The Wicked and the Just

by J. Anderson Coats

  I will enjoy watching it hurt.

  Something is wadded in the corner. It’s head-sized, washwater-colored and lumpy like vomit. I toe it and it becomes linen. A ray of glowing blue turns over. I kneel, peel apart the folds.

  The castle appears first. The castle and a walled town. It’s unmistakably Caernarvon, notched and purple-banded in tiny tight stitches high in the corner. Then Saint Joseph, his cloak a field of backstitches and his curly hair spilling over his collar while the Holy Child sits serenely on his arm, haloed. The Virgin is unfinished, an outline cast in blue and scarlet.

  The castle appears first. Even she has built it.

  Caernarvon, in stitches and thread.

  I jab the tip of my plundered knife beneath the stitches and twist. Thread catches, strains, and I gouge hard. More thread falls, tiny worms of purple and gray. I rip and stab Caernarvon from the linen even as Madog’s men pull down walls and townhouses.

  Finally there’s no more thread. I’ve cut myself twice and my blood stains the frayed edge.

  But Caernarvon is not gone. There’s a faint outline on the linen where the stitches were, tiny holes suggesting towers, walls, gates, rooftops. Ghosts of color where thread rubbed cloth. Caernarvon still presides over the Holy Family, present even without substance.

  And I look out the half-shuttered window at the castle just clipping the sky, dark as rain. My throat tightens and I grip the brat’s linen in both hands because Gruffydd is right, curse him, and it’s all for naught.

  The extents and rolls may be ash, the town charter may be naught but privy rag, but none of these acts can undo Caernarvon. Brick and plank have stood. Kings have blessed. Men have seen. Girls have stitched. We could pull it down again and again. They’ll come back. They’ll always come back.

  Outside, I ask one of the labor gangs carrying corpses to cut down the master and bury him. I wait till the crow-pecked body is wrapped in canvas and laid in a grave ere I fold the brat’s linen into a tight packet and head home, dirtying my feet through once-Watched fields.

  “EVERYTHING,” Gwinny says, and she smiles as if the Adversary himself did the wrecking.

  “Everything,” I whisper.

  “Every trunk and chest and wooden spoon,” she prods, still smiling. “Not a splinter or scrap remains.”

  “Did you see Mistress Tipley or Mistress Pole?” I ask. “Emmaline de Coucy? I would give much to know they’re sound.”

  Gwinny draws back and eyes me. “Naught remains in your house. Everything you have in the world has been kicked in or made off with. Your precious embroidery frame. Your colored threads. Your mother’s gown.”

  I swallow. “What of the Glovers next door? There are so many little ones, and Mistress Glover bore her baby not long ago. Surely they wouldn’t have slaughtered children. Would they?”

  “Madog’s men garrison the town,” Gwinny says stonily. “Should any English remain, God help them.”

  “They must have fled.” I nod, fierce and sure. “They must have.”

  Gwinny narrows her eyes. “Fled home, you mean. Back to England. Where they belong.”

  “Emmaline has no memory of England. All she knows is Caernarvon. That’s her home.”

  “It’s not her home. It’s not your home.”

  I square up and look Gwinny in the eye. “I would that were true. But it’s not. My home isn’t mine any longer. He took it, and I must make shift with what’s left me. Caernarvon is my home now.”

  Gwinny flinches, blinks, turns away.

  HORSEBACK ENGLISH, a decree from their king, and the new lord of Pencoed rode right up to the hall door and kicked it in and that’s all I saw because Mam threw the blanket over Gruffydd and me and there was screaming and clatter and ere long we found ourselves in a ditch tangled in that blanket a stone’s throw from the hall and Mam next to us was weeping quietly and there was nowhere to go but into the greenwood, away from that timbered hall that the prince himself granted Da, where I was just old enough to kneel before the prince during his final days on God’s own earth.

  IF I close my eyes I can see it still, the new chimney, the dovecote, the endless rolling yardlands of barley and oats and rye.

