The Wicked and the Just

by J. Anderson Coats

  “Would that I could, Cesspool,” Henry replies, “but the foremost honesti will be here tonight to discuss my prospects for taking the privileges.”

  Thimbles and pins! Not even Fortune will take my side.

  My father leaves explicit instructions to me in Henry’s presence that under no circumstances am I to leave the house for porch vigil and that it’ll be Henry’s hide as well as mine if he is disobeyed.

  Henry warns me with a single look, then bids Mistress Tipley fetch our second-to-last cask of ale from the cellar.

  I defy my father by sitting in the rearyard and throwing hempseed into the mud. It’s supposed to grow and my future husband is supposed to come rake it behind me. All it’s doing is giving the pigling something to root for.

  At dusk, Henry calls me inside and banishes me to my chamber with an awkward but genuine apology and the assurance that the hall will be no place for me tonight. And judging by the houndlike singing and hallooing and laughing that fills the house as the pillars of Caernarvon arrive to discuss Henry’s prospects, he may be right.

  Exiled, I throw my shutters open and lean out my window as far as I dare. I can see only a shade of the rear wall of Saint Mary’s, but mayhap I’ll catch sight of the souls on their way to the porch. Mayhap my uncle’s soul will be among them. Then my father will be back in possession of Edgeley. By Christmas I could be walking the same floorplanks my mother once trod, and Salvo could be buried at her feet when his time comes.

  In an Ave, I’m bored.

  So I sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the goings-on in the hall, trying to piece together how Henry is doing, how the burgesses are taking to him.

  How good a chance there is that he will become our neighbor.

  Apparently they took quite well to him. The honesti have extended an official invitation to my cousin Henry to consider the privileges of Caernarvon. He has accepted. He will take the oath at Christmas and move into the townhouse on Palace Street.

  Henry goes on at length about how envious Nicholas is and how Nicholas swears as soon as he gets his spurs he’ll come to Wales and take so much of that twopenny land that he won’t be able to ride its boundaries in a day. Baby Henry has finally beaten Nicholas to something, but I’m still trying to catch them both.

  Now that Henry will be our neighbor come Christmas, I cannot wait to show him the market and the Water Gate, Saint Mary’s and the wellheads and the place where the Seiont pools cold and quiet, where small fish come to nibble your toes.

  The evening ere he leaves for Coventry, Henry clears his throat and casts about and does worse than ruin my life.

  He ends it.

  Henry ends my life with the black news that Thomas d’Edgeley was born to my wretched uncle Roger and his worthless slip of a wife on May Eve.

  My father cheerfully throws on his cloak, seizes Henry by the elbow, and calls over his shoulder that they’re off to the Boar’s Head to drink to the babe’s good health.

  I sit at the empty table and stare into the dying hearthfire.

  It’s gone.

  The snug little hall with its brand-new chimney, the glowing garden, the dovecote, the turn of stream where quiet fish would gather in a silvery cloud. The pasturage where goats would crowd their necks through the fence for a handful of clover. The churchyard with its ancient yews and graves. The swing, swaying from an oak limb, that my father made from a length of hemp and an old cart-slat.

  Edgeley was to be mine. My mother promised all of it to me on my saint day when I turned seven and she let me carry the keys on a piece of twine tied about my waist from Prime till Compline. I could open every chest and door and lock. I spent every moment of that day at her side, hurrying to match her calm, swishing stride, and Salvo followed us both.

  At Vespers I was hiding from her in the dovecote, clutching the keys together to keep them from clanking. She had the grooms combing the yard for me, as it was long past my bedtime. The poor lads called and called, but they were grown and had forgotten the best places to hide. I could have stayed where I was till the Last Trumpet, and I planned to. I could not bear for the day to end.

  My father came out as far as the trough and promised me the whipping of my life should I not immediately present myself before him, but I held the keys tighter and moved not a margin.

  My mother finally came into the yard herself, holding up the horn-paned lantern. “Cecily, sweeting, one day it will all be yours. Every post and barrel, and there won’t be a day that goes by that those keys aren’t at your belt. You must be patient.”

