by Alis Hawkins
I wrench myself out of his grasp, furious at being spoken to like a child.
‘Or what? Going to kill me, are you, like you killed your stepfather?’
He stares at me, his eyes cold. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘Yes you did — you told me.’
He shakes his head, eyes fixed on mine. ‘No. I didn’t.’
‘Yes. You did. You said that with God taking lives all around, you didn’t see why you should be different. You said he deserved to die. So you killed him and you shrouded him and you told the priest he wouldn’t be doing any more burials.’
A look comes over Hob’s face, then; a look compounded of grudging belief and amazement. ‘All this time … you’ve been thinking me a murderer?’ He shakes his head.
I stare at him. He seems truly taken aback that I would have believed such a thing. Have I been too ready to think ill of him?
‘Well, if you didn’t kill him, what did you mean when you said that not every corpse put in a plague pit has died of the plague?’
He takes a breath and huffs it out, as if he’s expelling an unpleasant memory. ‘I didn’t kill him, but I let him die.’
‘What d’you mean “let him die”? How?’
His eyes are steady on mine. ‘Drank a skinful of ale, fell insensible from it, puked in his sleep and choked on it.’
‘And you watched?’
‘Yes.’ No regret, no contrition. ‘And, if he were here now, I’d do the same again.’
‘You need a priest, Hob. You’ve sent a man to his death unshriven and you’re unrepentant.’
He shakes his head. ‘Don’t worry about me, Martin. When God watches so many die without stretching out a hand to save them, why should I believe that he wants me to do differently?’
I open my mouth to speak but he forestalls me. ‘And before you tell me how black my soul is, shouldn’t you be considering the state of your own?’
The hairs on the nape of my neck prickle. ‘What?’
‘All this talk of me killing my father — what about yours?’ He pauses, staring at me. ‘No man shrouds himself. Don’t you think it’s more likely your demon put your hands over your father’s face — nose gripped here, hand over the mouth there —’ he mimes the actions — ‘just enough to stop up the breath of a sleeping man?’
A sweat freezes the skin on my back. ‘No! You didn’t know my father. He was a strong man — I couldn’t’ve held him down.’
‘What?’ Hob mocks. ‘Not, “he was my father, I wouldn’t’ve harmed a hair on his head”? Straight away you’re telling me he would have fought you off?’
‘I didn’t kill my father!’
‘Maybe he was weakened — maybe he had the pestilence. But you couldn’t risk the saint healing him as well, could you? You wanted your freedom as much as I wanted mine.’
Throughout my watch that night I am tormented. Is it possible that Hob is right — that I killed my own father, that the demon who makes me walk used my hands to do his master’s bidding? I fear it is — after all, there was no horseshoe over the roundwood lintel of our forest hut. And there were no plague-marks on him. None that I could see.
If the demon did pinch my father’s nose with my fingers and cover his mouth with my palm, did he find the seeds of the act in my own sinful soul? He would have if he had looked there, for I wished my father dead often enough.
For nothing would move the man! Not Master William’s appeals, not my mother’s soft persuasions and certainly not my own pleadings, could soften my father’s resolve. Always, his answer was the same. ‘Martin shall be a collyer with me.’
Not that he stopped me learning from William. He was proud that I could read and write, would ask me to read the licences he brought back from the Verderers court.
‘Read me the words, Martin. I know what it allows me but I never heard the words before.’
And it was his pride in me that kept my hope alive. Surely he would not continue to deny me a place at the abbey school when he saw how much Latin I knew, how I could recite the prayers and offices from memory?
But his determination proved the equal of mine. Well before the pestilence came, I had begun to wish that I had never sat at William Orford’s feet or walked behind him in white, for a desire unfulfilled is a desire made twice as potent.
Finally, when neither his bad temper nor the frequent use of the back of his hand could cure me, my father had beaten my pleadings out of me. Each fall of the rod had been accompanied by a grunted word.
