The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5)

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  On the way she would stop by the fuller’s shop. She remembered passing it down by the Vesle River when she’d first got to town, the day she’d gone to Abbey Saint Remi to ask if the abbot needed the work of an extra scribe. It was what her grandfather would have done. But the prior had sent her away with a scowl, telling her that the abbey’s work was done by the monks in the scriptorium.

  The trip had not been wasted, however. She’d found a shop close by the scriptorium that sold inexpensive parchment and papers, the very papers she’d used that night to forge her guild license. And she’d found something else besides—a fuller’s shop. It was only about half a mile or so beyond the cathedral near Rue de Vesle. She was sure to find a cheap but respectable cloak left by some pilgrim to be sheared and brushed for cleaning and never redeemed. The fuller would sell it to her cheap. It might not have a pretty fur-lined hood or be the quality that she was—had been—accustomed to, but it would keep her warm during the winter, and she would not have to rob her small horde of traveling money.

  But as Anna turned down Rue de Vesle, she couldn’t see the storefronts for the people. This was where all the shouting was coming from. A crowd had gathered by the banks of the river, a crowd of excited people. From the clamor of voices, a crowd of angry people.

  Anna looked about for the entrance to the fuller’s shop, but all the shop entrances were obscured. She recognized this mob. She had seen its ugly face before, heard its angry catcalls. This was a scene all too familiar. This was a scene to be avoided.

  Beyond the knot of people on its bank, the Vesle River snaked tranquilly into the vine-clad hills. The sun sparked its waters, just as the sun had sparked the waters of the Vltava River, where Anna had first encountered such a crowd as this. An image of Martin’s head impaled against a blue sky flashed before her eyelids. She blinked it away, determined to run back to the safety of her little chamber in Rue de Saint Luc, oblivious now of her errand. But her legs, as though they operated independently of her will, carried her instead toward the crowd of people.

  Closer.

  Close.

  Onto the verge of the crowd that sucked at her, drawing her into its heart. The smell of garlicky breath and sweat stifled her.

  Behind her a man’s voice shouted in her ear. “C’est une vieille sorciêre.”

  The crowd took up the chant. “Sorciêre. Sorciêre.” Witch. Witch.

  All around her, upraised fists pumped the air, hot breath on her neck, on her face. Anna could not breathe amid so much furor and anger. She could not breathe so close to the river.

  “Fakes flotter la sorciêre.” Float the witch. “Fakes flotter la sorciêre!”

  She pushed on through the chanting, pulsing crowd until somehow she gained the cleared space between the mob and the riverbank. Two big men, broad shouldered and meanly dressed, laborers by the look of them, shoved an old woman between them as they wound a hemp cord around her body, binding her arms to her sides. Others in the crowd, men, women, even some children, pelted her with handfuls of mud.

  The chants grew even louder, faster, more demanding. A chorus. “Le fleuve. Le fleuve!” The river! The river!

  Anna could not see the woman’s face, but the brightly clad figure, the kerchief on her straggled gray hair, the bangles in her ears: all were achingly familiar.

  Anna moved closer until the mob was in front of her, the river behind her, a circumstance that frightened her almost as much as the flash of recognition.

  Jetta stood between the two men, staring into the middle distance, mumbling to the voices in her head, apparently oblivious to the threatening voices all around her. And clutching at Jetta’s skirt was Little Bek, shrieking in his high, shrill tones.

  A man in the crowd pointed to Little Bek and yelled, “Il est lefamilier de son diable.”

  Little Bek! A devil’s familiar! Never was there a human being with less devil in him!

  Anna ran forward, turned to face the crowd, shouting, “Non, non,” as she tried to remember the French words to tell them, to say something, anything, to make them understand that the woman they thought was a witch was just a harmless old woman. Little Bek spotted Anna rushing toward them and turned his cries to the more familiar, yet still terror-laden, “An na, An na.”