  But it’s his now. It’ll never be mine, and even if I go back, I’ll be at their mercy. My thieving uncle Roger and his wretchedly fertile girl-wife and their little pink baby. I’ll have to pretend to like the howling brat who stole Edgeley from me and mayhap even play nursemaid to it.

  Gwinny said everything I had in the world was kicked in or made off with, but that’s not true. I have what’s left of a townhouse on a plot of ground sixty feet by eighty on Shire Hall Street in the king’s borough of Caernarvon. Out of one window you can see Anglesey, green atop green like layers of infidel silk. Out the other, houses and roads and the walls curving around it all like a great embrace. On one side the Glovers, on the other, the Poles. The church downstreet, the castle up, the middle alive with dogs and children and neighbors.

  I’ll find a way to have what’s mine. What my father made mine because he’d have more for me than the lot of a steward’s daughter on an estate, hers by right, that she could never have.

  Get out, he said.

  He did not mean forever.

  I’M pounding barley between two stones when Dafydd appears in the doorway. He’s dressed for weather even though the sky is holding blue well past the time it should have hunkered down for winter. He leans on the frame, flashes that damn carefree grin.

  “I’ve come to ply you ere I go to war,” he says cheerfully. “I’ve ten reasons why you should agree to be my wife, and I’ll not leave till you hear every one.”

  There’s a swish and a grunt, and the brat lurches past Dafydd into the steading, slanting beneath the water bucket. She greets us in English as she sways toward the hearth with a long and purposeful stride. She does not seem to notice that her hem is caked with mud or her hair is streaming from its plait like a halo of snakes.

  She looks nothing like a borough lady.

  Daughter Shrewcy would be in pieces by now, weeping for her veil and her blistered hands. But this girl looks as though she doesn’t even care.

  The brat would care.

  “Reason number one is—”

  “I will.” My voice is low and steady. I thought I’d want my words back right away, but I don’t.

  Dafydd closes his mouth. “You . . . what?”

  Now that I’ve said it, I cannot take my eyes off him. “If we both survive, that is.”

  “I’d hate to think you were mocking me,” Dafydd says in slow, measured words. “I’ve never once played you false.”

  “I’m not. I mean it. I’ll marry you should we both survive this.”

  “You’ll pardon the question, but I’ll not have you unconsidered.” His voice wavers. “What’s happened?”

  The brat wipes muddy hands on her gown, steps around the leaky place in the thatch, heads for the door with the water bucket. Dafydd steps inside to let her pass, then watches her stumble down the hill.

  “Ah,” he says quietly. “The crack. Caernarvon just wants one.”

  Dafydd kneels before me till I look up from my grinding, then takes the stones out of my hands and lays them aside. He pulls me gently to my feet and draws me into an embrace so deep it feels as if he’s been saving it up, as if he’d never let go should the choice be his.

  I curl beneath his arm and let him hold me, my cheek against his shoulder, and all at once I’m back in his bed, snug beneath the woolens and listening to the muffled beating of his heart, ere he single-handedly took on the task of undoing the English stranglehold on Caernarvon’s privileges with the simple act of requesting a burgage. All these months, and he’s still warm and solid, like city walls. He’s still flippant, maddening, and irresistible.

  He’d still have me.

  After this is over, everything will change. One way or another, Caernarvon will never be the same again.

  RAIN IS PELTING the steading as if we’re un
der Heaven’s eaves. The roof is leaking in no less than a dozen places, and the smell of moldy thatch is stronger than usual.

  Gwinny is sharpening her meat-knife, sliding the whetstone down the blade in lengthy, irritable shings. She’s in a foul mood because it took me too long to figure out she wanted me to patch the wall wattle, which I’m doing now, coated to the elbows in mud.

  “When you’re done,” Gwinny says in Welsh, “something something roof and fix the something something.”

  I almost glare at her. She cannot be serious. Assuming I could get on the roof and had half a notion what to do, the rain would wash me away like all the sinners in the Flood.

  “I hope your cousin never comes,” she taunts in English. “I’m growing quite used to having a servant. How idle and dissolute I’ve become. Almost like a fine lady of the borough.”

