The Cursed Wife

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Chewing my lip, I glance at you, hoping that you will force Cecily to say where the feather came from, but you are swaying slightly, your hand to your head and the colour quite drained from your face.

  ‘Mistress?’ Sarah asks in concern. ‘Are you quite well?’

  ‘No, I . . . I feel strange,’ you admit.

  They all start to flap around you with contradictory instructions, to sit down, to go to bed, to drink wine. In the end, I am so irritated by the fuss that I have to do something.

  ‘Stop crowding her!’ I snap. ‘Cecily, do you go and turn down the bed. Amy and Sarah, warm some wine. Now, Ma—, mistress,’ I catch myself just in time, but you are feeling so unwell you do not even notice. ‘You must lie down.’

  ‘Not yet,’ you say in a feeble voice. ‘I promised Good-wife Blake a remedy for little Peter. He has a rheum and she wants something to make him feel better.’

  ‘A rheum!’ I click my tongue in exasperation. ‘He will not die of a rheum. You are iller by far. If you must make a remedy, make one for yourself.’

  ‘I just need to rest,’ you say. ‘I will be fine.’

  You must always be a martyr.

  ‘Well, then rest!’

  ‘I will. Just as soon as I have made the remedy for Peter.’

  ‘May as well let her do it,’ Amy advises me in a low voice. ‘She’ll never rest otherwise.’

  I huff out a sigh. ‘Very well. I will come and help you, and then will you go to bed?’

  ‘I promise,’ you say with a shadow of your usually startling smile. ‘Thank you, Cat. I own, I would be glad of some help.’

  So off we go to the still room and I am set to running around, rummaging for sage and rubbing it to a powder, grating nutmeg, hunting for honey and raisins, while you sit on a stool looking positively green, but still able to order me around, it seems – not so close to the fire, skim off the filth, no, not like that, it needs more nutmeg, let me taste – until I wish I had let you do it yourself, ill as you are. If I am not careful, I will be the one collapsing with exhaustion.

  At last you are satisfied. We have a linen bag of herbs to be heated and laid on the wretched child’s neck, and a honey drink for his cough. ‘Do not forget to stopper it,’ you say. ‘When the potion is sealed, will you send it round to Goodwife Blake with the herbs straight away?’

  ‘I will take them myself,’ I say tiredly, ‘if you will just go to bed.’

  ‘Thank you, Cat.’ You let me help you up. ‘You’ll tell her that she has no cause to worry? That it is just a rheum and a cough as I said, and the remedies will help him?’

  ‘Yes, yes, and you prepared them with your own hands.’ I am quite short with you and am glad to hand you over to Cecily and Amy, who take you between them and bear you up the grand new staircase to your chamber.

  I walk back into the still room. I can smell the sage and the sweetness of the honey. A blob clings to the edge of the pot and I wipe it off with my finger and suck it, thinking.

  Remembering.

  I do not pluck chickens or scrub vegetables or beat rugs. The dust gets up my nose and under my fingernails. Ugh. But I have not minded helping you in the still room, and I must admit you are knowledgeable. You pull out drawers and let me rub seeds and herbs between my fingers, or sniff at roots, telling me which ones I can use for what. Mr Hawkins’s manservant, William, had swollen, red eyes the other day, and we went outside the city to gather hemlock, which I had often seen at Steeple Tew but had never known the name of before. You took the leaves and bruised them and laid them on William’s forehead to ease the swelling.

  ‘But look,’ you said. ‘See how like cow parsley the leaves are? And note how disagreeable the root smells. You must never, ever confuse these, Cat. If you were to eat either, they would strike to your heart.’

  ‘What, and I would die?’

  ‘Yes,’ you said seriously. ‘Strong wine or vinegar can be a cure, but it must be taken instantly, and if there is none to be had, or no one near to help, then yes, you would die.’

  I lick my finger, taste the honey fizzing on my tongue, and I look at the cabinet where you keep the seeds and roots you warned me of, and I cannot help thinking how convenient it would be if you died. Would I not be in the perfect position to console your husband? But I do not know enough to succeed without casting suspicion on myself, and besides, I am not such a monster that I would plot to kill you. Not you, not after everything we have shared.

