The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  Katharine flushed and avoided her questioner’s gaze by rebraiding the end of her long flaxen plait. ‘You know Skiener.’

  Indeed we all did. He was one of several men in the village who if he’d a coin to spare, or even if he hadn’t, chose to spend it on ale at Sybil’s brew-house instead of bread, and Sybil did nothing to discourage him. At least Katharine’s face did not bear the usual marks of his drinking, but if he had missed a morning’s catch, it would be the family who would suffer. But the women were making light of it, as if it was something to boast of to have such drunken husbands. I tried to ignore their chatter and strained to hear what Father Cuthbert might be saying, waiting my chance.

  ‘. . . congregation seems smaller than usual, Cador,’ he said.

  ‘Some of the packmen are away about their work. Not due back for a day or two.’

  ‘But their women and children?’ Father Cuthbert frowned as if he was trying to remember who might be missing. ‘The unwed woman, the one who’s with child again.’ He wrinkled his nose as if even to utter the words left a foul taste in his mouth. ‘Last time she came to Mass she was crying and wailing so loudly I could barely remember the words.’

  ‘Goda?’ Cador ventured.

  ‘I believe that was the name. Where is she? Has she been delivered?’

  Cador shrugged, turning his hood in his hand. ‘Some women take to their beds afore their time . . . vomiting and the like.’

  ‘Perhaps I should call on her before I depart. Childbirth is a dangerous time for women. If she should die, I would not like it on my conscience that I did not offer her a chance to confess her many sins.’

  Cador shook his head firmly. ‘You’ll not get any sense out of her at a time like this. Best leave it to the womenfolk. They know what they’re about. Don’t want to go getting mixed up with all that screaming and blood and the like. When my Isobel were pushing out our first, I just put my head round the door to ask what she’d made me for my supper and I got a pisspot thrown at my head for my pains. And it weren’t an empty one neither.’

  Father Cuthbert shuddered. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Besides, I’ve several parishioners who have urgent need of me back in Porlock town, respectable and devout women, who merit God’s comfort . . . Harold!’ he shouted. ‘You idler, aren’t you finished yet? Come at once, we’re leaving.’

  Harold stumbled out through the door, still hastily stuffing chasuble, amice and stole back into the priest’s pack, as carelessly as if they were old rags instead of holy garments.

  As Father Cuthbert swung up into the saddle, I hurried over and grasped the reins. ‘I have a meal prepared, Father. Will you not take some refreshment before you ride back?’

  If I could get him alone in my cottage, away from the many straining ears, I could relate all the details of what had transpired since the night of the storm, but he merely patted my hand.

  ‘You are a good and charitable soul, goodwife Matilda, and Our Lord will bless you for the thought. But have no fear that I shall go hungry, for I dine with Sir Nigel’s steward at the manor and he always keeps a rich table. I am hopeful we may enjoy a little hunting too.’

  With that, he pulled on the reins and trotted off down the path without waiting for Harold, who was still trying to fasten the straps of the pack around the belly of the donkey.

  As soon as Father Cuthbert was nothing more than a ball of dust in the distance, the women sauntered back down the path. They paused at the fork, looking up the rise to where the ridge of the thatched roof of Sara’s cottage could just be seen behind the hillock. No smoke from the hearth rose into the blue sky. Were Sara and her family sick? Dead? Or merely still abed, having no work to do? No one would venture there to find out.

  I followed the women at a distance down the path, making my way back round to my own cottage. Katharine peeled off from the others, hastened up to her own door and slipped in, shutting it firmly behind her. Skiener was evidently too drunk to stir himself, for the shutters were fastened and the door, in spite of the warmth of the day.

  As I pushed open the door of my little cottage, a streak of black fur shot out, slithering between my legs and the door frame. I had unwittingly trapped Gatty inside and she was plainly annoyed that I had been away so long. I knew she would stay out for hours now just to punish me.

