The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  ‘So it was her who emptied the chest. Where did she take the linens?’

  ‘Back to her cottage to stop the villagers using them to wrap their dead in.’

  I nearly said they’d have given better service as shrouds than they ever did as altar cloths, but I stopped myself. Harold was a pious lad in his own way and I couldn’t afford to offend him, not till I had some answers.

  His gaze had been drawn to the red streak on the altar and, wearing a puzzled expression, he moved closer to peer at what was lying on it. As he realised what it was, he recoiled, his eyes wide with alarm.

  ‘You kill this? We mostly get grass snakes in here. Come in after the mice. We only had a viper once before and it bit an old woman when she knelt for the elevation of the Host. She didn’t die, not straight off anyways. But the wound never healed, whole leg turned black and stinki— Here, what’s happened to the altar? There’s a great crack across it. That wasn’t there before. Did you smash it?’

  I pranced a few paces in a fool’s caper. ‘A short-arse like me?’

  He grinned, but his expression rapidly turned to one of puzzlement again and he stared down at the body of the viper. ‘Then how did this . . . Suppose a cat must have dragged it in.’

  Except that there aren’t any cats left in Porlock Weir, I thought. I shuddered, thinking how close that viper’s head had been to mine. If it hadn’t been for the bear . . . But there was no bear! There couldn’t have been. Yet something had killed that snake and it certainly hadn’t been a blade. I tried to shake the night terror from my head. Never mind about bears and snakes: Christina and my son were all that mattered now.

  ‘The chest, Harold, was there anything else in it besides the church linens?’

  Harold’s pimples seemed to become more livid as his pale face flushed. ‘Nothing else is kept in there,’ he muttered. ‘Father Cuthbert took all the church plate . . . for safe keeping.’

  But I saw his gaze slide over to the empty reliquary niche.

  ‘He took the reliquary too,’ I said.

  Harold grimaced. ‘Don’t see who else could have but . . .’

  ‘But not the relic that was inside,’ I said. ‘He left that in the linen chest.’

  Harold’s mouth fell open. ‘How did you . . .’

  I fixed him with my sternest glance. Not easy when you’re looking up at a mere boy and your mouth is grinning. ‘Who took the hand from the chest? You or Matilda?’

  Harold’s expression crumpled. ‘I tried to stop her,’ he wailed. ‘But you’ve seen her when she’s made up her mind to do something. Not even a ship full of bishops would be able to say no to her. I didn’t even know the hand was in there! What will they do to me when they find out I lost the relic?’

  He looked so scared that I drew closer and gave his arm a friendly squeeze. ‘Nothing, boy, nothing. If we survive, I doubt anyone outside the village will even remember the chapel had a relic, and if they do, they’ll blame Father Cuthbert since he took the reliquary, not you. But all the same, best not to say a word to Matilda or anyone else that I was asking about it. Our secret, yes?’

  Harold nodded gratefully, and I left him brushing the remains of the viper off the altar while I set off in search of food and a place where I could keep watch on Matilda’s cottage without being seen.

  The moment I discovered Matilda had the relic I realised that asking her to give it to me, of all people, would be as much use as asking the pope to canonise a heretic. The hand was probably tucked away in her cottage somewhere, along with the church linens. If she even suspected I was after it, she’d make certain to hide it where I’d never be able to find it. But if she didn’t know anyone was looking for it, she’d have no cause to move it. So the easiest thing was simply to wait until she went out and search for it myself. It would be more dangerous than raiding her pigsty at night, but Cador was dead, so even if she did catch me, there was no one to arrest me. Though I wouldn’t put it past the Holy Hag to take matters into her own hands and act as judge and executioner. I hadn’t forgotten those vicious caltrops she’d scattered about.

  I found a spot above her house in what had been the herb patch of one of the cottages but was now a tangle of sickly yellow weeds and dead currant bushes. The door to the cottage had been pulled off either to use as a bier for the dead occupants, or to be chopped up as firewood by others in the village. Swallows had made a nest inside, and brambles were already wriggling over the threshold.