  Anna pulled him away, wiping mud from his face. Jetta was mumbling to herself the way she sometimes did, harmless gibberish, some trick her mind played on her. The more she mumbled, the more inflamed the crowd became.

  “No. No,” Anna cried, forgetting the French. “She’s no witch. She’s a Christian. Like you. She’s just a Christian pilgrim! Jetta, show them. Say the Lord’s Prayer for them! Say the Paternoster. Say it in Latin.”

  But Jetta just kept on mumbling the same gibberish as though she didn’t hear, as though Anna were not even there.

  “Fakes flotter la sorciêref Jeteʐ les trois dans le fleuve.”

  All three? They were going to throw them all in!

  Hush, Anna. Save the child, she scolded herself, and reached down to clutch him to her. Scanning the crowd for some friendly face, some avenue of escape, she spied the sought-after fuller’s shop, its open door abandoned. Holding on to Little Bek, she inched toward it.

  Anna would remember later that her eye had registered what her mind did not. If her mind had registered VanCleve’s presence standing apart from the crowd, she would have called out to him for help. But it did not, and she did not. All her senses were fastened on Jetta and clinging to Little Bek, stroking his head to calm him, trying to stay calm enough to think as the two men hoisted Jetta into the air. They lifted the old woman, still mumbling to herself, and hurled her like a log headfirst into the river.

  The crowd sucked air as the old woman’s body twisted in the air like a diving gull, then broke the surface of the water.

  She sank like a stone into the frigid November water.

  The crowd held its collective breath, waiting to see if a witch would float or an innocent woman would drown. They are hoping for the witch, Anna thought. That way their drama will be extended. She heard her own voice calling out Jetta’s name, Jetta who had saved her from the river.

  The river smelled of death, of the dank logs washed up on its bank and piles of rotting debris. This was mixed with the pungent aroma of her fear.

  Seconds passed. Hours.

  Anna prayed that by some miracle Jetta would survive, that God would send down an angel to the drowning woman as he had sent Jetta to her. Don’t let it be me, she prayed, remembering the weight of the water on her skin, the way it had sealed her breath inside her body. Her cowardice shamed her. She peeled Little Bek from her skirts and moved closer to the river’s edge.

  With the others in the crowd she watched the unbroken surface of the water.

  Not a ripple stirred it.

  Behind her now was only one voice and it rose in a high, sweet hymn, marred with trembling: “An na. An na. An na.”

  Anna took a step forward.

  “A shame.” The man closest to Anna, one of the men who had thrown the old woman in, shrugged and mumbled, “Don’t go after her. If she was innocent, so are you.” Arms reached out to hold her back—the same arms that had hurled Jetta into the Vesle. “The current is swift and the water freezing. You’ll drown too. It is the will of God.”

  The same voices who only moments ago had shouted “witch, witch,” burdened now with concern lest they compound the guilt of their wrongful prosecution. Trial by ordeal. Trial by the devil, not of the devil.

  Anna struggled against the arms, straining to see Jetta come to the surface, but she never emerged. Not once. Proof of innocence, innocence that awarded her death by water instead of fire.

  Her mind only dully registered the man standing downstream, apart from the crowd, as he stripped to his braies, leaving his scarlet tunic and cloak behind him in a pile on the bank. Her mind jolted with recognition only when he leaped into the frigid current.

  VanCleve!

  Her heart stopped beating at t
he shock of the cold water against his skin.

  He swam toward the center of the river.

  Her muscles tightened as his strained against the current.

  His blond head disappeared beneath the water once, twice, three times, and her breath froze in her chest. An eternity passed. Airless. Empty.

  The surface of the water broke. VanCleve reemerged, this time dragging something with him. She breathed again, then started to run downriver to meet him, her feet sliding in mud, catching, sliding again. Her heart pounded, threatening the bars of its bone cage. Short, ragged breaths choked in her throat.

  VanCleve struggled toward the shore, dragging Jetta behind him. Anna was close enough now to see him start to pull the body from the water onto the bank. It was as limp as if it had no bones within it. And still. The only movement was the water that streamed from the fringes of Jetta’s shawl and from the long gray hair trailing to the hard ground.