  One day felt like the morrow when she said it. I came out and put the big ring of keys in her keeping. And I did get the whipping of my life.

  And ere the season turned, we buried her.

  Edgeley is his now. The rotten usurper mewling at his girl-mother’s breast. It’s all his, every post and barrel.

  Now we’re stuck in Caernarvon. We’re stuck here for good, and my father doesn’t even seem to care.

  HYWEL shuffles to the steading door. For a moment I’m wroth, Dafydd sending his cousin to ply me with more fruitless talk of marriage. But Hywel looks hagridden, his eyes red and his face blotchy. He’s been weeping.

  “All of them,” he whispers.

  He loves them like children. He names them and weaves crowns of flowers for their horns.

  Step away from the fire. “You had them up high. How could they have caught it?”

  Hywel shrugs, scrubs a wrist over his eyes. “I know not. They’re all dead. Sweating and staggering. Yours. Mine. Every beast in the vale.”

  They’re all dead. Cattle. Goats. Sheep. The murrain leaves nothing on the hoof untouched. No meat. No milk. No butter. No cheese.

  No food left but what’s doled out in Crown measures for ten times its worth.

  “Forgive me,” Hywel whispers, as if it’s his fault. Tears slide down his cheeks, winding through bristly beard-fuzz. “They all had to burn.”

  Beckon him in. Give him some mead. He refuses half an oatcake. Cannot eat, he mutters.

  Best eat now. Soon enough we’ll all be too hungry to care about the morrow.

  A thrash. The stumble of feet. Something being dragged.

  Awake. Instantly. The door-curtain wicks back to reveal a square of deep night-blue and a harsh silver wash of moonlight.

  They’ve come. As they did for Dafydd. Cudgels and thatch everywhere.

  On my feet, grappling for something heavy.

  “Gwen, it’s me!” Gruffydd’s voice is strained, as if he’s winded or bearing something heavy. “Help me. Right now.”

  Cannot move. Can barely breathe. The cooking pot slides out of my hand.

  From the dark comes gasping. Harsh bursts of sound a man would make were he drowning.

  Or hanging from an English rope.

  “Gwenhwyfar!”

  Kneel to stir up the coals. By the raft of sickly orange light, I can make out Gruffydd on his knees. Covered in blood.

  Sweet. Merciful. Christ.

  “Hssst! No fire! They’ll be looking for light!”

  Swipe up Mam’s water and douse the struggling coals. A great billow of smoke rises with a hiss of steam and the stench of burn.

  “No.” Whisper is choked. “Oh, Christ, no.”

  “It’s not my blood, Gwen. Please. He’s dying. Help me.”

  For a long moment, all I can do is tremble.

  Not his blood.

  Then I feel my way across the steading, moving toward Gruffydd’s voice. The disembodied gasps dry up as I near.

  “What happened?” Even as the words come out, I bite my lip. The less I know, the better for all. “To him, I mean.”

  “Cut,” Gruffydd replies tersely. “And never mind. He’s gone. God rest his soul.”

  Bump into Gruffydd and kneel at his side. Press my shoulder against his.

  “They got Cadwgan and Rhodri ap Tudur. Naught we could do. Bastards will hang them on the morrow. God damn those English sons of whores!”
/>   Stickiness spreading over my shoulder, soaking in. Not Gruffydd’s blood.

  Reckoning the fire now. Lackwitted of me to cast water on the coals. Somehow I’ll have to get the fire started again ere I leave for the brat’s.

  “Someone will have to tell their wives. And their mother.”

  This is why. Because I cannot bear to lose them both.

  Gruffydd beside me still draws his breath unsteadily.

  One day, a shadow will come to my door. He will push his hood back and scuff the dirt with one heel, and he will tell me to go to the market common should I want to say farewell ere the hangman does his work. Or that my brother died well in some anonymous way, calling down the only kind of justice the likes of us have recourse to.

  Then I will have naught left to lose.

  EMMALINE’S father is accused of murder.