  It is merely that if you did not recover, perhaps I would not mourn overmuch.

  There is Anthony to be thought of now. I touch my little finger to the corners of my lips, delicately. What if it was he who gave Cecily the feather? What does he mean by it? Nothing good, I fear. I am safer under your protection for now at least, so perhaps I need you to survive after all.

  Still, you humiliated me in the kitchen and I can’t forgive that. Did you do it deliberately? I remember the look Amy and Sarah exchanged, the way they pursed their lips to stop themselves smiling too broadly at my discomfort, and my cheeks sting. It really was too much, Mary.

  I pick up the honey potion and shake it around. Do not forget to stopper it, you said.

  I may not be able to kill you, but I can kill your reputation. See how you like the humiliation of people looking askance at you. I reach into one of the drawers at random and take a large pinch of seed. I flick it into the potion and brush the dust from my fingers. I stop up the pot and seal it with wax and give it another good shake. There! Let us see how well your precious remedy works now, Mary.

  Pleased with myself, I put the pot in a basket with the linen bag of herbs and cover it with a cloth.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Cecily asks sharply from the stairs. She and Amy are coming down together, looking worried.

  I am tempted to demand what business it might be of hers, just as she did to me earlier, but I assume a virtuous expression instead. ‘Your mamma asked me to take this remedy to Goodwife Blake,’ I say.

  Amy nods approvingly. ‘That is good of you, Cat. Mistress is fretting about it, and it will put her mind at rest to know that you are doing what she would do.’

  I smile, thinking of the musty smell of the seeds I dropped into the potion, the unpleasant powdery feel on my skin before I brushed it off. ‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘I am only thinking of her.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mary

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

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

  The tune strums and scratches in my ears and terror hums along with it. I toss my head frantically from side to side to rid myself of it, but it keeps on playing and playing and playing, beating out the rhythm along my veins, thrumming over my skin in time to Avery’s grunting as he pushes into me, and somehow that turns into the groan and creak of huge cartwheels rumbling closer, closer, closer . . . They are going to roll right over me, crush me into the dust, but nobody will help me. Certainly not Avery who is laughing with the others now and they are all singing: Oh, John, come kiss me now, now, now.

  ‘No, no! Stop it!’ I weep in horror. ‘Make them stop!’

  ‘Hush now.’ There is a moment of blissful coolness, a damp cloth wiping my face, and for a moment it seems the fiddlers cease and the cartwheels slow, but then the musicians strike up again, and the singers raise their voices and the cart picks up pace once more. They spin faster and faster as the music gets more and more manic and the voices are shrieking, or maybe that is me, me screaming as the wheels thunder towards me and the singers blur into grotesquely stretched mouths and the fiddlers scrape discordantly, and in the still centre of it all, a vagrant woman – no, it is Peg, my wooden baby. It is Peg who stares at me with hate-filled eyes and curses me again and again.

  May you never have a child of your own.

  May you never be safe, never.

  You will die kicking and choking on the gibbet.

  And the curse tightens vicious hands around my throat, and I choke and claw de
sperately at my neck until the darkness swoops mercifully and blots it all out.

  It feels as if there are great weights attached to my eyelids but I drag them open. I am aching all over and there is a booming in my head. I am afraid, terribly afraid, but I cannot remember why. It hurts too much to think.

  The chamber is dim and close. A figure is sitting on a stool by the bed, idly playing with Peg, flicking at her leather arm, bouncing her up and down on a knee, and the sight of the wooden baby shrieks an alarm in my head and makes my heart jerk with horror.

  ‘Cecily?’

  ‘You’re awake! It is I, Cat.’ There is a thump as she drops Peg carelessly on the floor. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Cat?’ I stare at her, astounded and aghast. How can Cat be here? She was standing over Lord Delahay’s body, and then she was gone.

  ‘Do you not remember? You have been very sick,’ she tells me.

