by Maria McCann
I was amazed. ‘Is this how you speak to your future husband? So you have let Zeb give an account of my character!’
‘No indeed. I have eyes and ears of my own.’ Caro stood up and arranged the top of her gown. ‘It may be he would not marry her, but to say he wishes her dead! You are too fierce with your brother.’
‘Was it not you, yourself, told me of her filthy braggings? Said it sickened you? Would a man want to marry that?’ I grimaced in disgust.
‘Such women do marry. What would you have him do?’ She replaced her cap. ‘But you are troubled, it is natural with Chris’s death. Surely that’s more terrible than—’
‘What has Chris to do with this?’
‘Jacob! Zebedee has lost both friend and love. Have some pity.’ Caro turned and walked through the first gap in the maze.
‘He plays on the pity of silly maids and then he ruins them,’ I shouted after her.
It is a woman of all people who should see the danger in such a fellow, and a woman who never will. I sat arguing it out with her though she could no longer hear me. She was as obstinate as Izzy, who was forever telling me that Zeb was not really bad, for all the world as if he too were a wench dazzled by Zeb’s eyes.
They were both of them deluded. He would never be anything but fickle, tasting one love and flying on to another. There had been a tramping woman, older than himself and no innocent, when he was but fifteen: I had caught Peter letting him in late at night, flushed and exhilarated. Being once alerted by Izzy, I had observed Zeb’s steady heating of Patience, who was only too hot already: his tickling her, putting the point of his tongue in her ear, and generally laying siege to that tottering fort, her virtue. Whenever I saw him at it, rage choked me. Had he been younger, and under my authority, I would have prescribed him a beating.
Back indoors, I again took up the tray and went on with my scouring, pressing the grains of sand against the pewter until each dish would have passed, at a distance, for silver. Near me sat Izzy, scraping teasels over Sir Bastard’s coat to raise the nap.
‘That will have to do.’ He stood and held up the garment. ‘What do you think?’
‘You’ve wrought marvels with it.’
‘It stinks of wine. God, how the man slobbers and sicks!’ He threw it aside. It was not like my brother to let ill temper gain on him and I saw in his petulance how weary he was.
‘The house is quiet without Zeb,’ I ventured.
‘Why do they keep him so long!’ Izzy moaned. ‘Is he suspected?’
‘No reason he should be.’ I rinsed the pewter clear of sand and began drying the pieces on a cloth. At that moment the sound of rapid footsteps came to us from the corridor. With a quick glance at me, Izzy ran to the doorway and looked out. I heard someone whispering and saw him gesture in reply. He closed the door and came back to where I was stacking the dishes.
‘That was Caro. Zeb’s back.’
‘Has he seen the Master yet?’
Izzy shrugged. We left the scullery and made our way to the hall, where we found our brother in council with Godfrey.
‘If the Mistress would be so good,’ Zeb was saying.
Godfrey listened judicially, nodding from time to time. ‘I will inform her. And when does he expect to have the cart, did you say?’
‘Tomorrow. O, and he asks that the boy’s friends here may be let go to the funeral.’
‘We shall see,’ the steward answered, frowning. The frown meant nothing, for Godfrey had never been known to grant anything on the first request and we would most likely get a half-holiday if we wished it. For my part I had just as lief stay home.
‘That is all the message he sent,’ Zeb prompted.
‘Thank you, Zebedee. Now, have you and your brothers sufficient work?’
‘Were we not to beat the hangings?’
‘Indeed. Pray do so.’ Godfrey turned and strode towards My Lady’s parlour. I groaned inwardly, for if there was one task I detested, beating hangings was it. ‘In God’s name, why remind him of that?’ I muttered as the door closed after the steward.
‘I want to talk to you both, out in the orchard. Anyway, Jacob, we should have to do them some day soon, so why wait until it rains?’
‘What did Biggin say?’ demanded Izzy. ‘Is he coming over to fetch the body? Do they know what the boy was doing here?’
‘During the night? No,’ Zeb returned. ‘He is to be carried back there tomorrow. The most suitable cart is out at present, but they will send it over with a coffin – the carpenter is put to the job already.’
