The Cursed Wife

by Pamela Hartshorne

  It might not be you at all. But there are bunches of herbs hanging by the door. Seeds and herbs are the kind of thing you would be buying. You were ever good with remedies.

  And poisons, of course.

  A brisk knock and you are ducking your head to go inside. I am left blinking owlishly at the space where you were.

  What am I doing here, stumbling through the rain after a stranger, while the world tilts and heaves around me? I feel as if I am floating outside myself, looking down at the drunk and dishevelled woman in disbelief. That woman cannot be me, Catherine Latimer, Lady Delahay. This has to be some terrible dream. Any moment now, I will wake up. I will be home, at Steeple Tew, with the sun pouring through the window, and the wood doves burbling contentedly on the roof. Down in the courtyard, there will be bustling and joshing and horses whickering. I miss the lovely clop of their hooves on the cobbles and the jingle of harness and Pappa’s voice. How I miss his voice. How I long for the lush countryside, the gentle hills dipping to glinting, gurgling streams and dappled woods, and up again to the ridgeways where the sheep nibble the grass, their bleats carrying across the still summer air and mingling with the sound of bees busy in the lavender. You should be there too, Mary, when I wake. But you should be there to comb my hair and help me dress, not striding around Cheapside like the lady you are not.

  Heartsick, I squeeze my eyes shut. Please, please, let this be a dream. Let me go home, I pray, but when has God ever answered my prayers? When I open them again, I am still standing in Cheapside, drenched to the bone, gulping back snotty sobs and my throat raw with longing.

  I blot the rain from my face with my sleeve. I should go back to the Dog’s Head. Anthony’s mood may have improved. There were few pickings today. Even foolish gamblers had stayed at home, and I made the mistake of telling him that I had said that it would be so. Anthony can be vicious when disappointment sours his temper, which happens all too often nowadays. We both had too much to drink, and passed the hours snipping and sniping at each other until we were screaming about I cannot remember what. I know it felt as if it mattered at the time. Even in the Dog’s Head, where arguments are two a penny, heads turned our way, and when the back of Anthony’s hand caught me across the mouth to quiet me and I fell squalling across the table just as the fiddlers fell silent, the innkeeper had enough. He pushed his way through and told us to be quiet or he would call the constable. I hauled myself up, dabbing at my cut lip, and vowed never to see Anthony again, but he knows I will be back. Where else can I go? I can slink back into the inn and have some more ale. Maybe that would make me feel better.

  Still, I linger. I just want to know if it is you or not. It seems to me that the rain is easing a little and I wipe my face again pointlessly as I lurk on the other side of Sopers Lane. I wait for the door to open, and when it does and you come out and I see your face for the first time, and it is you, the sight of you is like a slap, waking me out of the stupor I have been in for twelve years now.

  Mary. After all these years, there you are.

  And here I am, frozen into shyness, not knowing whether I long to embrace you, or dread the expression on your face when you see what I have become.

  You haven’t noticed me. Why would you? To you I am just a beggarwoman, scuttling along the skirts of the street, picking at the filth in the gutters, scrabbling for a crust of bread. You tuck your little packet of seeds into the purse that hangs from the girdle under your cloak, and pull your cloak closer over your head before heading back across Cheapside and up the street that leads north away from the famous conduit. I do not know this part of the city, but I follow you anyway, past one lane, and then another, and across a wider street. How far have you come, Mary? I almost give up, but now we are in a prosperous street with fine houses and orchards behind brick walls. Is this where you live now?

  I could let you go. I don’t want to see the disgust in your eyes, or worse, the pity. But you look prosperous. There are coins in that purse, and there will be more at home, I warrant.

  You are a maid, Mary. The world is turned upside down, and the two of us with it. I was born to be a mistress, not to beg from you, but I am tired and cold and hungry and wet and the injustice of my situation rises up inside me, swelling unstoppably. It is not right. The unfairness of it is likely to choke me if I do not call out, and so I do. Your name lurches off my tongue, out before I can stop it.

  Chapter Three

  Mary

  Oxfordshire, August 1562

  I was six when I was cursed.