  I’m not supposed to know a word of it, of course, but it’s impossible to get a moment of marketing done without absorbing who’s with child by whom or who’s fighting with her mother-in-law or whose baby has rump rash bad enough to blister.

  As near as I can figure out, Sir John de Coucy was out on his endowed cropland and caught a Welshman foraging in the stubble. Apparently there was a struggle and Sir John slew the Welshman with his falchion.

  My father keeps combing a hand through his hair and muttering that it could have been him, it could have been him.

  Murder is the Crown’s jurisdiction, not the borough’s, and the royal justice itinerant will be coming from Conwy to hear the case.

  The Coucys’ mousy servant appears on our doorstep with the message that the lady de Coucy will not expect me this Monday, nor on any Monday until further notice. My father says that no man can blame her, even though the look about him suggests that he’s a man who could. I merely glance up from my embroidery frame with my good-girl smile that says whatever the lady de Coucy thinks is best and all that rot.

  And I spend Monday peaceably for a change, outlining the city walls of Caernarvon with a strand of purple-gray thread that seems made for the purpose.

  It’s high summer, and that means there isn’t much hired work to do around the townhouse. I explain to my father that Gwinny is worried about her brother, who’s finding it hard to get a job of work, and I ask if there’s something that needs doing at one of the mills.

  My father has some sort of merry wine-tinted exchange at the Boar’s Head with the provisioner of the castle garrison and learns that one of the timber gangs is a man short. If Griffith wants the work, he’s to report to a man with the rather unsavory name of Snagnose John at the Newdale site on the morrow at dawn.

  One of the Glover lads is dispatched to inform Griffith of the offer, and I dance toward the kitchen to tell Gwinny what I’ve done, but I pull up short the instant I step into the rearyard.

  She’ll think it’s a trick. And she’ll tell him not to go.

  I hesitate in the doorway for a long moment.

  Then I take myself to my workroom and plant my backside before my frame.

  I know he takes the work, though. I know because Gwinny comes in one day smiling in a way that makes her every step light as she sweeps and tidies.

  Gwinny is rather pretty when she smiles. I wonder why I never noticed ere this.

  Emmaline de Coucy turns up on my doorstep unbidden and unannounced. She’s robed in servants’ linsey and her eyes are red.

  “Mother doesn’t know I’m here,” she whispers. “Won’t you please let me in ere someone sees me?”

  I bite back the choice words I have for the lady de Coucy and show Emmaline into the hall. I pour her a mug of new cider and steer her to the hearthbench, away from Salvo’s pallet.

  “Forgive me breaking your peace.” Emmaline’s voice quavers. “I couldn’t bear to be alone. I’m so worried about my father. What if the royal justice finds against him? They hang felons! Just like those two poor Welshmen, God rest them!”

  I pour myself some cider and take a long drink. It could very well have been my father who drew steel on a trespasser, and me weeping secretly at Emmaline’s hearth.

  If the lady de Coucy allowed it.

  “Do you think the king would truly hang your father?” I make my tone reasonable. “Sir John de Coucy? Burgess and honesti of Caernarvon?”

  “Yes! His Grace the king is adamant that this province be governed by statute and his law applied evenhandedly regardless of blood.” Emmaline wipes her eyes. “If the mayor himself were found guilty, he would be hanged.”

  “His Grace the king is rather generous.” I reply. “Mayhap he has never been here and met the Welsh.”

  Emmaline chokes on a giggle. “The king knows the Welsh very well. He would have them as subjects, so he must trust his officials here to govern as he bids. And he must trust us to treat the Welsh as neighbors.”

  “Neighbors,” I echo. Neighbors who pay all the taxes. Neighbors who rob one another at the market out of hunger. Neighbors who cannot get a decent job of work without the intervention of a burgess.

  “Oh, Cecily, my father had no murder in his heart!” Emmaline toys with a loosening stitch of her handkerchief. “It was all misadventure, but out there in county court there will be Welshmen on the jury. They’ll want vengeance, not justice.”

  Out there. Without the walls. I pat her shoulder as she sniffles into her handkerchief. “All will be well. Truly. His Grace the king would not suffer a man to be punished wrongfully. Especially a man like your father. There will be justice. You must believe that.”

