A Gathering of Ghosts

by Karen Maitland

  I didn’t know where I was going or even where I was. A week ago, that hadn’t seemed to matter, for by the time I’d left the riverbank that morning, I’d had only one thought in my head – that I must go. It was all I could do to stop myself running straight out of the village and keep running until my legs could no longer move. Had I finally gone mad? Yet I knew I would go mad if I didn’t follow that voice. I felt like a dog barking itself into a frenzy and leaping against the chain, almost choking itself in its desperation to break free and reach the one who was calling it.

  I’d gone straight from the river to my father’s cottage and bundled the few things I would need to survive into a small iron cooking pot that had once belonged to my mother. My father was, as usual, dozing by the fire. He grunted and cursed me as I tiptoed about gathering what I needed. He didn’t open his eyes to see if it was me who had disturbed his rest. But for once his curses made me smile. I’d been raised on them, weaned on his scorn, you might say. It was almost comforting to hear the old goat swear at me for the last time. It was like a parting kiss or a dying blessing. For I was determined that, even if I starved or froze on the road, nothing would make me return.

  My father constantly told neighbours and strangers alike that he should have smothered me when I was a babe, as soon as it became plain that my left arm, which had been wrenched from its socket when I was dragged from the womb, would never mend right. I can move it a little, use the back to help balance things, but there’s no strength in it. My hand hangs withered and useless, like a rosebud that’s been half broken off its stem.

  When I was little, I would try to pull my arm off when no one was looking. It felt as if it didn’t belong to me, as though the limb of some dead animal had been sewn on to my body. But at other times it seemed almost alive, a giant leech that had fastened on to my shoulder. It was swelling, bloated and full of blood, while the rest of my body shrank and shrivelled, like a dry leaf. I’d tear at the arm, bite it and scream till I was exhausted. But no matter how I hated it, I couldn’t rid myself of it. I’d found out, earlier than most, that crying changes nothing.

  And I’d learned to do with one hand what other women could do with two, including take care of my brother and the old goat, which I’d done ever since he’d driven poor Mam into her grave.

  I’d turned in the doorway and watched my father scratch his belly in his sleep. He’d stir himself when my brother trudged home from the fields. They’d sit, the pair of them, either side of the hearth, drinking ale and grumbling about why their supper wasn’t ready. I wondered how long they would wait before hunger drove either of them to look for me. And how many days would pass before they realised I wasn’t coming back.

  I wouldn’t return, but where was I going? Ever since I’d left the village, the voice that had been calling to me so insistently had stayed silent, and the dreams I’d had in the few brief hours of sleep I could snatch, huddled in the wind and rain, were not of fire and flowing springs, but of Mam sitting on the threshold of our cottage in the summer sun, plucking pigeons. I was exhausted, soaked and starving, traipsing through mud and rain to reach some place I knew not where or why. What had I done?

  I stirred the iron pot. The water was beginning to steam a little, but even if the wood burned long enough to soften the handful of blighted leaves and roots, I knew they wouldn’t ease the hunger pains for long, probably only make them worse. And if I became too weak to walk . . . Help me. Speak to me. Show me where to go. I closed my eyes, trying to hear her voice. But the only sounds were the dripping of rain from the sodden thatch and the hissing of the wind. Even the rooks had fallen silent.

  It was then that I heard the noise, not the voice in my head, but something outside. A distant clanging and clattering, like a ghost dragging chains. I shrank back. Mam used to tell me tales of tatter-foals that haunted lonely tracks after dark, demons who took the guise of wild, shaggy horses and frightened travellers into bogs with their creaking and rattling, or else swept them on to their backs and carried them into lakes to drown them. Heart pounding, I peered out through the broken wattle and in the witch light saw a monstrous creature crawling down the track. I couldn’t make out what it was at first, but then I laughed. It was nothing more than an ancient, swollen-kneed donkey ambling past. The noise came not from the poor beast, but from the shovels and picks strung from the wooden cradle on its sway-back.