  I settled down between the withered bushes and stared at the cottage below, trying to ignore my empty belly. Goda was the first to emerge, her baby cradled in one arm, and a pail swinging from the other. She set off towards what was left of the stream, but before she was out of sight of the cottage, the Holy Hag called her back, snatched the baby from her and carried the infant back into the cottage. The child’s shrill wail rose from somewhere inside, and Goda rocked back and forth on her feet, plainly agitated, as if she wanted to go to her but was afraid to do so. Eventually the cries stilled and Goda, still casting anxious glances back at the cottage, ambled away. I waited, dozing in the heat, so that I nearly missed the door opening again. This time it was Matilda who emerged, with a basket on her arm, and hobbled down towards the shore. The baby must still be inside, but she couldn’t tell any tales. I’d never get a better chance than this.

  I crept up the path and gave the door a little push. It creaked open. With a quick glance round to ensure I was unobserved, I sidled in. It was dark and cool, plainly furnished, save for a table in one corner crowded with painted statues of martyred saints, their half-naked bodies covered with exquisitely stitched cloaks. How could the wife of a lowly ship’s carpenter afford such figures?

  I crept closer, peering at the objects that lay at the feet of the saints. They were pieces of bone, human backbone. Relics of some saint, I assumed, but where had she got them? Even a wealthy monastery or cathedral would have a hard time raising the money to buy so many holy bones. But it was little wonder she’d taken the hand of St Cadeyrn. She evidently collected holy bones the way some women collect jewels.

  Cadeyrn’s relic must be somewhere close by, though the table was so cluttered with statues, bones, vials of holy water and holy seals, it was hard to pick out anything in the dim light. I began lifting the objects one by one, searching for a box or a hollow inside one of the statues where she might have hidden it.

  The slap of bare feet on the hard earth and a shadow falling across the open doorway made me wheel round. I don’t know which of us was more startled, Goda or me. She jerked backwards, almost spilling the precious bucket of muddy water.

  It had been some time since I’d seen her close to and she looked as if she’d aged twenty years. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes sunk and rimmed with dark shadows, and her hair had noticeably thinned. Her arms were covered with green-yellow marks from fading bruises and fresh purple ones too. The pestilence? My heart began to pound. But she was blocking the doorway and I didn’t want to risk touching her as I pushed past.

  She set her pail down and gnawed her lip. ‘You’d best not let Mistress see you in here,’ she whispered. ‘She said you’re a thief.’

  ‘You call her Mistress?’

  ‘She says I must, now I’ve come to live here.’

  ‘So she’s made you her servant, has she?’

  The girl shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. ‘She says I’m to be grateful she took me in and feeds me. But when my Jory comes back from the sea, he’ll take care of us.’

  She spoke with the kind of desperation that the condemned cling to when they’re standing in the gallows cart on their way to the scaffold, still hoping that someone will speak the one magical word – pardon. Even when the rope lies about their neck, still they believe they will hear the word, but they never do.

  ‘Your baby,’ I said, ‘you’d do anything to protect her, wouldn’t you?’

  I edged deeper into the room, trying to draw her away from the doorway.

  Her
gaze darted to the heap of rags on the floor in the corner behind me. ‘Don’t take her!’ She rushed past me and scooped up the sleeping child, turning to face me as I hastily backed out of the door. ‘I won’t let you have her! She’s mine!’

  I tried to reassure her, fearing she might start screaming for help. But it took several minutes before I could convince her I meant no harm to her child.

  ‘Goda, I need your help. I have a baby son of my own, but someone will kill him if I cannot get him to safety. Like you, I’d do anything to protect him. You can understand how that feels, can’t you?’

  She nodded warily, still clutching her daughter to her chest.

  ‘Matilda . . . Mistress Matilda took something from the church, a relic – the hand of St Cadeyrn. If I can deliver that hand to one of Cadeyrn’s kin, they will help me get my child to safety. It’s not stealing. Any court in the land would say the hand belongs to Cadeyrn’s kin.’