  “An na, An na,” the high sweet voice behind her purer now, calm. She glanced behind her to see that the child was all right. When she looked back, VanCleve was still struggling to free his burden from the river. It was as though the river grasped at her with its clutching fingers, reluctant to give her up.

  One by one the crowd drifted away until there was no one left to help the merchant from Flanders pull the dead woman’s body from the river. Nobody except Anna. No angel had come this time; the river had claimed the life it was owed.

  Anna cried that night. She cried for the first time in a long time. After she’d sent VanCleve to the Romani camp. After Bera had come to claim the body. After she’d bathed and fed Little Bek and put him in her own bed to sleep. Sleeping beneath the feather counterpane of Anna’s bed, he looked like an angel with his blond hair and pale lashes, long and shiny against his milk-white cheek.

  He had clung to her when Bera came to take Jetta’s body away, and she had not the heart to send him back to the camp. Only she and Jetta had ever cared for the child. To the others he was gadje. He was mahrime. So much innocence in the world. So much pain.

  But that was not when the tears came down.

  “Who are those people?” VanCleve had asked when he returned from the camp with Bera, after the Gypsies took Jetta’s body away on a stretcher contrived of saplings and silk cloth. A dozen or so mourners, the familia, both men and women from the camp, followed behind, honoring the dead with loud lamentations and a great show of mourning lest the deceased come back to haunt them for some slight of grief.

  “They are my friends,” Anna had said simply. And then she had started to cry.

  The tears began with a trickle and soon became a torrent. It was as though the rivers of the Vesle and the Vltava had sprung a fountain inside her.

  “Hush, you’ll make yourself sick,” VanCleve had said. But still she could not stop.

  He had wrapped her in his arms and quietly led her from the room where the sleeping child lay, so she would not wake him with her sobs. He’d taken her to his room and they’d sat together on his bed until darkness came. He did not get up to light a candle but held her cradled in his arms as the river inside her overflowed its banks, else she would surely have fallen apart and floated away like bits of flotsam on a current.

  He did not try to stop her crying, only held her, a kind of consternation on his face that she should mourn the passing of such strangeness.

  “She was a good, kind woman. She didn’t traffic with the devil. She only told fortunes to make a living. There were always Christians enough to hear her silly divinations.” But the words erupted in little gasps and choked her.

  VanCleve gave her a cup of wine, warmed and spiced with cloves and valerian. “This will help to calm you,” he said.

  She drank the wine and, exhausted, laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes.

  She felt the touch of his lips on the top of her head, and she was a child again, sick with a fever, coddled in the cradle of Ddeek’s arms.

  Sometime during the night Anna woke from her troubled sleep, startled at first, not knowing where she was. They lay together now, on VanCleve’s narrow bed, her head resting in the crook of his arm, his hand beneath her shirt. His breath, warm and moist against her neck, whispered her name. A three-quarter moon sweat a sheen of light across his bed—a bed only big enough for one—picking out the outline of his body beneath the coverlet. His hand gently caressed her breast.

  I should stop him, she thought. He is not my husband. But she did not. Her head was thick with the fog of grief and wine. She could not will her arms to push him away. The protest she should have made died on her lips, and came out in a sigh.

  “Anna,” he said, “Anna,” his breath against her throat. There was such need, such urgency in his voice. She loved the sound of her name on his lips, filled with his breath. His hands tugged urgently, pushing at her skirt, bunching it around her. He shifted his body slightly, gently, moving his body against hers, caressing her, covering her throat with his kisses. She had thought her body surely depleted of all moisture by her tears, as dry as a husk.

  She had thought wrong.

  She closed her eyes, giving in to the heat and fog of her mind, waiting as though her spirit watched her body’s betrayal from a distance. Then she felt a sudden shifting of his weight, a stirring of the air around her, and where there had been warmth, there was now an absence of warmth. She opened her eyes to look at him.