  Still angry that Abel had prevented me from speaking to Father Cuthbert, I crossed to the table in the corner of my cottage on which I had placed all the statues of the saints. I had rescued them from those shrines where I could plainly see they were not being given proper reverence. The nuns in the convent where I had been raised as a child had taught me that neglect of a saint’s statue was as grave a sin as failing to pray to the saints themselves. And Our Blessed Lord would never have occasion to reproach me with that.

  There was St Amphibalus bound to a tree by his eviscerated bowels, while he was scourged bloody; St Laurence roasting on a gridiron; St Edmund, his decapitated head borne in the mouth of a wolf. And the one I was most devoted to – St Sebastian, his naked flesh pierced with a dozen arrows, his sweet mouth lifted up as if he was begging Christ to lean down from Heaven to kiss his lips.

  Each morning I bathed them carefully in turn, rubbing clean each sinew and muscle, foot and nose. I stitched little cloaks to cover them, red for when it was their saint’s day, black for Lent and Advent, and white for all other days. Above the table I hung my bloody scourge, my discipline, as nuns have to mortify the flesh, and at the feet of the saints I laid the sharp stones I used to press into my intimate parts to mortify them. My saints watched over both.

  I took a taper from the fire and used it to light a candle. I always made the candles for my shrine from the finest beeswax, perfumed with oil of roses or lavender, and moulded them in human vertebrae. The spines on the bones made useful handles and it pleased me to think that I could mark my devotions by the time it took for the wick to burn to nothing in a man’s backbone. It was a fitting sacred light for my holy saints.

  But that day nothing pleased me. I had lain awake half the night before, planning what I would say to Father Cuthbert, imagining his outrage when I showed him the new graves, his gratitude when he finally realised that I was the only person in the village he could trust. I’d risen early to bake new bread and prepare the dish of pumpes, which I made from the last of the salt pork, mixed with cloves and currants, which are not cheap. I had fried them in pig’s fat, till they were golden and crisp and I planned to serve them dusted with sugar and decorated with ramson flowers from the forest. Father Cuthbert always says pork is the most wholesome and Christian of meats. And it was meat I could ill afford since that little vermin had stolen so many of my piglets. Now that he was caught, I would see that he was hanged, but that would not restore my pigs.

  I knelt before the flickering candles and stared up into the painted face of St Sebastian, but his eyes seemed not to be turned to Heaven but turned away from me. Again I saw the uncanny resemblance between the saint and the priest as if their faces were one. The saint’s lips moved with Father Cuthbert’s.

  ‘You have failed us,’ they were saying. ‘You have failed us and you will be punished.’

  Chapter 20

  Sara

  If a child has the whooping cough, put the head of a live fish in the child’s mouth and let him breathe into the fish’s mouth. After, release the fish and it shall carry the cough away with it down into the sea.

  The corpse-birds are screeching on the roof again. Goda shrieks as if their call is ripping her soul from her body. Ever since we’ve been walled up in the cottage, she’s been sitting in the corner pressed to the wall, as if she wants to melt into it. She whimpers constantly, asleep and awake, as if she doesn’t know which is the prison and which the nightmare. But, then, neither can I tell if I’m still among the living or have been dragged down to torment in Purgatory.

  Even when my Elis died, Goda barely noticed, but he was not her husband. Elis gripped my hand as fiercely as a woman in labour,
but all he gave birth to was blood. He pissed it, shit it, coughed it and vomited it, till I was certain there could be not a drop left in his body, for the straw in the byre was soaked with it. They say bleeding cures a man of all ills, from winter ague to summer flux. If that were so, my Elis should have been the fittest man in all England.

  I’d known him boy and man all the days of his life, played with him in the dirt when we were both babbies ourselves. My first kiss I gave to him, joined hands with him in the chapel door, bore him two sons, and yet those last days he stared at me as if I was a stranger to him. He constantly begged for water, but vomited as soon as he swallowed it.

  I made a little meat broth from one of the dead goats and what little water we had left, though my own throat was raw from thirst. I tried to help Elis swallow it, but he swore I was one of the faery folk who’d imprisoned him inside a hill and was trying to make him eat enchanted food. He dashed the bowl from my hand. The precious liquid vanished into the fouled straw. I wept then. I cried over a bowl of spilled broth.

