The Wicked and the Just

by J. Anderson Coats

  Two nooses stand out against the crisp sky. The condemned stand beneath the dangling ropes.

  The crowd is buzzing now. Not hollering. Not baying for blood. Muttering. Fidgeting. And though those gathered keep a healthy distance from the men-at-arms, I can feel thousands of eyes on us up here, in the very shadow of the gallows.

  Two men-at-arms no longer seems like a lot, even though they’re built like mastiffs and armed with daggers and broadswords.

  The hangman cinches a noose tight over the neck of the first man, then the second. The first one says something in Welsh, something calm and bold, something that redoubles the crowd’s murmur and turns more eyes to us than ever.

  I grip my father’s elbow.

  The hangman puts a hood over each man’s head, then steps back to the tether. There’s a drawn-out swiff of rope and both men sail into the air, wriggling like worms on a fishhook.

  The crowd falls utterly still, as if they’re deep in prayer.

  My father insists we stay till the bodies cease swaying. When we finally leave, much of the crowd remains. Some are kneeling as if it’s a vigil.

  The men-at-arms escort us to our dooryard. One offers to stand post outside for a few days, but my father thanks him and says him nay.

  “This,” my father says, gesturing to the house, “I know they wouldn’t dare.”

  The man-at-arms shifts beneath his leather armor. “I’ve been here long enough to know better than to guess at what the Welsh will and will not dare.”

  My father laughs and sends him and his fellows on their way. I watch the men-at-arms disappear around the top of Shire Hall Street, then I go into the rearyard and put both hands on the walls that keep things like sooty felons and the need for armed guards safely without.

  When I arrive at the Coucy house for my se’ennight’s bad-mouthing, I find the lady de Coucy arranging strips of linen and foul-smelling pottles in a basket.

  “Oh, you’re leaving.” I clasp my hands and study the floor so she cannot see my good cheer. “Beg your pardon. I’ll just be off.”

  She pulls a bright cloth over the basket and reaches for her cloak. “You’ll be coming with me. Emmaline, too. It’s nearing Mistress Glover’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “For her child to be born, silly girl.”

  I step back. “I—I’ll just be in the way.”

  “Nonsense, Cecily. Helping at a birth is one of the most important things a good woman of Caernarvon does.”

  It’s Mistress Glover’s hundredth child. Like as not she just has to sneeze for the baby to come out.

  Emmaline takes my elbow. “Mayhap we’ll be allowed to hold the baby!”

  Mayhap I’ll be allowed to hide in the garden shed.

  Mistress Sandys is already at the Glover house when we arrive, as is Mistress Pole. They’re fluttering up and down the stairs bearing lengths of linen and basins of water. Someone has brought a relic to aid in the birth—a girdle that Emmaline swears belonged to Saint Margaret—and draped it reverently over the mantel.

  The moment the lady de Coucy walks into the Glover house, she takes charge of everything. She sends Emmaline abovestairs with some rosewater for Mistress Glover’s brow, and she gives me the task of opening and untying. Leaving even a single knot tied might tangle up the baby or wrap the cord about its neck, and a closed door or shutter could stop up the birth canal. It would be all my fault. So I throw open every shutter and untie every knot in the house, down to the laces in Saint Margaret’s girdle on the mantel.

  After I finish, I edge into the shadows of the hearth corner. Borough ladies wick by me, eyes to their footing or their burdens. Betimes they mutter in hushed voices that put me too much in mind of a sickroom for my liking.

  I haven’t a paternoster, but I whisper a prayer for Mistress Glover.

  Then there’s a thin, spindly cry from abovestairs. A baby’s cry.

  Emmaline appears at the bottom of the stairs. Her hands are clasped and she’s bouncing like a wagon on the low road. “Oh, come and see, Cecily. He’s just the sweetest baby in all of Christendom!”

  Babies ruin your garden, even when they aren’t yours. They get lost and worry you ill, even when they aren’t yours.

  But I follow Emmaline abovestairs and into the bedchamber, where Mistress Sandys has just lifted the tiny baby dripping from a basin. She dries him off and wraps him tightly in crisp white linen, then tucks him into his mother’s elbow.

