The Cursed Wife

by Pamela Hartshorne

  So, it turns out that you are not such a milky miss after all. I would have expected hand-wringing and protestations of guilt at the very least, but no. Although perhaps I should have known. You can be steely when someone tries to take something away from you. That look in your eyes tonight reminded me of when I tried to look at that horrible wooden baby when you first arrived at Steeple Tew. You would not let anyone near it. It is not as if I even wanted to hold the thing. I was just being kind, but you snatched it to your chest and wouldn’t let me see. It is only now that I understand how very selfish you are, Mary. You give the impression of being good and devout, but really, underneath you only care about yourself. You don’t care about me at all.

  So I must care for myself. Things could be worse. I unlace my kirtle and petticoat thoughtfully. You have disposed of Anthony for me, but you do not know that I know where Anthony has been living. I know where he has kept the remainder of the money you gave him. Some has been spent, of course, I remember regretfully. I could not expect Anthony to keep a coin in his pocket for long and he will have gambled much of it already, not to mention his new velvet suit. But there should be a sum left that I can find and hide. A little nest egg for me, if you will. Just in case my other plans do not work out.

  You didn’t tell me what you planned to do, Mary. That rankles. You do not trust me. Well, perhaps you are wise. You have become a worthy foe. I despise you when you are too good. Now we are even. No longer can you flaunt your goodness over me. I know what you are.

  It is stuffy in the chamber still in spite of the rain earlier and I shift restlessly in bed. I didn’t like the feeling tonight that you were in control, not I. It is as if the competition between us has become real at last after all these years. Only one of us can win. I am back to where I first found you again that day in Cheapside, apart from a few coins that I may be able to retrieve from Anthony’s lodging. I have no prospects, not really. Marriage is still my best option, but I do not want to marry the first stout merchant who will offer for me.

  I want what you have, Mary, and what you have killed to protect. Perhaps I had better wait and see what happens when Gabriel comes home? The thought of him is a warm tingle in my bones. Is that the idea of him, or the reality of his cool mouth and steady eyes? What I feel for him is a yearning, although I am not sure what I am yearning for. Gabriel offers a tantalizing mixture of my father’s security and the passion I felt for Anthony. I am not surprised you burn for him, Mary. I burn for him myself. But I am puzzled by what he sees in you. I have seen the way he looks at you, and I do not understand it.

  Still, a few months away must surely temper his ardour. When he comes home and sees me, he will see me properly. He must do so. When I came here first I was bruised and battered. Of course he did not see my beauty then, and since then I have become familiar. This time, though, I will be at pains to be sweet and modest, and I will look my best. He will not be able to resist me.

  But he cannot have us both. One of us must lose, and it must be you, Mary. It is my turn now. I must find a way to be rid of you. It would be helpful if you would die of guilt, but I don’t think you are going to do that, are you? You survived the sickness too. But who knows when there might be an accident. It would be all too easy to trip on that fancy staircase of yours, for instance. All it would take would be one little push. But I couldn’t be sure. And it is not as if I want to kill you, Mary: it is just that I can see no other way.

  You stay abed, claiming to be sick the day after the murder. Murder, murder, murder. The word jangles in the air, so loud I can scarce believe nobody else hears it. But you hear it, don’t you, Mary? That is why you lie abed, sick with guilt, no doubt.

  I am willing to play along. Why not? And you do look unwell, grey and haggard, your clear eyes dull. Well, what can you expect when you go around murdering people? I shake my head sympathetically and even offer to make you a caudle, but you will have none of it. You refuse quite petulantly.

  When you stay in bed another day, I let myself hope that you are ailing in truth. Perhaps you will be sick again, and this time you will not recover. But no, you must always thwart me. You force yourself up and take control of the household, but there is a sourness in the atmosphere now. The others may not know what you did, but they sense the wrongness in you. Cecily is pettish, John disconsolate. He must think himself abandoned by his new friend. But Anthony has taught him well. The dice are his best friends now, and they lure him to the taverns every night whether Anthony be there or no. You watch him with worried eyes. Did you think getting rid of Anthony would make everything better? It is not so, is it?