  Someone was leading the animal, though I couldn’t see him clearly until he seemed to spot the drovers pen’ and stepped off the track towards it. The donkey stubbornly resisted, until it caught sight of the water trough and bolted towards it, almost ripping the leading rope from his master’s hands and rattling the tools so violently that the rooks flapped up from their night roost, cawing in alarm.

  The man looked as if he’d not slept beneath a roof for weeks. His hair hung in long matted rats’ tails and his clothes were so patched and dirty I reckoned even his lice had gone off to beg for alms. I’d have taken him for a beggar if it hadn’t been for his donkey and all his tools.

  Would he come to the hut? I pulled my knife from the sheath on my belt and held it ready to defend myself, though it was scarcely much of a weapon. My first thought was to slip out while he was occupied with watering the donkey, but the possessions I’d been carrying in the pot lay heaped in the corner, and my supper was just beginning to boil. I was ravenous. If I didn’t get something hot inside me, I was afraid I’d not survive another night out in the cold and rain. I couldn’t bring myself to tip it away. Besides, I had found the hut first: why should I give it up to him?

  But if he did mean me harm, I daren’t risk being trapped. If he chose to block the doorway, I’d never get past him. Leaving the pot simmering over the sulky fire, I crept out and crouched behind the bank.

  The donkey, having drunk his fill, had turned his attention to the sparse patches of rank weeds and his master was sitting with his back to me on the side of the trough, pulling off his tattered boots. With a squeal of protest, followed by a sigh of relief, he dipped his blistered feet into the cold water. Mud and grass drifted from his filthy soles. But something else rose slowly to the surface. It was a single purple-red flower. It was crushed almost beyond recognition inside his boot, but I knew it, and it made my spine tingle. Hound’s-tongue.

  Come! Come to me.

  He dried his feet on a bit of rag, then thrust them back into his worn boots. Without even a glance in my direction, he dragged the protesting donkey over to the more sheltered part of the pinfold and tethered it there, then edged towards the drovers’ hut with a wariness that matched my own. He stood a few paces off and sniffed the air. The smell of wood smoke mingled with boiling worts gusted over the bank. His fingers slid to the hilt of the knife in his belt, as mine had done. But I sensed he was more afraid of being attacked than intending to do another harm. He glanced back at the donkey. Would he retreat and journey on?

  The time is now. Follow. Follow.

  ‘You’re welcome to share my fire for the night, Master.’ The words were out before I even knew I would utter them. She had sent him and I couldn’t let him walk away.

  He jerked round. His gaze darted to the knife in my hand, but instead of raising his own as most would have done, he shuffled backwards a few paces. I slid my blade back into its sheath and gestured towards the hut.

  He still hesitated, as if he feared I was leading him into a trap, but finally a broad grin split his long, thin face. ‘Kindly offered, Mistress, and I’ll not offend you by refusing. My friends call me Todde. I’ll not trouble to tell you what my enemies call me,’ he added, with a chuckle, ‘for a woman with such a generous nature could never be one of them.’

  It was only as I led the man across the muddy pen that I realised what I had done. I hadn’t enough to fill my own belly, never mind his, and so little wood that the fire would surely die away before the hour had passed, if it hadn’t already. Suppose he became angry and thought I had tricked him.

  As soon as he e
ntered, Todde crouched, pressing himself as close as any man could to the miserable fire as if he meant to suck all the heat from it. He stank like an old wet dog that had rolled inside the carcass of a rotting pig. He pulled out a battered wooden bowl from somewhere inside his jerkin and I tipped some of the herb broth into it. I found myself giving him a bigger share than remained in the pot for me, for Mam had always given the menfolk the largest portion of any food to be had, and I had learned to do the same. I felt a flash of resentment towards him and anger at my own foolishness. The few mouthfuls I had of the watery broth made my stomach cry out louder than ever. What had possessed me to invite this stranger to my fireside?

  But when he had devoured every last drop, Todde rubbed his belly and, grinning, offered me his thanks. I stared at him slack-jawed: I’d never heard any man thank a woman in my life, much less me.