  The baby is a deep glowing pink. He isn’t stinky or screamy. He looks weary but content.

  Emmaline shyly asks if she can hold the baby. Mistress Glover hands him up and Emmaline settles him in the crook of her arm as if he’s wine from water.

  “Would you like to hold him next, Cecily?” Mistress Glover asks.

  I shake my head violently and the women laugh, but not in a mocking way. Then Mistress Pole says she’d never even held a baby until the moment her eldest was placed in her arms, and Mistress Pannel cackles when she says she tiptoed around her eldest’s cradle for a whole fortnight after he was born, afraid to wake him. She’d have to pick him up then, she explains, and she was sure she’d drop him and break every bone in his body.

  The good borough ladies laugh and brag and best one another with outlandish stories, and it isn’t long ere we’ve all drawn stools around Mistress Glover’s bed. Someone produces a flask of claret and starts it around. Mistress Glover smiles and closes her eyes while Emmaline hums a lullaby and sways the baby like a dancing partner.

  Mistress Pole places the flask in my hand without thinking twice. She does not seem to notice that I’m a novi who will never be one of them. The wine is strong and sweet. Not bitter at all.

  I’ve saved what I can of my tattered wardrobe. I manage to piece together two shifts, two pairs of hose, and my bedrobe. What’s left is a mass of fibers that cannot even be unraveled, tied together, rerolled into a skein, and rewoven. They are finely spun, expensive rags.

  So I do what you do with rags. I bundle them up for the ragman.

  I find him at the market one Saturday, the same wizened ruffian whom Gwinny and I avenged when Levelooker Pluver was plying his odious trade. We surely got the best of Pluver that day. I laughed like a madman when Pluver finally found his hat crushed beneath that hog’s filthy trotters.

  Neither Alice nor Agnes would ever have done anything so clever and brave. They would have pressed hands to mouths and fretted about being caught.

  The ragman offers me a penny for my bundle. I tell him I cannot take less than five, and show him the quality of the rags.

  He chitters like a jay, rubs them, then asks toothlessly, “What possessed you to stove up such fineries?”

  I pet the rose wool. I could be wearing this gown, and thinking about it still makes me want to kick something.

  But I toe a line in the dirt and quietly reply, “I know not what I was thinking.”

  Gwinny is finally well enough to leave. Mistress Tipley tries to persuade her that it’s too late for her to walk home, that the men with blackened faces do terrible things to collaborators, but Gwinny shakes her head firmly.

  She totters into the hall, stiff like a lance. I’m grinding bits of beechnut hull for dyestuff. She nods to me as she fumbles with her cloakstrings.

  “Gwinny.”

  She’s halfway out the door, hands already balled in her cloak against the cold, and she winces as she sidles back into the hall.

  I put aside the beechnuts and approach her. She lifts her chin. She does not cringe, but she seems to be bracing for a blow.

  I untangle her hand from her cloak and lay her wages in her palm. Three pennies that catch firelight.

  Gwinny gapes at the coins. The bird-look falters and she begins blinking rapidly.

  Then she inclines her head, fists a hand about the pennies, and disappears into the deepening winter twilight.

  MAKE no haste. Couldn’t if I wanted to, but I don’t. What awaits me at the steading will be the same
regardless of haste.

  It’ll be bad. Scavengers will have been at the corpse.

  She’ll have died alone, weeping for her babies.

  That is what the brat will pay for. Whatever the cost.

  Uphill takes months and years. Must move in tiny margins. Mustn’t bend. Scabs are still raw enough to tear.

  Cannot smell the corpse yet. Mayhap the cold holds it down.

  Limp inside and blink. There’s fire.

  Go cold all over because fire means Gruffydd has foregone labor to tend Mam and it’ll be se’ennights ere he sees even half a chance at a penny again.

  But it’s not Gruffydd who rises from the shadows. It’s Fanwra from down the vale, and she gestures shyly to Mam.

  “She’s a tough old girl,” Fanwra says in her wispy little voice that makes me think of baby birds and dry grass.

