The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Don’t fret,’ Sara growled. ‘I’d not abandon a mad dog to your care, much less a helpless child!’

  Sybil shoved her way through the door behind her. ‘Bridle that tongue of yours, Sara. ’Tis honey not vinegar that’s needed here.’

  Sara muttered something I couldn’t catch over the shriek of the wind.

  I grabbed Goda’s arm. ‘Close the door, girl, before the wind lifts my thatch off.’

  Goda and Sybil both pushed against the door and latched it, but not before the dwarf creature had slipped inside.

  ‘Put him out!’ I ordered. ‘I’ll not have that vermin in my cottage.’

  Sybil glanced up from the fire where she was warming her great red hands. ‘You want us to let that wind in again, do you? Just hold your peace and hear us out. Then we’ll all be gone.’

  They settled themselves on the floor, close to the fire. Goda had snatched up her baby and retreated to the furthest corner, her eyes fixed on the dwarf. I could see her mumbling as if she was reciting a prayer or, more likely, a charm to ward off evil.

  Sybil and the dwarf caught Sara’s eye and nodded. Evidently she was the one they’d chosen to speak for them.

  ‘Will here has found Janiveer,’ Sara announced.

  ‘I might have known a dwarf could find a witch. Evil seeks out its own kind,’ I said. ‘And I suppose he’s brought her back to the village to put us all in even greater danger.’

  ‘I left her in Porlock Manor,’ the dwarf said. ‘Seems she’s been working there all these weeks.’

  ‘Then it is a blessing the road’s been sealed between us and them. But how did you—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how he came to be there,’ Sara said. ‘Point is, he’s seen her and he reckons he can persuade her to come back here, if we give her what she seeks.’

  ‘You want to bring that witch back to the village after what she did?’ I glanced at Goda. ‘Are you listening, girl? You see, I was right, wasn’t I? This is what I warned you of – lies and deceit. He wants to bring her back so she can finish her evil work and kill those of us who by God’s mercy have escaped her malice.’

  Goda whimpered and pressed herself harder against the wall, holding her baby tightly against her.

  ‘Will doesn’t want her back here. I do!’ Sara snapped.

  ‘We all do,’ Sybil said. ‘We agreed. She put a curse on the village, so she has to be the one to lift it. You went looking for her, same as Will and Sara here. Why go unless you wanted to find her?’

  I folded my lips. It should have been plain enough why I had gone, precisely to stop them bringing her back here.

  ‘She may not even need to return,’ Sybil said. ‘If she’s the power to bring such death, I reckon she could call it away from us without setting foot here again. But she’ll do naught to help us, unless we give her what she wants—’

  ‘What she wants is the hand of St Cadeyrn,’ the dwarf interrupted. ‘He was her forefather, and she means to take his bones back to the land of his birth. As soon as she has it, she’ll be gone, not just from Porlock, but from England, too, which should please you.’

  ‘The hand? To save us from the pestilence?’ I said. ‘But I seem to recall that what she said she wanted was a human life. Has she changed her price?’

  For a moment, I thought I saw the dwarf’s gaze flicker as if I had caught him out in a lie.

  ‘Will says it’s the hand she wants from us, that’s all,’ Sara said.

  Sybil nodded firmly. ‘Aye, it’s that hand she’s after. Maybe . . .’ She glanced uncertainly at the dwarf as if she was suddenly puzzled too. ‘Maybe what she said before was just to frighten us. Like the pedlars. They start with what they know you’d never pay to soften you up, then come down to the real price. Makes it seem a bargain then. After all, we’d have no more given her the relic than we would a life. There’s none would’ve been willing to steal a holy relic from the church, not back then afore the sickness began. It would have meant a hanging or worse. Isn’t that so, Will?’

  He pulled one of his grotesque faces. ‘How may a man dance without touching the ground? When he is hanged, poor fool.’

  I ignored him. ‘So what has this to do with me?’

  The dwarf lifted his head, staring at me impudently as if we were equals. ‘Because you have the hand,’ he declared, his tone serious now. ‘Harold told me you took it from the chapel.’ He craned round to stare at the door. ‘Where is Harold, anyway? He was right behind me when we were outside.’

