The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  Father Cuthbert’s scowl returned. He was plainly not accustomed to having his discourses cut short. ‘There is such game, certainly. But these are not the flat lands of the New Forest, which you are doubtless accustomed to hunting. Here all is steep hillsides and deep ravines. A rider galloping after a stag on these treacherous slopes may easily find it is his own corpse that is borne home, not the stag’s. Besides, there are so many hidden valleys, even a good lymer would be hard put to track a beast gone to cover, however keen its nose.’

  Sir Harry gave a thoughtful smile. ‘I have heard it said that if there is a place in the forest where a king is buried, the hart that leads the herd will go every evening at sunset to the place to speak with his noble brother, king to king.’

  Father Cuthbert snorted. ‘The souls of kings sit at the hand of God in Heaven. They do not wander the forests communing with dumb beasts.’

  ‘Ah, but if the hart discovers that the sweetest grass and herbs grow on such graves, will it not return there to graze each evening? They are creatures of habit, are they not? A man might lie in wait there with his bow and bring down the noblest of beasts without any danger to himself or his horse. I understand there are a great many earthen mounds in these parts where the ancients buried their dead, even their kings.’ His eyes fastened on the priest’s face. ‘Do you know of such graves, Father Cuthbert?’

  The priest fixed his gaze on a platter of snipe, which had been skewered with their own beaks. He was studying them so intently that Lady Pavia half expected him to command them to rise and fly away. ‘There are mounds, I believe,’ he muttered at last, ‘but the burial sites of pagans are of no concern to the Holy Church and therefore of no interest to its priests.’ He raised his head. ‘But as I was endeavouring to explain, if you have come here in search of good hunting, you will be sadly disappointed.’

  Sir Harry spread his hands. ‘If my only care was the chase, Father Cuthbert, I would have gone to the New Forest with the king’s court.’

  ‘Then may I enquire what does bring you to Porlock Manor, sir?’

  Sir Harry hesitated, only for a moment, but it was long enough to make Lady Pavia’s senses prick, like the ears of a watchdog. ‘Why, to ensure that Sir Nigel’s favourite cousin and his wards are well protected in his absence. With so many people fleeing the cities, manors remote as this become easy prey for thieves or bands of cutthroats and vagabonds seeking shelter.’

  ‘Sir Nigel knows he can rely on me to assist Master Wallace in keeping order,’ Father Cuthbert said stiffly.

  ‘When the Great Mortality struck last time, many servants abandoned their places of employment, looting as they went. Many priests fled too,’ Sir Harry added pointedly. ‘In the end, Father Cuthbert, those who are paid to serve cannot be relied upon to do so, especially if they think that pay will not be forthcoming. Only true friends can be trusted to do their duty.’

  Lady Pavia smiled grimly to herself. As her late husband, Hubert, was frequently heard to remark: ‘A full purse never wants for friends.’ And Sir Nigel’s purse was better stuffed than most. But she would have wagered a casket of jewels that neither friendship nor duty was what had brought Sir Harry to Porlock.

  Chapter 9

  Matilda

  St Adjutor comes to the aid of swimmers and those who are drowning, for he stilled a whirlpool by throwing into it holy water and the chains of his captivity.

  It was only by chance that I saw what she did. Usually I keep the door of St Olaf’s chapel firmly shut, but it was so dark inside I’d been obliged to pull it open before I was ready to leave. The drawstring of my pigskin bag, which always hangs from my belt, had tangled and I needed daylight to unknot it. I keep my precious skull chalice inside the bag. Pigskin is soft and constantly polishes the chalice, so that the bone and pewter gleam. Such an object must be cared for reverently, tenderly.

  The sun had barely risen, so I had not expected anyone to be abroad that early. But as I opened the chapel door, I caught sight of a woman on the track that leads into the forest, towards a hidden forsaken village known as Kitnor. A century ago the Church had sent blasphemers and witches there to keep them safely away from decent people, so they could do no harm. But Kitnor had been abandoned for a hundred years and it lay in ruins, or so the pedlars said, for no one from Porlock Weir ever ventured there, though I could think of many in the village who should have been banished to that desolation of ghosts.