  “You’re kind to come.”

  Fanwra worries her ratty sleeves. “Gruffydd asked me to stay with her. There’s not much I’d deny him.”

  Her words hang there, waiting for me to dignify them, to bless her devotion. Not in this lifetime, though, nor in any spare moment of the hereafter.

  “You’re kind to come.”

  Fanwra finally flutters toward the door, muttering well-wishes and prayers for Mam. The moment she’s gone, I sink in fits and measures to my knees while keeping my mincemeat back in a rigid column.

  Mam whimpers for water. The leather bucket is empty. Look at it and look at it, as if one wrung-out plea will make it fill itself. Then rise, every margin a blade of fire, and edge downhill toward the creek with the bucket swaying from my hand like a hanged man.

  They come at night. Gruffydd goes with them. He darkens his face with ashes and pulls Da’s spear from the rafters without flinch or hesitation, as if he’d known where it was all along. His eyes scream like jewels from the soot.

  The others say little. They stand without the door, flat against the steading. A mass of shadows, men and weapons, curves and angles and blades.

  Don’t see them. Don’t know them. Cannot betray them.

  Da went out. Da never came back. They left his body on the walls till naught but scraps were left.

  Gruffydd wears no cloak. Cloaks catch and snag on brush. He shivers already.

  My little brother. The boy who once wept for injured hares and maidens ill-served in nursery tales. Now there’s down on his cheeks. Scars across both hands.

  Da went out, called up by his prince. Da stood with the prince when he fell at Cefn-y-bedd, and all Wales with them. He stood after, while men submitted in droves to save themselves, their lands. He stood against their king till English hanged him from the walls of Caernarvon.

  They come at night and Gruffydd follows, disappears into darkness.

  A SE’ENNIGHT after Candlemas, we always feed the poor in honor of my mother.

  At Edgeley, tenants filled the great trestle tables in the hall and spilled out into the yard. Every man, woman, and child in the village left full to bursting. Meat and ale, bread and cheese. Wine for the reeve. Cakes for the children. Whatever was left we sent home with each family, wrapped up in linsey.

  When we return from Candlemas Mass, I ask my father how we’ll feed the poor this year when our house is so small.

  “Oh, sweeting, it’ll be hard enough to keep our bodies and souls together till spring.” He runs a hand through his hair. “And it isn’t as if this is Edgeley, where the tenants would be at the door with pitchforks should I think to go against custom.”

  I frown. “You mean we aren’t going to feed the poor this year?”

  “I’ll pray for them, sweeting. These people aren’t my tenants. There’s no custom binding me to them.”

  The custom doesn’t bind us to the tenants. It binds us to her.

  But he’s got that don’t-make-me-cuff-you look about him, so I duck my head like a good girl and say naught. Instead I wait for him to put on his boots and pick up his questioning cudgel and go out to officer the mills. I hide behind the garden shed until Mistress Tipley lumbers into the yard privy, then I dart into the kitchen and liberate three big loaves from the trestle. I put on my cloak and find Gwinny plaiting hemp in the hearth corner.

  “Can you walk? I’m going without the walls and I’d have you with me.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m feeding the poor.”

  Gwinny’s eyes jerk up as though I’ve crowned myself dunghill princess. “You are not.”

  My mother had hair the color of a new-brushed roan. She was always moving, never still, and she walked chin up with a jingle of keys, with Salvo ever her shadow.

  I hold up the bread.

  Gwinny lays aside her task and rises in stiff margins. “If you say it’s so, it must be so.”

  “Does that mean you’re coming?”

  Gwinny smiles in a way I’m not sure I like. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  It’s rising Tierce. Midmorning is achingly cold and the color of wallstone. The bread in the satchel against my back is no longer warm and grows heavier by the moment. The serjeant at the trestle marks Gwinny at my elbow, but I meet his eyes steadily until he steps aside and lets us through.

  Outside the gate, I drift a few paces, then stop ere I even get across the quay bridge. I didn’t think this through very well. I haven’t the first idea where to even look for the poor.