  We sat in awkward silence for a while, rubbing our wind-chapped hands over the dying embers. Times had been hard for everyone since last year’s harvest failed, and what precious seed had been saved for planting had rotted in the sodden earth or been gobbled by mice and birds that were as hungry as we were. Some folks from my village, the freemen, had packed up their families and left for the towns to see what work they could find. Most drifted back, saying it was even worse there. They’d been forced to sleep in graveyards and doorways – they couldn’t find enough work pagging loads for merchants or scavenging bones for the lime-makers even to put food in their children’s bellies, much less have any left to buy shelter for the night. They said the pilgrims’ halls in the monasteries were full to bursting, and so many crowded to the alms windows when a dole of bread or broken meats was to be had that the food ran out long before those at the back could fight their way near enough to reach it. Many now tramped from village to village in the desperate search for work or to beg food. I guessed that Todde was simply another.

  He scratched his armpit. ‘Where are you bound, lass?’

  I shrugged. It sounded foolish to say I didn’t know and worse still to ask a stranger if he could tell me.

  ‘Hunger driven you on the roads, has it? Aye, I’ve seen a good many along the tracks in search of food and work. But seeing as you treated me so kindly, I’ll let you into a secret that’ll serve you well.’

  He lowered his voice, looking round with great exaggeration as if he was about to reveal where a crock of gold was hidden, though he could have stood on the middle of the pinfold and shouted it – there was no one, save me, to hear him.

  ‘The King’s decreed that any man has the right to look for tin on anyone’s land as he pleases, without let or hindrance. There’s not a sheriff or lord in the land can stop a tinner digging wherever he’s a notion to, even if the land belongs to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. But see now, it’s pointless just searching anywhere. In most places a man could dig for a year and not find enough to make a sheath for a mouse’s pizzle. But I know of a place where such quantities of tin lie just beneath the sod that a man can make his fortune as easily as scooping up coins spilled from a sack.’

  ‘So where is this place of riches? Up there in the clouds with the angels, is it?’ I said. My aching belly and light head were making me irritable. How could this help me? Had she really sent him or had the hound’s-tongue been nothing more than a crushed flower that might be found in the shoes of a hundred pedlars, beggars and pilgrims to ward off savage dogs?

  Todde grinned. ‘You’d think you really were in Heaven if you saw the place. For with less digging than it takes to plant a row of beans, a man can become as wealthy as a lord. All you have to do is make a trench, then let water from a stream wash through it to sweep away the worthless gravel and leave the heavy tin. Then you pick it up, like you were gathering eggs from a hen’s nest.’

  Todde shuffled on his backside a little closer to me, and I found myself rocking away from his sour breath. ‘It’s where I’m bound right now,’ he said. ‘They call it Dertemora.’ He frowned, then chuckled, striking his head with a palm. ‘Whatever put that word on my tongue? Rain has rotted my wits. Dartmoor, that’s the place.’

  The fire smouldering on the stones burst up in a blaze, the flames clawing so high I was afraid they would set the hut ablaze, but Todde seemed not to notice. A shimmering ribbon of molten ruby gushed out from a brand and flowed down into the heart of the fire as if a spring was spouting from a rock.

  Fire and water wait for you.

  The voice was so clear, I thought someone was standing behind me. I whipped round, but the doorway was empty. And when I looked back at the fire it was no more than the heap of smouldering embers it had been a few moments before. But I knew. In that moment, I knew that this was the place I had to reach.

  Todde was still talking: ‘. . . soon as word spreads every Jack and Jill in the country will be heading up to those moors to claim the richest seams. So, you want to get yourself there as fast as you can.’

  ‘Have you not eyes to see?’ I snapped. Lifting my withered arm, I let the useless hand dangle in the glow of the dying fire.

  ‘Aye, I saw it,’ he said softly, and a spasm of what might have been pain flickered over his face, as if it was his own arm that was hurt.