  Sybil gave a deep belly laugh. ‘Taken to his heels, I’d wager. Exorcising a demon’s one thing, but facing Matilda . . .’ She turned her face away, trying to stifle another laugh.

  ‘Father Cuthbert said he’d hidden Cadeyrn’s hand in the linen chest,’ the dwarf continued, ‘but the chest is empty. Harold swears you both found it in there and you removed it along with the linens.’

  Sara was staring pointedly at the altar cloth, which now covered the table on which my saints stood.

  ‘Father Cuthbert!’ I said. ‘How dare you accuse a priest of such a sacrilege? It was you who stole the reliquary, dwarf, and when the road to Porlock is unblocked again, I intend to go straight to the manor and report your heinous crime. Even if you flee, they will pursue you till they have you hanging in a gibbet cage, you can be certain of that.’

  The others were staring at the dwarf, but he still wore that foolish grin. He waggled his fingers at me.

  ‘As Bald John pointed out the last time you tried to hang me, Matilda, would I really have returned to sit freezing my cods off in a cave if I had anything half as valuable as that lump of silver? Sorry to disappoint you, but Father Cuthbert has already admitted he took the reliquary for – well, let’s be charitable, shall we? – for safekeeping, so he says. But he swears he left Cadeyrn’s hand in the linen chest, and Harold is equally willing to swear he saw it there and you took it. So you have the oaths of two clergymen, Matilda. You going to call them both liars?’

  ‘If it was Father Cuthbert who removed the reliquary,’ I said, ‘then he took it because he knew that it would be a sore temptation for thieves. He will naturally return it as soon as he is able to hold Mass in the chapel once more.’

  ‘Your priest won’t be in any hurry to return the reliquary,’ the dwarf said. ‘Far too valuable. And apparently he didn’t care much for the relic, else he’d not have thrown it into the chest.’

  Though I knew the dwarf was trying to provoke me, I kept my dignity. ‘It is plain that Father Cuthbert did not want to deprive our village of the protection of her saint by removing the holy bones from Porlock Weir when we would most have need of them. But he knew if a thief like you stumbled across the hand when you were looting the chapel, you’d think nothing of tossing such a relic to the pigs.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had any pigs left to throw it to,’ the dwarf sneered.

  ‘So,’ I said, ignoring his jibe, ‘Father Cuthbert concealed the precious relic in the chapel’s linen chest because he knows I mend the altar cloths and would be the one to discover it. He knew he could trust me to take it to a safe place and ensure that it was properly guarded until the reliquary can be returned to us.’

  The dwarf looked as if he was about to make another vile remark, but Sybil held up her hand. ‘No use arguing over what Father Cuthbert’s done. He’ll not be returning at all unless this curse is lifted. Bald John was stricken this very afternoon. If he dies, the village’ll be without a blacksmith – and who’s going to shoe the packhorses and make the tools for tilling the land or mending the boats? We lose any more men, we’ll all starve. We must give that hand to Janiveer, if that’s her price.’

  ‘Do you really imagine I am going to relinquish the relic of God’s holy saint to a witch for her to use in some diabolic dark magic? St Cadeyrn’s blessed hand will stay in my keeping, where it can protect this village.’

  ‘A saint’s hand it may be, but it didn’t protect my Elis,’ Sara said. She clambered to her feet and st
ood facing me, her fists clenched. ‘If it’ll make Janiveer lift that curse, if it’ll make her tell me where I can find my sons, then she will get that hand.’ She took a threatening pace towards me. ‘You give it me, Matilda, right now, else we’ll search every stick and pot in this cottage till we find it, even if we have to rip the thatch from the roof and tear down the walls stone by stone.’

  Sybil and the dwarf scrambled to their feet and stood behind Sara, glaring at me.

  The thought of that dwarf opening my chests, fingering my garments and desecrating my holy saints with his brutish hands made me shudder.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, drawing myself up, ‘but when Janiveer uses St Cadeyrn’s hand against you, to raise ghosts from their graves and summon the demons of Hell, don’t say that you were not warned.’

  I dragged a small box from under my bed, lifted out a bundle wrapped in oil cloth and thrust it towards Sara. ‘There, take it. And may the blood of every living soul in this village be upon your head.’