  That wasn’t exactly true. Can you imagine the uproar if judges started ruling that abbots and bishops had to return all their stolen relics? There wouldn’t be a single church in England that remained consecrated, but Goda was hardly going to argue that point.

  ‘I’d merely be returning something that was lost to its rightful owner,’ I told her. ‘And I would be sparing Mistress Matilda the great trouble of having to do it herself. It’s a long journey, far too long and wearisome for a delicate woman of her advancing years. So if you could just tell me where Matilda keeps it, I could remove it and be on my way, without having to bother her.’

  An expression of horror crept over Goda’s ravaged face. ‘You want to take it behind her back? You can’t . . . I won’t let you . . . if the mistress found it had gone . . .’

  ‘You could tell her you saw me fleeing from the house as you returned. She’d readily believe that I broke in and stole it.’

  ‘She’d know it were a lie . . . she knows everything . . . she always knows.’

  ‘I always know what, Goda?’ Matilda pushed past me, her eyes blazing in fury. She grabbed the girl by the hair, dragging her out through the doorway. ‘I took you, slut, and your bastard into my home out of Christian charity, shared what little food and shelter I have with you and this is how you repay me, conspiring with a thieving dwarf to rob me.’

  She slapped Goda hard across her cheek. The girl cried out, but before she could move away, slaps and blows were raining down on her head, shoulders and back. Matilda, in a fury of rage, was punching and hitting her with both hands. Goda, her arms wrapped around her wailing baby, bent over the infant, trying to protect her from Matilda, but she could do nothing to protect herself.

  ‘Don’t!’ I yelled. ‘Goda was trying to defend your cottage. She was stopping me forcing my way in.’

  But my words seemed only to infuriate her more, and she struck out with even greater force.

  I grabbed the bucket of water and tossed it over Matilda. With a shriek, she turned towards me, and I thought she was going to start beating me, but the water had made the baked earth and her own shoes as slippery as butter. She took a single pace, slid and crashed down hard on her back, her legs flying up into the air. Goda took one look and fled into the cottage. I ran the other way, glancing back only once to see Matilda rocking on the ground, limbs flailing like those of an upturned beetle as she struggled to pull her wet skirts down to cover her scrawny legs.

  Chapter 56

  Matilda

  St Edmund protects against pandemics. When he was martyred his severed head was tossed into the forest, but it was found by his men who followed the call of a wolf, which cried, ‘Hic, hic, hic’ – ‘Here, here, here.’

  ‘Answer me, Goda, and stop snivelling,’ I snapped. ‘I only gave you a little slap to bring you to your senses.’

  The girl sat hunched on the stool in the far corner beside her sleeping baby, sniffing loudly and flinching away from me, like a whipped cur.

  ‘What did that little piece of vermin want?’

  She shook her head, bending her face even lower, trying to hide the truth. Goda was always a simple girl, with the temperament of a butterfly. When she was a child her poor mother would set her to stir a pot or spin wool and she’d return to find the pottage burned and the yarn blowing in the wind because Goda had wandered off, distracted by a flock of gulls or the sight of men gathered on the shore.

  But what she lacked in brains she made up for in animal cunning. Before she was four summers old she’d already learned how to gaze up at men from under her long lashes and insinuate herself on to the lap of any adult who might feed her titbits or stroke her hair. Not even her mother could bring herself to scold her, much less punish her, however wayward she grew. That girl had never been corrected or made to do a day’s work until she came to live with me, and it was left to me to teach her what she should have learned at her mother’s knee or across it.

  I ladled some hot broth into one of the wooden bowls and handed it to her. She took it warily, sniffing it. Then, tipping the bowl, she gobbled it down like a beggar’s child.

  ‘Goda,’ I said, ‘do you remember the painting on the chapel wall, where sinners are cast into Hell?’

  Her eyes widening, she peeped at me over the rim of the bowl.

  ‘Can you remember what those wicked demons looked like? Foul creatures, nasty little grinning dwarfs.’