  Until I was cursed, I was blessed. I had survived the sickness, after all. Before then, I only have clots of memory: my mother’s deft fingers sewing a tiny gown for my wooden baby; my father all bombast and good cheer, but a twitch under his eye when he thought no one was watching; my sisters, Nan, the eldest and self-important, and Frances, the peacemaker. I remember the stifled giggles under the covers in the bed we shared, how we would burrow together like puppies. The way Nan tossed her head, the anxious line between Frances’s brows. I was the youngest, desperate to catch up and be included in their games, forever relegated to the lowliest role or to fetching and carrying.

  Who fell sick first? One day we were playing Hoodman’s blind, and then my memory jumps to tossing and turning in a bed, the fever hammering in my bones, the heat of it shrivelling me, thirst burning in my throat. I called for my mamma, but she did not come. There was only Emmot, her maid, her face drawn, laying a rough hand on my forehead. ‘The fever is broken,’ she said. ‘Good.’ But she did not smile and she sounded like an old woman.

  After that there is only greyness, when I was not quite asleep, not quite awake, and all I could do was to lie listlessly, wondering at the eerie silence of the house. ‘Where is Nan?’ I asked when Emmot came in with broth. ‘Where is Frances? I want Mamma.’

  All dead, Emmot told me at last. My father, too. My bold, boisterous pappa with his big hands and his big laugh. My foolish pappa who had gambled away all his money, and my mother’s with it. There was nothing left to pay the rent.

  Grim-faced, Emmot put me on a cart laden with hessian sacks and sent me to Steeple Tew, where Sir Hugh Latimer was kin to my mother and would take me in. My father was the second son of a second son, and improvident with it, but he was a gentleman and had charm enough to win a gentlewoman for his wife. She was a cousin of sorts to Sir Hugh, Emmot told me. The connection was remote, but it was all that I had.

  ‘Be grateful,’ she told me. ‘Nowadays there’s plenty of folk like you end up sleeping in barns and hedgerows and roaming the country. You remember little Susan Pollard you used to play with? Someone said they saw her and her brother begging on the road to Banbury the other day, poor lass.’ She shook her head. ‘Used to be it was just countryfolk turned to vagrants. The sheep got their fields and they was turned off the land, and that was bad enough, but now, now it can happen to anyone. A neighbour one day, a vagabond the next. Nowhere to live, nowhere to go, moved on from town to town because decent folk don’t want to look them in the eye and realise how easily they could be living like savages too. So don’t forget your good fortune, lambkin. It is God’s will. You ent got much, but now you’ll have a roof over your head and food to eat. You be thankful for that.’

  She pushed the wooden baby my father had bought me from St Bartholomew’s Fair into my hands as I sat uncertainly next to the carter. ‘You take your Peg and you be good, Mary.’

  The carter slapped the horse’s rump with the reins and the cart lurched into movement. My throat was so tight that when I called a farewell it came out as barely more than a squeak, and I don’t know if Emmot heard it over the creak and rumble of the wheels on the cobbles. When I swivelled on the seat to look back and wave instead, she was standing with her lips pressed into a very straight line, not moving. The expression on her face made my stomach ache with the longing to jump off the cart and run back to her and bury my face into her apron.

  ‘It is as it is,’ Emmot had said. ‘Be grateful
.’

  The carter’s name was Jack. He had a weathered face with a hairy wart on the side of his nose and a most pungent smell, although whether that came from him or the battered leather apron he wore I couldn’t decide. He was a taciturn companion, but as I was shy and had never been on a wagon before, I was content to sit silently beside him, holding Peg on my lap and looking about me.

  Our progress was slow through the clamorous streets of Oxford, but once out into the open countryside we made better speed. I was used to looking up at the world, but now I was up high, I could look down and everything looked different, smaller and more distant: the kine in the meadows, the sheep on the hillsides, the countryfolk miniature versions of themselves as they cut the last of the crop, their scythes glinting in a swinging rhythm while the women and the children pitchforked the hay into stacks and the air blurred with dust that stung my eyes as we trundled past.