  He sat on the side of the bed, holding his head in his hands. She shivered and tried to say his name, to call him back. When he did not respond, her arm reached out, independent of her will, to pull back the warmth of his body.

  “Shh, Anna, go back to sleep.” His voice was low, almost gruff. He smoothed her skirts and covered her with a blanket. She closed her eyes.

  She woke at first light to see VanCleve sleeping in the chair beside the bed. The gray dawn made his face look haggard and wan. She got up and tiptoed gingerly from the room, so as not to disturb him or the throbbing in her head. She wondered as she went if she had dreamed he lay beside her in some wine-induced, fevered dream. Her face grew hot at the very thought of it. She felt again his breath upon her neck, and she was sure it was more memory than dream.

  “You are a good man, VanCleve,” Anna said when he brought the little wagon.

  They both knew she was talking about something besides his charity for the child. And then she added, to lighten the moment, “For a papist,” laughing as she said it to mitigate the criticism.

  He did not laugh, did not even smile. “Because I did not debauch a woman drunk with grief and wine does not make me a good man.” His gaze did not meet hers but settled upon the child as he bent to lift him into the wagon.

  “And what about the fact that you risked your life to save an old woman and—” She pointed to the boy, who was laughing as he rocked back and forth inside the wagon, moving it first forward then back, first forward then back, with the motion of his body. “You are a good man because your heart is good. ‘Suffer the little children.’”

  “Do you quote English Scripture for every occasion?” he asked, rancor creeping into his tone.

  “Would it be more true, more comforting to me and less discomforting to you, if I quoted it in Latin?”

  “Indeed it would.”

  She disliked the frown on his face. “Why do you not like being called a good man?”

  “You don’t know how close I came to not being a good man, Anna.”

  It was her turn to avert her gaze. She felt the heat creeping up her neck. “Do you think he can learn to ride it?” Anna asked, pointing to the wagon.

  “I do.” Was that a sigh of relief that she had changed the subject? “If God wills it,” he said.

  “And why would a loving God not will it? Why would He not want his children to be happy?”

  “Why not indeed?” he said. But she had the feeling he was talking about something else entirely.

  Anna put Little Bek to bed early. He was worn out from playing with his ne
w wagon, and since he had not yet mastered it, he had more than a few bruises from bumping into things. She was worn out too and her first thought was to decline when VanCleve showed up at her door with a meat pie and cider.

  “Bek’s already asleep,” she whispered.

  “Then come to my chamber.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea—”

  “You need to eat. I have to eat. We might as well eat together. We need to talk about how you can keep yourself and your child safe.”

  “No wine this time?”

  “No wine, just cider.” He held up the jug as proof.

  “We’ll leave your chamber door open?”

  “We shall leave my chamber door open so that all the world can see how innocent is our discourse.”

  They were arguing over the doctrine of transubstantiation—hers the heretic’s assertion that the bread and wine were only symbolic, not the literal blood, not the literal body of Christ—when her hand flew angrily into the air and collided with his. She was so close he could smell her hair. The same exotic fragrance he’d come to associate with her, the scent of jasmine flowers. The smell of it, the touch of her skin against his, the passion in her voice, all overwhelmed his senses, rendering his mind inadequate. He could not counter her reasoned argument. He could no longer think. He could only feel.

  What an arrogant, pride-filled fool he had been to think he could resist such a temptation. He should ask her to leave. And that he could not bear to do. For if she left, she would take the world with her.

  He kissed her.

  When she did not resist, he reached with one hand to unlace her bodice. With the other he closed the door.

  The plump little landlord, upon hearing the abrupt cessation of their strident voices, peeked into the hall. He noticed the closed door and gave a little shrug before returning to his game of chess. Soon enough they’ll move in together, he thought, and I’ll have another room to rent. But the thought of the couple together made him smile. He’d known from the first time he’d seen them together that it was inevitable. They belonged together. It was as it should be.