  Amy is hoity-toity, and Sarah is grown much too pert. I had to be quite sharp with her this morning, and she just gave me a surly look. When I am mistress again, I will keep my servants in better order.

  Now we sit in the great chamber, and the unease festers. Cecily is showing off at the virginals, but she keeps striking a wrong note that jars in the air until I want to scream at her to stop. I am not sure you even hear her. You are straight-backed as ever, but still you seem slumped in your thoughts, and your hands are idle, resting on your lap, the cloth you are sewing forgotten.

  I am weary of this waiting. Weary of playing a servant. Weary of sitting on a stool while you sit in a chair. Weary of my narrow bed and practical gowns. Weary of listening to Cecily’s playing and watching you, wondering when you will break. Because break you must, sooner or later. I cannot see you living with Anthony’s death on your conscience, not you. It might be best for me if you took your own life, I think often. I would be here, ready to console your husband and step into your shoes, which are rightfully mine, after all.

  Sighing fretfully, I finger the lute. If Cecily would only cease, I could play and that would soothe me. As it is, I must wait – more waiting! – until she is tired.

  The door opens, and she breaks off, thanks be to God. You look up dully. It is John, looking dishevelled and anxious. ‘I have news,’ he says.

  Your hand goes to your throat and you half rise from your chair. ‘Gabriel?’ You fear it is bad news, but John manages a smile. He brings a message from the sea captain, Mr Martindale, master of that monkey-like servant you trust so much. He is sailing to Hamburg on the tide and he will bring your husband back with him.

  Gabriel is coming home.

  For the past two weeks you have been in a frenzy of preparation for the return of your husband. The silver has been polished, the carpets beaten. Amy and Sarah have laid new rush matting in the chambers, and you have ordered new linen for your bed. You are planning a warm welcome, I see.

  Meanwhile, I am left with nothing to do. You send me out to do the marketing, but I sense that it is just an excuse to get me out of the way. I spend more than I should and make certain to exchange friendly tidings with Anne and those few friends you have left. They were concerned about you at first. I told them that you were preoccupied, consumed with guilt about Peter Blake’s death. I hinted that something similar happened before. No harm in preparing the ground just in case you oblige me by taking poison or following Agnes Blake to the river. I think I did it rather cleverly. Nothing too obvious, just hints and worried looks, and insistence that I must leave to see how you are.

  You should be consumed with guilt, if not for that child, at least for Anthony. Would those goodwives feel so torn if they knew how easily you knelt to skewer a man’s heart? How you looked in his eyes and killed him as if you were doing no more than snapping a chicken’s neck?

  You have ordered a new gown for yourself, and one for Cecily, so that you both look your best for his return. There is no new gown for me. You have deliberately arranged it that I look shabby beside you as we stand and wait for the traveller. I will not forgive you for that, Mary.

  Anyway, you can order all the vibrant silks and velvets you like, you will never be as beautiful as I am. You look drawn still, and your nails are nibbled down almost to their quicks. Cecily, on the other hand, looks very well indeed. Of cou
rse, she is young, but she is untried yet. She has no allure.

  It will take more than a new gown to beat me, Mary. I have planned how I will be: demure and obedient, but so quietly beautiful that he will not be able to resist.

  John waits, looking edgy. The servants are beaming, their hands wrapped in their aprons. Cecily is dancing up and down. How restless the child is! Was I as bad as that? You stand very still and outwardly composed, but I see the tremor in your throat. I can almost feel the booming of your heart. Yes, you are glad to be welcoming your husband home, but how will you feel when he turns to you tonight? When you know the great wickedness that lies between you?