‘I — will — not — hear — no — more — of — this — non — sense.’
There had been more, much more, but the burden of it had been conveyed in that first sentence.
My father had never beaten me with such anger before and, stroke after stroke, I had learned to favour his own sullenness over my natural inclination to argue and persuade. It was then that I began to picture in my mind how mishaps might befall him.
A burn that festered. A slip of the coppicing axe. A fall that pushed bone through skin and let poison into his blood...
And then the pestilence came.
And I woke to find him dead.
CHAPTER 25
We stand on the track and gaze up at the village on the slope above us. If I narrow my eyes, I can make out smoke hanging on each roof-line, kept from rising into the air by the drifting rain. There is no pestilence here. Nor has there been for, if the pestilence had been and gone, there would be houses cold and empty.
‘Nobody will question us going into the village for water.’
Hob’s voice startles me and my gaze is jerked towards him. His face gives the lie to his words; any villager might balk at welcoming such a battered stranger into their midst. To the blackened eye and swollen nose he got at Slievesdon, I added a split and swollen lip last night when my knuckles mashed it to his teeth.
Not that I have any reason to suppose I look better. I am reminded of Hob’s knee smashing into my face every time I wipe away the rain.
Since the village came into view, he has insisted that, when we ask for water, we present the saint to the people. But I do not want to do it, I am plagued by a fear that Hob will play the peddler and cry aloud the power and virtues of the saint.
Come and see our miraculous saint!
Pay your penny and receive her blessing!
As we make our careful, zig-zag way up the slope towards the village, I watch him from the corner of my eye. The rain has eased to a fine drizzle but his cloak, like the blanket round my shoulders, is heavy with water. Feeling my gaze, he glances at me, flicking hanging drips from the sodden edge of his hood as his eyes meet mine. ‘How are we going to protect the Maiden from this rain?’ he asks.
All morning, the saint has been under the canvas, wrapped in a blanket, safe and dry. Now, in my mind’s eye, I see cold raindrops gathering on her face, joining to make larger drops, running beneath their own sudden weight down her cheeks. I see the chestnut of her hair trickling down the delicate pink of her brow, the russet mingling with the blue of her eyes and the black of their lashes, running in dark rivulets towards her lips, the mingled colours dripping from her chin on to the smooth white of her kirtle. What will the keeper of her woodland shrine say if I bring her back in such a state?
‘You can’t Hob! We can’t risk it. We’ll have to leave it till the rain stops.’
‘It may not stop for days.’ His voice is tight, flat, like a quelling hand slapped down. ‘We’ve got no money. Our food is running out.’
I wince as the wheels thud and creak over a sheep-track. This journey is pulling the cart apart, joint by joint.
‘Well?’ Hob is impatient.
I pull the mare up and, as she stands, snorting her hot breath into the drizzle, I untie the canvas and pull myself up on to the wheel to reach into the bed of the cart. As I do so, the spoke beneath my feet groans as if it will snap. I jump back down and bend to see the damage.
There is no break or visible crack but a man does not
need to be a wheelwright to fear a noise like that. The wheel is surely weakening.
Hob comes around the cart. ‘What was that?’
I straighten up. ‘All those rutted paths up and down the hills. The cart wasn’t built to withstand them.’
‘Is it going to last till Salster?’
I shrug but, in truth, I doubt it.
‘How much could the mare carry?’ he asks.
‘Without a saddle to tie things to or panniers to put them in, not much.’
‘We could sell the cart and buy panniers.’
We could. We would travel faster and be able to choose our roads more freely than we can with the cart. But I am unwilling to give it up. It will be more fitting for the saint to arrive at her shrine set up above the herd on the cart than to peer out of a pannier bumping on a horse’s flank. And besides, the cart is mine; if I were to sell it, Hob would demand half the money left over from buying pack-horse trappings in repayment of his ten shillings.
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s good for a few miles yet.’ I stand on my toes and pull out Hob’s bow and the pilgrim-staff from Tredgham. ‘We need to lash these together at the top,’ I tell him.
