to fear from him. He could hardly have me dismissed, not with what I knew. In the past, I’d always sneaked out when I could, or idled whenever his back was turned, but I’d always been obliged to make a pretence of obeying his querulous commands. Now I had no intention of being used as his slave for one hour longer. You should have seen the look on the ancient one’s face when I refused to fetch our supper.

  ‘Not tonight,’ I said, pert as a tavern wench. ‘I’m going to eat in the Great Hall, but if I see a maid, I’ll try to remember to ask her to bring you something. Can’t promise when that might be, though.’

  His jaw fell so slack you’d have thought a butterfly had roared at him. I was halfway out of the door before he had recovered enough to hurl his stick after me and yell at me to return, but the stick clattered harmlessly against the closing door and I found myself whistling as I bounded down the stairs. I couldn’t afford to push Gaspard too far, not yet anyway, for I wasn’t about to reveal to him what I’d learned. That news was for only one pair of ears.

  But I soon discovered that it is easier for a mouse to bell a cat than for a lowly apprentice like me to meet in private with a nobleman such as Philippe. Indeed, one of the scullions from the kitchens or a stable boy would have had more chance of speaking to him. In the past, whenever I’d been summoned with Gaspard to the salle basse, the lower hall, in which Philippe received the peasants, so that we could record the judgements he made in their affairs, or even to the hall above, the salle haute, to record the contracts he had made with other nobles, we might as well have been at the town fair. There were always crowds of men, women and servants milling about, not to mention their dogs and hawks, snarling and shrieking.

  Since his rise at Court, Philippe was far too busy to stroll alone in the gardens. Even when he was walking between the main house and his private chambers in the tower, he was always surrounded by petitioners trying to beg favours, or arse-lickers, like Charles, pretending to marvel at his every word, as if he shat gold coins and pissed rubies. Try
as I might, I couldn’t catch Philippe alone.

  I even contemplated sending him a letter begging for a private audience. I’d written and read enough letters in my time to know how to flatter, but he received a hundred such requests a week from men he considered far more important that his librarian’s whipping boy, so it might be weeks or months before he summoned me, if he bothered at all. More likely, he’d simply ask Gaspard what I wanted, and he would doubtless tell him I was a fool and to ignore me. I might have been hanging around for months. But ironically it was the lickspittle, Charles, who gave me my chance in the end.

  Charles was a distant cousin of Philippe’s, the poor relation. He was his father’s third son, so he was never destined to inherit much from his own family, unless his brothers had the decency to die before their father. But Charles had a modest allowance and enough noble blood running through his veins to ensure that, if he’d entered the Church or had managed to display even a little prowess in the jousting tournaments, he’d have risen swiftly enough. If I’d had half of his advantages, I’d have been a bishop or knight by his age and amassed a small fortune in spoils from either blessing people, slaughtering them or both.

  But Charles was as lazy as a cuckoo and was far more interested in marrying wealth and position than trying his hand at building it for himself. All the women in the château seemed to find him attractive and charming, with his immaculately curled hair, cow’s eyelashes and elegant flattery, especially Amée, who allowed him to fawn over her and actually seemed to like it. Why do women fall for such oily arse-wipes? I’d never be seduced by a pretty face if the woman behind it was as blatantly vacuous as that slug-brain.

  As I said, Charles had never bothered to apply himself to anything, and when Philippe foolishly entrusted him with inspecting some properties he owned, he hadn’t even known which records he would need to take with him to check that all the goods and livestock were accounted for, the boundaries and buildings in good order. With a languid wave of his paw, Charles instructed old Gaspard to have me bring him whatever he might need. The ancient one, anxious as ever to please, had me running around like a ferret in a rabbit warren, pulling out ledgers and boxes, until there was such a great heap of them that not even a warhorse could have carried them. He meticulously sorted them until he had a leather bag full of what he considered the most important, changing his mind several times before sending me, staggering under the weight of it, to deliver it to Charles. It was then that I saw my chance.