  There is a stomping of boots and a jingle of harness outside in the courtyard and we all suck in our breaths and look at each other. And then the door is open and the hall is suddenly full of men, and it rings with greetings and laughter and excited dogs. I only have eyes for one man: Gabriel. It is strange, I have thought about him so much since he has been gone. I have wondered if I have made him up somehow, or was pretending my yearning for him, but just seeing him there in the flesh sends the breath whooshing from my body. I am frozen into place, paralyzed by the force of my desire. My eyes crawl over him, the way his eyes crease, the way his hair grows at his temples, the curve of his mouth, the four-square way he stands. He is not as handsome as Anthony, not near. He is not really handsome at all. But every part of me is clamouring for him.

  And he, he has eyes only for you, Mary. Whey-faced as you are, he takes your hands and he kisses you fiercely on your mouth. He says something to you, something only you can hear, that sends the colour rushing into your face and a smile blooms and all at once, just like that, you are beautiful. My fingers twist in my skirts. It is you that he wants. Why, why, why? I do not understand it.

  He has clapped John’s shoulder and swept Cecily into an embrace that makes her squeal with happiness. The way I used to squeal when my pappa embraced me.

  Now Gabriel is greeting us all in turn. He is a kind man, a decent man. He has a word for all of us, Amy, Sarah, and now me, it is my turn and my mouth dries. I have no clever words, no plan of seduction. I can just stare at him with dumb longing.

  ‘Cat,’ he says. It is impossible to tell if he is pleased or disappointed to see me. ‘So you are still here?’

  Where is my witty response to make him laugh?

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  This is what you do not understand, Mary. I am not staying to spite you, not really. I am staying because I cannot leave him.

  It is madness. I lie in bed and torture myself with thoughts of you and him together in bed. I think I may be sickening for something. I am hot and cold, and then hot again, and my belly churns and twists with jealousy and longing. I have never felt this before. It was not like this with Anthony. I always knew that I could have him, and he looked on me with desire. But there is nothing in Gabriel’s eyes when he looks at me, just a keen, cool stare that seems to lay me bare. You asked me to sing tonight, and I did, a song of love and of yearning that brought tears to Amy’s and Sarah’s eyes, but Gabriel only pushed a stray strand of hair under your cap and let his fingers linger on your cheek. I could have been any wait scraping away on a fiddle in the street. The two of you are absorbed in each other; it is as if the rest of us barely exist. And Gabriel, breathing heavily like a beast in heat, practically pawed at the ground in his haste to get you to your chamber and mount you.

  I love him and I fear him. He makes me feel exposed, as if I must lay my heart out and wait for him to stamp on it.

  But this must not be. I must have him, I must. He must come to love me, and he will only do that if you are gone, Mary. I will let him grieve, I am not so crass that I would make my move too soon, but he will need me then. Who else will he turn to? I am sorry, but sooner or later, somehow, somehow, you must die.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Mary

  London, Little Wood Street, September 1590

  When Gabriel steps through the door at last, a desperate relief swells my heart, pushing it into my throat and hard against my ribs so that it is almost painful and I can neither speak nor swallow. Until this moment, I have not let myself trust that he would come. Even when a boy ran up from the docks with the message that the ship was tied up at the quay, I could not truly believe it.

  Hastily, I took off my apron, brushed down my skirts, straightened my cap. I peered into the looking glass in my chamber and saw myself, pale and sunken-eyed, a poor wife for Gabriel to come home to. There was no time to do more than pinch my cheeks to bring them some colour.

  Now we are assembled in the hall, the servants whispering and shuffling their feet. Cecily is dancing with impatience, John twitching his gown into place on his shoulders. I see Cat adjusting her collar and surreptitiously tugging at her laces, and I frown.

  We have kept our distance since the night in the warehouse. The night I murdered Anthony. I have to be honest with myself, even though I have done my best to keep the events of that night shut away behind a closed door in my mind. It has not been easy. Every time I kneel, I remember kneeling beside him to plunge a knife into his heart. Every time I light a candle, I remember the darkness in the warehouse. Every time I dress a joint, the memory of that night engulfs me and nausea rises up in me, choking me, making me gag and I have to put a hand to my mouth to hold it back.

  Every time you change your smock.