  After a long, dry summer, the colour had leached out of the countryside. The trees looked ragged and the yellowing grass along the hedgerows collapsed onto itself, bedraggled and untidy. Only the elderflowers seemed to be thriving, bowing under the burden of their berries.

  There were deep ruts in the track in places, and Jack would curse as the cart lurched in and out of them. I held on tight to Peg with one hand, and to the edge of the cart with the other, mesmerised by the steady bob of the horse’s head, by its flicking ears and the rounded rear with its twitching tail. Its plodding hooves kicked up a fine layer of dust that coated my skin and settled into the creases in my apron.

  Beside me, Jack whistled tunelessly through his teeth, breaking off only to throw a desultory curse at his patient horse. I knew the song. Nan and Frances used to sing it often: Oh, John, come kiss me now, now, now, they would sing it as they danced around with me. Oh, John, my love, come kiss me now. I remember the sticky warmth of their hands clasped around mine, how they dissolved into squeals of laughter at the idea of kissing a boy.

  They would never kiss a boy now.

  My world had shrunk to this small space on the hard wooden seat, with Peg tucked under my arm and my legs dangling. There was nothing but the creak of the cart wheels, and the squeak and groan of the wagon as it lurched up and down and from side to side, a ship on an earthen sea where the mud had dried into crumbling brown waves. I could smell the horse and something piquant and spicy in the barrels behind me, and after a while Jack’s whistling faded to a comforting background noise, blurred with the sound of the wagon and the chittering birds and the plaintive bleat of the sheep along the ridgeways.

  I was half asleep. Perhaps that is why I don’t remember exactly what happened. One moment we were travelling along an empty section of the highway, the next, it seemed, the wagon tipped into a deep rut and Jack was shouting and cursing and I jerked properly awake to find that we were surrounded by beggars who had swarmed out of the ditches. The drowsy summer afternoon was suddenly cracking with danger, as violence sprang out of nowhere, raw and red, snapping and snarling like an unmuzzled mastiff. I caught my breath as I shrank back against Jack in terror.

  These were the vagrants and vagabonds Emmot had told me about, folk so poor they had nothing left to lose and who roamed the country like wild beasts, folk I might have been destined to join were it not for the fact that I was blessed and had kin who would take me in. But they did not seem folk like me as they grabbed at the edges of the cart and reached up to me, as if they would pull me down and eat me alive. Horror scrambled over me, snapping shut my throat so that I couldn’t breathe, and darkening my mind. I think I may have whimpered, but my chest was so tight I could do no more than watch, frozen, as Jack swung his whip furiously from side to side.

  ‘Get out of the way!’ he bellowed. ‘Go on, git out of it, you whoreson rogues!’

  The vagrants were shouting and jeering back at him, their faces feral and twisted. To me they seemed barely people at all. Many were grotesquely disfigured with suppurating wounds, or so encrusted with dirt and grime it was hard to tell if they were men or women. Terrified, I let Peg slip onto my lap so that I could put my hands over my ears. The horse was straining at the harness to pull the wagon out of the rut. I was willing it on, desperate for it to keep moving.

  I didn’t see how the girl appeared. Perhaps she scrambled up, perhaps someone lifted her. All I know is that quite suddenly she was standing on the cart step in front of me while the air splintered viciously with desperation and hate.

  ‘Git off!’ Jack tried to swipe at her wildly, but he needed both hands on the reins as he urged the horse forward and the urchin ducked easily.

  For one still moment, I stared at the girl, and she stared back. She was so dirty that I could barely make out her features, and the stench of her so close made me gag. In a strangely detached way, I found myself remembering what Emmot had told me about Susan Pollard, begging on the road to Banbury. This could not be her, surely? Susan had always been so dainty and neat. Her cap was always straight, her apron always pristine. There was no spark of recognition in those blank eyes, but I thought it might be her. I don’t know why.

  What if it was Susan? What could I say? What could I do? I had nothing to give her.

  ‘Susan?’ I said tentatively.

  She didn’t answer. Instead she bent and snatched Peg by her leather arm from my lap.