‘And the surgeon?’ I asked.
‘They had no cause to tell me. I guess they’ll call one to the house when the boy arrives. You washed him, Jacob. Did you see—?’
‘Slit right up the belly. They won’t need a surgeon to interpret that.’
‘O, the little fool!’
Izzy stared at him. ‘Fool?’
My heart began to thump. Supposing Zeb was risen, gone to the chamber window. It was bright moonlight when I grabbed the boy’s knife, and my empty bed – but no, his way of speaking to me earlier on –
‘Out,’ Zeb insisted. ‘Let us go out. You fetch the hangings, I will set up the line, when I have once rid myself of these clothes. I am not Sir Bastard, to ruin them with dust.’ He hurried off towards the stairs leading to our chamber. Izzy and myself gazed at the hangings which covered three walls of the hall, and then at one another.
‘Hold hard – there’s a corner come down – let me not trip!’ Thus, standing on a chair, did I bully my brother from above. It was my task to unhook the tapestries from the wall while Izzy gathered up the edges and held them away from my feet.
‘I have it,’ he assured me. ‘Step down.’ A spider ran over my neck as I dangled one leg in the air, almost causing me to fall, but at last we laid the third hanging on the worn flags of the floor. Izzy loaded me up and we progressed along the corridor, my brother going ahead to open each door as I came to it.
‘Wait,’ he said as we emerged into the sun. I was glad enough to stand and do nothing as he ducked back into the house, coming out directly with the carpet-beaters. There were five of these, supposedly from Turkey, of fine withy and all different in form. Godfrey said they had been presented to My Lady by some traveller much taken with her in that far-off time, her youth. I wondered what Caro would say to such a gift. With Izzy holding up the hangings behind me like a maid holding her mistress’s train, we passed by the maze where I had been scolded by Caro, by the pond where Christopher Walshe had been fished up by the armpits that very morning, and along a stony track to the orchard.
Zeb was not there. ‘He is sloth itself,’ I grumbled, all the while dreading the sight of him. We spread the hangings over some bushes until our brother should come up with the line. Izzy sat in the shade of a pear tree and began swishing about him with the beaters, as if killing flies. ‘This for me,’ he said, setting one apart from the rest. ‘Do you wish to choose?’
‘They’re all alike.’ Surely Zeb was lingering in the house expressly to torment me.
‘Not in the least,’ said Izzy. ‘This one is the fastest, and that the prettiest.’
Sometimes, I reflected, my brother had odd notions: he had preferences in cups and candles as well as in the customary things like food and music, wherein each man has his particular taste. He had once told me that when we worked in the fields as children, every implement had for him its own character. But this was, after all, a small oddity. Apart from Caro, I loved Izzy better than anyone I knew, much more than I loved Zeb or my mother, perhaps because he never teased me.
A whistle, full and liquid, drifted over the orchard among the songs of blackbirds and thrushes.
‘See, he is not so late,’ said Izzy the peacemaker.
Zeb’s face, solemn, even strained, was oddly out of tune with his warbling of ‘There Lived a Pretty Maid’. He nodded to us, then began looping the rope he had brought over the apple boughs.
‘Higher,’ sugg
ested Izzy. Zeb obeyed without question.
‘We are alone,’ I prompted him.
‘There.’ Zeb gave a final tweak to the line and turned to face us. ‘If someone comes, we put up the hangings.’
‘Yes, yes!’ My shirt was all damp. ‘But tell us, how did you break it to them at Champains?’
‘Godfrey gave me a note for the master. He – Mister Biggin – called me into his study and asked me was I sure, how was the lad, dark or fair – you know how it goes. In the end I did persuade him that what we have in the laundry is the earthly shell of Christopher Walshe.’
‘And did you say how he died?’
‘Drowned, of course. When you find a lad in a pond—’ he shrugged. ‘Would I had known about the stabbing. There will be more explanations tomorrow.’
‘Not from you, surely? You don’t think they suspect you?’ Izzy
‘Perhaps not of killing the boy.’ Zeb picked up the hanging on the top of the pile and laid it ready. ‘They kept asking me how we knew it was he, as if our knowing him were some proof of guilt.’