  As I watched from the shadow of the doorway, the woman bent to pick up a small branch that had fallen in the storm and used one end of it to gouge out a shallow hole in the middle of the path. As I watched her, I realised she was the woman they had dragged from the sea, Janiveer. Dropping the stick, she reached into a pouch that hung from her waist and drew out a flat, round stone. She held it out towards the sea, the sun glinting from its smooth white surface. I wondered where she had found it for it is rare to see such a flattened stone on our beach.

  She laid it carefully in the hole she’d dug, walking round it several times, staring at it intently, as if it was a rare treasure she wished to examine from every angle. Then she bent down and turned the stone round and round in the shallow hole, as if it was a tiny grinding stone, though no Christian woman would ever turn a grinding stone widdershins, for that is to call upon the devil himself.

  Janiveer straightened up and, with her bare foot, scraped the dirt back over the hole, burying the stone, then flattening the earth with her heel. She brushed the dust from her feet, then, without a single glance behind her, strode off down the path and vanished into the trees.

  As soon as I was sure she had gone, I slipped out of the chapel and hurried along the track, searching for the place where I’d seen her digging. I was determined to take a closer look. But the ground was so dry that the dirt and dust she had kicked over the hole were the same hue as the rest of the path and I couldn’t see where she’d buried the stone.

  I scolded myself for wasting time. It was only a stone and there were thousands more on the beach. All the same, I was uneasy. She had buried it with such care. She must have had her reasons. I felt a sudden chill, as if Satan’s shadow had touched me. Though it was scarcely dignified, I found myself scrambling up the bank to get off the path, fearing that I might accidentally walk over the place where the stone was buried.

  It was only as I reached out to pull myself up that I realised the pigskin bag dangling from my waist was empty. I’d left the skull chalice in the chapel for anyone to steal! I hurried along the grassy bank, slipping and stumbling, not stopping to draw breath until I was safely inside. It was still where I’d left it on the altar. No one had entered. They never set foot inside except when Father Cuthbert said Mass. If it wasn’t for me, days would pass without a single prayer rising from that holy place. I clutched the chalice to my chest, my heart still thumping from the fright. It was valuable, a temptation to any thief.

  I had taken the skull to a silversmith along the coast at Mynedun. I’d heard he had worked the bones of holy men or enemies slain in battle into objects before. I had him cut and polish the top of the skull to make a cup, which he fixed to a stem made from an arm bone. The base of the goblet was fashioned from the broad part of a shoulder blade. I had wanted the rim of the chalice finished with a silver band, but I could afford only pewter. Nevertheless, it gleamed handsomely enough by candlelight.

  My hands still shaking, I dipped the bone chalice into the holy water stoop by the door, and sprinkled the blessed water over my head, hands and feet, just to be certain I had washed the dust of that path away and with it whatever curse the woman had buried there, for I was certain that was what she had done.

  As I tucked the chalice safely away in the bag I became aware of a distant clamour. The commotion was coming from the shore. I peered down towards the harbour. A small knot of people had gathered on the beach behind the weirs and others were hurrying down the track. I made haste to join them.

  The tide was ebbing, though not yet fully out, but it
had retreated from the weirs – three sets of thick V-shaped walls, which jutted up out of the mud in the bay, built of rocks piled high and wide. They pointed towards the sea, with a gap in the apex of each one into which long wicker traps had been fixed. The massive arms of the walls stretched out on either side as if they were reaching out to crush the whole village. Trenches ran along the base of the walls on the shoreward side, and the fish pulled in there by the receding tide were flailing in the shallow water, as they tried in vain to escape.

  Usually the men and children who worked the weirs would be scooping them out and carrying them up the beach to the women who sat gutting them, but today the fish were left to live, as attention focused on one of the great woven baskets. Something bigger than the usual fish or crabs had become trapped inside and several men clustered round it as they tried to ease it out. Mostly likely it was a porpoise or a seal. Like the fish, they would swim over the wall at high tide chasing their prey, but as the tide retreated they, too, would be trapped, funnelled into the long baskets as the water ran out. If the seal was still alive, it was hard to coax it out without getting mauled. Seal bites were stubborn to heal and often went foul. Fishermen were wary of them.