  She set the bowl down, staring at me. ‘Is Will a demon? But he’s got no tail. Those demons in the chapel, they got tails.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him naked?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  ‘His clothes conceal his tail. It’s curled up over his back. And you remember Father Cuthbert taught that you must not consort with demons. They lie and deceive you, so that they can drag you down to the flames of Hell. Think of the agony of burning in the fires and never being able to escape that pain. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you, Goda? Hearing your baby shrieking and screaming as she burns and not being able to pull her from the flames because you are burning too.’

  She stared at the burning wood on the hearth, and her hand edged over to clutch the cloth her baby was swaddled in, as if she feared the dwarf would burst through the door and drag them both through that fire and down into Hell below.

  ‘So, you must be a good girl,’ I said softly, ‘and tell me exactly what the dwarf said to you. If you tell me the truth, he won’t be able to take you.’

  Wind shrieked around the cottage, rattling the dry wooden door and plucking at the shutters. Goda lay curled up around her child on a pile of moth-eaten sheepskins and blankets, but she was not asleep. I could see the red glow of the embers of the fire, shining in her eyes. But the baby slept on, oblivious to the wind’s howls and the crash of waves down on the shore.

  The candle flames burning in the bones around the little cluster of saints danced wildly in the icy draughts. Shadows darted across the painted faces and their tortured bodies writhed once more in the agony of martyrdom.

  Goda gave a little shriek and sat up. Holding the blanket in front of her like a shield, she stared at the floor. I glimpsed the movement too. Something black was running across the bracken. In the dim light of the candle, I couldn’t make out what it was – a mouse, a snake? I rose and, grasping the poker, edged warily towards it. It wriggled and I slammed the poker down, pinning it hard against the dried bracken, then bent closer. It was just a feather, a long black feather, blown under the door by the wind.

  ‘It means death!’ Goda moaned.

  ‘It means a strong wind,’ I snapped, hurling it on to the fire. It shrivelled, bursting into a tiny blaze of flame.

  ‘It’s bad luck to burn—’ She broke off, turning her head towards the shuttered casement, listening. For a few moments I could hear nothing more than the wind and waves, then I heard it too, the sound of several pairs of feet scrabbling over the stones and the murmur of voices. Flickering orange light danced through the cracks in the wood and almost at once there was a heavy thumping on
the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called, gripping the poker more tightly. ‘What do you want at this hour?’

  ‘It’s me, Sara, and some of the village folk. We must speak with you. This’ll not wait.’

  ‘Are you sick?’ I called. ‘If it’s food you want, I’ve none to spare.’

  ‘There’s none sick with us, and we’d not take a bite from you, but there’s summat must be said. It’ll not take long for we’d all sooner be in our beds than out in this wind.’

  Goda had scrambled up from her corner and was already at the door. ‘Is my sister with you? Is she come to take us home?’

  She was already heaving the brace beam from its socket, and before I could stop her, she’d flung the door wide, staring out into the darkness. The wind roared into the house sending the smoke whirling, lifting the bracken from the floor and snatching away the candle flames. A half-dozen faces, lit by the guttering torch, crowded in front of my door.

  ‘Aldith! That you?’ Goda called out eagerly, standing on tiptoe to peer over their heads.

  ‘Aldith’s not with us,’ Sara said quietly.

  ‘With some man, no doubt,’ I said.

  Sara glanced down at little Ibb, who was balanced on her hip. The child’s head flopped sleepily against her shoulder. ‘Some days these dark humours come upon Aldith and she’ll not stir from where she sits. Next she’s acting like she’s a giddy maid again, laughing at naught and prancing round the village. Don’t know what ails her. But it’s not her we’ve come about.’

  Without so much as a nod to manners, she marched in and deposited the sleeping child on my bed.

  ‘Don’t imagine for one moment you’re going to leave that child at my door,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s enough that I’m taking care of her sister and her babe. I’ll not take in Aldith’s brat as well. If she can’t be bothered to look after—’