  Soon after, he fell to a violent fit of coughing, gasping and choking on his own blood, like a man drowning in the sea. He fell back lifeless, his eyes rolling up into his head. But I was all dried up. I couldn’t find a single tear to shed, not for my husband or for Daveth, who followed him into death so soon after that it was as if he was hanging tight to his heels. I could only marvel at the silence that flooded the stinking byre, feel only relief that the screaming, which had split my head in two, had ended. Their pain, which I could do nothing, nothing to ease, was finally over.

  I sit on the floor of the cottage now, staring at the thin red veins of fire that zigzag through the grey ash in the hearth, too numb, too exhausted even to wipe away the bead of sweat that crawls, like a spider, down my face. Luke is hunched in the corner, his legs drawn up, crying like an infant. I should try to comfort him, but if I try, he will only push me away.

  Aldith rocks Kitto and Ibb, keeping up a tuneless hum as if she is trying to drown voices only she can hear. She did not sit with Daveth as he died. She’s not gone near him, since Luke and I dragged him into the byre.

  ‘The chillern . . . I have to take care of the chillern. Can’t do nothing for him.’

  I can just make out the grey smudge of her Col lying near the door, his mouth pressed against the thin gap at the bottom trying to suck in splinters of air and light. He didn’t even turn his head when the coughing and the screaming stopped. Does he realise what the silence means?

  I stagger to my feet. The ground seems to rock beneath me as if I’m standing on a boat. I have to hold my own wrist to keep my hand steady enough to light one of the two remaining tallow candles. I drag myself back into the byre. The last goat lies on the stinking straw, her neck stretched out, her tongue lolling. She feebly lifts her head, bleating. Her pale-yellow eyes fix on mine as if she is pleading with me, one mother to another. But even if we had so much as a mouthful of water to spare, it won’t save her.

  I watch the goat because I don’t want to look at the bodies of the men. But I can smell them. You stop noticing most smells after a while, but this stench grows and grows, as if it is coming from inside you. I can’t bear it. I must get rid of it. I must bury it.

  I snatch up a spade and scrape away at the straw until I reach the beaten-earth floor into which pebbles from the beach have been hammered, edge on, to cobble it. I try to dig them out, but they are set too close, too deep. Even with the end of a mattock, I can only prise a few loose. Thirst claws at my throat. I will never be able to dig a hole deep enough in that floor to bury two big men. There is nothing to be done except leave them and seal the flimsy wicker door between the byre and the house as best I can.

  If we had given Janiveer what she demanded, if we had even promised . . . if I had promised, would Elis be alive? Would I be sitting outside in the sun, watching my little Hob racing up the hill towards me, bubbling over with some wild new tale? I should have listened to her. I should have believed, begged her to save us, even if no one else in the village would. What Janiveer asked then does not seem so great a price now. If I had given my life, she would not have taken Elis. And Hob: has she taken my little Hob too?

  The goat stares up at me as I cut her throat. She doesn’t struggle, barely even twitches as the blood splashes hot on my hand. I drag the carcass into the cottage. The lights and liver, still steaming, I drop in the pot. We’ve no firewood or dried salt-weed to cook them, but what else can I do with them? The bloody limbs, carcass and head I hang from the beams of the cottage. I don’t want ever to return to the byre. Blood drips on to the bracken. I see it everywhere I look, a great surging tide of it.

  Goda gives a sharp, sudden cry as if she’s been slapped. She is staring up at the skinned goat’s head. The eyes stare down at her. She grips her belly and a shudder runs through her. Her birth pangs have started! But a tomb is no place to birth a babby. The fire is almost gone and the tallow light nearly burned away. We will need both light and heat before the child is delivered.

  ‘Luke, chop the table and the stools into logs to burn on the fire.’

  He doesn’t even raise his head. I shake him. ‘The table! Shift yourself, boy! Goda’s baby is coming.’

  He shoves me away. ‘Leave me alone! My father’s dead! Don’t you remember? Don’t you even care?’