  A cry went up from the men and something flopped from the mouth of the basket on to the mud, like a foal being pulled from the womb of his dam, except this was no foal. It was hard to make out what it was. At that distance, the creature looked as if it had two heads. The men lifted it between them and began to carry it back towards the shore, splashing through the shallows and slipping on patches of weed. The two heads of the beast lolled away from each other, swaying limply, as the men bore it over the pebbles. A foul monster risen from the dark depths of the sea. It was another bad omen,

  Daveth and Skiener, a habitual drunkard, carried the creature up the beach, with the rest of the fishermen following. They laid it, dripping, on the stones and we all crowded round, expecting . . . I don’t know what we expected to see. A grotesque giant fish? A savage sea snake? But it was not a beast. It was a human child, or rather two children bound face to face by a rope wound around their bodies. Daveth drew his knife and sawed through the wet cord. As soon as it broke the two corpses rolled apart to sprawl side by side on the shore. A wail of sorrow rose up from Sara and several of the other women.

  The boy’s eyes were shut, but the girl’s were wide open, staring sightlessly up at the wheeling gulls above, the pupils so dilated they seemed like two black holes. Her mouth was wide open too, as if she had been screaming when she plunged into the sea. But their bodies were not bloated; neither was the skin beginning to peel. Strands of livid green seaweed and the broken limb of an orange starfish lay tangled in the girl’s long hair. As we watched, a tiny transparent crab crawled out from the boy’s nostril, scuttled over his face and vanished beneath his body.

  ‘Brother and sister, by the look of it,’ Aldith said, crossing herself. ‘One’s the near spit of t’other. You reckon they were from the same ship as the foreign woman?’

  ‘Don’t look like they’ve been in the sea two nights,’ her husband said. ‘Fish would have started nibbling at them by now. But they must have been in the water afore the tide turned this morning, else they’d not have got trapped in the weir. I reckon they fell in during the night, but no more than a mile or two up the coast. They’ve not been drifting long.’

  ‘Fell?’ Skiener said scornfully. ‘That rope was knotted, not tangled. Tied up deliberately they were, and thrown in.’

  ‘You reckon they were alive when . . .’ His wife, Katharine, looked stricken. ‘The poor mites!’ She knelt down and tried in vain to close the eyes of the dead girl.

  Skiener hauled her roughly to her feet. Then he crouched himself, peering and prodding at the bodies, before straightening up again. ‘Reckon the boy was already dead, but the maid . . . See there . . .’ He nudged her arm with his bare toe. It was badly grazed and bruised. ‘She struggled against the rope that bound her, fought like an eel on a hook to free herself. She’d have done better letting the sea take her straight off. She’d never have got herself free.’

  ‘Who’d do such a thing to innocent chillern?’ Sara demanded.

  ‘Pirates, more than like,’ Skiener muttered. ‘Devil take them.’ He spat copiously as if to clean his mouth of the word.

  ‘Why seize them only to drown them?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe they found them on a ship they captured, but thought them not worth the bother of taking to slave markets in the Holy Land. Cost them too much to feed, see. Sailor told me once they drown the nisselers as a warning to the others not to make trouble.’

  I could see that nothing was to be gained by standing around guessing the fate that might have befallen the children. ‘If they were captured by pirates, they were probably snatched from an English village, so they should be given a Christian burial. It’s our duty.’

  ‘Should give ’em back to the sea, that’s what we should do,’ one of the fishermen muttered.

  ‘Not chillern, we won’t,’ Sara said. ‘’Sides, Skiener reckons boy was dead afore water took him, so the sea’s no claim on him.’

  All the women nodded.

  Old Abel spat out the wad of brown dulse he was chewing. ‘Violent death, it is,’ he said. ‘If bailiff was here he’d say we must send for the coroner.’

  There was a sullen murmur among the men crowded round. Several darted sour looks at him.