I felt a twist of fear. ‘What did you say?’
‘I told them Godfrey knew him. That was nothing but truth, Godfrey did know him from when he was sent over there last year.’ Zeb took a beater (like me, not choosing for the beauty of it but merely seizing the nearest) and lashed out at the pallid face of Chastity, represented in the act of taming a unicorn.
I took the next hanging and spread it over the line next to Zeb’s. ‘They suspect one of us, then.’
He shot me an impatient look. ‘Would they tell me if they did?’
‘You said “Not of killing” him. But that’s the way they’re thinking. They’ll fasten on somebody, if not you, then—’
‘Listen, both of you.’ Zeb hit his tapestry again, sending a cloud of motes into the air. ‘Biggin had one of his tenants waiting in the corridor outside. When he brought him in, he called the man Tom Cornish.’
I cried, ‘Not the intelligencer?’
‘The same.’
Izzy and I spoke together: ‘What manner of man is he?’ and ‘What is he like?’
‘Grey-haired, with purplish cheeks. But if he were young, I’d say he was amazingly like Christopher Walshe.’
I stiffened and felt Izzy do the same.
‘Cornish began crying right in front of me.’ Zeb waited for this to
‘The lad is – was – a nephew of his?’ faltered Izzy.
‘Closer.’
I gasped.
Izzy’s hand flew to his mouth. He stammered, ‘But – but why was he called Walshe?’
‘A bastard, I guess, brought up under the mother’s name until Cornish put him out to service.’
‘God have mercy on us,’ Izzy whispered.
Zeb went on, ‘He worked for Biggin but it seems to me that Cornish had uses for him too. The servants whipped for their reading, remember? Spiders and spies, do draw in the flies.’
Now I saw it, the wretched little Judas bringing us the bait with which his father would scoop us into the net. There he had sat, with Zeb’s arm round him, sharing the pipe of tobacco which Zeb and Peter could ill afford. I brought down the carpet-beater with such force that the tapestry leapt like a fish on the line, and I kept on cutting into it, dust settling on my face, which was already beaded with fresh sweat.
‘So we are all suspected for that part,’ I said. ‘Nay, Cornish knows.’
‘And thinks one of us put a stop to the game,’ said Izzy, his cheeks pale. I felt a pang at having exposed such a gentle, upright soul to suspicion. He was innocence itself, but what was that to a spy?
‘We must burn every pamphlet in the house,’ I declared. ‘And look behind the stables, in case we left anything there.’
‘But what was he doing here at night?’ mused Zeb. ‘I cannot come at it.’
‘I am going behind the stables this minute,’ said Izzy. ‘And after to Caro and Peter, to bid them burn anything in the chambers. Have you papers or pamphlets, either of you?’
‘Under the bed,’ I answered. ‘An Answer to the Great Tyrant. Bid Peter look near the bedhead, along the wall.’
Izzy ran off. Zeb and I continued flogging the hangings. I looked down at his lady and her unicorn. She was as tawdry a female as I have seen; only a beast disordered in its wits would yield to her its magic power. My tapestry showed the same woman strolling in a knot garden, one unlikely-looking flower held to her nose. A young man watched her from a tree. I had always thought him a lover, but now I saw he could as easily be a spy set on by her husband. I brought the beater down upon his stupid face until my arm ached.
‘There is worse,’ Zeb said.
This was a novelty. As a rule he avoided reposing any confidences in me, preferring to talk to Izzy. Observing him, I thought he looked sickly. Perhaps the thing could not wait, but had to come out, like the secret of King Midas’s ears.
There was a woman waiting in the corridor where Cornish was.’ Zeb’s voice shook. ‘I saw her through the open door as he came in. She was very like Patience.’
I concealed my shock. ‘Why would she go there?’ Zeb shrugged. ‘I never denied the child was mine, how could I? She had a promise of marriage, and she loved me, why, she could scarce—’ He recollected himself. ‘That is, I thought she loved me. Suppose she was there to give evidence against us? I am afraid she was.’ He rubbed at his brow with the back of his hand.
‘What evidence? Peter and Caro have burnt the papers by now. But this woman’s not Patience. You will see.’