  ‘So!’ I demanded furiously, angry with him for making me show my arm, like some whining beggar. ‘Even if I was to find a seam, how would I keep it, much less work it? With strapping men desperate to make their fortune, even a woman with two good arms couldn’t hold a claim against them, especially if there’s no law against any man digging where he wants.’

  ‘Maybe you couldn’t. But I reckon there must be more wants doing in a tinners’ camp than digging. Same as reaping the grain. There’s some that scythe and some that gather, tie and stook the sheaves, and others that keep all the hands fed. Haven’t you noticed the pedlars and merchants haven’t been coming to the villages these past months? They know there’s few can afford their prices now. I reckon they must all be flocking to sell whatever they have on Dartmoor, for that’s the only place where men have money enough to buy. They live off the fat of the land, those tinners.’

  A sly smile creased the corners of his mouth. ‘But, now, here’s the thing. When those tinners come back after a long day’s work bone-weary, their bellies roaring for food, they’ll not want to go out again to find wood for the fire, fetch water or pluck a chicken. They’ll want a good hot meal on the table afore their backsides touch their stools.’

  Todde nudged my cooking pot with the toe of his mud-caked boot. ‘If they’re earning a king’s ransom, I reckon there’s a fair few who’d be willing to part with a good measure of it to someone who could put hot food in their bellies night and morn, and maybe fetch them wood enough for a warm fire to sit by of an evening.’

  I stared into the ash of my tiny fire. Now that the heat was gone the wind, blowing through every broken slat in the walls, sliced bone-deep through my wet kirtle. I couldn’t remember how it felt to wear dry clothes. The rain never stopped. If what Todde had said was true, there would be dry dwellings, blazing fires and good food where a host of men and women were tinning. Fetching and cooking for tinners couldn’t be worse than tending my father and brother, and I’d be paid in coin, not curses, for my trouble. If I tried to survive on the road alone, I’d soon be too weak from hunger and cold to continue searching. If she was calling me to this place, then surely she was showing me a way to live. With food in my belly and warm shelter each night, I could continue to search for her and I would find her. I had to.

  Chapter 6

  Hospitallers’ Priory of St Mary

  Brother Nicholas was dreaming that he was struggling in the sea, trying desperately to swim to the shore, but seagulls were attacking him, diving at him, pecking at his eyes, and shrieking loud enough to make his ears bleed. He jerked awake and the birds vanished, but their cries did not. It took a few moments for his fogged brain to remember where he was and even longer to grasp that the noise was coming from the courtyard outside, and they were not the cr
ies of gulls but of women.

  He groped for his cloak, which he’d laid over the bed for extra warmth, stumbled to the door and dragged it open. He peered out cautiously. The courtyard was crowded with people standing in small groups staring at the far end, though what was arousing their interest he was unable to see without stepping on to the muddy cobbles. He realised his feet and legs were bare. He shivered.

  ‘What hour is it?’ he called, but if any heard him, no one replied.

  An overexcited pedlar’s dog began to herd a paddling of squawking ducks towards him, their wings flapping wildly. Still unnerved by his dream of the gulls and not wanting the creatures to invade his chamber, he slammed the door and sank into a chair. The chamber was freezing. The fire was nothing more than ashes, and there was no sign of any servant bearing breakfast or even water in which to wash his face.

  He had overslept, and the burning in his belly, the sour taste in his mouth and dull headache convinced him that the cause was too much strong wine on a stomach that had been far from lined with solid food: by the time Nicholas had returned to the guest chamber, Alban had devoured every fragment of rabbit and every morsel of bread. There wasn’t even a spoonful of sauce left in the pot.

  In a foul temper, Nicholas had clambered into the narrow bed with the intention of rising early to question the old priest in the infirmary before he tackled the prioress again and began the tedious process of examining the priory’s ledgers. Commander John had told him that the procurator at Clerkenwell was convinced there was something wrong with the account records he was receiving from the priory, not that he could put his finger on what was amiss. Nicholas had been ordered to ferret it out, whatever it might be.