He shrugs. ‘Let’s get to it, then.’
Though the saint stands well back inside the dry, canvas-gabled niche we have fashioned, I take no chances and wrap her in a blanket until we come within sight of any villagers. The rain has eased but drizzle hangs in the air.
We stop at the edge of the village and I feel Hob’s eyes on me.
‘Go on.’ He points at the saint. ‘Nobody’ll see her in that.’
Testing the spoke with half my weight first, I stand on the wheel and ease the blanket down to reveal the Maiden’s face, offering a silent prayer for her forgiveness as I do so.
It is not long before our presence attracts interest. A man in a leather hood appears, a young boy at his side.
‘Good day, friends. You’re a mite battered!’
Hob grins. ‘Some churls disliked our good looks.’
The fellow returns his grin. ‘So — what news?’
‘Apart from ugly churls, only good news,’ Hob says. ‘We’ve seen nobody sick for four days.’
The man rubs the back of his hand over the beard on his chin, relieving an itch on face or hand, and glances aside at the boy who smiles up at him. ‘You’re not sick, yourselves?’ he asks, turning to me.
‘No, we’re well.’
Hob opens his mouth and I wait for him to start — to tell this fellow that not only are we well but I have been miraculously healed of the pestilence.
‘We’d be grateful to fill up our water butt,’ he says. ‘The mare’s thirsty and we’ve a long way to go.’ He hesitates, then adds, ‘To Salster.’
‘Salster? Don’t you fear going so near to London as that will take you?’
Hob smiles. The man has given him a feed-line that a huckster’s mate would be proud of.
‘No, friend. We have our saint who protects us,’ he turns and sweeps a hand around to the Maiden. ‘We’re taking her to her shrine in Salster. But —’ He stops, as if he is weighing whether to continue.
‘What?’ Leather-hood’s curiosity is aroused.
‘She’s not just any saint,’ Hob begins. ‘She’s an English saint — one of our own.’
The man stares at the Maiden with what seems like new interest. ‘Well she’s a beauty, that’s for certain.’
Hob takes a step towards him. ‘And not just beautiful but a miracle worker, too.’
The man frowns but, instead of explaining, Hob clears his throat as if he feels he has said too much. ‘We need water, friend,’ he says, in a different tone. ‘Can we walk on?’
In this village, we are allowed to dip the well-bucket ourselves and, as I set about filling the butt, Hob chats with our guide who has introduced himself as Symond.
Rain or not, people need water and those coming to the well spread news of our arrival so that we are quickly surrounded by a curious crowd. I am surprised at their willingness to approach us but their fearlessness is soon explained.
‘As long as you don’t see a corpse dead of the plague, or breathe the breath of the sick, you’re safe,’ one woman assures us. ‘Our lord has travelled to France and Venice,’ she adds, ‘so he knows the way of it.’
‘You’re late,’ a man remarks, nodding at the saint.
I turn to him. ‘How so?’
‘Lady Day’s been’n gone.’
Lady Day. The Feast of the Annunciation.
‘That’s not the Virgin!’ Symond corrects him. ‘That’s a saint. An English saint.’ He turns to Hob. ‘What did you call her?’
Hob gives a smile of such sweetness that he seems almost touched with saintliness himself. ‘Her name,’ he looks about at the gathered people, ‘is Saint Cynryth and she’s from the time before the Conqueror came, from the time of the Seven Kingdoms.’
Nobody wants to listen to a story in the rain so they take us to the church. I bring the Maiden, wrapped in her blanket, while Symond’s boy takes the mare and the cart to the tithe barn.
Somebody guides me to an empty niche in the fine, stone-built rood screen and motions for me to put the Maiden there.
‘Everybody’ll be able to see her, then,’ he says, patting my arm and ambling off to sit on the pile of trestle-boards left over from the Lady Day court.