‘I am afraid,’ he said again. ‘Nothing is as I thought.’
‘So it seems.’ The news struck me like a chill wind. Was it possible that my beguiling brother had been beguiled? Yet it seemed more likely he was mistaken; what woman would desert Zebedee for a greybeard with purple cheeks? As for myself, I had killed not a simpleton but a practised, treacherous wolf cub. We were well rid of him. I turned to Izzy’s hanging and drove the dust from it in clouds.
Cornish did not show himself, with or without Patience, the following day. Nor did Mister Biggin. A farmworker we had never seen before drove the cart, bearing a plain deal coffin, round to the laundry door. Caro had washed the boy’s shirt and done what she could with his other garments. Izzy folded them neatly next to the deal box and I lowered the lad in my arms until he was lying snug within it.
‘It’s him for sure?’ asked the cart driver.
For answer, I drew back the linen shielding the corpse’s face. The boy’s freckles showed greenish against the dull white skin.
The man took off his hat. ‘That’s him. God ha’ mercy.’
I pulled the shroud across again, seeing in my mind the wound with its clean folds lying one against the other. The man led the horse about, mounted to the front of the cart and cracked his whip. Our false friend jogged away over the cobbles, lapped in borrowed linen and in a silence all his own.
THREE
Battles
We never went to the funeral, for which I was glad. But our talk was of little else, and while we tormented ourselves about Walshe, Cornish and Patience, the date of my espousal to Caro was almost upon us. Lying in bed, I gave myself up to voluptuous imaginings of my wedding night, almost too sweet to bear; but when I slept there came nightmares in which I was seized by Cornish or the officers. Sometimes Christopher Walshe walked before them, pointing me out. Starting out of sleep, I would dry my face on the bolster and consider whether I dared make away with myself, rather than be arrested. Once, when my groaning had woken both myself and Izzy, my brother whispered to me, ‘Do you truly wish to be wed? Better cry off now than repent it after,’ and I answered that the dreams had nought to do with my wedding, it was the boy, sunk deep into my mind. He put his hand on my brow, to cool it, and said he also dreamt of Walshe. Izzy was the only man there that ever touched me softly, as if I were capable of being hurt.
By day, these fears seemed foolishness. None had witnessed the boy’s death, and none was come fo
r me though he was laid in the ground.
Less than a week after the pond-dragging, I looked out of a window to see our mother crossing the courtyard. I at once ran down to her, my head filled with sudden panic, fancying that the men were in her cottage, throwing the pots about in the scullery, ripping up every bed in the house and carrying away my father’s Bible.
When we embraced her cheek lay against the buttons of my coat, and I remembered how as a child I had looked upwards into her face. The tables had been turned for many years now.
‘I hope there is nothing wrong at home,’ I said, pushing open the stiff oak door to the hall. I would never have called the cottage home except to Mother. ‘Or are you come to see Caro?’
Mother ignored Caro’s name. When the two first met, I had seen by numerous signs, which none but sons could read, that she disapproved of my choice. Having nothing however to dispense or withhold, she was forced to bow to it.
‘What should be wrong at home? I am come to thank the Mistress for a present she made me,’ she said. ‘So I might make a good show at your betrothal.’
I flushed. ‘Do we beg money now?’
‘No, son! It came without asking. O my boy – you’re grown so handsome—’ she pulled my head down and kissed all over my face—‘she’s a fortunate lass that gets you.’
Hoping that Caro would not choose this moment to come by, I held Mother off from my kiss-dampened cheeks. ‘The luck is on my side, to have such a one to wife. And such a mother,’ for her eyes told me that to praise Caro was, in my mother’s view, to dispraise herself. ‘Pray wait here a while. I’ll announce you to My Lady.’
‘You’ll take me to Zeb and Izzy after?’
I groaned inwardly. ‘Of course,’ and leaving Mother near the stairs I went up to My Lady’s chamber.
It was Caro who opened to my knock, and on seeing me she at once laughed. I guessed by this that I was the subject of their talk, but said only, ‘Will you tell Her Ladyship that my mother is here to give her thanks in person?’