  ‘Thirsty,’ I manage, and she pushes a pillow behind me to prop me up and holds a cup so that I can sip at some ale. It is doctored with something, but I am too weak to ask or care.

  ‘Not too fast.’ Cat takes the cup away and I slump back, exhausted by that simple effort, my head whirling with confusion.

  ‘Is the coroner come yet? Is Avery here?’

  She puts her face down to mine. ‘Mary,’ she says quietly but very distinctly. ‘Your mind is addled. That is all in the past. You are in London, and all is well. Do not say anything until you are clearer. Do you understand?’

  ‘Do not say anything,’ I agree, but I do not understand. My mind is full of images that jump out at me, shrieking, and I cannot tell what is real and what is not: those wheels rolling towards me with their monstrous creaking, the frantic fiddlers, and Peg cursing me . . . but Peg is just a toy, that cannot be. I close my eyes, hoping that will still the swirling in my brain, but that just lets other thoughts come crowding in. Avery, thrusting and grunting. The weight of George’s body. I snap them open again as memory returns at last.

  ‘Where is Gabriel?’ I whisper fearfully.

  ‘He is in Hamburg. He will be home soon, God willing.’ Cat gets to her feet. ‘I will leave you to sleep,’ she says. ‘It is a good sign that you are awake. We feared for your life many times.’

  We? I want to ask who she means but it is too hard to speak, too hard to think. I watch, bemused, as she goes out of the door and closes it behind her. Peg is still lying on the floor, discarded. I blink at her. I would like to pick her up but I can’t seem to move. I can only stare back at her wooden face and wonder why she looks so terrified.

  The next time I wake, a girl is sitting by my bed. ‘Oh, Mamma, I am so glad you are better!’ she cries as I stir.

  Mamma . . . She means me. ‘She said I would not have a child,’ I murmur, still disentangling myself from the coils of a half-remembered nightmare.

  ‘Who did?’ she demands, bristling. ‘What nonsense! I am your child, am I not?’

  Cecily. Cecily, my daughter. I remember now, and my heart warms.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and I squeeze her fingers to reassure myself that she is real and alive. And mine. ‘Yes . . . I am a little confused . . .’

  ‘I can tell.’ She helps me sit up so that she can shake out my pillows and then lowers me back, before straightening the coverlet and sheet and patting them both into place. ‘Until the fever broke, you were shouting and crying out . . . Who is Avery?’

  Thrusting. Grunting. Hurting. I turn my face on the pillow. ‘No one,’ I say.

  ‘It has been so awful while you have been ill,’ Cecily chatters on. ‘Cat has been ordering us all around. Sarah dislikes her as much as I do. The barber surgeon came and bled you, even though I said you did not believe in bleeding, but no one would listen to me. She – Cat – has been treating me like a child! She has John wrapped around her finger and he gives her authority to do whatever she likes while Pappa is away. I wish he would come home! But now you are better, you will make it all right.’ She smiles radiantly at me.

  My head is reeling but at least I am myself. I know who John and Sarah are, and I remember now why Cat is here.

  I remember why I was afraid.

  ‘How long have I been ill?’

  ‘Days! It was Tuesday when you fell ill, and now it is Saturday.’ Tears stand in her eyes and her beautiful mouth wobbles tragically. ‘Mamma, I was so afraid that you would die!’ Dropping to her knees, she buries her head on the coverlet beside me and I stroke her hair with a trembling hand.

  ‘I am not going to die just yet,’ I say with an effort. ‘Did anyone else get sick?’

  ‘No, just you.’

  ‘That is good. I will get better now, but you must be patient with Cat. She has been nursing me, has she not?’

  ‘And Sarah, and I helped. Sarah doesn’t trust Cat at all.’

  I promised to get better, but it took longer than I thought. It was some days before I could even get out of bed, and then could barely get to the chair, but I was better enough to insist that the curtains at the window were pulled back and the casement opened. The chamber was so hot and stuffy I could barely breathe in it.