  I knew that I was fortunate compared to the vagrants. My skirts might be let down as far as they would go, and my apron might be worn, but at least I was not dressed in rags. I had a clean linen smock and a seat on a cart. To the girl I must have seemed rich indeed, and perhaps she just wanted a wooden baby of her own to play with.

  But Peg was all I had. Already my mother’s face was fading from my memory, but I had an impression still of gentleness and warmth, and seeing those dirty fingers close around my wooden baby’s arm brought a surge of feeling that I could not name: horror, fury, grief. It roared in my head so loud that when my hands rose to grab Peg back they didn’t seem to belong to me at all. They might have been another child’s hands observed from a distance, one closing around Peg, the other palm raised, drawing back, pushing forward . . .

  The cart lurched violently from one side to the other as it was pulled out of the rut at last and the girl was gone, a jagged shriek rending the air. Did she cry out or did I? My palm was tingling as if I had slapped it against a wall. Behind us, a chilling wail of anguish rose, and as the horse laboured out of the next rut I twisted in spite of myself to see where it was coming from. I was trembling violently, Peg pressed so hard into my chest that it hurt. She had lost an arm. It must have come off when the girl fell (was pushed).

  Behind us, the vagrants were clustered like flies around a shapeless bundle of rags on the track. The girl. A woman was on her knees, keening. As if sensing my gaze, she looked up and even from a distance I could see the malevolence snarl her features. Struggling to her feet, she started after us, catching up with the cart easily in spite of her limp, her hand near my foot. I could see the dirt seaming her face, the hate in her eyes, and I wanted to look away but I couldn’t.

  ‘You’ve killed her!’ she spat at me, her voice low and more frightening than if she had screamed. ‘How does that feel, eh? No more than a bairn and a murderer already! What harm did my daughter ever do to you? She were just a lass like you, and now she is dead.’ Her voice was clotted with grief, her words tumbling from her lips, drowning out Jack’s snarling attempts to whip her away from the cart. ‘My Ellen might have ridden on a cart too until last year. She had a wooden baby, just like yours, but that is long gone, sold for a crust of bread. It might have been ‘you in filthy rags,’ she told me, ‘you scrabbling through the mud for a coin, did you think of that, you whey-faced trull?’

  My first reaction was relief: it had not been Susan. Then I felt ashamed. I wanted to tell her that I had not meant it, that I did not know what had happened, but my tongue cleaved to the top of my mouth and I could not utter a syllable. All I could do was cover my ears with my hands but i
t did no good. I could not shut out her words as they went on and on.

  ‘A curse be on you!’ she cried, breathless, as Jack lashed at the horse which broke into a trot. Unable to keep up, she fell back at last. ‘A curse on you, I say!’ she screamed after me. ‘You and that wooden baby of yours!’ She flung Peg’s leather arm after the cart. It bounced off the wooden wheel and tumbled into the dust.

  ‘May you never have a child of your own, you little devil. Think of my Ellen every time you stir a pot, every time you change your smock. By God’s blood, may you never be safe, never. The truth of what you have done this day will stay with you always,’ she cried. ‘It will haunt you until you die kicking and choking on the gibbet. A curse on you!’

  Her wail curled up into the air behind the cart, a terrible keening sound that chilled me to the core. I was shuddering, my breath coming in jerky little gasps. I looked down at Peg for comfort, twisting her until I could see her face, but her blank eyes seemed to look back at mine in horror.

  A curse on you.

  ‘Don’t you pay her no mind.’ Jack spat into the dust. ‘One less beggar brat stealing honest folks’ money.’ And he went back to his whistling.

  Oh, John, come kiss me now, now, now.

  Oh, John, my love, come kiss me now.

  The blood was still booming in my ears, and my heart thudded frantically in terror.

  I would never have a child of my own.

  I would never be safe.

  I would die choking on a gibbet.

  My hands went up to circle my neck. I could almost feel the noose tightening.

  It could not be. I shook my head to clear it of the woman’s shrill accusation. The girl had jumped, or she had slipped. I had not pushed her. I did not mean to.