  ‘And if we do, ’tis us that’ll get the fine,’ Daveth said, ‘besides losing a day’s work.’

  Skiener nodded vigorously. ‘Coroner’ll be here for hours drinking our ale and stuffing himself on our meat, and after all that, what’s he going to tell us?’ He lifted his chin and thrust out his belly. ‘My good fellows, I am come to tell you the children drowned, which, being ignorant fishermen, you’d never have guessed.’ He made a flourishing bow and his friends laughed. ‘But,’ he resumed in his own voice, ‘the luggins’ll not be able to tell who threw them in any more than we can.’

  ‘Probably accuse us of doing it,’ Daveth said. ‘Justices always have to have someone to hang the blame on and they generally hang it round the neck of the poor whelk who found the corpse. So I say we bury ’em quickly and quietly before they bring a heap of trouble down on our heads.’

  ‘Graves will need to be dug,’ I said, taking charge. ‘I’ll prepare the winding sheets if someone will come to help me. Sara?’

  A look of alarm flashed over her face. ‘I think Aldith needs . . .’

  ‘I need Sara to help me wash the bodies,’ Aldith said firmly, but I caught the smile that Sara threw her.

  ‘As you please,’ I snapped, ‘but someone had better fetch Father Cuthbert from Porlock town or there will be no burial.’

  Daveth glared at me. ‘No one’s fetching any priest. He’ll only go sending for the coroner. We’ll bury them ourselves. Skiener here – he’s watched a few dropped overboard in his time. He knows the words.’

  ‘We are not at sea,’ I reminded him tersely. ‘I intend to ensure those children are given a proper Christian burial by Father Cuthbert, even if I have to fetch him myself.’ I took a step forward to show them I meant to set off at once.

  But Skiener rudely barred my way. ‘You set one foot out of this village afore those chillern are safely below ground and I swear on the devil’s arse you’ll find yourself lying in a grave alongside them.’

  Chapter 10

  Sara

  The chad is called ‘chuck-cheeld’ or ‘choke-child’. For St Levan caught two chad on one hook and gave them to his sister, St Breage, to cook for her children, but the children choked on the bones.

  ‘Where do you want them laid for the washing and winding? In the chapel, is it?’ Daveth asked me.

  ‘Can’t take a murdered corpse into a church, you know that. Blood pollutes it, makes it unclean. There’d be no chance of stopping Matilda running to Father Cuthbert if she thought we’d desecrated the chapel. Spends half her life in there.’

>   ‘No blood on those corpses. Sea’s already washed them.’

  ‘And I’ll wash them again,’ I said, hands on hips, so he knew I’d brook no arguments. ‘If they’re not to be buried by a priest, least we can do is lay them in the ground decently. Their poor souls will never rest easy, if we don’t.’

  Aldith gnawed her lip. ‘If it wasn’t for the storm, I’d fetch them into our cottage, but there’s nowhere to lay them. Table’s smashed and you’d be up to your knees in mud and seaweed.’

  ‘Take them up to mine, Daveth,’ I said. ‘And while you’re there, send the boys to fetch water from the stream. What’s coming out of that spring wouldn’t wash a sparrow’s toenail.’

  The little bodies looked even more helpless and pitiful when we’d laid them side by side on the table. Wherever you stood, the girl seemed to be looking straight at you, accusing. Somewhere in my head I could hear her screaming, like a far-off storm out at sea. Luke, Hob and Col returned with the pails of water far quicker than they usually shifted themselves. They dumped the buckets and crowded round the table, daring each other to touch an arm or leg or even put a finger inside the girl’s open mouth, teasing each other that her jaws would suddenly snap together and bite it off.

  ‘Stop that, you little hellers!’ Aldith yelled.

  I peered into the buckets. They were only half full and the water was muddy.

  ‘If I wash anything in this, it’ll be blacker than when I started. Take this out to the herb patch and water the beans with it, then march back to that stream and fetch more. Full pails this time and take them from upstream above where the beasts drink, not where they’ve muddied it. Go on! And,’ I called after them, ‘leave the pails outside the door when you bring them back. I don’t want you back in here till these poor chillern are in their graves.’