  When it was clear that I was not infectious, I had a constant stream of visitors to sit with me: Cecily, complaining about Cat; Sarah, clumsy as ever, but touchingly glad to see me better; Amy, of course; and Cat herself, who seems to have acquired a new authority while I have been ill. In spite of her concern, there is something sleek and satisfied about her now, a sheen of purpose, and I find myself wondering why I am the only one who has been ill. Is it possible that she gave me something? But no, it was a fever, not a poison. Of course Cat would not do that to me.

  But now the suspicion has lodged in my mind like a raspberry seed in a tooth, and I cannot winkle it free.

  My neighbours, too, come to see how I do and to pass on all the neighbourhood news. Joanna Felton’s husband has fathered a child on their maid and will have to pay for its support. Joanna is not happy about it, Anne Hawkins says. She does not mention the maid. I wonder what has become of her. I wonder if Richard Felton forced her, the way Avery forced me. I wonder how she feels now that the child has been taken away to be brought up as a charge on the parish. How must that hurt, to give birth, to hold your own babe in your arms, and then give it up?

  My gossips have already moved on from Joanna Felton’s woes. William Dinsdale has spent a morning in the stocks for short-changing his customers. There is talk of another Spanish invasion. The Queen is at Greenwich and oh, have I heard about poor Agnes Blake?

  That was Isabella Parker, her pale eyes snapping with a secret glee.

  ‘No?’ I confess my attention has been slipping but I sit up at the familiar name.

  ‘So sad.’ Isabella shakes her head, but there is a suppressed pleasure in her pursed lips.

  ‘What has happened?’ Something cold creeps up the back of my neck and makes me shudder.

  ‘That poor woman . . .’ Someone else sighs.

  I press a hand to my chest where all at once my heart is threatening to beat its way through my ribs. ‘Tell me.’

  So Isabella does. Agnes’s body was pulled from the Thames yesterday. Her husband says she could not bear the grief of losing her child, she says.

  ‘Peter is dead? No,’ I say, shaking my head firmly. ‘No, that is not possible. He only had a rheum. It was nothing.’

  ‘It was not nothing. Agnes sent for you, but you were sick by then, and anyway, he died. They had to prise her off him so that they could bury him. She was out of her mind with grief. You know how devoted she was to that boy. She lost so many babes before him, and he was all she had.’

  Now they will have to bury her outside the churchyard, away from her child.

  I stare blindly over their heads at the chest, where Peg looks back at me. Is it the fever still, or does she look as aghast as I feel?

  ‘Agnes said that he was getting better until she gave him the posset you sent,’ Isabella says pointedly.

  ‘But it was just a
mild remedy. There was nothing really wrong with him.’ I twist my fingers together on the sheet, trying to remember. I was feeling ill, I do remember that. I went to the still room. I made the posset for Peter. But was I confused? I was feverish and sweating.

  ‘I am sure you are right.’ Anne lays a soothing hand on my arm. ‘No one who knows you would believe that you deliberately gave Peter the wrong potion. But it is better that you know what some ignorant people are saying.’

  ‘You were there,’ I say to Cat when they have all gone. ‘Do you remember what I did?’

  ‘You were very feverish,’ she says. ‘I begged you to leave it until your head was clearer or to let me make it for you, but you would not.’

  I rub my temples. Did I make the potion? I have a wisp of memory: Cat stirring a potion while I slumped on the stool, but it drifts away when I try to grasp it. It may not be a memory at all. I am so confused. Cat says I made the potion. Why would she lie? ‘I just can’t remember . . . You would have seen if I had done something wrong, would you not?’

  ‘Of course I would, and so I shall tell everyone who asks.’

  But they will all think that she is lying for me, I know. I lie feeling wretched. How many more deaths will I be responsible for? The vagrant child. Lord Delahay. Now Peter, and Agnes. I did not mean for any of them to die, but they did anyway.

  I wish Gabriel would come home, but he is in Hamburg and not likely to return for at least another month yet, when he is sure that Tom has settled in. I am adrift without him. I have lost all sense of purpose, and I am tired all the time, and it is Cat who has taken charge of the household in my place. I am glad to see that she is taking more of an interest in the domestic matters, although Cecily complains long and loud that she orders her around.