  Emmaline worries the stitching on her handkerchief. She doesn’t believe it. The king might want Caernarvon ruled by statute, but it’s hard to insist on it when he’s so far away.

  ***

  It’s not even Tierce and it’s sweltering. The market is dusty and the basket is heavy and I’m thirstier than a year’s worth of Augusts. Mistress Tipley bustles ahead. I sway behind her, heaving the basket because this task is rightfully mine.

  At the bakery, Mistress Tipley hands over the five wads of bread dough. The baker pulls out five loaves and pushes them across the counter.

  “Are you not supposed to keep one?” I ask him. “To feed the castle garrison?”

  The baker shakes his head. “Don’t need it now. The garrison is being thinned since the order to muster came down.”

  “What order?”

  “Every man of military age in the Principality is summoned to fight for his Grace the king in Gascony and—Demoiselle, what ails you?”

  No.

  Not him, too.

  I tear out of the bakery, leaving Mistress Tipley and the market basket behind. Past shoulders and around carts and over puddles and he’s a trial and a goose but the king cannot make him go to Gascony, he just cannot!

  I burst in, slam the door, stumble down the corridor. My father is in the hall buckling on his wrist braces. I fling myself at him and hold on hard.

  “Don’t go! You cannot go!”

  My father peels me off gently and steers me toward a bench. “What’s all this, sweeting? Where can I not go?” He sits on the other bench, forearms on knees, all wrinkled brow and downturned mustache and gray at his temples.

  “Gascony! The baker said that all the men here must fight for the king in Gascony!”

  “Sweeting, that summons isn’t for the burgesses. His Grace is summoning the Welshmen of the Principality to his standard. They’re the ones who must fight abroad.”

  I lift my head, scrub my eyes. “The Welshmen? Not you?”

  “No, sweeting. I owe for my burgage twelvepence a year. I owe no military service abroad. I owe no service in England, either. All I must do is defend the king’s interests in the Principality. Remember?”

  My father is not going to Gascony.

  I let out a long, shuddering breath.

  “Now, your uncle Roger,” my father says with a smile, “is responsible for equipping two and a third serjeants for service in Gascony, if he does not go himself.”

 
I giggle. Two and a third serjeants. I wonder what good a third of a serjeant would be to the king.

  My uncle Roger owes service for Edgeley. He must pay taxes like lastage and passage and a fifteenth of his movable goods when the king requests it. He must trade on market day.

  We don’t have any such restrictions. Here in Caernarvon, we’re friends of the king.

  “That’s my girl.” My father embraces me and rises. “I’m off. The mayor is expecting a report on the state of the mills. Have you seen my counter-roll of fines?”

  “In the coffer. Where it always is.”

  “Good girl.”

  And he’s out the door with a tromp of boots and a whuffle of wood.

  Thank Christ. Thank Christ and all the saints for our friendship with the king.

  Gwinny stands before the hearth, clinging to the broom. She looks like a corpse, bloodless and stiff.

  “Oh, Gwinny, your brother!” I press a hand to my mouth. “Your brother will have to go.”

  She sinks to the floor and runs both hands over her hair. The broom clatters behind her. She looks greensick.

  “He’s all I’ve got,” she whispers.

  Gwinny looks so small crumpled like a dishrag in the hearth corner that I sift for something to say that will make her feel better.

  Someone else might try, “Mayhap it’ll be a good thing. His Grace the king pays wages, you know.” Or, “Griffith will be fine. He’ll come back with a purse full of silver and tales of heroics in Gascony. And September is a long time from now.”

  But I keep my mouth shut.

  Because if anyone had said those things to me an Ave ago, I might have clawed her eyes out.

  TAKING. They’re always taking. Da. Pencoed. Coin. Beasts.

  Now they want my brother.

  Hands out, rattle parchment, cry it down in grating, rusty English.

  Those who do not give freely lose all.

  Know not where I first hear the name. It rises from the dusty ground, from the powdered ash of charcoal bones that once were live and lowing and keeping us from hunger.