  Chapter 57

  Sara

  To cure whooping cough, catch a flatfish, even one as small as a dab, and lay it upon the bare chest of the sufferer till the fish dies.

  The moon was fat, almost at full wax, so large and bright you could see the leaping hare in it. At least we’d have some light, though the trees were bending so low in the wind, I was afraid to enter the forest in case they came crashing down on us. Below us, the black sea roared in. The great white heads of the waves raced towards the shore, rearing up and pouncing down, like cats leaping on mice to break their backs.

  ‘Need to go straight up the hillside, then along near the top as far as we can, before we drop down behind the manor,’ Will said. ‘But there’s no need for you to come. It’ll be a hard climb. The undergrowth is thick and there’s no path.’

  I took a firmer grasp of Elis’s stave. ‘If I can bell that old cat, Matilda, then a few bushes aren’t going to stop me going,’ I told him firmly. ‘You just keep tight hold of that saint’s hand.’

  Will started to argue again, but I ignored him and, holding up the horn lantern that Sybil had lent us, began to edge in among the trees. I’d made up my mind to go with him before we ever reached Matilda. There was summat about his story that didn’t seem right to me, like a fish covered with fur. It was queer the way he’d discovered Janiveer at the manor. I’d not have thought of looking for her there and I couldn’t make out why he’d gone back to it in the first place, not when they’d thrown him out. Unless, like Matilda said, he was a thief. But I didn’t want to believe that. I’d grown fond of Will these past months. I’d not put such trust in any man afore, save for my Elis. But now, suddenly, I felt uneasy, and angry because of it.

  Once, years ago, when my Elis came back from carrying a cargo to one of the towns on the other side of the moor, he said that he’d seen a man hanged. They’d left him on the gallows long after he’d stopped dancing, just to make sure he was really dead. Only when they came to cut him down at sunset, his right hand was missing, sliced off at the wrist.

  I’d shuddered when he told me. ‘Whoever would want a dead man’s hand?’ I asked him.

  ‘Thieves, that’s who,’ my Elis said, ‘to make a hand of glory. The hand of a hanged felon’ll open any lock and it’ll put the whole household into a deep sleep, hounds too, so the thief could walk right in and pluck the hair from a man’s nose without him waking.’

  I stared at the crooked back of the little man waddling in front of me with his strange rocking gait. Was that why he wanted the hand? Because he meant to use it to steal from the manor? He’d stolen Matilda’s piglets. Cador had caught him with the carcasses. And Cador was dead, murdered.

  Maybe if I hadn’t come to care for Will so much I’d not have felt so hurt, betrayed. But now I was sure he’d been gulling me with his kindness, laughing at us all, and I was the fool for not seeing it.

  The dwarf stopped and snatched the lantern from my hand. Holding it up, he took a few paces forward, swinging the light around as he searched for some mark or tree he recognised. The bone-pale light threw a giant shadow of him against the trunk, so that he loomed over me, his great misshapen head and twisted back monstrous in the lamplight. Suddenly I was afraid, terrified. In a panic, I gripped the stave in both hands, and swung it high.

  As if he sensed the movement, he half turned, and a look of shock and horror flooded his eyes. ‘No!’

  But even as that one word rang out, another rose above the howling wind – a woman’s scream. Then a crashing and tearing of twigs and branches as if some huge beast was lumbering through the undergrowth.

  Will caught my skirt and dragged me back, pushing me against the gnarled trunk of an oak.

  ‘Keep still,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t make a sound.’

  He darted forward, taking the lantern with him, and the darkness closed around me. I pressed myself against the rough bark, but the wind was snatching at my skirts, tossing them around like the sails of a ship. I clamped them between my legs. Far off, I could just make out the faint glimmer of the lantern, but it kept vanishing as the branches and bushes whipped back and forth. I couldn’t tell if it was still moving. Another scream split the night, and then something came crashing towards me through the bushes, snapping branches as if they were twigs. I gripped the stave so fiercely my hands ached. It was getting closer. I wanted to cry out, call Will back, but daren’t, for fear of calling the monster to me.