As I watch the crowd listening to Hob, I realise what close attention he must have paid every time I told the saint’s story in the woods at Tredgham. The words he uses are my words, from Saint Cynryth’s childhood fleetness of foot — ‘swift as a breeze in April’ — to the gleaming whiteness of the shift she wore to her death.
He observes my own pause for breath after cutting off the Exile’s arm and hissing the fairy’s departure, before beginning the second part of the Maiden’s story.
They listen, without so much as a shuffle or a cough as Cynryth grows from jilted lover to steadfast bedeswoman; they listen as she rejects all husbands but Christ and is pursued by the single-minded Aethenoth; they weep as she is martyred and they smile through their tears as her intercessions seed a babe in a barren womb.
‘For ever afterwards,’ Hob finishes, casting his eye around, ‘St Cynryth was known as the White Maiden and her well as the White Maiden’s Well. It lies in woods on a hill outside the city of Salster and there are miracles done there to this very day. And that,’ he says, ‘is where Martin and I are bound.’ He turns to me.
I clear my throat, attempt a smile to match his own. ‘We’re taking the Maiden to her shrine at Salster.’ My glance at the statue is followed by every eye present. ‘I’m going to present her to the keeper of the shrine in return for his prayers for my father’s soul.’
Hob does not interrupt, says nothing about the saint’s miraculous appearance at our well-side shrine or the fact that she might have come, miraculously, from the shrine where we are bound.
A voice is raised, hesitantly. ‘You’re brave. I wouldn’t want to be on pilgrimage now.’
There are murmurs of agreement, a sucking of teeth and an exchanging of glances. Hands rise to make the sign of the cross.
I wait for Hob to speak, to take up the story of my father and his devotion to the saint. But he says nothing. I wait, but the silence seems to grow and grow until it fills the church like the weak grey daylight. I wait for somebody to speak but not a voice is raised and the silence presses in on me, like the weight of red forest earth, until I can barely draw breath.
I seek out Symond’s face, waiting for him to ask about the miracle Hob spoke of when we met, but perhaps he thinks that the story of the barren woman is miracle enough.
I turn to look at the Maiden and, as I fix my eyes on her, the white of her garments begins to glow in the gloom of the church and she seems to grow before my eyes until she reaches the stature of a living woman; a living woman reaching out from her niche to the people who stand before her. With my eyes on her reaching hand, it seems to me that the whol
e company is kneeling before her, like my Tredgham vision.
‘My father was devoted to Saint Cynryth,’ I hear myself saying. ‘She appeared to him in a vision in the woods where we worked as collyers and he made a shrine to her at our well.’ I look up. Every soul is watching me, waiting. ‘“All wells and springs that rise in woods are particularly mine to care for” — that’s what she told him — “and your well shall be mine, too”.’
Why are none of them are looking at the Maiden? Have they not seen how she glows, how tall she has grown?
‘My father made a statue. Not this one — a small, rough statue which he put in the shrine.’ I look at them, at their waiting faces. ‘That statue carried years of prayers — all my father’s devotion.’ I hear my voice and it does not sound like my own. ‘And he put it on my chest, pressed it into my hands, when I was dying.’
A woman takes a step towards me, puts a hand on my shoulder. I realise that there are tears running down my face.
‘I was dying of the pestilence,’ I tell them. ‘I’d been given the last eucharist, anointed. I was ready.’
The woman’s hand in still on my shoulder. She looks into my eyes. ‘And yet you’re alive.’
‘Yes. My father put his saint into my hands and she healed me.’
Dusk is coming on inside the church. We have been here half a day and Hob has yet to ask for a penny. He has asked for nothing but the water we came for. Has he realised that it would be wrong to make money out of the saint?
From the sanctuary of the rood screen, I watch as he beckons people forward to kneel and ask the saint’s blessings; I hear him tell a glad-eyeing maid that Cynryth reaches out in tender love, ‘as she reached out to the Exile — not seeing his treachery but seeing only a soul in need.’