  The memories are slippery worms inside my head, constantly wriggling free from the box in which I keep them. I may lunge and grab one, but others escape the moment I lift the lid to put it back. It is exhausting, and I have barely slept since that night. Closing my eyes just takes me back to the counting house and the feel of my knife sliding into Anthony’s flesh as easily as I carve a leg of bacon.

  I have held onto the thought of Gabriel. As soon as he comes home, I have told myself, all will be well. The world will stop lurching like a cart with a broken wheel. I will be able to put the past behind me as I have done before.

  Now he is coming. Any minute now and he will be here at last. I am gripped by a terrible fear that I have forgotten what my husband looks like. My eyes skitter frantically around the hall as I try to conjure up his image, but my mind is blank. All I can see are signs of poor housekeeping: the cobweb in the corner, a thread unravelling at the edge of a hanging, a pewter pot in need of a polish, in spite of the fact that everything has been cleaned and cleaned again over the past two weeks.

  It is a golden September day and the glass panes divide the sunlight into beams that stripe the hall, trapping lazily twirling motes of dust. I am mesmerised by them. I feel cut off from everyone else, trapped like the dust in a bubble from which the noise of the street and the murmurs of the servants have receded, leaving a muffled silence behind. I am strangely weightless, and I press my shoes into the floor lest I simply float up into the air.

  Into the silence, the sound of boots and men’s voices outside sends a ripple around the hall, and the firm rap on the door makes me jump. Gabriel is here, but I am not ready!

  I look around in panic, but then there he is, warm, solid, real. His skin is weather-beaten and there are lines at the edges of his eyes, but he sees me. He sees me. My husband, my love. How could I have forgotten him?

  There is a moment when we just stare at each other across the hall, drink each other up. I cannot speak. My heart is too full. I can only wait as Gabriel moves at last. He comes straight to me, as if there is no one else in the hall. He takes my hands and he kisses me, his mouth warm and firm on mine, and the world settles into place once more.

  ‘My heart,’ he says to me, low. ‘I have yearned for you these past few months.’

  Light-headed with relief, I feel my face warm with pleasure. ‘And I you,’ I say. He will never know how much.

  Now, when we lie together in bed, I press against his sleeping body. I want to burrow into him, lose myself in him. I tell myself that it is all over now.

  But it is not over. I know b
ecause sometimes when I look at Peg, her expression is bleak and a trail of blood runs from the corner of her mouth. The first time I saw it, my heart jumped sickeningly and I snatched her up, thinking that someone – Cat was my first thought – had disfigured her, but when I looked closely, the blood was gone and her mouth looked just the same as always. It is only sometimes, in a certain light, when the candle flame flickers or the light slants through the window, that I seem to see the blood trickling down her chin, just the way it trickled down Anthony’s chin.

  I hoped that Gabriel’s return would set things to rights. We pretend that life is as it always was, but the household is fractured in ways I can’t explain. On the surface it seems the same, but there is something rotten hidden below, like a sack of flour when you need to dig your hand down, down, to test for mould. There is something tense in the air, an oppression that I cannot shake. Smiles seem forced, laughter too brittle, and we watch each other guardedly, even though we know not what we are watching or waiting for. I feel the weight of secrets pressing behind every door. My own secrets, Cat’s. The secrets we share that are the most dangerous of all.

  Ah, Cat. We are bound together more tightly than ever, and neither can shake the other free. Cat watches me more warily now. I know she is remembering the moment I knelt by Anthony and dealt him the death blow. She likes to pretend that she was horrified, but she did the same to George. She made sure that he was good and dead before she ran to find me. We both have blood on our hands, and we both know it.

  We cannot go on like this. Somehow, Cat must be persuaded to leave. I must work harder to find her a husband, but no matter how many marriageable men I invite to the house, she turns up her nose at all of them. I do not understand what she wants. She cannot want to spend her life here with me, trapped together with our secrets.

  I think of the time when we were a happy household. Was I fooling myself in thinking that we were as one? Now we are fractured, but perhaps we always were. I had forgotten that we all have our own secrets and experiences, and that we do not share everything, no matter how much we love each other.