  “You still want to feed the poor?” Gwinny stares into the distance, her hair snarling into her eyes. I nod and she says, “Come.”

  She leads me toward the market common. Along the trodden toll path, huddled like piles of wet laundry awaiting the clothesline, are whole families with cheeks like slack sails, and graybeards with fingers all knuckle. Dozens of men, women, and children, and I have but three loaves.

  “The poor,” Gwinny says expansively, gesturing. She’s appraising me sidelong, not quite smiling.

  She’s waiting for me to run away screaming.

  The poor are ashen and malodorous. They’re not like the poor of Edgeley. Those were people I knew. Every one of them. Down to their livestock. They were a part of Edgeley and therefore mine. But these poor wretches are living skeletons, something straight out of a sermon on sin. If I stay too long in their company, I’ll end up one of them.

  But I’ll not give Gwinny the satisfaction of leaving. Besides, I’m not here for her.

  I slide my satchel off my shoulder and fumble with the bread. Nearby is a gaunt mother of two tiny redheads who are covered in rashy scabs. I tear off a chunk of bread and hand it to her.

  She gapes and stammers something to me in a voice that sways like a bird on the wing, then breaks the bread in two and hands one piece to each child. She closes her eyes as they gulp it down.

  Some of the poor, the stronger ones, rise and lurch toward us, and Gwinny says something to them in Welsh in a sharp, no-nonsense voice. They stop and retrace their steps, some mutinous, some hopeful.

  “I told them to make a queue,” Gwinny says to me, “and that you’d go along and give everyone something.”

  So I do. I break off pieces as equally as I can, placing bread in every palm that’s put toward me. They eat as if they’ve never seen bread ere this. As if they’ll never see it again.

  When the bread is gone and my satchel twice tipped for every last crumb, I smile and shrug and look to Gwinny to say something to them. She does, and when she’s finished, I gesture to the city gate and she falls into step at my elbow.

  I cannot recall ever running out of food when we fed the poor at Edgeley.

  “This isn’t even the worst of it,” Gwinny says quietly. “These are the ones with strength enough to crawl to the common to beg.”

  My mother was always moving, never idle, and had she been starving on the roadside with me beneath her arm, she would have gone without so I could feel full just for a moment. She would have wept to see me hungry, to have no way to feed me.

  “Why?” Gwinny asks, so quiet the wind nearly takes it away.

  �
��Why feed the poor?” I ask, and she nods. “Er, because they’re hungry?”

  Gwinny frowns as though she’s heard me wrong. “Because they’re hungry.”

  I nod firmly, because I don’t trust my voice to speak of my mother. Especially not today.

  Back at the townhouse, my father is roaring at Mistress Tipley for taking the bread that was to last us the better part of a fortnight, and Mistress Tipley is cowering before the hearth and blubbering that she didn’t take the bread and cannot imagine where it has gone.

  As usual, it’s up to me to make things right.

  When my father pauses to take a breath, I clear my throat. “Papa, I know what became of the bread.”

  All three turn toward me—my father in rage, Mistress Tipley in mute hope, and Gwinny in disbelief. But I’m no fool. I’ll feed the poor, but I’ll not take a thrashing for them.

  I blame the one creature in the house guaranteed never to feel my father’s temper.

  “Please don’t be wroth with him, Papa,” I say, “but I saw him coming out of the kitchen with the bread in his mouth, and when he saw me, he just gobbled it down ere I could get it away from him. I tied him up after that, but he must have eaten the other loaves ere I caught him. He’s just so hungry, poor beast. Like the rest of us.”

  My father’s color is still high, but his fists are sliding to his sides and relaxing. He looses a long breath and mutters something to Mistress Tipley that might be an apology or permission to depart. Either way, she bobs her head and all but flies out of the hall.

  I go to the rear storage chamber to fetch my father a mug of ale, but when I see the level in the barrel, bring him half a mug instead. My father sulks on one of the trestle benches and glares at Salvo, who lies against the warm hearthstones in dreamless sleep.

  We eat naught for dinner, and for supper there is only watered maslin and some old squishy turnips that smell like unwashed hose.