  “He’ll come.” I slap some mud on the wall hard enough to spatter my face. “I know he will.”

  “You hope he will,” she drawls. “Wallingford’s a long way from here. Anything could happen to the priest’s boy. Imagine a lad that young trying to cross a countryside in revolt, to say naught of him finding one knight among hundreds. It’s already been what, a fortnight? A month?”

  I want to tell her to shut her mouth, but instead I picture the sun streaming through my workroom windows and spread some mud on her wretched walls.

  Nicholas is coming.

  He has to be.

  “And what if your king calls him and his lord to the royal standard?” Gwinny presses a hand to her cheek in mockhorror. “Surely he could not say your king nay. And you’d have to stay here. Unless I put you out. I could always do that. How far do you think you’d get? Do you even know which way to go?”

  If she’s going to put me out, I would she’d just get on with it. I cannot contain a glare, and she’s on me like a ratter.

  “Don’t you look at me like that! You’ll be in the ditch ere you turn around!”

  Picture the market. Picture the hall, the table set with broadcloth and pewter.

  But all I feel is cold on my skin, raw terror in every direction.

  Gwinny is smiling.

  “You’d best hope it’s the wolves that find you,” she purrs. “They’ll merely kill you.”

  “Stop it!” I fist up both hands and brandish the mud spreader like a dagger. “Do you take pleasure in this? Why are you doing this to me?”

  And I freeze. Lower the mud spreader.

  Justice for those who deserve it.

  Gwinny rises slow, draws shallow breaths as if she’s run to London and back.

  “I’m done,” I whisper. “I’m done playing games.”

  And I turn back to my task because there is naught like justice well served. Mud up my arms, over my face. No one can even see my cuffs anymore.

  I’ve studied my lessons, but now it’s too late.

  After a while, there’s a shuffling behind me. Gwinny crosses the small room, takes up a second mud spreader, and wordlessly begins to patch the walls alongside me.

  ENGLISH collapses into sleep within moments of gobbling her corner of bread. Without the walls, labor is a ghost she has come to know painfully well.

  Those first few se’ennights are the hardest, English. Ere calluses roughen everything on you and in you. Barely a month bereft, you’re still pink and raw.

  You’ll have to harden, though. Even if you weep as it happens.

  At least it’s just you. You’ve no one who wept for trapped hares and maidens in nursery tales, pushed beyond your protection then and now and forever.

  The steading is still. I withdraw English’s length of linen from my apron and unfold it.

  The linen is cleaner from several washings, but the shadow of a ruined Caernarvon still towers over the Holy Family. Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, faded but finished, all but leap off the wrinkled gray cloth.

  Da went out. Gruffydd went out. Should I ever bear a son, he will go out. He will meet the same fate. He will die for this realm already twice lost.

  English whimpers in her sleep. Her cheeks are wet.

  The burgesses will come back and she will be among them. She will bring her husband into the privileges and tell him what to think of us.

  I have not harmed her. I have not allowed harm to come to her. It’s more than her lot has ever offered me, and English has seen what befalls them when they press the boot on our necks. She has survived the wages of justice through luck, mettle, and wit enough to open her eyes.

  English finally sees.

  If I’m to be ruled, may it be by those who see.

  GWINNY AND I eat the last of the plundered bread. The loaf-end has deep finger-holes, one of which is bloody. I cannot look at the bread while I eat it, but nor will I stop eating.

  The pile of blankets near the fire begins to quake and gasp like a rusty bellows. Gwinny drops her bread and flies to her mother’s side.

  The old woman’s eyes roll back in her head and her tiny frame shudders as if throttled. Gwinny holds her mother down at the shoulders and kneels on the blankets to still her legs. The poor dame’s face is bloodless and her blue lips stand out like leeches.

  “Fetch the priest,” Gwinny snaps as she wrestles a piece of wood between her mother’s clattering teeth.

  I can barely find the stream. I shrug helplessly.

  Gwinny groans like a wounded beast. “Then you hold her!”

  The old woman looks like a corpse, all waxen and pale, but I kneel and gingerly lean my hands on her shoulders as much as I dare. Her shoulderbones poke like peg hangers.