  The branches above me parted as a violent gust caught them. Moonlight flooded the forest floor. In that moment, I glimpsed a huge and shaggy creature lumbering towards me, taller and wider than any widgebeast. With a great roar, it reared up on its hind legs. Above me I could see a scarlet maw and great white fangs. It stretched up, clawing at the moon as if it would rake it from the sky. Then, as the darkness closed in again, it thumped back to the ground, bounded past me and was gone. I waited, my heart thumping, until the sound of its crashing died away and only the wind shrieked through the trees. Then I ran towards the faint glimmer of lantern light.

  I was afeared I’d find Will lying bleeding on the ground, but he was standing with his back to me, the lantern at his feet casting a pool of yellow light across the ground. A thin, dishevelled woman stood facing him, her grey hair half tumbled, her skirts ripped and her hands bleeding from a dozen scratches as if she’d been tearing through brambles. The candlelight shining up from below made her face all sharpness and shadow like a skull.

  ‘They should have hung you from the tower, dwarf. Instead, it’s me they cast out. Me! Who was only trying to protect her.’

  ‘Protect her? You tried to murder her son!’ Will growled.

  ‘That’s a wicked lie! I told him – I told Wallace I’ve never harmed a child in my life! Nor would I! But he wouldn’t listen. Dragged me to the gate as if I was a scullion. I’d not even the chance to pack my belongings or take so much as flint and iron with me to make a fire. It was me who kept m’lady’s child alive. I fed it, tended it so it was warm and safe. I kept the whole manor from learning the truth – that she’d given birth to a bastard, your bastard. But I’ll not keep silent now. I’ll make sure Sir Randel knows his new bride is nothing but a whore. Worse than a whore, for she didn’t betray him with another man, but with a beast. When he hears you laid your filthy hands on his niece, Sir Nigel’ll have you hunted down and torn apart by the dogs.’

  I glimpsed the flash of steel in the lantern light as Will drew his knife and sprang at her. She staggered backwards, crashing to the ground. As he lunged towards her, she scrambled back on her elbows to get away from him.

  ‘Don’t kill me,’ she whimpered. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘You meant it!’ Will raised the knife higher. ‘It was your poisonous tongue that separated us. It was you who had me sent away. Let’s see how many malicious tales you can tell when I’ve cut it out.’

  He grabbed her by her straggly grey hair, hauling her head back so that she was forced to open her mouth. She was gasp
ing, and struggling frantically to push him away, but her strength was no match for his. I could see the terror in her eyes. I darted forward and caught his arm trying to drag him away. ‘No, Will. She’s just an old woman. You’d never harm a woman.’

  He tried to shake me off, but my weight on his arm unbalanced him. The old woman shoved him hard and rolled over. In a trice she was on her feet and running through the trees. The night swallowed her and the howls of the wind obliterated any sound.

  Will sat in the dried leaves, his head in his hands, panting hard. Finally, he raised his head and glowered up at me. ‘You should have let me kill her! She’ll get word to Sir Nigel and that word will mean death for my son.’

  ‘Your son?’ I repeated, staring at him. ‘You have chillern . . . a wife?’

  ‘You heard Eda, what I have . . . had is another man’s wife. But, yes, I have a son.’ Will laughed bitterly. ‘No need to gape at me like that. Even beasts breed.’

  He struggled to his feet. ‘I have to get my son and his mother away from the manor tonight before her husband learns of this. But I can’t get her out without Janiveer’s help and she won’t give it unless she has the hand of Cadeyrn.’

  ‘So that’s why you wanted it, not to stop the pestilence but to save your son.’

  He grimaced, then glanced slyly up at me. ‘But you said you wanted to find Janiveer, and I found her for you, didn’t I?’

  He gave a comical little skip, pulling a face, like a small boy trying to coax his way out of trouble by making his mam smile, just like Hob used to do. A gust of wind ripped through the trees, making me shiver.

  ‘No good’ll come from standing here. We’ve a long night ahead of us,’ I said.

  He lifted the lantern, picked up my stave and handed it to me. ‘Not sure it’s safe to give you this. Are you intending to brain me with it again?’

  I flushed. ‘My Elis told me about the hand of glory that thieves use. I got to thinking maybe you’d another reason for wanting that hand.’