  ‘My husband is dead . . . mine!’ I shout at him. ‘You’re the man now. You think your father would just have sat there and let a babe freeze to death? He’d be ashamed of you.’

  Luke glowers up at me. Even in that dim light I can see the resentment glittering in his eyes. He wishes I’d died, not his father.

  He struggles to his feet. ‘So what am I supposed to chop it with? We’ve no axe in the cottage. Father left it outside on the wood pile, afore they shut us . . . Why didn’t he bring it in? Why?’

  He is sobbing and I cannot look at him. We have nothing left in here except time, but we can spare none of it for tears.

  ‘Find something to smash the table then. In the byre . . .’ But I can’t make him go in there.

  Goda howls for Aldith as another wave of pain sweeps over her. Aldith sets Ibb down on the bracken, and dumps little Kitto in Ibb’s lap where she can watch them both as she rubs her sister’s belly. Who does she fear will snatch them in here? Ibb gazes up, wide-eyed, as Goda writhes and moans. We lift her shift to see how close the baby is to coming. Ibb watches it all, just as she watched the goats and the horses give birth. Goda’s gaze keeps straying back to the bloody goat’s head dangling above her. Its eyes, blackened now, stare down at her.

  The tallow light gutters and dies. We are plunged into darkness. Luke gropes towards the faint glow of the embers of the fire. He has smashed the legs from the table and thrusts them into the embers. I blow on them, willing the wood to catch, and finally it does. Flames lick up, bathing the cottage in blood-red light. But four legs will not burn for long.

  ‘Top won’t break,’ Luke mutters.

  ‘Good solid wood that is, my maid,’ Elis had said, slapping the table he had just completed and beaming his pride. ‘See us both through till we’re in our graves, our grandchillern too, God willing.’

  But even as I see his hand caressing that table, I see the same hand clawing in agony. And God was willing, only too willing, for the table to outlive the man. Suddenly I want it smashed to splinters, burned to ashes, destroyed not for warmth but because it should not be allowed to survive when he was not.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Luke,’ I snap, ‘you’re not even trying. You’re no more use than a babby in clouts!’

  They are cruel words to utter. I know it even as I speak them, but I don’t stop myself.

  Chapter 21

  Matilda

  ‘St Anthony, please look around; something is lost and must be found.’ When St Anthony was a monk, a novice once borrowed his psalter without asking permission, but after being haunted by a terrifying spectre of the monk, he returned it at once.

  A
scream half roused me from my sleep. A vixen in the forest, that was all. The devil’s creature often shrieks like a terrified woman. Many have been deceived by the cry and led into danger. I turned over and tried to burrow back into sleep. But the shriek echoed again, and as I was jerked awake, I heard a muffled banging as if those lying in coffins up in the graveyard were hammering with their bones on the stone lids, trying to break out. I groaned and sat up in bed. I was sure the noise was emanating from Sara’s cottage. The clamour had haunted half the village these past nights. Mostly it had been the sound of men shouting, but the new voice was so shrill it set my teeth on edge.

  So Sara and her family weren’t dead, after all, or perhaps they were and it was their ghosts rattling the shutters and crying curses on the village. But no one would venture out in the dark to investigate. How long would Cador wait before he had the cottage reopened, or would he simply leave the bodies to rot in there? He wasn’t willing to discuss the matter, and tried to pretend that he couldn’t even hear the screams, though I could see by his haggard face, and that of his wife Isobel too, that neither was getting any more sleep than the rest of us.

  I had given my word I would say nothing to Father Cuthbert, but I would find a way of bringing him to a place in the village where he could see and hear the evidence for himself. He’d ask questions then, of that you could be certain. And when he did, Cador would not remain bailiff for a single day more.

  I turned over and tried to blot out the cries, but swiftly sat up again. There was another sound that had gained my attention, one that was much softer, but much closer – a scratching on the door, a strange little squeaking. Gatty! My naughty little cat had finally returned and was clawing and mewing to coax me to open the door and let her in to her supper and the warmth of the fire.