  “Hold her steady,” Gwinny says, and out the curtain she races.

  Gwinny’s mother jerks like a puppet on strings and there’s a fresh privy stench. She must have loosed her bowels. I gag and retch but I don’t let go. She’s gasping low and harsh at the back of her throat and I beg her not to die till Gwinny comes with the priest, till she can be shriven and have her own daughter holding her head as she goes.

  Her struggles are fading. I’m losing her.

  I pray. I pray, clinging to the old woman’s shoulders as I might a paternoster. I pray with my every fiber that she not die, not yet, not like this.

  Something tugs at my collar. It’s Gwinny, with a coldeyed priest hovering over her shoulder. I let go. I stumble away and they both kneel at the old woman’s side, blocking her from view. I’m in the corner again, overlooked and passed by.

  Rattly gasping drowns out Extreme Unction and the viaticum. Gwinny’s profile stands out against the dark wall like a new-stamped coin. Tears slide down her cheeks and my face is wet and I’m in the corner praying and we’re the same, Gwinny and I, we’re the same.

  I BURY my mother. All those who knew her gather at the grave and commend her to God.

  English comes, too. She stands at my elbow and wipes away tears as four graybeards lower Mam’s body into the frozen earth.

  She’s brave to show her face at this burial. My neighbors glare at her sidelong and mutter, but she does not look away from the grave. Her lips are moving. Her fingers, too, as if they’re sliding over beads on a paternoster.

  I should be weeping for my mother. I should be tearing my hair and smearing my face with soot. Or at least drying tears, as does English, who barely knew her.

  Instead I feel light. As if I could float away on the wind, somewhere far from here.

  Ashes to ashes. Mam is buried. My neighbors cluster, pushing English aside.

  Your mother is with God now, they say. Her suffering is over. Beyond the cares of the world.

  It’s like saying the sky is blue or the Pope is Christian.

  I lag behind till they strip away and head for their own hearths to what’s left of their children and beasts. Soon it’s just English and I, heaving uphill toward the steading that’s mine now. Empty and mine.

  And English says, even when you know it’s coming, it still hurts. She squeezes my hand and whispers, I’m sorry . . . Gwennaver.

  She’s filth
y and tattered and hungry, waiting on a cousin who may never arrive. Her hands are blistered raw and her cheeks windburned, but she looks me in the eye and she hasn’t broken and she’s sorry.

  Now mayhap time can do its work.

  NICHOLAS ARRIVES when the wind off the strait is flinging angry snow against the steading. He lurches up the hill on a half-dead horse and leaps from the saddle as if it’s afire. His face is mottled red and his hands are like leather, but I throw my arms about him and hold on hard.

  “Thank Christ,” he whispers into my hair. “Oh, Cecily, I never thought I’d see you again in this world.”

  It’s Nicholas. Lop-eared, gingerfool Nicholas. My eyes sting.

  “I had a look at Caernarvon as I passed,” he growls. “They will pay for what they’ve done, mark me. His Grace the king is even now massing forces at Chester.”

  “What they’ve done,” I echo, in the shadow of hungry crofts and churchyard graves and toll-table splinters.

  “Come, we ride for Chester,” Nicholas says. “Father will meet you there and take you back to Coventry.”

  He’s tugging me toward his horse, but I pull away. “First I must bid farewell.”

  “To whom?”

  She puts the bucket down as I near the steading door. We regard each other for a long moment. She’s a lot thinner than the girl who came with my house, but she stands just the same. Chin up, shoulders squared, steady as the Adversary’s throwing arm.

  But I understand why.

  “Pob llwyddiant,” Gwennaver says. “Hwyl.”

  “Di-diolch yn . . . er, fawr,” I stumble, and I mean every word. I need every bit of good fortune I can get, and although a simple thank-you seems inadequate, it’s the best I can do with my new words.

  I turn away, but Gwennaver catches my sleeve and presses a folded packet into my hands. Ere I can respond, Nicholas manhandles me atop the rickety horse and leads it away.